There's the materialist feminist current of which Christine Delphy's probably the most prominent member (which applies Marxist concepts like mode of production to domestic labour and patriarchy). e.g. this.
Then there's Donna Haraway's 'cyborg feminism' which is kinda a feminist engagement with the potentials of science and technology. e.g. this.
There's the materialist feminist current of which Christine Delphy's probably the most prominent member (which applies Marxist concepts like mode of production to domestic labour and patriarchy). e.g. this.
I've read most works by Delphy that are available online and was actually impressed by her work in lots of ways. What I'm looking for is something else though. Delphy in my opinion has a narrow definition of the proletariat and does not consider domestic laborers are proletarians but something else, subject to a different relation that capitalism.
What I'm looking for are theorists who do consider the exploitation of domestic labor an essential part of capitalism but who aren't Leninists or autonomists.
Within marxist feminism we encounter several sets of binary terms to analyse gendered forms of domination under capitalism. These include: productive and reproductive, paid and unpaid, public and private, sex and gender. When considering the gender question, we found these categories imprecise, theoretically deficient and sometimes even misleading. This article is an attempt to propose categories which will give us a better grasp of the transformation of the gender relation since the 70s and, more importantly, since the recent crisis.
I thought it resolved a lot of the ambiguities and issues with some of the autonomist stuff.
Thanks for that. I read that quickly and decided to come back to it again later when I'm more well-read in the debate as this was a pretty loaded article. Another text I'll come back to is Gilles Dauve's critique of Federici: http://www.troploin.fr/node/85
I've had agreements and disagreements with both texts so far.
I thought it resolved a lot of the ambiguities and issues with some of the autonomist stuff.
Perhaps. Unfortunately, the text also regurgitates that pseudo-ultraleftist blunder about "use-value" being historically specific to capitalism. (And even calls the opposite view – i.e., the reasonable one, also evidently held by Marx himself – a "foreshortened critique of capital".) On this distorted basis, the text tries to map the pair sex – gender onto the pair use-value – value. I think Lise Vogel's book, even though it's not without problems, provides a much better grounding in the basic categories (while also avoiding the "autonomist" nonsense about all labor being productive of value and surplus-value etc.).
Is that 'use value is specifically capitalist' thing in that text? I remember that in Endnotes, didn't realise it was in that piece. Will have to re-read, and will check out Vogel.
I quite liked Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women.
Thanks for the response! A number of people with leftcom politics have specifically mentioned and recommended this and it's one of the books I'm currently reading actually. While she does have some criticisms of Lenin, the feeling I got from the book was that she was at least a Leninist, and Stalin isn't mentioned once. She claims "Existing socialist societies have made important advances in the area of women’s equal participation in public production and political life". I have a feeling that she is politically somewhat close to the CPUSA, and apparently she called for an Obama vote in 2008. None of this, of course, means that the analyses in her book should be ignored of course.
Well, I don't know anything about her politics. FWIW, the passage you mention also includes the claim that in those societies "the oppressive division of labour within the family-household remains largely untouched" – so at least in this respect she's critical of them. Of course, calling them "socialist societies" is obviously a misnomer. She mentions Cuba, China and Albania as examples and cites some maoisty-looking literature – perhaps she had some affiliation to some form of Maoism, I don't know.
What I liked about the analysis, apart from her critiques of other approaches (which are spot on, especially when she traces the "dual-systems" view back to Engels, Bebel and Aveling) was that it's firmly situated in the framework of (total) social reproduction and links women's role in capitalism directly to child-bearing and -rearing. I think that ultimately, the oppression of (working class) women in capitalism has to be traced to the fact that women (and, at least as of yet, only women) can give birth, and the relationship central to (working class) women's position to capital (other than being wage workers – if they are that) needs to be viewed as a historically specific social form of this transhistorical biological fact (the use-value of a woman's body, so to speak). In other words, a materialist analysis of women's role in capitalism can't dispose of that biological fact and pretend like it's just a social construct. This is an unpopular position, but I think it's the only way forward if the "production of material life" is to be analyzed as a unity of its material and social aspects.
Anyway, I think there are some other problems in the book:
1. some terminological slips (she states that "strictly speaking", a portion of the value created by the worker replaces used-up constant capital – this is incorrect, that value is not newly created by merely transferred; elsewhere, she writes that domestic labor, unlike necessary labor, "does not have value" – but no labor "has value").
2. more importantly, her explanation of what goes on "beyond domestic labor" is left underdeveloped. Clearly, women – and not just working class women – are oppressed in many other contexts than just the household and the workplace (or the labor market), but her explanations of this are tentative at best and there is little indication of how to proceed in this area (can all this be linked to the role of working class women in social reproduction, i.e., their child-bearing and -rearing capacities, or should it be analyzed independently in terms of ideology or residues of pre-capitalist modes of production? etc.)
