Patriarchy or class? A Marxist critique of socialist feminism by Rose McCann
As readers of my blog know, I tend to defend marxist analyses of women's oppression against different "theories of patriarchy". This pamphlet was written in the late 1980s by an Australian Marxist, and I think it is worth a read. The marxist in question, Rose McCann, comes from a different revolutionary organization than the ones I am involved in, so I don't agree with everything, but I think it highlights many of the main questions. Debates about feminism are more common than they were fifteen or twenty years ago, partly because of something of an upturn in campaigns combatting women's oppression. This can only be an excellent thing, even if the debates are sometimes carried out in rather uncomradely terms.
JM
Patriarchy or class?
A Marxist critique of socialist feminism
by Rose McCann
First published February 1988
A Resistance pamphlet, published by New Course Pty Ltd
23 Abercrombie St Chippendale NSW, 2008
ISBN 0 909 196 50 8
Patriarchy or class? A Marxist critique of socialist feminism is based on a talk presented by Rose McCann to the twelfth national conference of the Socialist Workers Party, held at Hawkesbury Agricultural College, NSW, in January 1988.
McCann has been a member of the SWP and a women’s movement activist for 10 years. For several years she was a shopfloor health and safety delegate in the metal industry. She is currently active in the Socialist Feminist Coalition in Sydney.
Preface
We live in a society in which enormous resources are devoted to mystifying and obscuring politics and the origins of the great social problems of our time. The monopolised news media constantly tell us that these problems are not so serious, or that they are natural and we must learn to live with them.
At every new turn in the political situation, options that might involve challenging the present holders of wealth and power are firmly ruled out by the parliamentary politicians, in close alliance with the newspapers, television and radio. We are subjected to a constant propaganda offensive to the effect that it is realistic to accept things as they are, and totally wrongheaded to challenge them.
Yet never has the need for fundamental alternatives been more urgent. At a time when humanity commands greater wealth and resources than at any previous time in history, we also face greater threats than at any previous time, and more people than ever before suffer enormously because of the politics we are told are normal and unchangeable.
There are alternatives to passive acceptance of the threat of nuclear annihilation, of continuing destruction of the natural environment, of mass poverty, of racial and sexual discrimination, of the oppression of small, poor nations by their wealthy, powerful counterparts. As a socialist youth organisation, Resistance is dedicated to helping to develop, and to promoting, these alternatives.
The Resistance pamphlet series is intended to assist those who, to paraphrase Karl Marx, seek to understand the world more fully in order to change it.
…Janet Parker,
National Secretary of Resistance
Contents
Patriarchy or class?
A Marxist critique of socialist feminism
1 Currents in the feminist movement 3
2. Marxism and the theory of patriarchy 6
3. Socialism, capitalism and gender blindness 10
4. Sexual division of labour 14
5. Who is the enemy? 18
6. Socialist feminism and the socialist states 20
7. Feminism and class-blindness 25
8. Socialist feminism's theoretical impasse 27
Introduction
The discussions and debates currently proceeding in the women’s liberation movement attest to the continuing good health of the movement after more than 20 years of activity and achievement.
This contribution to the discussion is offered in the spirit of solidarity with which the Socialist Workers Party has always viewed its participation in the women’s movement.
In any discussion in such a broad movement it is inevitable that some will not agree with my definitions of various terms and political currents. In particular, I would expect that many women who regard themselves as socialist feminists and radical feminists would not necessarily subscribe to the theory of patriarchy.
My use of the terms socialist feminism and radical feminism is based on the theoretical origins of these terms - origins of which many feminists are undoubtedly no longer aware. Many have now given their own content to these terms, and that is an entirely positive thing as it reflects the continuing growth and vigour of the women’s liberation movement.
My argument is with the theory of patriarchy, and certainly not with all who regard themselves as socialist feminists or radical feminists.
I must also acknowledge my debt to Ann Curthoys for her excellent contributions to Marxist analysis of the women’s movement, and to Linda Burnham and Miriam Lovie of Line of March, a socialist organisation in the United States, for their pamphlet The impossible marriage: A Marxist critique of socialist feminism (Institute of Economic Studies, Oakland, California, 1985).
Rose McCann
February 1988
1. Currents in the feminist movement
Most present-day feminists would probably agree that feminism is not one single world view or movement. Women with an extraordinary diversity of views regard themselves as feminists yet often share only the barest agreement as to the content of feminism. Sometimes the only common denominator is a broad commitment to a better life for women.
While there is more general agreement about the situation confronting women, there are many different views as to why women are oppressed and how sexual oppression may be ended.
Ideological diversity within the feminist movement is not new. While this essay focuses mainly on some contemporary discussions in the women’s movement, it might prove useful to briefly survey the evolution of the main theoretical explanations of women’s oppression.
Utopian socialism
The great utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century - Henri Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen - were among the first philosophers to address the question of the oppression of women within capitalist society. Fourier, in particular, strongly supported the emancipation of women. As Frederick Engels later noted:
He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of women’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. (Frederick Engels, “Socialism; Utopian and Scientific”, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3. Progress Publishers, Moscow. 1977, p. 122)
The utopian socialist critique of the horrors of capitalism was vivid and profound for its time, but because the utopians were unable to explain the laws of motion of capitalism, or those of human social evolution in general, they failed to provide an explanation of women’s oppression that went beyond the framework of bourgeois liberalism.
Nor did the utopians understand the strategic role of the working class and the necessary role of class struggle in the development of a new, more just society. Their aim was to liberate all humanity at once. Their socialism was utopian because it relied on rational benevolence and cooperation prevailing against the greed and self-interest of the then-emerging capitalist class.
Marxism
The first consistently scientific explanation of women’s oppression was provided by scientific socialism (which rapidly became known as Marxism).
Using a materialist method to trace the development of human society through various historical stages, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels showed that women’s oppression arose with the newer forms of social organisation that replaced the earliest human society - primitive communal society, The development of these new societies was ultimately dependent on the economic resources available to humanity, and the level of productivity of human labour.
These new societies differed from the primitive commune in that they gradually evolved private ownership of property. Because humanity’s resources were at that stage still very limited, and were not capable of providing higher living standards for all, the evolution of private property was paralleled by the growth of class divisions and the rule of the wealthy over the propertyless. Associated with these developments was the emergence and consolidation of the family as one of the key units of the new, class-divided societies. Marxism identified this as the main source of women’s oppression.
Marxist analysis of women’s oppression did not end with the work of Marx and Engels. From 1889 in particular, large working-class parties developed in Europe under the banner of the Second International, and these in turn generated a great deal of theoretical and practical activity concerning the situation of women.
The Bolshevik Party of Russia made particularly important contributions, as did the revolutionary wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
By 1914, the membership of the German SPD included 141,000 women. The party was formally committed to campaigning for abortion rights, creches for working mothers, equal pay for equal work, and education for women, among other things. The women’s journal, Die Gleicheit (Equality), edited by Clara Zetkin, advocated socialist revolution, women’s rights, a new household regime in which men would be encouraged to do housework, and education that would encourage girls not to confine themselves to traditional female roles.
Earlier, in the 1860s, the German Marxists had waged a fierce political struggle with followers of the opportunist socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle, around the question of women’s right to work. The Lassalleans had argued for exclusion of women from the paid workforce because their cheap labour undercut male wages and conditions.
The Marxists, who later went on to form the SPD, defended the right of women to work, and urged the fledgling trade unions to fight for equal pay for women, As Hal Draper and Anne G. Lipow have pointed out, the early German Marxists didn’t think the entry of women into the workforce would end sexual oppression, let alone class oppression. “It merely posed the right questions for solution. It provided the necessary starting point for struggle.” (Hal Draper and Anne G. Lipow, “Marxist women versus bourgeois feminism”, Socialist Register 1976. p. 184)
Under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, the Russian Marxists also made important advances in the theoretical understanding of the causes of women’s oppression. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik party became the first in history to attempt to implement a program leading to the liberation of women.
More recently, the Marxist view of women’s oppression and the program for women’s liberation has been further developed by Marxist parties involved in revolutionary struggles, particularly in Cuba and Nicaragua. As well, socialists in Australia and around the world have continued to develop a Marxist perspective on the liberation of women.
Bourgeois-liberal feminism
Historically, after the development of Marxism, the next major, internally consistent explanation of women’s oppression was that of bourgeois liberalism. The origins of bourgeois liberal feminism date back to the suffrage movement of the late nineteenth century.
Liberal feminism is essentially rooted in a biological explanation of women’s oppression. Writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft based their arguments for women’s rights on the liberal principle of the inalienable natural rights of the individual. In their view, all men and all women, by virtue of their common humanity, should be entitled to the opportunity to fully develop their potential.
According to the liberal feminists, women had been in bondage from the earliest times because of their physical weakness and their sexual value to men. Master—slave relations between men and women were said to be unforgivable remnants of more primitive times.
But as the Canadian feminist Charnie Guettel observes, this common argument of nineteenth century bourgeois feminists “lends itself to a kind of be-kind-to animals approach” because it is based essentially in the notion that woman is a weak and basically sexual creature dependent on the good graces of men to improve herself. (Charnie Guettel, Marxism and Feminism, Women’s Press, Toronto, 1974, p. 6)
After winning the struggle for women’s right to vote, bourgeois-liberal feminism effectively lapsed into a 40-year hiatus as a mass political current. Its contemporary re-emergence is commonly traced to the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. (Gollancz, London, 1963)
Today, the best-known exponents of the liberal approach are organisations such as the National Organisation for Women in the United States, and the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Australia. Such organisations generally see the fight for women’s rights in the framework of a bourgeois feminist world view.
This liberal feminism basically limits its critique to the discriminatory laws, prejudices, and traditions that prevent women from achieving full equality with men within the context of the capitalist system.
Because liberal feminism concentrates mainly on legal reform and integration of women into the so-called mainstream of contemporary life, it has little impulse to develop any comprehensive social theory regarding either the origins of women’s oppression or its relationship to the class structure of capitalist society. Serious theoretical study of women‘s oppression has not been, and is very unlikely to become, a hallmark of this particular trend within feminism.
Radical feminism
Chronologically, the next major political-ideological strand in the women’s movement arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It dubbed itself radical feminism.
While this current sought to go beyond the civil libertarian approach of liberal feminism, it shared liberal feminism’s biological explanation of the causes of women’s oppression. It took the view that women are subordinated because of men‘s manipulation of women’s sexuality and their reproductive role, especially through the use of violence and rape as methods of control.
Radical feminism identifies men - both individually and collectively - as the enemy. Moreover, men are said to be the creators of all other divisions and inequalities in human society. Men are said to have a vested interest in women’s oppression.
