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Gender and Capitalism: Debating Cinzia Arruzzas

Remarks on Gender
Viewpoint Magazine

Hannah Hch, The Beautiful Girl, 1920

Remarks on Gender | Cinzia Arruzza

We often use the term patriarchy to underscore that gender oppression is a

phenomenon not reducible to interpersonal relations, but rather has a more
societal character and consistency. However, things become a bit more
complicated if we want to be more precise about what exactly is meant by
patriarchy and patriarchal system. And this move becomes even more
complex when we begin to ask about the precise relationship between patriarchy
and capitalism.

Capitalism and Gender Oppression: Remarks on Cinzia

Arruzzas Remarks on Gender | JohannaOksala

24

It may not be enough to find new answers to the old question of what is the
organizing principle connecting patriarchy and capitalism. We may have to pose
completely new questions.

The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State |

Sara R. Farris

32

The nation-state could be the lens through which we can try to see the necessity
of gendered and racial oppression, alongside class exploitation, as preconditions
and not only consequences of capital accumulation.

Closing the Conceptual Gap: A Response to Cinzia Arruzzas

Remarks on Gender |FTC Manning
46
If we are truly committed to a rigorous and unifying theory of capital, we must
consider the possibility that race and gender are as logically necessary as class
is to the capitalist mode of production.

Logic or History? The Political Stakes of Marxist-Feminist Theory |

Cinzia Arruzza
56
Specifying the relationship between the logical and historical dimensions of
capitalism is one of the most controversial problems in Marxist theory, and one
about which I am very uncertain. But, as this is the point of contention between
Oksala, Farris, Manning and myself, I will address a set of concerns pertaining to
this problem which is relevant to the central issues at stake: whether or not we
can claim that gender oppression is a necessary feature of capitalism and, if so,
at what level of abstraction can we make that claim.

Remarks on Gender

Cinzia Arruzza | September 2, 2014

I. Patriarchy and/or Capitalism: Reopening the Debate

It is standard to find references to patriarchy and patriarchal relations in feminist texts, tracts,
or documents.1 Patriarchy is often used to show how gender oppression and inequality are not
sporadic or exceptional occurrences. On the contrary, these are issues thattraverse all of society,
and are fundamentally reproduced through mechanisms that cannot be explained at the
individual level.

This is a translation of a series of remarks that were originally published in Italian for the
Communia Network website as riflessoni degeneri, and subsequently in French (translated by
Sylvia Nerina) for Avanti. The four installments appeared over the course of a few months for a
primarily Italian audience. The individual remarks have been combined into one article, and the
author has made some necessary changes to the text for the English-language version. It was
translated from the French by Patrick King with assistance from the author.

4
In short, we often use the term patriarchy to underscore that gender oppression is a
phenomenon not reducible to interpersonal relations, but rather has a more societal character
and consistency. However, things become a bit more complicated if we want to be more precise
about what exactly is meant by patriarchy and patriarchal system. And this move becomes
even more complex when we begin to ask about the precise relationship between patriarchy
and capitalism.

The Question

For a brief period, from the 1970s to the mid-1980s, the question of the structural relationship
between patriarchy and capitalism was the subject of a heated debate among theorists and
partisans of a materialist current of thought as well as Marxist-feminists. The fundamental
questions which were posed revolved around two axes: 1) is patriarchy an autonomous system
in relation to capitalism? 2) is it correct to use the term patriarchy to designate gender
oppression and inequality?
Although it produced very interesting work, this debate gradually became more and
more unfashionable. This occurred in tandem with the retreat of critiques of capitalism, while
other currents of feminist thought asserted themselves. These new modes of thought often did
not go beyond the liberal horizon of the times they sometimes essentialized relations between
men and women and de-historicized gender, or they avoided questions of capitalism and class
but at the same time, they developed useful concepts for the deconstruction of gender (such as
queer theory in the 1990s).
Of course, to go out of fashion does not necessarily mean to disappear. In the past
decade, many feminist theorists have continued to work on these questions, at the risk of
seeming out of touch with the times, vestiges of a tedious past. They were certainly right to
persevere: during a time of economic and social crisis, we are currently bringing partial but
much-needed attention back to the structural relation between gender oppression and
capitalism.
Over these last few years, empirical analyses or descriptions of phenomena or specific
questions have certainly not been lacking, such as the feminization of work; the impact of
neoliberal politics on womens living and workplace conditions; the intersection of gender,
racial, and class oppression; or the relation between the different constructions of sexual
identity and capitalist regimes of accumulation. However, it is one thing to describe a
phenomenon or a group of social phenomena, where the link between capitalism and gender

5
oppression is more or less evident. It is another to give a theoretical explanation of the reason
for this structural relation that can be identified within these phenomena and their mode of
functioning. It is therefore crucial to ask if there is an organizing principle which explains this
link.
In order to be both clear and concise on this point, I will try to summarize the most
interesting theses on these matters that have been suggested until now. In the following
remarks, I will analyze and question these different theses separately. To uphold a degree of
intellectual honesty and to avoid any misunderstandings, I stress that my reconstruction of
different points of view is not impartial. My own view is found in the third thesis below.

Three Theses

First Thesis: Dual or Triple Systems Theory

We can put the original version of this thesis in the following terms: Gender and sexual
relations constitute an autonomous system which combines with capitalism and reshapes class
relations, while being at the same time modified by capitalism in a process of reciprocal
interaction. The most up-to-date version of this theory includes racial relations, also considered
as a system of autonomous social relations interconnected with gender and class relations.
Within materialist feminist circles, these reflections are usually associated with the
notion that gender and racial relations are systems of oppression as much as relations of
exploitation. In general, these theses have an understanding of class relations as defined solely
in economic terms. It is only via the interaction with patriarchy and the system of racial
domination that they acquire an extra-economic character as well. A variation of this thesis is to
see gender relations as a system of ideological and cultural relations derived from older modes
of production and social formations, independent of capitalism. These older relations then
interact with capitalist social relations, giving the latter their gendered dimension.
Second Thesis: Indifferent Capitalism
Gender oppression and inequality are the remnants of previous social formations and modes of
production, when patriarchy directly organized production and determined a strict sexual
division of labor. Capitalism is itself indifferent to gender relations and can overcome them to
such a degree that patriarchy as a system has been dissolved in the advanced capitalist
countries, while family relations have been restructured in quite radical ways. In sum, capitalism

6
has an essentially opportunistic relation with gender inequality: it utilizes what it finds to be
beneficial in existing gender relations, and destroys what becomes an obstacle.
This view is articulated in various versions. Some claim that within capitalism women
have benefited from a degree of emancipation unknown in other kinds of society, and this
would demonstrate that capitalism as such is not a structural obstacle to womens liberation.
Others maintain that we should carefully distinguish between the logical and historical levels:
logically, capitalism does not specifically need gender inequality, and could get rid of it;
historically, things are not so simple.
Third Thesis: The Unitary Thesis
According to this theory, in capitalist countries, a patriarchal system that is autonomous from
capitalism no longer exists. Patriarchal relations continue to exist, but without being part of a
separate system. To deny that patriarchy is an autonomous system under capitalism is not to
deny that gender oppression really exists, permeating both social and interpersonal relations. In
other words, this thesis does not reduce every aspect of oppression to simply a mechanistic or
direct consequence of capitalism, nor does it seek to offer an explanation solely in economic
terms.
In short, the unitary theory is not reductionist or economistic, and it does not
underestimate the centrality of gender oppression. Proponents of the unitary theory disagree
with the idea that today patriarchy would be a system of rules and mechanisms that
autonomously reproduce themselves. At the same time, they insist on the need to consider
capitalism not as a set of purely economic laws, but rather as a complex and articulated social
order, an order that at its core consists of relations of exploitation, domination, and alienation.
From this point of view, the task today is to understand how the dynamic of capital
accumulation continues to produce, reproduce, transform, and renew hierarchical and
oppressive relations, without expressing these mechanisms in strictly economic or automatic
terms.

II. One, Two, or Three Systems?

In 1970, Christine Delphy wrote an article called The Main Enemy, in which she theorized the
existence of a patriarchal mode of production, its relation to, as well as its non-correspondence
with, the capitalist mode of production, and the definition of housewives as a class, in the strictly
economic sense of the term.

7
Nine years later, Heidi Hartmann published her own article, The Unhappy Marriages of
Marxism and Feminism, in which she argued for the thesis that patriarchy and capitalism are
two autonomous systems, but also historically interconnected. For Hartmann, capitalist laws of
accumulation are indifferent to the sex of labor-power, and if there arises a need for capitalism
to create hierarchical relations in the division of labor, racism and patriarchy determine the
distribution of the hierarchical positions and the specific way these are utilized.
This thesis eventually took on the name of Dual Systems Theory. In her 1990 book
Theorizing Patriarchy, Sylvia Walby reformulated the dual systems theory by adding a third, the
racial system, and also sought to understand patriarchy as a variable system of social relations
composed of six structures: the patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal relations in wage
labor and salaried labor, patriarchal relations in the State, male violence, patriarchal relations in
the sphere of sexuality, and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions. These six structures
reciprocally condition each other while remaining autonomous: they can also be either private
or public. More recently, Danile Kergoat has theorized the consubstantiality of patriarchal,
race, and class relations; these are three systems of relations based on exploitation and
domination which intersect and are of the same substance (exploitation and domination), while
being distinct, like the three persons of the Holy Trinity.
This brief survey of authors and essays is only one example of the different ways in which
the intersection of the patriarchal system and capitalist system has been theorized, and the ways
in which one system is distinguished from the other. There are others, too, but for limits of space
I am forced to limit my analysis to these examples, which are among the most clear while
remaining the most systematic and complex. As I have already shown, the difficulty with this
debate concerns the definition of patriarchy. There is not a uniform definition, but more of a set
of propositions, some of which are compatible with each other, while others are contradictory.
Since I cannot analyze all of these definitions, I propose, for now, to focus on the concept of the
patriarchal system, understood as a system of relations, both material and cultural, of
domination and exploitation of women by men. This is a system with its own logic that is at
same time malleable to historical changes, in an ongoing relation with capitalism.
Before analyzing the problems presented by this theoretical approach, we should define
exploitation and make some distinctions. From the point of view of class relations, exploitation
is defined as a process or mechanism of the expropriation of a surplus produced by a producing
class for the benefit of another class. This can happen either through automatic mechanisms
such as the wage, or the violent expropriation of the others labor this was the case with the
corve, by which the feudal lords constrained the serfs through imposed authority and violent

8
coercion. Capitalist exploitation, in the Marxist sense, is a specific form of exploitation that
consists in the extraction of the surplus-value produced by the worker for the benefit of the
capitalist. Generally, in order to talk about capitalist exploitation, there must exist generalized
commodity production, abstract labor, socially necessary labor time, value, and the wage-form.
I am clearly leaving out other hypotheses, such as those based on the real subsumption
of society in its totality, as defended by the workerist and post-workerist traditions. Confronting
this view and its consequences for understanding gender relations would take up another
article. In loosely defined terms: the extraction of surplus-value for Marx is the secret of capital,
in the sense that it constitutes the origin of socially produced wealth and its modes of
distribution.
Exploitation as the extraction of surplus-value is not the only form of exploitation within
capitalist society: to be simplistic, we can say that an employee in an unproductive sector (in
value terms) is also exploited through the extraction of surplus-labor. And the wage-rate, living
conditions, and workplace conditions of a shopkeeper can of course be worse than that of a
factory worker. In addition, beyond the slightly economistic tendencies of past
misunderstandings and debates, it is important to note that from a political point of view, the
distinction between productive and unproductive workers (in terms of value or surplus-value
production) is practically irrelevant. Strictly speaking, the mechanisms and forms of organization
and division of the labor process are much more important.
Let us return now to the dual systems theory and to the problem of patriarchy.
First Problem
If we define patriarchy as a system of exploitation, it logically follows that there is an exploiting
group and an exploited group or, better, an expropriating class and an expropriated class. Who
makes up these classes? The answers can be: all women and all men, or only some women and
some men (in the example cited by Delphy, housewives and the adult male members of their
families). If we talk about patriarchy as a system of exploitation in the public sphere, the
notion can arise in which the State is the exploiter or expropriator. The workerist feminists
applied the notion of capitalist exploitation to domestic labor, but according to their view, the
true expropriator of domestic labor is capital, which would imply that patriarchy is not in fact an
autonomous system of exploitation.
In the case of Delphys work, the thesis that housewives are a class and their immediate
male family members (in particular their husbands) are the exploiting class is not fully
articulated, but also taken to its most far-reaching consequences. In logical terms, the

9
consequence of her position would be that the spouse of a migrant worker belongs to the same
social class as the wife of a capitalist: they both produce use-values (in one case care work pure
and simple, in the other, the work of representation of a certain social status, organizing
meetings and receptions, for example) and are both in an exploitative relation of a servile
nature, that is to say, working in exchange for the financial security provided by their husbands.
In The Main Enemy, Delphy insists that being a member of the patriarchal class is a
more important fact than being part of the capitalist class. It would follow that the solidarity
between the wife of a capitalist and the wife of the migrant worker must take precedence over
the class solidarity between the wife of the migrant worker and the other members of her
husbands class (or, and this is more optimism than anything else, it must take precedence over
the class solidarity of the wife of the capitalist and her country club friends). In the end, Delphys
actual political practice stands in contradiction with the logical consequences of her theory,
which makes its analytical limits even more apparent.
Furthermore, if we define men and women (in one version or another) as two classes
one the exploiters, the other the exploited we inevitably come to the conclusion that there is
an irreconcilable antagonism between classes whose interests are in reciprocal contradiction.
But, if Delphy is wrong, should we then deny that men profit and take advantage of womens
unpaid work? No, because this would be a symmetrical error, unfortunately made by many
Marxists who have taken this reasoning to the opposite extreme. It is clearly better and more
convenient to have someone cook you a hot meal in the evening than to have to deal with the
dishes yourself after a long day of work. It is quite natural, then, that men tend to try and hold
on to this privilege. In short, it is undeniable that there are relations of domination and social
hierarchy based on gender and that men, including those of lower classes, benefit from them.
However, this should not be taken to mean that there is a class antagonism. We could
rather make the following hypothesis: in a capitalist society, the complete or partial
privatization of care work, that is, its concentration within the family (whatever the type of
family, and including single-parent households), the lack of large-scale socialization of this care
work, through the state or other forms, all this determines the workload that must be
maintained within the private sphere, outside of both the market and institutions. The relations
of gender oppression and domination determine the mode and scale in which this workload is
to be distributed, giving way to an unequal division: women work more while men work less.
But there is no appropriation of a surplus.
Is there evidence to the contrary? A simple thought experiment will do. A man would
lose nothing, in terms of workload, if the distribution of care work were completely socialized

10
instead of being performed by his wife. In structural terms, there would be no antagonistic or
irreconcilable interests. Of course, this does not mean that he is conscious of this problem, as it
may well be that he is so integrated into sexist culture that he has developed some severe form
of narcissism based on his presumed male superiority, which leads him to naturally oppose any
attempts to socialize care work, or the emancipation of his wife. The capitalist, on the other hand,
has something to lose in the socialization of the means of production; it is not just about his
convictions about the way the world works and his place in it, but also the massive profits he
happily expropriates from the workers.
Second Problem
The second problem concerns the fact that those who insist that patriarchal relations today make
up an independent system within advanced capitalist societies must face the thorny problem of
determining its driving force: why does this system continually reproduce itself? Why does it
persist? If it is an independent system, the reason must be internal and not external. Capitalism,
for example, is a mode of production and a system of social relations, with an identifiable logic:
according to Marx, it is a process of the valorization of value. Certainly, to have identified this
process as the driving force or motor of capitalism does not say everything that needs to be said
about capitalism: this would be analogous to thinking that the explanation of the anatomy of
the heart and its functions would suffice to explain the whole anatomy of the human body.
Capitalism is an ensemble of complex processes and relations. However, understanding what its
heart is and how it works is a fundamental analytic necessity.
Where patriarchal relations play a direct role in the organization of the relations of
production (who produces and how, who appropriates, how the reproduction of these
conditions of production is organized), identifying the driving force of the patriarchal system is
simpler. This is the case with agrarian societies, for example, where the patriarchal family
directly forms the unity of the production with the means of subsistence. Yet this is more
complicated in capitalist society, where patriarchal relations do not directly organize production,
but play a role in the division of labor, and the family is relegated to the private sphere of
reproduction.
Faced with this question, either one agrees with Delphy and other materialist feminists
in seeing contemporary patriarchy as a specific mode of production, but would then have to face
all the challenges I noted above, especially the intractable problem of who, in this conception,
would make up the exploiting and exploited classes; or one simply has to abandon the view
that patriarchy is a distinct mode of production, at least in the conventional sense of that term.