3. that second point is, I think, due to Vogel's abstract Althusserianism, which makes the book more of a "methodological" treatise or a "Prolegomena" to a full blown analysis which would involve a great deal of historical detail.
have read it ages ago when my understanding of marxist theory wasn't that sophisticated: Der Wert ist der Mann ("The Value is the Man") by Roswitha Scholz (Robert Kurz's widow), don't know if the text is available in English
Another text I'll come back to is Gilles Dauve's critique of Federici: http://www.troploin.fr/node/85
Thanks for the link. I was surprised to find how terrible that text is. Dauvé first completely omits the fact that the central tenet of any Marxian analysis of modes of production is the relationship of the immediate producer to the means of production, and criticizes Federici for emphasizing "disposession" (and some aspects of it that were undertheorized by Marx). But it was this very dispossession that enabled capitalist production and with it the "lowering [of] the cost of labour... by manufacturing the same articles cheaper", which Dauvé sees as the real reason behind Britain's overtaking of India's cottons industry. Later, he affirms that the separation from the means of production is crucial, but fails to realize the consequences of this for the first argument
He then dismisses Federici as a reformist because she acknowledges the influence of Selma James, a supposed reformist. (Whether any of them is a reformist is irrelevant; they both may well be, but the thing is that the entire argument by association is invalid.) Finally, he ascribes to Federici some claims (e.g. that "human evolution is first and foremost a question of power") -- without much textual evidence -- that he then bravely goes on to criticize.
Criticize Federici by all means (the actual historical evidence produced in Caliban and the Witch is sketchy, the idea that non-capitalist development could have been possible in Europe on the basis of anti-feudal uprisings and their proto-communist ideas is questionable, the fliriting with the notion of domestic labor as labor productive of value or surplus-value is misguided, the idea that housewives lower the value of labor power is wrong, the strategy of commons may well lead to reformism, the thesis that the nuclear family household is a necessary condition for the reproduction of labor power is unwarranted, the talk of a serious crisis in reproduction unfolding today is overblown), but at least get the textual facts right and do it without the sectarian posturing of a bitter pensioner who gets less limelight than Negri.
BTW, Dauvé argues for re-examining "Capital's first chapter". He could definitely use having another look at it because it appears he does not understand it very well. In the linked article, he says "...use value is an analytic category both opposed to and encompassed by exchange value: it is impossible to do away with one without doing away with the other". This amounts to a complete undoing of Marx's theory of value (of course, this is the same blunder as in that Endnotes article). But who cares for theories when you can have sloganeering of being "against work".
Well, I don't know anything about her politics. FWIW, the passage you mention also includes the claim that in those societies "the oppressive division of labour within the family-household remains largely untouched" – so at least in this respect she's critical of them. Of course, calling them "socialist societies" is obviously a misnomer. She mentions Cuba, China and Albania as examples and cites some maoisty-looking literature – perhaps she had some affiliation to some form of Maoism, I don't know.
I would imagine it would be standard for a Tankie academic to be neutral on the conflicts between these states, whereas I'd expect a Maoist not to consider many of those societies to be socialists at all. Who knows though?
In other words, a materialist analysis of women's role in capitalism can't dispose of that biological fact and pretend like it's just a social construct. This is an unpopular position, but I think it's the only way forward if the "production of material life" is to be analyzed as a unity of its material and social aspects.
I'd be interested in your thoughts on this work then: https://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/firestone-shulamith-dialectic-sex-case-feminist-revolution.pdf
the notion of domestic labor as labor productive of value or surplus-value is misguided
This is my only major disagreement with your last post.
the strategy of commons may well lead to reformism
And this was my only major agreement with Dauve's review of Federici.
Some of the economic stuff I simply am not clear on yet, of course.
have read it ages ago when my understanding of marxist theory wasn't that sophisticated: Der Wert ist der Mann ("The Value is the Man") by Roswitha Scholz (Robert Kurz's widow), don't know if the text is available in English
I'd be interested in your thoughts on this work then: https://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/firestone-shulamith-dialectic-sex-case-feminist-revolution.pdf
I haven't read it, only heard of it and read accounts of it. But IIRC, Firestone's a radical feminist who basically locates the problem directly at the biological level (even arguing for stuff like pregnancy outside of the womb as a means of liberation) which is then necessarily expressed at the level of social forms. My view is that the problem originates at the level of social forms (but whose content is the biology, and the latter exists objectively, is not simply socially constructed, is the precondition of all gender relations and exists independently of these relations – on this, I guess I really am closer to Firestone than to third-wave feminism which dissolves everything in performativity and discourse). In other words, for Firestone (as I recall) the problem comes before class society and class (hence her call for a revision of historical materialism based on the category of sex instead of class or social labor), whereas I'd say that gender relations are the form in which societies organize biological reproduction. Hence these relations can't be viewed as a simple consequence of biology. So I think we can have "standard" biological reproduction (as seen on the Discovery Channel) and pregnancy in the womb without having gender oppression.
