MARXIST PERSPECTIVE ON GENDER AND CLASS, INCLUDING CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS BY CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIALIST FEMINISTS.

 

Marxist theory are works in the philosophy which are strongly influenced by Karl Marx materialistic approach to theory. There are endless interpretations of Marx philosophy Namely the interior of the Marxist movement and exterior of the Marxist movement, also some have separated his works as “young Marx” and “mature Marx” or divided his work into economics works, philosophical work, political works and historical interventions.

Étienne Balibar (1993) has pointed out that Marx's works can be divided into "economic works" (Das Kapital, 1867), "philosophical works" and "historical works".

All the classical Marxist feminist works within the theories and concepts given by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other nineteenth-century thinkers. They give more importance or value to classism than sexism as a cause of violation in women. According to them all the reason for injustice, violation, inequality is classism.

There are numbers of Marxist theories like The Marxist Theory of Economics, The Marxist Theory of Society, The Marxist Theory of Politics, The Marxist Theory of Family Relations,

Liberals believe that there several characters which distinguish humans from other animals, like a set of abilities, such as the capacity for rationality and the use of language; a set of practices, such as religion, art, and science; and a set of attitude and behavior patterns, such as competitiveness and the tendency to put oneself over others.

but Marxist reject this concept of human nature, and they believe that our ability to produce is what makes us different from animals. We do fishing, farming, building etc… to meet our basic need is what makes us different then animals, because animals’ life is governed by their instincts but we create our self in the process of making and living the life as we want on the basis of our thinking, believes and other abilities.

For the Marxist, material forces the production and reproduction of social life are the prime movers in history.

Marx stated, “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

Adding to Marx’s point, Richard Schmitt later emphasized that the statement “Human beings create themselves” is not to be read as “Men and women, as individuals, make themselves what they are,” but instead as “Men and women, through production collectively, create a society that, in turn, shapes them.”

In the theory of society by Marxist, Marxist analysis of class has provided a conceptual tool to understand women’s oppression to both Marxist and social feminist groups. Marx observed that every political economy, primitive communal state, the slave epoch, the pre capitalist society, and the bourgeois society contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Therefore, according to Marx, in capitalism there are enough internal problems and contradictions to generate class divisions which are enough to have large impact on the very system that produce it. There exist many poor and property less works who lives their life normal and modestly and their livelihood is mostly dependent on their wages which they received after intense hard work in the working hour. On the other hand, their employers enjoy very luxurious life based on the worker’s hard work. Marx said that when these two classes of people become conscious of themselves as classes, then class struggles are bound to happens and removes the system that produced these classes. It is important to emphasize the dynamic nature of class. Classes do not simply appear. They are slowly formed by the people facing struggle, who as same needs and wants over the period of time.

According to Marx people who belongs to any division of class have no unity but through a long and complex process of struggling together about issues of local and later national interest to them, a group of people gradually becomes a unity, a true class. Because class unity is difficult to achieve, its importance cannot be overstated, said Marx. As soon as a group of people is fully conscious of itself as a class, it has a better chance of achieving its fundamental goals. There is power in group awareness.

Class consciousness is, in the Marxist framework, the opposite of false consciousness, a state of mind that impedes the creation and maintenance of true class unity. False consciousness causes exploited people to believe they are as free to act and speak as their exploiters are.

Because Marxist and socialist feminists wish to view women as a collectivity, Marxist teachings on class and class consciousness play a large role in Marxist and socialist feminist thought.

Much debate within the Marxist and socialist feminist community has centered on the following question: Do women per se constitute a class? Given that some women are wives, daughters, friends, and lovers of bourgeois men, whereas other women are the wives, daughters, friends, and lovers of proletarian men, it would appear women do not constitute a single class in the strict Marxist sense.

By keeping the Marxist class and class consciousness in mind there is an concept called alienation which plays a very important role in both Marxist and social feminist theory. Allen wood suggested “if we either experience our lives as meaningless or ourselves as worthless, or else are capable of sustaining a sense of meaning and self-worth only with the help of illusions about ourselves or our condition.”

As a result of invidious class distinctions, as well as the highly specialized and highly segmented nature of the work process, human existence loses its unity and wholeness in four basic ways. First, workers are alienated from the product of their labor.

Second, workers are alienated from themselves because when work is experienced as something unpleasant to be gotten through as quickly as possible, it is deadening.

Third, workers are alienated from other human beings because the structure of the capitalist economy encourages and even forces workers to see each other as competitors for jobs and promotions.

Fourth, workers are alienated from nature because the kind of work they do and the conditions under which they do it make them see nature as an obstacle to their survival.

The Marxist feminists who decided that women’s sex class as well as economic class plays a role in women’s oppression began to refer to themselves as socialist feminists or materialist feminists.

One of the initial goals of this evolving group of feminist theorists was to develop a theory powerful enough to explain the complex ways in which capitalism and patriarchy allied to oppress women. The result of this effort was, as might be predicted, not a unitary theory, but a variety of theories that sorted themselves into two types:

1. two-system explanations of women’s oppression and

2. interactive-system explanations of women’s oppression.

the relevance of contemporary socialist feminism’s overall message for women cannot be overstated. Worldwide, women’s oppression is strongly related to the fact that women’s work, be it at home or outside the home, is still unpaid, underpaid, or dis valued, a state of affairs that largely explains women’s lower status and power nearly everywhere.

As understandable as it was for many feminists to look under materialist surfaces to find deeper cultural explanations for women’s oppression, it was probably a mistake for them to reject materialist explanations outright.

However exciting it may be for contemporary socialist feminists to probe women’s psyche from time to time, the fundamental goal of these feminists needs to remain constant: to encourage women everywhere to unite in whatever ways they can to oppose structures of oppression, inequality, and injustice.