Gender and Capitalism

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Gender and Capitalism: Debating Cinzia Arruzza’s “Remarks on Gender” Viewpoint Magazine

Hannah Höch, The Beautiful Girl, 1920


Remarks on Gender | Cinzia Arruzza

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We often use the term patriarchy to underscore that gender oppression is a phenomenon not reducible to interpersonal relations, but rather has a more societal character and consistency. However, things become a bit more complicated if we want to be more precise about what exactly is meant by “patriarchy” and “patriarchal system.” And this move becomes even more complex when we begin to ask about the precise relationship between patriarchy and capitalism.

Capitalism and Gender Oppression:  Remarks on Cinzia Arruzza’s “Remarks on Gender” | Johanna Oksala

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It may not be enough to find new answers to the old question of what is the “organizing principle” connecting patriarchy and capitalism. We may have to pose completely new questions.

The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State |  Sara R. Farris

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The nation-state could be the lens through which we can try to see the necessity of gendered and racial oppression, alongside class exploitation, as preconditions and not only consequences of capital accumulation.

Closing the Conceptual Gap: A Response to Cinzia Arruzza’s “Remarks on Gender” | FTC Manning 46 If we are truly committed to a rigorous and unifying theory of capital, we must consider the possibility that race and gender are as logically necessary as class is to the capitalist mode of production.

Logic or History? The Political Stakes of Marxist-Feminist Theory | Cinzia Arruzza 56 Specifying the relationship between the logical and historical dimensions of capitalism is one of the most controversial problems in Marxist theory, and one about which I am very uncertain. But, as this is the point of contention between Oksala, Farris, Manning and myself, I will address a set of concerns pertaining to this problem which is relevant to the central issues at stake: whether or not we can claim that gender oppression is a necessary feature of capitalism and, if so, at what level of abstraction can we make that claim.


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Remarks on Gender

Cinzia Arruzza | September 2, 2014

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I. Patriarchy and/or Capitalism: Reopening the Debate

It is standard to find references to “patriarchy” and “patriarchal relations” in feminist texts, tracts, or documents.1 Patriarchy is often used to show how gender oppression and inequality are not sporadic or exceptional occurrences. On the contrary, these are issues that traverse all of society, and are fundamentally reproduced through mechanisms that cannot be explained at the individual level.

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This is a translation of a series of remarks that were originally published in Italian for the Communia Network website as “riflessoni degeneri,” and subsequently in French (translated by Sylvia Nerina) for Avanti. The four installments appeared over the course of a few months for a primarily Italian audience. The individual remarks have been combined into one article, and the author has made some necessary changes to the text for the English-language version. It was translated from the French by Patrick King with assistance from the author. 

4 In short, we often use the term patriarchy to underscore that gender oppression is a phenomenon not reducible to interpersonal relations, but rather has a more societal character and consistency. However, things become a bit more complicated if we want to be more precise about what exactly is meant by “patriarchy” and “patriarchal system.” And this move becomes even more complex when we begin to ask about the precise relationship between patriarchy and capitalism.

The Question

For a brief period, from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, the question of the structural relationship between patriarchy and capitalism was the subject of a heated debate among theorists and partisans of a materialist current of thought as well as Marxist-feminists. The fundamental questions which were posed revolved around two axes: 1) is patriarchy an autonomous system in relation to capitalism? 2) is it correct to use the term “patriarchy” to designate gender oppression and inequality? Although it produced very interesting work, this debate  gradually became more and more unfashionable. This occurred in tandem with the retreat of critiques of capitalism, while other currents of feminist thought asserted themselves. These new modes of thought often did not go beyond the liberal horizon of the times – they sometimes essentialized relations between men and women and de-historicized gender, or they avoided questions of capitalism and class –  but at the same time, they developed useful concepts for the deconstruction of gender (such as queer theory in the 1990s). Of course, to go out of fashion does not necessarily mean to disappear. In the past decade, many feminist theorists have continued to work on these questions, at the risk of seeming out of touch with the times, vestiges of a tedious past. They were certainly right to persevere: during a time of economic and social crisis, we are currently bringing partial but much-needed attention back to the structural relation between gender oppression and capitalism. Over these last few years, empirical analyses or descriptions of phenomena or specific questions have certainly not been lacking, such as the feminization of work; the impact of neoliberal politics on women’s living and workplace conditions; the intersection of gender, racial, and class oppression; or the relation between the different constructions of sexual identity and capitalist regimes of accumulation. However, it is one thing to “describe” a phenomenon or a group of social phenomena, where the link between capitalism and gender

5 oppression is more or less evident. It is another to give a “theoretical” explanation of the reason for this structural relation that can be identified within these phenomena and their mode of functioning. It is therefore crucial to ask if there is an “organizing principle” which explains this link. In order to be both clear and concise on this point, I will try to summarize the most interesting theses on these matters that have been suggested until now. In the following remarks, I will analyze and question these different theses separately. To uphold a degree of intellectual honesty and to avoid any misunderstandings, I stress that my reconstruction of different points of view is not impartial. My own view is found in the third thesis below.

Three Theses

First Thesis: “Dual or Triple Systems Theory” We can put the original version of this thesis in the following terms: Gender and sexual relations constitute an autonomous system which combines with capitalism and reshapes class relations, while being at the same time modified by capitalism in a process of reciprocal interaction. The most up-to-date version of this theory includes racial relations, also considered as a system of autonomous social relations interconnected with gender and class relations. Within materialist feminist circles, these reflections are usually associated with the notion that gender and racial relations are systems of oppression as much as relations of exploitation. In general, these theses have an understanding of class relations as defined solely in economic terms. It is only via the interaction with patriarchy and the system of racial domination that they acquire an extra-economic character as well. A variation of this thesis is to see gender relations as a system of ideological and cultural relations derived from older modes of production and social formations, independent of capitalism. These older relations then interact with capitalist social relations, giving the latter their gendered dimension. Second Thesis: “Indifferent Capitalism” Gender oppression and inequality are the remnants of previous social formations and modes of production, when patriarchy directly organized production and determined a strict sexual division of labor. Capitalism is itself indifferent to gender relations and can overcome them to such a degree that patriarchy as a system has been dissolved in the advanced capitalist countries, while family relations have been restructured in quite radical ways. In sum, capitalism

6 has an essentially opportunistic  relation with gender inequality: it utilizes what it finds to be beneficial in existing gender relations, and destroys what becomes an obstacle. This view is articulated in various versions. Some claim that within capitalism women have benefited from a degree of emancipation unknown in other kinds of society, and this would demonstrate that capitalism as such is not a structural obstacle to women’s liberation. Others maintain that we should carefully distinguish between the logical and historical levels: logically, capitalism does not specifically need gender inequality, and could get rid of it; historically, things are not so simple. Third Thesis: The “Unitary Thesis” According to this theory, in capitalist countries, a patriarchal system that is autonomous from capitalism no longer exists. Patriarchal relations continue to exist, but without being part of a separate system. To deny that patriarchy is an autonomous system under capitalism is not to deny that gender oppression really exists, permeating both social and interpersonal relations. In other words, this thesis does not reduce every aspect of oppression to simply a mechanistic or direct consequence of capitalism, nor does it seek to offer an explanation solely in economic terms. In short, the unitary theory is not reductionist or economistic, and it does not underestimate the centrality of gender oppression. Proponents of the “unitary theory” disagree with the idea that today patriarchy would be a system of rules and mechanisms that autonomously reproduce themselves. At the same time, they insist on the need to consider capitalism not as a set of purely economic laws, but rather as a complex and articulated social order, an order that at its core consists of relations of exploitation, domination, and alienation. From this point of view, the task today is to understand how the dynamic of capital accumulation continues to produce, reproduce, transform, and renew hierarchical and oppressive relations, without expressing these mechanisms in strictly economic or automatic terms.

II. One, Two, or Three Systems?

In 1970, Christine Delphy wrote an article called “The Main Enemy,” in which she theorized the existence of a patriarchal mode of production, its relation to, as well as its non-correspondence with, the capitalist mode of production, and the definition of housewives as a class, in the strictly economic sense of the term.

7 Nine years later, Heidi Hartmann published her own article, “The Unhappy Marriages of Marxism and Feminism,” in which she argued for the thesis that patriarchy and capitalism are two autonomous systems, but also historically interconnected. For Hartmann, capitalist laws of accumulation are indifferent to the sex of labor-power, and if there arises a need for capitalism to create hierarchical relations in the division of labor, racism and patriarchy determine the distribution of the hierarchical positions and the specific way these are utilized. This thesis eventually took on the name of “Dual Systems Theory.” In her 1990 book Theorizing Patriarchy, Sylvia Walby reformulated the dual systems theory by adding a third, the racial system, and also sought to understand patriarchy as a variable system of social relations composed of six structures: the patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal relations in wage labor and salaried labor, patriarchal relations in the State, male violence, patriarchal relations in the sphere of sexuality, and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions. These six structures reciprocally condition each other while remaining autonomous: they can also be either private or public. More recently, Danièle Kergoat has theorized the “consubstantiality” of patriarchal, race, and class relations; these are three systems of relations based on exploitation and domination which intersect and are of the same substance (exploitation and domination), while being distinct, like the three persons of the Holy Trinity. This brief survey of authors and essays is only one example of the different ways in which the intersection of the patriarchal system and capitalist system has been theorized, and the ways in which one system is distinguished from the other. There are others, too, but for limits of space I am forced to limit my analysis to these examples, which are among the most clear while remaining the most systematic and complex. As I have already shown, the difficulty with this debate concerns the definition of patriarchy. There is not a uniform definition, but more of a set of propositions, some of which are compatible with each other, while others are contradictory. Since I cannot analyze all of these definitions, I propose, for now, to focus on the concept of the patriarchal system, understood as a system of relations, both material and cultural, of domination and exploitation of women by men. This is a system with its own logic that is at same time malleable to historical changes, in an ongoing relation with capitalism. Before analyzing the problems presented by this theoretical approach, we should define exploitation and make some distinctions. From the point of view of class relations, exploitation is defined as a process or mechanism of the expropriation of a surplus produced by a producing class for the benefit of another class. This can happen either through automatic mechanisms such as the wage, or the violent expropriation of the others’ labor – this was the case with the corvée, by which the feudal lords constrained the serfs through imposed authority and violent

8 coercion. Capitalist exploitation, in the Marxist sense, is a specific form of exploitation that consists in the extraction of the surplus-value produced by the worker for the benefit of the capitalist. Generally, in order to talk about capitalist exploitation, there must exist generalized commodity production, abstract labor, socially necessary labor time, value, and the wage-form. I am clearly leaving out other hypotheses, such as those based on the real subsumption of society in its totality, as defended by the workerist and post-workerist traditions. Confronting this view and its consequences for understanding gender relations would take up another article. In loosely defined terms: the extraction of surplus-value for Marx is the secret of capital, in the sense that it constitutes the origin of socially produced wealth and its modes of distribution. Exploitation as the extraction of surplus-value is not the only form of exploitation within capitalist society: to be simplistic, we can say that an employee in an unproductive sector (in value terms) is also exploited through the extraction of surplus-labor. And the wage-rate, living conditions, and workplace conditions of a shopkeeper can of course be worse than that of a factory worker. In addition, beyond the slightly economistic tendencies of past misunderstandings and debates, it is important to note that from a political point of view, the distinction between productive and unproductive workers (in terms of value or surplus-value production) is practically irrelevant. Strictly speaking, the mechanisms and forms of organization and division of the labor process are much more important. Let us return now to the dual systems theory and to the problem of patriarchy. First Problem If we define patriarchy as a system of exploitation, it logically follows that there is an exploiting group and an exploited group or, better, an expropriating class and an expropriated class. Who makes up these classes? The answers can be: all women and all men, or only some women and some men (in the example cited by Delphy, housewives and the adult male members of their families). If we talk about patriarchy as a system of exploitation in the “public” sphere, the notion can arise in which the State is the exploiter or expropriator. The “workerist feminists” applied the notion of capitalist exploitation to domestic labor, but according to their view, the true expropriator of domestic labor is capital, which would imply that patriarchy is not in fact an autonomous system of exploitation. In the case of Delphy’s work, the thesis that housewives are a class and their immediate male family members (in particular their husbands) are the exploiting class is not fully articulated, but also taken to its most far-reaching consequences. In logical terms, the

9 consequence of her position would be that the spouse of a migrant worker belongs to the same social class as the wife of a capitalist: they both produce use-values (in one case care work pure and simple, in the other, the work of “representation” of a certain social status, organizing meetings and receptions, for example) and are both in an exploitative relation of a servile nature, that is to say, working in exchange for the financial security provided by their husbands. In “The Main Enemy,” Delphy insists that being a member of the patriarchal class is a more important fact than being part of the capitalist class. It would follow that the solidarity between the wife of a capitalist and the wife of the migrant worker must take precedence over the class solidarity between the wife of the migrant worker and the other members of her husband’s class (or, and this is more optimism than anything else, it must take precedence over the class solidarity of the wife of the capitalist and her country club friends). In the end, Delphy’s actual political practice stands in contradiction with the logical consequences of her theory, which makes its analytical limits even more apparent. Furthermore, if we define men and women (in one version or another) as two classes — one the exploiters, the other the exploited — we inevitably come to the conclusion that there is an irreconcilable antagonism between classes whose interests are in reciprocal contradiction. But, if Delphy is wrong, should we then deny that men profit and take advantage of women’s unpaid work? No, because this would be a symmetrical error, unfortunately made by many Marxists who have taken this reasoning to the opposite extreme. It is clearly better and more convenient to have someone cook you a hot meal in the evening than to have to deal with the dishes yourself after a long day of work. It is quite “natural,” then, that men tend to try and hold on to this privilege. In short, it is undeniable that there are relations of domination and social hierarchy based on gender and that men, including those of lower classes, benefit from them. However, this should not be taken to mean that there is a class antagonism. We could rather make the following hypothesis: in a capitalist society, the complete or partial “privatization” of care work, that is, its concentration within the family (whatever the type of family, and including single-parent households), the lack of large-scale socialization of this care work, through the state or other forms, all this determines the workload that must be maintained within the private sphere, outside of both the market and institutions. The relations of gender oppression and domination determine the mode and scale in which this workload is to be distributed, giving way to an unequal division: women work more while men work less. But there is no appropriation of a “surplus.” Is there evidence to the contrary? A simple thought experiment will do. A man would lose nothing, in terms of workload, if the distribution of care work were completely socialized

10 instead of being performed by his wife. In structural terms, there would be no antagonistic or irreconcilable interests. Of course, this does not mean that he is conscious of this problem, as it may well be that he is so integrated into sexist culture that he has developed some severe form of narcissism based on his presumed male superiority, which leads him to naturally oppose any attempts to socialize care work, or the emancipation of his wife. The capitalist, on the other hand, has something to lose in the socialization of the means of production; it is not just about his convictions about the way the world works and his place in it, but also the massive profits he happily expropriates from the workers. Second Problem The second problem concerns the fact that those who insist that patriarchal relations today make up an independent system within advanced capitalist societies must face the thorny problem of determining its driving force: why does this system continually reproduce itself? Why does it persist? If it is an independent system, the reason must be internal and not external. Capitalism, for example, is a mode of production and a system of social relations, with an identifiable logic: according to Marx, it is a process of the valorization of value. Certainly, to have identified this process as the driving force or motor of capitalism does not say everything that needs to be said about capitalism: this would be analogous to thinking that the explanation of the anatomy of the heart and its functions would suffice to explain the whole anatomy of the human body. Capitalism is an ensemble of complex processes and relations. However, understanding what its heart is and how it works is a fundamental analytic necessity. Where patriarchal relations play a direct role in the organization of the relations of production (who produces and how, who appropriates, how the reproduction of these conditions of production is organized), identifying the driving force of the patriarchal system is simpler. This is the case with agrarian societies, for example, where the patriarchal family directly forms the unity of the production with the means of subsistence. Yet this is more complicated in capitalist society, where patriarchal relations do not directly organize production, but play a role in the division of labor, and the family is relegated to the private sphere of reproduction. Faced with this question, either one agrees with Delphy and other materialist feminists in seeing contemporary patriarchy as a specific mode of production, but would then have to face all the challenges I noted above, especially the intractable problem of who, in this conception, would make up the exploiting and exploited classes; or one simply has to abandon the view that patriarchy is a distinct mode of production, at least in the conventional sense of that term.

