Matchmaking Marxism and Feminism
Chapters 3 and 4 of Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism (2014) by Cinzia Arruzza
Cinzia Arruzza’s Dangerous Liaisons: The marriages and divorces of Marxism and Feminism (2014) is a concise introduction to the historical (non)intersections of womens’ and workers’ movements around the world, organized into four chapters.
I found myself slowing down in the final two chapters to wade through the weeds of the various theoretical proposals Arruzza outlines and understand them in relation to one another, so my highlights and circles are concentrated there. I’m so glad I read this. I feel like I emerged from this book’s pages with a renewed solidity in my political analysis.
Chapter 3: Dangerous Liaisons Between Gender and Class
3.1: Once Upon a Time…
This sub-section synthesizes scholars’ answers to the questions of when, how, and why women’s oppression came into being.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), an influential text for second wave feminism, contends that women are not born, but become women insofar as the male monopoly of power and cultural production have dictated womanhood; and men’s systematic oppression of women has always existed. This theory implies that the birth of culture counter to nature was contingent on the subordination of women.
Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) attributes women’s oppression to the emergence of individual private property and the establishment of marriage as between a couple. Engels suggested men wanted to ensure inheritances for their sons, which necessitated taking control of women’s reproductive capacity and alienating women from their kinship group, hence the shift to patrilineal lines of descent from matrilineal lines of descent. Engels implied both a change in the social control of (re)production, and an innate male instinct to control women’s reproduction, which Arruzza determines are unsatisfactory answers for why relations between the sexes became hierarchical.
Arruzza states that while Engels had factual errors in his book (namely, the existence of original matriarchy being a myth, and matriarchy and matrilineal descent being a mistaken conflation), his line of questioning is still useful for historicizing the male domination of production and distribution through the evolution of social relations.
Stephanie Coontz and other researchers reach a different answer than Engels’s, in which the change of women’s status can be traced to the transformation of kinship relations which organized productive labor within lineage societies, prior to class society (i.e., the emergency of private property and the state). This view places the origins of women’s oppression during the transition from matrilocality to patrilocality, wherein residence is the determinant factor for the social control of (re)production instead of descendance (re: matrilineal versus patrilineal). In matrilocal societies, men must live in their wife’s parental home, and the results of her labor remains within her lineage. This understanding still yields the question of why patrilocality prevailed over matrilocality, of which there are variable reasons.
Based on the understanding of economic and sexual oppression being interwoven historically, we can take away three main things: (i) women’s oppression did not always exist because it was linked to marked transformations in the organization of social production and distribution; (ii) the sexual division of labor was not as rigid as scholars had hypothesized and cannot be the singular reason for which women’s oppression emerged; and (iii) social and economic factors rather than biological factors are critical considerations for the explanation of the origins of women’s oppression.
3.2: Class Without a Gender
This sub-section explores the consequences of a theory that conceptualizes gender-based oppression as disparate from and secondary to class exploitation.
Reducing the urgency of gender oppression in comparison to class exploitation prompts a logic in which the ending of capitalism would naturally also mean the liberation of women, and the organizing around women’s issues would detract from workers’ unity. This erroneous reasoning contributed to a historical divorce between the workers’ movement and feminism.
Even with the historical transformations in the organization of (re)production and distribution, patriarchal structures have demonstrated being much more adaptive and enduring than expected (e.g., the ongoing oppression of women in post-capitalist societies such as the Soviet Blog and Cuba).
Engaging in class struggle as an insular problem is to overlook the gendered organization of productive relations (specifically the privatization and reproductive function of family ties, and its fixing of a sexual division of labor) and therefore fail to understand the mechanisms of capitalism.
3.3: Gender as Class
This sub-section explains overlaps and differences in material feminism’s and “wages for housework” feminism’s points of view of gender as class within second wave feminist theory.
I was most curious about this framework because it directly speaks to the understanding I had of Marxist feminism as a junior in college, specifically as I was planning to read Silvia Frederici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004).
This analysis of the productive role of women’s domestic labor does not see the point of separating women’s oppression from class exploitation, given that women’s domestic labor produces surplus value that is appropriated, and therefore, oppression and exploitation are fundamentally interconnected.
Both materialism feminism and “wages for housework” feminism criticize Marxism for not viewing the labor of care work as productive labor. The analogy is given, of a meal being sold at a restaurant that could also be prepared at home. The aspect of a meal being prepared at home “for free” only obscures its character as a commodity that has to be produced and exchanged.
For “wages for housework” feminists such as Italian thinkers Alisa Del Re and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, capitalism has constructed the nuclear family in such a way that denies the (re)productive capacity of women’s domestic labor by providing men with a sufficient income to maintain his family. This analysis views the wife’s labor and sexual contracts as one and the same, and a form of wage slavery, whereby men gain ready access to a woman’s body, children, and labor power even if the wife is not formally hired as the husband’s employee. “Wages for housework” feminism concludes that housework should be paid so that women’s domestic labor is recognized as productive labor in its own right, instead of being indirectly compensated through the husband’s salary. In this sense, men and women share the common enemy of capitalism.
