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Marxist Feminism and Socialist Feminism

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Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Marxist Feminism
  3. Marx and Human Nature
  4. The Marxist Theory of Economics
  5. The Marxist Theory of Society
  6. Marx and Alienation
  7. Marx and Alienation
  8. Classical Marxist Feminism
  9. Socialist Feminism
  10. Socialist Feminism in a Globalizing Era

Introduction

You should now be familiar with the basic principles and premises of Karl Marx's works. Marx's work is probably the only work that has been translated into a system of political organization, i.e. Marxism. We have formed governments based on Marxist principles. We have movements shaped by Marxist ideology. In a sense, Marxist ideas have shaped the world in far more active ways than the ideas of Durkheim or Weber. For Marxist theory was not only an explanatory theory, but it also provided the key to the process of social transformation. Marxist theory aims for a practice aimed at social change towards a just society. It is critical and transformative. In this sense, she is very close to the project of feminist transformation. This is probably the reason why feminists have been able to criticize Marxist ideas but rely on them. In fact, Marxist feminism is a very important perspective in feminism. This module introduces you to selected ideas from Marxist feminism. We have used Rosemary Tong's book Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction extensively as the framework for this article.

Marxist Feminism

Feminists influenced by Marx attempted to use his understanding of human nature, the construction of the economy and society based on the organization of modes of production, the construction of classes and the historical-materialist trajectory of social change. , in their understanding of the oppression of women. . Although Marx himself dealt only to a limited extent with issues of sexual difference and the subjugation of women for this reason, his analysis of capitalism produced rich theories on which feminism built its own understanding. Feminism influenced by the ideas of Marx can be divided into two major groups, Marxist feminism and socialist feminism. These groups differ in emphasis rather than substance. While Marxist feminists believe that capitalism, not patriarchy, is the fundamental oppressor, socialist feminists, many of whom wrote in post-Soviet times, recognized that in a socialist/communist system, especially under Stalin, women were not significantly better off than their own. counterparts living under capitalist systems. Thus, socialist feminists are more interested in the complex ways in which capitalism and patriarchy simultaneously oppress women, along with other aspects of identity such as race/ethnicity or sexual orientation. To fully understand these ideas and nuances, it is important to first discuss some of Marx's key ideas.

Marx and Human Nature

Liberals believe that certain characteristics and abilities, such as the ability to think rationally, use of language, practices such as religion, the arts, and science, and a range of attitudes and behaviors such as competitiveness and self-interest, distinguish human beings. humans from other animals. . Marxists, on the other hand, argue that what distinguishes us from animals is our ability to produce our own livelihoods. The fact that we can intentionally change ourselves and intentionally transform and manipulate nature to meet our basic needs is what makes humans different from bees and beavers. As an implication of this, Marx argues that the material forces for the production and reproduction of social life are the most important engines in history. 

Marx believed that the material modes of production (the raw materials, tools, and workers that actually produce goods), what he called the basis, and the social conditions and institutions for maintaining the order of material production (law, state, family) were what he superstructures, they influence each other. While liberals believe that men and women create themselves as individuals, Marxists believe that through production, men and women collectively create a society which in turn shapes them. Marxist and socialist feminists have elaborated on this point to explain that the collective subordination of women's work to men's work has in turn created in women an image of themselves as economically and socially submissive in the family and workplace. They argue that women's oppression is therefore pervasive down to the level of women's collective construction of self-image.