11
A hypothesis that has already been suggested in the past is that patriarchy is an
independent ideological system, whose motor resides in the process of the production of
signifiers and interpretations of the world. But here, we run into other problems: if ideology is
the way in which we interpret our conditions of existence and our relations to them, a link must
exist between ideology and these social conditions of existence; a link that is definitely not
mechanistic, or automatic, or anything like that. But it would still be a matter of a certain form of
connection, otherwise we would risk having a fetishistic and ahistorical conception of culture
and ideology. Now the idea that the patriarchal system is an ideological system that constantly
reproduces itself, despite the incredible changes introduced by capitalism in social life and
relations of production these last two centuries, is even less convincing. Another hypothesis
could be that the motor is psychological, but this also risks falling into a fetishistic and
ahistorical conception of the human psyche.
Last Problem
Let us admit for a moment that patriarchy, racial relations, and capitalism are three independent
systems, but also intersect and reciprocally reinforce each other. In this case, the question is of
knowing the organizing principle and logic of this holy alliance. In Kergoats texts, for
example, the definition of this relation in consubstantial terms remains a descriptive image,
which does not succeed in explaining much. The causes for the intersection between these
systems of exploitation and domination remain mysterious, just like with the Holy Trinity!
Despite these problems, the dual or triple systems theories, in their different forms,
remain implicit influences in many recent feminist theories. In my opinion, this is because these
seem to be the most immediate and intuitive kinds of explanation. In other words, these are
explanations that reflect how reality as such is manifested. It is evident that social relations
include relations of domination and hierarchy based on gender and race that permeate both
the social whole and daily life. The more immediate explanation is that these relations all
correspond to specific systems, because this is the way they manifest themselves. However, the
most intuitive explanations are not always the most correct.

III. Is It All Capitalisms Fault?

In the last section, I wrote that the conception of patriarchy as an independent system within
capitalist society is the most widespread not only among feminist theorists but also activists.
This is because it is an interpretation that reflects reality in the way this appears to us. To speak of

12
modes of appearance does not mean to describe an illusory phenomenon that is to be put in
opposition to reality with a capital R. Appearance here refers to the specific way in which the
relations of alienation and domination produced and reproduced by capital are experienced by
people because of their very same logic. As Daniel Bensad has remarked, the critique of
political economy is first and foremost a critique of economic fetishism and ideology, which
forces us to think in the shadow of capital.2 This is not a matter of false consciousness, but of a
mode of experience determined by capital itself: the fragmentation of our perception of reality.
This is a complex discourse, but in order to have an idea of what is to be understood by a mode
of experience determined by capital, we have to refer, for example, to the section in the first
volume of Marxs Capital on commodity fetishism.
Since our perception is fragmentary and those who have developed an awareness of
gender inequality usually experience and perceive it as determined by a logic that is different
and separate from that of capital, any denial of the view that patriarchy is an independent
system within capitalism inevitably encounters rejections and doubts.

The Transformation of the Family

The most common objection has to do with the historic dimension: how can one affirm that
patriarchy is not an independent system when the oppression of women existed before
capitalist society? Now, to say that within capitalist society womens oppression and power
relations are a necessary consequence of capitalism, and that these phenomena do not have
their own independent and proper logic, is not to support the absurd argument that holds that
gender oppression originates with capitalism. What is being defended here is a different
argument, tied to the particular characteristics of capitalism. Societies in which capitalism has
supplanted the preceding mode of production are characterized by a profound and radical
transformation of the family.
The transformation of the family is above all the result of the expropriation of the land, or
primitive accumulation, which separated large portions of the population from their means of
production and subsistence (the land), provoking on the one hand the disintegration of the
patriarchal peasant family, and on the other a historically unprecedented process of
urbanization. The result was that the family no longer represented the unity of production with a

See Daniel Bensad, Marx for Our Times, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, New York: Verso,
2002), 227-228.

13
specific productive role, generally organized through the specific patriarchal relations that
prevailed in the previous agrarian society.
This process began at different moments and took different forms in all the countries in
which capitalist relations took hold. With the separation between the family and the site of
production, the relation between production and reproduction (in the sense of biological,
generational, and social reproduction) was also radically transformed.
And here is the point: although the relations of gender domination were maintained,
they have, on the other hand, ceased being an independent system following an autonomous
logic because of this transformation of the family from a unit of production to private place
outside commodity production and the market. Moreover, these relations of domination have
undergone a significant transformation.
For example, one of these transformations is tied to a direct link between sexual
orientation, reified into an identity, and gender (we can consult on this matter the work of
Foucault in The History of Sexuality, works by Judith Butler, or, more recently, the writings of
Kevin Floyd and Rosemary Hennessy). While it is certainly true that gender oppression existed
well before the advent of capitalism, this does not mean that the forms it takes remained the
same afterwards.
Moreover, one could question the idea that gender oppression is a transhistorical fact, an
idea defended forcefully by a number of second wave feminists but which must be revised in
light of recent anthropological research. In fact, not only has the oppression of women not
always existed, but it did not exist in various classless societies, where gender oppression was
introduced only with colonialism. In order to have a better idea of the link between the class
relation and the power relations between genders, we can take the example of slavery in the
United States.

Race and Class

In her book Women, Race, and Class, Angela Davis highlights the way in which the destruction
of the family and all the relations of kinship between African-American slaves, as well as the
specific form of slave labor, gave rise to a substantial overturning of gendered power relations
between slaves. This does not mean that the female slaves did not undergo a specific form of
oppression as women, quite the opposite: they severely suffered, but at the hands of the white
slaveowners, not their fellow slaves. In other words, the persistence and articulation of gender
relations are linked in complex ways to social conditions, class relations, and relations of

14
production and reproduction. An abstract and transhistorical vision of womens oppression does
not allow for an understanding of these articulations and differences, and therefore cannot
explain them.

Persistence of the Domestic Mode of Production

As I wrote above, in the countries where the capitalist mode of production supplanted the
preceding mode of production, radically transforming the family and its role, the relations of
power between genders ceased to form an independent system. This does not hold for countries
with structures of production that are not entirely transformed and that remain on the periphery
of the global capitalist economy. Claude Meillassoux documented on this point the persistence
of a domestic mode of production in many African countries, in which the process of
proletarianization (that is, the separation of the peasantry from the land) remained quite
limited.3
However, even in places where the domestic mode of production remains in place, it is
subjected to intense pressure by the countrys integration into the world capitalist system. The
effects of colonialism, imperialism, the pillaging of natural resources on the part of the
advanced capitalist countries, the objective pressures of the global market economy, etc., have a
significant impact on the social and familial relations which organize the production and
distribution of goods, often exacerbating the exploitation of women and gender violence.

A Contradictory Totality

Lets return now to the advanced capitalist countries. A classic objection to the thesis that
patriarchy does not constitute an independent system is that Marxist feminism is fundamentally
reductionist. In other words, it tries to reduce the plural complexity of society to mere economic
laws without correctly grasping the irreducibility of power relations. This objection would make
sense under two conditions: the first would be that capitalism is understood only as a strictly
economic process of the extraction of surplus-value, and thus as an ensemble of economic rules
that determines this process; the second would be to understand power relations as the
mechanistic and automatic result of the process of surplus-value extraction. The truth is that this
type of reductionism does not correspond in the least to the richness and complexity of Marxs

Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

15
thought, and even less to the extraordinary sophistication of a large part of the Marxist
theoretical tradition.
As I already said above, to try to explain what capitalist society is only in terms of surplusvalue extraction is like trying to explain the anatomy of the human body by explaining only how
the heart works.
Capitalism is a versatile, contradictory totality, continually in movement, with relations of
exploitation and alienation that are constantly in a process of transformation. Even though Marx
attributed an apparently automatic character to the valorization of value in the first volume of
Capital a process in which value is the real subject, while capitalists and individuals are
reduced to the role of emissaries or bearers of a structure Monsieur le Capital does not really
exist, except as a logical category. It is not until the third volume of Capital that this becomes
clear. Capitalism is not a Moloch, a hidden god, a puppeteer or a machine: it is a living totality of
social relations, in which class relations trace lines of demarcation and impose constraints that
affect all other forms of relations. Among these, we also find power relations connected to
gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and religion, and all are put into the service of the
accumulation of capital and its reproduction, but often in varying, unpredictable, and
contradictory ways.

Is Capitalism Indifferent to the Oppression of Women?

A widely held opinion among Marxist theorists is to consider gender oppression as unnecessary
to capitalism. This is not to say that capitalism doesnt exploit or profit from the forms of gender
inequality produced by previous social configurations; it is, however, a contingent and
opportunistic relationship. In actuality, capitalism does not really depend on gender oppression,
and women have attained an unprecedented level of freedom and emancipation under
capitalism in comparison to other historical epochs. In short, there is not an antagonistic
relationship between capitalism and the project of womens liberation.
This point of view has been favorably received among Marxist theorists from many
different schools of thought, so it is worthwhile to analyze it. We can use an article written by
Ellen Meiksins Wood as a starting point.In her article Capitalism and Human Emancipation:
Race, Gender, and Democracy, Wood begins by explaining the fundamental differences
between capitalism and the modes of production that preceded it. Capitalism has no intrinsic
ties to particular identities, inequalities, or extra-economic, political, or juridical differences.
Quite the opposite: the extraction of surplus-value takes place in the relations between formally

16
free and equal individuals, without any differences in juridical or political status. Capitalism is
thus not structurally disposed to creating gender inequalities, and it even has a natural
tendency to put such differences into question and dilute racial and gender identities.

An Internal or an Opportunistic Relationship?

Capitalist development also created the social conditions conducive to the critique of these
inequalities, and to the facilitation of social pressure against them. This has no precedent in
previous historical epochs; one only needs to think back to Greco-Roman literature in which
abolitionist positions are practically absent, despite the universal presence of slavery for
productive ends.
At the same time, capitalism tends to use pre-existing differences inherited from
previous societies in an opportunistic manner. For example, gender and racial difference are
utilized in order to create hierarchies between the more and less advantaged sectors of the
exploited class. These hierarchies are passed off as consequences of natural differences,
masking their real nature, namely that they are products of the logic of capitalist competition.
This should not be understood as a conscious plan that capitalism follows, but as the
convergence of a series of practices and policies which follow from the fact that gender and
racial equalities are advantageous from the point of view of the capitalists. Capitalism does
indeed instrumentalize gender oppression for its own ends, but it would be able to survive just
fine without it. On the other hand, capitalism would not be able to exist without class
exploitation.
It is crucial to note that the framework of Woods article is a series of basic political
questions about the type of extra-economic gains and benefits that can and cannot be
obtained in a capitalist society. Her starting point is the shift in attention of social struggles from
the economic terrain to non-economic questions (racial and gender emancipation, peace,
environmental health, citizenship). And theres the rub. I mention Woods framework because
on the one hand, her article is based on a sharp separation between the logical structure of
capital and its historical dimensions; but, on the other hand, it ends up conflating these very
same levels, thus reproducing a classic confusion that is unfortunately common in the work of
many Marxist theorists who would subscribe to the theses of Woods article.
To put this point more clearly: as soon as we accept this distinction between the logical
structure of capital and its historical dimensions, we can then accept the idea that the extraction
of surplus-value takes place within the framework of relations between formally free and equal

17
individuals without presupposing differences in juridical and political status. But we can do this
only at a very high level of abstractionthat is to say, at the level of the logical structure. From the
point of view of concrete history, things change radically. Lets take this issue point by point.
1. Lets start from a fact: a capitalist social formation devoid of gender oppression (in its
various forms) has never existed. That capitalism was limited to the use of pre-existing
inequalities in this process remains debatable: imperialism and colonialism contributed to the
introduction of gender hierarchies in societies where they did not exist before, or existed in a
much more nuanced way. The process of capitalist accumulation was accompanied by the
equally important expropriation of women from different forms of property to which they had
access, and professions that they had been able to hold throughout the High Middle Ages; the
alternation of processes of the feminization and defeminization of labor contributed to the
continual reconfiguration of family relations, creating new forms of oppression based on
gender. The advent of the reification of gender identity starting from the end of the 19th century
contributed to the reinforcement of a heteronormative matrix that had oppressive
consequences for women, but not only them.
Other examples could be cited. To say that women obtained formal freedoms and
political rights, until then unimaginable, only under capitalism, because this system had created
the social conditions allowing for this process of emancipation, is an argument of questionable
validity. One could, in fact, say the exact same thing for the working class as a whole: it is only
within capitalism that the conditions were created allowing for the political emancipation of the
subaltern strata and that this class became a subject capable of attaining important democratic
victories. So what? Would this demonstrate that capitalism could easily do without the
exploitation of the working class? I dont think so. It is better to drop the reference to what
women have or have not obtained: if women have obtained something, it is both because they
have struggled for it, and because with capitalism, the social conditions have been favorable to
the birth of mass social movements and modern politics. But this is true for the working class as
well.
2. It is important to distinguish what is functional to capitalism and what is a necessary
consequence of it. The two concepts are different. It is perhaps difficult to show at a high level of
abstraction that gender oppression is essential to the inner workings of capitalism. It is true that
capitalist competition continually creates differences and inequalities, but these inequalities,
from an abstract point of view, are not necessarily gender-related. If we were to think of
capitalism as pure, that is, analyze it on the basis of its essential mechanisms, then maybe
Wood would be right. However, this does not prove that capitalism would not necessarily

18
produce, as a result of its concrete functioning, the constant reproduction of gender oppression,
often under diverse forms.
3. Lastly, we must return to the distinction between the logical level and the historical
level. What is possible from logical viewpoint and what happens at the level of historical
processes are two profoundly different things. Capitalism always exists in concrete social
formations that each have their own specific history. As I have already said, these social
formations are characterized by the constant and pervasive presence of gender oppression. Let
us suppose, as a thought experiment, that these hierarchies in the division of labor were based
upon other forms of inequality (large and small, old and young, fat and skinny, those who speak
an Indo-European language versus those who speak other languages, etc.). Lets suppose as
well that pregnancy and birth are completely mechanized and that the whole sphere of
emotional relationships can be commodified and managed by private services briefly, lets
suppose all of this. Is this a plausible vision from a historical point of view? Can gender
oppression be so easily replaced by other types of hierarchical relations, which would appear as
natural and be as deeply rooted in the psyche? These scenarios seem legitimately doubtful.