Leo
This is my only major disagreement with your last post.
OK. I think Vogel's book does a good job of explaining my position, so I won't go into that now.
Leo
And this was my only major agreement with Dauve's review of Federici.
I agree with this, too. But the whole commons thing, although it is present to some extent already in Caliban, is much more prominent in her later writings and in any case has little to do with her basic analysis of domestic labor which is from the 1970s. I also think that Federici's views are from being the worst of the whole "commons" academic industry.
But the whole commons thing, although it is present to some extent already in Caliban, is much more prominent in her later writings and in any case has little to do with her basic analysis of domestic labor which is from the 1970s.
Yeah, that's true.
I haven't read it, only heard of it and read accounts of it. But IIRC, Firestone's a radical feminist who basically locates the problem directly at the biological level (even arguing for stuff like pregnancy outside of the womb as a means of liberation) which is then necessarily expressed at the level of social forms. My view is that the problem originates at the level of social forms (but whose content is the biology, and the latter exists objectively, is not simply socially constructed, is the precondition of all gender relations and exists independently of these relations – on this, I guess I really am closer to Firestone than to third-wave feminism which dissolves everything in performativity and discourse). In other words, for Firestone (as I recall) the problem comes before class society and class (hence her call for a revision of historical materialism based on the category of sex instead of class or social labor), whereas I'd say that gender relations are the form in which societies organize biological reproduction. Hence these relations can't be viewed as a simple consequence of biology. So I think we can have "standard" biological reproduction (as seen on the Discovery Channel) and pregnancy in the womb without having gender oppression.
Well, here's a quote from Firestone herself which summerizes her views:
"And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of either. However one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken... Marx was on to something more profound than he knew when he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the society and the state. For unless revolution uproots the basic social organisation, the biological family - the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled - the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated. We shall need a sexual revolution much larger than - inclusive of - a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems."
Firestone's main point was that the sex distinction itself as it is in nature was something which we need to go beyond by eliminating the role of one sex as solely responsible for child-bearing. But I think Firestone would agree with the third-wave feminists that gender is something socially constructed which would, otherwise be, "unhindered pansexuality". Interstingly enough, similar thouhts were echoed by Italian left communist Mario Mieli in his Homosexuality & Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique. What academic third-wave feminism did was to take the most radical conclusions of people like Shulamith Firestone, Mario Mieli and Gayle Rubin, and replace Marx's metholodical framework these people used with Derrida's.
This being said, I agree with you completely when you say "gender relations are the form in which societies organize biological reproduction. Hence these relations can't be viewed as a simple consequence of biology". Hence, I think Firestone was quite wrong in dismissing the importance of primitive communism.
OK. I think Vogel's book does a good job of explaining my position, so I won't go into that now.
I can write up my criticisms when I finish Vogel.
I agree with this, too. But the whole commons thing, although it is present to some extent already in Caliban, is much more prominent in her later writings and in any case has little to do with her basic analysis of domestic labor which is from the 1970s.
But I think Firestone would agree with the third-wave feminists that gender is something socially constructed which would, otherwise be, "unhindered pansexuality".
There's no question that gender is socially constructed – this has been fundamental ever since the sex-gender distinction was made, and I agree with this as well (hence why I called gender a "social form"). But third-wave feminism goes beyond this in saying that sex is socially constructed as well and has no objective existence outside of discourse and/or performance. And this is what I disagree with. I think that just as atoms exist independently of physical theory, so do penises, chromosomes and hormones exist independently of our thinking (both everyday and scientific) about the significance of having a vagina etc. (as well as independent of our acting on that significance). Gender relations are only possible because there's this objective basis – if as human animals we didn't have these organs, there would be no material substrate to "inscribe" gender onto. Of course all this is Materialism 101, but ever since the postmodernist counterrevolution it has been out of fashion (well I don't really follow academic feminism so perhaps it's back in fashion again). The problem is that the opposite view (i.e., that everything, including sex is socially constructed) posits the entire problem in the realm of discourse and thus makes a theory of gender relations as a component of social reproduction (which is also material and can't be reduced to acts of discourse) impossible. I mean I'm sure there are people in a Comparative Literature program somewhere who'd tell you that giving birth is first and foremost a symbolic act (just as there are marxists who will tell you that use values don't really exist independently of value).
Leo
I can write up my criticisms when I finish Vogel.
That would be super useful, there's surprisingly little written about it.
