Abstract
The article gives a materialist interpretation of the first, second and third Marxist-feminist Theses through a critical analysis of the Unitary Theory of Social Reproduction. It argues that Social Reproduction Theory resorts to idealism and biologism when explaining male domination. A meta-critical incision will be carried out by studying the use Social Reproduction Theory makes of categories such as ‘production’, ‘reproduction’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’, in that these categories are addressed as historical while the categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ are de-historicized and naturalized. According to Unitary Theories, ‘women’ are not material, historical products of patriarchy but biological beings (biologism) that have been culturally devalued (idealism). This leads to an essentialist ontology where ‘women’ and ‘men’ precede the relations of production that create them. This idea obstructs the formation of a materialist philosophy of praxis.
Introduction
The philosophy of praxis, as Marx said, does not aim to think about the world; it aims to change it, thus making it essential to think about the world differently. The fundamental philosophical problem is the practical problem of the transformation of the human world, and that can only be done by using knowledge of what exists. This article is a meta-critical incision to address how particular categories that constitute the dominant idealist and biologist worldview in political theory are reproduced within seemingly materialist theories such as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). SRT admittedly sheds light on certain processes obscured by fragmentary, androcentric thinking, and also tries to politicize these processes by making the principles of Marxist philosophy of praxis its own: ‘Marx’s contribution to social theory was to point to the historical-materialist basis of social life’ says Bhattacharya (2017: 69). Thus, SRT carries out an analysis of how gender, race and class are intertwined in capitalist production as a ‘whole’ (Arruza 2015; Arruza et al. 2019). Yet, for this ‘whole’ or totality in order to be a ‘totality’, it should explain the existence of race, sex, and the varied dominations that create social life, first in a materialist way and, second, as belonging to the workings of capitalism. I will show how SRT resorts instead to idealism and biologism to explain male domination or the patriarchy, and the existence of ‘women’ and ‘men’. The article will display this hypothesis through a materialist interpretation of the Marxist-feminist Theses I, II, and III, which state the following:
Thesis I: In the attempt to move the remaining female activities likewise into the center of the analysis, Marxist feminism shifts the question of the domestic and non-domestic activities from the paralyzing attempts to think of them either completely as one or, vice versa, as completely apart (the dual economy debate and the domestic labor debate),
Thesis II: Thereby
Thesis III: It is clear that
In the next section, On categorization and emancipation, Theses I and III will be the starting point for analyzing how access to certain categories that articulate dominant emancipatory political theories within Marxism, is blocked when these categories are used to explain the neoliberal patriarchy in materialist terms. I will study the workings and consequences of the Premise of Restricted Access (PRA from now on) for the creation of categories aimed at transforming the world in an emancipatory way. The PRA refers to the traditional attempt by diverse and even divergent authors and theoretical schools to exclude or restrict the use of certain concepts such as ‘work’, ‘production’, ‘exploitation’, or ‘class’ to analyze the patriarchy in materialist terms. I will argue that the PRA leads to the reproduction of an idealist and biologist conception of masculine domination by hindering access to epistemological tools which are necessary, first, to think of the world differently and second, to change it.
The critique of how the PRA hinders the production of emancipatory categories was made long ago; on one hand, by Marxist feminists such as Dalla Costa and Federici, and, on the other hand, by postcolonial, decolonial and materialist feminists such as Spivak, Wittig, Mies, Curiel, Haraway and Delphy (see Castro Varela & Dhawan 2024; Dinerstein 2024). I will update their enquiry through the critique of the use the current Unitary Theory of Social Reproduction makes of PRA. This will be accompanied by some of Scholz’s proposals. Value Dissociation theory was developed, at least partially, in order to carry out a critical feminist analysis of the Value Criticism school. Bearing this in mind, Scholz’s (2013) suggestion on how to use concepts such as ‘work’ or ‘labor’ will be criticized along with SRT’s use of ‘reproduction’ and ‘oppression’, while Scholz’s idea on the use of ‘value’, ‘class’, and ‘exploitation’ will be defended along materialist feminist lines.