Many radical feminists, no matter how radical and scathing they may be in their attacks on existing institutions and attitudes, believe that women’s liberation is achievable within the framework of the capitalist system. Like liberal feminism, this type of radical feminism is fundamentally a bourgeois feminist current.
While liberalism does seek to humanise capitalism through a process of reform, over time it tends inevitably to develop a reactionary aspect because of its insistence that capitalism is not a system founded ultimately and necessarily on class exploitation. It sees capitalism as a collection of individuals, or at best a system of competing interest groups.
Liberalism regards history, politics and social organisation as simply the working out of power relationships between individuals. It views the freely determined individual as the moving force of history. Its main distinguishing characteristic is its myopia concerning conflicts of class interests. Radical feminists approach the question of women’s oppression from a similar angle. Sexual oppression is seen as the result of unequal power relations between men and women.
Radical feminism is founded on a view that ideas, rather than forms of social organisation, are responsible for sexual oppression, and can therefore be the central force for change.
The two most influential and original statements of radical feminism were Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (Hart-Davis, London, 1971), and Shulamith Firestone’s The dialectic of sex: The case for feminist revolution (Jonathan Cape, London, 1971).
Millett’s Sexual Politics was largely responsible for popularising the notion of patriarchy as an all-encompassing, insidious system of male dominance and sexist ideology permeating all societies throughout history. The view that women’s oppression arises from biological differences between men and women, and the accompanying identification of all men as oppressors, have become the hallmarks of radical feminism.
The identification of men as the enemy led many radical feminists to the conclusion that women should separate themselves from men politically and socially. Lifestyle preferences for all-women households, personal relationships, cultural institutions, and even communities, were often promoted as the key to liberation. Often this resulted in various forms of apolitical lifestylism or political passivity.
Socialist feminism
Although feminists now understand many different things by the term socialist feminism, it began as an attempt to develop a synthesis between radical feminism and Marxism, particularly drawing on the radical-feminist concept of patriarchy.
Socialist feminism first emerged in Australia (and the US, Britain, Canada, etc) in the early 1970s. It developed initially as a theoretical current comprising women who worked actively in left politics (many were or had been members of communist parties, such as the Communist Party of Australia and the Communist Party of Great Britain). These women sought to respond to the theoretical challenges of radical feminism while maintaining some association with left-wing, or socialist, politics.
Socialist feminism developed as a critique of both radical feminism and of Marxism. Its point of departure was that radical feminism alone was ahistorical and idealist and therefore inadequate to provide an understanding of the situation of women.
It argued that the radical feminist use of the concept of patriarchy was ahistorical because it assumed that relations between men and women were unchanging throughout history and universal in different cultures. The socialist feminists argued that radical feminism was simplistic in arguing that there was one single cause of women’s oppression. They also said that it focused too exclusively on ideological factors and that it totally separated the oppression of women from capitalist social relations.
Socialist feminism argued that Marxism was the main theoretical source that could provide feminist analysis with a materialist foundation -- an analysis that took account of class relations as well as the concept of patriarchy. Such a synthesis was said to be necessary because Marxism alone was incomplete or deficient when it came to a comprehensive understanding of women’s oppression.
This is how one US socialist feminist, Barbara Ehrenreich, explained the synthesis:
The trouble with radical feminism, from a socialist feminist point of view, is that it doesn’t go any farther. It remains transfixed with the universality of male supremacy things have never really changed; all social systems are patriarchies; imperialism, militarism, and capitalism are all simply expressions of innate male aggressiveness. And so on. [The trouble with Marxism is that] the only ‘real’ and important things that go on in capitalist society are those things that relate to the productive process or the conventional political sphere. From such a point of view, every other part of experience and social existence — things having to do with education, sexuality, recreation, the family, art, music, housework, you name it — is peripheral to the central dynamics of social change; it is part of the “superstructure” or culture. [Socialist feminism seeks the common ground] free from the constrictions of a truncated kind of feminism and a truncated version of Marxism — in which we can develop the kind of politics that addresses the political/economic/cultural totality of monopoly capitalist society. We could only go so far with the available kinds of feminism, the conventional kind of Marxism, and then we had to break out to something that is not so restrictive and incomplete in its view of the world. We had to take a new name, “socialist feminism,” in order to assert our determination to comprehend the whole of our experience and to forge a politics that reflects the totality of that comprehension.” (Barbara Ehrenreich, Win magazine, June 3, 1976)
2. Marxism and the theory of patriarchy
Socialist feminism’s starting point - the alleged inadequacy of Marxism in providing a theoretical explanation of women’s oppression and a program for combating it - is based on an extremely distorted interpretation of Marxism. A crude, dogmatic, eclectic caricature is presented as Marxism and then knocked down as inadequate to the task of explaining women’s oppression.
Having rejected Marxist analysis, socialist feminism then sets up the concept of patriarchy as the centrepiece of its viewpoint.
While criticising the ahistorical approach of radical feminists such as Kate Millett, socialist feminism adopts the radical feminist notion that women’s oppression is a result of a distinct system of social relations based on male supremacy and oppression of women.
In the socialist feminist view, patriarchy is a system of oppression bearing equal responsibility with economic/class relations for the shape and character of a society. It rejects as “reductionist” and “economist” the notion that all social relations, including those between the sexes, are framed and determined by historically developed systems of social relations (such as capitalism, feudalism, etc) centring on production of the essentials of life.
Socialist feminism asserts that patriarchy and particular relations of production have different origins and are relatively autonomous of each other. It rejects the notion that particular forms of social organisation can be understood as a unified whole. Relations between men and women are said to have their own, independent logic, dynamic and history that do not stand in any necessary or contingent relationship to the prevailing relations of production.
While Marxists reject the underlying philosophical idealism of such a view, this does not mean that they accept the vulgarised, mechanical view often presented as the materialist alternative. Although relations between men and women are historically and materially incomprehensible in isolation from the context of the prevailing relations of production, relations between the sexes cannot simply be reduced to economic/class relations.
In any society, relations between the sexes do have a substantially autonomous dynamic, influenced by non-economic relations and the social consciousness these relations generate (political, moral, religious, and other ideas). In addition to social relations of oppression between men and women generally, there is also the realm of interpersonal relations between individual men and individual women. It would be absurd to attempt mechanically to trace all aspects of such interaction back to the influence of the prevailing property relations.
The Marxist (or historical materialist) approach does not deny that all known class societies have oppressed Women. Nor does it dispute the fact that the capitalist system is male dominated or that male privilege is a central feature of it.
Marxism emphatically agrees that men dominate virtually all aspects of capitalist economic, social and political life, and that capitalist society is riddled with degenerate sexist attitudes. It also agrees that a by-product of this is the oppression of individual women by individual men. Sometimes, individual men can be responsible for extreme violence against women.
But none of this proves that patriarchy is an autonomous structure with its own history, laws of motion, and material base separate from the class relations associated with exploitative relations of production. In fact, this notion is rather dangerous, as is becoming increasingly clear from the drift of some feminists towards steadily more right-wing conclusions.
Origins of patriarchy
In The origin of the family, private property, and the state Engels used the term, patriarchy, to denote a specific form of community that arose in pre-class society during the transition from barbarism to civilisation. (Marx/Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 234-236)
Engels and later Marxists have used the term to describe extended kinship formations in which descent was traced through the male line. These patriarchal communities were communal economic units. Land and instruments of labour were commonly owned, though authority in questions of social relations resided with a patriarch.
These patriarchal formations evolved out of the group marriage system of primitive-communal society, in which descent was usually traced through the female line. The patriarchal formations eventually evolved into the individual-pairing, monogamous family household of class society.
Such patriarchal communities existed among the Irish Celts until fairly recent historical times, and in France until the French Revolution of 1789. They also existed in places as diverse as India and Algeria, and they persisted in parts of Russia until some years after the revolution of 1917. Indeed, Lenin specifically referred to these formations as a distinct socio-economic structure alongside small-scale commodity production, private capitalism, state capitalism and the socialist sector of the Soviet economy. (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964. pp.335-336)
So the term patriarchy, or patriarchal family, has a very specific, historically limited, meaning. Both radical feminism and socialist feminism have sought to broaden this historically limited concept as the basis for a theory of an entrenched, transhistorical structure of male domination. They have also attempted to elevate this structure to one bearing equal responsibility with class relations and the economic organisation of society as the source of women’s oppression.
Western Marxism
The intellectual and political current known as Western Marxism is an important source of the socialist feminist challenge to the historical materialist understanding that economic relations determine the limits and broad outlines of social formations.
Western Marxism is also the main source of the view that economic relations are only one of several systems of relations that play roughly equal roles in determining the nature of a social formation.
The term Western Marxism refers to various Western European attempts, from the 1920s onwards, to reconcile Marxism with bourgeois philosophical and sociological theories such as Hegelianism1 (Lukacs, Sartre), Freudianism2 (Fromm), and structuralism (Althusser). Among socialist feminists, the major theoretical project has been the application of structuralist concepts to the analysis of women’s oppression.
The New Zealand-born socialist feminist Juliet Mitchell attempts to provide a Marxist model for the study of women in the family by incorporating concepts from French academic Louis Althusser’s structuralist reinterpretation of Marxism. Althusser and the structuralists maintain that society is divided into a range of autonomous structures and that women’s condition at any particular time is a product of several of these. Because of this, women’s lot is said to be overdetermined.
According to the Althusserian theory of overdetermination, fundamental social change in modern capitalist society cannot be the result of a change in any single structure (for example, a socialist revolution that changes the relations of production). Instead, such change requires an interaction of developments in a number of structures (which are said to include, for example, scientific ideas, religion, political conditions, modes of work).
According to Mitchell, the key structural determinants of women’s condition are production, reproduction, sex and the socialisation of children. (Juliet Mitchell, Women‘s Estate, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1971)
Mitchell maintains that although the various structures may have inter-related originally, each has laws peculiar to itself. Mitchell and others attempt to focus on each separate structure in order to analyse what is peculiar to them, and to demonstrate that their histories have a relative independence.
Mitchell dismisses orthodox Marxism as “economic reductionism” because it claims that women’s situation derives ultimately from the relations of production. Mitchell says women’s oppression must be understood as the result of various structures made up of different elements.
Overwhelmed by the complexities of modern society, Western Marxist analysis has effectively severed the connection between the economic base and all other elements that make up a social formation - the political, legal and cultural superstructure, and the various forms of social consciousness (science, religion, art, ideology, etc). The Western Marxists attribute relative independence to each of these component parts, with the economic component being the determining factor “only in the last instance.”
For socialist feminists, the appeal of the structuralist view is that it gives greater weight to superstructural relations, such as the family, and forms of social consciousness, such as sexist ideology, which are of great concern as fields of feminist analysis and as sites of women’s oppression. But structuralism ignores the dialectical relationship between the economic basis of a social formation (i.e. the relations of production), the superstructure (i.e. the non-economic social relations), and the forms of social consciousness to which this relationship gives rise.