The Marxist Theory of Economics

Capitalism is a system of organization of material and social modes of production. Liberals see it as a system based on relations of exchange, in which individuals exchange with each other with their free will, their ability to work with material returns. Rather, Marxists view capitalism as a system of power relations and recognize that such exchange occurs within a larger system of class power inequalities, making the exchange exploitative. In capitalist systems, the owners of the means of production are able to create surplus value simply by remunerating workers for their labor while accumulating profits from the sale of commodities as “rents” on their means of production. This widens and deepens the inequality gap between the haves and the have-nots. Because workers have little other than their physical labor to contribute to the means of production, their bodies and ability to work are traded and sold. For women, this often meant selling their "bodies" into surrogacy or prostitution, which, according to Marxist and socialist feminists, is not necessarily an act of free will, but rather the product of poverty, illiteracy and lack of ability that compels women to express their sexual and reproductive services. The commodification of women's bodies, in addition to their work in wage labor markets, also includes the commodification of their freedom of sexual and reproductive choice. When women cannot compete with men in the wage labor market, they are vulnerable to exploitation by selling their bodies for prostitution or surrogacy. While liberal feminists argue that such transactions are made voluntarily, which is often the case, Marxist and socialist feminists argue that in the case of illiteracy, poverty, and subordination, these transactions are often coercive and exploitative.

The Marxist Theory of Society

According to Marx, the reproduction of modes of production increases inequalities and divides society into two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to Marx, the ensuing class struggle, which would follow the proletariat's realization of its oppression, is what would transform society from its capitalist state to a communist state. Class consciousness is not easy to generate, as members of both classes often believe that the status quo is the best possible system in which to exist. Forming a class is a long and tedious process that brings together people from a similar situation. Marxist and socialist feminists want to see women as a collective. Whether women count as a class is debatable. Given that women have some kind of relationship with men of their class, can women form a unique and separate class? On the other hand, the experience of patriarchal domestic spaces of bourgeois and proletarian women can be similar. For example, it might be possible for women to wage a unifying struggle for the recognition of domestic work as real and productive work. The idea that wives and mothers usually love the people they work for doesn't mean that cooking, cleaning, and caring for children aren't productive jobs. (Language, page 100-101)

Marx and Alienation

Marx argued that workers, as a product of capitalism, are alienated for four reasons. First, the product they create, second, themselves, third, others, and fourth, nature. He also saw the role of women in the household as one that helps reduce this alienation through the love and care of a marital relationship. However, Marxist feminists have argued that the alienation of women under capitalism is actually worse than that of men. Man exists both in the social world of business and industry and in the family and can therefore express himself in these different spheres. For the woman, however, her place is at home. 

The objectification of people within industry through the expropriation of the product of their labor takes the form of alienation. As Ann Foreman says, “But the effect of alienation on women's lives and consciousness takes on an even more oppressive form. Men seek relief from their alienation through their relationships with women; for women there is no relief, for it is precisely these intimate relationships that are the essential structures of her oppression. (Foreman, pp102) 

Rosemary Tong says, "The fact that a woman's sense of self depends entirely on her family and friends' appreciation of her often means that if they express warm feelings toward her she will be happy, but if she doesn't even thank her, she'll be sad.Thus, Marxist and socialist feminists want to create a world where women can experience themselves as whole people, as integrated rather than fragmented beings, as people who can be happy even when they are not in able to make their family and friends happy. (Tong S. 102)

Marx, Engels and the Family

While Marx paid little attention to the exploitative role of the family, Engels devoted himself to an analysis of the institution, theorizing the links between capitalism and the control of women's sexuality. He postulated that prior to structured family or marital relationships there existed a primitive state of "promiscuous sexual intercourse". At this early stage, every woman was fair game for every man and vice versa. As Engels puts it: “The fall of maternal rights was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man also took charge of the house; woman has been degraded and reduced to servitude, she has become the slave of her lust and a mere instrument to engender her children” (Engels, p. 50). 

Engels points out that if in the first forms of society the forms of marriage and family were not well developed, the limitations of rights and taboos gradually developed and, in doing so, family patterns with a man "possessing" a woman developed, who became the model. of the patriarchal regime. He assumes that the earliest forms of such organization were matrilineal, but eventually the patrilineal form became the norm. Engels argued that before capitalism, the household was the main space of production. With the advent of modernity, production outside the household began to overtake internal production, and the traditional sexual division of labor between man and woman, which had originally developed out of physiological difference and of "the sexual act", has acquired new social meanings. As the importance of men's labor and production increased, the value of women's labor and production declined, as did their status in society. 