There's no question that gender is socially constructed – this has been fundamental ever since the sex-gender distinction was made, and I agree with this as well (hence why I called gender a "social form"). But third-wave feminism goes beyond this in saying that sex is socially constructed as well and has no objective existence outside of discourse and/or performance. And this is what I disagree with. I think that just as atoms exist independently of physical theory, so do penises, chromosomes and hormones exist independently of our thinking (both everyday and scientific) about the significance of having a vagina etc. (as well as independent of our acting on that significance). Gender relations are only possible because there's this objective basis – if as human animals we didn't have these organs, there would be no material substrate to "inscribe" gender onto. Of course all this is Materialism 101, but ever since the postmodernist counterrevolution it has been out of fashion (well I don't really follow academic feminism so perhaps it's back in fashion again).
I'm not really into academic feminism (or the academia in general, in fact) either to be honest but I didn't think that the point made by third-wave feminism, at least people like Judith Butler is that biological sexes themselves, that is the fact that individuals are born as biological males, females or intersex is a social construct though these terms themselves, as is all language, undoubtedly are. However biology doesn't determine the whole life of an individual and with the help of science humans can actually change their birth-sex, not just socially but biologically. So basically as far as I understand, what third wave feminists like Butler, who, as I said before are following earlier radicals are saying that gender, as you said "can't be viewed as a simple consequence of biology". As far as I know Butler uses the term gender performativity, not sex performativity, and is in general more worried about abolishing the former.
Fwiw I don't think third wave types necessarily dismiss the materiality of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sex characteristics etc. The more defensible argument (e.g. Anne Fausto-Sterling, who Judith Butler has cited in her more recent stuff) is that the biological category of sex is created through the lens of gender.
Hence e.g. the decision to label testosterone (present and active in all humans) as a 'sex hormone' reflects gender norms and has its own specific history (iirc, it was due to be debated and the advocates of 'sex hormones' won by default when their opponents couldn't attend the conference), but subsequently becomes 'proof' of sex. Chromosomes, hormones, primary/secondary sex characteristics etc often cluster, but the decision to group these various discrete/continuous variables all under a single category (and even impose 'treatment' on otherwise healthy people who don't fit the schema) is an example of gender 'creating' (the binary categories of) biological sex.
This position has scientific credibility imho, e.g. Nature. Fwiw I still think the post-structuralist stuff tends to collapse the distinction between discourse/categories and the reality they describe and organise.
It's been a long time since I had to read Gender Trouble, but what I remember specifically is that Butler is dismissive of the sex-gender distinction itself.
There's a useful explanation here. The point of the sex-gender distinction was to demarcate the biological from the social (i.e., the natural characteristics of human bodies from the social roles and expectations imposed on them). In other words, that distinction was intended to attack biological determinism which argues, e.g., that women's roles as carers are a biological given.
Butler goes further in that she argues that there are no properties (biological or otherwise) which would make women women (if that makes sense). The distinction between sex and gender loses significance, and gender dimorphism (the "fact", which Butler denies is a fact, that there are men and women as distinct biological categories - and I'm not saying that they are the only categories or that there can't be borderline cases, but the peculiar circumstance that the biological reproduction of our societies seems to be working just fine attests to the fact that vaginas and penises have intercourse which seems to result in female pregnancy a lot of the time, followed by birth) is simply a socially constructed scheme.
Specifically (from the Stanford article):
In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For her, both are socially constructed: "If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all." (Butler 1999, 10–11)
And this:
For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). ... Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed: they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1).[6] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts). In effect, the doctor's utterance makes infants into girls or boys.
FWIW, I am not disputing the fact that the biological category of sex is socially constructed and all kinds of power relations and nasty stuff enter into how scientists and laypeople alike think about sex. Every scientific category, including the physical category of atom, is "socially constructed" simply because science, and language itself, is a social enterprise, like pretty much everything people do. Again, this is (Marxian) materialism 101. What I am against is the idea of denying the independent reality (independent of language and thought) of that which our concepts like sex or atom refer to, and of viewing everything as part of some Platonic symbolic/conceptual world (i.e., idealism).
Edit: I'm not saying that this is what Butler does (I would have to re-read the book which I have no intention of doing as it was a pain to read), but my impression is that that's how she's interpreted by her fans, and it would fit into the achievements of post-structuralist "theory" in other areas.
On the tangent of academic fashions, My understanding is there's a bit of a trend away from 'everything is discourse' theory in academia, with some big names in continental theory (e.g. Bruno Latour) looking at stuff like climate change deniers using his arguments and finding himself saying 'but it's a fact!' (quoted in last paragraph of this).