Other Althusserian feminists claim that the obstacles to women’s liberation, in both the capitalist West and the postcapitalist East, are more ideological than economic. “Ideological state apparatuses” are said to be deeply riddled with sexist ideology.
Althusserian-influenced feminists have documented how ideology that regards women primarily as domestic creatures economically dependent on men is embedded in the organisation and content of work, welfare, education, health, social security and the law. Drawing on the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, they maintain that “patriarchal ideology” is internalised at the individual level.
The way forward, they claim, is for feminists to challenge this ideology. But they seldom relate this challenge to women’s struggles to improve the economic conditions of their lives, and they often exclude consideration of the economic structures that determine and shape sexist ideology. They fail to recognise that such structures must be identified and replaced if sexist ideology is to be overturned.
Juliet Mitchell, for example, never considers class to be one of the structures that must be examined to determine how social relations affect the position of women, both in society as a whole and in the context of different social classes.
Socialist feminists are aware to varying degrees of the philosophical foundation on which they are building. In her essay, “Capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism” (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1979), American socialist feminist Zillah Eisenstein explicitly adopts the structuralist concept of relative autonomy, and acknowledges her debt to Western Marxism.
Althusser’s misinterpretation of the Marxian method of dialectical and historical materialism is profoundly useful to the socialist feminists, as it enables them to pose as materialists while embracing the idealist theory of patriarchy.
Such attempts are nothing new in the Marxist movement, as Lenin observed in 1917:
In falsifying Marxism in opportunist fashion, the substitution of eclecticism for dialectics is the easy way of deceiving the masses; it gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all tendencies of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it presents no integral and revolutionary conception of social development at all. (“The state and revolution”, Collected Works, Vol. 25, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, p. 400)
Content of the theory of patriarchy
Although all socialist feminists make use of the concept of patriarchy, the exact content of the term is the subject of much debate in socialist feminist theory.
There is fairly general agreement on a number of points:
- Patriarchy expresses the totality of the social relations of male supremacy/female subordination.
- Patriarchy is generally understood to have existed in all known socio-economic formations (Though most analyses tend to focus on the particular features of capitalist patriarchy).
- Patriarchy is a hierarchical system in which power and control are invested in men to effect and reproduce their domination over women. Patriarchal relations are said to be reproduced through the sexual division of labour and patriarchal ideology.
- Patriarchy unites men across class lines. This unity is based on the fact that although men hold different degrees of power within the patriarchy, all men dominate at least some women.
The flip side of this particular coin is that all women are said to share a common condition and experience across class lines.
While socialist feminist theory in general recognises the existence of class distinctions among women, there is an overriding emphasis on the unifying aspects of women’s experience as the oppressed sex within the patriarchal system.
Different socialist feminist theoreticians describe the relationship between patriarchy and the relations of production somewhat differently, but there are essentially two main ways in which this relationship is understood.
- In the first interpretation, patriarchy and the relations of production are viewed as two distinct systems forming one mutually dependent whole. According to this view, patriarchy operates on the basis of a dynamic independent of the relations of production. Patriarchal relations are distinct from, and not reducible to, class relations, though the two systems are closely inter-related.
Thus each historically developed social formation is defined not only in terms of its relations of production but also in terms of its mode of patriarchy: feudal patriarchy, capitalist patriarchy, etc. Neither of the systems determines the other, and neither is dominant over the other.
- The second interpretation, advanced by some socialist feminists, conceives of patriarchy and the relations of production as two entirely independent structures. The two systems coexist, but each has its own separate history and independent development.
- Finally, socialist feminism regards the patriarchy as a system that also prevails in socialist society. According to socialist feminism, the transformation of exploitative class relations has no qualitative impact on the patriarchal system.
Socialist feminism’s original point of departure was its contention that the radical feminist theory of the patriarchy was idealist. Socialist feminism therefore set out to provide a materialist basis for the theory of patriarchy. However, in its efforts to dress up patriarchy in Marxist garb, socialist feminism surrenders the basic tenets of both historical materialism and materialist dialectics.
Heidi Hartmann
Heidi Hartmann is one of the most prominent socialist feminist theoreticians to have attempted an outline of the material basis of patriarchy as a structure independent of the relations of production. In her essay, “The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism: Towards a more progressive union” (Lydia Sargent (ed.) Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, South End Press, Boston, 1981) Hartmann defines men’s control over women’s labour power as the material base upon which patriarchy rests. This control is maintained, she says, by excluding women from economically productive resources (e.g. high paying jobs), and by restricting women’s sexuality.
This is Hartmann’s attempt to clarify the relationship between the two theoretical systems of Marxism and patriarchy:
Economic production (what Marxists are used to referring to as material production) and the production of people in the sex/gender sphere both determine “the social organisation under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live," according to Engels. The whole society then, can be understood by looking at both these types of production and reproduction, people and things. Despite being closely intertwined, there is no necessary connection between changes between these two separate systems of production of people and production of things.” (In Women and Revolution, p. 17)
To rationalise this attempt at a new theoretical synthesis, Hartmann distorts the Marxist definition of mode of production, narrowing it almost beyond recognition. From a Marxist standpoint, it is absurd to define a mode of production simply on the basis of “the production of things.”
In the Marxist view, a mode of production encompasses far more than economic production in the narrow sense of the sum of things produced. Furthermore, the concept of economic production encompasses far more than the production of things. It includes all the social relations that mediate economic production.
In Marxist theory, mode of production refers to the relatively stable totality of relations of production (ie the relations that arise among people in the process of the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of the products of labour) which are reproduced more or less automatically by a given pattern of productive forces (i.e. the amount and sophistication of the means of production and the level of the labour skills of the working population).
Examples of distinct modes of production include primitive communism, the Asiatic mode of production, ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism and communism. However, a socioeconomic formation may be characterised by production relations that do not constitute a distinct mode of production.
This is invariably the case with societies in transition from one mode of production to another. The distinction between a socio-economic formation based on a distinct mode of production and a transitional socio-economic formation characterised by hybrid relations of production has particular relevance to the question of why women are still oppressed in the USSR and other post-capitalist societies.
Hartmann’s view that Marxism is concerned only with the production of things reduces historical materialism and Marxist economic theory to a mere study of the history of technology and the technical organisation of the labour process. But historical materialism is concerned above all with the social, rather than the technical, side of production.
Marxism does not concern itself primarily with material production, but with social relations in the productive process. Its main focus is the social system of production and the noneconomic relations and forms of social consciousness that arise on the basis of given economic relations.
The founders of historical materialism sought an explanation of all the myriad forms of social interaction in a study of the means by which human societies produce and transform the conditions of their existence. In any society, production of the means of human subsistence is the sphere in which the fundamental social relationships are focused (i.e. the dominant property/class relations).
In turn, these economic relations determine and frame all other social relations and constitute the material basis for their development. Marx explained it this way:
In the social production of their life, people3 enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being. but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Karl Marx, “Preface to A Critique of political economy”, in Marx/Engels, Selected works, Vol. 3, pp.503-504)
3. Socialism, capitalism and gender blindness
The content and the relationships of general theoretical categories are crucial to any theoretical work. Marxist analysis makes use of abstractions (such as forces of production, relations of production, wage labour, surplus value, capital, etc), which are based in analysis of complex historical social practice but emptied of detail and particularity.
Like any scientific method, Marxism must make use of such abstractions if it is to probe the essential interconnections and laws of motion of a given social formation. To this extent, it is true that Marxist categories are blind to particularity, and in this sense socialist feminists are correct when they accuse Marxist economic theory of gender blindness.
But this is not an analytical failing of Marxism. Rather, it is the very source of its ability to uncover the dynamics of widely varying social realities.
The Marxist method insists that an understanding of the general laws of motion of a given set of productive relations must be combined with careful investigation of the historical, cultural, racial, sexual, and national particularities of socioeconomic formations based on those relations of production. Using this approach, the theory of patriarchy is not necessary to trace the sources of women's oppression.
Hartmann’s insistence on the existence of a separate system of social relations concerned with “the production of people” is a logical outcome of her acceptance of the theory of patriarchy. This theory forces those who adopt it towards a dual, rather than unified, notion of social development.
Zillah Eisenstein
Zillah Eisenstein is one of the most prolific socialist feminist theoreticians. Her main contribution is an ambitious and extremely convoluted analytical system explicitly indebted to Western Marxism for its approach to politics, the state, and the supposed relative autonomy of patriarchy and capitalism.
According to Eisenstein, capitalism and patriarchy are neither identical nor autonomous systems, though in their present forms they are mutually dependent.
But like Hartmann, Eisenstein has a dualist view of social reality. Her argument is distinct from that of other socialist feminist writers in two main respects.
- Firstly, she identifies patriarchy essentially as a political system, rather than a system of social relations with a particular political expression. ‘
- Secondly, while other socialist feminists recognise (at least implicitly) a realm of -class politics that is not primarily an expression of the contradiction between men and women, Eisenstein extends the concept of patriarchy to cover politics in general.
In other words, she views patriarchy as a system of political hierarchy and control for the capitalist system and all preceding social formations. She sees the political system as an outgrowth of hierarchical relations between men and women, not an expression of class conflict.
Her theory idealistically separates politics from any material basis. Politics is no longer fundamentally an expression of contradictory interests engendered by class relations in exploitative societies. Rather, Eisenstein provides her notion of politics with an extremely tenuous alternative basis in “the relations of reproduction.”
Marx and Engels argued that politics is an expression of class struggle. In their view, various political orders arise on the basis of, and correspond to, economic relations. Underlying all political struggle is the ultimate question of freedom from exploitative economic relations. Political relations are determined by economic relations.
Like many other Western Marxists, Eisenstein lightly dismisses these views - which are absolutely central to Marxist theory. She says they are too “reductionist” and crude to be taken seriously. In place of Marx’s and Engels’ “simple-minded reductionism,” she tries to substitute a theory that a political system is an expression of sexual hierarchy, and that this sexual hierarchy is not a product of the economic structure of a given social formation. In the relationship between the two, economic relations are not the decisive element, argues Eisenstein.
While the class system rests on relations of production, the system of patriarchy rests upon “relations of reproduction,” claims Eisenstein. These relations of reproduction are described primarily as political power relations based in the social and political manipulation of women’s reproductive functions. In other words, patriarchal power is centred in political and social controls developed to force women into the roles of mother and unpaid domestic labourer.
While the notion of relations of reproduction sounds quite Marxist, Eisenstein fails totally to discover any real material base for her relations of reproduction.