The fact that men now owned more valuable things than women owned and, as some argue, because of their need to transfer their property advantage only to their own heir (rather than shared by the community) prompted men to transform the society from a matrilineal society to a patrilineal society. While patriarchy's origins had to do with the sexual roles of men and women, its consolidation, Engels argues, comes with the development of a society in which private property becomes the organizing principle. In his view, the subjugation of women in such a feudal society is driven by the processes of control over property and inheritance. Consequently, according to Engels, the bourgeois woman is trapped in a more oppressive marriage than her proletarian counterpart. The bourgeois family is a degenerate institution and marriage is a fiction. It is, for Engels, the worst form of prostitution in which the security and comfort of a home is sought in exchange for lifelong sexual slavery. On the other hand, the proletarian woman is forced by necessity to leave the domestic sphere and to engage in productive work outside the home, and here lie the roots of her emancipation and the nascent possibility of equality between the proletarian woman and her husband.

Marx, Engels and the Family

While Marx paid little attention to the exploitative role of the family, Engels devoted himself to an analysis of the institution, theorizing the links between capitalism and the control of women's sexuality. He postulated that prior to structured family or marital relationships there existed a primitive state of "promiscuous sexual intercourse". At this early stage, every woman was fair game for every man and vice versa. As Engels puts it: “The fall of maternal rights was the world historic defeat of the female sex. The man also took charge of the house; woman has been degraded and reduced to servitude, she has become the slave of her lust and a mere instrument to engender her children” (Engels, p. 50). 

Engels points out that if in the first forms of society the forms of marriage and family were not well developed, the limitations of rights and taboos gradually developed and, in doing so, family patterns with a man "possessing" a woman developed, who became the model. of the patriarchal regime. He assumes that the earliest forms of such organization were matrilineal, but eventually the patrilineal form became the norm. Engels argued that before capitalism, the household was the main space of production. With the advent of modernity, production outside the household began to overtake internal production, and the traditional sexual division of labor between man and woman, which had originally developed out of physiological difference and of "the sexual act", has acquired new social meanings. As the importance of men's labor and production increased, the value of women's labor and production declined, as did their status in society. 

The fact that men now owned more valuable things than women owned and, as some argue, because of their need to transfer their property advantage only to their own heir (rather than shared by the community) prompted men to transform the society from a matrilineal society to a patrilineal society. While patriarchy's origins had to do with the sexual roles of men and women, its consolidation, Engels argues, comes with the development of a society in which private property becomes the organizing principle. In his view, the subjugation of women in such a feudal society is driven by the processes of control over property and inheritance. Consequently, according to Engels, the bourgeois woman is trapped in a more oppressive marriage than her proletarian counterpart. The bourgeois family is a degenerate institution and marriage is a fiction. It is, for Engels, the worst form of prostitution in which the security and comfort of a home is sought in exchange for lifelong sexual slavery. On the other hand, the proletarian woman is forced by necessity to leave the domestic sphere and to engage in productive work outside the home, and here lie the roots of her emancipation and the nascent possibility of equality between the proletarian woman and her husband.

Classical Marxist Feminism

As pointed out earlier, because Marxist feminists see class as the greatest oppressor of gender, many classic Marxist feminists have argued that not all women are equally oppressed by men and also acknowledge the ways women oppress other women. They claim that bourgeois women are capable of oppressing both proletarian men and women. Some Marxist feminists have argued that class interests precede gender interests. Many bourgeois women unite not with proletarian women but with bourgeois men "in defense of private property, profit, militarism, racism - and the exploitation of other women" (Tong p. 107). ). 

Optimistic about gender relations in a post-capitalist society, Marxist feminists argued that the subjugation of women and the bitter animosity between the sexes is a recent phenomenon, caused by the drastic social changes brought about by the family, private property and the state . They believed that women's entry into the workforce was a step towards ending "bitter hostility" and towards a more egalitarian relationship between the sexes. 