In the third section Who produces what, Theses II will appear on the scene. I will give a brief, unsystematic overview of the premises underlying some theories of value and labor, which will lead us to a more detailed study of the material and unpaid production carried out almost exclusively by women, a fact which, according to a materialist interpretation, creates ‘women’ as a historical, social, and economic class at the same time (see Falquet 2024). I will argue that the SRT displays a liberal, idealist, and biologist ontology through the use of epistemic dichotomies such as production versus reproduction, exploitation versus oppression, and identity versus class, where women are understood to be different from men, not exploited by them but culturally devalued by them (idealism). This cultural devaluation, according to some SRT authors, might be corrected by redistributive and identity politics so that, once the cultural oppressive devaluation is erased, we can go on celebrating the remaining biological difference between women and men.
Categories articulate reality, making it manageable, manipulable, and therefore changeable, so the production of categories and the alteration of categories already in circulation is a sine qua non of the emancipatory process. I conclude by underlining the necessity for a materialist feminist theory that would produce new frameworks and categories to conceive of the world differently in order to change it.
On categorization and emancipation
The premise of restricted access: ‘work’, ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’
There is a debate between Haug and Scholz (1999: 2, 4) on ‘work’ and ‘production’, in which Scholz virtually responds to Haug that the use of key concepts such as ‘work’ or ‘production’ are not adequate for analyzing the neoliberal patriarchy, as to use these categories outside conceptual framework X (whether X is classical, Marxist, or neoclassical theories of value and production) could be problematic. The argument is that these concepts were created to analyze historical phenomenon Z not Y (whether Z is abstract labor in capitalism, commodification or industrialism). One of the consequences of what I call the Premise of Restricted Access (to the use of particular categories and concepts out of their ‘original’ framework), is that ‘what women do at home for free is not labor’, because ‘labor’ in capitalism should just refer to ‘abstract labor’ so we should call these things ‘women’s activities’ or ‘tasks’. As we will see, those in favor of the PRA know that Marx spoke of ‘concrete labor’ and ‘abstract labor’ but, for clarity and precision: the activities that women do as women, that is, unwaged and mainly within the household, should be named ‘activities’ or ‘tasks’ since they do not ‘produce’ wealth, because they are not ‘productive’, they do not create ‘surplus value’ even though they are necessary to create ‘value’.
I will argue that the PRA for categories such as ‘work’, ‘production’, ‘exploitation’, and ‘class’ is not explicitly stated by Social Reproduction Theorists, but that it is the premise which leads them to exclude ‘exploitation’ from ‘what women do as women, that is, unwaged labor or activities’ and to call to this domination ‘oppression’. For SRT, ‘exploitation’ involves ‘productive work’ and unwaged women’s work or activities do not create surplus value, they help to create it, so they are not materially ‘exploited’, but culturally ‘oppressed’ (Arruza 2015; Arruza et al. 2019; Bhattacharya 2017; Fakier et al. 2020; Ferguson 2016, 2017; Fraser 2017, 2021; Vogel 2017).
This premise has direct consequences for the interpretation of Marxist-feminist Thesis I and III, which states that ‘gender relations are relations of
[. . .] she enters the wage relation for her subsistence needs, which is to say that the needs of ‘life’ (subsistence) have a deep integral connection to the realm of Within the category of It reminds us that although
In Bhattacharya’s citation, we see ‘work’ with quotation marks alongside ‘exploitation’ as connected to, yet different from, the needs of ‘life’. Next, we see that ‘women’s work’ goes with quotation marks due to ‘work’, because this ‘work’ women do does not have ‘exchange value’, so it has no productive value, and hence, belongs to ‘reproductive household activities’, not to ‘productive work’, as Ferguson reaffirms by separating ‘value-productive labor’ from ‘other forms of labor’: SRT is primarily concerned with understanding how categories of
Here the questions start to multiply: if gender and race are ‘coproduced’ with the production of surplus value, then, does capitalism produce gender and therefore women? It seems it does not, since according to Fraser, ‘women’ existed before capitalism: Capitalist societies have separated the work of
Capitalist societies
The above-mentioned Marxist-feminist Unitary School authors argue that categories such as ‘productive value’ are already taken, and to extract them from their own framework (we will not here go into what ‘own’ is), would mean using these concepts as
It is true that SRT includes the critique by Dalla Costa and Federici, and thus uses the concept of ‘labor’ and ‘work’ indistinctly from ‘women activities’ or ‘women tasks’, politicizing the latter. Nonetheless, as we will observe now, the category of ‘women’ and ‘women’s activities’ is usually followed by ‘reproduction’ and opposed to ‘production’, ‘productive labor/work’, and ‘economy’, structurally damaging the SRT’s openly claimed objective of the development of a new conception of the division between productive and reproductive work: The notion of labor is conceived here in the original sense in which Karl Marx meant it, as ‘the first premise of all human history’—one that, ironically, he himself failed to develop fully. Capitalism, however, acknowledges