11 A hypothesis that has already been suggested in the past is that patriarchy is an independent ideological system, whose motor resides in the process of the production of signifiers and interpretations of the world. But here, we run into other problems: if ideology is the way in which we interpret our conditions of existence and our relations to them, a link must exist between ideology and these social conditions of existence; a link that is definitely not mechanistic, or automatic, or anything like that. But it would still be a matter of a certain form of connection, otherwise we would risk having a fetishistic and ahistorical conception of culture and ideology. Now the idea that the patriarchal system is an ideological system that constantly reproduces itself, despite the incredible changes introduced by capitalism in social life and relations of production these last two centuries, is even less convincing. Another hypothesis could be that the motor is psychological, but this also risks falling into a fetishistic and ahistorical conception of the human psyche. Last Problem Let us admit for a moment that patriarchy, racial relations, and capitalism are three independent systems, but also intersect and reciprocally reinforce each other. In this case, the question is of knowing the organizing principle and logic of this “holy alliance.” In Kergoat’s texts, for example, the definition of this relation in consubstantial terms remains a descriptive image, which does not succeed in explaining much. The causes for the intersection between these systems of exploitation and domination remain mysterious, just like with the Holy Trinity! Despite these problems, the dual or triple systems theories, in their different forms, remain implicit influences in many recent feminist theories. In my opinion, this is because these seem to be the most immediate and intuitive kinds of explanation. In other words, these are explanations that reflect how reality as such is manifested. It is evident that social relations include relations of domination and hierarchy based on gender and race that permeate both   the social whole and daily life. The more immediate explanation is that these relations all correspond to specific systems, because this is the way they manifest themselves. However, the most intuitive explanations are not always the most correct.

III. Is It All Capitalism’s Fault?

In the last section, I wrote that the conception of patriarchy as an independent system within capitalist society is the most widespread not only among feminist theorists but also activists. This is because it is an interpretation that reflects reality in the way this appears to us. To speak of

12 modes of appearance does not mean to describe an illusory phenomenon that is to be put in opposition to reality with a capital R. “Appearance” here refers to the specific way in which the relations of alienation and domination produced and reproduced by capital are experienced by people because of their very same logic.   As Daniel Bensaïd has remarked, the critique of political economy is first and foremost a critique of economic fetishism and ideology, which forces us to think in the shadow of capital.2 This is not a matter of “false consciousness,” but of a mode of experience determined by capital itself: the fragmentation of our perception of reality. This is a complex discourse, but in order to have an idea of what is to be understood by “a mode of experience determined by capital,” we have to refer, for example, to the section in the first volume of Marx’s Capital on commodity fetishism. Since our perception is fragmentary and those who have developed an awareness of gender inequality usually experience and perceive it as determined by a logic that is different and separate from that of capital, any denial of the view that patriarchy is an independent system within capitalism inevitably encounters rejections and doubts.

The Transformation of the Family

The most common objection has to do with the historic dimension: how can one affirm that patriarchy is not an independent system when the oppression of women existed before capitalist society? Now, to say that within capitalist society women’s oppression and power relations are a necessary consequence of capitalism, and that these phenomena do not have their own independent and proper logic, is not to support the absurd argument that holds that gender oppression originates with capitalism. What is being defended here is a different argument, tied to the particular characteristics of capitalism. Societies in which capitalism has supplanted the preceding mode of production are characterized by a profound and radical transformation of the family. The transformation of the family is above all the result of the expropriation of the land, or primitive accumulation, which separated large portions of the population from their means of production and subsistence (the land), provoking on the one hand the disintegration of the patriarchal peasant family, and on the other a historically unprecedented process of urbanization. The result was that the family no longer represented the unity of production with a

2

See Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, New York: Verso, 2002), 227-228.

13 specific productive role, generally organized through the specific patriarchal relations that prevailed in the previous agrarian society. This process began at different moments and took different forms in all the countries in which capitalist relations took hold. With the separation between the family and the site of production, the relation between production and reproduction (in the sense of biological, generational, and social reproduction) was also radically transformed. And here is the point: although the relations of gender domination were maintained, they have, on the other hand, ceased being an independent system following an autonomous logic because of this transformation of the family from a unit of production to private place outside commodity production and the market. Moreover, these relations of domination have undergone a significant transformation. For example, one of these transformations is tied to a direct link between sexual orientation, reified into an identity, and gender (we can consult on this matter the work of Foucault in The History of Sexuality, works by Judith Butler, or, more recently, the writings of Kevin Floyd and Rosemary Hennessy). While it is certainly true that gender oppression existed well before the advent of capitalism, this does not mean that the forms it takes remained the same afterwards. Moreover, one could question the idea that gender oppression is a transhistorical fact, an idea defended forcefully by a number of “second wave” feminists but which must be revised in light of recent anthropological research. In fact, not only has the oppression of women not always existed, but it did not exist in various classless societies, where gender oppression was introduced only with colonialism. In order to have a better idea of the link between the class relation and the power relations between genders, we can take the example of slavery in the United States.

Race and Class

In her book Women, Race, and Class, Angela Davis highlights the way in which the destruction of the family and all the relations of kinship between African-American slaves, as well as the specific form of slave labor, gave rise to a substantial overturning of gendered power relations between slaves. This does not mean that the female slaves did not undergo a specific form of oppression as women, quite the opposite: they severely suffered, but at the hands of the white slaveowners, not their fellow slaves. In other words, the persistence and articulation of gender relations are linked in complex ways to social conditions, class relations, and relations of

14 production and reproduction. An abstract and transhistorical vision of women’s oppression does not allow for an understanding of these articulations and differences, and therefore cannot explain them.

Persistence of the Domestic Mode of Production

As I wrote above, in the countries where the capitalist mode of production supplanted the preceding mode of production, radically transforming the family and its role, the relations of power between genders ceased to form an independent system. This does not hold for countries with structures of production that are not entirely transformed and that remain on the periphery of the global capitalist economy. Claude Meillassoux documented on this point the persistence of a “domestic mode of production” in many African countries, in which the process of proletarianization (that is, the separation of the peasantry from the land) remained quite limited.3 However, even in places where the domestic mode of production remains in place, it is subjected to intense pressure by the country’s integration into the world capitalist system. The effects of colonialism, imperialism, the pillaging of natural resources on the part of the advanced capitalist countries, the objective pressures of the global market economy, etc., have a significant impact on the social and familial relations which organize the production and distribution of goods, often exacerbating the exploitation of women and gender violence.

A Contradictory Totality

Let’s return now to the advanced capitalist countries. A classic objection to the thesis that patriarchy does not constitute an independent system is that Marxist feminism is fundamentally reductionist. In other words, it tries to reduce the plural complexity of society to mere economic laws without correctly grasping the irreducibility of power relations. This objection would make sense under two conditions: the first would be that capitalism is understood only as a strictly economic process of the extraction of surplus-value, and thus as an ensemble of economic rules that determines this process; the second would be to understand power relations as the mechanistic and automatic result of the process of surplus-value extraction. The truth is that this type of reductionism does not correspond in the least to the richness and complexity of Marx’s

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Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

15 thought, and even less to the extraordinary sophistication of a large part of the Marxist theoretical tradition. As I already said above, to try to explain what capitalist society is only in terms of surplusvalue extraction is like trying to explain the anatomy of the human body by explaining only how the heart works. Capitalism is a versatile, contradictory totality, continually in movement, with relations of exploitation and alienation that are constantly in a process of transformation. Even though Marx attributed an apparently automatic character to the valorization of value in the first volume of Capital –  a process in which value is the real subject, while capitalists and individuals are reduced to the role of emissaries or bearers of a structure – “Monsieur le Capital” does not really exist, except as a logical category. It is not until the third volume of Capital that this becomes clear. Capitalism is not a Moloch, a hidden god, a puppeteer or a machine: it is a living totality of social relations, in which class relations trace lines of demarcation and impose constraints that affect all other forms of relations. Among these, we also find power relations connected to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and religion, and all are put into the service of the accumulation of capital and its reproduction, but often in varying, unpredictable, and contradictory ways.

Is Capitalism “Indifferent” to the Oppression of Women?

A widely held opinion among Marxist theorists is to consider gender oppression as unnecessary to capitalism. This is not to say that capitalism doesn’t exploit or profit from the forms of gender inequality produced by previous social configurations; it is, however, a contingent and opportunistic relationship. In actuality, capitalism does not really depend on gender oppression, and women have attained an unprecedented level of freedom and emancipation under capitalism in comparison to other historical epochs. In short, there is not an antagonistic relationship between capitalism and the project of women’s liberation. This point of view has been favorably received among Marxist theorists from many different schools of thought, so it is worthwhile to analyze it. We can use an article written by Ellen Meiksins Wood as a starting point. In her article “Capitalism and Human Emancipation: Race, Gender, and Democracy,” Wood begins by explaining the fundamental differences between capitalism and the modes of production that preceded it. Capitalism has no intrinsic ties to particular identities, inequalities, or extra-economic, political, or juridical differences. Quite the opposite: the extraction of surplus-value takes place in the relations between formally

16 free and equal individuals, without any differences in juridical or political status. Capitalism is thus not structurally disposed to creating gender inequalities, and it even has a natural tendency to put such differences into question and dilute racial and gender identities.

An Internal or an Opportunistic Relationship?

Capitalist development also created the social conditions conducive to the critique of these inequalities, and to the facilitation of social pressure against them. This has no precedent in previous historical epochs; one only needs to think back to Greco-Roman literature in which abolitionist positions are practically absent, despite the universal presence of slavery for productive ends. At the same time, capitalism tends to use pre-existing differences inherited from previous societies in an opportunistic manner. For example, gender and racial difference are utilized in order to create hierarchies between the more and less advantaged sectors of the exploited class. These hierarchies are passed off as consequences of natural differences, masking their real nature, namely that they are products of the logic of capitalist competition. This should not be understood as a conscious plan that capitalism follows, but as the convergence of a series of practices and policies which follow from the fact that gender and racial equalities are advantageous from the point of view of the capitalists. Capitalism does indeed instrumentalize gender oppression for its own ends, but it would be able to survive just fine without it. On the other hand, capitalism would not be able to exist without class exploitation. It is crucial to note that the framework of Wood’s article is a series of basic political questions about the type of extra-economic gains and benefits that can –  and cannot –  be obtained in a capitalist society. Her starting point is the shift in attention of social struggles from the economic terrain to non-economic questions (racial and gender emancipation, peace, environmental health, citizenship). And there’s the rub. I mention Wood’s framework because on the one hand, her article is based on a sharp separation between the logical structure of capital and its historical dimensions; but, on the other hand, it ends up conflating these very same levels, thus reproducing a classic confusion that is unfortunately common in the work of many Marxist theorists who would subscribe to the theses of Wood’s article. To put this point more clearly: as soon as we accept this distinction between the logical structure of capital and its historical dimensions, we can then accept the idea that the extraction of surplus-value takes place within the framework of relations between formally free and equal

17 individuals without presupposing differences in juridical and political status. But we can do this only at a very high level of abstraction–that is to say, at the level of the logical structure. From the point of view of concrete history, things change radically. Let’s take this issue point by point. 1. Let’s start from a fact: a capitalist social formation devoid of gender oppression (in its various forms) has never existed. That capitalism was limited to the use of pre-existing inequalities in this process remains debatable: imperialism and colonialism contributed to the introduction of gender hierarchies in societies where they did not exist before, or existed in a much more nuanced way. The process of capitalist accumulation was accompanied by the equally important expropriation of women from different forms of property to which they had access, and professions that they had been able to hold throughout the High Middle Ages; the alternation of processes of the feminization and defeminization of labor contributed to the continual reconfiguration of family relations, creating new forms of oppression based on gender. The advent of the reification of gender identity starting from the end of the 19th century contributed to the reinforcement of a heteronormative matrix that had oppressive consequences for women, but not only them. Other examples could be cited. To say that women obtained formal freedoms and political rights, until then unimaginable, only under capitalism, because this system had created the social conditions allowing for this process of emancipation, is an argument of questionable validity. One could, in fact, say the exact same thing for the working class as a whole: it is only within capitalism that the conditions were created allowing for the political emancipation of the subaltern strata and that this class became a subject capable of attaining important democratic victories. So what? Would this demonstrate that capitalism could easily do without the exploitation of the working class? I don’t think so. It is better to drop the reference to what women have or have not obtained: if women have obtained something, it is both because they have struggled for it, and because with capitalism, the social conditions have been favorable to the birth of mass social movements and modern politics. But this is true for the working class as well. 2. It is important to distinguish what is functional to capitalism and what is a necessary consequence of it. The two concepts are different.  It is perhaps difficult to show at a high level of abstraction that gender oppression is essential to the inner workings of capitalism. It is true that capitalist competition continually creates differences and inequalities, but these inequalities, from an abstract point of view, are not necessarily gender-related. If we were to think of capitalism as “pure,” that is, analyze it on the basis of its essential mechanisms, then maybe Wood would be right. However, this does not prove that capitalism would not necessarily

18 produce, as a result of its concrete functioning, the constant reproduction of gender oppression, often under diverse forms. 3. Lastly, we must return to the distinction between the logical level and the historical level. What is possible from logical viewpoint and what happens at the level of historical processes are two profoundly different things. Capitalism always exists in concrete social formations that each have their own specific history. As I have already said, these social formations are characterized by the constant and pervasive presence of gender oppression. Let us suppose, as a thought experiment, that these hierarchies in the division of labor were based upon other forms of inequality (large and small, old and young, fat and skinny, those who speak an Indo-European language versus those who speak other languages, etc.). Let’s suppose as well that pregnancy and birth are completely mechanized and that the whole sphere of emotional relationships can be commodified and managed by private services… briefly, let’s suppose all of this. Is this a plausible vision from a historical point of view? Can gender oppression be so easily replaced by other types of hierarchical relations, which would appear as natural and be as deeply rooted in the psyche? These scenarios seem legitimately doubtful.

Towards Concrete Historical Analysis

To conclude: in order to respond to the question of whether it is possible for women’s emancipation and liberation to be attained under the capitalist mode of production, we must look for the answer at the level of concrete historical analysis, not at the level of a highly abstract analysis of capital. It is indeed here where we find not only Wood’s misstep, but also the error of many Marxist theorists who remain fiercely attached to the idea of a hierarchy between (principal) exploitation and (secondary) oppression. If we want to pose the political aspect of this question and also be in a position to respond to it, we must have a historical conception of what capitalism is today and what it has been historically. This is one of the points of departure for a Marxist feminism where the notion of social reproduction occupies a central role.

