Autonomies

Voices of revolutionary feminism …

If we have little interest in the scholasticism and the baroque arcana of contemporary marxist theoretical debates, the wealth of marxist theory can be neither dismissed nor ignored. And debates around marxist inspired feminism are a case in point.

Without wishing to over simplify, and in the wake of our post on “autonomist feminism“, we wish to share a contrasting marxist analysis of gender that focuses on what may be called the structural dimensions of capitalism, rather than the subject centred or political dimensions of the same, as autonomist feminism does.

The “structural” analyses go under various names, among which may be included different schools of marxist communisation theory and marxist value criticism theory. (We will ignore the question of whether such theories are more properly described as “post-marxist”).

If “autonomist feminism” begins from the concept-reality of “wage labour” to understand the social and political construction of the female sex and gender as subservient subjects, the more structural analyses begin with the commodity form (exchange value). Under capitalism, it is the latter which structures social relations, and therefore the categories of sex and gender are to be understood as consequences of commodity production under patriarchal capitalism.

The production of commodities and their consequent fetishisation in social life marginalises and destroys use values, the usefulness that things, activities, relations possess independently of economic relations. Something is made valuable or is valorised, regardless of how useless it is. And social and economic life is governed by a logic of exchange value production, and not the creation of useful things.

One difficulty however emerges – capitalism’s central contradiction, marxists often contend – in relationship to the commodity that is labour, or labour power. If human working activity is commodified under capitalism, if it is reduced to the abstract value of exchange (a value measured exclusively by the labour time necessary for its production), it retains a necessary use value, namely, all of that which constitutes the usefulness of the labourer in the making of a commodity. And if, in turn, commodities must be produced for the production and upkeep of labour power, the latter’s production is never reducible to commodities. It also requires care; a summarising term for all of the differing human and social relations required for producing a reasonably effective and efficient worker.

The production and reproduction of workers, which is to say the reproduction of capitalist social relations, is a necessarily non-commodifiable activity. (If under contemporary capitalist social relations, a great deal of what was formerly given in care must now be bought, a total commodification of care is impossible, except at an overwhelming cost – which would amount to either complete slavery or mass death. The former would no longer be capitalism and the latter can only be tolerated at a relative scale, in elaborated necropolitics). But as non-commodifiable, it is not literally speaking labour, that is, it produces no value, in the sense of exchange value, producing rather the useful humans required for the production of value.

A residue of non-value haunts the human, the making of useful humans for capital, and because this activity is also social, categories of human beings are entirely or partially relegated to it, categories identified by gender, race, ethnicity, and the like. In other words, patriarchal sex and gender identifications under capital are a consequence of capitalist social relations, and because non-value producing activity – however necessary to the reproduction of capitalist social relations – is not “valued”, then those who engage in it are in turn “produced” as inferior agents within capitalism.

Patriarchal oppression is therefore not the consequence of patriarchal political machinations, or of men, but of the subservience of society to the commodity form. The task of a revolutionary feminism then is not to seek wages for labour that goes unpaid, but rather to undermine and destroy the social relations of capital that force “women” (and other “identities”) to engage in non-socially validated activity, and thus be the object of capitalist patriarchal sexism.

Without deciding between the two tendencies or schools, autonomist feminism and structural marxist feminism, what divides them is the interpretation of “value” (commodity exchange value) as the structuring concept of capitalist social relations and the role of politics in shaping the conditions of commodity production.

Contrary to what is affirmed by their apologists and their differing politics – wages for housework versus the destruction of wage labour and the commodity form – it is not entirely clear whether the two are actually opposed. Wages for housework feminists, for example, never imagined that such wages would destroy capitalism – they served or serve rather to unmask the “naturalisation” of the role of women -, while it is unclear what a complete or total opposition to capitalism would involve. If the “cracks” of capitalism open up spaces of political opposition to capital, it is obvious that what fills the cracks may not necessarily be anti-capitalist; but whether what does is anti-capitalist or not cannot be foretold from the beginning. And it seems blind to ignore that the conditions that make commodity production possible are in fact inherently political – “primitive accumation” is not a thing of the past, but an everyday task of political appropriation.

Two share, two articles from “structural marxist feminism”.