Towards Concrete Historical Analysis

To conclude: in order to respond to the question of whether it is possible for womens

emancipation and liberation to be attained under the capitalist mode of production, we must
look for the answer at the level of concrete historical analysis, not at the level of a highly abstract
analysis of capital.
It is indeed here where we find not only Woods misstep, but also the error of many
Marxist theorists who remain fiercely attached to the idea of a hierarchy between (principal)
exploitation and (secondary) oppression. If we want to pose the political aspect of this question
and also be in a position to respond to it, we must have a historical conception of what
capitalism is today and what it has been historically. This is one of the points of departure for a
Marxist feminism where the notion of social reproduction occupies a central role.

IV. Rethinking Capital, Rethinking Gender

In the previous section, I tried to clarify the limits of the fragmented thought which presents
the different types of oppression and domination as each being connected to an autonomous
system, without understanding their intrinsic unity. Moreover, I criticized the reading of the
relation between capital and gender oppression that relies on what I called an indifferent

19
capitalism. It is time now to approach unitary theory, as well as the concept of social
reproduction.

Reconceptualizing Capital

The dualist positions often begin from the idea that the Marxist critique of political economy
only analyzes the economic laws of capitalism, through solely economic categories. This
approach would be inadequate to understand such complex phenomena as the multiplicity of
power relations, or the discursive practices that constitute us as subjects. This is why alternative
epistemological approaches are deemed to be more capable of seeing causes that lie outside
the domain of economics, and more adequate for understanding the specificity and irreducible
nature of these social relations.
This position is shared across a broad spectrum of feminist theorists. Some of them have
suggested that we need a marriage or eclectic combination between different types of critical
analyses, some devoted to the pure economic laws of capitalist accumulation, and others
addressing other forms of social relations. On the other hand, other theorists have embraced
what is called the linguistic turn in feminist theory, which separates the critique of gender
oppression from the critique of capitalism. In both cases, there is the common assumption that
pure economic laws exist, independent from specific relations of domination and alienation. It
is precisely this assumption that must be critically questioned. For reasons of space, I will limit
myself to highlighting two aspects of the Marxian critique of political economy.
1. A relation of exploitation always implies a relation of domination and alienation.
These three aspects are never truly separated in the Marxian critique of political economy. The
worker is before everything else a living and thinking body and is submitted to specific forms of
discipline that remold her. As Marx writes, the productive process produces the worker to the
same extent that it reproduces the work-capitalist relation. Since each process of production is
always concrete that is to say, characterized by aspects that are historically and geographically
determined it is possible to conceive of each productive process as being linked to a
disciplinary process, which partially constructs the type of subject the worker becomes.
We can say the same thing for the consumption of commodities: as Kevin Floyd has
shown in his analysis of the formation of sexual identity, commodity consumption entails a
disciplinary aspect and participates in the reification of sexual identity. Consumption thus takes
part in the process of subject-formation.

20
2. For Marx, production and reproduction form an indivisible unity.
In other words, while they are distinct and separate and have specific characteristics, production
and reproduction are necessarily combined as concrete moments of an articulated totality.
Reproduction is understood here as the process of the reproduction of a society as a whole, or in
Althusserian terms, the reproduction of the conditions of production: education, the culture
industry, the Church, the police, the army, the healthcare system, science, gender discourses,
consumption habits all these aspects play a crucial role in the reproduction of specific
relations of production. Althusser noted in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses that
without the reproduction of the conditions of production, a social formation would not be able
to hold together for even one year.
It is essential, however, not to understand the relation between production and
reproduction in a mechanistic or deterministic manner. In fact, if Marx understands capitalist
society as a totality, he nonetheless does not understand it as an expressive totality: put
otherwise, there is no automatic or direct reflection between the different moments of this
totality (art, culture, economic structure, etc.), or between one particular moment and the totality
as a whole.
At the same time, an analysis of capitalism that does not understand this unity between
production and reproduction will fall back into a vulgar materialism or economism, and Marx
does not make this mistake. Beyond his political writings, Capital itself is proof of this, for
example in the sections on the struggle over the working day or on primitive accumulation. In
these passages, one can clearly see that coercion, the active intervention of the State, and class
struggle are in fact constitutive components of a relation of exploitation that is not determined
by purely economic or mechanical laws.
These observations allow us to highlight how this idea that Marx conceives capitalism
solely in economic terms is untenable. This is not to say that there have not been reductionist or
vulgar materialist tendencies within the Marxist tradition. This means, however, that these
tendencies relied on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Marxian critique of
political economy and a fetishization of economic laws, the latter conceived as static things or as
abstract structures rather than as forms of activity or human relations.
An alternative, opposed assumption to the separation between the purely economic laws
of capitalism and other systems of domination amounts to conceiving the unity between
production and reproduction as a direct identity. This point of view characterizes a section of

21
Marxist-feminist thought, in particular the workerist tradition, which insisted on seeing
reproductive labor as directly productive of surplus-value, and thus governed by the same laws.
Again, for reasons of space, I will limit myself to the observation that such a point of view
returns to a form of reductionism, which obscures the difference between various social
relations and does not help us understand the specific characteristics of diverse relations of
domination that are not only constantly reproduced but also transformed within each capitalist
social formation. Moreover, it does not help us to analyze the specific way in which certain
relations of power are located outside of the labor market, while still being indirectly influenced
by this market: for example, through different forms of commodity consumption, or through the
objective constraints that wage labor (or its equivalent, unemployment) imposes on personal
life and interpersonal relationships.
To conclude, I propose to rethink the Marxian critique of capitalism as a critique of an
articulated and contradictory totality of relations of exploitation, domination, and alienation.

Social Reproduction and Unitary Theory

In light of this methodological clarification, we now have to understand what is meant by social
reproduction within what is generally called unitary theory. The term social reproduction, in
the Marxist tradition, usually indicates the process of reproduction of a society in its totality, as
already mentioned. In the feminist Marxist tradition, however, social reproduction means
something more precise: the maintenance and reproduction of life, at the daily or generational
level. In this context, social reproduction designates the way in which the physical, emotional,
and mental labor necessary for the production of the population is socially organized: for
example, food preparation, youth education, care for the elderly and the sick, as well as
questions of housing and all the way to questions of sexuality
The concept of social reproduction has the advantage of enlarging our vision of what was
previously called domestic labor, and which a large part of Marxist-feminism has focused on. In
fact, social reproduction includes within its concept a series of social practices and types of labor
that go well beyond only domestic labor. It also makes it possible to extend analysis outside the
walls of the home, since the labor of social reproduction is not always found in the same forms:
what part of the latter comes from the market, the welfare state, and family relations, remains a
contingent question that depends on specific historical dynamics and feminist struggles.
The concept of social reproduction, then, allows us to locate more precisely the mobile
and porous quality of the walls of the home: in other words, the relation between, on the one

22
hand, domestic life within the home, and the phenomena of commodification, the sexualization
of the division of labor, and the policies of the welfare-state on the other. Social reproduction
also enables us to more effectively analyze phenomena like the relation between the
commodification of care-work and its racialization by repressive migration policies, such as
those that aim to lower the costs of immigrant labor and force them to accept slave-like working
conditions.
Finally, and this is the crucial point, the way social reproduction functions within a given
social formation has an intrinsic relation to the way the production and reproduction of societies
are organized in their totality, and therefore to class relations. Once again, these relations cannot
be conceived as purely accidental and contingent intersections: viewing them through the lens
of social reproduction allows us to identify the organizing logic of these intersections without for
this reason excluding the role played by struggle, and the existence of contingent phenomena
and practices in general.
We must keep in mind that the sphere of social reproduction is also determinant in the
formation of subjectivity, and thus relations of power. If we take into account the relations that
exist in each capitalist society between social reproduction, the production of the society as a
whole, and the relations of production, we can say that these relations of domination and power
are not separate structures or levels: they do not intersect in a purely external manner and do
not maintain a solely contingent relation with the relations of production.
The multiple relations of power and domination therefore appear as concrete
expressions of the articulated and contradictory unity that is capitalist society. This process
should not be understood in an automatic or mechanistic manner. As noted before, we must not
forget the dimension of human praxis: capitalism is not a machine or automaton but a social
relation, and as such, is subject to contingencies, accidents, and conflicts. However,
contingencies and conflicts do not rule out the existence of a logic namely, capitalist
accumulation that imposes objective constraints not only on our praxis or lived experience but
also on our ability to produce and articulate relations with others, our place in the world, and our
relations with our conditions of existence.
This is exactly what unitary theory tries to grasp: to be able to read relations of
power based on gender or sexual orientation as concrete moments of that articulated,
complex, and contradictory totality that is contemporary capitalism. From this point of
view, these concrete moments certainly possess their own specific characteristics, and thus must
be analyzed with adequate and specific theoretical tools (from psychoanalysis to literary

23
theory), but they also maintain an internal relation with this larger totality and with the
process of societal reproduction that proceeds according to the logic of capitalist accumulation.
The essential thesis of unitary theory is that for Marxist feminism, gender oppression
and racial oppression do not correspond to two autonomous systems which have their own
particular causes: they have become an integral part of capitalist society through a long
historical process that has dissolved preceding forms of social life.
From this point of view, it would be mistaken to see both as mere residues of past social
formations that continue to exist within capitalist society for reasons pertaining to their
anchoring in the human psyche or in the antagonism between sexed classes, etc. This is not to
underestimate the psychological dimension of gender and sexual oppression or the
contradictions between oppressors and oppressed. It is, however, a matter of identifying the
social conditions and framework provided by class relations that impact, reproduce, and
influence our perceptions of ourselves and of our relations to others, our behaviors, and our
practices.
This framework is the logic of capitalist accumulation, which imposes fundamental limits
and constraints on our lived experiences and how we interpret them. The fact that such a large
number of feminist theoretical currents over the last few decades have been able to avoid
analyzing this process, and the crucial role played by capital in gender oppression in its various
forms, attests to the power of capital to co-opt our ideas and influence our modes of thinking.

24

Capitalism and Gender Oppression:

Remarks on Cinzia Arruzzas Remarks on Gender
Johanna Oksala | May 4, 2015

Hannah Hch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic, 1919

25
Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that capitalism must constitute
the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of gender oppression. Investigating
the relationship between feminism and capitalism raises a host of difficult questions, however,
which Cinzia Arruzza faces head on in her lucid essay. She gives an illuminative roadmap of the
terrain in which this issue was debated in the 1970s and 1980s by laying out three different
theses on how capitalism and gender oppression are related: dual or triple systems theory,
indifferent capitalism, and the unitary thesis. She begins by assessing carefully the problems of
the first two positions and concludes by defending the third, the unitary thesis: in capitalist
societies, a patriarchal system that would be autonomous and distinct from capitalism no longer
exists. Instead of treating gender and sexual oppression as separate forms of domination, a
unitary Marxist-feminist theory must incorporate them in the total framework of capitalist
accumulation.
Similar to Marx himself, Arruzzas argument is both historical as well as philosophical.
She contends that gender oppression and racial oppression have become an integral part of
capitalist society through a long historical process that has dissolved preceding forms of social
life. Theoretically, she insists that we have to understand capitalism not merely as an economic
system or a distinct mode of production, but as a complex and articulated social order that
essentially consists of relations of exploitation, domination, and alienation. Such an enlarged
conception of capitalism allows us to recognize the irreplaceable role of social reproduction in it
the daily and intergenerational maintenance and reproduction of social life. From such an
expanded theoretical perspective, patriarchal gender relations appear intrinsic, rather than
merely contingent or instrumental for the way that social reproduction is organized in capitalist
societies.
I strongly agree with Arruzza on several points of her argument, starting with the
importance and the urgency of the topic she raises: a critical analysis of contemporary
capitalism is a pressing task for feminist theory today. I am in full agreement with her on the
need to recognize that social reproduction forms an essential condition of possibility for
contemporary capitalist economies. I also find her critique of the first thesis the dual systems
theories astute and convincing. Arruzza incisively summarizes the problems that Marxistfeminists faced in trying to model gender oppression on class exploitation by theorizing
patriarchy and capitalism as similar, yet distinct systems of oppression. While men clearly
benefitted from a sexist division of labor, there was no surplus in the strictly Marxist sense that
men were able to appropriate from womens unpaid work at home. Neither did women form a

26
unified, transhistorical class with essentially the same interests; instead the intersections of
class, gender, and racial oppression called for more specific and historically varied analyses.
However, I have some problems with Arruzzas dismissal of the second position,
indifferent capitalism, as well as her endorsement of the third, the unitary thesis. But before I
turn to examine them more closely, I want to make a more general remark that underlies my
concerns here. Arruzza notes at the beginning of her essay that the debate on the structural
relationship between capitalism and patriarchy became increasingly unfashionable in the
1980s. She commends the many feminists who have nevertheless continued to work on the
question at the risk of seeming out of touch with the times. In the midst of our current economic
and social crisis, we are now well advised to return to their analyses.
I want to insist that returns are never easy: something more than intellectual fashion
changed in the 1980s and 1990s. Empirically, neoliberalism and globalization happened;
theoretically, post-structuralism happened. Both of these changes mean that the terrain upon
which the questions about capitalism and gender oppression have to be posed has radically
changed, too. Hence, it may not be enough to find new answers to the old question of what is
the organizing principle connecting patriarchy and capitalism. We may have to pose
completely new questions.
*
The problem the early Marxist-feminist projects faced was economic reductionism. The
motivation behind developing so-called dual systems theories was the realization that gender
oppression was not merely an economic phenomenon, but something that traversed all aspects
of social life. It was not only capitalists who were benefitting from gender oppression, but all
men. As Heidi Hartman noted sharply in her definitive essay: Men have more to lose than their
chains.1 In other words, if feminists were going to analyze womens subordination through the
theoretical framework of capitalism, and to avoid economic reductionism, it seemed apparent
that they had to either supplement the existing economic analyses of capitalism with their own
analyses of other, complementary or intersecting forms of oppression, or they needed to adopt a
broader, non-economic conception of capitalism. The unitary theories that Arruzza defends
opted for the latter alternative.

Heidi Hartmann, The Unhappy Marriage of Patriarchy and Capitalism: Toward a More
Progressive Union,Capital & Class 3.2 (1979), 24.

