Gendercraft

On Why ‘Marxism-Feminism’ is neither Marxist, nor particularly feminist, but just another bourgeois ideology

The following presents a shortened version of an article that was originally published in Science&Society just last week.[1] In it, I take a look at what had been circulating in left academia under the term “gendered exploitation” and “unpaid/unwaged housework”, as performed exclusively by women. I argue that the contention of “gendered exploitation” as constitutive to capitalist relations of production is a barely concealed assertion lacking proof and argument. In the whole literature of Marxism-feminism, it is impossible to find a single argument proving the existence of capital depending on ‘gendered’ exploitation. The authors of this tradition seem to think that just by relating gender to capital, and mobilising an array of moralistic implications, one has already proven or provided an argument that the relation is necessary to capitalist exploitation. Sure, one can relate anything to anything. One can also relate the concept of a meat hook to the poems of Dylan Thomas. But that does not mean that Dylan Thomas’s poems require a meat hook to exist.

The reflections presented here are the beginning of what I hope to be a series of critiques of intersectionality theory that still dominates much of current academia and relies on moral blackmail to sustain its dominance.

If you are interested in reading the full text, and especially my critique of Johanna Brenner and Lise Vogel omitted here for reasons of space (with the full Marxology), please don’t hesitate to drop me a message in the comments.

With that, I’ll leave you to it: bon appétit!

Introduction: Marxism-Feminism and the Problem of Money

Ten years after interest in Marxian critical theory has been rekindled by the breakdown of financial capitalism in 2010 and the debates surrounding it, we can acknowledge that among its different strands, Marxism-feminism has prevailed as the most successful: not only did the Women’s March and the International Women’s Strike between 2017 and 2019 mobilise political activism and solidarity deeply into the liberal camp on an unprecedented scale, but a new enthusiasm for feminist theory found expression in many publications, re-publications, edited collections and book series.[2] In the literature of recent years, however, the dual systems-approach of second wave feminism (roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s) was outshone by a reappraisal of the ‘women’s question’ as it related to the role of domestic or household reproduction within capitalist production as a whole in what has once been known as Unitary Theory (Vogel 2013 (1983)) and politicised within Lotta Femminista and Silvia Federici’s, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s ‘Wages for Housework’-movement in the 1970s.[3] While sharing some of its theoretical cornerstones, though not its political initiative of demanding wages for housework, the role and function of women’s reproductive labour today is most prominently discussed under the name of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). SRT arguably forms the most influential strand within the newer streams of Marxism-Feminism. Yet, as Julia Dück and Katharina Hajek point out, even within the literature focusing on the role of reproduction within capitalism, we can differentiate between ‘value-theoretical, subsistence-theoretical, patriarchy-logical, historical-reconstructive, regulation-theoretical, political-economic, as well as biopolitical and queerfeminist approaches’ (Dück and Hajek 2019, 501). In the first part of this article we shall limit ourselves to a discussion of the value-theoretical[4] approach, before we problematise the use of the category of ‘gender’ in Marxism-feminism more broadly in the second part of this essay.

Despite its different articulations, the common denominator within the SRT-strand of Marxism-Feminism is the focus on the unpaid/unwaged labour of women in the household as the ultimate source of ‘women’s oppression’ (Vogel 2013 (1983)). However, as we will argue, they also share a common lack – an adequate theoretisation of the significance of capitalist social relations as monetary, as well as the form of reproductive labour adequate to these relations, namely moneyed wage labour. For a theoretical literature whose main concern are the conditions of possibility of capitalist reproduction in its social totality, this lack is quite astonishing. However it significantly informs their view of ‘gender’ and the deferral of levels of abstraction on which both hypotheses – a general view of social reproduction regardless of its (monetary) form on the one hand, and a supplementary view of ‘gendered exploitation’ (Gonzalez 2013, 1) within its specific locus in the household and family – are grounded. The dismissal of the specifically capitalist form of social reproduction through money and the monetary form of wages within this literature is reminiscent of bourgeois and vulgar political economy’s declaration of ‘the wages system to be an external and irrelevant formality in capitalist production from which we may deduce what an F. Bastiat understands about the nature of capitalist production’, as Marx polemically asserted (Marx 1973, 1006).

As we will show, the absence of money as a theoretical problem in SRT not only renders their analysis ahistorical with regard to the specificity of capitalist reproduction and the function and substance of money within it, but also implies the bourgeois theoretical framework of use-value centered (non-monetary) social reproduction, similar to that of David Ricardo, which fails to grasp the specific character of capitalist subsumption.

In the first part of this article, ‘Labour Power: Not a Capitalistically Produced Commodity?’, we will question the main hypothesis of SRT that labour is not a capitalistically produced commodity, and confront it with Marx’s monetary theory of value and social reproduction through the wage form as a form of value. Drawing on Ricardo’s view of use-value mediated reproduction allows us to highlight its convergence with the SRT approach, as well as demonstrating SRT’s failure to capture the specifically capitalist form of reproduction.