Eisenstein views Marxism primarily as a tool for general analysis of power relations. Thus she writes:
Marxist analysis is directed to the study of power. We can use its tools to understand any particular expressions of power. . . Marx used his theory of social relations — understanding “things” in their concrete connections — to understand the relations of power in society. (Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy, p. 42)
But historical materialism is not essentially a study of power and power relations. It is the study of historical and material relations that lead to the exploitation and oppression of one social group by another. In Marxist theory, the exercise of power is the political and social expression of a material relationship - primarily an economic relationship - between classes.
Because Eisenstein denies the need for a class and material basis for a theory of political power and hierarchy, she ends up with an abstract notion of power that amounts to little more than a rehash of classless power theories long advanced by bourgeois sociologists.
Origins of the family
Many socialist feminists claim that if Engels had carried his analysis further he would have arrived at a two-systems theory akin to that of socialist feminism. This is deduced from Engels’ famous statement in the preface to The origin of the family, private property and the state:
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This again is of a two-fold character; on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
The social organisation under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production; by the stage of development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other. (The origin of the family, private property and the state, pp.191-192)
But anyone who has read past this two-page preface to the body of Engels’ work would know that the whole aim of it, insofar as women’s oppression is concerned, is to draw an explicit connection between changes in the form of kinship relations (and women’s role within them) on the one hand, and changes in property and class relations on the other.
In fact, the overall intent of The origin of the family, private property and the state is to identify the stages and sub-stages in the development of increasingly advanced labour technique and the effect of this on kinship relations. Engels also emphasises the fundamental linkage between the development of the productive forces and the emergence of classes and the state.
Unlike the socialist feminists, Engels provides a unified theory of social development in which all questions of social relations ultimately flow from the level of the productive forces and the form of property relations. Engels himself states as much immediately following the passage cited above:
The lower the development of labour and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labour increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilising the labour power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up. In its place appears a new society with its control centred in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history. (The origin of the family, private property and the state, pp.191-192)
Far from advocating a two-separate-spheres theory of social development, Engels consistently argues that social wealth arising from progress in raising the technical level of productive activity is the main force for social change, including change in kinship and family forms.
Engels is painstaking in his efforts to clarify the leading role of production for subsistence in shaping all other social relations, including the social role of the family and the relationship between women and men within the family. He makes it clear that the development of a large social surplus and of class society brought the family system under the domination of property relations.
Engels clearly regarded reproduction of humans and production of their means of subsistence as distinct processes, but he certainly did not conclude that two separate forces organise society.
In her perceptive introduction to The origin of the family, Eleanor Leacock concisely summarises the substance of Engels’ overall work and conclusions:
Engels’ fundamental theme is clear. He writes ‘We…have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly to the three principal stages of human development: “for the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilisation, monogamy…” The significant characteristic of monogamous marriage was its transformation of the nuclear family into the basic economic unit of society, within which a woman and her children became dependent upon an individual man. Arising in conjunction with exploitative class relations, this transformation resulted in the oppression of women that has persisted to the present day. (Eleanor Leacock, Introduction to The origin of the family, private property and the state, International Publishers, New York, 1973, pp.71-72)
And again:
The separation of the family from the clan and the institution of monogamous marriage were the social expressions of developing private property; so-called monogamy afforded the means through which property can be individually inherited. And private property for some meant no property for others, or the emerging of differing relations to production on the part of different social groups. The core of Engels’ formulation lies in the intimate connection between the emergence of the family as an economic unit dominated by the male and this development of classes. (Leacock, p.41)
Patriarchy at work
In support of their contention that patriarchy is a system of social relations autonomous of capitalism, socialist feminists often claim that capitalism and patriarchy have rival interests in relation to women’s labour. They say that capitalism, like Marxism, is gender-blind: That it takes no account of the sex of the people it exploits. In fact, according to this view, it is in capitalism’s interests to employ large numbers of women because their labour is cheaper and can thus help to increase profits.
But in opposition to capitalism, men - both in trade unions and in the state (which also is usually described as patriarchal rather than capitalist) - collude to force women out of the workforce or to exclude them from higher-paid jobs. This, the argument goes, is because men have a material interest in the subordination of women.
Men, rather than capital, are said to benefit materially from the domestic service of women in the home. Men, not capital, are said to benefit from job discrimination against women. The fact that large numbers of women work part-time in most advanced countries today (in Australia it is around 40 per cent) is said to be a result of some compromise between the rival systems of patriarchy and capitalism.
All this is backed up with numerous examples of male dominated trade unions supporting exclusion of women from particular industries, and the unions’ lack of support for struggles of working-class women. The sexual division of labour between social production and the domestic realm is consequently said to be reproduced primarily as a result of the initiative and struggle of working-class men, who resist the tendency of capitalism to absorb women into large-scale production.
Heidi Hartmann has produced a lengthy analysis of such processes during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Working men recognised the disadvantage of female wage labour. Not only were women cheap competition, but working women were their very wives who could not serve two masters well. So male workers resisted the wholesale entrance of women and children into the labour force and sought to exclude them from union membership and the labour force as well.
Men sought to keep high wage jobs for themselves and to raise male wages generally. They argued for Wages sufficient for their wage labour alone to support their families. Instead of fighting for equal wages for men and women, male workers sought the family wage, wanting to retain their wives’ services at home. In the absence of patriarchy a unified working class might have confronted the capitalists. (Hartmann, Capitalist patriarchy, p.210)
Hartmann views the sexual division of labour as an expression of the will of men in general to dominate women in general. She makes no reference to the socio-economic conditions that give rise to specific forms of the sexual division of labour. In doing so, she provides an essentially ahistorical and idealist account of relations between working-class women and men.
As Hartmann correctly explains, the Industrial Revolution broke down the old, feudal productive relations and forced millions of peasant families into mass production. But men were frequently not economically dominant in the new, proletarian family unit. Often, only women and children were able to find work.
Thus, women’s labour was by no means marginal to the rise of capitalism. In fact, the factory system was built largely on the super-exploitation of women. The Industrial Revolution hardly provides a convincing example of capitalism’s alleged gender-blindness!
4. Sexual division of labour
Little was unplanned or accidental about the capitalists’ use of women and children in factory production during the Industrial Revolution. From the first days of modern industrial social organisation, capitalists consciously used sexual and other divisions among working people to undermine the positions of skilled workers and craftspersons and to drive down wages. They used classic divide and rule tactics.
Before long, however, the capitalist class began to realise that unless this pattern was modified the increasing employment of women under existing conditions would lead to total disintegration of the family unit among the working class. This would have posed the question of social responsibility for the care of children, the aged, and those unable to work.
In turn, that could have raised awkward questions as to why domestic chores should not be organised socially rather than within individual family units. Such a reorganisation of the social division of labour would have required considerable redistribution of the wealth appropriated by the capitalist class.
Capitalism’s failure to provide even minimal social services was threatening the capitalists’ future sources of labour power (in terms of both quantity and quality). Nursing facilities were minimal and illness was widespread due to the deplorable conditions in which working people lived and worked. The burden of these conditions fell particularly heavily on working mothers.
At this stage, bourgeois ideologists and liberal reformers began to blame employment of women for a variety of social evils, including prostitution, high infant mortality, and the poor health of the workforce.
Defending the collective interests of the capitalist class, rather than those of individual employers seeking the cheapest labour, the capitalist state stepped in to halt the decline of the family system. The female working day was reduced to 10 hours to allow women more time for domestic chores. Governments adopted some laws regulating female and child labour and some public health measures were adopted. A beginning was made on the establishment of a public education system.
Thus capitalist exploitation was rationalised and the family system was shored up. The balance was redressed between male and female/child labour.
Ann Curthoys, a Marxist historian at Sydney’s University of Technology, makes a sound critique of socialist feminist analysis in this area. She argues that the sexism of male workers was not a major factor in the exclusion of women from particular jobs and industries, though it undoubtedly played a role, given the dominance of sexist bourgeois ideology.
Curthoys argues that unions tried to exclude women primarily from higher-paid jobs, into which the capitalists sought to introduce female labour in order to reduce wages. She also maintains that the campaign for a family wage was a defensive struggle for the working class as a whole, and was supported by many working class women because it entailed recognition that existing male wage rates were not sufficient to support dependent or low-paid women and children. (Ann Curthoys, “The sexual division of labour”, in Australian women: New feminist perspectives, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1986)
In rejecting the socialist feminist notion of patriarchy, Curthoys argues that capitalism necessarily creates especially oppressed strata to sow divisions within the ranks of the exploited. It also links production and reproduction in ways that focus the burden of exploitation most heavily on the most vulnerable social layers. (Curthoys, “Feminism and the classes,” in Arena No. 64, 1983)
Working-class men
One of the major problems with socialist feminist analysis of the sexual division of labour is its tendency to grant working class men and trade unions a degree of social power they simply have never had:
Men increased their control over technology, production, and marketing, as they excluded women from industry, education and political organisation,” observes Heidi Hartmann, concluding her description of the early, spontaneous self-organisation of labour and of some campaigns by male-dominated unions to exclude women from some industries and some sectors of the job market. (Hartmann, Capitalist Patriarchy, p.217)
Unquestionably, male workers of that time had many sexist and backward attitudes, but at no stage were they in control of technology - much less of production and marketing. Blinded by her patriarchy theory, Hartmann fails to distinguish between male workers and the real beneficiaries of women’s oppression - the capitalist ruling class.
Hartmann’s view that working-class men sought control over women’s labour and destiny flows from her theoretical assumption that patriarchal power is the main determinant of women’s lives. In fact, the supposed desire of working-class men to control women’s labour power is an extremely inadequate explanation of the factors that either lock women in the home or make them available for exploitation in the paid workforce.
Hartmann’s analysis is incapable of explaining why and how the desire of working-class men to control women’s labour power could have the same material impact as the process of capital accumulation in transforming sectors of the population into proletarians.
When, whether, and on what basis, women enter into capitalist production is not determined primarily by their husbands’ desire to have the home fires burning. It is principally a question of when capital needs to draw on the reserve labour of working-class women. When that need is sufficiently strong (as, for example, it was during World War II) any desire of men to keep women at home is relatively inconsequential. It simply becomes a matter of whether the family will be able to exist comfortably (or sometimes at all) on the earnings of one wage worker.
The phenomenon of women’s integration into social production has to do with a complex set of factors and circumstances in which the Wishes of individual working-class men (and women for that matter) play only a minor part. Though the socialist feminists may dismiss such an assertion as “economist” and “reductionist,” the decisive factors are ultimately the forces and relations of production.
Some of the factors influencing the timing of women’s integration into the paid workforce include:
- The fertility rate and the state of reproductive technology (in particular the mass availability of effective birth control).
- The extent of socialisation of some aspects of childrearing (such as education). '
- The development of devices capable of freeing women from the most time-consuming household chores.
