Abstract
The fourth international Marxist feminist conference was the most international and best attended with around 700 participants, including Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser, Tithi Bhattacharya, Lorena Cabnal, Ochy Curiel, Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Elsa Dorlin, Jules Falquet, and Frigga Haug. The main themes of the panels established continuity with the previous conferences, from debates on intersectionality which overlap in various fields with practical and theoretical issues such as value, the state, law, care, production, and social reproduction to those that were closely linked to the thinking of new organizations and repertoires of struggle. This Special Issue is based on the plenary titled: the Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism. Frigga Haug, the author of The Thirteen Theses, considers all of them in her opening interview. The most widely debated theses by the Special Issue contributors are Theses I, II, and III on relations of production and the production of the means of life followed by theses from V to VIII which deal with intersectionality and how to study race, class and gender, the role of labor movement in the process of emancipation, and the issue of primary and secondary contradictions which is closely related to the development of an effective political emancipatory subject. The Special Issue closes with an interview with the philosopher Nancy Fraser on the three faces of labor.
Introduction
The idea of an International Marxist feminist conference was originally brought into being, and was since then continuously organized, by the feminist section of the Berliner Institute of Critical Theory centered around the German sociologist and philosopher Frigga Haug. It was held in Berlin for the first time in 2015, followed by an increasingly international second conference in Vienna in 2016, and then Lund (Sweden) 2 years after. It is, however, the fourth conference held in 2021 in Bilbao which is the main focus of this Special Issue.
In the first international Marxist Feminist conference in Berlin, more than 500 participants explored topics such as neoliberalism, intersectionality, and social reproduction. The second international conference in Vienna took place under the title: ‘Building Bridges – Shifting and Strengthening Visions – Exploring alternatives’. It had a similar number of participants but was more international with attendees from 29 countries. Discussions focused on concepts such as labor and care-work, intersectionality, new materialism, and ecofeminism, as well as Marxist feminist analyses of motherhood, fundamentalism, racism, and education. Activists and researchers from Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, South Africa, the United States, and several European countries presented the different ways in which Marxist or socialist feminists organize under diverse and adverse conditions.
As philosopher Frigga Haug tells us in her opening interview to this Special Issue, the organizers of the second conference received not only much positive feedback but also criticisms for having a program that was too dense and did not allow for the participation of everybody who was present. As a result, a larger group of participants and organizers convened in Germany in May 2017 and, after a 2-day discussion, decided to substantially change the format of the next conference held a year later in Sweden. In this third conference, the focus was, once again, on how gender regimes operate globally within capitalism. This exploration was carried out through a critical dialogue with indigenous, Black, and queer inspired feminist traditions. The organizers stated that the main experience haunting Marxist feminists today (and not only them) is the experience of crisis. Forced migration and widening inequality across and within countries in the north and south are the most palatable manifestations of a human crisis. The crisis of nature is visible in an ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes, which hit predominantly poor and vulnerable populations. The related economic crisis was analyzed under the notion of ‘financialization’ to emphasize intensified profiteering and inequality during this phase of neoliberal capitalism. The legacy of the economic crisis has been one of ‘permanent austerity’. While vulnerabilities abound, the possibilities to care for those who are most vulnerable are decreasing, rather than expanding; a process analyzed by feminists as the ‘crisis of care’. Whether these crises have different causes and feed off each other, or whether they are seen as different facets of one and the same crisis is still an open debate as this Special Issue shows. What the organizers and participants of the third conference observed was that these trends lead to the strengthening of conservative, supremacist, racist, and misogynist movements across the globe.
Thus, one of the central questions that Marxist feminists want to answer in this conference, and in this special issue, is how can we halt the tide of increasing right-wing radicalism and translate those crises into Marxist feminist strategies for a radical transformation of ourselves and the world, two processes, which, as Marx formulated, constitute two sides of the same coin: The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and of education forgets that circumstances are changed by people and that it is essential to educate the educators. [. . .] The simultaneity of changing the circumstances and of the human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
1
The fourth international Marxist feminist conference was the most international and best attended. Around 700 participants gathered online, including Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser, Tithi Bhattacharya, Lorena Cabnal, Ochy Curiel, Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Elsa Dorlin, Jules Falquet, and Frigga Haug. Most participants in this conference came from both militancy and activism, as well as from academia, so quite a lot of collective panels by research groups, organizations, social movements, and trade unions took place. The main themes of the panels established continuity with the previous conferences, from theoretical debates on intersectionality which overlap in various fields with practical and theoretical issues such as value, the state, law, care, production, and social reproduction to those that were closely linked to the thinking of new organizations and repertoires of struggle. In this fourth conference, there was more time to deal with case studies, directly connected to resistance and organization. Apart from the collective reflection on the feminist strikes in the global north and south carried out in 2018 and 2019, there was also time to delve into local and specific resistances in companies, the Internet, universities, and the public sphere. The new unionism of women workers in feminized workplaces and sectors was also examined, as well as feminist unionism in different employment arenas, including the analysis of the current digital and financialized capitalism.