FWIW, I am not disputing the fact that the biological category of sex is socially constructed and all kinds of power relations and nasty stuff enter into how scientists and laypeople alike think about sex. Every scientific category, including the physical category of atom, is "socially constructed" simply because science, and language itself, is a social enterprise, like pretty much everything people do. Again, this is (Marxian) materialism 101. What I am against is the idea of denying the independent reality (independent of language and thought) of that which our concepts like sex or atom refer to, and of viewing everything as part of some Platonic symbolic/conceptual world (i.e., idealism).
Like I say, she tends to collapse 'how things are classified'/cultural meaning with 'what exists'. After 'Gender Trouble' Butler backed off a bit (or clarified, depending on how charitable you're feeling), not denying the independent reality of hormones, chromosomes etc, but stressing their meaning as 'sex' is socially negotiated. Like you say, once stated plainly and without all the psychoanalysis jargon, this is a fairly standard realist position.
After 'Gender Trouble' Butler backed off a bit (or clarified, depending on how charitable you're feeling), not denying the independent reality of hormones, chromosomes etc, but stressing their meaning as 'sex' is socially negotiated. Like you say, once stated plainly and without all the psychoanalysis jargon, this is a fairly standard realist position.
"If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all
Isn't Butler talking about a possibility here though rather than a fixed opinion though? Maybe I'm being a bit too "charitable" but her own words do not seem to be as certain as the Stanford article portrays her to be.
Butler goes further in that she argues that there are no properties (biological or otherwise) which would make women women (if that makes sense). The distinction between sex and gender loses significance, and gender dimorphism (the "fact", which Butler denies is a fact, that there are men and women as distinct biological categories) is simply a socially constructed scheme.
I think part of the problem with Butler is that in line with the tradition of Derrida, the terminology isn't clearly defined which obscures the work and opens it to interpretations of various sorts. According to wiki, which is better at describing terms than post-modernists tend to be, "Sexual dimorphism is the condition where the two sexes of the same species exhibit different characteristics beyond the differences in their sexual organs themselves." I would say that based on this definition, this dimorphism is indeed socially constructed though an important part of this construction is the social impacts of the genitals in question in relation to biological reproduction.
I don't know if Silvia
I don't know if Silvia Federici is autonomist ( I'm not too knowledgeable on that history), but I think she is pretty damn good.
There's the materialist
There's the materialist feminist current of which Christine Delphy's probably the most prominent member (which applies Marxist concepts like mode of production to domestic labour and patriarchy). e.g. this.
Then there's Donna Haraway's 'cyborg feminism' which is kinda a feminist engagement with the potentials of science and technology. e.g. this.
Thanks a lot for the
Thanks a lot for the responses.
Yeah, Federici is an autonomist.
I've read most works by Delphy that are available online and was actually impressed by her work in lots of ways. What I'm looking for is something else though. Delphy in my opinion has a narrow definition of the proletariat and does not consider domestic laborers are proletarians but something else, subject to a different relation that capitalism.
What I'm looking for are theorists who do consider the exploitation of domestic labor an essential part of capitalism but who aren't Leninists or autonomists.
Did you see the piece in
Did you see the piece in Endnotes 3? The logic of gender.
Endnotes
I thought it resolved a lot of the ambiguities and issues with some of the autonomist stuff.
Thanks for that. I read that
Thanks for that. I read that quickly and decided to come back to it again later when I'm more well-read in the debate as this was a pretty loaded article. Another text I'll come back to is Gilles Dauve's critique of Federici: http://www.troploin.fr/node/85
I've had agreements and disagreements with both texts so far.
I quite liked Lise Vogel's
I quite liked Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women.
Joseph Kay wrote: I thought
Joseph Kay
Perhaps. Unfortunately, the text also regurgitates that pseudo-ultraleftist blunder about "use-value" being historically specific to capitalism. (And even calls the opposite view – i.e., the reasonable one, also evidently held by Marx himself – a "foreshortened critique of capital".) On this distorted basis, the text tries to map the pair sex – gender onto the pair use-value – value. I think Lise Vogel's book, even though it's not without problems, provides a much better grounding in the basic categories (while also avoiding the "autonomist" nonsense about all labor being productive of value and surplus-value etc.).
Is that 'use value is
Is that 'use value is specifically capitalist' thing in that text? I remember that in Endnotes, didn't realise it was in that piece. Will have to re-read, and will check out Vogel.
Quote: I quite liked Lise
Thanks for the response! A number of people with leftcom politics have specifically mentioned and recommended this and it's one of the books I'm currently reading actually. While she does have some criticisms of Lenin, the feeling I got from the book was that she was at least a Leninist, and Stalin isn't mentioned once. She claims "Existing socialist societies have made important advances in the area of women’s equal participation in public production and political life". I have a feeling that she is politically somewhat close to the CPUSA, and apparently she called for an Obama vote in 2008. None of this, of course, means that the analyses in her book should be ignored of course.