Once we start reading their proposals however, we see that the division is not only replicated, but also intensified, chapter by chapter. We have seen this with Ferguson and Oran in the previous pages; let us now see it with Fraser: Boundary struggles over As the The rise of outwork coincided with the decline of households’ self-sufficiency, even though
Here, we see ‘reproduction’ along with ‘social’, ‘women’s work’, ‘households’ and domestic ‘tasks’ as opposed to or distinct from ‘production’, which goes with ‘economy’ and ‘class struggle’. It could be argued that they made the division discursively because they are explaining the historical development of this division, which will be categorized as ‘ideological’ (this idealist incision will be analyzed in the third section): Within the category of
Then, ‘women’s work’ has no exchange value for they are ‘reproductive activities’; or are they ‘reproductive activities’ because they are ‘not productive’? And, are they not productive, because they are unwaged? Not at all, for according to Fraser, reproductive household activities can be waged: Social reproduction,
First, this is circularity. Second, why this insistence on using those same categories and divisions that have articulated the Capitalist societies have separated the work of
Fraser is criticizing capitalism for dividing the spheres of production and reproduction while she justifies the very division of spheres by considering some type of ‘activities’ as ‘reproductive’ and others ‘productive’. If both activities were ‘productive’, the theory they call ‘Social Against this, social reproduction theorists perceive the relation between labor dispensed to
If people are ‘ Marxism: If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then In the US, the welfare system took a dualized form, divided into stigmatized poor relief for Ford framed this rationalization as a
In this ontological framework, capitalism creates ‘workers’, liberal nationalism creates ‘American workers’ and racism creates ‘races, whites, non-whites’; this is why those terms appear next to ‘production’, ‘construction’, ‘making’, and, usually, with quotation marks or in italics, to indicate either that they are talking about the category itself or that they are treating it either as historical or a general phenomenon: The child subjects of The For Marx, is the premise of all human history: the conscious, practical activity that transforms the world – that which is generally called I do, however, want to insist that
The categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ never appear with quotation marks or in italics as historical categories or phenomena. However, we can observe the imprecision of the category of ‘reproduction’ throughout the book, because on page 113, we still do not know the difference between ‘producing’ and ‘reproducing’ children (in Ferguson’s case) and workers (in Fraser’s and Bhattacharya’s case). However, according to Bhattacharya, Conceptual categories such as ‘class’, the ‘economy’, or even the ‘working class’ can no longer be filled with the historical data of the nineteenth century that were available to Marx. This does not invalidate them as categories. Instead, our own historical moment demands that we
We can see that most authors lack accuracy, and this may be due to how they use the category of ‘reproductive labor’ as a The Under the capitalist mode of production,
First, in the name of accuracy, ‘reproduction’ cannot be inserted into the definition since it is the word to be defined. Second, this definition, repeated in similar ways throughout the book, uses the term ‘reproduction’ for everything that ‘true production’ leaves out. This is not very rigorous for a book that aims to be rigorous with the category of ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’. Third, SRT authors do not clarify the link between defining the category of ‘reproductive labor’ as something that has no ‘productive value’, but
From a materialist philosophy of praxis, what defines women is what they do, so this latest praxis whereby almost all unwaged work worldwide is done by women defines ‘women’. From this framework what Theses I and III state, namely, that ‘gender relations are relations of
Who produces what
Who produces value, subjects, and categories
Theses I and III state that ‘gender relations are production relations’ and they are production relations because, from a materialist approach, gender is materially produced. The Theses could have used the word ‘make’ but they deliberately use ‘produce’, not because everything is ‘production’ or that we believe it is a trans-historical category, but, on the contrary, because ‘production’ is a concept which in the current historical era implies a politically relevant action and position in the constitution of a type of material domination that underlies work, the creation of social value and material well-being. In addition, it usually constitutes a position of collective, class or group domination, so its use paves the way to an emancipatory categorization, precisely because of the position that those who ‘produce’ have in this domination and therefore in emancipation.
