https://theorieundpraxis.org/marxismus-feminismus-reproduktion-produktion-geschlecht-frauenfrage/
Around March 8th, debates repeatedly arise concerning the causes of women’s oppression, as well as the appropriate demands and strategies for overcoming it. After decades of liberal feminism’s hegemony, in recent years, with its “feminist foreign policy” and rising poverty, coupled with propaganda promoting the image of the “girlboss”—the woman who can achieve anything—it has completely abandoned its progressive demands and become merely a purple facade for a policy of war and exploitation. In explicit rejection of this, a new women’s movement has emerged in the last ten years (see the NiUnaMenos movement, the fight against abortion bans, and the women’s strikes), which once again raises the question of the connection between the “woman question” and the “social question,” or rather, the oppression of women, gender and class, patriarchy and capitalism. In the context of this new movement, strike days in the public sector, where women are particularly prevalent, were scheduled for March 8th to send a message. The demand of the women’s and workers’ movements, “Equal pay for equal work!”, is being voiced at numerous protests, and the slogan “Women’s struggle is class struggle” is also frequently seen. It is clear that there is a direct connection between the oppression of women and capitalism. But what exactly is this connection? This question has been the subject of much debate within the women’s movement, and one recurring claim is that while Marxist theory is good for explaining capitalism and class society, it has a gap regarding the women’s question. Accordingly, a feminist supplement is needed to understand and strengthen women’s struggles. From this critique, the current of Marxist feminism developed, which attempted to combine feminism and Marxism.
But what conclusions does Marxist feminism reach, and how are these useful for women’s struggles? A closer look reveals that adding feminism to Marxism is actually a case of making things worse where there is nothing to improve: Marxism doesn’t have a gap regarding the women’s question; in fact, it is the most important tool for leading women’s struggles to success. But let’s examine Marxist feminism and its theories more closely.
Caught between two stools
Marxist feminism has been caught in a kind of limbo since its inception. In the 1970s, feminist movements emerged that, in explicit contrast to Marxism, viewed patriarchy as an independent system of male domination over women. The fundamental societal contradiction is seen as the one between the sexes. The Marxist approach of prioritizing class was rejected as economistic and reductionist. Representatives of this movement, such as Kate Millett and Christine Delphy, assume that a societal power structure in which men rule over women exists independently of class society. In this sense, it is also assumed that men have an interest in the oppression of women and directly profit from their patriarchal exploitation. Men thus become both the point of reference and the primary adversary of women. The debate at that time, in which feminism was developed in contrast to Marxism, is also reflected in the current one, because to this day the accusation against Marxism is widespread that it considers the women’s question only as a “secondary contradiction”.
While large parts of the women’s movement turned away from Marxism in this sense, Marxist feminists took a different path: they did not want to reject Marxism, but rather to create a connection between Marxism and feminism, since Marxism’s answers to the women’s question were inadequate and they therefore considered it “gender-blind.” Numerous texts and theorists have thus been dedicated to such a synthesis.
Central to the formulation of Marxist feminism was the so-called housework debate of the 1970s. Representatives of Marxist feminism agreed that Marx had not analyzed housework, or had done so inadequately. They argued that Marx’s labor theory of value did not take into account women’s unpaid labor, and consequently, the oppression of women was not analyzed within Marxist theory. However, they disagreed on precisely how to analyze domestic reproductive labor, which is primarily performed by women, and how it relates to production.
The Italian feminist Silvia Federici is one of the most important and well-known founders of Marxist feminism and an influential voice in the domestic labor debate. She diagnoses Marxism with a “blindness to reproductive labor.” Her texts, such as “Caliban and the Witch” from 2004, remain widely read and highly influential within anti-capitalist segments of the women’s movement. She writes: “By understanding capitalist production and wage labor as the central arenas of the class struggle and neglecting some of those activities that are most essential for reproducing our lives, Marx gave us only an incomplete view of the capitalist system.” According to Federici, the focus should not be on wage labor itself, but rather on the activities that reproduce the commodity labor-power, which is the prerequisite for wage labor. Federici describes reproductive labor as the foundation of all life and thus also as the foundation for capital accumulation. The production of labor power, a commodity devalued in capitalism and invisibly performed by women, is the central element in the production process. To compensate this invisible and unpaid labor and fight for its recognition, Federici, along with other feminists of the time, demanded wages for housework through the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC). In “Caliban and the Witch,” she formulates an alternative to Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation by placing women at the center of this transformation.
