Column: Woman as Reason
May 1999
Is Marx's CAPITAL about women's freedom?
by Terry Moon
Last month, Maya Jhansi ended her column by insisting that classes in
Marx's CAPITAL "are important for women and women's liberation because if
we are serious about putting revolution back on the feminist agenda, then a
new confrontation with the fullness of Marx is necessary." Yet much of
feminist theory has, for the most part, reduced Marx's philosophy of
freedom to economics.
Alison M. Jaggar is an example of a feminist theorist who interprets Marx
in a narrow way. Even though her work FEMINIST POLITICS AND HUMAN NATURE
was written 15 years ago, it remains one of the best examples of the
truncated view of Marx that is still being put forth today. Jaggar
critiques Marxists-she makes no distinction between post-Marx Marxists and
Marx-for theorizing that "once women are fully integrated into wage labor,
there is no material basis for the sex specific oppression of women" (p.
223). While post-Marx Marxists and much of the Left did claim that all our
problems would be solved if only we were integrated into the labor force,
this was NOT Marx's idea.
In a much maligned paragraph Marx writes that "modern industry, by
assigning as it does an important part in the process of production outside
the domestic sphere to women, to young persons, and to children of both
sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family
and of the relations between the sexes...." Jaggar, like many others,
interprets this to mean that Marx thinks that "participation of all in
public production" will end "the oppression of any group by another" (p.
225). Jaggar rightly criticizes this idea because she knows that women's
oppression is not only linked to the workplace, but "that to reconstruct
reality from the standpoint of women requires a far more total
transformation of our society and of ourselves..." (p. 389).
But what Jaggar misses is what Marx says in the very next paragraph-that
"in its brutal capitalistic form," women's entry into the labor force can
be nothing other than a "pestiferous source of corruption and slavery."
This makes it obvious that he wasn't saying all women have to do is work.
Rather the entire society must be transformed so that the way we produce
things would be done in a liberating manner.
What would we learn if, rather than thinking that what Marx said about
women and labor was a limitation, we look at what it means for women's
liberation today? Marx's chapter on "The Working Day" could have been
written yesterday, describing, as it does in great detail, the conditions
women and girls are facing right now. It is filled with descriptions that
speak to the women and girls as young as 12 and 14 who have become the
dominant labor force of multinational factories and sweatshops in the U.S.:
"With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labor,
irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves,
pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his
Inferno surpassed in this industry" (p. 356).
Moreover, we need to look at how women's liberation moved from an idea to a
movement. The movement didn't only start with Betty Friedan and
middle-class women. It was as well working-class women-Black and
white-during World War II who went to work in the factories, resisted being
forced out of their jobs at the end of the war, and raised questions that
today's women's movement is still grappling with.
We can see this in an essay by Raya Dunayevskaya, "On Women in the Post-War
World, and the Old Radicals" in WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF
REVOLUTION. Dunayevskaya writes that the women's experiences in the
workplace did transform them to the point where, when they came home, they
wished "to establish new relations there, too...They gained a new dignity
and a new concept of what their relations to their fellowmen and
fellowwomen should be, and they refused to submit to the subordinate role
in which they had been placed in the home before they got their factory
jobs. So where they could not work out the new relations, they took to
breaking up the homes..." (p. 32).
Contrary to Jaggar's interpretation, Marx was not saying that working
outside the home equaled either socialism or the end to women's oppression.
In every subject Marx touched, be it production, anthropology, or history,
he was always looking for how human relations were changed. That was his
focus because he was trying to work out the creation of a new society built
on new human, instead of alienated, relationships.
Marx's studies, unseparated from the history of his time, enabled him to
see the possibility of new human relationships, of "new passions and
forces," that arise to create a new, truly human world. That is why
confrontation with the fullness of Marx can help us make sure that our
revolution is total from the start.
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