[This article is part of a short series on Marxism and its relevance for left resistance in today’s challenging geopolitical and ecological climate, and for the continuing effort to win a better world beyond immediate crises. A previous ZNetwork article written by Michael Albert, entitled Should Our Resistance Enrich or Transcend Marxism?, was the catalyst for the series, and the subsequent articles used this one as their jumping off point. You can see all articles in the series here.]
In my book, Socialist Feminism, A New Approach (Pluto Press, 2022), I argue that, in the twenty-first century, we need a humanist alternative to capitalism that challenges all forms of domination and transcends the oppressive models of the former USSR and Maoist China, as well as more recent claims to socialism as in Venezuela.
While making a distinction between Marx’s body of ideas and the totalitarian forms of rule that have claimed his name, I argue that his humanist philosophy as a whole advocates revolutionizing human relations, including what Ann Ferguson (2018) calls “affective practices” (p. 184).
Marx critiques capitalism as a system based on alienated labor and hence monetary value production. He does not simply call for the abolition of private property of the means of production and an end to the rule of the market. Marx’s early writings in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 argue that alienated labor is not only about the alienation of the producer from their products but also from the process of labor, from their ability for free and conscious activity, and from other human beings. In those very same essays, Marx relates the issue of alienation to marriage, love, and the man-woman relationship. He argues that “in the relationship with woman, as the prey and the handmaid of communal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself” (Marx & Fromm, 1961, p. 126, emphasis in the original). He further emphasizes that the relationship of man to woman is the measure of how developed or undeveloped a society is, because in this relationship, in relating to another human being, one is relating to one’s own sexuality. One can interpret Marx as saying that when in relating to another human being, one is also relating to one’s own sexual desires, it becomes more difficult to hide feelings and attitudes that one might be able to cover over in other social interactions.
It is true that Marx’s (1976, 1981) Capital does not theorize the relationship between women’s domestic and reproductive labor and capitalist accumulation. As Silvia Federici (2019) has acknowledged however, the phenomenon of working-class housewives did not exist until the 1890s, after Marx’s death (p. 157).[i] However, Marx was very well aware of the fact that capitalism uses the unpaid domestic and reproductive labor of women to reproduce the working class. He also devoted extensive sections of Capital to capitalism’s “pestiferous” exploitation of women, children, and the family (Marx, 1976, pp. 620–1). Marx assumed that from the vantage point of capitalism, women’s unpaid domestic and reproductive labor does not directly contribute to the accumulation of capital because capitalism defines “value” as only labor that is sold in the market and produces surplus value.
I would argue that socialist feminists who specifically wish to theorize an alternative to capitalism that takes into account the transformation of gender relations, still need Marx’s body of work for various reasons:
- Marx’s understanding of the capitalist system does not limit it to a system based on economic inequality. He identifies capitalism as a system based on alienated labor that takes the mental/manual division of labor and the separation of mind and body to the extreme. To him, the degradation and violence that women experience is a clear manifestation of this separation.
- Marx’s affirmative alternative is not limited to reclaiming the commons and collectivizing labor or abolishing labor and simply relying on machines and technology to do the work. While in the draft of Capital known as the Grundrisse, Marx’s’ language in some passages may create some ambiguity about the role of technology, in Capital itself, which is a later work, he clearly states that technology as such is not the key to liberation.[ii] He argues that technology can give us possibilities to spend less time on the work of material production of our basic daily needs. It can also help us spend less time on domestic and reproductive labor and more time on developing ourselves as multidimensional human beings with various natural and acquired talents. However, he emphasizes that technology, under capitalism, also turns human beings into cogs in a machine and denudes their work of all interest. Far from having an uncritical view of technology, Marx advocates the emancipation of human beings from alienated labor and “human self-alienation” in favor of a conscious existence, and a two-way relationship between mind and body as the key to human liberation. That is why in his early writings, he calls his philosophy a “fully developed naturalism” or “humanism” or “the return of man [Mensch] himself as a social, that is, really human being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development” (Marx & Fromm, 1961, p. 127).
- Marx did not advocate an essentialist view of human nature and a human essence based on productivism or what Kathi Weeks (2011) calls “the work society perfected” (p. 30).[iii] When in his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx wrote of “a higher phase of communist society” in which “labour from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life” (Marx, 1966, p. 10) he was referring to the flowering of the human potential for free and conscious activity. As Judith Grant has noted, for Marx, true human essence is about constantly transforming oneself. This is what he, in the Grundrisse, also called “the absolute movement of becoming” (Marx & Engels, 1986, pp. 411–12).
Both Maria Mies and Kathi Weeks advocate a feminist concept of time. Marx too was arguing for a different concept of time involved in overcoming capitalist alienated labor. At issue for him was the idea that under capitalism, the amount of time necessary for the production of a use-value is determined “behind the backs of the producers” (Marx, 1976, p. 135), and is constantly reduced to satisfy capitalism’s incessant drive for the expansion of value. He argued that under capitalism, “socially necessary labor time,” that is, a global social average time for the production of each use-value, dominates the process of production because producers are not allowed to determine the amount of time they need to do their work based on their abilities and their local conditions.
The capitalist concept of time, Marx demonstrated, is a manifestation of the capitalist mode of production. We cannot possibly create a free, conscious, and non-alienated existence when we are made to work faster and faster in order to keep up with capitalism’s demand for a shortening of socially necessary labor time. We cannot do our work thoughtfully and have time for meaningful interpersonal relationships when we are constantly made to push ourselves to the extreme to keep up with capitalist time or what the late social theorist Moishe Postone (1993) called “the treadmill effect” (pp. 289–91).