This Special Issue is based on the plenary of this conference titled: the Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism. The last keynote speech on contradictions in Marxist feminism was reserved for Frigga Haug, the author of The Thirteen Theses, who was described as a living legend. Haug began by mentioning that the contradictions in Marxist feminism should be thought of as constructive dialects rather than errors that could help to revitalize both feminism and Marxism. The first contradiction was about the challenges faced by women in the struggle for liberation. Women’s conflicting care relations highlight a vital yet weakened position at the forefront of revolutionary politics. The second contradiction, drawing on Marx and Luxemburg, concerned the necessary destruction of the old. Haug stated that ‘in order to build the new, the old has to be destroyed’. The main question in this conflict that Haug laid out was how to politically navigate this destruction of the old while crises tend to induce feelings of attachment to precisely the old. These contradictions are the starting point of the Marxist feminist theses proposed by Haug, which have been the object of debate in each and every international Marxist feminist conference.
Special issue on the Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism
In the plenary The Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism, the theses were analyzed, reformulated, and debated by the invited speakers and the 400 participants who attended the round table. In this special issue, the criteria to select some of the theses has been the same as in the plenary: there is no space to critically analyze all of them, so Frigga Haug considers all of them in her interview by Mònica Clua-Losada and, the special issue contributors have selected the theses which best connect to their research and/or activist trajectories. The most widely debated theses are Theses I, II, and III on relations of production and the production of the means of life followed by theses from V to VIII which deal with intersectionality and how to study race, class and gender, the role of labor movement in the process of emancipation, and the issue of primary and secondary contradictions which is closely related to the development of an effective political emancipatory subject. We close the Special Issue with an interview with the philosopher Nancy Fraser, who also participated in the fourth Marxist feminist conference.
Theoretical contributions to the Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism
In her interview, Frigga Haug shares with us the origin of the Thirteen Theses and their genealogies. The latest version of the Theses (added at the end of this article) collects the key points that articulate current debates around Marxist feminism, which increasingly encompasses decolonial, materialist, postcolonial, queer, communitarian, and ecofeminist contributions. During the interview, Haug adds new theses we did not know about. Haug explains how more than 40 years ago, feminists among Marxists in many countries spoke out and criticized the concept of labor that was then commonly used in Marxism. They criticized certain aspects of value theory, views on domestic labor and the family, the way of dealing and interacting with each other and with nature, as well as of the future and the impending necessity for liberation. They triggered passionate debates and their criticism was not totally ignored, but, as she insists on in the interview, the work they have carried out on an international scale is far from complete.
This critique as regards the concept of value, labor, production, and reproduction started by Marxists feminists is developed in detail in the articles by the materialist feminists Jule Goikoetxea and Jules Falquet. Goikoetxea in her article, Idealism and Biologism in Social Reproduction Theory: A materialist Critique, gives a materialist interpretation of the first, second, and third Marxist feminist theses through a critical analysis of the Unitary Theory of Social Reproduction (SRT). The first three theses deal with the relations of production, the means of production, and the production of life. Goikoetxea argues that SRT resorts to idealism and biologism when explaining patriarchy. The article analyzes in detail the use SRT 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 that have been culturally devalued. The first premise leads to biologism and the second to idealism. Her conclusion is that this approach leads to an essentialist ontology where ‘women’ and ‘men’ precede the relations of production that create them. This critique is shared by Jules Falquet in her article Francophone Materialist Feminism, the missing link: Towards a Marxist-feminism that accounts for the interlockedness of sex, race and class. She expands Goikoetxea’s proposal with Delphy’s and Guillaume’s idea that women and men are created by a structural social relation of power, a relation that needs to be conceptualized as an appropriation or ‘sexage’. Thanks to this concept, she explains how Francophone materialist feminism has convincingly demonstrated the existence of a structural social relation that existed before, and continues existing during capitalist structural social relations of exploitation as Thesis III proposes. She also delves into Thesis VIII on the ‘race question’ which is related to class and sex, allowing us to understand the logics of what Falquet calls ‘interlocked structural relations of power’.