[This part is omitted from the text below.]

The aim of this argument, developed in the second part, ‘The Logic of Gendercraft’, is to demonstrate that convincing theoretical evidence of women’s oppression as inherent to the logic of capitalism cannot be reconstructed from the examined texts and theories in the Marxist-feminist literature. Introducing the critical heuristic of ‘Gendercraft’ – leaning on Barbara and Karen Fields’s critical notion of ‘Racecraft’ -, we review eminent Marxist-feminist historical and sociological studies, and their use of ‘gender’, ‘gendered exploitation’, and ‘women’ by which they intend to deepen an understanding of the nature of women’s oppression as specific to capitalism. We will show that the conjuring of conceptual determinisms in the form of ‘biological facts’ (Brenner 1984, 2000, 26) and the view of an alleged ‘resilience of gender as a principle of human differentiation’ (Salzinger 2003, 25) is based on an anti-materialist and de facto Platonic framework that re-enacts rather than deconstructs the naturalisms associated with gendered housework, despite its own intention. This gender determinism also influences the view of an alleged ‘irreducibility’ of certain household tasks within the sexual division of labour (Brenner 1984, 2000), which we will question for advanced capitalist societies under conditions of real subsumption and the production of relative surplus value, i.e., the commodification of domestic services under a competitive price system.

We contend that the aim of the SRT strand in the Marxist-Feminist literature, namely to demonstrate women’s oppression and the gendered division of labour in the household as a sine qua non of capitalist sociation - ‘gender is re-created along with value’ (Weeks 2011, 10) – remains unconvincing.

To sum up our intervention at the end of this essay, we will critically evaluate the plea for de-emphasising workplace struggles in favour of ‘a broader movement’, e.g., struggles ‘for cleaner air … or for fairer housing prices’ (Bhattaracharya 2017, p. 92) and question the efficacy of such a shift for the struggle against wage labour that constitutes the essence of capital.

The Logic of Gendercraft

How does the so-called ‘gender divide’ - analogous to ‘the so-called race divide’ problematised in the work of Fields and Fields (Fields and Fields 2012, 24) - ‘fit into’ the account of the reproduction of capitalist society that forms the focus of feminist theories of social reproduction? As we will show, the deferral of levels of abstraction that the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘gender’ require, poses no theoretical problem for many SRT feminists. ‘Of course, gender is fundamentally defined by capitalism’, Gonzalez contends with admirable matter-of-factness (Gonzalez 2013, 4), but as to the how and why (and through what) of it, we are none the wiser after her ambitious account. This is because, simply speaking, the common conceptual denominator or the tertium comparatonis of ‘capital’ and ‘gender’, the prerequisite to theorising both with the same means of analysis, cannot be established without significantly distorting, thus rendering inexact, the meaning of each of these concepts. We find it remarkable that a theoretical discussion which requires a methodological reflection on the use of these concepts, e.g. the demonstration of their ‘interdependency’, remains lacking.

On the question of the ‘logic’ and the ‘history’ of capital, however, Cinzia Arruzza (Arruzza 2015) and Lise Vogel (Vogel 2013 (1983)), the latter to whom we will return in detail, have been more vigilant. But ‘history’ is not a realm distinct from ‘logic’, if only because we cannot help but think ‘concrete history’ in logical terms: ‘Women’s oppression is a conditio sine qua non of capitalism’ may be a historical fact, but that judgment is the result of a logical operation. The claim can only be attributed validity if it is to be assessed as a logical one, for only on this basis can it be discussed and criticised, defended, rejected, or proven. Historical facts can ever only be expressed or thought in the medium of thought and language. We are therefore unconvinced by Arruzza’s contention – directed against Ellen Meiksins Wood’s ‘indifference’ thesis (Wood 1988)[5] – that ‘logical formalization is not the sole rational means of grasping reality at our disposal, and that not all necessitating constraints [such as ‘race’ or’gender’] are grasped in this way or formalized at that level.’ (Arruzza 2015, 6), because, like all claims similarly rejecting conceptual logic as the sole means to grasping reality, it is clearly a logical claim. In what other way can ‘necessitating constraints’ be argumentatively proven –  than with arguments?[6] If gendered oppression cannot be shown to be necessary to the logic of capital, then it cannot be shown to be necessary to capital.[7]