Concepts based on this work continue to resonate today: The so-called Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) , particularly championed by Tithi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser, and Cinzia Arruzza, is a Marxist-feminist theory that emerged in connection with the women’s strikes of recent years and is among the most influential of its time. In their 2019 book, “Feminism for the 99% – A Manifesto,” they argue against liberal feminism and emphasize the importance of the social question in understanding the oppression of women. Through an analysis of reproduction, they aim to formulate a feminism for the 99%. Unlike Federici, the authors do not consider unpaid housework productive, but they, too, criticize Marx for providing an inadequate analysis of reproduction and gender oppression. Central to the SRT approach is placing “social reproduction” at the heart of their analysis of inequality, their concept of class, and also of struggles.
Although Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) approaches Marxism by decisively rejecting liberal feminism and emphasizing both the class character of reproduction and contradicting bourgeois propaganda about the supposed end of the working class, it simultaneously distances itself consistently from a Marxist concept of class. SRT theorists call for a renewal of the Marxist understanding of class toward a “dynamic understanding” of class that systematically incorporates the sphere of “social reproduction.” Membership in the working class is not determined by dependence on the sale of one’s labor power, but rather is the result of a “dynamic” interplay between reproduction and production. The precise meaning of this only becomes clear in their understanding of class struggles and revolutionary potential. They rightly observe that the living conditions of workers worldwide are under attack, that neoliberal privatizations have drastically worsened the situation in healthcare and led to cuts in social services, and that the climate crisis threatens the livelihoods of peoples in the Global South and workers worldwide. According to SRT, the struggles for housing, education, health and against oppression are class struggles which (also because of the weakness of the workers’ movement within the industrial working class) constitute at least as much, or even in modern times, the essential revolutionary potential.
Reproduction and/or production = patriarchy vs. capitalism?
Although the SRT claims to offer a unified theory and aims to overcome the dualism of radical feminism or other Marxist feminists such as Heidi Hartmann, in whom capitalism and patriarchy are conceived as two systems independent of each other.
The central problem of theories of social reproduction, however, remains that although they formally speak of a “unified theory”, they separate the processes of production and reproduction of the commodity labor power and declare them to be the arenas of two different struggles (for example, SRT makes an artificial separation between gender-specific “human production” and “profit production”), which ultimately makes it impossible to understand an overall context of class society.
For, as Marx himself explains, both spheres are part of one and the same social production process.
Marx analyzed social reproduction not as a sphere separate from production, but as the necessary, continuous renewal of the entire production process. In his analysis, every social production process is simultaneously a reproduction process, encompassing both the renewal of the means of production and the restoration of individual and social labor power. This reproduction of labor power, while taking place outside the immediate circulation of commodities, is nevertheless a fundamental part of social production under the rule of capital.
The value of labor power, like that of any other commodity, is determined by the average amount of labor time socially necessary for its production and reproduction. Specifically, this means that its value corresponds to the value of the food and everyday necessities required to sustain the worker and their family—that is, to secure the next generation of workers. Since capital’s profit increases as wages decrease, capital has an interest in keeping the costs of producing and reproducing labor power as low as possible. This also explains why activities related to the production and reproduction of labor power, such as housework, often remain unpaid or why jobs in this sector are poorly paid.
This understanding of the entire social production process makes it possible to understand why housework in capitalism is shifted onto women and the private sphere, why it is given lower status, is not paid at all, or (in the public sector such as healthcare) is poorly paid.
Federici criticizes Marx for a “lack of theoretical consideration of reproductive labor” and claims that Marx ignored the significance of housework in the capitalist accumulation process. She argues that Marx developed a “disembodied conception of labor” that fails to analyze gender relations within the division of labor. She contends that Marx provided only an incomplete view of the system because he did not recognize housework as a central field of accumulation. She sees it, however, as a distinct sphere of capital accumulation, since it is this housework that makes capital accumulation possible in the first place. For her, housework and reproductive labor are value-creating (productive). This contradicts Marx’s analysis, because no exchange value is produced here, and therefore no surplus value is extracted. Value is a category that presupposes the exchange of commodities: since the products of housework are generally not sold, they do not acquire exchange value, and their production therefore does not generate surplus value for a capitalist. Where no surplus value is produced, there is no exploitation, and no capital is accumulated. This does not mean that this work is unnecessary – it simply means that in the capitalist system a separation between productive and unproductive labor is created as a prerequisite for the production process. Understanding reproductive labor as value-creating obscures a proper analysis of capitalism, as it fails to acknowledge the central role of wage labor, its exploitative nature, and its class contradiction.