Since ancient times, humans have divided their activity into productive and unproductive, virtuous and vile, industrious and lazy. The official criterion was the kind of activity that was considered to enhance the common good, but it was really about Who does what. Thus, Aristotle identified virtuous work by whether it was carried out by the citizen or the slave, a criterion that St Thomas Aquinas reformulated in his De opere manual and in the Contra impugnantes, where he also spoke of ‘value’. Later, with the expansion of mercantilism, people began to understand production as wealth measured in national terms, when the first estimates of national income appeared. There were various competing criteria, exactly the same as nowadays when it comes to establishing what was productive and unproductive, but there was one thing in which all theorists who happened to be men agreed; the work of women, what they do as women, was never productive, whether judged by the mercantilists Petty and King, the physiocrat Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, or later the neoclassicals and marginalists.
According to Mies (2014), the European patriarchy of the monotheistic era, initially called ‘Christian’ and later ‘liberal’, is the condition that enables capitalist and colonial development to go beyond commodification and the imposition of wages. The first thing they privatize, alienate, and dispossess is the body of women themselves and their product (humans, reconverted by capitalism into ‘labor power’), as well as the social value and the profits this value produces. At first precariously and then, century after century and in an almost totalitarian way a particular production is established as the only type of production: male production, where what is done with the hands (or the mind) is ‘labor’ or ‘production’, but what is produced with the rest of the body (with the vagina, uterus, breasts, etc.) will not be considered production. This is an interpretation to which Federici will add her theory on medieval patriarchy and her critique on the understanding of ‘primitive accumulation’. Many Unitary Theorists in SRT agree with Mies, among them Fraser. In the following pages, I will argue that in order for SRT to be consistent with this materialist genealogy, it would have to use the category of ‘exploitation’ not ‘oppression’, because it is not cultural devaluation but the material dispossession of specific beings’ means of life by other beings which creates ‘women’ and ‘men’. The two ‘productions’ Thesis II speaks about, the production of life and that of the means of life, have not been reappropriated by women: this is precisely why ‘women’ still exist everywhere. Women are not those beings with XX chromosome (in the same way that race is not about skin color genes); women are those beings that work more than the men in their family or community but have less economic capital, social, and political power than them. To omit this fact is to neglect women’s material domination so that it can be classified as cultural, ideal, or symbolic ‘oppression’ within a hierarchical order whereby ‘material exploitation’ takes primacy as Vogel explicitly says at the beginning of her chapter: I think we must
For SRT, ‘gender’ and ‘race’ have less causal weight than class, for gender, and race are not produced by ‘material exploitation’ (exploitation vs oppression), because ‘exploitation’ implies ‘productive work’ (productive vs reproductive), unlike ‘cultural oppression’, which means just a devaluation, that is, a problem of values or ideas, which, within this classical dichotomic materialism, has
In order to maintain this hierarchy, the PRA is paramount for restricting access to the categories of ‘production’, ‘productive value’, ‘exploitation’, ‘class’, and ‘material relations of production’. Yet, according to historical data (Yadira 2016), it is ‘men’ (with quotation marks for it refers to the group or class of men) who have decided, defined, and established for at least 2000 years that what ‘men’ do with their bodies will be culturalized and politicized as ‘production’, while what ‘women’ do with their body will be considered ‘reproductive or unproductive’. As Mies explains exquisitely, ‘men’ cannot produce life with their bodies, but they can produce categories. Nevertheless, just as it is ridiculous to say that everyone was wrong about what creates value, it is ridiculous to say that the true theory of value is X. This is why the categorical critique of this article is not about the mode of production of a certain value in capitalism composed of ‘productive’, ‘unproductive’, and ‘reproductive labor’. The point is that these categories are established and vary based on certain epochs, genealogies, and historical and epistemic conflicts which the proposals based on the Premise of Restricted Access aim to omit, as they contradict their own historical intentionality. My critique points to an absence: Unitary Theories and SRT lack a specific materialist theory of value and domination able to explain male domination as a system that materially produces ‘men’ and ‘women’, those who are not born but made; and this absence, as Marx said as regards political theories, is a historical and therefore a political issue, not a scientific one. That it is not a scientific issue is plainly shown by the current marginalist theory of value where finance is included in the GDP of national accounts as productive, while domestic work is not.
