Helpsheet created for Phi 383W, Spring 2002.
LINDA NICHOLSON,
“Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic”
Nicholson is looking back on a long line of attempts by feminists to come to terms with
Marxism—to use whatever is useful in Marxist thought, while modifying whatever fails
to illuminate the oppression of women. She agrees with those feminists who have
concluded that we CAN use some of the insights and methods we owe to Marx. She asks,
what must feminists do to improve upon the conceptual tools for social analysis that
Marx gave us, in order to make them effective tools for FEMINIST social analysis? In
answer to this question, Nicholson rejects the “dual systems” approach which many
feminists sympathetic to Marxism, but trying to modify or supplement it, have proposed.
Dual-systems feminists say, in effect: “Marx was right to insist that social relations are
the results of historical processes, and can be made to change. But Marx was wrong to
say that economic class is the single, key category of analysis; in addition to looking at
class, he should have looked at gender.” I.e., dual-system theorists say “Sure, do class;
but add gender also.” For example, “Yes, capitalism is a problem; but patriarchy is an
additional, separate problem.” Nicholson, like Iris Young, finds this approach lacking.
Instead of saying “We must ADD gender analysis to class analysis,” she wants to say
“Gender analysis IS class analysis!” Ok, so what does this mean?
“Gender IS class” in two senses. First, in pre-capitalist societies, kinship, organized
around gender, was the system that organized economic activity and political relations as
well as sexuality. Gender relations (kinship) determined economic relations: gender WAS
class. Furthermore even within capitalist societies, economic class is not entirely
independent of gender.
So how did it come about that Marx virtually ignored gender—that he regarded the
economy as both autonomous (separate from the state and from the family) and as
dominant (so that economic categories are the most important categories for social
analysis, and so that the organization of commodity production in a society determines
the superstructural features of that society)? How did this come about? And second, why
does it matter that we understand that Marx’s error was not that he “Did class, but forgot
gender”; rather, it was that he failed to see that “Gender IS class”—definitively so in
some societies and partially so even in capitalist society. What can feminism gain by
moving from dual-systems analyses to the Nicholson-Young analysis of where Marx
failed?
Nicholson argues that Marx went wrong because he failed to follow consistently the most
important lesson he himself taught: historicize. Do not assume that the way we are is the
way we always have been or the way we always must be. In particular, Marx's “historical
materialism” claims that the economy (the “modes of material production”) characteristic
of a society is the most powerful force in the society and is the key to analysis that wants
to promote social change. In other words, “the economy” is analytically separable from
both the state and the family, and is a more powerful force that state or family in shaping
a society. The economy, Marx thought, is autonomous and it is dominant. . . .
[Incidentally, notice the clash between, on the one hand, the claim that the economy,
state, and family are all autonomous, and, on the other hand, the feminist slogan that “the
personal is the political.” ]
Nicholson suggests it was easy for Marx to regard the economy as autonomous and
dominant, because AT HIS POINT IN HISTORY, IT WAS! And in this instance, Marx
forgot his own rule: historicize. He spoke as though economic activity is always and
everywhere autonomous and dominant—separable from and more powerful than political
organization and/or kinship systems. Interestingly enough, this idea that the economic
and political are independent of the family or “the personal” is one that Marx SHARES
with the fathers of liberalism as an economic and political theory. They too failed to look
beyond their historical moment. What WAS the moment that allowed both Marxists and
liberals to regard the public and private as separate? It was the historical moment when a
genuine market economy came into being.
Here Nicholson draws on Polanyi’s analysis. Kinship systems had already ceased to
organize social life in its entirety. The state had become a separate system of social
organization, distinct from the kinship system. Initially, though, the state had controlled a
lot of economic activity, even in the days of mercantile capitalism. By Marx’s time,
however, a true market economy had developed in Europe. State controls on trade had
diminished, so that even land and labor had become commodities—they, too, now had a
price. All the components needed to produce goods were now subject to the market: not
just raw materials, but land and labor as well. With a market economy, then, the economy
IS independent of the state and the family. Hence Marxists could analyze class and
remain blind to gender. Hence, too, liberals could declare that the public and the private
are separate spheres.
Are the economy, the state, and the family autonomous, independent of one another? Are
the public and the private separate? AT SOME HISTORICAL MOMENTS, in some
geographical regions, yes. When the time is ripe for a true market economy to develop,
then yes. Next question: if a market economy is autonomous, does that also mean it is
dominant? UNDER SOME ANALYSES, yes—but it depends on the terms of the
analysis. Here, the ambiguities Marx permitted himself in his use of such terms as
“production” and “the economy” have an important effect. If we give them a narrow
definition, as Marx usually (but not always) did, so that “production” means
COMMODITY production and the economy means the production and exchange of
COMMODITIES (rather than of everything that is need to maintain and reproduce a
society)—in that case, yes. In that case, the economy will be dominant (over state and
family). Why? Because if commodity production is all that counts, then acquisition
becomes the principle motive (commodities being, precisely, those products that can be
acquired and kept, building up wealth). If “production” and “the economy” were
understood in the broader sense—so production would include the production of people,
e.g., and the economy would mean all activities needed to maintain and reproduce
socity—then the picture would be different. But then, if “production “ and “the economy”
were defined in those broader ways, we wouldn’t be separating family, state, and
economy, would we? We wouldn’t be separating public and private. And this would
undercut BOTH Marxist and liberal analyses.
And that, friends, is why Nicholson thinks its worth our while to go beyond the dualsystems, “add gender” approach to the alliance of feminism and Marxism. Always
historicize--it gets you far(ther)! -)