- The level of exploitation imposed by capital. At times, all employable members of the family may be forced into production just to obtain the means of subsistence.
Sexism
It is undeniable that male chauvinist attitudes and prejudices did and do exist among working-class men. These ideas are inculcated by capitalist ideology and are constantly reinforced by capitalism’s systematic relegation of women to subordinate roles.
Human societies have always incorporated a sexual division of labour. One of humanity’s first cultural adaptations involved assigning women tasks compatible with childbearing. However, in pre-class society the sexual division of labour did not involve exploitation or social inequality. It was not used as a rationale for exclusion of women from productive labour and from an equal role in social life.
In fact, precisely because of their role in the sexual division of labour (gathering food rather than hunting or fishing for it), neolithic women were responsible for the most important economic revolution in human history - the invention of agriculture.
Marxism showed that women were relegated to an inferior social position (and that their childbearing capacity was used as the basis for this) only with the rise of class society. With the division of society into classes, the monogamous family also developed as the basic social unit.
Women were relegated primarily to the role of child-rearers and domestic servants not because this served the interests of men in general, but because it served the interests of men who owned property. The accompanying sexual restrictions on women were designed to assure the paternity of the heirs of private property, installing the family system as the main mechanism for transmission of this property from generation to generation. As well, the family unit was forced to take over the previously social responsibility for care of those unable to produce - children, the sick and the elderly.
Today, it is not necessary to look farther than the capitalist system when allocating responsibility for women’s oppression. It serves capitalism’s interests to discriminate in employment, to maintain wage differentials between men and women, to deny rights to free abortion and childcare, and to encourage attitudes and beliefs that belittle women. The oppression of women is immensely profitable to capitalism, yet even that fact is often ignored or underestimated by some socialist feminists.
Under capitalism, working men are relatively privileged because of the oppression of women. In the same way, white working-class women are relatively privileged in comparison to Aboriginal men and women. But the extra privileges are just crumbs, doled out deliberately to divide the working class and other oppressed social groups.
It is true that men hold a definite competitive edge in intra-class struggles (as do whites over blacks, Australian-born citizens over migrants, etc) and at times they certainly do organise in defence of their advantages in the labour market despite the fact that such activity is against their basic class interests.
Situating male privilege within a broader class context in no way exonerates those who promote and benefit from sexist attitudes. Such attitudes must be fought uncompromisingly. But this does not change the fact that the context and terms of male privilege are set by the relations of production, not by any independent system of patriarchy.
The material and historical foundations of sexual inequality cannot be understood outside the context of broader class relations. The historical materialist analysis demonstrates that capitalism has seized upon a pre-existing social/ sexual division of labour and used it as a vital component of its mechanism for cultivating and exploiting divisions among the oppressed. As well, it has structured this division in the family system in order to repeatedly reinforce women’s economic dependence on men.
Notions of the family
Many socialist feminists reject the Marxist view that women’s oppression is rooted in the class-based family system. This has produced two broad approaches.
· According to the first view, the position of women is determined primarily by ideological structures, and it is no longer valid to regard the family as an economic unit shaped to serve the interests of capitalism. Rather, it is regarded as an ideological construct.
Supporters of this view often reduce Marxist analysis to a crude notion of the family as simply the mechanism whereby private property is passed from one generation to the next. According to this view, because the working-class does not own the means of production, the working class family cannot be regarded as a product or instrument of class/property relations.
Marxism certainly does regard passing on property as one of the vital roles of the bourgeois family. Without the ability to pass on private property from one generation to the next, it would scarcely be possible to maintain a stable class society.
The family system thus ensures the maintenance and reproduction of social inequality and of the existing class structure. The family system remains an indispensable instrument of the ruling class, but the transmission of property is not its only role. As already noted, through the family system working class women are more or less automatically cast in the role of unpaid domestic workers, thus saving the capitalist class much of the expense of producing the next generation of wage labourers and much of the cost of maintaining the present generation.
A pervasive misogynist ideology is fostered to reinforce the view that this is women’s natural role, and that women are biologically fit for little besides procreation and childrearing.
These prejudices are in turn used by the capitalist class to justify denial of job equality and the use of married women effectively as a reserve army of labour. Under these conditions, women may be blackmailed into accepting poor working conditions and lower-paid jobs.
By oppressing women and granting relative privileges to men, the capitalist class is able to divide the working class, making it easier to reduce the living standards of all workers.
Moreover, the family system has an ideological role in maintaining the private property system. It is used to inculcate respect for authority and acceptance of social inequality between families of different classes.
· The second stream of socialist feminist opinion about the family is that it is an autonomous structure existing largely because it serves the interest of patriarchy. The roots of this position go back to feminist domestic labour debate, which began in the mid-1970s when some European feminists claimed that the domestic labour of women in the family produces both value and surplus value. It was said that this was the case because the product of women‘s household labour is ultimately incorporated into capital.
Against this view, some upheld the orthodox Marxist position that housework is indeed work, which produces articles to meet human needs, but that in the framework of the capitalist economy this work does not create value because the products of housework are not exchanged on the market for other commodities.
Feminists holding the first position advocated wages for housework, rather than the Marxist policy of socialisation of domestic labour.
At least in Australia, this discussion had largely lapsed by the late 1970s, though there were later criticisms that neither side confronted the question of men’s interests in perpetuating the domestic labour system.
A patriarchal mode of production?
In a recent book, Patriarchy at Work (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986), Sylvia Walby argues that the domestic labour debate failed to question the centrality of capital, and that most writers had nothing to say about gender relations per se. They presumed that capitalism was the main problem rather than patriarchy, or men.
Walby regards Heidi Hartmann’s analysis of the sexual division of labour as one of the most “creative and sophisticated attempts to synthesise the analysis by Marxists and feminists without subsuming one to the other; it is the most successful attempt yet.” (Patriarchy at work, p.45) But she criticises Hartmann’s conception of patriarchy: “While she argues that patriarchy is just as important and materially based as capitalism, she considers only capitalism to be a mode of production.” (Patriarchy at work, p. 44)
Walby argues that since capitalism is a system under which capital expropriates wage labour, in order for patriarchy to have equal weight as a system founded on men’s exploitation of women, there must be a patriarchal mode of production based on social relations in domestic work.
According to Walby, it is necessary to postulate a patriarchal mode of production in order to establish a basis to patriarchal relations analytically independent of capitalism: “The concept of the patriarchal mode of production is essential to a theory of the exploitation of women by men independently of the exploitation of proletarians by capitalists.” (Patriarchy at Work, p. 52)
According to Walby, in the patriarchal mode of production the producing class is composed of housewives/domestic labourers, while the exploiting class consists of husbands. The domestic labourer is said to produce labour power (i.e. children) as well as the day-to-day labour power of her husband.
The exploitation consists of the husband’s expropriation of the supposed surplus labour of the domestic labourer:
The husband uses and exchanges that labour power with an employer as if it were his own, even though the wife laboured to produce it. He sells this labour power to the employer and receives a wage in return. He gives a portion to his wife for the maintenance of the family. The portion that he keeps for himself may be regarded as the wife’s surplus labour which he has expropriated. (Patriarchy at work, p. 53)
This argument presumes, of course, that the male wage earner’s physical and mental capacity to work is totally used up by the capitalist employer at the end of each working day and is totally recreated by the domestic labour of the wife - a presumption that would only be true if the male worker died of exhaustion at the end of each working day and was resurrected by his wife before the next working day!
Secondly, it ignores the fact that without the income from the husband’s wage the domestic labourer would be unable to maintain her own labour power, or even to survive.
Ignoring these rather obvious problems, Walby goes on to develop her view that patriarchal relations within waged work are crucial in preventing women from entering that work as freely as men. And, she claims, the struggles that have kept women out of the better jobs explain women’s subordinate position in the family. Because women are denied equality in paid employment, they are forced to turn to unpaid employment in the home.
It is ironic that Walby, in rejecting the view that the family system arises from exploitative, class-based relations of production, is forced to use Marxist categories to give her patriarchy theory a material basis. Her theory is static and ahistorical, not least because it assumes the permanent existence of the wage labour system. She has no analysis of how a patriarchal mode of production might have existed in pre-capitalist society.
The fact that Walby’s patriarchal mode of production presumes the existence of wage labour, and thus of the capitalist mode of production, contradicts the whole point of her argument - that sexism is the product of a set of social relations independent of capitalism.
What’s more, a logical extension of her argument is that children are exploiters within the family. As children contribute nothing to the family income, it must be assumed that they live parasitically upon the unpaid labour of the mother.
In fact, Walby completely distorts the real relationship between men and women within the working class family. The real problem for both working class men and women is the enforced economic dependence of the working class woman on an individual man (her husband) - the fact that many women are materially dependent on their husbands for the economic survival of themselves and their children.
Who gains from all this? Ultimately, only the capitalist class. The unpaid labour of women in the home is immensely profitable to capitalism, though many socialist feminists go to great lengths to deny or ignore this vital point.
5. Who is the enemy?
Socialist feminism has been unable to develop a synthesis between Marxist materialism and the idealist theory of patriarchy. Rather, the socialist feminist analysis has led many back in the direction of the radical feminist view that men are the enemy. Some socialist feminists have become virtually indistinguishable from the radical feminists, contending that the main social contradiction is between men and women.
Socialist feminism’s underestimation of the role of class oppression in promoting and perpetuating sexual oppression leads it to neglect the question of whether some men might be more likely to break the male supremacist ranks and become reliable allies in the struggle for women’s rights. Radical feminism expects men of all classes to defend their privileges with more-or-less equal fervour.
The socialist feminist analysis can, and does, tend to leave unchallenged the role of the capitalist class and its institutions in oppressing women. Instead it focuses its attack on male workers. Some socialist feminists have repeatedly attacked the working class movement, and the trade unions in particular, even when they have been in struggle. A particularly grotesque example of this was British socialist feminist Beatrix Campbell's attack on the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984 miners’ strike. Such positions have undermined support for both feminism and Marxism among many women, and have contributed to support for right-wing projects.
A prime example of this is Sweet Freedom, a 1982 work jointly authored by Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell (Sweet freedom: The struggle for women’s liberation. Picador, London, 1982)
Campbell, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, also visited Australia around this time, addressing several large meetings of women. Her views are still quite influential in the socialist feminist current here in Australia.
Campbell and Coote argue that male supremacy and “the difficulty of persuading men to relinquish their privileges” are the main obstacles to women’s liberation. In their analysis, class relations are of diminishing importance (they are usually reduced merely to relations between workers and bosses at the workplace), while so-called patriarchal relations envelop all. Their main strategic answer is a call for redistribution of wealth between men and women within the family.