IV. Rethinking Capital, Rethinking Gender

In the previous section, I tried to clarify the limits of the “fragmented thought” which presents the different types of oppression and domination as each being connected to an autonomous system, without understanding their intrinsic unity. Moreover, I criticized the reading of the relation between capital and gender oppression that relies on what I called an “indifferent

19 capitalism.” It is time now to approach “unitary theory,” as well as the concept of “social reproduction.”

Reconceptualizing Capital

The dualist positions often begin from the idea that the Marxist critique of political economy only analyzes the economic laws of capitalism, through solely economic categories. This approach would be inadequate to understand such complex phenomena as the multiplicity of power relations, or the discursive practices that constitute us as subjects. This is why alternative epistemological approaches are deemed to be more capable of seeing causes that lie outside the domain of economics, and more adequate for understanding the specificity and irreducible nature of these social relations. This position is shared across a broad spectrum of feminist theorists. Some of them have suggested that we need a “marriage” or eclectic combination between different types of critical analyses, some devoted to the “pure” economic laws of capitalist accumulation, and others addressing other forms of social relations. On the other hand, other theorists have embraced what is called the “linguistic turn” in feminist theory, which separates the critique of gender oppression from the critique of capitalism. In both cases, there is the common assumption that “pure economic laws” exist, independent from specific relations of domination and alienation. It is precisely this assumption that must be critically questioned. For reasons of space, I will limit myself to highlighting two aspects of the Marxian critique of political economy. 1. A relation of exploitation always implies a relation of domination and alienation. These three aspects are never truly separated in the Marxian critique of political economy. The worker is before everything else a living and thinking body and is submitted to specific forms of discipline that remold her. As Marx writes, the productive process “produces” the worker to the same extent that it reproduces the work-capitalist relation. Since each process of production is always concrete – that is to say, characterized by aspects that are historically and geographically determined –  it is possible to conceive of each productive process as being linked to a disciplinary process, which partially constructs the type of subject the worker becomes. We can say the same thing for the consumption of commodities: as Kevin Floyd has shown in his analysis of the formation of sexual identity, commodity consumption entails a disciplinary aspect and participates in the reification of sexual identity. Consumption thus takes part in the process of subject-formation.

20 2. For Marx, production and reproduction form an indivisible unity. In other words, while they are distinct and separate and have specific characteristics, production and reproduction are necessarily combined as concrete moments of an articulated totality. Reproduction is understood here as the process of the reproduction of a society as a whole, or in Althusserian terms, the reproduction of the conditions of production: education, the culture industry, the Church, the police, the army, the healthcare system, science, gender discourses, consumption habits…  all these aspects play a crucial role in the reproduction of specific relations of production. Althusser noted in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” that without the reproduction of the conditions of production, a social formation would not be able to hold together for even one year. It is essential, however, not to understand the relation between production and reproduction in a mechanistic or deterministic manner. In fact, if Marx understands capitalist society as a totality, he nonetheless does not understand it as an “expressive” totality: put otherwise, there is no automatic or direct “reflection” between the different moments of this totality (art, culture, economic structure, etc.), or between one particular moment and the totality as a whole. At the same time, an analysis of capitalism that does not understand this unity between production and reproduction will fall back into a vulgar materialism or economism, and Marx does not make this mistake. Beyond his political writings, Capital itself is proof of this, for example in the sections on the struggle over the working day or on primitive accumulation. In these passages, one can clearly see that coercion, the active intervention of the State, and class struggle are in fact constitutive components of a relation of exploitation that is not determined by purely economic or mechanical laws. These observations allow us to highlight how this idea that Marx conceives capitalism solely in economic terms is untenable. This is not to say that there have not been reductionist or vulgar materialist tendencies within the Marxist tradition. This means, however, that these tendencies relied on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Marxian critique of political economy and a fetishization of economic laws, the latter conceived as static things or as abstract structures rather than as forms of activity or human relations. An alternative, opposed assumption to the separation between the purely economic laws of capitalism and other systems of domination amounts to conceiving the unity between production and reproduction as a direct identity. This point of view characterizes a section of

21 Marxist-feminist thought, in particular the workerist tradition, which insisted on seeing reproductive labor as directly productive of surplus-value, and thus governed by the same laws. Again, for reasons of space, I will limit myself to the observation that such a point of view returns to a form of reductionism, which obscures the difference between various social relations and does not help us understand the specific characteristics of diverse relations of domination that are not only constantly reproduced but also transformed within each capitalist social formation. Moreover, it does not help us to analyze the specific way in which certain relations of power are located outside of the labor market, while still being indirectly influenced by this market: for example, through different forms of commodity consumption, or through the objective constraints that wage labor (or its equivalent, unemployment) imposes on personal life and interpersonal relationships. To conclude, I propose to rethink the Marxian critique of capitalism as a critique of an articulated and contradictory totality of relations of exploitation, domination, and alienation.

Social Reproduction and “Unitary Theory”

In light of this methodological clarification, we now have to understand what is meant by “social reproduction” within what is generally called “unitary theory.” The term social reproduction, in the Marxist tradition, usually indicates the process of reproduction of a society in its totality, as already mentioned. In the feminist Marxist tradition, however, social reproduction means something more precise: the maintenance and reproduction of life, at the daily or generational level. In this context, social reproduction designates the way in which the physical, emotional, and mental labor necessary for the production of the population is socially organized: for example, food preparation, youth education, care for the elderly and the sick, as well as questions of housing and all the way to questions of sexuality… The concept of social reproduction has the advantage of enlarging our vision of what was previously called domestic labor, and which a large part of Marxist-feminism has focused on. In fact, social reproduction includes within its concept a series of social practices and types of labor that go well beyond only domestic labor. It also makes it possible to extend analysis outside the walls of the home, since the labor of social reproduction is not always found in the same forms: what part of the latter comes from the market, the welfare state, and family relations, remains a contingent question that depends on specific historical dynamics and feminist struggles. The concept of social reproduction, then, allows us to locate more precisely the mobile and porous quality of the walls of the home: in other words, the relation between, on the one

22 hand, domestic life within the home, and the phenomena of commodification, the sexualization of the division of labor, and the policies of the welfare-state on the other. Social reproduction also enables us to more effectively analyze phenomena like the relation between the commodification of care-work and its “racialization” by repressive migration policies, such as those that aim to lower the costs of immigrant labor and force them to accept slave-like working conditions. Finally, and this is the crucial point, the way social reproduction functions within a given social formation has an intrinsic relation to the way the production and reproduction of societies are organized in their totality, and therefore to class relations. Once again, these relations cannot be conceived as purely accidental and contingent intersections: viewing them through the lens of social reproduction allows us to identify the organizing logic of these intersections without for this reason excluding the role played by struggle, and the existence of contingent phenomena and practices in general. We must keep in mind that the sphere of social reproduction is also determinant in the formation of subjectivity, and thus relations of power. If we take into account the relations that exist in each capitalist society between social reproduction, the production of the society as a whole, and the relations of production, we can say that these relations of domination and power are not separate structures or levels: they do not intersect in a purely external manner and do not maintain a solely contingent relation with the relations of production. The multiple relations of power and domination therefore appear as concrete expressions of the articulated and contradictory unity that is capitalist society. This process should not be understood in an automatic or mechanistic manner. As noted before, we must not forget the dimension of human praxis: capitalism is not a machine or automaton but a social relation, and as such, is subject to contingencies, accidents, and conflicts. However, contingencies and conflicts do not rule out the existence of a logic –  namely, capitalist accumulation – that imposes objective constraints not only on our praxis or lived experience but also on our ability to produce and articulate relations with others, our place in the world, and our relations with our conditions of existence. This is exactly what “unitary theory” tries to grasp: to be able to read relations of power based on gender or sexual orientation as concrete moments of that articulated, complex, and contradictory totality that is contemporary capitalism. From this point of view, these concrete moments certainly possess their own specific characteristics, and thus must be analyzed with adequate and specific theoretical tools (from psychoanalysis to literary

23 theory…), but they also maintain an internal relation with this larger totality and with the process of societal reproduction that proceeds according to the logic of capitalist accumulation. The essential thesis of “unitary theory” is that for Marxist feminism, gender oppression and racial oppression do not correspond to two autonomous systems which have their own particular causes: they have become an integral part of capitalist society through a long historical process that has dissolved preceding forms of social life. From this point of view, it would be mistaken to see both as mere residues of past social formations that continue to exist within capitalist society for reasons pertaining to their anchoring in the human psyche or in the antagonism between sexed “classes,” etc. This is not to underestimate the psychological dimension of gender and sexual oppression or the contradictions between oppressors and oppressed. It is, however, a matter of identifying  the social conditions and framework provided by class relations that impact, reproduce, and influence our perceptions of ourselves and of our relations to others, our behaviors, and our practices. This framework is the logic of capitalist accumulation, which imposes fundamental limits and constraints on our lived experiences and how we interpret them. The fact that such a large number of feminist theoretical currents over the last few decades have been able to avoid analyzing this process, and the crucial role played by capital in gender oppression in its various forms, attests to the power of capital to co-opt our ideas and influence our modes of thinking.


24

Capitalism and Gender Oppression: Remarks on Cinzia Arruzza’s “Remarks on Gender” Johanna Oksala | May 4, 2015

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919

25 Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that capitalism must constitute the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of gender oppression. Investigating the relationship between feminism and capitalism raises a host of difficult questions, however, which Cinzia Arruzza faces head on in her lucid essay. She gives an illuminative roadmap of the terrain in which this issue was debated in the 1970s and 1980s by laying out three different theses on how capitalism and gender oppression are related: dual or triple systems theory, indifferent capitalism, and the unitary thesis. She begins by assessing carefully the problems of the first two positions and concludes by defending the third, the unitary thesis: in capitalist societies, a patriarchal system that would be autonomous and distinct from capitalism no longer exists. Instead of treating gender and sexual oppression as separate forms of domination, a unitary Marxist-feminist theory must incorporate them in the total framework of capitalist accumulation. Similar to Marx himself, Arruzza’s argument is both historical as well as philosophical. She contends that gender oppression and racial oppression have become “an integral part of capitalist society through a long historical process that has dissolved preceding forms of social life.” Theoretically, she insists that we have to understand capitalism not merely as an economic system or a distinct mode of production, but as a complex and articulated social order that essentially consists of relations of exploitation, domination, and alienation. Such an enlarged conception of capitalism allows us to recognize the irreplaceable role of social reproduction in it – the daily and intergenerational maintenance and reproduction of social life. From such an expanded theoretical perspective, patriarchal gender relations appear intrinsic, rather than merely contingent or instrumental for the way that social reproduction is organized in capitalist societies. I strongly agree with Arruzza on several points of her argument, starting with the importance and the urgency of the topic she raises: a critical analysis of contemporary capitalism is a pressing task for feminist theory today. I am in full agreement with her on the need to recognize that social reproduction forms an essential condition of possibility for contemporary capitalist economies. I also find her critique of the first thesis – the dual systems theories – astute and convincing. Arruzza incisively summarizes the problems that Marxistfeminists faced in trying to model gender oppression on class exploitation by theorizing patriarchy and capitalism as similar, yet distinct systems of oppression. While men clearly benefitted from a sexist division of labor, there was no “surplus” in the strictly Marxist sense that men were able to appropriate from women’s unpaid work at home. Neither did women form a

26 unified, transhistorical class with essentially the same interests; instead the intersections of class, gender, and racial oppression called for more specific and historically varied analyses. However, I have some problems with Arruzza’s dismissal of the second position, indifferent capitalism, as well as her endorsement of the third, the unitary thesis. But before I turn to examine them more closely, I want to make a more general remark that underlies my concerns here. Arruzza notes at the beginning of her essay that the debate on the structural relationship between capitalism and patriarchy became increasingly unfashionable in the 1980s. She commends the many feminists who have nevertheless continued to work on the question at the risk of seeming out of touch with the times. In the midst of our current economic and social crisis, we are now well advised to return to their analyses. I want to insist that returns are never easy: something more than intellectual fashion changed in the 1980s and 1990s. Empirically, neoliberalism and globalization happened; theoretically, post-structuralism happened. Both of these changes mean that the terrain upon which the questions about capitalism and gender oppression have to be posed has radically changed, too. Hence, it may not be enough to find new answers to the old question of what is the “organizing principle” connecting patriarchy and capitalism. We may have to pose completely new questions. * The problem the early Marxist-feminist projects faced was economic reductionism. The motivation behind developing so-called dual systems theories was the realization that gender oppression was not merely an economic phenomenon, but something that traversed all aspects of social life. It was not only capitalists who were benefitting from gender oppression, but all men. As Heidi Hartman noted sharply in her definitive essay: “Men have more to lose than their chains.”1 In other words, if feminists were going to analyze women’s subordination through the theoretical framework of capitalism, and to avoid economic reductionism, it seemed apparent that they had to either supplement the existing economic analyses of capitalism with their own analyses of other, complementary or intersecting forms of oppression, or they needed to adopt a broader, “non-economic” conception of capitalism. The unitary theories that Arruzza defends opted for the latter alternative.

1

Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Patriarchy and Capitalism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” Capital & Class 3.2 (1979), 24.