The criticisms contained within Theses III and VIII are echoed in the article by Ana Dinerstein On Motley Feminism: Decolonising Marxism for a Thesis XIV of Marxism-Feminism. Dinerstein offers a critical perspective on Social Reproduction Theory’s understanding of value. Her main contribution, however, focuses on the internal colonialism of the feminist movement that continues to create racialized hierarchies among White feminists vis-à-vis indigenous and women of color. The author contends that Marxism Feminism is failing to find new ways to understand diversity due to the pervading influence of Eurocentric-Marxism. Dinerstein considers that Marxist Feminism requires a decolonising of Marxism that draws on ‘late Marx’ and recent Marxist and feminist theoretical developments. The author explores four elements for a ‘decolonising’ Marxism: value theory, subsumption and social formation, linear development of radical change, and temporality of struggles; she also discusses their implications on Marxism Feminism toward a possible Thesis XIV.
Theses VII and VIII, on social and labor movements and intersectionality, respectively, are considered by María do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan on Class, Capitalism and the Postcolonial Question. Castro Varela and Dhawan address the question of how colonialism emerged as a tumultuous collision between Western and pre-colonial power structures, resulting in an unexpected convergence of colonial and indigenous patriarchal ideologies that led to a mutual reinforcement of these ideologies. In colonized societies, gender, sexuality, race, class, and religious distinctions became intricately intertwined, giving rise to intricate systems of domination. From a postcolonial feminist framework, they caution against overly simplistic analyses that concentrate on single isolated dimensions like race or class, or gender, without recognizing their interconnected and mutually constitutive nature. Postcolonial feminism emphasizes the need to avoid universalizing tendencies that overlook the unique particulars of different contexts.
The last article by Clara Camps, Jordi Bonet, and Rosa Ortiz engages with Theses X and Social Reproduction Theory in order to critically understand the state. The article explores how social movements in Barcelona failed to politicize the crisis of reproduction during the COVID-19 syndemic. According to the authors, one of the factors accounting for such absence of politicization was the type of responses given by the State to the pandemic emergency, responses which were beyond those theorized by Marxist feminism and Social Reproduction Theory. They take this failure as an opportunity to establish a dialogue between Critical State Theory and Marxist feminism which can lead to a better understanding of how the agency of the State determines the social reproduction of life by blocking emancipatory options regarding the crisis of care.
Jule Goikoetxea closes the Special Issue with an interview with Nancy Fraser on the Three Faces of Labor. Uncovering the Hidden Ties among Gender, Race, and Class. The interview was carried out to delve into the contents of the Benjamin Lectures that Fraser gave at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The first lecture was on Gender, Race, and Class through the Lens of Labor; the second was on Labor’s Twisted Histories; and the last one on Class beyond Class: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Politics. In the interview, Fraser explores how the three faces of labor associated with exploitation, expropriation, and externalization are functionally integrated in capitalist society and yet, only the first is widely recognized as labor with the consequence that only those directly engaged in it have organized politically as ‘workers’. Therefore, the functional integration of the three faces is not matched by any comparable political integration among the expropriated, the externalized, and the exploited. On the contrary, they appear divided in the classical triad: gender, race, and class. The approach by Fraser reminds us of the materialist, decolonial, and postcolonial critiques made by the authors of this Special Issue to this classical triad which is not necessarily conceptualized as a division, but as different interlocked systems of appropriation, dispossession, and exploitation.
The latest version of the 13 Theses of Marxism-Feminism
Thesis I
Marxism-Feminism are two sides of one coin, but it must be added that this coin itself requires transformation. Feminist Marxism holds firmly on to Marx’s legacy and thus to the significance of the analysis of work in the form of wage labor and as the driving force of the workers’ movement. However, in the attempt to move the remaining female activities likewise into the center of the analysis, MF shifts the question of the domestic and non-domestic activities from the paralyzing attempts to think them either completely as one or, vice versa, as completely apart (dual economy debate, domestic labor debate), into the fundamental challenge of occupying and transforming the concept of relations of production for feminist questions.
Thesis II
Thereby two productions are assumed, that of life and that of the means of life. The two are related to each other, so that it is possible to examine individual practices and how they interact. This opens up an enormous field of research, in which specific modes of domination may be investigated and possibilities of transformation can be sought in different historically and culturally specific ways.
