WOMEN AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE (original) (raw)

The Woman Question Reflections on Feminism and Marxism

The entwined and conflicted histories of feminism and Marxism could yield new understandings of the problems besetting the women’s movement in 21st century India, particularly issues concerning sex work, and caste. Spanning the socialist feminists of early 19th century Europe, Marx’s own writings on the “woman question,” and the scholarship that emerges from the 1960s and 1970s, this paper suggests that recent post-Marxist work can offer a fruitful site for pushing the boundaries of feminist approaches to capitalist development in India today.

Marxism and the Struggle for Women ’ s Emancipation

2018

The struggle for and the road to women’s emancipation depends on the nature of the State and the specific correlation of class forces in any given society.1 Which are the forces responsible for the unequal status of women, the violence against women, the daily humiliations and creation of multiple barriers in women’s struggles for freedom? Such identification is essential for the development of a strategy to achieve women’s emancipation. Equally important is the need to identify friends, not in a personal sense, but in a class framework, to gather allies towards this aim. For communists in India working among the mass of women, such a fundamental programmatic understanding is required to inform our day to day work. At the same time the international situation with the aggressive hegemonic role of imperialism against national sovereignty and basic democratic rights of peoples across the world has a deep impact on country-based struggles for equality and justice. Imperialist-driven gl...

Theorizing women's oppression - Part 1 | International Socialist Review

This is part one of a two-part series, "Theorizing women's oppression," which includes excerpts from Sharon Smith's forthcoming book, Marxism, Feminism, and Women's Liberation, to be published later this year by Haymarket Books. The first article focuses on the role of women's domestic labor as fundamental to their oppression far beyond family relations under capitalism. The second article, "Black feminism and the interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender," will appear in a future issue of the ISR.

Feminism and Marxism: Questions on the Field of Struggle

ΚΡΙΣΗ / KRISI, 2023

Opening with a discussion of the relationship and tension between Marxism and feminism, the article argues for the specificity of Marxist feminist analysis in relation to other currents of feminism on the left. Drawing on Susan Watkins, the article contends that capitalist strategy has contributed to shaping the intellectual trajectory of feminism as known today. This trajectory developed under a complex hegemony that entailed, among other things, the Cold War and the end of Bretton Woods in relation to postmodernism and cultural imperialism, ideological uses of the 'middle class' , and technologies that increasingly challenge the clear distinction between production and reproduction. The analysis is specifically concerned with (a) how histories of reactionary but also progressive ideas formed under this hegemony (b) the pull of/ to immateriality in a perceived 'post-industrial' society, and the relevance of both to feminism. The article revisits the debate of Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser from 1997 as encapsulating the roots of a divide within left feminism-one related to understandings of intersectionality, a popular concept also in Marxist feminism. Intersectionality brings together salient political categories (such as gender, race, class), the question for Marxist feminism being: how? It is argued that intersectionality, coined at a specific moment of American cultural history and in relation to postmodernism's spatialising imaginary, is not always and necessarily compatible with Marxist feminism's focus on a social totality forming out of a mode of production and reproduction. To demonstrate this, the article concludes by considering Ashley Bohrer's influential interpretation of intersectionality. Overall, the article argues for a Marxist feminism that attends closely to the key tendencies, possibilities and contradictions of 21st-century capitalism and what hegemony consists of-as a first step towards re/thinking the priorities and specificity of struggle. Reference: Κρίση 13-2023/1, 9-44 Journal: ΚΡΙΣΗ - Εξαμηνιαία Επιστημονική Επιθεώρηση / KRISI - Biannual Scientific Review

Revisiting the Marxist Approach to sex work

Left Politics in South Asia: Reframing the Agenda, Edited by Ravi Kumar, Published by Aakar Books, 2018

For several decades now, the debate on sex work/prostitution has been polarized broadly between liberal and radical feminists. The liberal feminists focus upon prostitution as sex work which in its voluntary form should be treated as legitimate. Radical feminists on the other hand see prostitution as a gross instance of sexual violence against women which should be done away with. Although the signs of this polarization giving way to a common ground are not at all obvious, there are many further divisions within these camps and several complex alliances. However, it is worth remembering that not very long ago, feminist positions on the issue of sex work were categorized into three and not two groups: liberal, Marxist and radical. But at some point, the Marxist position was collapsed with radical feminism which now occupies the main space in the contentious debates with the liberal and other allied perspectives on sex work. There is much that can be said about why this has happened. This paper presents a brief overview of the problems with the classical Marxist perspective on sex work alongside a discussion of how the same is undergoing a reworking which is however not yet widely acknowledged. I have argued that while the dominant feminist approaches to the prostitution question that occupy much of the discursive space are often one sided and inadequate to theoretically grasp the complexity of the empirical contexts in which sex work takes a material form, a reworked Marxist approach provides a desirable alternative as it is able to accommodate, make sense of and provide a complex understanding of many different empirical facts that get clubbed under the category of sex work/prostitution. This is of much use in the South Asian and Indian contexts as this region exemplifies many different conditions in which sex work occurs and the same can be usefully understood within a Marxist perspective which the paper outlines. The paper draws upon my ongoing work on a short monograph on this issue which is trying to trace the major shifts that have occurred in the Marxist understanding of sex work. It also draws upon some of the insights which are derived from my earlier published work on sex work among the Bedia community in India.

The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a more Progressive Union

Capital & Class, 1979

This paper argues that the relation between marxism and feminism has, in all the forms it has so far taken, been an unequal one. While both marxist method and feminist analysis are necessary to an understanding of capitalist societies, and of the position of women within them, in fact feminism has consistently been subordinated. The paper presents a challenge to both marxist and radical feminist work on the “woman question”, and argues that what it is necessary to analyse is the combination of patriarchy and capitalism. It is a paper which, we hope, should stimulate considerable debate.

Femininities: a Way of Linking Socialism and Feminism?

Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond

The decline of socialist feminism When second wave feminism emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxist or Socialist feminism was a vigorous part of the new ideas which emerged. By the late 1990s publishers' catalogues usually contained only some socialist feminist classics plus one or two books at most which aimed to revive materialist feminism. The reasons for this are legion, and a thorough analysis of them would take up the whole chapter. In no particular order, the following are certainly important. Then, Communist societies could be held up as a distorted but possibly promising illustration of the possibilities held out by communism for women: the percentage of Russian doctors or engineers who were women, good collective child care facilities and the ready availability of abortion could be seen as positive features, even if the lack of consumer goods, unreconstructed Russian males and the lack of democracy rendered Russia ultimately unattractive as a model. With the collapse of communism, however, the long and bloody history of the revolution and then of Stalinism could hardly be seen as a price worth paying to achieve a society whose leaders finally gave up on their own system, still less the dreadful suffering caused by the post-Communist Russian economy of today. A second set of problems has to do with whether Marxism provides a satisfactory description and set of guidelines for today's capitalist societies. Whether one turns to the class structure with the decline of the industrial working class and rise of a new middle class of technicians, teachers and service workers, the economic analysis with its problems about the declining rate of profit and the transformation of value into price, or the political analysis which has problems making sense of M. Cowling et al. (eds.), Marxism, the Millennium and Beyond