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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2006Marx's 1844 Essays: ground for feminist theoryby Anne Jaclard This year is the 35th anniversary of Women's Liberation-News and Letters Committee (WL-N&LC), founded when the "second wave" of feminism swept the U.S. We began in a period of mass liberatory movements: the Black "Freedom Now" movement inspired student rebellions, and both gave birth to the women's liberation movement. Revolution and a new society seemed within grasp. Marx's humanist dimension was also being discussed at that time, after years of so-called Marxism's domination by Stalinist anti-humanism. His early "humanist" essays, the 1844 ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS (first published in English by Raya Dunayevskaya), condemned the degradation of women under capitalism and under what he called "vulgar communism," a form of society that sounded a lot like the Soviet Union. This discussion attracted us young women in WL-N&LC and many other feminists to these essays. Inasmuch as neither we nor other socialist feminists fully worked out their implications, however, I propose we return to them now. OVERCOMING ALIENATED LABOR Fundamental concepts that Marx developed throughout his life appear in 1844, which Dunayevskaya later termed the "philosophic moment" out of which his whole philosophy of revolution was born. We see his concept of alienated labor, his view of the man-woman relationship as the measure of whether a society permits real freedom for anyone, and his theory of the possibility of a double negation of both capital and "vulgar communism" that would result in entirely new human development. From the first paragraph of the essay, "Private Property and Communism," Marx lets us know that the nature of modern society does not turn on whether there exists private property for the few and none for the many. Rather, the inner, active opposition in society is between capital and labor. Marx calls this opposition "the developed movement" of private property, "developed to the point of contradiction and, therefore, is the active form driving toward resolution." The contradiction threatens capitalism, as workers struggle to overcome alienated labor and to become whole human beings. Thus although Marx's concepts here are general, he is clear that the overthrow of the capital relation is key to social revolution. KEY MAN-WOMAN RELATION Then in the third paragraph, Marx begins a discussion of women. He equates the exclusive ownership of women as private property, via marriage, with the communal ownership of women under "vulgar communism," a society that purports to have replaced capitalism but has not established socialism. He calls prostitution the "particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker." And two paragraphs later, Marx identifies the relationship between men and women as the measure of whether a society has achieved any free and human relations: "The direct, natural, necessary relationship of person to person is the relationship of man to woman." The man-woman relationship shows "to what degree people, as a species, have become human and have recognized themselves as such." It exposes the lie of "vulgar communism," which is not the opposite of capitalism, but is likewise focused on property forms. The essay then identifies the real opposite to capitalism: our appropriation (recreation) of ourselves, our own self-development. "Communism, as the positive abolition of private property, which is human self-alienation, and therefore, as the actual appropriation of human essence by people and for people, is the return of people to themselves as social, i.e., human people, complete, conscious and matured within by the entire wealth of development to date....It is the true solution of the strife between people and nature, and between person and person. It is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, between reification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and it knows itself as this solution. "The whole movement of history is, therefore,...the realized and recognized process of [human] development." Thus Marx exposes the outer, surface manifestations of capital-labor and of man-woman relations, both of which appear as property relations. He contrasts those appearances to essential, inner, active relations between human beings. His concept of communism is not mere opposition to capitalism, but rather a second negation, "positive Humanism beginning from itself." The forms of private property and "vulgar communism" are historical, transitory, subject to the transformative activity of live human beings. In 1971, we in WL-N&LC loved these essays, but we did not develop the connections between a society's mode of production and women's liberation. By now, feminist theory has gone in other directions, far from Marxism. What needs much more theorization is how, in 1844, Marx was able to single out woman-man relations as key, while at the same time holding alienated labor to be central. He did not simply view the two as existing side by side, or as contradictory, as so many feminist theorists have done. We need to dig further into not only the 1844 essays, but, as Dunayevskaya urged us, the totality of Marx's work. |
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