According to Arruzza, “wages for housework” feminism further entrenches the sexual division of labor by insisting women should be paid for domestic work, confining them to inside the family unit and preventing them from being included in the realm of production. Proposals for wages or income does not challenge capitalist exploitation precisely because it does not seek to change production relations between men and women.
Christine Delphy, the creator of materialist feminism from France, argues that men are the ones that directly appropriate the surplus value of domestic labor, not capitalism (what “wages for housework” feminism posits). This analysis views all women as members of the same class to the extent that their domestic labor is exploited in varying forms, depending on their father or husband’s class position. Delphy herself outlines the consequences of the kind of political analysis, wherein it presupposes the housewife of a petrochemical worker who has lung cancer has more material interests in common with a billionaire’s wife than her own husband. The conclusion would be that a woman identifying with the antagonistic patriarchal class, which her husband belongs to, actively inhibits women’s liberation. Arruzza notes that Delphy’s stance is not one which believes women’s oppression to look the same even with differences in class position, even if her stance does have a set economic parameter.
Reproduction occurs mostly within a family unit that is placed outside of the capitalist marketplace, which makes it difficult to claim that domestic labor produces surplus value. Arruzza points out that Delphy does not address this aspect in her materialist feminist analysis, as she focuses on the nature of the labor (being domestic carework) than the labor’s location within (where it fits into) the context of production and distribution.
What makes a commodity is not its physical properties, but its social form (how it is produced and consumed).
Arruzza concludes that subsuming the sphere of reproduction into production makes the former loses its specificity, contributing to an analytical confusion.
3.4: Gender Without Class
This sub-section discusses questions of reproduction, sex, and sexuality that became central in political discourse in the 1970s, as opposed to production and class relations.
Psychoanalysis was one of the theoretical proposals for understanding the formation of sexual identities, although radical feminists wanted to reveal its underlying misogyny. Psychoanalytic theory considers women’s bodies to be fundamentally lacking (no penis); naturalizes women’s roles within (re)productive relations as a function of their inherent traits (e.g., Oedipus complex, penis envy, and castration complex); and interprets these traits as fixed.
In the late 1960s, radical feminism emerged in the United States. The latin origins of its name (radic- = radix in Latin = roots) describe its undertaking of tackling the roots of women’s oppression, patriarchy as an autonomous system of oppression. Radical feminists differentiate themselves from liberal feminists and socialist feminists with the analysis that all forms of hierarchy and exploitation are extensions of male domination, given that patriarchy pre-dates colonialism, racism, and capitalism. This analysis has contributed to the feminist movement’s isolation from workers’ movements.
Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) diagnoses biological differences (sex) as the roots of women’s oppression, rejecting both the Marxist understanding of social transformations of productive relations and the psychoanalytic thesis of innateness as explanations.
Gayle S. Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” (1974) proposes sex (biological and anatomical difference) and gender (a result of historical, social, and cultural construction) should be distinguished from one another. Women’s oppression is based upon inscribed gender differences, which is what must be challenged rather than sex.
Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) asserts that the oppression of women was the first form of domination and must be fought before all others.
Arruzza describes two main theorists of French feminism (counterintuitively named, having emerged in the United States and whom Arruzza also refers to as difference theorists), Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, and their essentializing of sexual difference with ideas close to Jacques Lacan’s mirror concept, by positing women as an inverted image of men and emphasizing the mother’s semiotic order as opposed to the father’s symbolic order, respectively.
In the 1980s, lesbian feminism challenged binary logics of difference as in French feminism. Monique Wittig’s “One is Not Born a Woman” (1980) rejects the definition of lesbians as women because heterosexuality is the basis of the division of men and women into antagonistic sexual classes, and lesbians break the heterosexual contract.
Queer theory was developed in the 1990s, particularly through Judith Butler’s work. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) introduces the concept of gender performance and discipline as an alternative to conceiving gender difference as an ontological essence or social constructivism. According to Butler’s gender performativity, gender is not so much determined identity as it is continually created, so behaviors “perform” and “undo” the gender instead of the other way around (behaviors being the effect of an already-gendered subject).
Arruzza connects patterns of where various theoretical approaches pinpoint the difference between men and women. Radical feminism, theories of difference (French feminism), and queer theory all pay attention to the level of discourse and language as a way to understanding gender identity and women’s oppression. Both radical feminism and theories of difference (French feminism) naturalize relations of oppression between men and women.
Chapter 4: A Queer Union Between Marxism and Feminism
4.1 One Theory for Dual Systems
This sub-section details theoretical proposals for understanding the parallel mechanisms of capitalism and patriarchy.