Well, I don't know anything
Well, I don't know anything about her politics. FWIW, the passage you mention also includes the claim that in those societies "the oppressive division of labour within the family-household remains largely untouched" – so at least in this respect she's critical of them. Of course, calling them "socialist societies" is obviously a misnomer. She mentions Cuba, China and Albania as examples and cites some maoisty-looking literature – perhaps she had some affiliation to some form of Maoism, I don't know.
What I liked about the analysis, apart from her critiques of other approaches (which are spot on, especially when she traces the "dual-systems" view back to Engels, Bebel and Aveling) was that it's firmly situated in the framework of (total) social reproduction and links women's role in capitalism directly to child-bearing and -rearing. I think that ultimately, the oppression of (working class) women in capitalism has to be traced to the fact that women (and, at least as of yet, only women) can give birth, and the relationship central to (working class) women's position to capital (other than being wage workers – if they are that) needs to be viewed as a historically specific social form of this transhistorical biological fact (the use-value of a woman's body, so to speak). In other words, a materialist analysis of women's role in capitalism can't dispose of that biological fact and pretend like it's just a social construct. This is an unpopular position, but I think it's the only way forward if the "production of material life" is to be analyzed as a unity of its material and social aspects.
Anyway, I think there are some other problems in the book:
1. some terminological slips (she states that "strictly speaking", a portion of the value created by the worker replaces used-up constant capital – this is incorrect, that value is not newly created by merely transferred; elsewhere, she writes that domestic labor, unlike necessary labor, "does not have value" – but no labor "has value").
2. more importantly, her explanation of what goes on "beyond domestic labor" is left underdeveloped. Clearly, women – and not just working class women – are oppressed in many other contexts than just the household and the workplace (or the labor market), but her explanations of this are tentative at best and there is little indication of how to proceed in this area (can all this be linked to the role of working class women in social reproduction, i.e., their child-bearing and -rearing capacities, or should it be analyzed independently in terms of ideology or residues of pre-capitalist modes of production? etc.)
3. that second point is, I think, due to Vogel's abstract Althusserianism, which makes the book more of a "methodological" treatise or a "Prolegomena" to a full blown analysis which would involve a great deal of historical detail.
have read it ages ago when my
have read it ages ago when my understanding of marxist theory wasn't that sophisticated: Der Wert ist der Mann ("The Value is the Man") by Roswitha Scholz (Robert Kurz's widow), don't know if the text is available in English
Leo wrote: Another text I'll
Leo
Thanks for the link. I was surprised to find how terrible that text is. Dauvé first completely omits the fact that the central tenet of any Marxian analysis of modes of production is the relationship of the immediate producer to the means of production, and criticizes Federici for emphasizing "disposession" (and some aspects of it that were undertheorized by Marx). But it was this very dispossession that enabled capitalist production and with it the "lowering [of] the cost of labour... by manufacturing the same articles cheaper", which Dauvé sees as the real reason behind Britain's overtaking of India's cottons industry. Later, he affirms that the separation from the means of production is crucial, but fails to realize the consequences of this for the first argument
He then dismisses Federici as a reformist because she acknowledges the influence of Selma James, a supposed reformist. (Whether any of them is a reformist is irrelevant; they both may well be, but the thing is that the entire argument by association is invalid.) Finally, he ascribes to Federici some claims (e.g. that "human evolution is first and foremost a question of power") -- without much textual evidence -- that he then bravely goes on to criticize.
Criticize Federici by all means (the actual historical evidence produced in Caliban and the Witch is sketchy, the idea that non-capitalist development could have been possible in Europe on the basis of anti-feudal uprisings and their proto-communist ideas is questionable, the fliriting with the notion of domestic labor as labor productive of value or surplus-value is misguided, the idea that housewives lower the value of labor power is wrong, the strategy of commons may well lead to reformism, the thesis that the nuclear family household is a necessary condition for the reproduction of labor power is unwarranted, the talk of a serious crisis in reproduction unfolding today is overblown), but at least get the textual facts right and do it without the sectarian posturing of a bitter pensioner who gets less limelight than Negri.
BTW, Dauvé argues for re-examining "Capital's first chapter". He could definitely use having another look at it because it appears he does not understand it very well. In the linked article, he says "...use value is an analytic category both opposed to and encompassed by exchange value: it is impossible to do away with one without doing away with the other". This amounts to a complete undoing of Marx's theory of value (of course, this is the same blunder as in that Endnotes article). But who cares for theories when you can have sloganeering of being "against work".
Thanks for the very
Thanks for the very informative posts Jura.