27 The problem that unitary theories face, however, is that while they forge connections between seemingly fragmented and isolated phenomena, they do so at the cost of hiding contradictions, historical contingencies and singularities under generality. They inevitably risk solidifying diversity and theoretical specificity into a totality. Arruzza is very aware of this problem and tries to avoid it by insisting that we need a radically historicized analysis of capitalism. She emphasizes that while surplus-value extraction is a distinctive and defining feature of capitalism, trying to explain capitalism by this process alone would be “analogous to thinking that the explanation of the anatomy of the heart and its functions would suffice to explain the whole anatomy of the human body.” Instead of only considering the heart, we have to understand capitalism as “a versatile, contradictory totality, continually in movement, with relations of exploitation and alienation that are constantly in a process of transformation.” She sounds very Foucauldian when she emphasizes that capitalism consists of varied and diffuse power relations: “power relations connected to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and religion.” Moreover, there is no unidirectional and overarching rationality that explains them all. Although she insists that all these power relations “are put in the service of the accumulation of capital and its reproduction,” this often happens “in varying, unpredictable, and contradictory ways.” Once we insist that capitalism is in fact versatile, adaptable, historically dynamic and that it contains contradictory tendencies, diffuse power relations and produces unpredictable effects, however, we seem to be rapidly emptying the notion out of its explanatory force. If everything is capitalism, then nothing is. In other words, if we give up the idea that the functioning of the heart can explain the functioning of the whole human body, then we seem to have given up the idea that we can find one “organizing principle” that explains gender oppression in capitalism. We can still grant that the economic logic of capitalism explains something, or even a great deal about gender oppression, but we nevertheless need a variety of other critical analyses that are linked with the analysis of class exploitation, and with each other, in complex and historically contingent ways. In other words, it seems to me that a radically historicized and complex version of the unitary theory in fact makes it more or less indistinguishable from a historicized version of the second thesis, which Arruzza calls “indifferent capitalism” – the thesis that the relationship between capitalism and gender oppression is opportunistic and historically contingent. When discussing this second “indifferent capitalism” thesis Arruzza switches back to a more narrow, essentially economic understanding of capitalism as a distinct mode of production and highlights one of its key defining features: in capitalist modes of production, production aims at capitalist accumulation – the maximization of profits. All other normativities

28 are subservient to this overriding goal. When we focus on its economic logic, capitalism now appears to have a merely contingent and opportunistic relationship to gender oppression. When women’s subordination and gendered division of labor are beneficial for the goal of capitalist accumulation, capitalism works in tandem with mechanisms of gender oppression. In geographical locations and historical periods in which the reverse is true, however, it is completely conceivable that capitalism and feminism are in fact allies. In other words, there is no intrinsic or essential relationship between them. Arruzza notes that those feminists who argue that capitalism is good for women have readily appropriated this thesis: capitalism has no intrinsic ties to particular identities, inequalities, or extra-economic, political, or juridical differences. Just because a thesis can be appropriated to defend capitalism does not mean that it is false, however. As Arruzza notes at the beginning of her article, we have to carefully distinguish between logical and historical versions of this thesis and therefore between logical or metaphysical necessity on the one hand, and empirical or historical necessity, on the other. Even if we accept that capitalism, now understood as a distinct economic system of production, does not logically need gender inequality, historically things are not so simple. Arruzza admits herself that it is “perhaps difficult to show at a high level of abstraction that gender oppression is essential to the inner workings of capitalism,” but insists that her argument concerns the way things are now, in our lived, historical reality. In other words, what I take her to be arguing is that if we operate with an abstract, economic definition of capitalism that identifies it through its economic logic, then it is impossible to make a necessary, logical connection between capitalism and gender oppression. The relationship is historically contingent and opportunistic. However, if we move to the level of lived reality where capitalism denotes a totality – a historically specific social formation consisting of all the myriad social practices in which we are involved daily – then the two become indistinguishable. Here Arruzza and I are again in full agreement: I think that both of these claims are valid and ontologically true at the same time. However, my problem is methodological. Once we have moved on to the level of a totality, the level of our lived reality, there is not much else that can be significantly stated about the connection between capitalism and gender oppression than that they are intertwined or inherently connected. The proposition becomes non-falsifiable. Stating that something in a total social formation is connected to something else in it is obviously true in a trivial sense. But on this level it seems difficult to explain the link between capitalism and gender oppression through a single organizing principle. To explain anything at all about their connection, we have

29 move back to some form of “fragmented thought”: retrieve a more precise definition of capitalism and then study the myriad and often contradictory ways in which the economic logic of capitalism determines, intersects or shapes historically specific, gendered social practices. * It is my contention that today we can identify at least two different and opposing ways that the capitalist logic of accumulation – the imperative of economic growth – intersects with gender oppression. On the one hand, the rapid neoliberalization of our economies in recent decades has resulted in a constant drive to extend the reach of the market. According to neoliberal economic theory, commodification and privatization are particularly effective means of speeding up economic growth given that the GDP is measured in terms of market transactions. This doctrine is consistent with the attempts to commodify both the private and the public realms and to turn women into wage-laborers. As the marketization of everyday life expands, people have come to increasingly rely on the affective and care services that they now buy and which used to be provided mainly by women in the private realm. This has resulted in new forms of gender oppression, as it is often poor, immigrant and third-world women who end up providing these commodified services. The so-called “global care chains” and the enormous growth in the trafficking of women have become some of the gendered effects of globalization.2 On the other hand, it is also clearly beneficial for capitalism in the current historical conjuncture to rely on women’s unpaid reproductive labor in the private sphere. Even though it is possible to construct economic thought experiments and to imagine, logically, capitalist forms of production that have completely commodified social reproduction, historically we are still far from achieving that. Attempts to commodify biological reproduction and affective relationships, such as sex and love, encounter both technical difficulties as well as moral objections in our current forms of life. The social provision of childcare and domestic labor, on the other, is an obvious hindrance to the logic of capitalist accumulation because it requires public investment. This must be counted as at least part of the explanation for why the feminist movement, despite decades of political struggle by now, has had very little success in socializing and ungendering

2

The term “global care chain” was first used by Arlie Hochschild to describe the links between people across the globe based on their roles in the transnational division of care work. See, Arlie Hochschild, “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value”, in On The Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, eds. William Hutton and Anthony Giddens (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 131.

30 reproduction. Women are still expected to take the main responsibility for the early provisioning of childcare, as well as for most of the housework. Hence, we can identify opposing ways to relate capitalist economic logic and gender oppression – capitalism wants women to both work and to stay at home –and we can find examples of both incentives today. Women are increasingly torn between the conflicting demands of femininity in neoliberal capitalist societies.3 A contradiction characterizes the gendered consequences of recent economic crises too. The instability of capitalist economies has been negotiated in recent decades through neoliberal forms of governmentality – new political technologies of power and social regulation that emphasise individual responsibility in risk management. While a stable nuclear family was previously understood to provide the necessary counterweight to competitive and individualistic capitalist societies, today social volatility and economic risks have become increasingly central for profit making. It is especially the poor and the most vulnerable segments of the population, for example, who have been forced into unprecedented levels of debt in recent decades, and whose indebtedness has thereby made possible the growth of the lucrative credit markets and the rapid financialization of Western economies. In other words, the breaking up of the stable nuclear family and the collapse of the traditional gender order based on the idea of family-wage can be understood as both useful and harmful for capitalist accumulation: on the one hand the dissolution of social cohesion and the growing number of poor, single-parent households has provided new lucrative opportunities for capitalist accumulation in the form of subprime lending, for example; on the other hand, the disintegration of the traditional gender order has resulted in an intensified crisis of care in Western societies and made the questions concerning social reproduction appear as acute problems in capitalism. * We should be mindful of Nietzsche’s assertion that only that which is without history can be defined. Our conceptions and theoretical understandings of reality are produced through political struggle and are thus always contingent and contestable. All definitions of capitalism must be understood as political acts, and their extension and validity remains open to constant

3

Cf. Johanna Oksala, “The Neoliberal Subject of Feminism,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42.1 (2011), 104–120.

31 contestation. In other words, capitalism does not “essentially” mean anything. It is a theoretical tool, or perhaps even a weapon, that I believe can be successfully deployed in several contexts. Depending on the theoretical or political context in which it is deployed and the way it is defined there, we can do different things with it. In political economy, it denotes a distinctive mode of production, which can be identified through a list of key features – private property, the dominance of wage labor, the allocation of goods and services through markets and so on – and usefully distinguished from other types of economic systems. In much of critical social theory, on the other hand, it denotes something broader, usually framed in terms of a totality or a comprehensive social formation. The clear advantage of such a totalizing perspective is that it is capable of theoretically connecting seemingly disparate phenomena and therefore politically uniting people who are able to recognize that their individual problems are not merely local, psychological or accidental. However, as I have tried to argue, there are also costs and risks involved in such totalistic thinking. When capitalism is analyzed as a mega-structure or an all-encompassing explanatory background against which all other things are understood, we risk losing a clear theoretical focus and political aim. Not only do varied forms of gender oppression have historically contingent relationships to the distinct and contradictory economic logics characterizing contemporary capitalism – feminist political struggles do too. In other words, I want to cast our disagreement as ultimately strategic: whilst Arruzza defends a unitary theory based on an enlarged definition of capitalism because it can provide feminists with an effective and cutting conceptual weapon, I want to defend a more precise definition and more variegated historical analyses – for the very same reason.


32

The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State Sara R. Farris | May 4, 2015

!

Hannah Höch, Roma, 1925

It is not an easy task to reconstruct succinctly the main problematics that have traversed Marxist feminism in the last 40 years, without risking simplifications or serious omissions, or without producing a mere summary that avoids critically engaging with the subjects that it raises. And yet, I believe Arruzza’s text “Remarks on Gender” accomplishes the task very well: her reconstruction of the key theses on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism proposed by different currents within socialist and Marxist feminism from the 1970s onwards is not only lucid and informative, but also extremely clear and accessible. Furthermore, her partisan critique of the different positions on the table, alongside an indication of the most

33 promising questions for debate, give us – as feminists who locate ourselves in the Marxist tradition(s) – a great opportunity to begin and/or deepen a much needed discussion and exchange. A new generation of Marxist feminists has emerged in the last years; it begins to question, re-articulate, expand and criticise the theorizations and disputes it has inherited from previous generations. I find myself mostly in agreement with the arguments put forward by Arruzza. I share her criticisms of the dual and triple system analyses and the theoretical preference for the “unitary theory” approach as well as social reproduction feminism. There are, however, two elements raised in her text that I feel require further investigation and reflection. The first concerns the way Arruzza responds to the thesis of the “indifference of capitalism” to gendered and racial oppression exemplified by Meiksins Wood. In spite of the many compelling points of critique she raises, here I think Arruzza does not really overcome the problems posed by Meiksins Wood’s approach. The second element that would deserve some treatment in the context of discussions on class exploitation and gendered and racial oppression is the  relationship between Marxist feminism and intersectionality theory. The latter is in fact the specter that haunts these discussions, as I will argue throughout this text. In what follows I will try to explain in what ways I think that these two points require further examination and to sketch a proposal for future research and discussion that I believe can potentially enable us to overcome some of the pitfalls of Marxist feminism on the terrain of race and racism in particular. I should say from the outset that those that follow are not meant to be fully-fledged thoughts or conclusive reflections. They constitute only the initial and still very preliminary stages of a work in progress. I thus hope that this round-table discussion will be the initial agora for an exchange of ideas between scholars and activists who are struggling to find answers to these complex issues.

Logical Structure and History

Let me begin from the first point. The questions about whether capitalism is structurally “indifferent” or not to gendered and racial oppression and how we can understand the relationship between these forms of oppression and class exploitation are the most controversial, but also the most challenging from a Marxist feminist viewpoint. As Arruzza notes, the thesis that capitalism does not require gendered oppression and racial inequalities to operate, but has instead forged an “opportunistic” and instrumental relationship with them, has

34 been sustained in a particularly clear way by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In her essay “Capitalism and Human Emancipation,” Wood maintains that:

If capital derives advantages from racism or sexism, it is not because of any structural tendency in capitalism toward racial inequality or gender oppression, but on the contrary because they disguise the structural realities of the capitalist system and because they divide the working class. At any rate, capitalist exploitation can in principle be conducted without any consideration for colour, race, creed, gender, any dependence upon extra-economic inequality or difference; and more than that, the development of capitalism has created ideological pressures against such inequalities and differences to a degree with no precedent in pre-capitalist societies.1

Arruzza rightly notes that Wood’s argument is unfortunately common currency amongst numerous Marxists who still maintain a hierarchy between principal exploitation (based on class) and secondary oppression (based on gender and race). Further, she notes that Wood’s focus upon, on the one hand, capitalism’s logical structure as one indifferent to gender and racial oppression, and, on the other hand, her recognition that capitalism’s concrete history is one in which these forms of oppression have continuously occurred, is confusing and unhelpful from a political point of view. Insofar as capitalism always occurs in concrete historical forms – Arruzza argues – Wood’s treatment of capitalism as above all an ideal type in which “extraeconomic” inequalities do not play any substantial role does not explain why its unfolding has actually never done without them. This notwithstanding, Arruzza continues with a critique that, in my view, lessens the force of her otherwise compelling arguments. She writes that one of Wood’s mistakes is the confusion between “what is functional to capitalism and what is a necessary consequence of it.” Further, she maintains that Wood’s problem – like that of other Marxists – is to conflate the logical and historical level as if they could be used as interchangeable arguments and methods of analysis. For Arruzza, they should remain separate and distinguishable. Thus, she argues that while Wood might be right in contending that gendered and racial inequalities are not necessary to the inner workings of capitalism – if we think of the latter at a high level of abstraction – this nonetheless “does not prove that capitalism would not necessarily produce, as a result of its concrete functioning, the constant reproduction of gender oppression, often under diverse forms.” Arruzza thus concludes that, given the difficulty of showing “at a high level of abstraction that gender oppression is essential to the inner workings of capitalism,” we must instead “look for the answer at the level of concrete historical analysis, not at the level of a highly abstract analysis of capital.” When we do that, she suggests, we see that the core of capitalism – i.e., the 1Ellen

Meiksins Wood, “Capitalism and Human Emancipation,” New Left Review I/167 (1988), 6.

35 production of surplus-value – cannot exist without socially reproductive labor, which has been historically predominantly female. The unity of reproduction and production is thus the key to understanding contemporary capitalism as a complex totality that needs domination and alienation as much as exploitation. While I agree with the idea that we need to understand capitalism as a complex totality and as an historical social production relation within which gendered and racial oppression are constantly reproduced as part and parcel of its functioning, I am both unclear about the distinction Arruzza makes between “what is functional to capitalism and what is a necessary consequence of it” and I disagree with the idea that we must keep logic and history separate. I would argue that by conceding that capitalism at a high level of abstraction might not need gendered and racial oppression in order to survive, though it produces them as its necessary and non-contingent consequences, we fundamentally remain trapped within Wood’s reasoning. In other words, if we argue that capitalism might not require gendered and racial oppression as its presuppositions at the logical structural level, but rather as its necessary byproducts at the historical level, we still need to pose the questions: why does capitalism do so? What is the inner logic of capitalism that requires gendered and racial oppression to be continuously produced and reproduced by necessity – albeit in shifting forms? What is the mechanism according to which capitalism causes gendered and racial oppression? If we say that capitalism produces oppression by necessity, we are in fact still putting forward an argument that requires explanation at the logical structural level, and not only at the historical level. My sense is that this impasse is due to the binary thinking according to which the logical and historical levels are distinct one from the other. Instead, I think we should rather comprehend the relationship between these levels in a dialectical manner. To quote István Mészáros, in any particular type of humanity’s reproductive order, the social structure is unthinkable without its properly articulated historical dimension; and vice versa, there can be no real understanding of the historical movement itself without grasping at the same time the corresponding material structural determinations in their specificity.2

In other words, we can’t separate logic, or structure, from history because they are dialectically related moments of our historical materialist attempt to grasp and to change the historically determined structure of the world in which we live. In this vein, I think we should not displace

2

István Mészáros, “The Dialectic of Structure and History: An Introduction,” Monthly Review, Vol. 63.1 (2011). 

36 our reasoning regarding the role of gendered and racial oppression onto the historical terrain alone, but try to articulate an answer at the level of the structural logic of capitalism as well. I propose that one potentially promising way of analyzing capitalism’s structural need for gendered and racial oppression while considering its concrete historical dimensions is to look at capitalism’s logic of valorization through the lenses of capital’s necessary political form: i.e., the nation-state. But before I argue this point more thoroughly let me briefly discuss the second aforementioned element which I regard as haunting our discussion: intersectionality theory.

Intersectionality Theory

Since its coinage by Kimberle Crenshaw in her seminal 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,”3 the concept of intersectionality and the theoretical field it has opened up posed a serious challenge to feminist theories, Marxist and non-Marxist alike. In a nutshell, intersectionality theory – if one can talk of a theory at all and not instead of a heuristic device – maintains that each individual and group occupies a specific social position within interlocking systems of oppression. For example, the discrimination experienced by women of color in the US context should be understood as resulting from their location at the junction between gendered, racial and class based structures of oppression and exploitation. Intersectionality has been described as “the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far.”4 By highlighting some feminist currents’ systematic overlooking of the different life experiences of racialized women when compared to those of white women as well as racialized men in Western societies, and also by criticizing Marxism – or at least certain economistic currents within it – for considering race and racism as “secondary,” or “derivative” forms of oppression with respect to class exploitation, intersectionality has obliged scholars and activists to confront the gendered dimensions of racism in unprecedented ways. As Gail Lewis put it,

3

Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Chicago Legal Forum, special issue: “Feminism in the Law: Theory, Practice and Criticism” (1989), pp. 139-167. Although of course the problematic related to intersectionality does not begin with Crenshaw’s seminal intervention. For instance, one should trace it back at least to Sojourner Truth’s famous speech “Ain’t I A Woman.” 4

Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 30.3 (2005), 1771-1800, 1771.