While their struggles have helped achieve a higher percentage of women in the workforce, it has created a new set of inequalities in the workplace. On the one hand, women were pushed into jobs that had much lower status and generally involved less power within the organization and little participation in decision-making. Indeed, some of those jobs that women have been pushed into, such as hospital nurses, have simply reconfigured their domestic roles as caregivers and educators to be effective in the public space. This inevitably led to the separation of the professional sphere into "masculine" and "feminine". This meant that not only were they paid significantly lower wages than men, but they were also treated as indispensable and could easily be thrown out of work. Furthermore, while they only ventured into a public workspace out of economic necessity, they could only do so if they simultaneously performed their primary duties as housewives and fulfilled their domestic duties. 

Some Marxist feminists argued that women's work at home generates added value. They affirm that domestic work by women is the necessary prerequisite for all other work from which surpluses can be made. By providing not only food and clothing, but also emotional comfort for current (and future) workers, women turn the cogs of the capitalist machine. From this emerged the movement of some Marxist feminists demanding wages for housework, while others nevertheless concluded that paying women's wages for housework was not so feasible or desirable. She felt that paying women to clean was not feasible for a number of reasons. First, if employers were to pay wages to housewives for housework, employers would likely pay lower wages to housewives' husbands. Under such circumstances, the total capitalist profit margin would remain high and the material conditions of workers would not improve. Second, not all women in advanced capitalist economies, or even most of them, are domestic workers in the home. Moreover, capitalism has not changed the economic role of the family, but requires and perpetuates this role. 

As Barbara Winslow says, “But can capitalism detach and radically transform the family? Can the position of women be reformed? When capitalism experienced its maximum expansion (1948-1968), the economic importance of the family for capitalism did not diminish. Although more women have entered the workforce and reforms have been implemented, including a small increase in the number of childcare centres, there has been no fundamental change in the organization of reproduction. Equally important is that capitalism cannot and does not expand indefinitely. As we have seen in the United States and the United Kingdom, when the economy collapses, the oppression of women increases. Many social services which partially relieve women within the family, such as crèches, extended school provision, parks, local public transport, health care, libraries, services for the elderly, sick, disabilities and leisure activities are often the first to be cut. Today, women are forced to return home and this increases and increases their oppression” (Winslow, p. 3). 

Marxist feminists, who decided that women's sexual class and economic class played a role in the oppression of women, began to call themselves socialist feminists or materialist feminists. One of the initial goals of this growing group of feminist theorists was to develop a theory powerful enough to explain the complex ways in which capitalism and patriarchy conspire to oppress women. The variety of theories under socialism

Socialist Feminism

The variety of theories proposed by socialist feminists can be sorted into two types:
(1) two-system explanations of women’s oppression and
(2) interactive-system explanations of women’s oppression.

Two-system explanations of women's oppression typically combine a Marxist feminist explanation of class power with a radical feminist explanation of sexual power. One class of these explanations uses Marxist economic determinism to argue that patriarchy itself must be understood in terms of the inequalities created by capitalism. Women are more subject to capitalist forces than to patriarchal forces. However, not all socialist feminists share this view. They argue that capitalism oppresses women only in their role as workers, through which they participate in the activities of the capitalist system. But their identity as women, it is argued, is more fundamental because it persists even when they cease to be workers and are completely confined to the home. As socialist feminist Alexandra Kollontai observed: “A working woman is not only a member of the working class but at the same time a representative of half of humanity. Unlike feminists, socialists, in their demand for equal rights for women in state and society, do not overlook the fact that women's responsibility to society as a whole will always be somewhat different. from that of men. 

The woman is not only an independent worker and a citizen, she is at the same time a mother, bearer of the future” (Kollontai, p.16). In discussing patriarchy, socialist feminists also introduced the Marxist idea of ​​alienation and explained how it affects sexuality, motherhood, and intellectuality. In typical Marxist analysis, a worker is seen as alienated from the products of his labor in capitalist modes of production. Social feminists argue that a new dimension of alienation arises in the case of women because patriarchy alienates women from their bodies. Under a patriarchal system, women find themselves caring for, modeling and decorating their bodies, mostly for the pleasure of men. It is, in this sense, a process of alienation from their bodies and their sexuality which are available to them only as mediated by male perception. Just as women are estranged from sexuality, motherhood in a patriarchal family situation is due to masculine considerations. The role of mother that a woman should play is determined by the expectations of her husband and other family members. 

