Marxist feminism

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Marxist feminism is the analysis of women's exploitation through the historical materialist framework. Marxist feminists uphold that capitalism is the ultimate cause of women's oppression and over-exploitation.

Marxist feminist scholars include Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, and many others.

History

Friedrich Engels' 1884 book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and August Bebel's Woman and Socialism, which was published in 1879 and preceded Engels by five years, were points of reference for many Marxists in the movement's early days.

Post-WWII feminism and Marxism

Starting with the publication of Juliet Mitchell's Women: The Longest Revolution in 1966 and her 1971 book Woman's Estate, feminists took a renewed interest in creating and debating a framework for Marxist feminism. In 1969, Margaret Benston published The Political Economy of Women's Liberation, which broke new ground by reframing the household as a unit for (non-capitalistic) production of use-values. This was followed two years later by Peggy Morton's article A Woman's Work Is Never Done, which clarified some of Benston's arguments. Kate Millett's book Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone's book The Dialectic of Sex, both published in 1970, were not Marxist works, but were influenced by Marxism.

Domestic-labor debate

An important moment for Marxist feminism was Mariarosa Dalla Costa's 1972 article Women and the Subversion of the Community, which made the case that women's unpaid household labor produces not just use-values for household consumption but the commodity labor-power, which their husbands then exchange for wages. Dalla Costa aimed to prove that housework was productive labor, i.e. labor producing surplus-value, and therefore exploited. This article helped inspire the Wages for Housework movement and sharpened a debate known as the domestic-labor debate.

The Marxist feminist Lise Vogel provides an overview of the issues at stake in the domestic-labor debate:

Participants in the domestic-labour debate pointed to difficulties created by Marx’s formulation, and asked a number of questions about the role of domestic labour and household-structure in the establishment of the normal wage-level. For example, it was not clear in Marx’s work whether the normal wage covers individuals or the entire household supported by a worker. In addition, the functioning of the wage as a type of articulation between domestic labour and the capitalist mode of production required investigation. Those who viewed domestic labour as value-producing proposed that the wage is the vehicle by which the value produced by women, and embodied in male wage-workers’ labour-power, is transferred to the capitalist employer. Many also believed that women’s unpaid domestic labour enables the capitalist class to pay less than the value of labour-power, that is, less than the normal level of subsistence. Some suggested that a non-working wife cheapens the value of male labour-power. Those who maintained that domestic labour produces use-value but not value attempted to identify the role of domestic labour in the reproduction of labour-power. Most participants in the debate also explored the possibility that certain tendencies immanent in capitalist development affect the performance of domestic labour and, therefore, wage-levels.

She concludes:

Several years after the domestic-labour debate began, certain questions could be said to be settled. As it turned out, it was relatively easy to demonstrate theoretically that domestic labour in capitalist societies does not take the social form of value-producing labour. Benston’s original insight that domestic labour produces use-values for direct consumption had been essentially correct. In the scientific sense, then, domestic labour cannot be either productive or unproductive, and women are not exploited as domestic labourers. At the same time, domestic labour is indispensable for the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Just what domestic labour is, rather than what it is not, remained a problem only superficially addressed by participants in the domestic-labour debate. Some suggested it constitutes a separate mode of production which is outside the capitalist mode of production but subordinate to it. Others implied domestic labour is simply a special form of work within the capitalist mode of production. Most left the question unanswered. The problem of specifying the character of domestic labour, and issues concerning the wage and women’s wage-work, now represent the central concerns of most theorists working with Marxist economic categories. As for politics and strategy, few today would use their analyses of the material foundation for women’s oppression to draw easy conclusions about the role of women in revolutionary struggle.