37 To cast intersectionality as such a powerful and creative concept, theory, and analytic is perhaps to bear witness to the generative capacity of theory making that comes from the margins. It is to acknowledge that black women and other women of color produce knowledge and that this knowledge can be applied to social and cultural research beyond the issues and processes deemed specific to women racialized as minority, that it can become part of a more generalizable theoretical, methodological, and conceptual tool kit.5

Beside putting the experience of racialized women center stage, intersectionality has also underlined an important methodological question: oppression is not a matter of a single issue only, nor of adding each single axis of oppression one to the other. Instead, oppression is an intersectional field and experience; it is the result of the interlocking between different and yet connected ‘systems’ of domination. Moreover, intersectionality theory’s refusal to conceive of racial or gendered oppressions as secondary, or derivative in relation to class – or even as mere ideologies as we still find theorized by Marxist authors like Terry Eagleton and Martha Gimenez6 – and to think of them instead as ‘equal’ axes of domination in capitalist society has had the salutary effect of pushing Marxist feminists to interrogate more deeply assumptions and theoretical baggage inherited from ‘economistic’ readings of class. Confronting intersectionality’s pervasive intervention in feminist studies as well as in many fields of the humanities and the social sciences, I think several Marxist scholars feel increasingly compelled to question what kind of social relation

5

Gail Lewis, “Unsafe Travel: Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist Displacements,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38.4 (2013), 869-892, 871. 6

In The Illusions of Postmodernism Terry Eagleton argues that: “Social class tends to crop up in postmodern theory as one item in the triptych of class, race and gender, a formula which has rapidly assumed for the left the kind of authority which the Holy Trinity occasionally exerts for the right. The logic of this triple linkage is surely obvious: racism is a bad thing, and so is sexism, and so therefore is something called ‘classism.’ ‘Classism,’ on this analogy would seem to be the sin of stereotyping people in terms of social class.” See Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, 56-57. Noting Eagleton’s intervention, Martha Gimenez wrote: “To refer to class as ‘classism’ is, from the standpoint of Marxist theory, ‘a deeply misleading formulation’ because class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression; it denotes exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production.” See Martha Gimenez “Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking The Trilogy,” Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 8.2 (2001), 23-33.

38 class is, as well as to excavate Marx’s writings to find insights on the role played by race and gender within the capitalist mode of production.7 But above all, intersectionality theory speaks loudly to Marxists because it frames the problem of race, gender and class as ‘dimensions’ of a complex integrated totality. Intersectionality, in other words, ‘implicitly’ rejects the idea that capitalism is indifferent to gendered and racial oppression and maintains that all forms of oppression and exploitation play an equally pivotal role in shaping our unequal societies. Nevertheless, the problem with intersectionality theory lies precisely in the fact that it falls short of delivering what it promises. First, most accounts of intersectionality have limited themselves to describe instances of intersections between different axes of domination, but without explaining how and why they occur in specific forms, at certain times and in determined contexts. Second, they have assumed the existence of different systems, or axes of oppression but without questioning the configuration, functioning, historical dimensions and the very nature and existence of these systems themselves (in this sense, similar to triple system analyses that Arruzza rightly criticises). Third, intersectionality theory tends to think of oppression as a spatial metaphor and as an individual experience, which I think runs the risk of reifying the subject of oppression and of not grasping the movements, changes and temporalities of oppression itself. Finally, intersectionality theory has mostly not problematized capitalism as the societal, historical and political-economic order within which these intersections take place. Intersectionality theory, in other words, poses the right questions but has not yet produced satisfactory answers as to the problem of why and how gender, race and class together are essential to the production and reproduction of inequalities under capitalism.

The Nation-State

How can we overcome the double impasse created by our dissatisfaction with both those Marxist readings that deem racial and gendered oppression as unnecessary from a structural

7

An increasing number of Marxist scholars in the last years have discussed intersectionality in more or less critical ways. See Kevin Anderson, “Karl Marx and Intersectionality,” Logos, Vol. 14.1 (2015); Susan Ferguson, “Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor,” Race, Gender & Class, Volume 15.1-2 (2008), 42-57; Abigail Bakan, “Marxism, Intersectionality and Indigenous Feminism,” Paper presented at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference, London, 2013; Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

39 logical viewpoint to capitalism’s survival and with intersectionality theory’s present limitations to provide a solid theoretical infrastructure that challenges such readings? Before this impasse, Arruzza and other Marxist feminists have resorted to unitary theory, which argues that gendered and racial oppression do not reflect the existence of two autonomous systems but “have become an integral part of capitalist society through a long historical process that has dissolved preceding forms of social life.” Furthermore, they have warned Marxists against fixating on capital as a unit of production only, but rather to see how social reproduction is essential to capitalist functioning and to the production of surplus-value itself. The unity between production and reproduction, they maintain, allows us to analyze gendered and racial oppression within capitalist societies both as legacies from pre-capitalist social formations that capitalism re-shapes in different forms, and as necessary consequences of capitalism itself. While I agree with the underlying premises of unitary theory, and that social reproduction theory offers crucial resources for understanding gendered oppression under capitalism, I also think that more work is needed to show if and in what ways social reproduction theory can account for racial oppression. Moreover, we need to clarify whether social reproduction theory enables us to explain not only the historical dimensions of gendered and racial oppression under capitalism, but also why they are necessary to the structure of capitalism. In other words, we still need to explain why capitalism needs to oppress women and racialized people. That is, we need to combine our historical understanding of capitalism as a societal order that requires the constant reproduction of labor-power with an understanding of the logical structure of capital accumulation as a process that both requires this work to be done by women (and perhaps racialized people too) and as a mechanism that presupposes the subjugation of women and the racialization of certain people in particular. As I wrote above, I certainly do not claim to have answers to these very complex issues, whose rigorous treatment would require not only the hard work of the concept, but also empirically and historically grounded demonstrations. However, I would like to propose tentatively that one possible way of dealing with the double dissatisfaction with the Marxist thesis of “indifferent capitalism” and with intersectionality’s lack of explanatory power and, thus, one way of trying to produce an account of the intersection (and unity) of gendered and racial oppression with class exploitation as necessary presuppositions and not only consequences of capitalism, is to look more closely at capital’s inseparable friend: the nation-state. Capital accumulation is not possible without the nation-state as its political form, its framework and its necessary mediator. As Marx wrote in Volume 3 of Capital, the state is the

40 “political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence” which is integral to the “specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers.”8 For instance, Marx analysed the creation of the world-market itself as resulting from the competition and uneven development between different national capitals.9  For reasons of space, I cannot go into the enormous debate on the relation between capital and the state, which has engaged numerous Marxist scholars often from very different perspectives.10 To give an idea of why capital accumulation requires the nation-state as its necessary framework and mediator I will briefly quote a passage by Neil Davidson, which has the benefit of being extremely clear and, in my view, right on the point. As Davidson puts it: The capitalist class in its constituent parts has a continuing need to retain territorial home bases for their operations. Why? Capitalism is based on competition, but capitalists want competition to take place on their terms; they do not want to suffer the consequences if they lose. In one sense then, they want a state to ensure that they are protected from these consequences – in other words, they require from a state more than simply providing an infrastructure; they need it to ensure that effects of competition are experienced as far as possible by someone else. A global state could not do this; indeed, in this respect it would be the same as having no state at all. For if everyone is protected then no-one is: unrestricted market relations would prevail, with all the risks that entails. The state therefore has to have limits, has to be able to distinguish between those who will receive its protection and those who will not.11

Not only is the state the necessary framework and mediator of capital accumulation in a global marketplace, but also nationalism is the “necessary ideological corollary of capitalism.”12 By putting forward the hypothesis that the valorization of value, or capital accumulation and capitalist reproduction, needs by necessity the nation-state as much as it requires formally free labor-power to exploit, we can begin framing the problem of the intersection (and unity) between class exploitation and gendered and racial oppression in new ways.

8

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 37 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 778. 9

For a discussion of this point see Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, trans. Peter D. Thomas and Sara R. Farris (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 10

Bob Jessop, “Globalization and the National State,” in Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered, eds. Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 185-220; Chris O’Kane,  “State Violence, State Control: Marxist State Theory and the Critique of Political Economy,” Viewpoint Magazine, Issue 4, 2014. 11

Neil Davidson, 2008, “Nationalism and Neoliberalism,” Variant, No. 32 (Summer 2008)

12

Ibid.

41 As postcolonial feminism in particular has compellingly showed,13 the nation-state as capital’s chief political form is not thinkable without the oppression of women. This occurs in a twofold manner. On the one hand, the nation as the allegedly homogenous community, with a common origin/destiny and kinship that is ‘attached’ to the state, can only think of women as its symbolic markers as well as cultural and biological reproducers. This is true not only for ethnic conceptions of the nation as Kulturnation and Volknation, but also in those cases in which the nation as such is the driving force of liberation movements. Even when nationalism has played the role of a liberating force, such as in the context of the decolonization, and the issue of women’s rights has accompanied that of national independence, the results for women have often been disappointing. After independence, women’s role has frequently been reaffirmed as that of biological reproducers of the (new, liberated) nation. For instance, despite their key role during the Algerian war of independence from France and in the National Liberation Front, at the end of the conflict Algerian women did not gain the equality and rights they had wished for. One of the reasons for this limitation was, as Moghadam argues, that the struggle was one for “national liberation, not for social (class/gender) transformation.”14 In other words, the nation – any nation – cannot do without exercising its control over women’s bodies and women’s childraising role, because the very future of the nation depends on them. On the other hand, the state as the territorialization of centralized political authority and administrative machine guaranteeing and reproducing unequal class relations is the principal ‘organizer’ of gender orders in a society. The state is not only the dispenser of policies that have overtime systematically disadvantaged women and discriminated against racialized people in different spheres of social life. It is above all the most important “mediator” of social reproduction as well as the “fabricator” of racism as an institution. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici shows how the consolidation of capitalism in the 16th and 17th century in Europe required state interventions to guarantee the growth of the

13

Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shobat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 89-122. For an overview of different interpretations of the theme of women and the nation, see Kumari Jayawardena,  Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: ZedBooks, 1986); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, (London: Sage, 1997); Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, eds. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minno Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. 14

Valentine Moghadam “Introduction,” Gender and National Identity, ed. Valentine Moghadam (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 12.

42 population; that is, a secure basin of labor-power for the growing industries. These interventions included forms of punishment for women who tried to maintain some control over procreation. Furthermore, the establishment of the nuclear family as the center for the reproduction of the work-force took place under the auspices of the modern nation-state at the time when capital was consolidating its position as the dominant mode of production across the Western World. The Factory Acts in the United Kingdom in the 19th century that limited the employment of women and children in the factory created for the first time the figure of the full-time housewife within the working class family. Throughout the 19th century and especially the 20th century, the creation of the male breadwinner as the main income earner in the family was the product of state legislation meant to shape a disciplined workforce and above all to avoid capital paying the costs for the social reproduction of labor-power. In Europe in the 20th century up until the 1970s, the relegation of social reproduction within the family, where women were to take on the bulk of domestic tasks for free, was possible thanks to a number of welfare state provisions that allowed the mono-income family to survive. Even now, when more and more women enter the paid labor force and do less social reproductive work (but only to be exploited in ways that have been described as increasingly feminized), social reproduction has not been socialized through public state care provisions, or paid by capital, but increasingly commodified. The commodification of social reproduction (elderly and child care, housekeeping etc.) is possible thanks to so-called cash-for-care state monetary transfers, which push individuals and families to seek for caretakers and housekeepers on the market. And, quite importantly, migrant racialized women from postsocialist countries and the Global South constitute the lion’s share of the supply of these caretakers and housekeepers on the market. A crucial moment of intersection (and unity) between gendered and racial inequalities takes place at this juncture then. In order to guarantee the reproduction of the work force (which includes more and more women), the state uses public funds from taxpayers (mostly exploited workers) to provide families with small budgets that allow them to employ racialized women as care and domestic workers in slave-like conditions. This does not happen by chance. The employment of migrant women for socially reproductive work in fact allows the capitalist driven nation-state both to maintain traditional gender-roles in place and to reproduce sexual and racial divisions of labor in society. The fact that it is racialized women who do socially reproductive work most often in informal (illegal and undocumented) and very exploitative conditions allows capital to maintain social reproduction on the edge between market and non-market relations – and thus to guarantee its reproduction at no costs for capital – and it permits the nation-state to avoid providing public care facilities.

43 This now brings me to discuss why the nation-state as capital’s chief political form is unthinkable not only without the oppression of women, but also without the construction and subjugation of racialized people. Again, there is an immense literature on the links between capital, the nation-state and racism, which I could not even begin to discuss adequately here.15 I will limit my comments instead to pointing to one passage from Marx’s letter to Sigfried Meyer which in my view helps us to see in what ways racial oppression is a necessary presupposition of, or condition for, capitalist accumulation when scrutinized through the lenses of the nationstate. He wrote:

All industrial and commercial centers in England now have a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who forces down the standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself to be a member of the ruling nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He harbors religious, social and national prejudices against him. His attitude towards him is roughly that of the “poor whites” to the “niggers” in the former slave states of the American Union. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class’s impotence, despite its organization. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this.16

In this passage Marx does a few important things. Firstly, he shows that nationalism is an important source of racism (though he does not use the latter concept). Racism takes the form of the antagonism between workers of different nationalities, whereby the English proletarian as a member of the ruling nation “harbours religious, social and national prejudices against” the Irish proletarian as a member of the ruled nation. Secondly, he shows that racism is constructed and intensified by “all means at the disposal of the ruling class”; in other words, racism is a key element of the ideological state apparatuses. Racism is thus constructed and nourished by the ruling nation-state in order to stigmatize migrant members of the ruled-nations. Thirdly, Marx shows that racism, or the antagonism between “native” and “migrant” workers, is the secret of capitalists’ power. It is its secret not only because such antagonism prevents the working class from uniting against its real enemy (i.e., the capitalist class), but also because the presence of 15

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).  16

Karl Marx, “Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and Karl Vogt,” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 43 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 475. My emphasis.

44 migrant workers who compete with native workers for wages allows capital to have a reserve army of labor, which is what makes accumulation possible. Marx describes the reserve army of labor in Capital Volume 1 as “a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.”17 In Marx’s analysis, (a) the increase in the magnitude of social capital, that is, the ensemble of individual capitals; (b) the enlargement of the scale of production and (c) the growth of the productivity of an increasing number of workers brought about by capital accumulation, creates a situation in which the greater “attraction of laborers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion.”18 These three interrelated processes, for Marx, set the conditions according to which the laboring population gives rise, “along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, [also to] the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent.”19 Marx describes this as a “law of population,” which is peculiar to the capitalist mode of production just as other modes of production have their own corresponding population laws. The paradox of the creation of the surplus laboring population under the capitalist mode of production is that while it is “a necessary product of accumulation,” this surplus population is also the lever of such accumulation; namely, it is that which “forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.”20 The reserve army of labor is not constituted only of migrant workers. However, Marx well understood that capitalists benefit greatly from a migrant, non-native disposable workforce in particular, because it permits them to maintain the working class divided along artificially created national lines of separation. The state, on the other hand, makes sure the migrant workforce remains available and disposable for capital by denying migrant workers citizenship rights and thus keeping them in a state of political and economic fragility. We can thus see in what ways racism, just like gendered oppression, is not only produced and reproduced by capital through the mediation of the nation-state, but is also an essential premise for the logical structure of capital accumulation.