There can be no doubt that the labour movement as a whole should urgently tackle the effects of centuries of sexist discrimination in jobs and wages. Genuine equal pay and affirmative action are pressing questions of the moment, not of sometime in the indefinite future. However, Campbell and Coote call for a “feminist incomes policy,” and by doing so counterpose struggles around the so-called social wage to the right of all workers to pursue direct wage claims.
Campbell and Coote say male workers should accept lower wages and fewer jobs in order to allow women workers to catch up. They imply that the mainly male, skilled sectors of the working class are responsible for the oppression of others, and particularly of female workers.
Totally absent from this approach is any concept of the need to unite all sections of the working class in struggle against attempts to drive down wages and conditions. Such unity and struggle are essential preconditions to further efforts to address discrimination against women and other especially oppressed sectors of the working class.
The Campbell/Coote approach tailors the demands of the women’s liberation movement to make them compatible with a crisis-wracked capitalism which increasingly demands that workers and the poor must make sacrifices in the name of capitalist profitability. To Campbell and Coote, the interests of working men and working women are irreconcilable.
Wages and gender
The view that men’s and women’s basic interests are irreconcilable has been very influential within the socialist feminist current in Australia. This view was widespread in the women’s movement when the ALP/ACTU prices-incomes accord was adopted in 1983, and variants of it are still held by significant numbers of socialist feminists in the trade unions and the women’s movement. .
At the wages policy session of the September 1987 Socialist Feminist Conference in Sydney, several speakers argued for support of the Hawke government’s two-tier wage-cutting system. They said the system helped to protect low-paid workers and to reduce differentials between men’s and women's wages.
Collective bargaining and wage indexation (which had effectively been abandoned in late 1986 in preparation for the introduction of the new, two-tier system) were both described as patriarchal mechanisms that were of no use in the wage struggles of female workers. Both were said to benefit only the more highly paid male workers organised in strong unions. This argument assumes that there is a fixed wages fund and that women’s wages can rise only if those of men are reduced.
In truth, there is no fixed wages fund, though the employers would certainly have us believe that only a certain amount of their capital can be allocated to wages and that workers must slug it out among themselves for their share of a supposedly fixed fund.
But there is no automatic mechanism by which wage increases for miners, for example, must come out of the pockets of clerical assistants. There is no evidence that holding down men’s wages will improve women’s pay. In reality, such a step merely redirects a greater share of the wealth produced by workers into the coffers of the ruling class.
This has been the experience of the past five years in Australia. The success of the Hawke government in undermining the ability of the better-organised and strategically more powerful sections of the workforce to win wage rises has not led to any improvement in the lot of the less-organised and lower-paid. The ALP-ACTU wages straitjacket has restricted the defensive capabilities of the entire working class, and has emboldened the employers in their attacks on weaker sections of the workforce.
Attempting to improve the wages of one section of the workforce by supporting cuts to the wages of other sections is of the capitalists and their governments for so-called wage restraint.
It is also quite wrong to reject certain industrial strategies with the claim that they are inherently biased against women. A genuine system of automatic, monthly wage indexation, tied to a real consumer price index, could defend workers’ incomes against the inroads of inflation.
But even this would only put a stop to the erosion of wages. Forward movement to reclaim what has been lost in recent years, and to break new ground such as genuine equal pay, would require cross-sex working-class unity around more aggressive policies.
Prices-incomes accord
In severing the link between women’s oppression and class exploitation, socialist feminism often tends to dump any working-class perspective on a range of political issues.
That was certainly the case with the prices-incomes accord.
While some socialist feminists pointed to the obvious lack of female input in the drafting of the accord, and criticised some of the shortcomings of the package as it related to women, few rejected it outright as a project that was not only anti-woman but anti-working class.
The pattern was similar in regard to the ACTU’s 1987 industry policy discussion, and the Australia Reconstructed document. Some socialist feminists criticised the industry policy, not because its main concern was to help Australian capitalism to become more profitable at the expense of workers’ rights and interests, but because it was solely concerned with protecting and preserving mainly male jobs in the manufacturing sector.
In any case, the latter claim was false from any point of view. The federal government’s Steel Industry Plan, which involved billion dollar subsidies to BHP, accepted the loss of 10,000 mainly male steelworkers’ jobs at the Port Kembla steelworks.
All this is not to deny that the male-dominated ALP/trade union bureaucracy has failed to take up the fight against wage and job discrimination. It has defaulted on its responsibilities most disgracefully. But this is a political, not chromosomal, problem. It is a result of political betrayal by the reformist leadership of the labour movement. It’s due to the pro-capitalist perspectives of the ALP/trade union bureaucracy (which in any case now has its sprinkling of ambitious pro-capitalist femocrats whose politics are indistinguishable from those of Hawke, Unsworth, Cain, Bannon, Crean, Kelty, etc).
6. Socialist feminism and the socialist states
In essence, the socialist feminist theory of women’s oppression is a hybrid outgrowth of Western Marxism and radical feminism's patriarchy theory.
Like Western Marxism, socialist feminism is profoundly sceptical as to the revolutionary role of the working class, and is cynical about the capacity of socialism to liberate women or even to qualitatively improve their material condition.
Overwhelmingly, this scepticism flows from the pressure of the alleged social consensus, founded essentially in anticommunism, which the bourgeois establishment promotes relentlessly and ruthlessly through its media, its political institutions, and every other means at its disposal.
Liberal radicals, and even many who regard themselves as socialists, often feel compelled to compromise with this supposed consensus in the name of realism, and this leads them into all sorts of political and theoretical dead ends, of which socialist feminism’s patriarchy theory is one.
A contributing factor to the present pervasiveness of this bourgeois ideology is the inability of the world socialist movement, 70 years after the first socialist revolution, to offer any example of a society in which sexist discrimination has been eliminated. While there has been substantial progress in most of the post-capitalist countries, this progress is still partial, and to a large extent it is overshadowed by these countries’ poor overall image in the West.
This image is largely, but not entirely a product of the capitalists’ incessant anti-communist propaganda offensive. The crimes of the Stalin era have unquestionably made a deep impression on twentieth century history, and will not be quickly forgotten. They will continue to make many working people suspicious of the socialist movement for many years to come.
Adding to these suspicions is the poor example of many Communist parties, which have often pursued very bureaucratic policies and at times have even tried to defend the excesses of the Stalin years. Some still have backward attitudes towards the struggle for women’s equality.
Transitional societies
Another source of confusion is the fact that socialist feminists, along with many other leftists, usually regard the Soviet Union and the East European socialist states as fully fledged socialist societies, whereas in fact they are societies transitional between capitalism and socialism.
They are societies in which the capitalist mode of production has been replaced by a new socioeconomic formation based on embryonic socialist relations of production (including public ownership of the means of production, centralised economic planning, etc).
But alongside and intermeshed with these embryonic socialist relations of production, some aspects of capitalist relations of production continue to exist (e.g. small-scale private ownership of parts of the means of production, and bourgeois norms of distribution).
The continued existence of commodity production, money economy, social inequality and social classes (workers and peasants) reflects the fact that these post-capitalist societies are still socio-economically far closer to capitalism than to socialism (which is the first phase of classless communist society).
These countries are presently socialist only in the sense that they are based on embryonic socialist relations of production, and are seeking (within whatever limitations) to construct socialism.
Accepting the myth (invented by Stalin) that the USSR is already a socialist society, socialist feminism has been incapable of understanding the sources of the continuing oppression of women within the Soviet Union. Like Western Marxism and the Stalinised Communist parties, socialist feminism has no critical analysis of Stalinism.
In the early stages of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet government led the world in developing a program for the liberation of women. Starting in November l917, the new, revolutionary government passed a series of laws giving women complete legal and political equality with men for the first time.
Marriage became a simple registration process based on mutual consent. The marriage law was designed to free millions of women who had been married off against their will under traditional arrangements. The concept of illegitimate children was abolished, and free abortion was legalised. By 1927, it was no longer necessary even to register marriage. Divorce was free and available on the request of either partner. Anti-homosexual laws had been eliminated.
The new laws granted equal employment rights, including equal pay for equal work. Free medical and health care was introduced, as was l2 weeks’ paid maternity leave. The working day was restricted to eight hours; and in some dangerous and unhealthy industries in which the workforce was often predominantly female, the working day was reduced to between four and six hours.
The new government legislated for full social insurance of workers. This covered sickness, injury, occupational diseases, infirmity, old age, childbirth, widowhood, orphanhood and unemployment.
The new government also established free, compulsory education for children of both sexes to the age of 16. For the first time, thousands of schools were opened to women on the basis of preferential entry. Prostitution was decriminalised.
The Soviet government was the first in history to adopt a systematic program to tackle the immense task of achieving women’s liberation. It began tackling reactionary social norms and attitudes in a country the bulk of whose population still lived in tradition-ridden peasant societies, and in which women were a small percentage of the industrial workforce. Eighty per cent of women were illiterate, and the dead weight of feudal traditions and superstitions hung over all social relations.
But the Soviet people were not left in peace to build their new society. After the October Revolution, the capitalist world imposed an economic blockade on Soviet Russia and encouraged supporters of the old order to launch the four-year Civil War, in which troops from all the major capitalist powers participated.
The already backward economy of Russia had been devastated by World War I, and was almost completely destroyed by the civil war. Hunger and famine ravished the country. Blockaded on all sides and cut off from supplies of industrial raw materials and machinery, the Soviet economy virtually collapsed, leaving huge numbers unemployed, homeless or maimed. Hundreds of thousands of children were left orphaned and homeless.
Yet, in the midst of these conditions, the new, revolutionary government could still boast considerable achievements in the field of women’s rights.
Consciousness and material conditions
In the Marxist view, social consciousness is determined by the social conditions in which people live. These social conditions, in turn, are dependent upon the level of development of the productive forces (of the productivity of human labour).
That is why Marxists consider that the success of any attempt at social liberation depends on a society’s ability to overcome economic scarcity through development of the productive forces.
Ultimately, all forms of social oppression flow from the fact that humanity’s productive capacity has not been capable of creating a social surplus sufficient to free the whole population from repetitive, mechanical and tiring labour so that they could participate fully in collective political, social and economic managerial functions.
Until relatively recent historical times, the social surplus has been sufficient only to enable a tiny minority — the ruling class and its agents — to free themselves from fulltime productive labour. They have used this freedom to monopolise managerial functions.
Socialist feminism makes a grave error in underestimating the role of material conditions in determining the broad parameters of people's lives at any given time.
