Class Analysis Part 3: Concrete example of a vulgar class analysis with materialist feminism
What is Materialist Feminism
Materialist feminism is a feminist movement that originated in France in the later half of the 20th century. A lot of its main thinkers were coming from various socialist movements and parties but were disillusioned with how the question of feminism was treated within those movements. The most advanced, so to say, feminist analyses there went along the line of the following : The situation of working class women was simply of super-exploitation within the capitalist system in the sense that their wages were lower and that their subordinate position within society was a result of the bourgeoisie’s desire to force low wages upon them. Therefore for everything that had to do with the oppression of women the capitalist class was to blame.
What couldn’t be blamed on the capitalists however, such as the distribution of domestic work, was simply considered to be immutable. Those were just an inevitable part of life, preordained at birth for various biological reasons. That means that there wasn’t anything in the communist party program that would really change that status quo. Sure domestic work could be made less unpleasant, that’s why the communist party took the very brave stance of advocating for subsidies for vacuum cleaners, but as to who would do that house cleaning there was no question there that it was a woman’s work.
It is in this context that some feminist activists within the socialist movement became disillusioned with what it had to offer. Out of the need to chart a new analysis and political program for women’s emancipation materialist feminism was born.
While in conflict with the mainstream communist movement this new movement did not try to part with marxism at all. In fact the main idea was to use the marxist grid of analysis and apply it rigorously to the question of patriarchy. From this an economic aspect to the exploitation of women in the household was established. This led patriarchy to be understood as mode of production in the economic sense. A mode of production interacting with capitalism but ultimately independent from it with its own classes different from those that compose capitalism. One of the main thinkers to establish this theory was Christine Delphy and it is her analysis of classes within patriarchy that we will focus on here.
The Economic exploitation of women
hrisitine Delphy starts her analysis by examining the condition of the women in small french peasant families. Peasant women provide manual labour to the farm they live on, typically belonging to their husband or father. The tasks that fall onto them are usually among the most difficult there are, such as milking cows or preparing ham. The products of this labour are then either consumed within the household or sold onto a market and its profits captured by the patriarch of the farm. Since some of the product was sold on a market that means it has economic value. The fact that some of it is consumed internally within the household does not affect that since the nature of the product is the same. From that Delphy concludes that the domestic work of peasant women is in fact productive work in an economic sense. That means that they are economically exploited for their labour to the benefit of the farm’s patriarch.
While the examples of milk and ham are specific to this context, Delphy then generalises her conclusion to all domestic work. Indeed in the familial context, women perform most if not all domestic work destined to the reproduction of the household. From raising children to cooking food and tidying up the home. This domestic work however is unpaid and happens outside of any markets so how do we tie that back to economic exploitation ?
Well Delphy argues that this labour expended through this domestic work holds an economic value the same way the labour of peasant women does. Indeed, everything that is needed within a household can in fact be acquired on a market for money. For example you can buy a cooked meal from a restaurant or hire a housekeeper to clean the house. Therefore while there is no monetary compensation for the domestic work women do, this work does have an economic value. And since women provide this labour to the benefit of their husband they are subjected to the same economic exploitation from men as peasant women are.
The conclusion Delphy draws from that is that patriarchy is an all encompassing mode of production of our society, the same way capitalism is.
An example in class composition analysis
According to Delphy, the exploitation of women through domestic work within the household is the common denominator of every woman’s existence under patriarchy with the rare exception of when a woman is not part of a family dominated by a patriarch. That is mainly if a woman is either celibate, a widow or a lesbian. But the fact that domestic work varies from household to household does not mean that it loses its economic characteristic. For example, while they don’t have to milk cows, bourgeois women are still expected to put in the work necessary to raise kids and maintain their husband’s schedule for example and more generally still take care of the household ensuring everything runs smoothly. And all those things have a monetary value and can be bought outside of the household.
In the end that means that all women across society are a part of the same class when it comes to patriarchy. They belong in the same class because they have the same relation of production among themselves within the patriarchal mode of production. These relations of production are not defined by the ownership of the means of production but by having to perform for free labour inside the household that would be paid in a different context. This means that all women have a shared interest in dismantling the patriarchal mode of production in what can only be called a feminist revolution to free themselves from domestic work. The task that befalls feminists is therefore to organise and unite women as a gender class around this political goal. And this goal is achievable because all women would have nothing to lose but their chains.