I would imagine it would be standard for a Tankie academic to be neutral on the conflicts between these states, whereas I'd expect a Maoist not to consider many of those societies to be socialists at all. Who knows though?
I'd be interested in your thoughts on this work then: https://teoriaevolutiva.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/firestone-shulamith-dialectic-sex-case-feminist-revolution.pdf
This is my only major disagreement with your last post.
And this was my only major agreement with Dauve's review of Federici.
Some of the economic stuff I simply am not clear on yet, of course.
Doesn't seem to be. What are their politics?
Leo wrote: I'd be interested
Leo
I haven't read it, only heard of it and read accounts of it. But IIRC, Firestone's a radical feminist who basically locates the problem directly at the biological level (even arguing for stuff like pregnancy outside of the womb as a means of liberation) which is then necessarily expressed at the level of social forms. My view is that the problem originates at the level of social forms (but whose content is the biology, and the latter exists objectively, is not simply socially constructed, is the precondition of all gender relations and exists independently of these relations – on this, I guess I really am closer to Firestone than to third-wave feminism which dissolves everything in performativity and discourse). In other words, for Firestone (as I recall) the problem comes before class society and class (hence her call for a revision of historical materialism based on the category of sex instead of class or social labor), whereas I'd say that gender relations are the form in which societies organize biological reproduction. Hence these relations can't be viewed as a simple consequence of biology. So I think we can have "standard" biological reproduction (as seen on the Discovery Channel) and pregnancy in the womb without having gender oppression.
Leo
OK. I think Vogel's book does a good job of explaining my position, so I won't go into that now.
Leo
I agree with this, too. But the whole commons thing, although it is present to some extent already in Caliban, is much more prominent in her later writings and in any case has little to do with her basic analysis of domestic labor which is from the 1970s. I also think that Federici's views are from being the worst of the whole "commons" academic industry.
Quote: But the whole commons
Yeah, that's true.
Well, here's a quote from Firestone herself which summerizes her views:
"And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of either. However one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken... Marx was on to something more profound than he knew when he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the society and the state. For unless revolution uproots the basic social organisation, the biological family - the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled - the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated. We shall need a sexual revolution much larger than - inclusive of - a socialist one to truly eradicate all class systems."
Firestone's main point was that the sex distinction itself as it is in nature was something which we need to go beyond by eliminating the role of one sex as solely responsible for child-bearing. But I think Firestone would agree with the third-wave feminists that gender is something socially constructed which would, otherwise be, "unhindered pansexuality". Interstingly enough, similar thouhts were echoed by Italian left communist Mario Mieli in his Homosexuality & Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique. What academic third-wave feminism did was to take the most radical conclusions of people like Shulamith Firestone, Mario Mieli and Gayle Rubin, and replace Marx's metholodical framework these people used with Derrida's.
This being said, I agree with you completely when you say "gender relations are the form in which societies organize biological reproduction. Hence these relations can't be viewed as a simple consequence of biology". Hence, I think Firestone was quite wrong in dismissing the importance of primitive communism.
I can write up my criticisms when I finish Vogel.
Yeah, that's true.
Thanks for the summary. Just
Thanks for the summary. Just one thing:
Leo
There's no question that gender is socially constructed – this has been fundamental ever since the sex-gender distinction was made, and I agree with this as well (hence why I called gender a "social form"). But third-wave feminism goes beyond this in saying that sex is socially constructed as well and has no objective existence outside of discourse and/or performance. And this is what I disagree with. I think that just as atoms exist independently of physical theory, so do penises, chromosomes and hormones exist independently of our thinking (both everyday and scientific) about the significance of having a vagina etc. (as well as independent of our acting on that significance). Gender relations are only possible because there's this objective basis – if as human animals we didn't have these organs, there would be no material substrate to "inscribe" gender onto. Of course all this is Materialism 101, but ever since the postmodernist counterrevolution it has been out of fashion (well I don't really follow academic feminism so perhaps it's back in fashion again). The problem is that the opposite view (i.e., that everything, including sex is socially constructed) posits the entire problem in the realm of discourse and thus makes a theory of gender relations as a component of social reproduction (which is also material and can't be reduced to acts of discourse) impossible. I mean I'm sure there are people in a Comparative Literature program somewhere who'd tell you that giving birth is first and foremost a symbolic act (just as there are marxists who will tell you that use values don't really exist independently of value).
Leo
That would be super useful, there's surprisingly little written about it.