27
The problem that unitary theories face, however, is that while they forge connections
between seemingly fragmented and isolated phenomena, they do so at the cost of hiding
contradictions, historical contingencies and singularities under generality. They inevitably risk
solidifying diversity and theoretical specificity into a totality. Arruzza is very aware of this
problem and tries to avoid it by insisting that we need a radically historicized analysis of
capitalism. She emphasizes that while surplus-value extraction is a distinctive and defining
feature of capitalism, trying to explain capitalism by this process alone would be analogous to
thinking that the explanation of the anatomy of the heart and its functions would suffice to
explain the whole anatomy of the human body. Instead of only considering the heart, we have
to understand capitalism as a versatile, contradictory totality, continually in movement, with
relations of exploitation and alienation that are constantly in a process of transformation. She
sounds very Foucauldian when she emphasizes that capitalism consists of varied and diffuse
power relations: power relations connected to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, and
religion. Moreover, there is no unidirectional and overarching rationality that explains them all.
Although she insists that all these power relations are put in the service of the accumulation of
capital and its reproduction, this often happens in varying, unpredictable, and contradictory
ways.
Once we insist that capitalism is in fact versatile, adaptable, historically dynamic and that
it contains contradictory tendencies, diffuse power relations and produces unpredictable effects,
however, we seem to be rapidly emptying the notion out of its explanatory force. If everything is
capitalism, then nothing is. In other words, if we give up the idea that the functioning of the
heart can explain the functioning of the whole human body, then we seem to have given up the
idea that we can find one organizing principle that explains gender oppression in capitalism.
We can still grant that the economic logic of capitalism explains something, or even a great deal
about gender oppression, but we nevertheless need a variety of other critical analyses that are
linked with the analysis of class exploitation, and with each other, in complex and historically
contingent ways. In other words, it seems to me that a radically historicized and complex version
of the unitary theory in fact makes it more or less indistinguishable from a historicized version
of the second thesis, which Arruzza calls indifferent capitalism the thesis that the relationship
between capitalism and gender oppression is opportunistic and historically contingent.
When discussing this second indifferent capitalism thesis Arruzza switches back to a
more narrow, essentially economic understanding of capitalism as a distinct mode of
production and highlights one of its key defining features: in capitalist modes of production,
production aims at capitalist accumulation the maximization of profits. All other normativities

28
are subservient to this overriding goal. When we focus on its economic logic, capitalism now
appears to have a merely contingent and opportunistic relationship to gender oppression.
When womens subordination and gendered division of labor are beneficial for the goal of
capitalist accumulation, capitalism works in tandem with mechanisms of gender oppression. In
geographical locations and historical periods in which the reverse is true, however, it is
completely conceivable that capitalism and feminism are in fact allies. In other words, there is
no intrinsic or essential relationship between them. Arruzza notes that those feminists who
argue that capitalism is good for women have readily appropriated this thesis: capitalism has no
intrinsic ties to particular identities, inequalities, or extra-economic, political, or juridical
differences.
Just because a thesis can be appropriated to defend capitalism does not mean that it is
false, however. As Arruzza notes at the beginning of her article, we have to carefully distinguish
between logical and historical versions of this thesis and therefore between logical or
metaphysical necessity on the one hand, and empirical or historical necessity, on the other. Even
if we accept that capitalism, now understood as a distinct economic system of production, does
not logically need gender inequality, historically things are not so simple. Arruzza admits herself
that it is perhaps difficult to show at a high level of abstraction that gender oppression is
essential to the inner workings of capitalism, but insists that her argument concerns the way
things are now, in our lived, historical reality.
In other words, what I take her to be arguing is that if we operate with an abstract,
economic definition of capitalism that identifies it through its economic logic, then it is
impossible to make a necessary, logical connection between capitalism and gender oppression.
The relationship is historically contingent and opportunistic. However, if we move to the level of
lived reality where capitalism denotes a totality a historically specific social formation
consisting of all the myriad social practices in which we are involved daily then the two
become indistinguishable. Here Arruzza and I are again in full agreement: I think that both of
these claims are valid and ontologically true at the same time.
However, my problem is methodological. Once we have moved on to the level of a
totality, the level of our lived reality, there is not much else that can be significantly stated about
the connection between capitalism and gender oppression than that they are intertwined or
inherently connected. The proposition becomes non-falsifiable. Stating that something in a total
social formation is connected to something else in it is obviously true in a trivial sense. But on
this level it seems difficult to explain the link between capitalism and gender oppression
through a single organizing principle. To explain anything at all about their connection, we have

29
move back to some form of fragmented thought: retrieve a more precise definition of
capitalism and then study the myriad and often contradictory ways in which the economic logic
of capitalism determines, intersects or shapes historically specific, gendered social practices.
*
It is my contention that today we can identify at least two different and opposing ways that the
capitalist logic of accumulation the imperative of economic growth intersects with gender
oppression. On the one hand, the rapid neoliberalization of our economies in recent decades
has resulted in a constant drive to extend the reach of the market. According to neoliberal
economic theory, commodification and privatization are particularly effective means of speeding
up economic growth given that the GDP is measured in terms of market transactions. This
doctrine is consistent with the attempts to commodify both the private and the public realms
and to turn women into wage-laborers. As the marketization of everyday life expands, people
have come to increasingly rely on the affective and care services that they now buy and which
used to be provided mainly by women in the private realm. This has resulted in new forms of
gender oppression, as it is often poor, immigrant and third-world women who end up providing
these commodified services. The so-called global care chains and the enormous growth in the
trafficking of women have become some of the gendered effects of globalization.2
On the other hand, it is also clearly beneficial for capitalism in the current historical
conjuncture to rely on womens unpaid reproductive labor in the private sphere. Even though it
is possible to construct economic thought experiments and to imagine, logically, capitalist forms
of production that have completely commodified social reproduction, historically we are still far
from achieving that. Attempts to commodify biological reproduction and affective relationships,
such as sex and love, encounter both technical difficulties as well as moral objections in our
current forms of life. The social provision of childcare and domestic labor, on the other, is an
obvious hindrance to the logic of capitalist accumulation because it requires public investment.
This must be counted as at least part of the explanation for why the feminist movement, despite
decades of political struggle by now, has had very little success in socializing and ungendering

The term global care chain was first used by Arlie Hochschild to describe the links between
people across the globe based on their roles in the transnational division of care work. See,
Arlie Hochschild, Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value, in On The Edge: Living
with Global Capitalism, eds. William Hutton and Anthony Giddens (London: Jonathan Cape,
2000), 131.

30
reproduction. Women are still expected to take the main responsibility for the early provisioning
of childcare, as well as for most of the housework.
Hence, we can identify opposing ways to relate capitalist economic logic and gender
oppression capitalism wants women to both work and to stay at home and we can find
examples of both incentives today. Women are increasingly torn between the conflicting
demands of femininity in neoliberal capitalist societies.3
A contradiction characterizes the gendered consequences of recent economic crises too.
The instability of capitalist economies has been negotiated in recent decades through neoliberal
forms of governmentality new political technologies of power and social regulation that
emphasise individual responsibility in risk management. While a stable nuclear family was
previously understood to provide the necessary counterweight to competitive and
individualistic capitalist societies, today social volatility and economic risks have become
increasingly central for profit making. It is especially the poor and the most vulnerable
segments of the population, for example, who have been forced into unprecedented levels of
debt in recent decades, and whose indebtedness has thereby made possible the growth of the
lucrative credit markets and the rapid financialization of Western economies. In other words, the
breaking up of the stable nuclear family and the collapse of the traditional gender order based
on the idea of family-wage can be understood as both useful and harmful for capitalist
accumulation: on the one hand the dissolution of social cohesion and the growing number of
poor, single-parent households has provided new lucrative opportunities for capitalist
accumulation in the form of subprime lending, for example; on the other hand, the
disintegration of the traditional gender order has resulted in an intensified crisis of care in
Western societies and made the questions concerning social reproduction appear as acute
problems in capitalism.
*
We should be mindful of Nietzsches assertion that only that which is without history can be
defined. Our conceptions and theoretical understandings of reality are produced through
political struggle and are thus always contingent and contestable. All definitions of capitalism
must be understood as political acts, and their extension and validity remains open to constant

Cf. Johanna Oksala, The Neoliberal Subject of Feminism, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 42.1 (2011), 104120.

31
contestation. In other words, capitalism does not essentially mean anything. It is a theoretical
tool, or perhaps even a weapon, that I believe can be successfully deployed in several contexts.
Depending on the theoretical or political context in which it is deployed and the way it is
defined there, we can do different things with it. In political economy, it denotes a distinctive
mode of production, which can be identified through a list of key features private property, the
dominance of wage labor, the allocation of goods and services through markets and so on and
usefully distinguished from other types of economic systems. In much of critical social theory,
on the other hand, it denotes something broader, usually framed in terms of a totality or a
comprehensive social formation. The clear advantage of such a totalizing perspective is that it is
capable of theoretically connecting seemingly disparate phenomena and therefore politically
uniting people who are able to recognize that their individual problems are not merely local,
psychological or accidental.
However, as I have tried to argue, there are also costs and risks involved in such totalistic
thinking. When capitalism is analyzed as a mega-structure or an all-encompassing explanatory
background against which all other things are understood, we risk losing a clear theoretical
focus and political aim. Not only do varied forms of gender oppression have historically
contingent relationships to the distinct and contradictory economic logics characterizing
contemporary capitalism feminist political struggles do too. In other words, I want to cast our
disagreement as ultimately strategic: whilst Arruzza defends a unitary theory based on an
enlarged definition of capitalism because it can provide feminists with an effective and cutting
conceptual weapon, I want to defend a more precise definition and more variegated historical
analyses for the very same reason.

32

The Intersectional Conundrum and the Nation-State

Sara R. Farris | May 4, 2015

Hannah Hch, Roma, 1925

It is not an easy task to reconstruct succinctly the main problematics that have traversed Marxist
feminism in the last 40 years, without risking simplifications or serious omissions, or without
producing a mere summary that avoids critically engaging with the subjects that it raises. And
yet, I believe Arruzzas text Remarks on Gender accomplishes the task very well: her
reconstruction of the key theses on the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism
proposed by different currents within socialist and Marxist feminism from the 1970s onwards is
not only lucid and informative, but also extremely clear and accessible. Furthermore, her
partisan critique of the different positions on the table, alongside an indication of the most

33
promising questions for debate, give us as feminists who locate ourselves in the Marxist
tradition(s) a great opportunity to begin and/or deepen a much needed discussion and
exchange. A new generation of Marxist feminists has emerged in the last years; it begins to
question, re-articulate, expand and criticise the theorizations and disputes it has inherited from
previous generations.
I find myself mostly in agreement with the arguments put forward by Arruzza. I share her
criticisms of the dual and triple system analyses and the theoretical preference for the unitary
theory approach as well as social reproduction feminism. There are, however, two elements
raised in her text that I feel require further investigation and reflection. The first concerns the
way Arruzza responds to the thesis of the indifference of capitalism to gendered and racial
oppression exemplified by Meiksins Wood. In spite of the many compelling points of critique
she raises, here I think Arruzza does not really overcome the problems posed by Meiksins
Woods approach. The second element that would deserve some treatment in the context of
discussions on class exploitation and gendered and racial oppression is the relationship
between Marxist feminism and intersectionality theory. The latter is in fact the specter that
haunts these discussions, as I will argue throughout this text.
In what follows I will try to explain in what ways I think that these two points require
further examination and to sketch a proposal for future research and discussion that I believe
can potentially enable us to overcome some of the pitfalls of Marxist feminism on the terrain of
race and racism in particular. I should say from the outset that those that follow are not meant to
be fully-fledged thoughts or conclusive reflections. They constitute only the initial and still very
preliminary stages of a work in progress. I thus hope that this round-table discussion will be the
initial agora for an exchange of ideas between scholars and activists who are struggling to find
answers to these complex issues.

Logical Structure and History

Let me begin from the first point. The questions about whether capitalism is structurally
indifferent or not to gendered and racial oppression and how we can understand the
relationship between these forms of oppression and class exploitation are the most
controversial, but also the most challenging from a Marxist feminist viewpoint. As Arruzza notes,
the thesis that capitalism does not require gendered oppression and racial inequalities to
operate, but has instead forged an opportunistic and instrumental relationship with them, has

34
been sustained in a particularly clear way by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In her essay Capitalism and
Human Emancipation, Wood maintains that:

If capital derives advantages from racism or sexism, it is not because of any structural tendency in
capitalism toward racial inequality or gender oppression, but on the contrary because they disguise the
structural realities of the capitalist system and because they divide the working class. At any rate,
capitalist exploitation can in principle be conducted without any consideration for colour, race, creed,
gender, any dependence upon extra-economic inequality or difference; and more than that, the
development of capitalism has created ideological pressures against such inequalities and differences
to a degree with no precedent in pre-capitalist societies.1

Arruzza rightly notes that Woods argument is unfortunately common currency amongst
numerous Marxists who still maintain a hierarchy between principal exploitation (based on
class) and secondary oppression (based on gender and race). Further, she notes that Woods
focus upon, on the one hand, capitalisms logical structure as one indifferent to gender and
racial oppression, and, on the other hand, her recognition that capitalisms concrete history is
one in which these forms of oppression have continuously occurred, is confusing and unhelpful
from a political point of view. Insofar as capitalism always occurs in concrete historical forms
Arruzza argues Woods treatment of capitalism as above all an ideal type in which extraeconomic inequalities do not play any substantial role does not explain why its unfolding has
actually never done without them.
This notwithstanding, Arruzza continues with a critique that, in my view, lessens the force
of her otherwise compelling arguments. She writes that one of Woods mistakes is the confusion
between what is functional to capitalism and what is a necessary consequence of it. Further,
she maintains that Woods problem like that of other Marxists is to conflate the logical and
historical level as if they could be used as interchangeable arguments and methods of analysis.
For Arruzza, they should remain separate and distinguishable. Thus, she argues that while Wood
might be right in contending that gendered and racial inequalities are not necessary to the
inner workings of capitalism if we think of the latter at a high level of abstraction this
nonetheless does not prove that capitalism would not necessarily produce, as a result of its
concrete functioning, the constant reproduction of gender oppression, often under diverse
forms. Arruzza thus concludes that, given the difficulty of showing at a high level of abstraction
that gender oppression is essential to the inner workings of capitalism, we must instead look
for the answer at the level of concrete historical analysis, not at the level of a highly abstract
analysis of capital. When we do that, she suggests, we see that the core of capitalism i.e., the
1Ellen

Meiksins Wood, Capitalism and Human Emancipation, New Left Review I/167 (1988), 6.

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production of surplus-value cannot exist without socially reproductive labor, which has been
historically predominantly female. The unity of reproduction and production is thus the key to
understanding contemporary capitalism as a complex totality that needs domination and
alienation as much as exploitation.
While I agree with the idea that we need to understand capitalism as a complex totality
and as an historical social production relation within which gendered and racial oppression are
constantly reproduced as part and parcel of its functioning, I am both unclear about the
distinction Arruzza makes between what is functional to capitalism and what is a necessary
consequence of it and I disagree with the idea that we must keep logic and history separate.
I would argue that by conceding that capitalism at a high level of abstraction might not
need gendered and racial oppression in order to survive, though it produces them as its
necessary and non-contingent consequences, we fundamentally remain trapped within Woods
reasoning. In other words, if we argue that capitalism might not require gendered and racial
oppression as its presuppositions at the logical structural level, but rather as its necessary
byproducts at the historical level, we still need to pose the questions: why does capitalism do
so? What is the inner logic of capitalism that requires gendered and racial oppression to be
continuously produced and reproduced by necessity albeit in shifting forms? What is the
mechanism according to which capitalism causes gendered and racial oppression? If we say that
capitalism produces oppression by necessity, we are in fact still putting forward an argument
that requires explanation at the logical structural level, and not only at the historical level.
My sense is that this impasse is due to the binary thinking according to which the logical
and historical levels are distinct one from the other. Instead, I think we should rather
comprehend the relationship between these levels in a dialectical manner. To quote Istvn
Mszros,
in any particular type of humanitys reproductive order, the social structure is unthinkable without its
properly articulated historical dimension; and vice versa, there can be no real understanding of the
historical movement itself without grasping at the same time the corresponding material structural
determinations in their specificity.2

In other words, we cant separate logic, or structure, from history because they are dialectically
related moments of our historical materialist attempt to grasp and to change the historically
determined structure of the world in which we live. In this vein, I think we should not displace

Istvn Mszros, The Dialectic of Structure and History: An Introduction, Monthly Review,
Vol. 63.1 (2011).

36
our reasoning regarding the role of gendered and racial oppression onto the historical terrain
alone, but try to articulate an answer at the level of the structural logic of capitalism as well.
I propose that one potentially promising way of analyzing capitalisms structural need for
gendered and racial oppression while considering its concrete historical dimensions is to look at
capitalisms logic of valorization through the lenses of capitals necessary political form: i.e., the
nation-state.
But before I argue this point more thoroughly let me briefly discuss the second
aforementioned element which I regard as haunting our discussion: intersectionality theory.