17

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 626. 18

Ibid., 625.

19

Ibid.

20

Ibid., 626.

45 Concluding Remarks

My hypothesis that the nation-state could be the lens through which we can try to see the necessity of gendered and racial oppression, alongside class exploitation, as preconditions and not only consequences of capital accumulation certainly would need to be tested through hard conceptual, theoretical and empirical-historical work. Such work would also need to consider the many mediations at the ideological, symbolic, psychological and political level that bridge gender and race to capital and the nation-state, as well as to clarify the dialectic between the logical structure and history of capital accumulation. Furthermore, we should clarify what is the adequate level of abstraction at which we can analyze the logical structure of capital; whether it is exclusively the microeconomic level in which we consider capital as a relationship between formally free and equal individuals, or also the macroeconomic level in which we consider the spheres of circulation, consumption and reproduction more fully. Arruzza’s important critique of dual and triple system analysis and of the “indifferent capitalism” thesis for their lack of coherence regarding the explication of gender, race and class oppression and exploitation as key constituents of capitalism pushes us to think through these complexities and to strive to find answers that not only can improve our understanding of oppression and exploitation but that also can help us to find ways to put an end to them.


46

Closing the Conceptual Gap: A Response to Cinzia Arruzza’s “Remarks on Gender”

!

FTC Manning | May 4, 2015

Hannah Höch, Fashion Show, 1923-1935

This text raises the question of a unified theory of social relations. Cinzia Arruzza’s essay “Remarks on Gender” reminds us of the debates, left dormant for decades, around creating a unified theory of capital. However, Arruzza’s path toward that unification is one that abdicates the possibility of locating gender and race as part of the abstract, logical, or “essential mechanisms” of capitalism, opting instead to incorporate these pervasive relations as aspects of capitalism’s historical and concrete unfolding. This rejection of gender and race as part of the inner logic of capital is not particular to Arruzza. It is standard practice within Marxist-feminism, as well as other tendencies which attempt to argue for the importance of axes of violence, oppression, or exploitation beyond class (e.g. race, sexuality, gender) within the capitalist mode of production.  The possibility that gender and race are somehow inherent to the inner logic of capital is not rejected because the attempts to prove it have failed – it is dismissed out of hand, before any attempt has been made.

47 Hypotheses which do locate gender or race in the essential logical structure of capital are so rare or unpopular that Marxist critics like Arruzza do not even feel the need to argue against that possibility. It is taken for granted that these relations do not appear in capital’s inner logic, in the abstract structure at the heart of capitalism. While joining, albeit ambivalently, in this out-of-hand dismissal (see below), Arruzza also brings some important critiques to bear upon this and other erroneous resolutions to the question at hand. Arruzza’s essay lays out three common approaches taken by feminists who care to attend to capitalism: “dual systems theory,” “indifferent capitalism,” and the “unitary thesis.” I would like to add another category, what I provisionally call systemic fundamentalism. With this approach, I associate some theorists who Arruzza has designated within dual systems theory, such as Christine Delphy. Arruzza criticizes Delphy for holding that patriarchy is a system of exploitation more fundamental than capitalist class relations, and upon which capitalist class relations are established. Arruzza’s primary critique of this perspective is that it implies the existence of class relations between women and men, and hence “irreconcilable antagonisms” between the two genders, of which she finds no evidence (more on this below). But more importantly for my designation of “systemic fundamentalism,” Arruzza critiques Delphy for arguing that patriarchal class relations would trump capitalist class relations – deflating the importance of one system by emphasizing another more fundamental and essential one. Arruzza writes: “In ‘The Main Enemy,’ Delphy insists that being a member of the patriarchal class is a more important fact than being part of the capitalist class.” For Delphy, on Arruzza’s reading, the system of patriarchy is more fundamental than that of capitalism. Arruzza’s central critique of our next approach, dual systems theory (or triple, for those who deign to acknowledge race relations), is that they do not attribute to patriarchal or racial systems their own internal force of self-reproduction, which is ostensibly the most basic requirement for the existence of an independent mode of production. Arruzza aptly notes that the only formidable attempt to articulate this force has been in ideological or psychological terms, as an independent system of signs. She dismisses these on the basis of their implausibility, their close tarrying with fetishistic and ahistorical notions of psyche. She criticizes most dual systems theories for taking economics to be the purview of capitalist social relations, while ideological and cultural forms are the terrain of gender and racial processes. Finally, Arruzza rightly criticizes the lack of “organizing principle” or “logic” to the “Holy alliance” of systems which would explain their interrelation. This downfall can also be attributed to the “intersectionality” approach – which, while constituting an important intervention into legal

48 theory (the genesis of the term), and serving as a useful shorthand for people who want to say that they care about all three and don’t privilege one over another, nonetheless leaves the details of these relations entirely vague. However, Arruzza takes most issue with her third approach, the “indifferent capitalism” approach – and appropriately so, since it is the most formidable in contemporary Marxist and communist thought. For some thinkers that adhere to the “indifferent capitalism” approach, capitalism’s abstract indifference to gender and race means that capitalism is in fact beneficial for women in general, and/or for racial minorities, in certain contexts. Arruzza writes, for instance, that “some claim that within capitalism women have benefited from a degree of emancipation unknown in other kinds of society.” However some people who take up the “indifferent capitalism” approach do attend to the importance of racial and gender relations, arguing that the logical “indifference” of capital to race and gender is complicated by the historically ubiquitous role of gender and race, which re-inscribes gendered and racial oppression through contingent historical processes. On this reading, gendered and racial oppression are relatively inescapable because of how extensively they have permeated capitalism, historically. In posing her own chosen hypothesis, that of a “unitary theory” of capitalist and patriarchal social relations, Arruzza chooses the excellent foil of Ellen Meiksins Wood, a proponent of the “indifferent capitalism” approach, who staunchly argued that race and gender only have a “contingent and opportunistic relationship” to capital, not a necessary one. She summarizes Wood’s perspective thus: “Capitalism is… not structurally disposed to creating gender inequalities.” However, Arruzza makes a substantial concession to Wood: It is perhaps difficult to show at a high level of abstraction that gender oppression is essential to the inner workings of capitalism… If we were to think of capitalism as “pure,” that is, analyze it on the basis of its essential mechanisms, then maybe Wood would be right. However, this does not prove that capitalism would not necessarily produce, as a result of its concrete functioning, the constant reproduction of gender oppression, often under diverse forms.

Here we find a relatively straightforward argument for the logical indifference but historicallyconcrete necessity of gender to capital – something she seems to cast doubt upon earlier in the piece when she writes, in her critique of the “indifferent capitalism” perspective, that some of this perspective’s adherents “maintain that we should carefully distinguish the logical and historical levels: logically, capitalism does not specifically need gender inequality and could get rid of it; historically, things are not so simple.” Elsewhere she again proposes this perspective, which she seemed at first to critique, but now in a positive light: “In order to respond to the

49 question of whether it is possible for women’s emancipation and liberation to be attained under the capitalist mode of production, we must look for the answer at the level of concrete historical analysis, not at the level of a highly abstract analysis of capital.” There is some tension here. At the same time as she she states that on the most abstract level, we may not find gender within the defining characteristics of capital, Arruzza also criticizes the “indifferent capitalism” thesis for arguing that capitalism is not structurally disposed to creating gender inequalities, and that capitalism “has an essentially opportunistic relation with gender inequality.” For a moment, let us look back to Delphy, and the “systemic fundamentalism” approach that I added to Arruzza’s list of approaches to the gender/capital question. The problem with this perspective was that it displaced the importance of capitalist social relations by emphasizing the more fundamental and essential relations of patriarchy. Arruzza’s version of a “unitary thesis” does the opposite – it logically displaces gender relations in favor of the more fundamental relations of capital (which ostensibly do not necessarily include gender). She insists upon avoiding the economic reductionism that is taken up by some Marxist theories of capital, and on this point she is undeniably correct.1 But on Arruzza’s account, whether or not the inner laws of capital are exclusively economic, we still do not find gender there. Nor race, which enters for Arruzza primarily as a complication, along with class, to straightforward gender relations. While Arruzza does not firmly state that gender cannot be understood logically or in the abstract forms of capital, she casts doubt on this possibility and instead moves to a discussion of ostensibly non-abstract historical processes in order to locate the reproduction of gender in capital. Arruzza introduces the concept of “social reproduction,” modifying it from its more traditional definition as “the process of reproduction of a society in its totality” to a more focused definition of social reproduction generated by the Marxist-feminist tradition, in which “social reproduction designates the way in which the physical, emotional, and mental labor necessary for the production of the population is socially organized: for example, food preparation, youth education, care for the elderly and the sick, as well as questions of housing and all the way to questions of sexuality.” Arruzza lauds the concept for “enlarging our vision of what was

1

It is less clear whether or not Arruzza believes that the inner laws of capital are themselves “purely economic.” This essay assumes, following Marx’s work in the Grundrisse and throughout the volumes of Capital, that the essential inner laws of capital are not confined to an economic sphere.

50 previously called domestic labor,” thereby extending our analysis “outside the walls of the home, since the labor of social reproduction is not always found in the same forms.”2 Social reproduction here appears to designate processes and relations that are both logically and historically necessary. This necessity functions, for Arruzza, to subvert the problem of considering gendered dynamics (such as domestic life, gendered divisions of labor in the factory) and some racial dynamics (immigration, racial divisions of labor) as “contingent.” In other words, I understand Arruzza to be saying something like this: since this category of social reproduction circumscribes the essential gendering and racializing processes within capital – whether they take place in the waged sphere or not – and we can say with certainty that this category of activity is necessary to capital, then on this basis we can argue for the deep necessity of gender and race to capital. However, what remains logically and structurally contingent is the anchor between these necessary forms of social reproduction (e.g. housework, slave labor) to gender and to race. On Arruzza’s account, it appears to be this association between certain activities on the one hand, and gender or race on the other hand, that is historically constituted. To put this point slightly differently: whereas capital will always require members of working class to do unwaged activity such as childrearing and dishwashing, and will always engage in exploitative forms of social differentiation in which some people are cast out of work, enslaved, or otherwise hyperexploited, it appears as if it is not “necessary” that these dynamics are associated with gender or race. Her discussion beautifully sets in relief the question she doesn’t ask: how can race and gender relations be located within the logical understanding of the capitalist mode of production? Some people working within the communizing current have importantly approached this question,3  attempting, in the words of Gonzalez and Neton, to “delineate categories [of gender] that are as specific to capitalism as ‘capital’ itself.”4 The way that Arruzza frames her discussion of social reproduction allows the question to emerge in an interesting 2

Note that the Marxist-feminist use of the term reproduction and other complementary concepts is aptly problematized by Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton in “The Logic of Gender” in Endnotes, Vol. 3. 3

See Gonzalez and Neton, op. cit; P. Valentine  “The Gender Distinction in Communization Theory,” in Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, Volume 1, 191-208; Bernard Lyon, “The Suspended Step of Communisation” in SIC: International Journal for Communisation; Théorie Communiste, “Response to the American Comrades on Gender.” 4

Gonzalez and Neton, 57.

51 way. She acknowledges that certain forms that exceed waged labor are logically necessary to capital – e.g. unpaid housework.5 She also acknowledges that women are intimately connected to this necessary form of work. However, that connection remains contingent – women and social reproduction could, theoretically, be decoupled. But what if we were to collapse the set of necessary social relations associated with women in capitalism and the category of women in capitalism. What if “woman” was nothing but the formal category of people who are on one side of specific set of social relations, similar to the way in which the proletariat is nothing but the formal category of people who are on one side of a specific set of social relations. In the case of the proletariat, the social relations consist in being those who own nothing but their own labor power, which they must sell in order to make a living, and be subject to the threat of being cast out of labor pool by capital. In the case of “women”, or perhaps more effectively and accurately “feminized people” (see below), this set of essential social relations certainly involves the bulk of what Arruzza refers to as “social reproduction.” This set of relations has been generally been  theorized by some working within a communization framework as a distinction between two gendered spheres immanent to the capitalist mode of production. Recently, these spheres have been further specified in terms of the non-social6 or the abject7, but I’m sure all interested parties would agree it requires far more thought and study. Further, it seems clear that the category woman is insufficient, and that a more dynamic concept such as “feminized people” may serve both to emphasize the fact that it is a process and a relationship, and that the people in question are not always women. This also entails a richer understanding of the social relations involved, including, for example, sexual violence, which is something which can be easily left to the side in theories of social reproduction, but which is certainly fundamental to the gender relation. As I’ve argued elsewhere: “Understanding sexual violence as a structuring element of gender also helps us to understand how patriarchy reproduces itself upon and through gay and queer men, trans people, gender nonconforming people and bodies, and children of any gender.”8 I also believe it is also one of the ways to render internal to a theory of gender the way in which some women, 5

Many Marxists who oppose logical understandings of race and gender also acknowledge this; see, for example, David Harvey Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 6

See P. Valentine, op. cit.

7

See Gonzalez and Neton, op. cit.

8

Valentine, op. cit., 204.

52 particularly trans women, women of color, and poor women, experience on average far higher levels of susceptibility to violence and appropriation. At the moment, such acknowledgments still remain sidebars to our theorizing, as is made quite clear by the preceding sentence. The question is: how do we develop our categories in a way that integrates these elements more deeply and integrally, in a way that subverts these superficial nods? Arruzza’s formulation carries another confusing implication: it suggests that that relations of social reproduction, like housework, latch onto gender and become entwined with it. This implies that gender must then stand autonomous from those social relations, as waiting to be used in some sense. Here is where the “indifferent capitalism” thesis comes in through the backdoor, and we find ourselves back at the initial critique of an “opportunistic relationship” between gender and capital. We also abruptly encounter the question of what exactly is gender, then, and from whence does it come?  So let us close the conceptual gap between “feminized people” and the material relations they have in capital. A similar move is essential for the category of racialized/ethnicized people. To this end, Cedric Robinson’s work is extremely effective. In Black Marxism, he argues forcefully for the necessary role of what he calls “racialism” in the establishment and reproduction of capitalism, as a process with its own rationale that is immanent to capital’s rationale, rather than as a contingent adjunct to the class relation.9 His work, for one, along with the Afro-Pessimist concept of “social death”10 points towards defining that set of social relations which would be the real content of the category of racialized people in capitalism. Chris Chen has recently mobilized this work, along with an analysis of paradigms in racialism and race studies, towards the goal of accurately specifying the relation between race and capital, arguing that “‘[r]ace’ is not extrinsic to capitalism or simply the product of specific historical formations such as South African Apartheid or Jim Crow America. Likewise capitalism does not simply incorporate racial domination as an incidental part of its operations.”11

9

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]). 10

See, for example, Frank Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 9.2 (2003), 225-240; and Jared Sexton “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (Fall/Winter 2011), 1-47. 11

Christopher Chen, “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality,” in Endnotes Vol. 3.