Quote: There's no question
I'm not really into academic feminism (or the academia in general, in fact) either to be honest but I didn't think that the point made by third-wave feminism, at least people like Judith Butler is that biological sexes themselves, that is the fact that individuals are born as biological males, females or intersex is a social construct though these terms themselves, as is all language, undoubtedly are. However biology doesn't determine the whole life of an individual and with the help of science humans can actually change their birth-sex, not just socially but biologically. So basically as far as I understand, what third wave feminists like Butler, who, as I said before are following earlier radicals are saying that gender, as you said "can't be viewed as a simple consequence of biology". As far as I know Butler uses the term gender performativity, not sex performativity, and is in general more worried about abolishing the former.
Edit: crossed with Leo's post
Edit: crossed with Leo's post above
Fwiw I don't think third wave types necessarily dismiss the materiality of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sex characteristics etc. The more defensible argument (e.g. Anne Fausto-Sterling, who Judith Butler has cited in her more recent stuff) is that the biological category of sex is created through the lens of gender.
Hence e.g. the decision to label testosterone (present and active in all humans) as a 'sex hormone' reflects gender norms and has its own specific history (iirc, it was due to be debated and the advocates of 'sex hormones' won by default when their opponents couldn't attend the conference), but subsequently becomes 'proof' of sex. Chromosomes, hormones, primary/secondary sex characteristics etc often cluster, but the decision to group these various discrete/continuous variables all under a single category (and even impose 'treatment' on otherwise healthy people who don't fit the schema) is an example of gender 'creating' (the binary categories of) biological sex.
This position has scientific credibility imho, e.g. Nature. Fwiw I still think the post-structuralist stuff tends to collapse the distinction between discourse/categories and the reality they describe and organise.
It's been a long time since I
It's been a long time since I had to read Gender Trouble, but what I remember specifically is that Butler is dismissive of the sex-gender distinction itself.
There's a useful explanation here. The point of the sex-gender distinction was to demarcate the biological from the social (i.e., the natural characteristics of human bodies from the social roles and expectations imposed on them). In other words, that distinction was intended to attack biological determinism which argues, e.g., that women's roles as carers are a biological given.
Butler goes further in that she argues that there are no properties (biological or otherwise) which would make women women (if that makes sense). The distinction between sex and gender loses significance, and gender dimorphism (the "fact", which Butler denies is a fact, that there are men and women as distinct biological categories - and I'm not saying that they are the only categories or that there can't be borderline cases, but the peculiar circumstance that the biological reproduction of our societies seems to be working just fine attests to the fact that vaginas and penises have intercourse which seems to result in female pregnancy a lot of the time, followed by birth) is simply a socially constructed scheme.
Specifically (from the Stanford article):
And this:
DP
DP
FWIW, I am not disputing the
FWIW, I am not disputing the fact that the biological category of sex is socially constructed and all kinds of power relations and nasty stuff enter into how scientists and laypeople alike think about sex. Every scientific category, including the physical category of atom, is "socially constructed" simply because science, and language itself, is a social enterprise, like pretty much everything people do. Again, this is (Marxian) materialism 101. What I am against is the idea of denying the independent reality (independent of language and thought) of that which our concepts like sex or atom refer to, and of viewing everything as part of some Platonic symbolic/conceptual world (i.e., idealism).
Edit: I'm not saying that this is what Butler does (I would have to re-read the book which I have no intention of doing as it was a pain to read), but my impression is that that's how she's interpreted by her fans, and it would fit into the achievements of post-structuralist "theory" in other areas.
On the tangent of academic
On the tangent of academic fashions, My understanding is there's a bit of a trend away from 'everything is discourse' theory in academia, with some big names in continental theory (e.g. Bruno Latour) looking at stuff like climate change deniers using his arguments and finding himself saying 'but it's a fact!' (quoted in last paragraph of this).
jura wrote: FWIW, I am not
jura
Like I say, she tends to collapse 'how things are classified'/cultural meaning with 'what exists'. After 'Gender Trouble' Butler backed off a bit (or clarified, depending on how charitable you're feeling), not denying the independent reality of hormones, chromosomes etc, but stressing their meaning as 'sex' is socially negotiated. Like you say, once stated plainly and without all the psychoanalysis jargon, this is a fairly standard realist position.
Joseph Kay wrote: After
Joseph Kay
Ah, OK, like I said I don't really follow this.
Quote: "If the immutable
Isn't Butler talking about a possibility here though rather than a fixed opinion though? Maybe I'm being a bit too "charitable" but her own words do not seem to be as certain as the Stanford article portrays her to be.
I think part of the problem with Butler is that in line with the tradition of Derrida, the terminology isn't clearly defined which obscures the work and opens it to interpretations of various sorts. According to wiki, which is better at describing terms than post-modernists tend to be, "Sexual dimorphism is the condition where the two sexes of the same species exhibit different characteristics beyond the differences in their sexual organs themselves." I would say that based on this definition, this dimorphism is indeed socially constructed though an important part of this construction is the social impacts of the genitals in question in relation to biological reproduction.