In a 1925 address to a gathering of Soviet women, Leon Trotsky explained this point:
In the last analysis the development of the productive forces is needed because it provides the basis for a new human personality, conscious, without a lord over him on earth, not fearing imaginary lords, born of fear, in the sky — a human personality which absorbs into itself all the best of what was created by the thought and creativity of past ages, which in solidarity with all others goes forward, creates new cultural values, constructs new personal and family attitudes. higher and nobler than those which were born on the basis of class slavery. The development of the productive forces is dear to us as the material presupposition of a higher human personality, not shut up in itself, but cooperative, associative. (Leon Trotsky, Women and the family, Pathfinder Press, New York. 1970. p.42)
The revolution retreats
The achievements of the Soviet government in its early years contrast starkly with the depths of the later retreat under Stalin, beginning in the late 1920s.
Throughout the early years, the young revolution would always have been hard pressed just grappling with the economic backwardness it had inherited from the Tsars. But adding to these problems were the devastation of war and the long years of blockade and isolation by the world’s most powerful capitalist governments.
By the mid-'20s, all the long years of extreme hardship had produced a climate of exhaustion and demoralisation. As a result, the Soviet working class steadily surrendered the direct exercise of its power to a new layer of specialists and administrators. While capitalism was not restored, under Stalin’s leadership a privileged bureaucracy acquired a monopoly of the exercise of power in nearly all aspects of Soviet life and politics.
Along with many of the other revolutionary policies of the early years, the gains made by women under Lenin’s leadership were reversed one after another. Abortion was declared illegal once more, divorce was made more difficult and costly, day-care centres were closed, co-education was eliminated.
Above all, the family system was revived and fortified. The Stalinist bureaucracy consciously abandoned the Bolshevik perspective of moving systematically towards socialisation of domestic labour. Instead, it glorified the family system, attempting forcibly to bind families together through use of legal restrictions and economic compulsion.
In 1936, Trotsky pointed out that by turning back the clock for women in so many areas, the Stalinist bureaucracy went “infinitely further than the iron economic necessity demands.
The most compelling motive of the present cult of the family is undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations, and for the disciplining of youth by means of 40,000,000 points of support for authority and power.” (Leon Trotsky, The revolution betrayed, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1972. p. 153)
There were some changes after Stalin’s death in 1953. Abortion was legalised, for example, but the perspective of maintaining the family as an economic unit remained.
Women and production
Through all the vicissitudes of the Russian Revolution’s first 70 years, one gain remained — the large-scale integration of women into social production. But today’s socialist feminists often cite this as proof that the key to women’s liberation is not economic.
Socialist feminists regard emphasis on the relationship between women’s liberation and the level of economic development as an economist fetish of orthodox Marxists — a simplistic attempt to link every question of human liberation to productive labour.
But the socialist feminists remain unable to demonstrate how women can achieve their liberation short of breaking out of the context of economic dependency within monogamous marriage. Many socialist feminists vigorously reject this line of argument. In their view, women’s oppression is not fundamentally rooted in economic relations, and it therefore will not be resolved by a change in women’s relationship to production.
At bottom though, it is a non-argument to claim that women’s full integration into social production cannot alone resolve all the many aspects of women’s oppression. Of course, transforming the mass of women into socially productive workers will not eliminate all the manifestations of women’s oppression. That has never been Marxism's contention.
Socialist feminism throws up this false argument in order to dodge the question of whether the liberation of women is possible short of their integration into social production. The socialist feminists fail to address the question of whether such integration is a necessary element of women’s emancipation.
Engels, for example, never argued that this was the only element necessary. Rather, he said:
The first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry; and that this again demands that the quality possessed by the individual, family of being the economic unit of society be abolished. . . With the passage of the means of production into common property, the individual family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public matter. Society takes care of all children equally, irrespective of whether they are born in wedlock or not. (Origin of the family, pp. 247-248)
Integration of women into social production, and the transformation of private housekeeping into a social industry, both presuppose a high level of development of the productive forces.
In the USSR, the persistence of the family-based sexual division is primarily bound up with the relatively low level of the productive forces. While the productive capacity of the Soviet Union has risen enormously over the past- 70 years, a considerable amount of its social surplus has been absorbed by non-productive military spending forced on it by the threat from the capitalist powers. Adding to this problem has been the wasteful system of bureaucratic management inherited from Stalinism.
As a result of these factors, the USSR has lacked the enormous material resources necessary to socialise housework. Shortage of skilled labour power and other resources is a major obstacle to the socialisation of infant care, for example, in all the developing socialist countries (including Cuba and Vietnam, whose experience of revolutionary government has been effectively post-Stalinist).
As well as a legacy of bureaucratic inefficiency in most of the p0st~capitalist societies, the Stalinist experience also left its political mark in the theory and practice of the Communist Party of Australia and other Communist parties outside the socialist states.
Together with bourgeois-liberal anti-communism, Stalinism, and the often ill-informed reaction against it, bears considerable responsibility for mistaken theoretical rejections of Marxism, of which the socialist feminist patriarchy theory is one expression.
Stalinism and the Communist Party of Australia
The Communist Party of Australia is an organisation whose confidence in Marxism has been deeply shaken by the Stalinist experience. Discussing the evolution of the CPA’s position on women, Lyn Finch, a contributing editor of the feminist journal, Hecate, observes:
The history of how the party leadership dealt with the conflict over the theoretical analysis of women’s oppression, and the practical utilisation of female cadre, throws light on current debates about the relation between Marxism and feminism, or the Unhappy Marriage, as it has been termed. (Lyn Finch, “The unhappy marriage of theory and practice”, Arena, No. 76, 1986. p. 175)
Finch outlines the ideological confusion that reigned within the CPA from the 1930s onwards, both on the relationship of women’s struggles to the class struggle and on the relationship of female members to the CPA itself. She adds:
Finch outlines the ideological confusion that reigned within the CPA from the 19305 onwards, both on the relationship of women’s struggles to the class struggle and on the relationship of female members to the CPA itself. She adds:
The 1930s present a particularly complex backdrop for the study of communist women for it was during this decade that the early influence of Engels’ analysis of women’s oppression was being submerged under the weight of the dour authoritarianism of Stalinism. . . During the 1930s, Stalinism confused communists’ aims and tactics. Stalin’s most important speech on women, where he described them as “the greatest reserve of the working class” signalled a change in direction in 1925, but the full weight of Stalinist authoritarianism was not truly felt in the CPA until the 1930s. This decade then, was a changeover period. The 1920s notion of women as proletarian activists was replaced by the Stalinist notion of women as Mother Heroines.
With such an official line coming out of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it’s not surprising that an idealisation of traditional female roles began to emerge in the CPA’s press, says Finch. From 1933 onwards, articles in the CPA journal Working Women, increasingly addressed women as wives and mothers, rather than as workers and political activists:
For women in the CPA, Stalinist theory created a complex problem at both the theoretical and practical level. Throughout the history of Marxist thought in Australia the tendency to economism has been strong; within Stalinism it ran rampant…Women who were not engaged in wage labour were irrelevant, and such issues as why women as women, and not as workers or migrants, occupied certain places in society, and not men, dropped from the party’s range of concerns…
Feminism has had a completely separate history from that of Marxism and the CPA… Feminists were denounced as inherently bourgeois, and were seen to be achieving no other end than the splitting of the working class, by turning men against women. Thus theoretically, the CPA opposed feminism, and women in the CPA…were not seen to be feminist. (The unhappy marriage of theory and practice, as above, pp. l76-178)
Until at least the beginning of World War II, the CPA still insisted that women did not suffer specific oppression as women. During the war, however, the party began to recruit women in larger numbers than ever before. By 1942, a quarter of the greatly expanded membership of 15,000 consisted of women.
Meanwhile, some 4000 CPA members (most of them men), including a large proportion of the party’s leadership, had gone off to fight in the war against fascism. This led to promotion of an unprecedented number of women into party leadership bodies. At its 1942 national conference, the CPA partially reassessed its analysis of women’s oppression, and began to stress the need for its female members to enter the industrial workforce and become actively involved in the trade unions.
This decision effectively lapsed after the war, when the, male CPA leaders resumed their prior roles in all leading bodies. CPA women were told to concentrate on the organisation of a mass movement of housewives. Groups like the New Housewives Association and the Union of Australian women were established for this purpose.
Organising women around issues particular to their oppression was still generally regarded as a low priority, and perhaps even a downright distraction from “the real class struggle” at the point of production.
The CPA officially abandoned Stalinist following Khrushchev's revelations at the CPSU twentieth congress, in 1956. According to Finch, however, this had few practical consequences for the party’s attitude towards women:
The impact of this upon their analysis of women’s oppression was very limited indeed. While feminism was still not an accepted theoretical concern for the CPA when feminism reasserted itself within the driving dynamic of the 1970s women’s movement, the party welcomed into its ranks this “new wave” of feminists. This was again, I would argue, political pragmatism, and not a challenge to the gender-blind preoccupations of the CPA’s Marxism.” (The unhappy marriage of theory and practice, as above, pp. l79-80)
Thus the tendency of many present day socialist feminists to dismiss class struggle as simply the economic struggle of male dominated trade unions flows to a large extent from the political practice and theoretical distortions of the Stalinised Communist Party, which did not see the struggle against women’s oppression as part of the class struggle.
Today, largely in reaction to their party’s past record, CPA women are among the strongest advocates of the need for a separate theory of women’s oppression because of the alleged inadequacies of Marxism.
7. Feminism and class-blindness
The socialist feminist rejection of Marxism flows not only from confusion engendered by liberal and Stalinist distortions of Marxism, but also from a related stream of pessimism about the revolutionary potential of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries.
Western Marxism, a major tributary of the socialist feminist current, is a product of the disillusionment and despair of radicalised petty bourgeois intellectuals dating back to the 1920s.
Today, in the absence of a strong recent tradition of working-class politics, most of the socialist feminist theoreticians, like their male Western Marxist counterparts, are drawn from a rather narrow social base consisting largely of professional academics, trade union functionaries and workers in the upper levels of government bureaucracies.
Often, these theorists are people who have taken little, if any, responsibility for organising or encouraging broader political activity. Their class-blind theory of patriarchy has led them away from an understanding that the success of the women’s liberation movement depends very heavily on its ability to intersect with the lives and interests of the mass of working-class women.
Of course, women of diverse class and social origins have made valuable contributions to the struggle for women’s rights, and there is no reason to believe that this will cease to be the case. But some feminists have tended to proceed rather arrogantly from their own, often quite narrow, experience to develop very exaggerated views of a supposedly automatic homogeneity of women’s interests that crosses all other lines of social division.
More recently, however, a limited but significant growth of feminist consciousness among migrant and Aboriginal women has prompted some recognition that the extent of sexual oppression can vary considerably according to the social situations of various women. The Aboriginal and migrant women have tended to challenge some long-held middle-class feminist assumptions, particularly the view that women‘s liberation consists of climbing the capitalist social ladder through the ALP and the government bureaucracy.
The migrant, Aboriginal and working class feminists have also tended to challenge the view that women’s oppression is the only problem, or even the main problem. For many women, it is demonstrably not. Issues of national oppression or class exploitation are often of greater immediate concern.
