Link to article and
podcast of presentation: http://podacademy.org/podcasts/marxism-and-the-oppression-of-women/
Transcript
First published in
1983, Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women – toward a unitary
theory is regarded as one of the founding
texts of Marxist Feminism. It has now been relaunched, and Pod
Academy was at the relaunch.
Lisa Vogel was joined on the platform by Dr Tithi Battacharya, Purdue Liberal Arts University,
in US, Dr Sue Ferguson, Laurier Brantford University in Canada
and Kate Davison, Melbourne University
Tithi
Battacharya said she had first read the book in the early 1990s, when
‘Marxism was not common parlance in academia’, and she kept going back to
it for several reasons. Firstly, it was a book that was
explanatory rather than descriptive. To her, Lise Vogel’s book was one of
the clearest explanatory texts to speak of the relationship between
the capitalist system as a whole and the oppression of women.
Secondly,
Battacharya said the word ‘unitary’ had resonance for her – it
countered the growing view at the time that patriarchy was a
system of oppression that was independent of capitalism – the view that
there was capitalism, and then there was racism and sexism etc. Vogel’s
book uses the word ‘unitary’ to reject this notion of autonomous tracks of social
relations, Vogel asserts that capitalism is a unitary system and we
need to explain it. She also suggested that ‘unitary’ was a fantastic
word to use in an age of the celebration of ‘the fragment’, ‘the cult of the
particular’ [see also our podcast on Beyond the Fragments here]. In that age the book brought thinking back to a
unitary way of thinking.
Tithi
Battacharya said that Lise Vogel restored to prominence the role of
the family within the system as a whole. The book explored
why the family is a source of oppression within its role
in capitalism. It theorised the role of the family in
capitalism, at the level of production, rather than simply at the level of
exchange. Vogel, she said, takes some of Marx’s insights in Capital, and builds on them,
exploring the gaps and silences. She looks at what labour power is, how it
is regenerated, and what it means to labour under capitalism.
Thirdly, in Tithi
Battacharya’s view, this thinking is of strategic importance because it
looked outside the workplace. This is particularly important, she said,
now that 40 years of neoliberalism has denuded the labour movement.
She suggests we will see much struggle starting outside the workplace (such as that in Ferguson),
and to misunderstand these struggles as not class struggle would be a strategic
error for this generation of the left.
Next up was Kate
Davison who started by saying she had felt star struck when she realised who
else would be on the panel, ‘But’, she added to laughter, ‘I dealt with
it!’ Quoting Sue Ferguson, she described the ideas put forward by
Lise Vogel as ‘The path not taken’, and said that had they known, in the 1980s,
about Vogel’s work, feminists might have avoided ‘much blood letting’. At
that time, she said, if you had been able to stick with the label ‘socialist
feminist’ and brave the attacks from adherents of identity politics, you
nevertheless often developed distrust of Leninism and by extension of Marxism
altogether. A small group turned towards socialism or anti-capitalist
politics at the end of the 1990s, and undertook a re-evalutation of identity
politics, eventually abandoning it in favour of the uniting power of the
working class or the anti capitalist movement. Kate said that she herself
has dropped the ‘feminist’ from Marxist-Feminist when describing herself.
She went on to say
that the book is being re-published at a time of the re-emergence of struggles
around sexual and gender based violence (eg the Slut
Walks), sexism etc. But many activists and revolutionary
Marxists, she said, have little knowledge or understanding of these debates.
While some of the issues have come up around gay and lesbian issues (eg
the campaign for equal marriage rights), the absence of campaigns around
women’s oppression have meant there has been little opportunity to develop the
ideas in practice or to tie them into a broader analysis of capitalism,
economy and politics. Some activists may have read Lindsey
German’s book Sex, Class and Socialism which
stands the test of time, she said, as a descriptive account of women’s
oppression, but they are less likely to have had the opportunity for
theoretical analysis afforded by Lise Vogel’s book. And many of the
issues in the book, after a long period of hibernation, are now back on the
agenda – privilege theory, identity, women’s only organising, the notion of
‘safe space’, patriarchy theory, as well as the precise nature and origins of
sexist thinking.
If the theoretical
blade on issues of women’s oppression has become dulled to a suprising if not
alarming extent, then Vogel’s book can act as a theoretical primer par
excellence. Had ‘my generation’, she said, read just the first few
chapters, we would have realised that many key questions had been debated and
analysed at length, and we might have started with a deeper understanding, and
avoided the mistakes of liberalism that manifested itself in identity politics
and post modernism.
She identified two
of the most important contributions of the book. Firstly how Vogel points to Lenin’s
anticipation of a unitary approach to women’s oppression, and secondly the way Vogel rejects the
reductionism of intersectionality theory (which, she said, describes but
cannot explain how women’s oppression arises) and instead offers an historical
materialist method which insist on the totality of the system and on class as
the unifying category.
