Power is dealt with in a dichotomous way by socialist women and radical feminists: it is seen as deriving from either one’s economic class position or one’s sex. The critique of power rooted in the male/female distinction focuses most often on patriarchy. The critique of power rooted in the bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction focuses on capitalism. One either sees the social relations of production or the social relations of reproduction,1 domestic or wage labor, the private or public realms, the family or the economy, ideology or material conditions, the sexual division of labor or capitalist class relations as oppressive. Even though most women are implicated on both sides of these dichotomies, woman is dealt with as though she were not. Such a conceptual picture of woman hampers the understanding of the complexity of her oppression. Dichotomy wins out over reality. I will attempt here to replace this dichotomous thinking with a dialectical approach.2
The synthesis of radical feminism and Marxist analysis is a necessary first step in formulating a cohesive socialist feminist political theory, one that does not merely add together these two theories of power but sees them as interrelated through the sexual division of labor. To define capitalist patriarchy as the source of the problem is at the same time to suggest that socialist feminism is the answer. My discussion uses Marxist class analysis as the thesis, radical feminist patriarchal analysis as the antithesis, and from the two evolves the synthesis of socialist feminism.
Thesis: Woman as Class
1. Marx: Revolutionary Ontology and Women’s Liberation
The importance of Marxist analysis to the study of women’s oppression is twofold. First, it provides a class analysis necessary for the study of power. Second, it provides a method of analysis which is historical and dialectical. Although the dialectic (as method) is most often used by Marxists to study class and class conflict, it can also be used to analyze the patriarchal relations governing women’s existence and hence women’s revolutionary potential. One can do this because Marxist analysis provides the tools for understanding all power relations; there is nothing about the dialectical and historical method that limits it to understanding class relations. I will use Marx’s analysis of class conflict, but I will also extract his method and apply it to some dimensions of power relations to which he was not sensitive. In this sense I am using Marx’s method to expand our present understanding of material relations in capitalism to material relations in capitalist patriarchy.
These relations are illuminated by Marx’s theories of exploitation and alienation. Since there has already been much discussion among socialist women and socialist feminists about the importance of the theory of exploitation to understanding woman’s oppression, I will mention this only briefly.3 I will focus on the importance of Marx’s dialectical revolutionary ontology as it is presented in his theory of alienation. Although his substantive discussion of alienation applies to women workers in the labor force and in qualified ways to nonpaid domestic workers as housewives, I am particularly interested in his method of analysis. By not reducing the analysis to class and class conflict as expressed in the theory of exploitation, the dialectical method present in the theory of alienation can be extended to the particular revolutionary potential of women. Essentially this means that although the theory of alienation is inclusive of exploitation it should not be reduced to it.4
The theory of alienation and its commitment to “species life” in communist society is necessary to understanding the revolutionary capacity of human beings.5 “Species beings” are those beings who ultimately reach their human potential for creative labor, social consciousness, and social living through the struggle against capitalist society, and who fully internalize these capacities in communist society. This basic ontological structure defines one’s existence alongside one’s essence. Reality for Marx is thus more than mere existence. It embodies within it a movement toward human essence. This is not a totally abstract human essence but rather an essence we can understand in historical contexts. “Species being” is the conception of what is possible for people in an unalienated society; it exists only as essence in capitalist society.
Without this conception human beings would be viewed as exploited in capitalist relations, but they would not necessarily be understood as potentially revolutionary. Exploitation, without this concept in the theory of alienation, would leave us with an exploited person. But because of the potential of species life in the individual, the exploited worker is also the potential revolutionary. Without the potential of species life we would have Aristotle’s happy slaves, not Marx’s revolutionary proletariat. And this potential exists in men and women, regardless of their position in the class structure or their relationship to exploitation. The actualizing of this potential, however, is differentiated according to one’s class.
With his theory of alienation, Marx is critically probing the nature of capitalism. By capitalism, Marx and Engels referred to the entire process of commodity production. In examining the exploitation inherent in this process, Marx developed his theory of power. Power or powerlessness derives from a person’s class position; hence oppression is a result of capitalist organization and is based in a lack of power and control. Through productive labor capitalist society exploits the worker who creates surplus value for the bourgeoisie. The surplus labor, which is inherent in profit, is derived from the difference between the actual and necessary labor time of the worker.
Productive labor, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage-labor which, exchanged against the valuable part of capital (the part of the capital that is spent on wages), reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labor-power), but in addition produces surplus-value for the capitalist … only that wage labor is production which produces capital.6
The class structure, which manifests itself in social, political, and cultural forms as well, is economic at its base. Society is divided into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The basis of separation and conflict between the two is the relation each one has to the modes of production; hence the proletariat’s exploitation, in which surplus value is extracted from their productive labor, is their oppression.
This Marxist indictment of capitalist relations is subsumed into a revolutionary ontology of social and human existence. It posits within each individual a dialectic between essence and existence which is manifested as revolutionary consciousness in society. Both the criticism of class existence as alienating and exploitative and the revolutionary ontology of the theory make Marxist analysis critical to developing a feminist theory which incorporates but moves beyond a theory of class consciousness.
When extended to women, this revolutionary ontology suggests that the possibility of freedom exists alongside exploitation and oppression, since woman is potentially more than what she is. Woman is structured by what she is today—and this defines real possibilities for tomorrow; but what she is today does not determine the outer limits of her capacities or potentialities. This is of course true for the alienated worker. While a worker is cut off from his/her creative abilities s/he is still potentially a creative being. This contradiction between existence and essence lies, therefore, at the base of the revolutionary proletariat as well as the revolutionary woman. One’s class position defines consciousness for Marx, but, if we utilize the revolutionary ontological method, it need not be limited to this. If we wish to say that a woman is defined in terms of her sex as well, patriarchal relations define her consciousness and have implications for her revolutionary potential as a result. By locating revolutionary potential as it reflects conflicts between people’s real conditions (existence) and possibilities (essence), we can understand how patriarchal relations inhibit the development of human essence. In this sense, the conception of species life points to the revolutionary potential of men and women.
The social relations defining the potential for woman’s revolutionary consciousness are more complex than Marx understood them to be. Marx never questioned the hierarchical sexual ordering of society. He did not see that this further set of relations made species life unavailable to women, and hence that its actualization could not come about through the dismantling of the class system alone. Nevertheless, his writings on women are important because of his commitment to uncover the tensions between species life and capitalist alienated forms of social experience for both men and women.