les voix: For/Getting｜Re/Membering

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