Finally, intellectuality is another domain of alienation for women. The idea that a woman is an emotional being is strongly reinforced in patriarchy. So a woman is not given the space to express her thoughts because she is not allowed to be part of an intellectual or rational discourse. These contemporary socialist feminists have used terms such as "capitalist patriarchy" or "patriarchal capitalism" to a greater or lesser extent in their work. These feminists have gone to great lengths never to see one system as fundamental to the oppression of women over another, and have been keen to emphasize the interdependence of capitalism and patriarchy. There are other socialist feminist theorists who try to explain the marginalization of women and their functioning as a secondary labor force as an essential and fundamental feature of capitalism. The sexual division of labor disadvantages women in almost all fields of work, so the two systems must be fought simultaneously. Socialist feminists, under the interactive system explanation, claim that they are simply two heads of the same beast. Socialist feminist leader Silvia Walby saw patriarchy in six independent structures: independent domestic work, paid work, culture, sexuality, male violence and the state. She noted that the meaning of each structure varied from one historical era to another, for example patriarchy oppressed women primarily in the private sphere of domestic production in the 19th century and primarily in the public sphere of wage labor and the state in the twentieth century.

Socialist Feminism in a Globalizing Era

The global oppression of women is strongly linked to the fact that women's work, whether at home or outside, is always unpaid, underpaid or devalued, a condition that largely reflects status and power. women's bottoms explained everywhere. The importance of domestic work as it is now recognized cannot be overstated, and social feminists have argued strongly for its equating with work in public spaces. It should be noted that the International Labor Organization has estimated that if indigenous labor were given the status it deserves as productive labor, it could significantly change the value of global GDP (on the order of 30% ). Rather, it should be pointed out that our current estimate of GDP is 30% off because it chooses to ignore women's productive work in their homes. As many social feminists and other feminists have pointed out, this essentially ends in a double work day for women who also work outside the home, as household chores are seen as their responsibility even in this situation. . 

An important lesson that socialist feminism teaches us is that it is important to have feminist theories and points of view based on economic reality. Abstract theories of feminism that ignore the realities of the economy and engage in critiques of capitalism will not end the oppression of women. Women are doubly enslaved by patriarchy and capitalism, and these are not necessarily independent of each other. It is important to understand the oppression of women within this set of ideas. This is all the more important in an increasingly globalized and market-driven world. The effects of this changing economic scenario are most severe for women, who are economically, sexually and intellectually exploited. In a global market scenario, developing and underdeveloped countries are seen as both markets for manufactured goods and sources of cheap labor. 

The global economy works to create industrial sweatshops where workers toil for very low wages, work in brutally repressive and unsanitary conditions, and lose all rights to unionise, protest or fight for their rights. Women, especially from underdeveloped or developing countries, are considered perfectly suited to constitute such a workforce. Traditional criticisms of the place of women in business point to the fact of the gender pay gap, the "male" and "female" segregation of the professional world and the undervaluation of women's work as less intellectual and less important. Such a critique could be made from a feminist perspective, but without addressing the issue of political economy. In the post-globalization era, such criticism is severely limited because it ignores the economic realities in which a woman's life is entangled. At the same time, a classic Marxist analysis of this globalized, gender-blind world will not bring change either. The socialist-feminist approach is therefore best placed to bring about this change.

References

  1. Tong, Rosemary, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, Westview Press,2009 
  2. Foreman, Anne Femininity as Alienation (Pluto, London 1977). 
  3. Engels, F, Origins of the Family (International Publishers, NY 1969). 
  4. Kollontai, Alexandra Women Workers Struggle for their Rights (Pluto, London 1971).
  5.  Winslow, Barbara, Women’s alienation and revolutionary politics (International Socialism, Spring 1979).
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