Opening Conversations with Marxist Feminists: A Response to the Symposium on Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today

Abstract

Marxism-feminism is a vital field with diverse voices and different political agendas for social justice, from the defense of land and water to the reorganization of production. The anthology Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today aims to grasp the originality and relevance of that tradition. The book represents a variety of contributions, defined as Marxist feminist by their authors, who presented papers at the Marxist Feminist Congress in Vienna in 2016. This was the second International Marxist Feminist Conference, the first having been initiated by the feminist section of the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory. Drawing on different theoretical frameworks and practices of Marxist feminism, the edited anthology provides an invitation to converse about our understanding and practice of engaging gendered, racialized heterocapitalism for a better global future. This book symposium and its reviewers demonstrate the richness of the resulting conversation.

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• Gender
• Marxist Feminism
• Race
• Social Reproduction

The anthology Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today is dedicated to Cynthia Cockburn, a British Marxist feminist and antiwar activist. Her research on gender, war and peace making, labor processes, trade unionism, and refugees always connected knowledge production with the facilitation of connections and cooperation between women divided by ethnic and religious conflicts like those in Palestine, Israel, Bosnia, and Ireland. From her we learned to think the relationship between capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and war and how to connect academic work with activism. She—her voice and commitment—is extremely missed in these days of increasing global violence.

An edited volume of this length has the potential to focus reviewers’ comments on specific contributions. Including twenty chapters by authors who draw on (sometimes widely) differing frameworks of Marxist feminism, we were eager not to present one common understanding of Marxist-feminist practice and theory. As we wrote in the introduction:

The authors in this anthology do not necessarily agree with each other’s analyses, nor do we as editors agree with all the contributions in this book. However, we believe that for Marxist feminism to continue being a useful tool for the analyses, and, thus, for the struggles against today’s relations of capitalist gendered and racialised exploitation and oppression we need a conversation between a variety of analyses and perspectives. What these diverse approaches have nevertheless in common is an understanding that for humanity to survive, we need to fundamentally transform the system of capitalism and its devastating globalised exploitation of humans and nature. (Fakier, Mulinari, and Räthzel 2020, 5)

The book represents a variety of contributions presented in 2018 at the second International Marxist Feminist Conference in Vienna.¹ The authors defined themselves as Marxist feminists. We did not select the authors; rather, they chose us, the conference organizers, who then edited their conference contributions into a volume. We respected the diversity of their self-definitions as Marxist feminists.

As much as Stefania Barca, Jules Falquet, and Jule Goikoetxea challenge us to complicate our understanding of exploitation and appropriation (Falquet 2024), to use the forces of reproduction (Barca 2020), to achieve a careful future (Barca 2024), and to honestly rethink materialism and break with a monotheistic thinking (Goikoetxea 2024), we think the anthology’s success lies in its ability to kickstart these kinds of conversations about gendered and racialized capitalism at present while putting forth visions, from a Marxist-feminist perspective, of a future that does not exploit humans and nonhuman nature.

In her generous reading of the anthology, Jules Falquet argues for the need to explore the concept of appropriation—a phenomenon existing on the same level as exploitation, historically anterior but still alive in the capitalist mode of production—in the analysis of gender and race relations. She identifies the central contribution of Black and indigenous scholars in the reconceptualization of the relationship between gender, class, and race. We agree with Falquet’s concern that the term Global South risks equalizing diverse, even contradictory feminist traditions that are fundamental for the production of feminist knowledges. In response to Falquet’s critique of race as a blind spot in Marxist feminism, we would state that key to the chapters in this book by Jennifer Cotter (2020); Nora Räthzel, Diana Mulinari, and Aina Tollefsen (2020); and Natasha Solari and Khayaat Fakier (2020) is an understanding of race, class, and gender. Class relations under capitalism do not elide racism or sexism. Rather, capitalism incorporates and uses forms of exploitation and oppression that cannot be reduced to the mode of production, but it shapes these forms of exploitation in the process of incorporating them and using them to stabilize its mode of production and its form of domination.

Barca (2024, 155) speaks in a language of hope and possibilities, centering her analysis in Marxist Feminist praxis and bridging theory and practice through the most vital question: “How to make constructive political use of theoretical debates so that they can inform the unity in struggle that we need to change our world.” She identifies several conceptual differences but argues that, while these diverse historical narratives are relevant to explore, they become quite marginal in a shared feminist-socialist vision for survival, a position we agree with. Barca emphasizes the radicality of love, of and between Marxist feminists, as argued in Kathleen Russel’s (2020) chapter, and she reminds us “to be moved by love” as Frigga Haug (2020) suggests in her chapter. She calls for connecting our desire for socialism with the courage to fight against the way in which the current oppressive social order has also shaped the way we live, think of, and feel about our daily lives. Thus, to change we need to incorporate practices and politics of care for human and nonhuman natures into the concept of the production of the means of life and the production of life.

The heading “What Theory to What Life?” creates the frame of Jule Goikoetxea’s exploration of new Marxist epistemologies. Rethinking Marxist feminism requires the development of a materialist theory of patriarchy and colonialism. We believe the anthology has shown that there already exist several vital conversations among feminist Marxists and between feminist Marxists and other feminist traditions (queer, abolitionist, indigenous). More specifically, we see the work of Marxist feminists working within the tradition of racial capitalism, the work of Marxist feminists working toward bridging social-reproduction analysis with intersectionality, and the work of anticolonial intellectuals (many of them of Marxist background) aiming to decolonize the curriculum, to name only a few.

We are grateful to Goikoetxea for her insistence that we need to opt out of homocentric worldviews and take as a point of departure the inseparable relationship of humans and nonhumans, the dependency of humans on the nonhuman nature that nurtures us, that enables human lives. We also agree with her notion that “the enemy” is in us, but we would add that to stay true to the complexity she demands, we need to recognize that “the enemy” is both outside and in us. In the same vein, we would claim that men and women are made socially and biologically, whereby these different “makings” can contradict each other.

The anthology engages with most of the perspectives put forward by the reviewers, criticizing capitalist forms of patriarchy. Ariel Salleh (2020), Gayatri Spivak (2020), and Natasha Solari and Khayaat Fakier (2020) draw on decolonial, environmental, and indigenous perspectives, aiming to connect them with and within a Marxist-feminist conceptualization.

However, such endeavors are sparse in the anthology—and elsewhere. Marxist feminists still need to broaden their visions, for instance, concerning the concept of work so that it includes not only unpaid work but also the work of indigenous peoples, which often—not always—includes stewardship of the natures they transform through their labor, as Salleh (2020) shows when she speaks about meta-industrial workers. In this respect, Marxist feminists can learn from ecofeminists and eco-Marxists integrating societal relations of and with nature into their analysis. This could in turn expand and complicate debates within the area of social reproduction, as well as in labor studies and environmental studies in general. One might think that Marxist feminism as a theoretical tradition is quite marginal to transnational feminism movements today. However, a closer look shows that the conceptualization of social reproduction can be traced back to the Marxist-feminist debates about housework in the 1970s and '80s. Ecofeminist analyses are based on a critique of the capitalist mode of production, drawing on indigenous movements for reclaiming collective ownership of the land against violent private appropriations by corporations, and bringing in the fight against racism in all its forms. These positions are congruent with Marx’s ([1887] 1998) argument that “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” While Marxist-feminist core ideas are alive in many theorizations of oppression and resistance, as well as in struggles defending the lives of humans and nonhuman species, Marxist feminists still have work to do in connecting themselves with these struggles in practice and in theory.

Notes

1 Information about all the conferences (five so far) can be found at “International Marxist Feminist Conference,” https://marxfemconference.net.