THE TWO-WAY CHALLENGE
Marxism has come a long way: from its initial conquest of class as the mainspring
of social structure and evolution to the systematic study of, and struggle against, all
other oppressions, including the oppression of women. This latter has deep roots
in the precapitalist past, along with many current threads tying it to the reproduction of capitalist social relations.
The editors of, and contributors to, this special issue have a strong message
for their sisters and brothers in the feminist movement (all waves thereof): neither
neoliberalism, nor mainstream political liberalism, nor postmodernism can offer a
secure ground for continued development of feminist thought and the movement
for women's equality. Vague and eclectic references to "socialist" or "materialist"
feminism also fail to meet the need for truly adequate foundations. To make real
progress, feminism must, in effect, be Marxist feminism; it must embrace the methodology and theoretical strategy begun in the work of Marx and Engels, and continued in the mainstream of Marxist practice up to the present.
But the challenge runs in the other direction as well. Readers of the articles
in this issue who are not active as feminist scholars or organizers will learn an enormous amount, about ways of thinking, about integrating culture and lifestyle with
political identity and practice, conflicts and problems at the interface between concerns of women as such and those of the gay and lesbian community, class divisions
among women, and much more. The special issue collective has, in effect, gone out
on a limb: they have said to the feminist movement, older and younger generations
alike: "You need Marxism, especially the Marxist understanding of class as structural and relational and constitutive and historical, if you are going to move
forward." I can hear the feminists' reply: "OK. But tell us also what the Marxists
are doing. Not just what they are saying about the oppression and liberation of
women, but also what they are learning from us."
It is a classic case of assumption of responsibility. Just as Lenin urged the
communists of the dominant nation to lead in the demand for full national self-determination, and those of the dominated nations to lead in the demand for
international class unity — each initiative complementing and enabling the other
— so the message here is for non-feminist Marxists (this means anyone — I
include myself in this category — who champions all struggles against inequality,
exclusion, oppression and objectification of women, but who has not been in the
feminist movement or discourse as such) to take the initiative in claiming the
contributions of feminist thought and experience for our overall project — not just
to see "women's issues" as one application of Marxism, but to search for ways in
which feminist perspectives enrich, even transform, Marxist understanding and
practice in general.
Our deepest thanks to the Guest Editors, Martha Gimenez and Lise Vogel, for
bringing this collection together, and for standing so firmly at the small but fertile
intersection of Marxism and feminism, looking always, both critically and lovingly,
in both directions.
D. L.
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INTRODUCTION
We are proud to present to readers of Science & Society this special issue on Marxist–feminist thought. We undertook this project because we want to stress the
continuing theoretical and political relevance of Marx's work for understanding the
capitalist processes that affect the fate of working people the world over and, most
importantly, the fate of women who comprise the majority of the world's working
class. It has become fashionable in some circles to dismiss Marx and his work as
irremediably flawed and useless to understand the complexities of "globalization"
and "postmodernity." Academics, students, the media, and even many on the left
denote a postmodern sensibility when, uncritically accepting stereotypes of Marx
and his work as deterministic, class reductionist, crass materialist, etc., they focus
only on localized struggles and view identity politics as the sole road to political
mobilization and social change. By contrast, we think, as the articles in this issue
demonstrate, that it is impossible adequately to theorize exploitation and oppression, including the exploitation and oppression of women, outside the framework
of Marxist theory. This standpoint does not assume any one hegemonic understanding of Marx's work, but rather posits an openness to its theoretical and methodological insights as crucially important to understand the manifold ways in
which capitalism oppresses people on the basis of gender and sexual preference.
Specifically, this means that, while the contributors to this issue approach Marx's
work from different angles and from within different intellectual traditions, they
nevertheless share the goal of demonstrating its continuing relevance for feminism
and for women's (and men's) political struggles.
Modern Marxist feminism launched itself in the late 1960s . From the start,
one of its core theoretical questions was that of how best to analyze women's oppression under capitalism. In her contribution to this special issue, Martha
Gimenez discusses her own approach to this question. She begins with a strong
critique of what feminism, for the most part, has made of Marx's work. Taking it
to be laden with failures (e.g., economic determinism, class reductionism) and
lacunae (e.g., childbirth, sex), early second-wave feminism produced at best a dual
systems approach in which an ahistorical theory of patriarchy explains male
domination while Marxist theory is useful only to explain capitalism. More
recently, postmodernist feminist theory has dismissed Marx's work entirely,
turning instead to a kind of discourse determinism that paralyzes social analysis
and political action. Meanwhile, Marxist scholars, concentrating on political
economy, the state, and so forth, see themselves as having little to say about
women's oppression; paradoxically, they thereby capitulate to the weaknesses of
ahistorical dual systems theorizing. For Gimenez, by contrast, the path forward is
through an intensive understanding of Marx's methodology. While Marx did not
specifically analyze women's oppression, his work provides powerful tools that
offer ways to get to the deep structure underlying the observable phenomena of
women's oppression. Such visible effects as wage differentials, gender stereotypes,
and impoverished single-parent families have their foundation in structural conditions and macro-processes whose workings Marx's methodology can distill and
elucidate. The bulk of Gimenez' article is devoted to accomplishing that task of
distillation and elucidation. Arguing that "the relationships between men and
women . . . are mediated by their differential access to the conditions necessary for
their physical and social reproduction," she shows how the capitalist mode of production is key to explaining gender inequality in its various class-specific forms. In
particular, the biological, physical and social reproduction of the propertyless finds
its conditions of possibility set by the fluctuations and variations in capitalist accumulation processes. Gimenez concludes with a discussion of the consequences of
her analysis for thinking about feminist struggles.
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