How is it possible to overcome this capitalist push to speed up labor time? Clearly Marx did not think it could be done only by abolishing the private property of the means of production and by doing away with market mechanisms. It demanded overcoming the alienated mode of labor itself. Does this mean that socialism, as Marx envisioned it, assumes that the contours of the utopian future can be predetermined with a blueprint, and closes the door to an open future, as Kathi Weeks (2011, p. 30) argues?
Peter Hudis’s (2012) Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism sheds light on this question. He argues that when the young Marx wrote that “Communism is the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not itself the goal of human development—the form of human society” (Marx & Fromm, 1961, p. 140),
Marx is here reflecting on the future on two levels: One is the idea of communism—the immediate principle of the future—that has as its task the elimination of private property and alienated labour. The other is a realization of the idea of freedom that is much more open-ended and harder to define or even give a name to, since it involves the return of humanity to itself as a sensuous being exhibiting a totality of manifestations of life. (Hudis, 2012, p. 75)
Marx was cognizant of the fact that even if humans succeed in creating such a life form, we would not have perfectly rational human beings who would stop grappling with the conflicts between passion and reason. We would, however, live under conditions that allow us to deal with those conflicts in a peaceful and creative manner instead of killing and destroying each other.
My aim in discussing the relevance of Marx’s concept of an alternative to capitalism for theorizing a socialist feminist alternative is not to be uncritical of Marx. Clearly, although he was a great visionary, he too had contradictions in his personal life and most importantly saw his philosophical project as a work in progress that needed further development.
Rather, I believe that socialist feminists who are truly serious about theorizing a vision that goes beyond private and state capitalism and all forms of oppression cannot make progress in this direction without grappling further with Marx.
We can have constructive debates as to what it means to overcome alienated labor and the capitalist concept of time, or whether it is really necessary to have what Marx envisioned as a two-phase process, to get to the point where the link between work time and income could be completely severed. However, we cannot simply skip over the issue of alienated labor and its connection to alienated human relations by advocating a return to a rural existence and subsistence farming, or by simply abolishing private property and the market and replacing them with cooperatives or a universal basic income as if these would solve the problem.
References
Federici, Silvia (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Federici, Silvia (2019) Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of Commons. Introduction by Peter Linebaugh. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Ferguson, Ann. (2018) “Socialist-Feminist Transitions and Visions.” Radical Philosophy Review,21(1):177–200. https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev201841687.
Hudis, Peter. (2013) Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism..Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Marx, Karl. (1961) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In Marx’s Concept of Man, by Karl Marx and Erich Fromm. New York: Frederick Ungar.
Marx, Karl. (1966) Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, Karl. (1976) Capital. Volume 1. A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowles. New York: Vintage.
Marx, Karl. (1981) Capital. Volume 3. A Critique of Political Economy. Introduction by Ernest Mandel. Translated by David Fernbach.London: Penguin Classics.
Marx, Karl.(1986) Marx and Engel Collected Works. Volume 28 of 50. New York: International Publishers. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/index.htm (last accessed February 24, 2021).
Marx, Karl, and Erich Fromm. (1961) Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Frederick Ungar.
Mies, Maria. (2014 [1986]) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. Foreword by Silvia Federici. London: Zed Books.
Postone, Moishe. (1993) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weeks, Kathi. (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[i]. In Re-enchanting the World, Silvia Federici (2019) writes:
When Marx was writing Capital, very little housework was performed in the working-class family (as Marx himself recognized) for women were employed side by side with men in the factories from dawn to sunset … . Only in the second part of the nineteenth century after two decades of working-class revolts in which the specter of communism haunted Europe, did the capitalist class begin to invest in the reproduction of labor power. (p. 157)
[ii]. In her Re-enchanting the World, Federici (2019) begins to acknowledge this: “It is also agreed that there are important differences between his two major works, Capital and the Grundrisse” (p. 152).
[iii]. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, we saw the ways in which Marx (1961) contrasted alienated labor to the human potential for free, conscious activity. In Capital, Marx contrasts abstract or alienated or value-producing labor to concrete labor. In the first chapter of Capital, where he discusses what he calls the “dual character of labor under capitalism” (Marx, 1976, p. 131), he writes: “Labor, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (p. 133). Under capitalism, however, labor becomes “simple average labor” (p. 135). It is denuded of its particularity and specificity. Labor under capitalism becomes something mechanical.
Furthermore, for Marx, labor as “an exclusively human characteristic” is not an instinctive but a purposeful process in which an ideal developed in the mind is realized in the labor process. Hence,
what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. (Marx, 1976, p. 284)
But “[t]he less he is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be” (p. 284). In sum
The labor process as we have just presented it is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use values … . It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between humans and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence , or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. (Marx, 1976, p. 290)
In contrast to this labor process, he presents “the valorization process” which is characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. In this process “use-values are produced by capitalists only because and in so far as they form the material substratum of exchange-value, the bearers of exchange-value” (Marx, 1976, p. 293). Labor is considered only in so far as it creates value. One type of labor differs in no respect from another. “We are no longer concerned with the quality, the character and the content of the labor, but merely with its quantity” (p. 296). From the standpoint of the valorization process, the means of production consume the human being as a means for the expansion of value as an end in itself (Marx, 1976, p. 425). “[T]his inversion, indeed this distortion which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production, of the relation between dead labor and living labor … is mirrored in the consciousness of the capitalist” (p. 425). This inversion or what Marx calls the domination of dead over living labor becomes the basis for capitalism’s constant revolutionizing of the technical basis of production.
Thus, capitalism seeks to extract more and more value from less living labor by increasing the productivity of labor. In doing so it takes the mental/manual division of labor characteristic of all class societies to an extreme, and fragments and alienates the human being more and more.
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