Sue Ferguson then
spoke of the historical and theoretical significance of the book, and said that
Lise had provided the theoretical tools to think through issues that still
need to be worked on, ‘[Lise Vogel] re-oriented the discussion and set us
up for a point of departure, a truly historical materialist explanation of
women’s oppression under capitalism.’
Historically, she
said, when Vogel was working in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was an
impasse in feminist discussion. The debate was framed as, ‘what causes
women’s oppression – is it capitalism or is it patriarchy, and what is the
nature of the interconnection between them?’ But, she said, feminists
floundered because the answers are by default reductionist or dualistic
trans-historical answers – it was the wrong question. A more
historical materialist approach does not search for ’causes’, rather it
looks for the relationship between aspects of the social whole (which is not
finite, but rather historical, ongoing, moving), trying to explore what we all
share in a capitalist world, and to do that, theory is important. Historical
materialists should be connecting theory and history all the time, constantly
moving between the two. That is what the historical materialist method is
all about.
In the book, Vogel
was asking how do women’s oppression and capitalist economic relations relate
to each other – as part of the capitalist social whole. According to
Ferguson, this question was and remains important because capitalism is
spoken of as an equalising system – as a purely economic
system, distinct from the social world. Vogel, she said, explains
the conditions under which women’s oppression is made possible under capitalism,
how it is part and parcel of capitalism. Crucially, capitalism requires
human labour power, but doesn’t produce it. It has no internal mechanism
for producing the very thing on which it is based.
So capitalism is
not an economic system unto itself, it is a social system. Labour power
is produced external to the direct labour/capital relationship in a socially
determined process. Marx talks of slavery,
enclosures and immigration, as well as households. What
Vogel does is focus on the households, as a central and important part of this
– not because households are the sites of men’s appropriation of
women’s labour or capitalist appropriation of women’s labour, but because they
are a crucial, and near universal, mechanism of ensuring the daily and
generational renewal of labour power. They therefore open up to
regulation, the internal practices and processes of the household.
Women, for
biological and historical reasons, said Ferguson, a unique relationship to
household labour – there is considerable autonomy to the form this takes
because of the internal/external aspects of the labour/capital relationship,
and because households are never simply about reproducing labour power for
capital. But it is not limitlessly flexible because households are a
condition of capitalist proecution and capitalism favours privatised and cheap
labour renewal – which is why the state steps in (eg in 19th century to remove
women and children from the workforce because the family was
disintigrating and today it facilitates the reproduction of cheap labour via
migrant domestics to do paid reproductive labour)
Finally Lise Vogel
spoke. She reminded people that the book was first published in 1983 –
but nothing happened. “I put the ideas out there,” she said, “some of which
I was unsure about , I felt I was writing in isolation……It is amazing now to
hear something I waited 30 years for.”
There is always
dominant ideology, she pointed out, those who control communication and space,
control the narrative in their own favour, so, she said, historical
materialists and revolutionaries should always be looking for an
alternative. “There must always be some people who think a different way.”
Vogel was a ‘red
diaper baby’, a child of the left who had been active in the civil rights
movement, women’s liberation and the anti-war movement in the 1960s
and 70s. She described those times as times of ferment, with social
movements around the world raising questions of justice and liberation.
She told how she participated in Marxist study groups (more difficult
then with fewer translations of Marx available), and how they became concerned
to situate what the left called ‘the woman question’ within a
Marxist theoretical framework.
This effort to
conceptualise women’s position within capitalism came to be called ‘the
domestic labour debate’. It came down to a debate between two systems,
capitalism and patriarchy (a term coined around 1970 in Britain).
The analysis (often called intersectionality) in which patriarchy, race,
sexuality and ethnicity ‘intertwined in a matrix of domination’ is
popular, says Vogel, because it seems to include everything in an accessible
and nuanced way But she does not think it is right, rather, she
sees it as a metaphor. She preferred to find ways of analysing
women’s ooppression within the categories of Marxism, the unitary/social
reproductive perspective where the dominant perspectives are labour power and
the reproduction of labour power, what she calls ‘the social reproduction
perspective’.
She was glad that
people now see social reproduction as a fruitful and persuasive starting point
for analysis, but she is not optimitistic about the future. ‘”We are in a new
historical moment”, she said, “when I went down South the enemy was clear-
segregation, now things are very mushy.” Although, she conceded,
scholars and revolutionaries have many more Marxist texts and more knowledge
available,- smart professors, translations – the lack of even an illusion of
being part of a world movement is, she said, very hard and she felt very
pessimistic.
Photo: 'Housework' by Pascal
This is the third in our series of podcasts on Marxism in the 21st
Century, made possible by a grant from the Amiel Melburn Foundation.
Other podcasts in the series:
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