According to Marx, the value of the whole social product corresponds to simple labor time socially necessary to produce it, regardless of whether the sale price of the commodities for each sector is above or below the exchange value. However, the problem is that the simple labor time socially needed to If
Who produces the workers? Other workers, who, over the last few centuries, have not been considered ‘productive workers’, or ‘workers’, and hence, ‘political subjects’. We call these beings ‘women’, that is, the beings who do the unwaged work of the world precisely because they are not political subjects. So, the question about who produces the workers was responded long ago. Here the question is ‘who produces women?’
In Scholz’s terms (2018), that omitted place that in fact makes not only ‘the value’ but the subject as a political subject possible is what enables a definition of the position that men in general occupy as producers of a value that is coincidentally the predominant value in the neoliberal patriarchy; exchange value and surplus value. Scholz proposes that not all value has to be conceptualized through use and exchange values, because this value, insofar as it is split, is created in a certain space/structure/social relationship that does not take into account patriarchal social relations, space, and structures. Accordingly, and contrary to SRT and to some proposals by Scholz herself, if we do not use the category ‘production’ with ‘work’ or ‘labor’ to speak about the creation of ‘labor power’ and ‘humans’, there is no way to say how ‘women’ are made within specific relations of production, because the political dimension of ‘materially making something’ is communicated through the terms ‘labor/work’ and ‘producing’, precisely because ‘production’ and ‘labor’ are the categories that nowadays introduce, politicize, and historicize the idea of ‘material relations’, thereby neutralizing both naturalization of the existence of ‘women’ and ‘men’ (biologism), and idealization of women’s domination as caused by cultural values or ideas (idealism).
It is Marx who emphasized that the definition of productive activity depends on the historical circumstances of society at a given moment, which is why his theory of value focuses on the nature of productive activity within the capitalist system of domination. But the definition of the system of domination in which we live also depends on historical circumstances, on the principles of vision and division produced by the system of domination itself, which make the reproduction of the system of domination possible without constant direct violence, making use of symbolic or epistemic violence, that is, of those dominant categories and principles of vision and division that, because they are dominant, tend to hide the foundations of their domination, as we are witnessing with the patriarchy.
Who produces idealism, biologism, and essentialism
So far, we have seen how certain categories have a Restricted Access under the excuse of historicity, while ‘women’ and ‘men’ are used without any quotation marks, as if they were trans-historical biological facts. In this section we will see in a nuanced way, how SRT understands the relationship between men and women as ‘difference’, a difference that can be celebrated if we apply structural measures to get rid of the ‘oppressive’ part of this difference. For SRT, ‘women’, unlike ‘workers’, cannot disappear, because women are not a material-semiotic (Goikoetxea & Noguera 2021; Haraway 2019) product of patriarchy, but biological beings who have been culturally-ideologically devalued.
Current debates about whether the left has prioritized the question of identity over the question of class (Fakier et al. 2020; Goikoetxea & Noguera 2021; Lewis 2020; Luz & Martinez 2019; Mezzadra & Neuman 2019; see also Historical Materialism Conferences in London and Barcelona – 2012–2019 – and the International Marxist feminist conferences of 2015–2021), illustrate to what extent idealism and biologism dominate social movements and left-wing academic and militant production. I will argue that the division between class and identity is grounded on liberal dichotomic pairs such as oppression versus exploitation, which are at the same time founded on a deeper division that pits material against symbolic, giving rise to the well-known division between economy and culture. Before displaying the argument, I will briefly review what this division so in vogue in the last three decades between identity-recognition policies and socio-economic redistribution policies is sustained on.