53 While Marxist critics have contended that relations of race and gender appear too malleable and complex to be articulated as structural and abstract,12 the class relation is no less blurry and porous – there are as many exceptions to the basic definition of working class as there are to the basic definition of feminized people and racialized people. Surely miners and clerical workers and sailors and nurses are no more or less logically united as “the working class” by their relation to capital than feminized or racialized people are? And there are innumerable exceptions to the strict definition of the proletariat amongst those we would surely like to include within that class that will struggle and win against capitalism: semi-proletarianized seasonal migrant laborers who retain cultivated land; petit bourgeois who own their own businesses and storefronts; religious communities or leaders who live off donations; and, most famously, the lumpenproletariat. In this text, I am more concerned with closing the conceptual gap referenced above than I am with nailing down the specificity of these relations that reproduce gender and race. That latter project is, in the end, the more important one, but here my goal is merely to show that if we are truly committed to a rigorous and unifying theory of capital, we must consider the possibility that race and gender are as logically necessary as class is to this mode of production. We must follow this hypothesis as far as it takes us. There has not yet been any good reason established as to why we should turn back from it. This path would entail the rigorous investigation of what those relations truly are. It would invariably render our understanding of capital more accurate, providing a more effective conceptual whetstone on which to sharpen our practical weaponry. On a different note, it is important to challenge Arruzza’s statements about the negligible benefits of patriarchy to men. She suggests that “A man would lose nothing, in terms of workload, if the distribution of care work were completely socialized instead of being performed by his wife. In structural terms, there would be no antagonistic or irreconcilable interests.” But this is far from the case: it is not possible for many elements of the hierarchized gender relation to be socialized. Men benefit directly and indirectly from the unpaid invisible work that women do, as well as from the relations of domination which are inherent aspects of the capitalist gender relation. Specific activities within the sphere of unwaged work can be socialized, but there will always necessarily remain a sphere of un-socialized work, and women – or feminized people – will, for the most part, do it. It is also not possible for coercive relations of

12

See, for example, exchanges between David Harvey, Alex Dubullay, and myself regarding Harvey’s recent book.

54 secretive sexual abuse to be socialized. It is not possible for violent forms of control and psychic isolation and domination to be socialized. These are essential components of the gender relation which bolsters men’s power, of the mechanisms by which men obtain and protect power, resources, acquiescence. There is no reason for men to let go of them anymore than there is reason for capitalists to socialize their profits. The gender relation, like the class relation, is, even in the abstract, not exclusively “economic.” Similarly, the direct and indirect material benefits of racialization to white and non- or less-racialized people are profound, and have been defended to the death throughout the history of capital. Neither can the particular relations of exploitation and oppression that characterize racialism or racialization be considered socializable. They are dynamics which cannot be ameliorated by even the best capitalist planning; to the contrary, capital is in part these processes of racialization/ethnicization. These processes include, at least, (1) the permanent and semi-permanent marginalization from remotely stable wage labor: as there will, definitionally, always be a group marginalized in this way, that group is thereby a racialized/ ethnicized group. In Chen’s words, “The expulsion of living labour from the production process places a kind of semi-permeable racialising boundary bifurcating productive and unproductive populations even within older racial categories: a kind of flexible global colour line separating the formal and informal economy, and waged from wageless life.”13 Those who are not marginalized in this way, and hence who are less racialized/ethnicized, will defend any threat to their position. In the United States, working class whites have fought back vehemently on every possible battlefield when black people have fought to gain access to waged economic stability. Also essential to racialization/ethnicization is (2) the vulnerability to untimely death, which is a vulnerability inherent to some large section of the proletariat no matter what. On this reading, the creation of this section is a racializing and ethnicizing process, and so the group which experiences this vulnerability has and will be, for the most part, racialized and/or ethnicized. In the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”14 Finally, this type of unifying theory which closes the gap (“unifying” rather than “unitary” here is meant to acknowledge that the picture will never be complete, will always entail further detail and nuance, a re-scaffolding – which is not to doubt our access to truth and accuracy, but 13 14

Chen, op. cit.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 28.

55 to acknowledge our finite limits) subverts the “common sense” of Arruzza’s point that triple systems theory is intuitive because these relations “manifest themselves” independently. She writes that “those who have developed an awareness of gender inequality usually experience and perceive it as determined by a logic that is different and separate from capital.” In concordance with the arguments of many feminist theorists of color that race, gender, and class never appear as distinct,15 or of working-class feminist theorists who describe their inability to disaggregate their gender oppression from their class oppression,16 of trans women activists and theorists who articulate the mutual constitution of of these axes with transmisogyny,17 and of prison abolitionists who, in their work, are fully confronted with the imbrication of race, class, sex, gender, sexuality, and so forth,18 we must acknowledge that for many people, these things do not tend to manifest themselves independently. To some they appear independent while to others they appear unified, and while that poses some interesting questions, it is beyond the scope of my concerns here. I believe that when we understand class, feminization, and racialization as different organs in a body, different laws within an ecosystem, or whatever metaphor we choose to use for different but mutually constituted parts within a whole, it is unquestionable that at every moment all of them are really at play. Their appearance depends on many things, including an individual’s situation within the whole. I welcome Arruzza’s reopening of these debates with tremendous warmth and excitement, and I offer my critiques and questions in comradeship to the project of a unifying theory of a capitalism in which, by Arruzza’s words, “It is evident that social relations include relations of domination and hierarchy based on gender and race that permeate both the social whole and daily life.”


15

See, for example, bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1981), as well as Sojourner Truth’s own words and work; Sharon Patricia Holland’s The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Lakeyma King, “Inversions & Invisibilities: Black Women, Black Masculinity, & Anti-Blackness” and Pluma Sumac’s “Notes on Prostitution”, both forthcoming in Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, Vol. 2. 16

See, for instance, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’ Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-75 (San Francisco, City Light Books, 2002); Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl (San Francisco, Last Gasp Books, 2004); and Selma James’s Sex, Race, and Class (Oakland: PM Press, 2012). 17

See Susan Stryker’s film Screaming Queens; also, recent interviews with Laverne Cox, for example here. 18

See, for example, both Angela Davis and Dean Spade’s work, nicely epitomized in speeches found here (Davis) and here (Spade).

56

Logic or History? The Political Stakes of Marxist-Feminist Theory

!

Cinzia Arruzza | June 23, 2015

Hannah Höch, Industrial Landscape, 1967

57 When I first started writing this series of remarks in Italian (Riflessioni degeneri), subsequently collected into a single piece for the English version, my aim was twofold. The first was to make a complex debate – one that has unfolded over the course of several decades – accessible to a public of activists and people interested in gender, race, and class politics. The second was to contribute toward reopening this crucial debate about how we should conceptualize the structural relationship between gender oppression and capitalism. This is why I am deeply grateful to Oksala, Farris, and Manning for accepting to respond to my piece and for articulating powerful and illuminating critiques, and which have helped me think through these complicated matters more carefully and rigorously. Specifying the relationship between the logical and historical dimensions of capitalism is one of the most controversial problems in Marxist theory, and one about which I am very uncertain. But, as this is the point of contention between Oksala, Farris, Manning and myself, I will address a set of concerns pertaining to this problem which is relevant to the central issues at stake: whether or not we can claim that gender oppression is a necessary feature of capitalism and, if so, at what level of abstraction can we make that claim. While there is an array of further criticisms in their responses to my essay, this issue is the focus of all three. Hence I will spend most of the limited space at my disposal addressing it. In the appendix, I will respond to two of Manning’s misrepresentations of my position. It is likely that these misrepresentations are misunderstandings caused by the ambiguity of some of my initial formulations. However, as they are connected to political issues, it is important to clarify them for the sake of advancing our discussion and marking the real points of dissent. From altogether different perspectives, Oksala, Farris, and Manning share a similar objection to my critique of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s 1988 New Left Review article, “Capitalism and Human Emancipation.”1 All three observe that I have conceded to Meiksins Wood both the distinction between the logical and historical dimensions of capitalism, and her claim that gender and racial oppression cannot be shown to be necessary to capitalism in a logical sense. Crucially, all three conclude that these concessions vitiate any compelling basis for distinguishing my account of the unitary theory from what I have called an “indifferent capitalism” approach. Thus, all three authors assume that the failure to show that gender

1

Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Capitalism and Human Emancipation,” New Left Review I/88 (1988), 3-20.

58 oppression is a logical precondition for capitalism entails that the relationship between capitalism and gender oppression is merely contingent and opportunistic.2 Manning and Farris conclude that we must demonstrate the logical necessity of gender oppression and of racial oppression for capitalism. Conversely, Oksala reaches the opposite conclusion, that we should be wary of totalities and epistemic certainties and fully endorse historical configurations as contingent, variable and opportunistic combinations of distinct fragments. While their conclusions pull me in opposite directions, this dilemma is based on a shared presupposition: all three seem to presuppose that there is nothing between logical necessity and arbitrary contingency; that one either demonstrates the first or fully endorses the second; and that gender oppression and racial oppression are either logical preconditions for capitalism or that their relationship to it is opportunistic, highly variable and, ultimately, dispensable. In other words, all three accept the presupposition of a theory of “indifferent capitalism” endorsed by Meiksins Woods and other Marxists. It is precisely this presupposition that I reject and that I tried to question in my piece. Farris’s and Manning’s preoccupation with proving the logical necessity of gender oppression for capitalism arises from an understandable political concern, i.e., the worry that failing to demonstrate this logical dependence would mean that gender oppression is politically secondary to class politics. Unfortunately, this concern is motivated by the widespread (and, in my view, mistaken) tendency among Marxist authors to directly derive political conclusions or theses from theoretical arguments developed at a high level of abstraction. This tendency lies behind the political conclusions Meiksins Wood draws in her own piece. Faced with this tendency, it is perfectly understandable that Farris, Manning, and other Marxist feminist authors have been preoccupied with showing the requisite logical necessity so as to grant women’s struggle the appropriate attention and centrality. A similar preoccupation arises regarding the logical necessity of racial oppression. While I understand and share this concern, I think that we should reject rather than answer this interpellation, given that it rests on a mistaken presupposition: the dynamics of political struggle cannot be directly deduced from theoretical observations at this level of abstraction. In fact, this tendency has led some Marxists or activists within class politics to elaborate hierarchies of processes of political subject formation, struggles, and practices based on abstract 2

This point of criticism, that I don’t have any persuasive theoretical basis for a distinct unitary theory left, seems to me more explicitly articulated in Oksala and Manning, but I suspect that Farris may agree with them given her insistence on the necessity to have a logical demonstration of the fact that gender and racial oppression are preconditions to capitalism.

59 logic – hierarchies within which racial and gender oppression would be secondary due to capitalism’s logical independence from them. This approach, however, only reveals a bookish understanding of political struggle. It is an approach that neglects the lived experience of exploited and oppressed people, the concrete and conjunctural processes through which they come to acquire political agency and subjectivity, the way they perceive themselves and their conditions of existence, the sedimentation of their past struggles, the actual history of the country they live in or they come from, and a number of other factors that are crucial to the effective construction of political strategies and projects.3 Once I have decoupled the issue at stake from this underlying political preoccupation, I can address it for what it is: a theoretical and analytical concern. While this concern may or may not have some political consequences, we certainly cannot directly deduce the kind of relevant political consequences that have been drawn in the past by a number of authors and political organizations.

Gender Oppression and Historical Causality

Before I restate my main arguments against “indifferent capitalism” more clearly,  I think some points raised by Manning and Farris need to be clarified. Manning claims that I (like many other Marxist feminist authors) “do not even feel the need to argue against”… the possibility that we can “locate gender or race in the essential logical structure of capitalism.” While my main claim – i.e., that capitalism is not indifferent to gender oppression – does not, in my view, depend on demonstrating that gender oppression is a logical precondition to capitalism, it also does not depend on arguing for the impossibility of such a demonstration. Thus, I do not argue that such a demonstration is impossible because I am actually agnostic regarding its possibility, and because my central claim does not require that I take a position on this issue. Despite my agnosticism in regards to its possibility, it is clear to me that I have not managed to actually demonstrate it myself, and that I find the other attempts so far, (including both Farris’ tentative

3

From this viewpoint, Meiksins Wood’s political considerations on gender are quite at odds with the more sophisticated stance she takes on Thompson’s theory of class experience. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E. P. Thompson and His Critics,” Studies in Political Economy 9 (1982), 45-75.

60 attempt, and Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton’s attempt cited by Manning) unpersuasive.4 While I am open to the possibility of locating gender and race as necessary preconditions of capitalism at the logical level, this position is very difficult to prove. Unlike Manning, I think that the attitude of several Marxist feminist authors is a symptom of a real theoretical difficulty rather than an out-of-hand or prejudicial dismissal. In light of these concerns, I wish to clarify a second point, raised by Farris. Farris disagrees with my claim that logic and history are separate, and then suggests that they have a dialectical relationship. I suspect that Farris took my claim to suggest that logic and history are separate in the sense that they are unrelated. But, of course, I reject this claim as it entails that logical analyses of capitalism tell us nothing about concrete capitalist societies. Such a position would make our theoretical efforts meaningless and sterile exercises of intelligence. My claim about logic and history is much more banal than the one Farris attributes to me, as I only meant that they are distinct. Although she questions this distinction, the non-identity of logic and history is consistent with Farris’ view that logic and history have a dialectical relationship, given that such a relationship precludes their identity: a “dialectical relationship” can entail opposition, but certainly not unmediated identity and, consequently, holding that logic and history are identical (i.e. denying the distinction between them) is equivalent to denying the dialectical relationship between them. While I may agree with Farris that there is a dialectical relationship between logic and history, it is still unclear to me what we actually mean by “dialectical.” The quote provided by Farris from Mészáros, according to whom the social structure is unthinkable without its historical dimension and vice versa, simply re-articulates the problem without clarifying it. While I 4

Farris’s attempt draws on Davidson’s theory of the nation-state: this is an extremely complex and controversial issue that I cannot fully address here. I will confine myself to note that Davidson’s explanation of nationalism leans toward a functionalist explanation that raises an array of serious difficulties: see Neil Davidson, “The Necessity of Multiple Nation-States for Capitalism,” Rethinking Marxism 24.1 (2011), 26-46. This is why, while I find Farris’s considerations on intersectionality illuminating, I am more skeptical about her outline concerning the logical necessity of gender and race based on capital’s need for a multiplicity of nation states. I agree with much of Gonzalez’s and Neton’s piece. However, a key point of their argument is the assumption that “for labour to exist and serve as the measure of value, there must be an exterior to labour” and that “for labour-power to have a value, some of these activities [the ones that reproduce labor-power] have to be cut off or dissociated from the sphere of value production.” Unfortunately, in my view their piece does not really succeed in demonstrating on a logical level that this is the case, hence I do not think that they have demonstrated that gender is logical precondition to capitalism. I will write about this point more on a different occasion. See Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton, “The Logic of Gender,” Endnotes, Vol. 3 (2013).