Socialist feminists often overlook the stubborn fact that many women have more in common with men of their own class or race than they have with women of other classes or other national groups.
This is not to deny that many of the demands of the women’s movement are of immediate relevance to working class, Aboriginal, and migrant women. These women experience gender oppression most acutely. Because of that, they are usually most interested in practical campaigns around issues such as the right to work, equal pay, childcare, etc.
Unfortunately, in the absence of a stronger working-class influence, some feminist circles develop an atmosphere of arrogance born largely of class and national privilege. This goes hand in hand with a tendency to generalise relatively narrow, middle-class experiences and outlooks as those of all women.
The academic language of much feminist theoretical discussion reflects an increasing divorce from reality and from the concerns of the great majority of women. But of even greater concern is the tendency of some to effectively dismiss the struggle against class oppression. Ann Curthoys has commented on this:
We are now confronted with the anomaly that many socialist feminists talk constantly about “men” and “women” in non-class-differentiated ways, refuse to cope with the fact that upper- and middle-class women are privileged in this society and in world terms, and evince - in my experience - remarkably little empathy or political allegiance with working class men.
The political consequences of this are important. I fear that many middle-class women, in fighting for their own interests, forget that they may be bringing into being another instance of class privilege. This is easier to see historically than in the present. Everything always is. Certainly we can see how the first wave feminists were usually enmeshed in the problems of their own class, seeking property rights and political representation, were interested in eugenics, getting enough servants, and so on. We can applaud and identify with their struggles against the men of their own class, but we cannot so easily applaud their approaches to working class men and women.
Many middle-class women today think they have avoided this by identifying their interests with those of working-class women, and by establishing a new wave of social services for women, or by constantly pointing to the double or triple burden of working-class women. But this isn’t good enough.
Middle-class women identify them as part of the enemy, the oppressors, and cast themselves as the oppressed, they have a theoretical basis for continuing to exert class privilege, for asserting their own interests over those of working-class men. And for socialists, Marxists, this just won’t do. Which is not to say one doesn’t combat sexism wherever one finds it - in trade unions, or wherever. It is to say that to focus on sexism out of context, to remain wilfully blind to the realities of class privilege and exploitation in this way, must locate a class-blind feminism as politically reactionary. (Ann Curthoys, “Feminism and the classes”, Arena, No. 64, 1983, pp.156-157)
The quest for united action
The fatal flaw of socialist feminism, like that of radical feminism, is its counter-position of the liberation of half of humanity to the liberation of the other half. Socialist feminism has no notion of how the front of male privilege might be broken up in the fight for a more just society.
Socialist feminists often obscure the fact that working-class men (bigoted though many may be individually) as a group face an objective predicament - that the oppression of working class women drags down the condition of the whole working class. Liberation from class oppression and exploitation will require the full participation of working-class women.
Unlike ruling class men, working class men are potential allies in the struggle against sexual oppression. None of this is to deny that women must develop their own collective identity and forms of organisation.
An autonomous women’s liberation movement is a political necessity. But just as necessarily, such a movement must be set in a wider context. It must ultimately be part of a broader political movement committed to toppling capitalist rule.
Consciousness of this, and of the close interrelationship of sexual and class oppression, will grow with the increasing involvement of working class women in the women’s liberation movement.
The need for cross-sex unity is far from the only question of unity confronting the feminist movement at the present time. It is also vital that theoretical discussion within the movement should not get in the way of united action.
Over the past 20 years, the women’s liberation movement has some impressive achievements to its credit as a result of its ability to inspire united action. Probably the most important of these achievements has been the de facto victory over the antiabortion laws. While reactionary laws remain on the books in most states, abortion is now effectively legal - even in Queensland, where change has come most slowly.
But while there has been progress, sexual oppression still distorts the lives of millions of women in Australia and around the world, and the struggle for women’s liberation will continue to be one of the major arenas of struggle for a more just society.
8. Socialist feminism’s theoretical impasse
Socialist feminism set out to make a historical materialist analysis of women's oppression, but it has ended up distorting historical materialism. It has failed in its declared task of producing a new synthesis of Marxism and feminism, and it has failed to provide a compass for women looking for the way forward in their struggle for sexual equality.
In recent years, some socialist feminist writers (such as Sheila Rowbotham and Michele Barrett) have begun to recognise this impasse. As Ann Curthoys has pointed out, this recognition has prompted various responses:
One is to reject the concept of patriarchy as currently used - the position argued here. Another is to reject Marxism as useful for understanding sexual division. This is the position taken by Hartmann (1979), and developed in Australia by several articles in Allen and Patton’s Beyond Marxism? Interventions after Marx (1983)…
A third possibility is to reject both the concept of patriarchy and the possibility that Marxism might be useful for understanding the nature of sexual division. This position is probably best represented in current debates in the British journal m/f [Marxist/Feminist]; I am not aware of any extensive Australian counterpart.
Writers in m/f argue that the concept of “patriarchy” imposes a false unity on what is in fact a series of competing and historically specific discourses and social practices constructing “men” and “women”. . .
Finally there is the view that a theory of patriarchy and a version of Marxism are in fact compatible. In Australia, this is best represented in Game and Pringle’s (1983) work. They argue that capitalism is a form of patriarchy, a form in which a sexual division of labor is built in, as a defining feature. But to my mind they have no means of explaining why this might be so. They argue that capitalism rests on a production/consumption split, but do not ask why women were and are more identified with consumption and men with production. (Ann Curthoys, “The women’s movement and social justice”, in Unfinished business. Social justice for women in Australia, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1984. pp.l74-l75)
Women Against Pit Closures
The 1984-85 British mineworkers’ strike provided an exciting demonstration of the potential for united action by working-class men and women.
At the beginning of the strike, the British newspapers swept into action with a big campaign about the plight of the wives, who allegedly wanted their men back at work.
But this tactic misfired. It precipitated the formation of a national network of miners’ wives and daughters and other women from mining communities. This network quickly became a very effective organiser in support of the strike.
Hundreds of women’s support groups sprang up across Britain. Three months into the strike, this network became Women Against Pit Closures, with representatives from all over the coalfields.
In August 1984, a 10,000-strong march of women in Barnsley was said to be the largest women’s demonstration held anywhere in Britain since the days of the suffrage movement. While Britain has no female miners, many women came to regard the strike as their own struggle.
Most of the women’s support groups were established by women who had never previously been involved in political action. In mining communities throughout Britain, these women’s groups became as important as the union in organising support for the strike.
The women’s contact with local people, and their awareness of local issues, made them more effective than the union in gathering community support. The women’s groups were also important for fund-raising, running food kitchens and assisting families suffering hardship because of the strike.
As the strike progressed, many women became actively involved on the picket lines, and others undertook speaking/fundraising tours both in Britain and overseas. Delegations visited the United States and the Soviet Union and addressed huge rallies of trade unionists and socialists in virtually every country of Europe.
As women became active in support of the strike, many miners found themselves forced to take more responsibility for childcare and housework. After the strike, the women’s support groups continued to meet because the fight against pit closures was not over and some families still needed assistance.
In late 1987, women attending an International Miners’ Organisation conference in Sydney addressed a meeting of women’s movement activists. Representatives from Women Against Pit Closures and the US mineworkers’ union described the process of politicisation resulting from experience during strikes.
They pointed out that the National Union of Mineworkers was the only large union to support feminist demands for positive discrimination at the British Labour Party’s 1984 conference. They also described how both the British miners’ union and women’s organisation became actively involved in campaigns against nuclear power and the arms race, and in supporting the boycott movement against South African apartheid.
Organising working-class women
The Sydney meeting was told that Women Against Pit Closures was conducting an important discussion on future political and organisational perspectives. One idea was to retain the name but to open up the organisation to female activists from other fields.
Another proposal was to build a national coalition of trade union women. Its role would be “to strengthen the trade union movement and workers’ struggles.” The organisation would be formed around “some sort of charter.”
A third idea was a Women for Socialism movement with a membership fee and national and local structures. This group would take up issues such as the Thatcher government’s attacks on abortion rights, family allowances and maternity leave, and would participate in struggles around issues such as peace and disarmament, solidarity with Third World struggles and “support for the victims of Thatcher."
These developments have had an important impact on many feminists. Many have been prompted to reassess their attitudes towards working together with men for common political goals.
Among a number of strike participants interviewed by Sheila Rowbotham was Jean McCrindle, national treasurer of Women Against Pit Closures and a longtime activist in mining community politics and the women‘s movement. In one interview, she said:
Many of us have said in the women’s movement that until there is a working class women’s movement, we won’t know what it will - what the women who are part of it - will want from it. We know the ideas of the women’s movement are relevant to all women, but we don't know the forms and content of what they will take out of it and make their own. I think this movement has given us some kinds of clues as to what these might be. (“More than just a memory: Some political implications of women's involvement in the miners’ strike l984-1985”, Sheila Rowbotham, Feminist Review, No. 23, 1986. p. ll3)
________________________________________
Footnotes
1. George Hegel (l770-1831) was the culminating figure of the German idealist school of philosophy that began with Immanuel Kant. He sought to resolve the traditional philosophical problem of the relation between consciousness (mind) and being (matter) by postulating a unified, monistic reality in which matter is the alienated expression of its own inner organising force, reason, or Absolute Idea (Hegel’s philosophical term for god).
While reason (or mind) was predominant in Hegel’s philosophical system, he viewed reality as undergoing a progressive development through the process of dialectical change. Hegel systematised dialectics, though within a mystical and idealist framework. In creating the philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx and Engels rescued the dialectical method from Hegel‘s idealist system, placing dialectics within a materialist framework. The Hegelianising current within Western Marxism has sought to minimise or discard Marx‘s materialism and to place human reason and activity at the centre of its analysis.
2. Freudianism is the theory and method of psychoanalysis named after and psychiatrist. Studying the causes of pathological mental processes, Freud resolutely rejected vulgar materialist attempts to explain changes in mental acts by physiological causes. He regarded psychic activity as independent, existing side by side with material processes, and governed by eternal psychic forces, above all sexual impulses, lying outside of the conscious mind. Eternal conflicts in the depth of the human psyche are, according to Freud, the source and content - concealed from direct comprehension - of morality, art, science, religion, the state, law, wars, etc.
The psychoanalytical current within Western Marxism has sought to discard Marx's emphasis on social relations as the key factors shaping human consciousness and action and to explain social consciousness and social practice as an expression of the totality of individuals’ subconscious minds.
3. In English translations of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and other German or Russian writers, references to man, men or mankind where human being, people, or humanity is clearly intended are the product of the translation and not of the original. Both the German and Russian languages distinguish between human and the gender-specific man.
Comments
Post a Comment