The SRT disagrees with Federici on this point, clarifying that housework is not a value-adding activity and therefore does not constitute direct exploitation of women by men. Nevertheless, it too aims to place reproduction at the center of the analysis of social inequality and class struggles.
Where is the lever for liberation? Where is the struggle taking place?
The theoretical analysis of reproduction and production and the relationship between gender and class are not purely abstract questions, but are crucial for the strategy of women’s liberation.
When “social reproduction” is placed at the center of analysis instead of the contradiction between capital and labor, this has direct consequences for political practice. The focus of struggles shifts away from production and toward the sphere of reproduction. Concrete examples of this are the “Wages for Housework” campaign, co-initiated by Silvia Federici, and the “reproduction strikes” carried out in the context of the recent women’s strike movements. However, by opening up the sphere of reproduction as an additional battleground alongside class struggle, serious problems arise in defining the revolutionary subject and its adversary. This approach inevitably leads back to dualistic assumptions that construct two separate systems of domination—patriarchy and capitalism—each with its own actors. While the contradiction between labor and capital is located in production, the subject of reproduction is constructed as a struggle against man, the supposed oppressor and beneficiary. Regarding the latest movement of women’s strikes, which are primarily intended to be reproductive strikes, the following questions arise: Who is targeted in a reproductive strike? What leverage is available and against whom is it used?
A strike is the central weapon of the working class, which derives its power from halting commodity production and thus the creation of surplus value. Only within production itself does the working class possess the leverage to stop production and demonstrate that they are not needed by the capitalists. Extending the concept of a strike to domestic, reproductive activities (such as cooking or cleaning at home) can dilute the concept and understanding of a strike. Those who stop working at home do not directly target the profiteers, the profit margin of a capitalist, but often face the same unfinished tasks the next day. Therefore, a women’s strike is only effective if it takes place in factories, at the workplace.
In “Feminism for the 99% – A Manifesto,” social reproduction is immediately defined as a purely “feminist question” solely on the basis of its gendered nature. A socialist perspective on women’s liberation is ignored. Since, for the Marxist feminists of the Socialist Reconstructionist Theory (SRT), the lives of working women “alongside or after wage labor” play the central role in modern class analysis, the category of class is no longer understood as a fundamental economic relationship to the means of production, but merely as stratification or an “indicator of inequalities.” This approach ultimately leads the analysis back to identity politics, in which various forms of oppression are elevated to the main axis of human action and social contradictions. Thus, the SRT’s claim to overcome the incompatibility of identity and class politics and thereby reconcile feminism with Marxism proves invalid, as class is effectively replaced by identity categories.
This also leads back to a feminist standpoint that emphasizes a unity of interests between genders rather than classes. Clara Zetkin rejected this unity: “The mass of bourgeois women will and must be hostile to social democracy, so their class position demands, and this has a more compelling influence on their attitude than their gender, than the fact that they are women.”
Oppression, exploitation and double burden
While all women are disadvantaged, regardless of their class, the oppression of working-class women differs qualitatively from that of capitalist women, as the latter have numerous means of protecting themselves. Working-class women perform the majority of unpaid housework and are also employed. They do not share a common interest with their employers, even if female capitalists may also be disadvantaged compared to male capitalists. However, it is the bourgeoisie as a whole that profits from the oppression of women. By systematically paying women less or forcing them into particularly poor working conditions, and by making the activities necessary for the reproduction of labor power unpaid and/or very poorly paid, capital not only reduces the cost of reproduction but also exerts downward pressure on the general wage level. Contrary to feminist assumptions, it is therefore not the proletarian man who “profits” from women’s unpaid housework. On the contrary, the gender divide weakens the collective fighting power of the working class against the existing conditions. A “battle of the sexes” thus obscures the economic basis of oppression and identifies a false enemy. Zetkin writes: “Ultimately, it is not her gender, her status as a woman, that prevents her from living out her individuality, but rather her class position, her membership in the proletariat. Even if, as a woman, she possesses tenfold, according to the letter of the law, all the rights to freely develop her being, her class slavery as a proletarian, her poverty, will prevent her from exercising these rights.”