61 obviously agree with this point, it still leaves open the theoretical task of specifying how we concretely think the two aspects together and the exact relationship between them. As I have already said, I cannot offer a complete solution to this larger problem. However, by addressing the more relevant distinction between logical possibilities and practical possibilities, I will provide some elements towards clarifying the relationship between logic and history. Since I have clarified these two points – first, that I am not prejudicially dismissing attempts to demonstrate that gender is a logical precondition to capitalism and, second, that I do not deny the relationship between the logical dimension and historical dimension of capitalism – I can now reformulate my main argument against the “indifferent capitalism” thesis. My argument is formulated as an “immanent critique” of Meiksins Wood’s argument: I provisionally accept her presupposition that demonstrating the logical dependence of capitalism on gender oppression is not possible (a point I am myself agnostic about), and I then proceed to show that this premise does not license the conclusions she draws. My argument has two parts: the first methodological part argues that we must distinguish between logical possibilities and historical (or, alternatively, practical) possibilities; the second concerns the distinction between a logical precondition to capitalism and a “necessary” consequence of capitalist accumulation. In articulating my argument again, I will also answer some of Oksala’s objections by restating the necessity to think of capitalist societies as moving totalities; in contrast to expressive totalities in which each part reflects and corresponds to the others, or where each part is “functional” to the whole, this moving totality is a set of social practices, relationships, and institutions which are all subject to the determining constraints and pressures posed by the logic of capitalist accumulation. As I will expand upon further, such a conceptualization entails refining and distinguishing the different senses in which we use the words “necessity,” “necessary,” as well as “laws.” When speaking of historically situated social practices and phenomena, terms such as “necessity” and “laws” should always be taken in a looser sense than what is generally understood. Even the so-called capitalist “laws of motion” are “tendencies” in that, qua social practices and relations, they do not operate with the necessity pertaining to certain physical laws. In other words, we can speak of “necessity” and “laws” in a weaker sense than our usage of those terms in the natural sciences. They are also weaker than logical necessity and logical laws, and perhaps part of the confusion on this point lies in the conflation between the necessity pertaining to logic (to our logical thinking) and that pertaining to history, social practices, and social relations – which is a different and weaker kind. This applies to both the relationship between gender and racial oppression and capitalism as well as to the unfolding of capitalist

62 accumulation itself. In using the term “necessary consequences,” I am referring to the consequences that will tend to be produced by capitalist accumulation, which should not provoke the theoretical anxieties evidenced by my respondents.

Practical Plausibility and Concrete History

When working with logical categories or with the analysis of capitalism at a high level of abstraction, we should recognize that we are referring to a theoretical model used to describe some aspect of reality. While I do not deny that this theoretical model has undoubtedly been constructed through the formalization of actual, historically-produced constraints, it is still a theoretical model that refers to – while remaining non-identical with – the reality it describes. When thinking at this level of abstraction we operate with specific kinds of possibility, which I would define as either logical or nomological. Logical possibilities denote what is thinkable without contradicting the given definition of the object at stake. If, in my definition of capitalism, the core of capitalist accumulation is the valorization of value (and hence the extraction of surplus-value through exploitation), then I cannot conceive of a capitalist society sans exploitation without logically contradicting my given definition. But I can think any configuration that does not contradict it as being possible. Put simply, logical possibilities concern the coherence of our thoughts toward objects. As such, the range of logical possibilities is as a general rule both wider and more rigid than that of real possibilities, which have to account for constraints other than logical coherence and thus, to a limited extent, allow for the existence of contradictory processes. A nomological possibility has to do with sets of laws: it circumscribes as possible everything that does not contradict those given laws. Now, coherence in thought does not exhaust the range of constraints that limit the set of possibilities on a practical or historical level. Nomological coherence, in its turn, would be able to express the entire range of constraints that either limit or rank possibilities on a historical or practical level, if and only if we assumed that all practical necessitating constraints can be formalized into laws. I am deeply skeptical that this is the case. This is not to suggest an irrationalist approach to parts of reality; I only mean to suggest that logical formalization is not the sole rational means of grasping reality at our disposal, and that not all necessitating constraints are grasped in this way or formalized at that level. The cognitive mapping of certain constraints demands concrete historical analysis or other heuristic tools. To make this point clearer, the concrete history of capitalism involves several practical constraints. For example, given the origin and development of capitalism in the United States, I

63 think that we can make a plausible case that racial oppression, in varying and historically specific forms, not only is but will likely remain a constitutive part of American capitalism and American society. It is likely that this practical constraint cannot be formalized in the same way that the extraction of surplus-value can. Nonetheless, it is a necessitating constraint that significantly qualifies possibilities according to degrees of probability. We may, of course, conceive of a version of American capitalism without racism, as such a possibility does not contradict either a given definition of capitalism or its formalized laws of motion. However, this scenario is historically implausible. Practical plausibility is what should really matter for political concerns, because we do not do politics, or at least we should not do it, by means of mere thought experiments whose only rule is logical coherence. To sum up, the unmediated jump between different forms of possibility is a mistake; we should reject this mistake rather than taking it as the guiding premise of our theoretical efforts.

Precondition or Consequence?

To continue with the second part of this re-articulation of my critique of “indifferent capitalism,” proponents of this approach such as Meiksins Wood fail to distinguish between the status of determinants that are logical preconditions to capitalism, and the status of determinants that are necessary consequences of capitalism. Farris observes that my distinction between these two terms is unclear, arguing that “if we say that capitalism produces oppression by necessity, we are in fact still putting forward an argument that requires explanation at the logical structural level, and not only at the historical level.” Farris is certainly correct in claiming that this necessity cannot be proved only at the historical level without some explanation at the logical structural level. However, as I have hoped to show in the preceding paragraphs, I have not denied this. Farris’s critique is fair given that the formulation and structure of my argument was unclear and potentially misleading. Hence her criticism has, thankfully, allowed me to reformulate my point in more robust terms. The distinction between a logical precondition and a necessary consequence of a social dynamic is warranted given that a set of social phenomena can be necessarily and constantly produced by the logic of capitalist accumulation without being a logical precondition for it. So, even if we were compelled to concede that gender oppression or racial oppression are not logical preconditions for capitalism, this concession would still not entail the conclusion that the relationship between capitalism and these forms of oppression is only an opportunistic and contingent one, and that capitalism is “indifferent” to them. In order to demonstrate the

64 indifference of capitalism to gender and racial oppression, a proponent of the “indifferent capitalism” approach would have to argue that gender and racial oppression are not “necessarily” produced and reproduced by the logic of capitalist accumulation. In other words, the definition of capitalism as essentially “indifferent” to women’s and racialized people’s oppression – exploiting them in merely opportunistic terms – fails to take into account the fact that capitalism does not just “use” pre-existing oppressions, but also produces them as a byproduct of accumulation. To quote Martha Gimenez on gender inequality: Gender inequality thus conceptualized, as a structural characteristic of capitalist social formations, is irreducible to microfoundations; i.e., it cannot be solely or primarily explained on the basis of either men’s or women’s intentions, biology, psychosexual development, etc. because it is the structural effect of a complex network of macrolevel processes through which production and reproduction are inextricably connected. This network sets limits to the opportunity structures of propertyless men and women, allocating women primarily to the sphere of domestic/reproductive labor and only secondarily to paid (waged or salaried) labor, thus establishing the objective basis for differences in their relative economic, social and political power. However, analysis of concrete or specific instances of gender inequality within households, enterprises, bureaucracies, etc. is not only amenable to study at the level of microfoundations, but requires this. We cannot fully explain oppressive practices in a given institution without taking into account the agency of the major social actors; these actors’ intentions, attitudes, beliefs, and practices have to be explained in terms of the structural conditions that made them possible.5

Claiming that gender oppression is a necessary consequence of capitalism entails relating an analysis of the logic of capitalist accumulation to historical considerations concerning the role of gender differentiation in reproductive activities. As it should appear clear by now, there is no real disagreement between Farris and myself on this point: the only real disagreement concerns both her insistence on the necessity to demonstrate that gender and racial oppression are logical preconditions for capitalism, and her attempt to prove this point by means of an analysis of the necessity of the nation-state for capitalism. To summarize my above response, I challenge the notion that capitalism has a merely opportunistic and contingent relationship to gender oppression on two counts: the first is that the “indifferent capitalism” approach is based on a conflation between different kinds of possibility and fails to take into account forms of practical necessity or constraints that cannot be formalized into laws of motion; the second is that it fails to take into account that sets of social phenomena can be necessary consequences of the logic of capitalist accumulation, even if they

5

Martha Gimenez, “Capitalism and the Oppression of Women: Marx Revisited,” Science & Society, 69.1 (2005), pp. 11-32, 24.

65 are not a logical preconditions for it, and that, moreover, these necessary consequences can be analyzed, at least to some extent, in abstract terms.

What is Unitary in “Unitary Theory?”

These two points allow me to answer part of Oksala’s objections. Some of her acute objections stem from my ill-advised use of the term “organizing principle” to discuss the link between gender oppression and capitalism. “Organizing principle” is a misleading term for the social dynamics I am describing, as I recognized only too late. I am willing to drop it altogether, as it fails to properly account for my claim that capitalist accumulation is the shared framework of various forms of oppression, and because it may imply functionalist conceptualizations of the dynamics of capital or suggest the existence of a “plan of capital.” Another difficulty has to do with the term “unitary theory,” which raised some problems from two opposing viewpoints: both for Oksala and for Manning. The fault here is not entirely mine, as I inherited the label from Vogel’s book, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, where, in my interpretation, the term “unitary” was only meant to demarcate her position from dual or triple systems theories.6 (The term “unitary,” however, may once again be misleading since it can be interpreted as indicating that all sets of social phenomena examined – hence the various forms of oppression at stake – are organized according to a single logic that can be studied with a single theoretical tool or mode of critical analysis. Understood in this way, it clearly raises a serious problem for my own position, as I want to avoid a functionalist account as much as I want to avoid a merely contingent account of the relationship between various forms of oppression and capitalism. Given that dropping this label may be more complicated because of the history of the debate on these issues, I wish to clarify once again what my position on these points is. I argue that capitalist accumulation produces, or contributes to the production of, varying forms of social hierarchy and oppressions as its necessary consequences. Moreover, I argue that it has a greater consequential and determining power than other forms of social hierarchy, and that it poses necessitating constraints that determine all other forms of social relations. Thus, my claims are more robust than simply stating that in a total social formation something “is connected to something else.” However, my claim is weaker than arguing that capitalist accumulation organizes other social hierarchies according to a single logic. Moreover, it is my contention that the logic of capitalist accumulation is pervasive (that is, that it has the capacity of 6

Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014 [1983])

66 coloring all other social relationships), which is one of the grounds for speaking of a contradictory and articulated moving totality. I am aware that this restatement of my position can and probably will be unsatisfying to many. The difficulty lies in the fact that I am trying to carve a different path between the opposite directions in which Oksala, on the one hand, and Manning and Farris, on the other, would like to pull my argument. Making this path compelling necessitates additional work on articulating the notions of historical necessity and possibility, of totality and of determination, as well as reconsiderations of the relationship between logic and history, and of the nature of Marx’s method of exposition. Clearly, being an even more difficult task, such work would require a combination of robust empirical, historical reflection and theoretical elaboration. It is work to be done in the years to come.

Appendix

In Manning’s piece there are two misrepresentations of some of my arguments that seem theoretically or politically relevant enough to require a clarification. This clarification is not intended as polemical, but as a necessary step to clear the ground from possible misunderstandings and further the debate. Moreover, it is quite possible that I bear some responsibility for these misunderstandings. The first of these misrepresentations concerns the issue of the benefits to men afforded by gender oppression. My concern with this misrepresentation of my argument is both theoretical and political, because whether we consider men and women as two antagonistic classes obviously has relevant political consequences. Manning writes that “it is important to challenge Arruzza’s statements about the negligible benefits of patriarchy to men”; then, to counter my argument, she goes on making a list of activities and practices that cannot be socialized, including sexual abuse and violence.7 I am puzzled by Manning’s interpretation of my position, and I must admit that I am frustrated by her implication that I deny that men significantly benefit from women’s oppression. Such a position is basically an antifeminist one that I have always been antipathetic to. My argument was quite simple and concerned the definition of class relationships as based on exploitation, understood as the extraction of surplus. My intent was to show that men and women cannot be considered as two classes in this technical sense due to the absence of 7

This is the contentious sentence: “A man would lose nothing, in terms of workload, if the distribution of care work were completely socialized instead of being performed by his wife.”

67 extraction and appropriation of a surplus: in this sense, and only in this sense, men would lose nothing from the socialization of care work. Moreover, I have never claimed that gender inequality’s benefits to men are negligible. I have only claimed that they are not an adequate ground for speaking of a class antagonism between men and women or for defining men and women as two classes. This does not make these benefits negligible: occupying a higher hierarchical place in the social order, working less than those who are in a subaltern position, having greater social recognition, and having a privileged access to violence and domination over others are not negligible benefits at all. As a matter of fact they are a powerful device of division and conflict among exploited and oppressed people and within a class. They would not be so powerful, if they were negligible. Still, within the theoretical framework I tried to elucidate, these elements alone do not define what a class relationship is, and cannot be taken as a ground for defining gender oppression as a class antagonism involving two classes – men and women. As my argument concerned the class status of gender inequality, it is unclear to me how Manning’s reminder of sexual abuse and violence, for example, may challenge it, unless what is a stake is the suggestion of a different definition of class and class relationship. If this is the case, then there is indeed a theoretical disagreement between Manning and me. Finally, Manning’s misinterpretation of my argument may be connected to another substantive theoretical disagreement with my position: Manning claims that there always will be a sphere of unsocialized work, and that women or feminized people will do it for the most part. Based on these premises, Manning concludes that there is as little reason for men to let go of the benefits they draw from women’s oppression as there is for capitalists to socialize their profits. Since the theoretical bases for these observations – whether Manning’s argument is a psychological, anthropological or ontological one, whether it refers to only capitalist societies or is a more general claim – are unclear to me, I will forego further debate on this issue. The reason why I deemed necessary to clarify this point is the identification of the gender oppression of women by men with class antagonism would entail that mixed-gender politics is a self-undermining political strategy for women insofar as such inter-class cooperation would, ultimately, be detrimental to women. Antagonistic class interests, indeed, cannot be reconciled in the long term. As a matter of fact, the definition of gender oppression as a class antagonism has led, more often than not, to separatism. Perhaps one of the reasons for conceptualizing gender oppression as a class relationship is that we want to consider unpaid reproductive work as exploited work. However, we do not really need to define women as a class in order to achieve this outcome. Workerist feminists, for example, have conceptualized unpaid care work as exploited productive work without conceptualizing the relationship between men and

68 women as a class relationship; others, while denying that reproductive work produces value, have argued that it contributes to both the reproduction of capitalist society and the production and extraction of value, hence it is exploited. The second point concerns race. I have never written that the category of social reproduction circumscribes the essential racializing processes within capital. As a matter of fact, it does not. We cannot adequately analyze race without addressing numerous determinants including the international division of labor, colonialism, imperialism, migration, and combined and uneven development; these determinants cannot be exhaustively conceptualized through the notion of social reproduction as used by Marxist feminists. While there may and should be important overlapping aspects, social reproduction theory cannot adequately address these matters on its own. Consequently, I am skeptical of the fashionable tendency to theoretically conflate discussions on race and gender: while it is true that racial and gender oppression are strongly intertwined at some level of analysis, and while it is often the case that one cannot understand the one without the other, at the level of the theoretical analysis of the consequences of capitalist accumulation and their determination of the reproduction of forms of hierarchy and oppression, there are several factors that play a fundamental role for one form of oppression but not for another.