Intersectionality Theory

Since its coinage by Kimberle Crenshaw in her seminal 1989 article Demarginalizing the
Intersection of Race and Sex,3 the concept of intersectionality and the theoretical field it has
opened up posed a serious challenge to feminist theories, Marxist and non-Marxist alike. In a
nutshell, intersectionality theory if one can talk of a theory at all and not instead of a heuristic
device maintains that each individual and group occupies a specific social position within
interlocking systems of oppression. For example, the discrimination experienced by women of
color in the US context should be understood as resulting from their location at the junction
between gendered, racial and class based structures of oppression and exploitation.
Intersectionality has been described as the most important theoretical contribution that
womens studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far.4 By highlighting some
feminist currents systematic overlooking of the different life experiences of racialized women
when compared to those of white women as well as racialized men in Western societies, and
also by criticizing Marxism or at least certain economistic currents within it for considering
race and racism as secondary, or derivative forms of oppression with respect to class
exploitation, intersectionality has obliged scholars and activists to confront the gendered
dimensions of racism in unprecedented ways. As Gail Lewis put it,

Kimberl Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, Chicago Legal
Forum, special issue: Feminism in the Law: Theory, Practice and Criticism (1989), pp.
139-167. Although of course the problematic related to intersectionality does not begin with
Crenshaws seminal intervention. For instance, one should trace it back at least to Sojourner
Truths famous speech Aint I A Woman.
4

Leslie McCall, The Complexity of Intersectionality, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, Vol. 30.3 (2005), 1771-1800, 1771.

37
To cast intersectionality as such a powerful and creative concept, theory, and analytic is perhaps to bear
witness to the generative capacity of theory making that comes from the margins. It is to acknowledge
that black women and other women of color produce knowledge and that this knowledge can be
applied to social and cultural research beyond the issues and processes deemed specific to women
racialized as minority, that it can become part of a more generalizable theoretical, methodological, and
conceptual tool kit.5

Beside putting the experience of racialized women center stage, intersectionality has also
underlined an important methodological question: oppression is not a matter of a single issue
only, nor of adding each single axis of oppression one to the other. Instead, oppression is an
intersectional field and experience; it is the result of the interlocking between different and yet
connected systems of domination.
Moreover, intersectionality theorys refusal to conceive of racial or gendered oppressions
as secondary, or derivative in relation to class or even as mere ideologies as we still find
theorized by Marxist authors like Terry Eagleton and Martha Gimenez6 and to think of them
instead as equal axes of domination in capitalist society has had the salutary effect of pushing
Marxist feminists to interrogate more deeply assumptions and theoretical baggage inherited
from economistic readings of class. Confronting intersectionalitys pervasive intervention in
feminist studies as well as in many fields of the humanities and the social sciences, I think
several Marxist scholars feel increasingly compelled to question what kind of social relation

Gail Lewis, Unsafe Travel: Experiencing Intersectionality and Feminist Displacements, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38.4 (2013), 869-892, 871.
6

In The Illusions of Postmodernism Terry Eagleton argues that: Social class tends to crop up in
postmodern theory as one item in the triptych of class, race and gender, a formula which has
rapidly assumed for the left the kind of authority which the Holy Trinity occasionally exerts for
the right. The logic of this triple linkage is surely obvious: racism is a bad thing, and so is
sexism, and so therefore is something called classism. Classism, on this analogy would seem
to be the sin of stereotyping people in terms of social class. See Terry Eagleton, The Illusions
of Postmodernism (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, 56-57. Noting Eagletons intervention,
Martha Gimenez wrote: To refer to class as classism is, from the standpoint of Marxist theory,
a deeply misleading formulation because class is not simply another ideology legitimating
oppression; it denotes exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the
means of production. See Martha Gimenez Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking
The Trilogy, Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 8.2 (2001), 23-33.

38
class is, as well as to excavate Marxs writings to find insights on the role played by race and
gender within the capitalist mode of production.7
But above all, intersectionality theory speaks loudly to Marxists because it frames the
problem of race, gender and class as dimensions of a complex integrated totality.
Intersectionality, in other words, implicitly rejects the idea that capitalism is indifferent to
gendered and racial oppression and maintains that all forms of oppression and exploitation
play an equally pivotal role in shaping our unequal societies.
Nevertheless, the problem with intersectionality theory lies precisely in the fact that it
falls short of delivering what it promises. First, most accounts of intersectionality have limited
themselves to describe instances of intersections between different axes of domination, but
without explaining how and why they occur in specific forms, at certain times and in determined
contexts. Second, they have assumed the existence of different systems, or axes of oppression
but without questioning the configuration, functioning, historical dimensions and the very
nature and existence of these systems themselves (in this sense, similar to triple system
analyses that Arruzza rightly criticises). Third, intersectionality theory tends to think of
oppression as a spatial metaphor and as an individual experience, which I think runs the risk of
reifying the subject of oppression and of not grasping the movements, changes and
temporalities of oppression itself. Finally, intersectionality theory has mostly not problematized
capitalism as the societal, historical and political-economic order within which these
intersections take place.
Intersectionality theory, in other words, poses the right questions but has not yet
produced satisfactory answers as to the problem of why and how gender, race and class together
are essential to the production and reproduction of inequalities under capitalism.

The Nation-State

How can we overcome the double impasse created by our dissatisfaction with both those
Marxist readings that deem racial and gendered oppression as unnecessary from a structural

An increasing number of Marxist scholars in the last years have discussed intersectionality in
more or less critical ways. See Kevin Anderson, Karl Marx and Intersectionality, Logos, Vol.
14.1 (2015); Susan Ferguson, Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race
and Embodied Labor, Race, Gender & Class, Volume 15.1-2 (2008), 42-57; Abigail Bakan,
Marxism, Intersectionality and Indigenous Feminism, Paper presented at the Historical
Materialism Annual Conference, London, 2013; Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through: Essays on
Feminism, Marxism and Anti-racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

39
logical viewpoint to capitalisms survival and with intersectionality theorys present limitations
to provide a solid theoretical infrastructure that challenges such readings?
Before this impasse, Arruzza and other Marxist feminists have resorted to unitary theory,
which argues that gendered and racial oppression do not reflect the existence of two
autonomous systems but have become an integral part of capitalist society through a long
historical process that has dissolved preceding forms of social life. Furthermore, they have
warned Marxists against fixating on capital as a unit of production only, but rather to see how
social reproduction is essential to capitalist functioning and to the production of surplus-value
itself. The unity between production and reproduction, they maintain, allows us to analyze
gendered and racial oppression within capitalist societies both as legacies from pre-capitalist
social formations that capitalism re-shapes in different forms, and as necessary consequences of
capitalism itself.
While I agree with the underlying premises of unitary theory, and that social
reproduction theory offers crucial resources for understanding gendered oppression under
capitalism, I also think that more work is needed to show if and in what ways social reproduction
theory can account for racial oppression. Moreover, we need to clarify whether social
reproduction theory enables us to explain not only the historical dimensions of gendered and
racial oppression under capitalism, but also why they are necessary to the structure of
capitalism. In other words, we still need to explain why capitalism needs to oppress women and
racialized people. That is, we need to combine our historical understanding of capitalism as a
societal order that requires the constant reproduction of labor-power with an understanding of
the logical structure of capital accumulation as a process that both requires this work to be done
by women (and perhaps racialized people too) and as a mechanism that presupposes the
subjugation of women and the racialization of certain people in particular.
As I wrote above, I certainly do not claim to have answers to these very complex issues,
whose rigorous treatment would require not only the hard work of the concept, but also
empirically and historically grounded demonstrations. However, I would like to propose
tentatively that one possible way of dealing with the double dissatisfaction with the Marxist
thesis of indifferent capitalism and with intersectionalitys lack of explanatory power and, thus,
one way of trying to produce an account of the intersection (and unity) of gendered and racial
oppression with class exploitation as necessary presuppositions and not only consequences of
capitalism, is to look more closely at capitals inseparable friend: the nation-state.
Capital accumulation is not possible without the nation-state as its political form, its
framework and its necessary mediator. As Marx wrote in Volume 3 of Capital, the state is the

40
political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence which is integral to the specific
economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers.8
For instance, Marx analysed the creation of the world-market itself as resulting from the
competition and uneven development between different national capitals.9 For reasons of
space, I cannot go into the enormous debate on the relation between capital and the state,
which has engaged numerous Marxist scholars often from very different perspectives.10 To give
an idea of why capital accumulation requires the nation-state as its necessary framework and
mediator I will briefly quote a passage by Neil Davidson, which has the benefit of being
extremely clear and, in my view, right on the point. As Davidson puts it:
The capitalist class in its constituent parts has a continuing need to retain territorial home bases for
their operations. Why? Capitalism is based on competition, but capitalists want competition to take
place on their terms; they do not want to suffer the consequences if they lose. In one sense then, they
want a state to ensure that they are protected from these consequences in other words, they require
from a state more than simply providing an infrastructure; they need it to ensure that effects of
competition are experienced as far as possible by someone else. A global state could not do this;
indeed, in this respect it would be the same as having no state at all. For if everyone is protected then
no-one is: unrestricted market relations would prevail, with all the risks that entails. The state therefore
has to have limits, has to be able to distinguish between those who will receive its protection and those
who will not.11

Not only is the state the necessary framework and mediator of capital accumulation in a global
marketplace, but also nationalism is the necessary ideological corollary of capitalism.12
By putting forward the hypothesis that the valorization of value, or capital accumulation
and capitalist reproduction, needs by necessity the nation-state as much as it requires formally
free labor-power to exploit, we can begin framing the problem of the intersection (and unity)
between class exploitation and gendered and racial oppression in new ways.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 37 (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 778.
9

For a discussion of this point see Massimiliano Tomba, Marxs Temporalities, trans. Peter D.
Thomas and Sara R. Farris (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
10

Bob Jessop, Globalization and the National State, in Paradigm Lost: State Theory
Reconsidered, eds. Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), 185-220; Chris OKane, State Violence, State Control: Marxist State Theory and
the Critique of Political Economy, Viewpoint Magazine, Issue 4, 2014.
11

Neil Davidson, 2008, Nationalism and Neoliberalism, Variant, No. 32 (Summer 2008)

12

Ibid.

41
As postcolonial feminism in particular has compellingly showed,13 the nation-state as
capitals chief political form is not thinkable without the oppression of women. This occurs in a
twofold manner. On the one hand, the nation as the allegedly homogenous community, with a
common origin/destiny and kinship that is attached to the state, can only think of women as its
symbolic markers as well as cultural and biological reproducers. This is true not only for ethnic
conceptions of the nation as Kulturnation and Volknation, but also in those cases in which the
nation as such is the driving force of liberation movements. Even when nationalism has played
the role of a liberating force, such as in the context of the decolonization, and the issue of
womens rights has accompanied that of national independence, the results for women have
often been disappointing. After independence, womens role has frequently been reaffirmed as
that of biological reproducers of the (new, liberated) nation. For instance, despite their key role
during the Algerian war of independence from France and in the National Liberation Front, at
the end of the conflict Algerian women did not gain the equality and rights they had wished for.
One of the reasons for this limitation was, as Moghadam argues, that the struggle was one for
national liberation, not for social (class/gender) transformation.14 In other words, the nation
any nation cannot do without exercising its control over womens bodies and womens childraising role, because the very future of the nation depends on them.
On the other hand, the state as the territorialization of centralized political authority and
administrative machine guaranteeing and reproducing unequal class relations is the principal
organizer of gender orders in a society. The state is not only the dispenser of policies that have
overtime systematically disadvantaged women and discriminated against racialized people in
different spheres of social life. It is above all the most important mediator of social
reproduction as well as the fabricator of racism as an institution.
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici shows how the consolidation of capitalism in the
16th and 17th century in Europe required state interventions to guarantee the growth of the

13

Anne McClintock, No Longer in a Future Heaven: Gender, Race, and Nationalism, in

Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. Anne McClintock,
Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shobat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 89-122. For
an overview of different interpretations of the theme of women and the nation, see Kumari
Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: ZedBooks, 1986); Nira
Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, (London: Sage, 1997); Between Woman and Nation:
Nationalisms, eds. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon, and Minno Moallem (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999.
14

Valentine Moghadam Introduction, Gender and National Identity, ed. Valentine Moghadam
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 12.

42
population; that is, a secure basin of labor-power for the growing industries. These interventions
included forms of punishment for women who tried to maintain some control over procreation.
Furthermore, the establishment of the nuclear family as the center for the reproduction of the
work-force took place under the auspices of the modern nation-state at the time when capital
was consolidating its position as the dominant mode of production across the Western World.
The Factory Acts in the United Kingdom in the 19th century that limited the employment
of women and children in the factory created for the first time the figure of the full-time
housewife within the working class family. Throughout the 19th century and especially the 20th
century, the creation of the male breadwinner as the main income earner in the family was the
product of state legislation meant to shape a disciplined workforce and above all to avoid capital
paying the costs for the social reproduction of labor-power. In Europe in the 20th century up
until the 1970s, the relegation of social reproduction within the family, where women were to
take on the bulk of domestic tasks for free, was possible thanks to a number of welfare state
provisions that allowed the mono-income family to survive.
Even now, when more and more women enter the paid labor force and do less social
reproductive work (but only to be exploited in ways that have been described as increasingly
feminized), social reproduction has not been socialized through public state care provisions, or
paid by capital, but increasingly commodified. The commodification of social reproduction
(elderly and child care, housekeeping etc.) is possible thanks to so-called cash-for-care state
monetary transfers, which push individuals and families to seek for caretakers and
housekeepers on the market. And, quite importantly, migrant racialized women from postsocialist countries and the Global South constitute the lions share of the supply of these
caretakers and housekeepers on the market. A crucial moment of intersection (and unity)
between gendered and racial inequalities takes place at this juncture then. In order to
guarantee the reproduction of the work force (which includes more and more women), the state
uses public funds from taxpayers (mostly exploited workers) to provide families with small
budgets that allow them to employ racialized women as care and domestic workers in slave-like
conditions. This does not happen by chance. The employment of migrant women for socially
reproductive work in fact allows the capitalist driven nation-state both to maintain traditional
gender-roles in place and to reproduce sexual and racial divisions of labor in society. The fact
that it is racialized women who do socially reproductive work most often in informal (illegal and
undocumented) and very exploitative conditions allows capital to maintain social reproduction
on the edge between market and non-market relations and thus to guarantee its reproduction
at no costs for capital and it permits the nation-state to avoid providing public care facilities.

43
This now brings me to discuss why the nation-state as capitals chief political form is
unthinkable not only without the oppression of women, but also without the construction and
subjugation of racialized people. Again, there is an immense literature on the links between
capital, the nation-state and racism, which I could not even begin to discuss adequately here.15
I will limit my comments instead to pointing to one passage from Marxs letter to Sigfried Meyer
which in my view helps us to see in what ways racial oppression is a necessary presupposition
of, or condition for, capitalist accumulation when scrutinized through the lenses of the nationstate. He wrote:

All industrial and commercial centers in England now have a working class divided into two hostile
camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as
a competitor who forces down the standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself to be
a member of the ruling nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists
against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He harbors religious, social and
national prejudices against him. His attitude towards him is roughly that of the poor whites to the
niggers in the former slave states of the American Union. The Irishman pays him back with interest in
his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of English rule
in Ireland. This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic
papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the
English working classs impotence, despite its organization. It is the secret of the maintenance of power
by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this.16

In this passage Marx does a few important things. Firstly, he shows that nationalism is an
important source of racism (though he does not use the latter concept). Racism takes the form of
the antagonism between workers of different nationalities, whereby the English proletarian as a
member of the ruling nation harbours religious, social and national prejudices against the
Irish proletarian as a member of the ruled nation. Secondly, he shows that racism is constructed
and intensified by all means at the disposal of the ruling class; in other words, racism is a key
element of the ideological state apparatuses. Racism is thus constructed and nourished by the
ruling nation-state in order to stigmatize migrant members of the ruled-nations. Thirdly, Marx
shows that racism, or the antagonism between native and migrant workers, is the secret of
capitalists power. It is its secret not only because such antagonism prevents the working class
from uniting against its real enemy (i.e., the capitalist class), but also because the presence of
15

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (London: Verso, 1999); Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).
16

Karl Marx, Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and Karl Vogt, Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume
43 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 475. My emphasis.