Those who maintain this division between the
I agree with Wittig, Haraway and Butler that these divisions between cultural and material, oppression and exploitation, class and identity are divisions that today aim to relegate to a secondary position whatever hinders the production of a specific ‘universal subject’, who is ‘materially exploited’ and can therefore access ‘class’. We have already seen this logic with Vogel’s quotation on how ‘gender oppression’ does not have the same The problem of the replacement of Most importantly, they address the relationship between
It is interesting, though not surprising, that ‘normality’ is inserted again to justify a division that reproduces women’s subordination as if the inclusion of the ‘normative’ use of categories did not involve, in an androcentric, liberal society, an androcentric, liberal use of categories. The same applies to Arruza’s quotation, where she identifies this division as liberal but installs this very division as the grounding principle of its Unitary Theory, reproducing it again and again (Arruza 2015; Arruza et al. 2019) in this liberal, idealist frame, as do Bhattacharya, Mohandesi and Teitelman: SRT is primarily concerned with understanding how The concept [social On the one hand, capitalism depends heavily on
Pay attention to how they use ‘household’ (and not ‘patriarchal family’ or ‘normative family’ or ‘heteronormative family’) and how ‘household’ (which is the nucleus of women’s unwaged work worldwide) is understood to be a site of As the The
An Thus, as men’s work increasingly took them outside of the household, their value as wage-earners was legitimized by the
This is why I argue that in SRT ‘women’ are not a material-semiotic product of patriarchy, but culturally or ideologically devalued biological beings. This view is based on the ‘normal’, hence, hegemonic ontology of modern liberal androcentric societies: Capitalist societies have separated the work of
In this latest quotation by Fraser, we again see that ‘reproduction’ ‘work’ and ‘production’ appear in quotation marks unlike ‘women’, and that women are ‘subordinated’ through a ‘capitalist institutional’ mechanism (not through a ‘material and economic’ mechanism or ‘male dominated mechanisms’) where it is not specific material relations of production, but
This ontology is replicated by other SRT authors, not only Bhattacharya (2017) but also by Arruza (2015) and Fraser (2017), Fakier et al. (2020), Ferguson (2016), to mention just a few. This categorization drives us to the 19th-century atomistic ontology (contrary to what McNally argues in Bhattacharya 2017) where it seems that we have entities, be it atoms, individuals or in this case, women, that exist prior to any material social relation, precisely because they are born women. This is why most SRT authors propose that some structural recognition and redistributive policies may reverse the cultural devaluation of these beings, which are not the effect of this devaluation, but on the contrary, precede it.
It is certain that Bhattacharya (2017: 2–5) uses ‘produce’ in some paragraphs, seemingly to try to insert the idea that human beings are the effect of social relations: ‘labor power and
In a non-androcentric materialist framework, ‘the symbolic’ or ‘the cultural’ is always the semiotic dimension of a specific materiality (Goikoetxea 2024; Goikoetxea & Noguera 2021). One of the theses of this article is that the division between identity and class, or symbolic (cultural) and material (economic) is a product of the capitalist patriarchy, a division that has been secularized little by little in the modern era, from Descartes and Kant to Hegel, Smith and Ricardo. It is a division that Marx would criticize with his materialist proposal, because believing that there are non-material social inequalities is precisely the basis of all idealism and essentialism.
Either monotheistic thinking or philosophy of praxis
Monotheistic thinking has many characteristics. One of them is to think there is just one fundamental cause for everything (such as God), one and only one fundamental contradiction, one and only one system of domination, one universal subject and one universal morality (Goikoetxea & Noguera 2021). The Unitary Theory school and SRT are imbued in this thinking, which is why they need to argue that the ‘patriarchy’ does not exist as a material system of domination that causes exploitation, for then we would have more than one fundamental cause of domination, more than one contradiction, and so on. Therefore, they argue that male domination benefits capitalists, not men, that is, ‘men’s having more time, space, economic, cultural, scientific, symbolic, and political power than women, does not benefit men, but capitalists’ (Arruza 2015; Bhattacharya 2017, 2019; Ferguson 2016; Fraser 2017, 2021; Vogel 2017).
Women work at least 400 hours/year more than men, and between 12 and 30 hours/week more than their family men (ONU Habitat 2021). If the unwaged labor women do (at least 85% of the whole) favors just capitalists, why do working men have more time, space, political, social, cultural, and economic capital than working women of the same ‘class’ and ‘community’?
