Marxist feminism & Socialist feminism
- Not much difference: a matter of emphasis than of substance
- Turning point: women’s subordination in the Soviet Union
- ‘Class’ as the root cause of all oppressions or a metaphor of different forms of oppression (complicated by patriarchy and sexism)
Let’s recall the Marxist conceptualisations
- What makes human distinct from non-human? – human nature and social progress
- Liberalist explanation
- Marxist explanation
- Metaphorical idealism v. Historical materialism
“Human beings create themselves.”
- Consciousness come before (a priori) or after (a posteriori) the creation of society
- Individualist v. Collectivist
Marxist theory of economic relations
- Capitalism = exchange relations (nothing is untransactable) + power relations (no transaction is inexploitative)
- “Surplus values” (pic)
- Feminist debates: sex work, surrogate mother
Marxist theory of social relations
- Class division —> internal contradictions —> class struggle
- “Class consciousness” v. False consciousness (you think you are free)
- Alienation effect: meaninglessness and worthlessness
- From the product of labour
- From themselves at work
- From others who are potential competitors
- From natural environment which bars development
- Feminist debates:
- ‘Women’ as a class?
- Self-worth defines by others’ worth
Marxist theory of political relations
- Class struggle at the centre of all politics: from everyday counter-tactics (sick time, personal strike), to class consciousness-based revolution
- ‘Emancipation’ of society and the self
Marxist theory of family relations
- Women as workers v. Women’s as women
- Engels (1845), The Origin of the Family
- What’s the social development that he was arguing?
Family formations/relations: from natural to economic conditions
“All marry all”: preventing extinction
—> incest taboo
—> home-based economy: matrilineal + matriarchal
—> extra-household economy: father up, mother down
—> the birth of patriarchy (patrilineal inheritance)
—> due to biological reproductive relations: the need of monogamous family
“Marriage of convenience” because of the rising significance of private property
Classical Marxist feminism
- Primary enemy of proletarian women is capitalism (Evelyn Reed)
- Work women’s neglected domestic labour, which should be socialised (Margaret Benston)
- Wages for housework, which is productive for capitalist society (Mariarosa Costa and Selma James)
Contemporary socialist feminism
- Dual-systemic oppression: Marxist feminist ‘class power’ (capitalism/production) + radical feminist ‘sex status’ (patriarchy/reproduction)
- * Capitalism has contradicted with, but also reinforced, patriarchy, which has lived longer (Juliet Mitchell).
- * Double alienation, because of patriarchy, is experienced by women through their bodies (Alison Jaggar).
- Interactive-systemic oppression: the co-sponsorship relations between women’s ‘class’ (second class) and ‘sex’ (second sex)
- * Sexual division of labour is fixated in capitalist society and inscribed as gendered relations (Iris Young).
- * Though self-contradictory, capitalist patriarchy becomes an self-adaptive unity system (Heidi Hartmann)
Imagine:
As a proletarian woman
As a bourgeois woman
As a proletarian man
As a bourgeois man
- What does the state mean to you?
- To what extent you think you are free/unfree?
- What everyday and workplace oppression, or tension, would you face?
- How do you pursue ‘emancipation’ – i.e. liberating from what to what end?
Post-Cold War to date
- The Soviet Union’s dissolution and the failure of communism in the 1990s
- The more, rather than less, relevance of Marxist/socialist feminism
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