44
migrant workers who compete with native workers for wages allows capital to have a reserve
army of labor, which is what makes accumulation possible.
Marx describes the reserve army of labor in Capital Volume 1 as a mass of human
material always ready for exploitation.17 In Marxs analysis, (a) the increase in the magnitude of
social capital, that is, the ensemble of individual capitals; (b) the enlargement of the scale of
production and (c) the growth of the productivity of an increasing number of workers brought
about by capital accumulation, creates a situation in which the greater attraction of laborers by
capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion.18 These three interrelated processes, for
Marx, set the conditions according to which the laboring population gives rise, along with the
accumulation of capital produced by it, [also to] the means by which it itself is made relatively
superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing
extent.19 Marx describes this as a law of population, which is peculiar to the capitalist mode of
production just as other modes of production have their own corresponding population laws.
The paradox of the creation of the surplus laboring population under the capitalist mode
of production is that while it is a necessary product of accumulation, this surplus population is
also the lever of such accumulation; namely, it is that which forms a disposable industrial
reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own
cost.20 The reserve army of labor is not constituted only of migrant workers. However, Marx well
understood that capitalists benefit greatly from a migrant, non-native disposable workforce in
particular, because it permits them to maintain the working class divided along artificially
created national lines of separation. The state, on the other hand, makes sure the migrant
workforce remains available and disposable for capital by denying migrant workers citizenship
rights and thus keeping them in a state of political and economic fragility. We can thus see in
what ways racism, just like gendered oppression, is not only produced and reproduced by
capital through the mediation of the nation-state, but is also an essential premise for the logical
structure of capital accumulation.

17

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 35 (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 626.
18

Ibid., 625.

19

Ibid.

20

Ibid., 626.

45
Concluding Remarks

My hypothesis that the nation-state could be the lens through which we can try to see the
necessity of gendered and racial oppression, alongside class exploitation, as preconditions and
not only consequences of capital accumulation certainly would need to be tested through hard
conceptual, theoretical and empirical-historical work. Such work would also need to consider the
many mediations at the ideological, symbolic, psychological and political level that bridge
gender and race to capital and the nation-state, as well as to clarify the dialectic between the
logical structure and history of capital accumulation. Furthermore, we should clarify what is the
adequate level of abstraction at which we can analyze the logical structure of capital; whether it
is exclusively the microeconomic level in which we consider capital as a relationship between
formally free and equal individuals, or also the macroeconomic level in which we consider the
spheres of circulation, consumption and reproduction more fully.
Arruzzas important critique of dual and triple system analysis and of the indifferent
capitalism thesis for their lack of coherence regarding the explication of gender, race and class
oppression and exploitation as key constituents of capitalism pushes us to think through these
complexities and to strive to find answers that not only can improve our understanding of
oppression and exploitation but that also can help us to find ways to put an end to them.

46

Closing the Conceptual Gap:

A Response to Cinzia Arruzzas Remarks on Gender

FTC Manning | May 4, 2015

Hannah Hch, Fashion Show, 1923-1935

This text raises the question of a unified theory of social relations. Cinzia Arruzzas essay
Remarks on Gender reminds us of the debates, left dormant for decades, around creating a
unified theory of capital. However, Arruzzas path toward that unification is one that abdicates
the possibility of locating gender and race as part of the abstract, logical, or essential
mechanisms of capitalism, opting instead to incorporate these pervasive relations as aspects of
capitalisms historical and concrete unfolding.
This rejection of gender and race as part of the inner logic of capital is not particular to
Arruzza. It is standard practice within Marxist-feminism, as well as other tendencies which
attempt to argue for the importance of axes of violence, oppression, or exploitation beyond class
(e.g. race, sexuality, gender) within the capitalist mode of production. The possibility that
gender and race are somehow inherent to the inner logic of capital is not rejected because the
attempts to prove it have failed it is dismissed out of hand, before any attempt has been made.

47
Hypotheses which do locate gender or race in the essential logical structure of capital are so rare
or unpopular that Marxist critics like Arruzza do not even feel the need to argue against that
possibility. It is taken for granted that these relations do not appear in capitals inner logic, in the
abstract structure at the heart of capitalism.
While joining, albeit ambivalently, in this out-of-hand dismissal (see below), Arruzza also
brings some important critiques to bear upon this and other erroneous resolutions to the
question at hand.
Arruzzas essay lays out three common approaches taken by feminists who care to attend
to capitalism: dual systems theory, indifferent capitalism, and the unitary thesis. I would
like to add another category, what I provisionally call systemic fundamentalism. With this
approach, I associate some theorists who Arruzza has designated within dual systems theory,
such as Christine Delphy. Arruzza criticizes Delphy for holding that patriarchy is a system of
exploitation more fundamental than capitalist class relations, and upon which capitalist class
relations are established. Arruzzas primary critique of this perspective is that it implies the
existence of class relations between women and men, and hence irreconcilable antagonisms
between the two genders, of which she finds no evidence (more on this below). But more
importantly for my designation of systemic fundamentalism, Arruzza critiques Delphy for
arguing that patriarchal class relations would trump capitalist class relations deflating the
importance of one system by emphasizing another more fundamental and essential one.
Arruzza writes: In The Main Enemy, Delphy insists that being a member of the patriarchal class
is a more important fact than being part of the capitalist class. For Delphy, on Arruzzas reading,
the system of patriarchy is more fundamental than that of capitalism.
Arruzzas central critique of our next approach, dual systems theory (or triple, for those
who deign to acknowledge race relations), is that they do not attribute to patriarchal or racial
systems their own internal force of self-reproduction, which is ostensibly the most basic
requirement for the existence of an independent mode of production. Arruzza aptly notes that
the only formidable attempt to articulate this force has been in ideological or psychological
terms, as an independent system of signs. She dismisses these on the basis of their
implausibility, their close tarrying with fetishistic and ahistorical notions of psyche. She criticizes
most dual systems theories for taking economics to be the purview of capitalist social relations,
while ideological and cultural forms are the terrain of gender and racial processes. Finally,
Arruzza rightly criticizes the lack of organizing principle or logic to the Holy alliance of
systems which would explain their interrelation. This downfall can also be attributed to the
intersectionality approach which, while constituting an important intervention into legal

48
theory (the genesis of the term), and serving as a useful shorthand for people who want to say
that they care about all three and dont privilege one over another, nonetheless leaves the
details of these relations entirely vague.
However, Arruzza takes most issue with her third approach, the indifferent capitalism
approach and appropriately so, since it is the most formidable in contemporary Marxist and
communist thought. For some thinkers that adhere to the indifferent capitalism approach,
capitalisms abstract indifference to gender and race means that capitalism is in fact beneficial
for women in general, and/or for racial minorities, in certain contexts. Arruzza writes, for instance,
that some claim that within capitalism women have benefited from a degree of emancipation
unknown in other kinds of society. However some people who take up the indifferent
capitalism approach do attend to the importance of racial and gender relations, arguing that
the logical indifference of capital to race and gender is complicated by the historically
ubiquitous role of gender and race, which re-inscribes gendered and racial oppression through
contingent historical processes. On this reading, gendered and racial oppression are relatively
inescapable because of how extensively they have permeated capitalism, historically.
In posing her own chosen hypothesis, that of a unitary theory of capitalist and
patriarchal social relations, Arruzza chooses the excellent foil of Ellen Meiksins Wood, a
proponent of the indifferent capitalism approach, who staunchly argued that race and gender
only have a contingent and opportunistic relationship to capital, not a necessary one. She
summarizes Woods perspective thus: Capitalism is not structurally disposed to creating
gender inequalities.
However, Arruzza makes a substantial concession to Wood:
It is perhaps difficult to show at a high level of abstraction that gender oppression is essential to the
inner workings of capitalism If we were to think of capitalism as pure, that is, analyze it on the basis
of its essential mechanisms, then maybe Wood would be right. However, this does not prove that
capitalism would not necessarily produce, as a result of its concrete functioning, the constant
reproduction of gender oppression, often under diverse forms.

Here we find a relatively straightforward argument for the logical indifference but historicallyconcrete necessity of gender to capital something she seems to cast doubt upon earlier in the
piece when she writes, in her critique of the indifferent capitalism perspective, that some of
this perspectives adherents maintain that we should carefully distinguish the logical and
historical levels: logically, capitalism does not specifically need gender inequality and could get
rid of it; historically, things are not so simple. Elsewhere she again proposes this perspective,
which she seemed at first to critique, but now in a positive light: In order to respond to the

49
question of whether it is possible for womens emancipation and liberation to be attained under
the capitalist mode of production, we must look for the answer at the level of concrete historical
analysis, not at the level of a highly abstract analysis of capital.
There is some tension here. At the same time as she she states that on the most abstract
level, we may not find gender within the defining characteristics of capital, Arruzza also criticizes
the indifferent capitalism thesis for arguing that capitalism is not structurally disposed to
creating gender inequalities, and that capitalism has an essentially opportunistic relation with
gender inequality.
For a moment, let us look back to Delphy, and the systemic fundamentalism approach
that I added to Arruzzas list of approaches to the gender/capital question. The problem with this
perspective was that it displaced the importance of capitalist social relations by emphasizing the
more fundamental and essential relations of patriarchy. Arruzzas version of a unitary thesis
does the opposite it logically displaces gender relations in favor of the more fundamental
relations of capital (which ostensibly do not necessarily include gender). She insists upon
avoiding the economic reductionism that is taken up by some Marxist theories of capital, and on
this point she is undeniably correct.1 But on Arruzzas account, whether or not the inner laws of
capital are exclusively economic, we still do not find gender there. Nor race, which enters for
Arruzza primarily as a complication, along with class, to straightforward gender relations. While
Arruzza does not firmly state that gender cannot be understood logically or in the abstract forms
of capital, she casts doubt on this possibility and instead moves to a discussion of ostensibly
non-abstract historical processes in order to locate the reproduction of gender in capital.
Arruzza introduces the concept of social reproduction, modifying it from its more
traditional definition as the process of reproduction of a society in its totality to a more focused
definition of social reproduction generated by the Marxist-feminist tradition, in which social
reproduction designates the way in which the physical, emotional, and mental labor necessary
for the production of the population is socially organized: for example, food preparation, youth
education, care for the elderly and the sick, as well as questions of housing and all the way to
questions of sexuality. Arruzza lauds the concept for enlarging our vision of what was

It is less clear whether or not Arruzza believes that the inner laws of capital are themselves
purely economic. This essay assumes, following Marxs work in the Grundrisse and throughout
the volumes of Capital, that the essential inner laws of capital are not confined to an economic
sphere.

50
previously called domestic labor, thereby extending our analysis outside the walls of the
home, since the labor of social reproduction is not always found in the same forms.2
Social reproduction here appears to designate processes and relations that are both
logically and historically necessary. This necessity functions, for Arruzza, to subvert the problem
of considering gendered dynamics (such as domestic life, gendered divisions of labor in the
factory) and some racial dynamics (immigration, racial divisions of labor) as contingent. In
other words, I understand Arruzza to be saying something like this: since this category of social
reproduction circumscribes the essential gendering and racializing processes within capital
whether they take place in the waged sphere or not and we can say with certainty that this
category of activity is necessary to capital, then on this basis we can argue for the deep necessity
of gender and race to capital.
However, what remains logically and structurally contingent is the anchor between these
necessary forms of social reproduction (e.g. housework, slave labor) to gender and to race. On
Arruzzas account, it appears to be this association between certain activities on the one hand,
and gender or race on the other hand, that is historically constituted. To put this point slightly
differently: whereas capital will always require members of working class to do unwaged activity
such as childrearing and dishwashing, and will always engage in exploitative forms of social
differentiation in which some people are cast out of work, enslaved, or otherwise hyperexploited, it appears as if it is not necessary that these dynamics are associated with gender or
race.
Her discussion beautifully sets in relief the question she doesnt ask: how can race and
gender relations be located within the logical understanding of the capitalist mode of
production? Some people working within the communizing current have importantly
approached this question,3 attempting, in the words of Gonzalez and Neton, to delineate
categories [of gender] that are as specific to capitalism as capital itself.4 The way that Arruzza
frames her discussion of social reproduction allows the question to emerge in an interesting
2

Note that the Marxist-feminist use of the term reproduction and other complementary concepts
is aptly problematized by Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton in The Logic of Gender in
Endnotes,Vol. 3.
3

See Gonzalez and Neton, op. cit; P. Valentine The Gender Distinction in Communization
Theory, in Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, Volume 1, 191-208; Bernard Lyon, The
Suspended Step of Communisation in SIC: International Journal for Communisation; Thorie
Communiste, Response to the American Comrades on Gender.
4

Gonzalez and Neton, 57.

51
way. She acknowledges that certain forms that exceed waged labor are logically necessary to
capital e.g. unpaid housework.5 She also acknowledges that women are intimately connected
to this necessary form of work. However, that connection remains contingent women and
social reproduction could, theoretically, be decoupled. But what if we were to collapse the set of
necessary social relations associated with women in capitalism and the category of women in
capitalism. What if woman was nothing but the formal category of people who are on one side
of specific set of social relations, similar to the way in which the proletariat is nothing but the
formal category of people who are on one side of a specific set of social relations. In the case of
the proletariat, the social relations consist in being those who own nothing but their own labor
power, which they must sell in order to make a living, and be subject to the threat of being cast
out of labor pool by capital. In the case of women, or perhaps more effectively and accurately
feminized people (see below), this set of essential social relations certainly involves the bulk
of what Arruzza refers to as social reproduction.
This set of relations has been generally been theorized by some working within a
communization framework as a distinction between two gendered spheres immanent to the
capitalist mode of production. Recently, these spheres have been further specified in terms of
the non-social6 or the abject7, but Im sure all interested parties would agree it requires far more
thought and study. Further, it seems clear that the category woman is insufficient, and that a
more dynamic concept such as feminized people may serve both to emphasize the fact that it
is a process and a relationship, and that the people in question are not always women. This also
entails a richer understanding of the social relations involved, including, for example, sexual
violence, which is something which can be easily left to the side in theories of social
reproduction, but which is certainly fundamental to the gender relation. As Ive argued
elsewhere: Understanding sexual violence as a structuring element of gender also helps us to
understand how patriarchy reproduces itself upon and through gay and queer men, trans
people, gender nonconforming people and bodies, and children of any gender.8 I also believe
it is also one of the ways to render internal to a theory of gender the way in which some women,
5

Many Marxists who oppose logical understandings of race and gender also acknowledge this;
see, for example, David Harvey Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
6

See P. Valentine, op. cit.

See Gonzalez and Neton, op. cit.

Valentine, op. cit., 204.