Thanks to the latest feminist research (Carrasco 2021; Moreno 2005; Oroloff 2001 [1993]; Sagastizabal 2020; Sagastizabal & Luxán 2015), we know that men in capitalism have more time, structures and space for education, political activism (to organize and fight for their rights and well-being), as well as more time and space for leisure, cultural production, artistic and scientific production – where 83% are men (Eurostat 2018) – thanks to the unwaged labor of women. Men, in addition, spend almost all their entire working time on waged labor, which gives them economic capital, which in turn leads to an increment of cultural, social, symbolic, and political capital, space, and time in capitalism (Goikoetxea et al. 2022). At the very same time, men are doing waged labor, half of women worldwide are doing waged and unwaged labor and the other half only unwaged labor (42% to be precise, while this figure is 6% in men – Oxfam 2020a, 2020b). Unwaged labor does not produce economic, cultural or social capital (due to very specific political decisions, not due to some objective economic truth about value). Thus, we find that the exploitation of women is the invisible hand of the liberal and neoliberal patriarchy (Moreno 2005); a system of domination that, in order to continue being dominant, produces the patriarchal argument according to which male domination does not benefit men.
Before finishing this section, I would like to respond to the critique by some members of the Marxist-feminist Indifference Capital and Unitary Theory schools, who argue that ‘it is not an ideological but an economic fact that women’s unwaged work benefits not men but capitalists or that production is exclusively that which creates surplus value within the capitalist market’, as if economy were not always political economy and as if by calling it ‘economy’ they positioned themselves on the ground of unquestionable objectivity, hence, ahistorical and therefore metaphysical. This is a type of certainty that only monotheistic thinking may need, because when dividing reality between ‘economy versus ideology’, what they are really after is to divide it between ‘ideology and truth’, where ‘ideology’ can be seen as false consciousness or falsehood (in a philosophy of consciousness that is not materialistic) and ‘economy’ as science, where ‘science’ does not refer to the scientific method (historical hence political), but to an objective and eternal truth, that is, to God. This monotheistic thinking has often got lost in economistic, positivist, and essentialist or biologist arguments made, not only by neoclassical or marginalist economists, but by certain currents within Marxism. The economicist, but also idealistic argument about political reality and its categorization was refuted long ago by Marx himself in his German Ideology, Theses on Feuerbach and in the Introduction for the Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law, forming, in fact, the fundamental critical theory in his Philosophy of Praxis.
In a feminist and materialist Philosophy of Praxis, the important thing for emancipation is to make strategic definitions, not true ones; basically, because all true definition is always based on historical criteria, since, if God is dead, there is nothing that can escape history, not even ‘the truth’, which is just as historical as ‘women’ and ‘production’. So, this attempt to divide historical reality between what is and is not historical is always based on a historical and therefore political criterion. Moreover, there is no science that is going to tell us what is and what is not political; among other reasons, because there is no science that is going to tell us what is and what is not unfair, since injustice has no greater scientific basis than shared ideas of justice or equality, as Delphy says (2016). Therefore, there is no science that is going to tell us whether or not we are ‘materially dominated’ or whether or not we have been ‘raped’ or ‘abused’ (the central issue of some of the biggest feminist demonstrations of the last few decades), since if science, a law, or a theory tells me that ‘I have not been raped’ or that what we do is not ‘productive labor’ because it has ‘no productive value’ but just ‘helps’ to produce it, what is not valid is the theory, law, or science that defines ‘rape’, ‘work’, or ‘value’. Not the other way around.
Conclusion
As Bourdieu says the most solid and omnipresent system of domination is that which is not seen, not made explicit, not named, and not categorized into material causes. This article has shown this is the case with the patriarchy.
We know that all disciplines of knowledge and their epistemic categories collaborate to keep the operation of male material domination hidden. In this regard, Scholz’s work of 1992 (here 2018), which has been reprinted various times this century, must be praised, for if it is certain that she has used the PRA many times, it is also true that she has confronted this eternally recurrent attempt at concealment and Restricted Access by placing the ‘exploitation’ of women at the center of the analysis, so that women can be theorized as a ‘social class’ (Scholz 2018: 901).