This is not about relativizing the oppression of women, the daily sexism they face, and their double burden. Quite the contrary: to overcome this oppression, its material basis must be removed. This requires social conditions in which the activity of producing and reproducing labor power—that is, all caring, nurturing, and raising children—is not devalued compared to production because the former generates no profit but only costs; in which reproduction is not subordinated to the valorization needs of capital; in which reproductive activities, from cooking to childcare, are collectively and socially organized and no longer take place in the private sphere. This requires economic conditions in which women are dependent neither on their husbands nor on their wages, that is, the sale of their labor power. The proletarian woman is not “doubly exploited,” but rather experiences intensified oppression, which can only be overcome through the common class struggle and the eventual socialization of reproductive labor in socialism.
For it is the dominant mode of production that also creates the conditions under which labor power is reproduced. This makes the fact that women are the oppressed sex a class question, and thus their liberation also falls within the realm of class struggle. This observation in no way relativizes the women’s question or indeed any question of oppression—it merely places them on a material foundation, allows them to be explained in their historically specific expression, and is therefore the key to their solution. This solution becomes possible through a system in which the necessity of separating production and reproduction is abolished, because commodity production and profit are not the goal of the production process.
Emancipatory character of the production
If the negotiation of the women’s question is limited to the question of reproduction, the power that lies in production, and thus in the power of female workers, is also overlooked.
While we see that women in capitalism are sometimes drawn into the production process as wage laborers (for example, during war or the industrialization period) and sometimes pushed out of it, as happened in some Western societies after the Second World War, where women “re” became housewives, capitalism uses women as a reserve and shapes the conditions under which reproduction takes place according to its needs. However, the tendency for women to become an equal part of the working class gains the upper hand in capitalism in the long run (without thereby relieving them of the burden of reproducing labor power; on the contrary, it becomes a double burden). Thus, in leading industrialized nations, the female employment rate is around 70%. For the labor movement, precisely this side of the coin has always been the central lever from which the women’s question had to be addressed. While Federici sees capitalism as a historical decline of the female sex, she overlooks the fact that the integration of women into capitalist production was and is a step towards emancipation. Clara Zetkin wrote: “The question of women’s emancipation is a child of modernity, and the machine gave birth to it.” She meant that the inclusion of women in social production as workers is the economic basis for equality. By selling their own labor power, women become independent of men and perform the same tasks, thus undermining the foundations of inequality. With the emergence of capitalist production relations, which pushed back subsistence farming and domestic production, large numbers of working women were thrust into the public production process. The proletarianization of women laid the groundwork for a women’s movement. With the advent of women’s paid employment under capitalism, their subordinate position and lack of political rights became increasingly difficult to justify.
Women’s liberation only under socialism! Women’s struggle means class struggle!
While the inclusion of women in production creates the material basis for their independence from their husbands, in capitalism this process primarily serves the profit maximization of capitalists. As Zetkin already pointed out, despite legal equality, proletarian women remain oppressed in capitalism due to their lack of property and their position in the production process.
Only socialism can bring about the true liberation of women. For only under socialism will the separation and subordination of reproductive labor to productive labor be abolished, by placing people’s needs, not profit, at the center. Only socialism will create the foundation for reproductive activities—housework, childcare, elder care, and so on—to no longer be subordinated to profit production, and for performing these activities to no longer lead to a worse social position and dependency. Socialism creates the possibility of socializing reproductive activities and orienting social production according to needs, not profit.
Engaging with Marxism and the proletarian women’s movement makes it clear that it is precisely the focus on class, and thus on the relations of production, that enables us to understand gender relations and oppression. Marxism does not need to be supplemented by feminism. Quite the contrary: Marxism is the only tool with which women’s oppression can truly be explained without naturalizing gender and role models. Class struggle is the only lever to overcome women’s oppression. “…to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, and contemptible being” is the goal of Marxism, of the workers’ movement. The power to do this rests solely with the working class. For this struggle, it needs everyone and must be united. That is why Marxists firmly believe: without women, there is no revolution, and without revolution, there is no women’s liberation!