The pitfalls of generalisation
Even in the midst of a significant feminist movement in the 60s in France, the goal of a revolutionary mass women movement failed to concretize despite the efforts of materialist feminists activists. They remained a fringe tendency within the larger movement and then slowly dislocated with time after a split within the tendency’s newspaper. In the end, the broader feminist movement was never united on a materialist feminist line and materialist feminists were marginalised after a series of controversies and a withdrawal from the rest of the movement.
The materialist feminist current never really recovered from this failure. As a matter of fact and as a small throwaway back to day 1, it cemented itself into a collection of sects and mainly online ideologues with little concrete political actions. This retreat into sectarianism and dogmatism can be observed through the positions materialist feminists hold with regard to trans people. For example, a few years ago, some materialist feminists including Delphy cosigned a transphobic tribune published in a reactionary newspaper. This tribune held that trans women were not really women since they were not “biological” women and therefore could not be oppressed in the same way. This position is in stark contrast with the matfem analysis of patriarchal oppression as economic oppression and not as a result of biological differences. Still it seemed to matter little that they propped up an inherently reactionary analysis of what a woman was as long as the end result of who would be categorised as woman would coincide with their own idea of it.
But transphobia was always present in materialist feminism, even if it contradicted the very core of the theory, because you cannot claim that being exploited through domestic work is what makes a woman and then disregard this very fact when that domestic work is done by trans women. But still it was present and in some texts transgender people were brought up only to be dismissed in a very visceral tone as being another liberal fancy, at best because it would distract people from what gender really is and at worst because it would try to smuggle members of the exploiter class into that of the exploited.
In order for the materialist feminist movement to wrestle out of the sect form it would have needed among other things to abandon this point of view when it so clearly contradicts the premises of the movement. Instead the opposite happened, we will try to explain why.
One of the fundamental flaws of the movement had to do with its reductionist approach to social struggle and more specifically the classes waging that struggle. There are two aspects to this. The first aspect comes from relying on the issue of exploitation through domestic work as the basis for a revolutionary movement. By putting its overthrow as the main goal of the revolution the materialist feminist struggle quickly tended to devolve from having a general goal of radically changing society to convincing women to get out of heterosexual relationships. This obviously leads to tensions and distrust within the feminist movement of the time therefore fundamentally damaging any base for a broad materialist feminist social base.
The second aspect has to do with a reductionist approach within the analysis of women as a class in itself. More specifically , with its fundamental notion that since all women were economically exploited in the same way then they are part of the same then they have the same material interests. This notion quickly falls apart when we compare the status of peasant and working class women with that of bourgeois women. Indeed, when it comes to domestic work, bourgeois households actually purchase the labour power it needs from outside the household in the form of cooks, maids, nannies and private teachers to list but a few. Due to being part of the bourgeoisie these women are able to shift a very significant part of all the labour necessary to domestic work to working class people and mostly other women.
In that case can we really expect the political unity of all women in a revolutionary struggle against patriarchy? Especially when it would question and undermine the status of bourgeois women to participate in the exploitation of their working class peers? The answer is no. What materialist feminism misses is that a class is not uniform, it is divided along other social lines. The same way that the proletariat is divided in terms of gender and race, women are divided with regard to their place in the capitalist mode of production.
As a result, the materialist feminist movement was unable to formulate a concrete and actionable political program. By failing to recognize the contradicting interests among women as a class it was unable to politically organise them. This led the movement to remain on the sidelines of the feminist struggle, helping here and there but ultimately unable to achieve any real progress. As a result of this it consolidated into a series of sects, each preaching its own variant of the theory but with less and less interaction with the real movement and people.
Conclusion
While the failure of the materialist feminist movement cannot be explained solely by a shaky class analysis there are still some valuable lessons to be learned. The main one being that when we consider a class as the group of people that have the same relation to a mode of production as one another then we cannot also consider them as being political monoliths with common unshakable interests across all its members. Classes are diverse in their composition and this diversity creates different interests across its members. This is actually something that was already touched upon by Marx in his analysis of the proletariat with the fact of proletarian fathers selling off their children’s labour power to the capitalist class in exchange for some money.
If we are ever to formulate an accurate plan of action and political program then we need to take notice of those nuances within a class. We cannot limit ourselves to painting society with the broad strokes of generalisation. And when confronted with the limits of our current analysis we have to stay anchored in the real movement of people and revise our theory instead of retreating into the sideline and limiting ourselves to abstract political theory.