Heidi Hartmann’s “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” (1979) develops the dual systems theory, which positions patriarchy as an autonomous logic with specific relations of production (e.g., slaveholding patriarchy, feudal patriarchy) currently functioning internally within capitalism as the factor which places women lower on the hierarchy of the labor force. Otherwise, capitalism would just have a sex-blind hierarchical law.
Nancy Fraser’s Justice Interruptus (1997) also develops what critics have deemed a dual-systems theory, premised upon a late 20th century paradigmatic shift to political demands for visibility. It is markedly distinct from Hartmann’s in the sense that it offers a schema for differences in demands for justice based on redistribution (economic injustice) and (mis)recognition (symbolic and cultural injustice). Women’s oppression, according to this analytical schema, is between the poles of economic injustice and misrecognition, and therefore requires both responses of redistribution and recognition. Fraser recognizes contradictions in this conclusion; redistributive justice would seek to abolish gendered distinctions, whereas recognition asks for differences in identity to be viewed positively so as to not be a source of discrimination. Fraser responds by counterposing an affirmative approach (measures that do not uproot oppressive structures, e.g., welfare state, multiculturalism) to a transformative approach (questioning the structure that generates injustices, e.g., socialism, deconstruction, queer theory) of justice.
Arruzza gathers that it is possible to theorize a combination of socialism and deconstructionist feminism due to their shared transformative nature (socialism seeking to deconstruct class and queer theory seeking to deconstruct gender), which allows for a common attack on economic and cultural injustice alike.
4.2 One Theory for a Single System
This sub-section considers criticisms of dual system theories in favor of a single system integrating the specificity of both class and gender hierarchy.
Iris Young critiques both Hartmann’s and Fraser’s iterations of dual systems theory in her two articles “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of the Dual Systems Theory” (1981) and “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual System Theory” (1997). According to Young, Hartmann doesn’t account for how class division also pre-dates capitalism, and Hartmann’s dual systems theory still enables traditional Marxism to understand capitalism as having a sex-blind hierarchical law by delegating the analytical task of patriarchy to feminism. Young suggested that an analysis of the gender division of labor be integrated with Marxism, encompassing reproductive labor within a family unit and the productivity of the labor force. Young maintained that Marxism is a reductive concept if it is only tasked with the critique of political economy and not cultural criticism. Moreover, unlike Fraser, Young did not view the political logic of recognition to be contradictory to redistribution, per se, as the former can contribute to a political subjectivization (identity-building process) that can be embedded in the struggle for social justice; only if the affirmative approach to justice becomes an end goal in itself and overshadows structural economic oppressions does it become contradictory to redistribution.
Michèle Barrett’s Women’s Oppression Today (1980) sought to reveal how ideology has historically shaped economy, but it was criticized for falling back into the dual systems theory trap and not recognizing how patriarchy has become completely integrated with capitalism in such a way that they act together as a single system.
Johanna Brenner’s and Maria Ramas’s “Rethinking Women’s Oppression” (1984) point out the co-opting of women’s reproductive role (breastfeeding, lack of reliable contraception) under 19th-century capitalist development, which barred women from entering the sphere of productivity through factory work. In their point of view, ideology is not so much a determinant factor in the sexual division of labor as it was a matter of biological facts. Michèle Barrett’s “Rethinking Women’s Oppression: A Reply to Brenner and Ramas” (1984) in turn points out that the responses to the limits imposed on women based on their reproductive biology were in fact, social (e.g., use of wet nurses by aristocratic women).
4.3 From Unhappy Marriage to Queer Union
This sub-section situates ongoing discourse on reconciling Marxism and feminism in the current political moment (at the time of this book’s publication in 2014).
The questions surrounding the theoretical relationship between gender and class have emerged as a result of concrete political challenges the feminism movement was subject to.
There remains an urgent need to consider developments in the feminist movement, especially pertaining to capitalist globalization. Arruzza names two problems: (i) the political left has not fully incorporated a class analysis of the feminization of productive labor (e.g., sexual division of labor, the role of reproduction in capitalism, and how patriarchal ideology is linked with capitalist accumulation) into their organizing praxis; and (ii) certain certain camps within feminism (which I, Y.B., am identifying as liberal feminism even though Arruzza herself does not explicitly name it) disavow class divisions in the name of a universal sisterhood, which only makes it more difficult to build a broad coalition with the workers’ movement.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989) introduces intersectionality, a theory of how the complex interaction between gender, class, and race all play a role in one’s political subjectivization (identity formation), which is not to be understood as a simple arithmetic of experienced oppressions.
Capitalism has devalued women’s participation in productive relations, as the feminization of the labor force is used to “deskill” productive sectors, produce cheaper labor, and deteriorate working conditions. Faced with an increasing female working class, it becomes all the more necessary to build a workers’ movement of men and women.
The point is not whether class comes before gender or vice versa; the point is how the confluence of gender, class, and race give rise to a complex reality of capitalist production and power relations, which influences the nature of the labor force and the formation of political subjectivities. A nuanced analysis of how gender and class inform one another is necessary work for the comprehensive political project of liberation.