SRT, to the extent that positions within Marxist feminism should recognize that from a materialist framework the domination of women can neither be due to biological phenomena (biologism) nor to a cultural or ideal devaluation of ‘women’s reproductive labor’ or ‘women’s activities’ (idealism), but instead to material relations of production which makes a sexual division of labor, as brilliantly argued in For a materialist feminism. There, Delphy (2023) insists upon the fact that it is not the technical specificity, function, or usefulness of the task or the activity that grounds the sexual division of labor: it is not so much to do diplomacy as to be a diplomat, not so much to get on a tractor, but to get on it in status of employer or even a worker who is paid to do it, from which it follows that tasks that cannot be carried out in a subordinate way must be prohibited for women. (p. 21)
This statement is verified by the labor legislation of at least three centuries. The sexual division of labor is not a division of ‘activities’ but a division based on sexualized relations of production, where ‘sexualized’ means material relations of masculine domination which produce or make ‘women’, those who are not born, but made, materially and historically. It is through this interpretation that we should understand Marxist-feminist Theses I, II and III. Sex and race are the consequence of material processes of sexualized and racialized production of bodies, as stated in the Theses, namely, that ‘gender relations are relations of production’, where the concept of ‘production’ must include ‘production of life’ and ‘production of means of life’.
The debate should not revolve around what is material and what cultural. As Scholz declares, it is not about introducing the feminist perspective into the dominant ontologies or the dominant theory of value on the left, balancing the excision of value, since we are moving in a framework where ‘value’ is male. As our latest research also shows (Goikoetxea et al. 2022) the difference between men and women is not cultural at all, but about cultural capital, economic capital, and political power. All of them are material: diversely and hierarchically articulated semiotic-materialities (Haraway 2019). Hierarchies are entirely material and political, not ontological and ideological (Goikoetxea 2024). Within our framework, the current neoliberal patriarchy is a commodified system of male domination where ‘men’ have less fear and more power, time, contacts, freedom, security, space, rest, representation, recognition, money, income, pensions, and salaries worldwide compared with ‘women’ in the same community, family, and socio-economic class. And this is precisely because material-semiotic inequality is created by creating ‘men’ and ‘women’. It is not a posterior or exterior relationship that is added to their existence; it is in their existence as ‘men’ and ‘women’ (the patriarchy produces women and men, racism produces whites and non-whites, capitalism produces workers and capitalists, and the caste system produces castes). Instead, most Marxist currents including SRT ask for the liberation of women, not for their disappearance, precisely because they believe ‘women are born, not made’. If one were to think that ‘women are not born but made’, one would demand women and men to be un-made, to disappear.
What I set out to demonstrate in this article is that at the base of the epistemic exclusion that women suffer is the historical-political and always material exclusion of women from government and economic, political, and social power. This material domination is in turn legitimized and reproduced through epistemic mechanisms such as categorical exclusions, restrictions (PRA), divisions, and ontological hierarchization.
As argued throughout the article, the most effective systems of domination are those that are least seen, and they are not seen because there is a whole set of devices dedicated to discarding and neutralizing any attempt to create or use categories which will allow a narrative to be forged and show the historical and material genealogy of a particular domination. It is in this attempt to hide the incessant struggle to impose the dominant sense, that the Premise of Restricted Access must be placed. We have seen how the PRA is used in historicity claims. However, trying to use History as an antidote to historicity, as if we could place history outside of History, that is, as if we could place the struggle of meanings that constitutes History itself outside or on the margins of History, is the basis of all idealism and essentialism. In a materialist, feminist philosophy of praxis, there are no untouchable concepts or categories, because the only principle is the political strategy that makes concepts and categories available for emancipation. There is no truth outside of history and politics or therefore outside of the struggle of meanings and classes, contrary to what idealistic and androcentric monotheism claims.
Emancipation belongs to all, and to achieve it, there will never be a single way, precisely because domination does not occur in a single way nor does it have a single cause. It is our duty to continue producing and reformulating categories that help us to emancipate ourselves, because, as Frigga Haug said in the IV. International Marxist-feminist Conference that is the origin of this article: Who, if not us.