52
particularly trans women, women of color, and poor women, experience on average far higher
levels of susceptibility to violence and appropriation. At the moment, such acknowledgments
still remain sidebars to our theorizing, as is made quite clear by the preceding sentence. The
question is: how do we develop our categories in a way that integrates these elements more
deeply and integrally, in a way that subverts these superficial nods?
Arruzzas formulation carries another confusing implication: it suggests that that
relations of social reproduction, like housework, latch onto gender and become entwined with
it. This implies that gender must then stand autonomous from those social relations, as waiting
to be used in some sense. Here is where the indifferent capitalism thesis comes in through the
backdoor, and we find ourselves back at the initial critique of an opportunistic relationship
between gender and capital. We also abruptly encounter the question of what exactly is gender,
then, and from whence does it come?
So let us close the conceptual gap between feminized people and the material
relations they have in capital. A similar move is essential for the category of racialized/ethnicized
people. To this end, Cedric Robinsons work is extremely effective. In Black Marxism, he argues
forcefully for the necessary role of what he calls racialism in the establishment and
reproduction of capitalism, as a process with its own rationale that is immanent to capitals
rationale, rather than as a contingent adjunct to the class relation.9 His work, for one, along with
the Afro-Pessimist concept of social death10 points towards defining that set of social relations
which would be the real content of the category of racialized people in capitalism. Chris Chen
has recently mobilized this work, along with an analysis of paradigms in racialism and race
studies, towards the goal of accurately specifyingthe relation between race and capital, arguing
that [r]ace is not extrinsic to capitalism or simply the product of specific historical formations
such as South African Apartheid or Jim Crow America. Likewise capitalism does not simply
incorporate racial domination as an incidental part of its operations.11

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill,
University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]).
10

See, for example, Frank Wilderson III, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil
Society?, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 9.2 (2003),
225-240; and Jared Sexton The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black
Optimism, InTensions 5 (Fall/Winter 2011), 1-47.
11

Christopher Chen, The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality, in Endnotes Vol. 3.

53
While Marxist critics have contended that relations of race and gender appear too
malleable and complex to be articulated as structural and abstract,12 the class relation is no less
blurry and porous there are as many exceptions to the basic definition of working class as
there are to the basic definition of feminized people and racialized people. Surely miners and
clerical workers and sailors and nurses are no more or less logically united as the working class
by their relation to capital than feminized or racialized people are? And there are innumerable
exceptions to the strict definition of the proletariat amongst those we would surely like to
include within that class that will struggle and win against capitalism: semi-proletarianized
seasonal migrant laborers who retain cultivated land; petit bourgeois who own their own
businesses and storefronts; religious communities or leaders who live off donations; and, most
famously, the lumpenproletariat.
In this text, I am more concerned with closing the conceptual gap referenced above than
I am with nailing down the specificity of these relations that reproduce gender and race. That
latter project is, in the end, the more important one, but here my goal is merely to show that if
we are truly committed to a rigorous and unifying theory of capital, we must consider the
possibility that race and gender are as logically necessary as class is to this mode of production.
We must follow this hypothesis as far as it takes us. There has not yet been any good reason
established as to why we should turn back from it. This path would entail the rigorous
investigation of what those relations truly are. It would invariably render our understanding of
capital more accurate, providing a more effective conceptual whetstone on which to sharpen our
practical weaponry.
On a different note, it is important to challenge Arruzzas statements about the
negligible benefits of patriarchy to men. She suggests that A man would lose nothing, in terms
of workload, if the distribution of care work were completely socialized instead of being
performed by his wife. In structural terms, there would be no antagonistic or irreconcilable
interests. But this is far from the case: it is not possible for many elements of the hierarchized
gender relation to be socialized. Men benefit directly and indirectly from the unpaid invisible
work that women do, as well as from the relations of domination which are inherent aspects of
the capitalist gender relation. Specific activities within the sphere of unwaged work can be
socialized, but there will always necessarily remain a sphere of un-socialized work, and women
or feminized people will, for the most part, do it. It is also not possible for coercive relations of

12

See, for example, exchanges between David Harvey, Alex Dubullay, and myself regarding
Harveys recent book.

54
secretive sexual abuse to be socialized. It is not possible for violent forms of control and psychic
isolation and domination to be socialized. These are essential components of the gender
relation which bolsters mens power, of the mechanisms by which men obtain and protect
power, resources, acquiescence. There is no reason for men to let go of them anymore than
there is reason for capitalists to socialize their profits. The gender relation, like the class relation,
is, even in the abstract, not exclusively economic.
Similarly, the direct and indirect material benefits of racialization to white and non- or
less-racialized people are profound, and have been defended to the death throughout the
history of capital. Neither can the particular relations of exploitation and oppression that
characterize racialism or racialization be considered socializable. They are dynamics which
cannot be ameliorated by even the best capitalist planning; to the contrary, capital is in part
these processes of racialization/ethnicization. These processes include, at least, (1) the
permanent and semi-permanent marginalization from remotely stable wage labor: as there will,
definitionally, always be a group marginalized in this way, that group is thereby a racialized/
ethnicized group. In Chens words, The expulsion of living labour from the production process
places a kind of semi-permeable racialising boundary bifurcating productive and unproductive
populations even within older racial categories: a kind of flexible global colour line separating
the formal and informal economy, and waged from wageless life.13 Those who are not
marginalized in this way, and hence who are less racialized/ethnicized, will defend any threat to
their position. In the United States, working class whites have fought back vehemently on every
possible battlefield when black people have fought to gain access to waged economic stability.
Also essential to racialization/ethnicization is (2) the vulnerability to untimely death, which is a
vulnerability inherent to some large section of the proletariat no matter what. On this reading,
the creation of this section is a racializing and ethnicizing process, and so the group which
experiences this vulnerability has and will be, for the most part, racialized and/or ethnicized. In
the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal
production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.14
Finally, this type of unifying theory which closes the gap (unifying rather than unitary
here is meant to acknowledge that the picture will never be complete, will always entail further
detail and nuance, a re-scaffolding which is not to doubt our access to truth and accuracy, but
13
14

Chen, op. cit.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 28.

55
to acknowledge our finite limits) subverts the common sense of Arruzzas point that triple
systems theory is intuitive because these relations manifest themselves independently. She
writes that those who have developed an awareness of gender inequality usually experience
and perceive it as determined by a logic that is different and separate from capital. In
concordance with the arguments of many feminist theorists of color that race, gender, and class
never appear as distinct,15 or of working-class feminist theorists who describe their inability to
disaggregate their gender oppression from their class oppression,16 of trans women activists
and theorists who articulate the mutual constitution of of these axes with transmisogyny,17 and
of prison abolitionists who, in their work, are fully confronted with the imbrication of race, class,
sex, gender, sexuality, and so forth,18 we must acknowledge that for many people, these things
do not tend to manifest themselves independently. To some they appear independent while to
others they appear unified, and while that poses some interesting questions, it is beyond the
scope of my concerns here. I believe that when we understand class, feminization, and
racialization as different organs in a body, different laws within an ecosystem, or whatever
metaphor we choose to use for different but mutually constituted parts within a whole, it is
unquestionable that at every moment all of them are really at play. Their appearance depends
on many things, including an individuals situation within the whole.
I welcome Arruzzas reopening of these debates with tremendous warmth and
excitement, and I offer my critiques and questions in comradeship to the project of a unifying
theory of a capitalism in which, by Arruzzas words, It is evident that social relations include
relations of domination and hierarchy based on gender and race that permeate both the social
whole and daily life.

15

See, for example, bell hooks, Aint I a Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1981), as well as
Sojourner Truths own words and work; Sharon Patricia Hollands The Erotic Life of Racism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Lakeyma King, Inversions & Invisibilities: Black
Women, Black Masculinity, & Anti-Blackness and Pluma Sumacs Notes on Prostitution, both
forthcoming in Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, Vol. 2.
16

See, for instance, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years,
1960-75 (San Francisco, City Light Books, 2002); Michelle Teas Rent Girl (San Francisco, Last
Gasp Books, 2004); and Selma Jamess Sex, Race, and Class (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).
17

See Susan Strykers film Screaming Queens; also, recent interviews with Laverne Cox, for
example here.
18

See, for example, both Angela Davis and Dean Spades work, nicely epitomized in speeches
found here (Davis) and here (Spade).

56

Logic or History?
The Political Stakes of Marxist-Feminist Theory

Cinzia Arruzza | June 23, 2015

Hannah Hch, Industrial Landscape, 1967

57
When I first started writing this series of remarks in Italian (Riflessioni degeneri), subsequently
collected into a single piece for the English version, my aim was twofold. The first was to make a
complex debate one that has unfolded over the course of several decades accessible to a
public of activists and people interested in gender, race, and class politics. The second was to
contribute toward reopening this crucial debate about how we should conceptualize the
structural relationship between gender oppression and capitalism. This is why I am deeply
grateful to Oksala, Farris, and Manning for accepting to respond to my piece and for articulating
powerful and illuminating critiques, and which have helped me think through these
complicated matters more carefully and rigorously. Specifying the relationship between the
logical and historical dimensions of capitalism is one of the most controversial problems in
Marxist theory, and one about which I am very uncertain. But, as this is the point of contention
between Oksala, Farris, Manning and myself, I will address a set of concerns pertaining to this
problem which is relevant to the central issues at stake: whether or not we can claim that gender
oppression is a necessary feature of capitalism and, if so, at what level of abstraction can we
make that claim. While there is an array of further criticisms in their responses to my essay, this
issue is the focus of all three. Hence I will spend most of the limited space at my disposal
addressing it. In the appendix, I will respond to two of Mannings misrepresentations of my
position. It is likely that these misrepresentations are misunderstandings caused by the
ambiguity of some of my initial formulations. However, as they are connected to political issues,
it is important to clarify them for the sake of advancing our discussion and marking the real
points of dissent.
From altogether different perspectives, Oksala, Farris, and Manning share a similar
objection to my critique of Ellen Meiksins Woods 1988 New Left Review article, Capitalism and
Human Emancipation.1 All three observe that I have conceded to Meiksins Wood both the
distinction between the logical and historical dimensions of capitalism, and her claim that
gender and racial oppression cannot be shown to be necessary to capitalism in a logical sense.
Crucially, all three conclude that these concessions vitiate any compelling basis for
distinguishing my account of the unitary theory from what I have called an indifferent
capitalism approach. Thus, all three authors assume that the failure to show that gender

Ellen Meiksins Wood, Capitalism and Human Emancipation, New Left Review I/88 (1988),
3-20.

58
oppression is a logical precondition for capitalism entails that the relationship between
capitalism and gender oppression is merely contingent and opportunistic.2
Manning and Farris conclude that we must demonstrate the logical necessity of gender
oppression and of racial oppression for capitalism. Conversely, Oksala reaches the opposite
conclusion, that we should be wary of totalities and epistemic certainties and fully endorse
historical configurations as contingent, variable and opportunistic combinations of distinct
fragments. While their conclusions pull me in opposite directions, this dilemma is based on a
shared presupposition: all three seem to presuppose that there is nothing between logical
necessity and arbitrary contingency; that one either demonstrates the first or fully endorses the
second; and that gender oppression and racial oppression are either logical preconditions for
capitalism or that their relationship to it is opportunistic, highly variable and, ultimately,
dispensable. In other words, all three accept the presupposition of a theory of indifferent
capitalism endorsed by Meiksins Woods and other Marxists. It is precisely this presupposition
that I reject and that I tried to question in my piece.
Farriss and Mannings preoccupation with proving the logical necessity of gender
oppression for capitalism arises from an understandable political concern, i.e., the worry that
failing to demonstrate this logical dependence would mean that gender oppression is politically
secondary to class politics. Unfortunately, this concern is motivated by the widespread (and, in
my view, mistaken) tendency among Marxist authors to directly derive political conclusions or
theses from theoretical arguments developed at a high level of abstraction. This tendency lies
behind the political conclusions Meiksins Wood draws in her own piece. Faced with this
tendency, it is perfectly understandable that Farris, Manning, and other Marxist feminist authors
have been preoccupied with showing the requisite logical necessity so as to grant womens
struggle the appropriate attention and centrality. A similar preoccupation arises regarding the
logical necessity of racial oppression. While I understand and share this concern, I think that we
should reject rather than answer this interpellation, given that it rests on a mistaken
presupposition: the dynamics of political struggle cannot be directly deduced from theoretical
observations at this level of abstraction.
In fact, this tendency has led some Marxists or activists within class politics to elaborate
hierarchies of processes of political subject formation, struggles, and practices based on abstract
2

This point of criticism, that I dont have any persuasive theoretical basis for a distinct unitary
theory left, seems to me more explicitly articulated in Oksala and Manning, but I suspect that
Farris may agree with them given her insistence on the necessity to have a logical
demonstration of the fact that gender and racial oppression are preconditions to capitalism.

59
logic hierarchies within which racial and gender oppression would be secondary due to
capitalisms logical independence from them. This approach, however, only reveals a bookish
understanding of political struggle. It is an approach that neglects the lived experience of
exploited and oppressed people, the concrete and conjunctural processes through which they
come to acquire political agency and subjectivity, the way they perceive themselves and their
conditions of existence, the sedimentation of their past struggles, the actual history of the
country they live in or they come from, and a number of other factors that are crucial to the
effective construction of political strategies and projects.3 Once I have decoupled the issue at
stake from this underlying political preoccupation, I can address it for what it is: a theoretical
and analytical concern. While this concern may or may not have some political consequences,
we certainly cannot directly deduce the kind of relevant political consequences that have been
drawn in the past by a number of authors and political organizations.

Gender Oppression and Historical Causality

Before I restate my main arguments against indifferent capitalism more clearly, I think some
points raised by Manning and Farris need to be clarified. Manning claims that I (like many other
Marxist feminist authors) do not even feel the need to argue against the possibility that we
can locate gender or race in the essential logical structure of capitalism. While my main claim
i.e., that capitalism is not indifferent to gender oppression does not, in my view, depend on
demonstrating that gender oppression is a logical precondition to capitalism, it also does not
depend on arguing for the impossibility of such a demonstration. Thus, I do not argue that such
a demonstration is impossible because I am actually agnostic regarding its possibility, and
because my central claim does not require that I take a position on this issue. Despite my
agnosticism in regards to its possibility, it is clear to me that I have not managed to actually
demonstrate it myself, and that I find the other attempts so far, (including both Farris tentative

From this viewpoint, Meiksins Woods political considerations on gender are quite at odds with
the more sophisticated stance she takes on Thompsons theory of class experience. See Ellen
Meiksins Wood, The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E. P. Thompson and His
Critics, Studies in Political Economy 9 (1982), 45-75.

60
attempt, and Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Netons attempt cited by Manning) unpersuasive.4
While I am open to the possibility of locating gender and race as necessary preconditions of
capitalism at the logical level, this position is very difficult to prove. Unlike Manning, I think that
the attitude of several Marxist feminist authors is a symptom of a real theoretical difficulty rather
than an out-of-hand or prejudicial dismissal.
In light of these concerns, I wish to clarify a second point, raised by Farris. Farris
disagrees with my claim that logic and history are separate, and then suggests that they have a
dialectical relationship. I suspect that Farris took my claim to suggest that logic and history are
separate in the sense that they are unrelated. But, of course, I reject this claim as it entails that
logical analyses of capitalism tell us nothing about concrete capitalist societies. Such a position
would make our theoretical efforts meaningless and sterile exercises of intelligence. My claim
about logic and history is much more banal than the one Farris attributes to me, as I only meant
that they are distinct. Although she questions this distinction, the non-identity of logic and
history is consistent with Farris view that logic and history have a dialectical relationship, given
that such a relationship precludes their identity: a dialectical relationship can entail
opposition, but certainly not unmediated identity and, consequently, holding that logic and
history are identical (i.e. denying the distinction between them) is equivalent to denying the
dialectical relationship between them.
While I may agree with Farris that there is a dialectical relationship between logic and
history, it is still unclear to me what we actually mean by dialectical. The quote provided by
Farris from Mszros, according to whom the social structure is unthinkable without its historical
dimension and vice versa, simply re-articulates the problem without clarifying it. While I
4

Farriss attempt draws on Davidsons theory of the nation-state: this is an extremely complex
and controversial issue that I cannot fully address here. I will confine myself to note that
Davidsons explanation of nationalism leans toward a functionalist explanation that raises an
array of serious difficulties: see Neil Davidson, The Necessity of Multiple Nation-States for
Capitalism, Rethinking Marxism 24.1 (2011), 26-46. This is why, while I find Farriss
considerations on intersectionality illuminating, I am more skeptical about her outline concerning
the logical necessity of gender and race based on capitals need for a multiplicity of nation
states.
I agree with much of Gonzalezs and Netons piece. However, a key point of their argument is
the assumption that for labour to exist and serve as the measure of value, there must be an
exterior to labour and that for labour-power to have a value, some of these activities [the ones
that reproduce labor-power] have to be cut off or dissociated from the sphere of value
production. Unfortunately, in my view their piece does not really succeed in demonstrating on a
logical level that this is the case, hence I do not think that they have demonstrated that gender
is logical precondition to capitalism. I will write about this point more on a different occasion.
See Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes, Vol. 3 (2013).