Thesis III
It is clear that gender relations are relations of production, not an addition to them. All practices, norms, values, authorities, institutions, language, culture, and so on are coded in gender relations. This assumption makes feminist Marxist research as prolific as it is necessary. The contemporaneity and connectedness within global relations, and the simultaneous heterogeneity of historically concrete kinds of women’s oppression require international activists bring together their knowledge and experiences.
Thesis IV
Marxism is not useful for capitalist society and its academic disciplines that legitimize domination. Since Marxism-Feminism assumes that humans make their own history (themselves) – or, where they are prevented from doing so, self-empowerment must be gained – it is unsuitable for a structure of top-down commands. This makes available research such as memory work as well as the historical-critical treatment of oneself in the collective, thus also self-criticism as a force of production.
Thesis V
That all members of society must participate in relations of domination in order to act necessitates concrete study of those knots of domination that paralyze or shackle the desire for change in capitalist patriarchy. Feminists have the advantage here of having fewer of the privileges that come with participating in power, they therefore have less to lose, as well as more experience in viewing the world from below.
Thesis VI
All members of capitalist society suffer the damage sustained in these relations of domination/subjection; and to that extent, no one is close to living in a liberated society. In our present, there are historically sedimented forms of domination and violence, which cannot be reduced to one continuous path of development or a central contradiction. The savage forms of violence (against women), brutalization, readiness for war, and so on are to be grasped as the historically disparate horrors stemming from old relations. For Marxist feminists, these violent relations have to be a fundamental theoretical and practical part of their struggle for liberation, and the struggle for the attainment of the status of subjects over and against male-human underdevelopment.
But violence is not just an expression of traditional and outdated relations, but also of relations produced at present. That is why a specific understanding of critique and analysis is needed which avoids essentialisms. The most brutal forms of violence have returned as horrors from relations we thought of as overcome and which are products of present relations at the same time.
Thesis VII
Marxism-Feminism takes a position on the primacy of the labor movement as a historical subject and agent of transformation. Bringing feminism into Marxism, and thereby changing the latter as well as the former, makes a critical view of traditional Marxism indispensable, which refers solely to the labor movement. Marxism is Marx’s critique of political economy plus labor movement – that makes its incomparable strength. It also makes its limitations visible. The fate of the working class also shows its inability to recognize and to further develop questions that transcend the historical horizon of class struggles. This traditional Marxism is neither receptive for the new feminist questions nor for those of ecology, therefore we must keep working on it. The wealth of the various movements and the still unused wealth in Marx’s cultural heritage require continued working into the present. This is a challenge for all Marxist feminists, and there is a consensus in nearly all contributions.
Thesis VIII
The controversy over race, class, and sex/gender (intersectionality) should be taken further. The connection between class and sex in all societies seized by capitalism is to be investigated in detail; what appears as ‘race question’ is to be answered concretely for each society and culture separately and to be related to the two other kinds of oppression. Nonlinear thinking is necessary.
Thesis IX
In the upheavals since the crisis of Fordism, manifest in the series of crises of the rapidly globalized economy and driving people into more and more precarious conditions, women are among those that lose out, just as other marginalized practices and groups.
Thesis X
The dismantling of the Western welfare state in a globalized economy leaves the care for life to women in unpaid domestic work or in low-paid wage work, something that can be experienced in the global care-chain. We can conceive of this as ‘care crisis’, as a necessary consequence of a capitalist society, which in the shift of its economic center to services gets into a profit squeeze, while it seizes on ever more barbaric forms of handling the crises through unequal creation of value levels.
Thesis XI
Common to us all is to move life into the center of our struggles and thus the struggles for collectively self-determined time. We can also follow the suggestion to analyze the crises around life as the consequence of unequal time logics within hierarchically organized areas. As a politics Haug suggests the four-in-one perspective, that is, to let policy-making be led by the disposition of time, thereby not to adapt the areas to each other, but to free them from hierarchy through generalization. Only when all are active in all areas, a liberated society shall be possible.
Thesis XII
Our struggles are directed against domination and radically democratic – this requires also politics from below. Our resistance is situated culturally and temporally in different ways. But we are in union with Marx, ‘to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being’. To organize a Marxist-Feminist Congress, and to reflect our modes of cooperation and conflict within it, is a means to translate our resistance into the development of a continuous Marxist-Feminist movement.
Thesis XIII
Marxist feminists do no longer remain in the position the labor movement ascribed to them, by virtue of division of labor, as women embodying peace and being made responsible for keeping it, while men continue waging wars. We refuse being reduced to this politics but want to bear responsibility for the whole. In the current global situation, characterized by crises and wars, we consider feminist power as indispensable. We bear responsibility and have powerful possibilities.