https://socialistaction.org/2018/04/05/essays-on-feminism-and-marxist-theory/
Essays on feminism and Marxist theory
/ 14 hours ago
April 2018 Feminists Venez.
Feminists march in Venezuela. (Feminist Socialist and WOmen’s
Collectives Network)
By CHRISTINE MARIE
“Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression.”
Edited by Tithi Battacharya; forward by Lise Vogel (London: Pluto Press
2017).
Social reproduction feminism is not new. Marxist thinkers began to focus
in earnest on the relationship between production and social
reproduction in capitalist society nearly 40 years ago, in the context
of what used to be referred to as the second wave of feminism. In 1979,
the Fourth International approved the resolution, “Socialist Revolution
and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation.”
That early mass movement also put on its agenda the theoretical work of
Lise Vogel, “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” first published in
1983. Vogel and other Marxist scholars put forth the concepts of what
came to be called “social reproduction theory.”
Tithi Battacharya explains in the introduction to this new book that
“social reproduction theorists perceive the relation between labor
dispensed to produce commodities and labor dispensed to produce people
as part of the systemic totality of capitalism. The framework thus seeks
to make visible labor and work that are analytically hidden by classical
economists and politically denied by policy makers.”
She goes on to point out that social reproduction theorists “by no means
represent a unified political or theoretical tradition.” But while
differences remain among the exponents of the theory, “SRT is primarily
concerned with understanding how categories of oppression (such as
gender, race, and ableism) are coproduced in simultaneity with the
production of surplus value.”
It is no accident that the new volume of essays on social reproduction
theory, edited by Battacharya, is appearing in the midst of the
emergence of giant women’s mobilizations on the global stage.
These mobilizations include the 2016 Polish women’s strike to defend
abortion access, the October 2016 Ni Una Menos demonstrations and
strikes against femicide in Argentina, and the March 2018 strike of 5
million in Spain against discrimination in wages and violence based on
gender. These 2016 women’s strikes led to the formation of a new
international network of radical women.
The potential for sustained motion by working women struggling in the
context of the most serious global anti-working-class offensive in
around 100 years has created the context for a burst of new work on the
roots of gender oppression and its relationship to one of capitalism’s
most profound contradictions. The system needs to drive women into the
pool of waged labor producing surplus value, while relying on gender and
the kin-based family, rather than socialized institutions, to create,
develop, and sustain that workforce.
As profit rates have dropped over the last three decades, and the bosses
have both super-exploited women in the less developed countries and cut
the social wage in developed countries to the bone, the crises for
working women have grown exponentially. Mass action and strikes by
women, on the job and off, are becoming central factors in the class
struggle.
Key figures from the leadership of the U.S. formation attempting to
provide an anti-capitalist framework for this new upsurge, the
International Women’s Strike U.S., have essays in this volume. Cinzia
Arruza explains how social reproduction theory can anchor a movement to
challenge the liberal feminism that sees Hillary Clinton as a solution.
Tithi Battacharya interrogates the parts of Marx’s “Capital” that imply
but do not detail the relationship of social reproduction to production.
David McNally argues that we should use the wonderfully thick
descriptions of radicalized and gendered class experience provided by
those working with intersectionality theory, but reject its failure to
explain the workings of capitalism and the related strategy of defeating it.
Additional essays are included from such key figures as Nancy Fraser,
Salar Mohandesi, Emma Teitelman, Susan Ferguson, Carmeen Temple Hopkins,
Serap Saritas Oran, and Alan Sears. Every socialist needs to read it now.
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April 5, 2018 in Marxist Politics and Philosophy, Marxist Theory &
History, Women's Liberation.
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