But aside from Arruzza who takes the problem that levels of abstraction pose in relation to ‘capital’ and ‘gender’ seriously, other authors have been altogether ignorant of this problem. Kathi Weeks’s sociological study The Problem with Work (2011) is a case in point. Arguing from an anti-workerist perspective, and aiming to challenge the ‘depoliticization of work’ of capital’s ‘work society’ in the exposé of her book, she suddenly introduces the notion of ‘gender’, neither informing the reader of its necessity for the development of her argument, nor about its conceptual relation to anti-workerism. In the section titled ‘Gender at Work’, it is simply there. Unprompted, we hear that ‘work is organized by gender’, meaning that ‘it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed, and recreated.’ (Weeks 2011, 9). Instead of replacing this tautology with a relevant argument, she continues in the same vein: ‘...the gendering of work… is a consequence of the ways that workers are often expected to do gender at work.’ (Weeks 2011, 9). Arguments are substituted by the imposition of the notion of ‘gender’ which immediately ‘explains’ a ‘gendered’ phenomenon. We thus hear that ‘gender is re-created along with value’ (Weeks 2011, 10), without hearing how and why, and we are confronted with the claim that ‘[f]or an employee, it is not merely a matter of bringing one’s gendered self to work but of becoming gendered in and through work’ (Weeks 2011, 10), a claim that stands as unsubstantiated as dogmatic. The diagnosis that the oppression of women consists in the ‘enactment’ of ‘gender’ in productive and reproductive work remains tautological: as Barbara and Karen Fields note with regard to the ‘explanatory’ function of ‘race’, it no more explains racism ‘than judicial review “explains” why the United States Supreme Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than Civil War “explains” why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.’ (Fields and Fields 2012, 120).

For the present discussion, we are more interested in the significance of gender in the analysis of social reproduction in contemporary capitalist societies. It seems, however, that the ways ‘gender’ is introduced into the analysis more often than not blurs the distinction between a merely discriptive and a normative proposition. To give a few examples:

...the considerable flexibility of notions of proper gender enactment does not undermine the appearance of inevitability and naturalness that continues to support the division of labour by gender. (Leidner 1993, 196, quoted in Weeks 2011, 11). 

      ‘… it is precisely the combination of rigid gender categories with the malleability and variability of their enactments and meaning that explains the resilience of gender as a principle of human differentiation.’ (Salzinger 2003, 25, quoted in Weeks 2011, 11).

‘He who before followed behind as the worker, timid and holding back, with nothing to expect but a hiding, now strides in front, while a third person, not specifically present in Marx’s account of the transaction between capitalist and worker (both of whom are male) follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers.’ (Hartsock 1983, 234, quoted in Weeks 2011, 25).

‘… none of these people – houseworker, domestic servant or care worker – is a productive worker in relation to the male worker, despite the fact that the work of each of them provides him with a product – cooked food.’ (Fortunati 1995, quoted in Gonzalez 2013, 7).

This blurring of the descriptive and normative is indicative of a specific symptom: in order to grasp ‘gender’ as the central mechanism of the reproduction of capitalist society, the authors mentioned cannot circumvent the need to introduce a strong naturalist fundamentalism into the debate, quite contrary to their claims of gender as a ‘social’ category. The lens of gender then ‘naturally’ defers the analytical gaze to the supposed objectivity of the ‘gender-divide’ and loses sight of its practical, and hence contingent, character. The unmediated introduction of ‘gender’ thus invites a quasi-ontic view of social relations the Marxist literature knows as reification: the identification of social practice with rigid naturalism. The point of reification however – and this is crucial – is that in order to appear as socially objective, the category, here gender, must be constantly re-enacted and re-asserted in a specific practice. This practice thus appears asthe result of a determinate objectivity, and not as its enforcement: ‘[t]hey do this without being aware of it.’ (Marx 1976, 166-7). Accordingly, as with the fetish-characteristic forms of value Marx describes in Capital, what is presupposed appears as a result: because the Marxist-feminist literature must, by definition of its own social analysis, constantly re-enact and re-assert the alleged ‘resilience of gender as a principle of human differentiation’, the latter presents itself as outcome, not as theoretical prerequisite.[8] This reverberates with what Fields and Fields have termed ‘racecraft’, its correlation to witchcraft existing in the strategies by which this reasoning seems to obtain a ‘plausible’ character: ‘Witchcraft and racecraft are imagined, acted upon, and re-imagined, the action and imagining inextricably intertwined.’ (Fields and Fields 2012, 19).

The alleged ‘objectivity’ of ‘gender’, consequently, is the result of a certain practice, namely its apotheosis as a meaningful concept of analysis for capitalist social relations. Matter-of-factly declared as the defining mechanism of reproduction, but avoiding the question of its explanatory power  – we cannot help but ‘become gendered in and through work’ - ‘gender’ receives the  naturalisation of concepts known from, e.g., Platonic realism: the order of the real world is arranged according to ideas - and not vice versa. The analytical relevance of ‘gender’ in these theories consequently depends on its own hypostasation. Within this framework, a ‘solemn a priori idealism in the guise of a radical materialism’, as Joan Didion has once written (Didion 1972/1979, 111), the concept of gender consequently ‘comes to live a life of its own’. As we will see, this work of gendercraft can be seen in various forms in the Marxist -feminist literature, and especially its SRT current. To give but one preliminary example: Nancy Hardsock’s ‘feminist’ ambitions  – if by feminism we mean not only the liberation of women from sexist practices, but also a normative liberating position, the rejection of oppressive stereotypes – turn into their opposite by hypostasising a strikingly anti-feminist caricature of women’s position in society. The rhetorical practice of ‘stereotypical’ hyperbole however presents a dilemma: it perpetuates a distorted view of gender stereotypes, when it should want to get rid of it – and yet, this same perpetuation forms the incentive for her own theorising. As with the category of ‘race’ that is perpetuated in similar ways[9], many feminist theorists thus ‘come much closer than they realize to the views of those they ostensibly oppose.’ (Fields and Fields 2012, p. 146).

…

The problem that feminist SRT faces then would have to be addressed as an adequate response to the singular mechanism that defines capitalist relations of production, namely the relation between capital and wage labor. The incentive to build a ‘broad-based, pluralist social movement’ (Ferguson 2019, 2), whose focus moves away from ‘the one-sided class struggle’ (Bhattaracharya 2017, 90) towards use-value oriented struggles ‘for cleaner air, for better schools, against water privatization, against climate change, or for fairer housing policies’ (Bhattaracharya 2017, 92) however neither adequately addresses nor challenges this problem. This is because struggles for use-values misidentify the logic of capital according to which use-values are only produced because they arebearers of value, and not for their own sake. ‘[T]he aim of producing capital’, as Marx says in the Grundrisse, ‘is never use value, but rather the general form of wealth as wealth’ (Marx 1973, 600, original emphasis). Struggles for better housing and cleaner water therefore do not threaten the existence of capital. The abolition of the wage relation however would: for it would abolish the very logic that produces and reproduces the subordination of use value to value. For many feminist social reproduction theorists however, the problem with ‘capitalism’ not so much consists in the wage relation itself, as the way this relation ‘inherently’ reproduces various forms of oppression, thereby leaving the wage relation itself intact. The devaluation of ‘economic struggles’ as a form among many (Bhattaracharya 2017, 85) here practically re-enacts the liberal foundations of SRT’s theoretical approach to capital on the level of the political.

The reluctance to see the wage relation and the moneyed form of capitalist production and reproduction as fundamental in much Marxist-feminist literature bespeaks a curious tacit agreement with its form of operation. We believe however that this reluctance is unintended, explaining why we term the disavowal of money a ‘blind spot’, not a conscious move. We agree with Bhattaracharya that the task today is to learn from 40 years of neoliberal restructuring: but also to learn from the blind spots of the resistance to it.

[1] “Gendercraft. Marxism-Feminism, Reproduction, and the Blind Spot of Money” [2]    To name but a few, Arruzza 2013, Fraser 2013, Arruzza et al. 2019, Bhattaracharya 2017, and the Mapping Social Reproduction Theory book series at Pluto, Toupin 2018, and Vogel‘s 1983 seminal work Marxismand the Oppression of Women, reissued in 2013 with the Historical Materialism book series. In 2009, Vogel‘s book was  published in Chinese, and in 2019 in German translation. For related issues, see the symposium on Intersectionality in Science & Society in 2018 (see Eisentein et. al. 2018). See also Quick 2018. [3]    For an overview, see Toupin 2018. [4]    For reasons of space, we bracket the discussion of German ‘value-theoretical‘ feminist Roswitha Scholz whose ‘value-dissociation theory‘, which we consider untenable, merits an individual discussion. [5] ‘The first point about capitalism is that it is uniquely indifferent to the social identities of the people it exploits.‘   Wood 1988, p. 5. [6]    Vogel reiterates this separation of theory from history, when she claims in the 2013 Appendix to Oppression of Women: ‘Theory … is a powerful but highly abstract enterprise and sharply different from history.’ Vogel 2013 (1983), p. 186. [7]    This is of course not to say that capital operates logically, but to say that even its irrationality can only be demonstrated in terms of argumentative logic.[8]    Vogel has expressed her concerns about the danger of circular reasoning in the 1970s domestic labour debates: ‘For example, domestic labour was frequently identified with women’s work and conversely, thereby assuming the sexual division of labour women’s liberationists wished to explain.’ Vogel 2013 (1983), p. 185. [9]    Fields and Fields differentiate between race, racism and racecraft. While race, like gender, ‘stands for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankin

d in distinct groups’ (Fields and Fields 2012, 16), racism ‘is first and foremost a social practice’ which ‘takes for granted the objective reality of race’ (Fields and fields 2012, 17), like sexism does. Racecraft is the practice that appears to give coherence to the objectivity of ‘race’, while gendercraft does the same for ‘gender’.