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obviously agree with this point, it still leaves open the theoretical task of specifying how we
concretely think the two aspects together and the exact relationship between them. As I have
already said, I cannot offer a complete solution to this larger problem. However, by addressing
the more relevant distinction between logical possibilities and practical possibilities, I will
provide some elements towards clarifying the relationship between logic and history.
Since I have clarified these two points first, that I am not prejudicially dismissing
attempts to demonstrate that gender is a logical precondition to capitalism and, second, that I
do not deny the relationship between the logical dimension and historical dimension of
capitalism I can now reformulate my main argument against the indifferent capitalism
thesis. My argument is formulated as an immanent critique of Meiksins Woods argument: I
provisionally accept her presupposition that demonstrating the logical dependence of
capitalism on gender oppression is not possible (a point I am myself agnostic about), and I then
proceed to show that this premise does not license the conclusions she draws. My argument has
two parts: the first methodological part argues that we must distinguish between logical
possibilities and historical (or, alternatively, practical) possibilities; the second concerns the
distinction between a logical precondition to capitalism and a necessary consequence of
capitalist accumulation. In articulating my argument again, I will also answer some of Oksalas
objections by restating the necessity to think of capitalist societies as moving totalities; in
contrast to expressive totalities in which each part reflects and corresponds to the others, or
where each part is functional to the whole, this moving totality is a set of social practices,
relationships, and institutions which are all subject to the determining constraints and pressures
posed by the logic of capitalist accumulation.
As I will expand upon further, such a conceptualization entails refining and
distinguishing the different senses in which we use the words necessity, necessary, as well as
laws. When speaking of historically situated social practices and phenomena, terms such as
necessity and laws should always be taken in a looser sense than what is generally
understood. Even the so-called capitalist laws of motion are tendencies in that, qua social
practices and relations, they do not operate with the necessity pertaining to certain physical
laws. In other words, we can speak of necessity and laws in a weaker sense than our usage of
those terms in the natural sciences. They are also weaker than logical necessity and logical laws,
and perhaps part of the confusion on this point lies in the conflation between the necessity
pertaining to logic (to our logical thinking) and that pertaining to history, social practices, and
social relations which is a different and weaker kind. This applies to both the relationship
between gender and racial oppression and capitalism as well as to the unfolding of capitalist

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accumulation itself. In using the term necessary consequences, I am referring to the
consequences that will tend to be produced by capitalist accumulation, which should not
provoke the theoretical anxieties evidenced by my respondents.

Practical Plausibility and Concrete History

When working with logical categories or with the analysis of capitalism at a high level of
abstraction, we should recognize that we are referring to a theoretical model used to describe
some aspect of reality. While I do not deny that this theoretical model has undoubtedly been
constructed through the formalization of actual, historically-produced constraints, it is still a
theoretical model that refers to while remaining non-identical with the reality it describes.
When thinking at this level of abstraction we operate with specific kinds of possibility, which I
would define as either logical or nomological. Logical possibilities denote what is thinkable
without contradicting the given definition of the object at stake. If, in my definition of
capitalism, the core of capitalist accumulation is the valorization of value (and hence the
extraction of surplus-value through exploitation), then I cannot conceive of a capitalist society
sans exploitation without logically contradicting my given definition. But I can think any
configuration that does not contradict it as being possible.
Put simply, logical possibilities concern the coherence of our thoughts toward objects. As
such, the range of logical possibilities is as a general rule both wider and more rigid than that of
real possibilities, which have to account for constraints other than logical coherence and thus, to
a limited extent, allow for the existence of contradictory processes. A nomological possibility has
to do with sets of laws: it circumscribes as possible everything that does not contradict those
given laws. Now, coherence in thought does not exhaust the range of constraints that limit the
set of possibilities on a practical or historical level. Nomological coherence, in its turn, would be
able to express the entire range of constraints that either limit or rank possibilities on a
historical or practical level, if and only if we assumed that all practical necessitating constraints
can be formalized into laws. I am deeply skeptical that this is the case. This is not to suggest an
irrationalist approach to parts of reality; I only mean to suggest that logical formalization is not
the sole rational means of grasping reality at our disposal, and that not all necessitating
constraints are grasped in this way or formalized at that level. The cognitive mapping of certain
constraints demands concrete historical analysis or other heuristic tools.
To make this point clearer, the concrete history of capitalism involves several practical
constraints. For example, given the origin and development of capitalism in the United States, I

63
think that we can make a plausible case that racial oppression, in varying and historically
specific forms, not only is but will likely remain a constitutive part of American capitalism and
American society. It is likely that this practical constraint cannot be formalized in the same way
that the extraction of surplus-value can. Nonetheless, it is a necessitating constraint that
significantly qualifies possibilities according to degrees of probability. We may, of course,
conceive of a version of American capitalism without racism, as such a possibility does not
contradict either a given definition of capitalism or its formalized laws of motion. However, this
scenario is historically implausible. Practical plausibility is what should really matter for political
concerns, because we do not do politics, or at least we should not do it, by means of mere
thought experiments whose only rule is logical coherence. To sum up, the unmediated jump
between different forms of possibility is a mistake; we should reject this mistake rather than
taking it as the guiding premise of our theoretical efforts.

Precondition or Consequence?

To continue with the second part of this re-articulation of my critique of indifferent capitalism,
proponents of this approach such as Meiksins Wood fail to distinguish between the status of
determinants that are logical preconditions to capitalism, and the status of determinants that
are necessary consequences of capitalism. Farris observes that my distinction between these two
terms is unclear, arguing that if we say that capitalism produces oppression by necessity, we are
in fact still putting forward an argument that requires explanation at the logical structural level,
and not only at the historical level. Farris is certainly correct in claiming that this necessity
cannot be proved only at the historical level without some explanation at the logical structural
level. However, as I have hoped to show in the preceding paragraphs, I have not denied this.
Farriss critique is fair given that the formulation and structure of my argument was unclear and
potentially misleading. Hence her criticism has, thankfully, allowed me to reformulate my point
in more robust terms.
The distinction between a logical precondition and a necessary consequence of a social
dynamic is warranted given that a set of social phenomena can be necessarily and constantly
produced by the logic of capitalist accumulation without being a logical precondition for it. So,
even if we were compelled to concede that gender oppression or racial oppression are not
logical preconditions for capitalism, this concession would still not entail the conclusion that the
relationship between capitalism and these forms of oppression is only an opportunistic and
contingent one, and that capitalism is indifferent to them. In order to demonstrate the

64
indifference of capitalism to gender and racial oppression, a proponent of the indifferent
capitalism approach would have to argue that gender and racial oppression are not
necessarily produced and reproduced by the logic of capitalist accumulation. In other words,
the definition of capitalism as essentially indifferent to womens and racialized peoples
oppression exploiting them in merely opportunistic terms fails to take into account the fact
that capitalism does not just use pre-existing oppressions, but also produces them as a
byproduct of accumulation. To quote Martha Gimenez on gender inequality:
Gender inequality thus conceptualized, as a structural characteristic of capitalist social formations, is
irreducible to microfoundations; i.e., it cannot be solely or primarily explained on the basis of either
mens or womens intentions, biology, psychosexual development, etc. because it is the structural effect
of a complex network of macrolevel processes through which production and reproduction are
inextricably connected. This network sets limits to the opportunity structures of propertyless men and
women, allocating women primarily to the sphere of domestic/reproductive labor and only secondarily
to paid (waged or salaried) labor, thus establishing the objective basis for differences in their relative
economic, social and political power. However, analysis of concrete or specific instances of gender
inequality within households, enterprises, bureaucracies, etc. is not only amenable to study at the level
of microfoundations, but requires this. We cannot fully explain oppressive practices in a given
institution without taking into account the agency of the major social actors; these actors intentions,
attitudes, beliefs, and practices have to be explained in terms of the structural conditions that made
them possible.5

Claiming that gender oppression is a necessary consequence of capitalism entails relating an

analysis of the logic of capitalist accumulation to historical considerations concerning the role of
gender differentiation in reproductive activities. As it should appear clear by now, there is no
real disagreement between Farris and myself on this point: the only real disagreement concerns
both her insistence on the necessity to demonstrate that gender and racial oppression are
logical preconditions for capitalism, and her attempt to prove this point by means of an analysis
of the necessity of the nation-state for capitalism.
To summarize my above response, I challenge the notion that capitalism has a merely
opportunistic and contingent relationship to gender oppression on two counts: the first is that
the indifferent capitalism approach is based on a conflation between different kinds of
possibility and fails to take into account forms of practical necessity or constraints that cannot be
formalized into laws of motion; the second is that it fails to take into account that sets of social
phenomena can be necessary consequences of the logic of capitalist accumulation, even if they

Martha Gimenez, Capitalism and the Oppression of Women: Marx Revisited, Science &
Society, 69.1 (2005), pp. 11-32, 24.

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are not a logical preconditions for it, and that, moreover, these necessary consequences can be
analyzed, at least to some extent, in abstract terms.

What is Unitary in Unitary Theory?

These two points allow me to answer part of Oksalas objections. Some of her acute objections
stem from my ill-advised use of the term organizing principle to discuss the link between
gender oppression and capitalism. Organizing principle is a misleading term for the social
dynamics I am describing, as I recognized only too late. I am willing to drop it altogether, as it
fails to properly account for my claim that capitalist accumulation is the shared framework of
various forms of oppression, and because it may imply functionalist conceptualizations of the
dynamics of capital or suggest the existence of a plan of capital.
Another difficulty has to do with the term unitary theory, which raised some problems
from two opposing viewpoints: both for Oksala and for Manning. The fault here is not entirely
mine, as I inherited the label from Vogels book, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, where,
in my interpretation, the term unitary was only meant to demarcate her position from dual or
triple systems theories.6 (The term unitary, however, may once again be misleading since it
can be interpreted as indicating that all sets of social phenomena examined hence the various
forms of oppression at stake are organized according to a single logic that can be studied with
a single theoretical tool or mode of critical analysis. Understood in this way, it clearly raises a
serious problem for my own position, as I want to avoid a functionalist account as much as I
want to avoid a merely contingent account of the relationship between various forms of
oppression and capitalism. Given that dropping this label may be more complicated because of
the history of the debate on these issues, I wish to clarify once again what my position on these
points is.
I argue that capitalist accumulation produces, or contributes to the production of, varying
forms of social hierarchy and oppressions as its necessary consequences. Moreover, I argue that
it has a greater consequential and determining power than other forms of social hierarchy, and
that it poses necessitating constraints that determine all other forms of social relations. Thus, my
claims are more robust than simply stating that in a total social formation something is
connected to something else. However, my claim is weaker than arguing that capitalist
accumulation organizes other social hierarchies according to a single logic. Moreover, it is my
contention that the logic of capitalist accumulation is pervasive (that is, that it has the capacity of
6

Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014 [1983])

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coloring all other social relationships), which is one of the grounds for speaking of a
contradictory and articulated moving totality.
I am aware that this restatement of my position can and probably will be unsatisfying to
many. The difficulty lies in the fact that I am trying to carve a different path between the opposite
directions in which Oksala, on the one hand, and Manning and Farris, on the other, would like to
pull my argument. Making this path compelling necessitates additional work on articulating the
notions of historical necessity and possibility, of totality and of determination, as well as
reconsiderations of the relationship between logic and history, and of the nature of Marxs
method of exposition. Clearly, being an even more difficult task, such work would require a
combination of robust empirical, historical reflection and theoretical elaboration. It is work to be
done in the years to come.

Appendix

In Mannings piece there are two misrepresentations of some of my arguments that seem
theoretically or politically relevant enough to require a clarification. This clarification is not
intended as polemical, but as a necessary step to clear the ground from possible
misunderstandings and further the debate. Moreover, it is quite possible that I bear some
responsibility for these misunderstandings.
The first of these misrepresentations concerns the issue of the benefits to men afforded
by gender oppression. My concern with this misrepresentation of my argument is both
theoretical and political, because whether we consider men and women as two antagonistic
classes obviously has relevant political consequences. Manning writes that it is important to
challenge Arruzzas statements about the negligible benefits of patriarchy to men; then, to
counter my argument, she goes on making a list of activities and practices that cannot be
socialized, including sexual abuse and violence.7
I am puzzled by Mannings interpretation of my position, and I must admit that I am
frustrated by her implication that I deny that men significantly benefit from womens
oppression. Such a position is basically an antifeminist one that I have always been antipathetic
to. My argument was quite simple and concerned the definition of class relationships as based
on exploitation, understood as the extraction of surplus. My intent was to show that men and
women cannot be considered as two classes in this technical sense due to the absence of
7

This is the contentious sentence: A man would lose nothing, in terms of workload, if the
distribution of care work were completely socialized instead of being performed by his wife.

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extraction and appropriation of a surplus: in this sense, and only in this sense, men would lose
nothing from the socialization of care work. Moreover, I have never claimed that gender
inequalitys benefits to men are negligible. I have only claimed that they are not an adequate
ground for speaking of a class antagonism between men and women or for defining men and
women as two classes. This does not make these benefits negligible: occupying a higher
hierarchical place in the social order, working less than those who are in a subaltern position,
having greater social recognition, and having a privileged access to violence and domination
over others are not negligible benefits at all. As a matter of fact they are a powerful device of
division and conflict among exploited and oppressed people and within a class. They would not
be so powerful, if they were negligible. Still, within the theoretical framework I tried to
elucidate, these elements alone do not define what a class relationship is, and cannot be taken
as a ground for defining gender oppression as a class antagonism involving two classes men
and women. As my argument concerned the class status of gender inequality, it is unclear to me
how Mannings reminder of sexual abuse and violence, for example, may challenge it, unless
what is a stake is the suggestion of a different definition of class and class relationship. If this is
the case, then there is indeed a theoretical disagreement between Manning and me.
Finally, Mannings misinterpretation of my argument may be connected to another
substantive theoretical disagreement with my position: Manning claims that there always will
be a sphere of unsocialized work, and that women or feminized people will do it for the most
part. Based on these premises, Manning concludes that there is as little reason for men to let go
of the benefits they draw from womens oppression as there is for capitalists to socialize their
profits. Since the theoretical bases for these observations whether Mannings argument is a
psychological, anthropological or ontological one, whether it refers to only capitalist societies or
is a more general claim are unclear to me, I will forego further debate on this issue.
The reason why I deemed necessary to clarify this point is the identification of the gender
oppression of women by men with class antagonism would entail that mixed-gender politics is
a self-undermining political strategy for women insofar as such inter-class cooperation would,
ultimately, be detrimental to women. Antagonistic class interests, indeed, cannot be reconciled
in the long term. As a matter of fact, the definition of gender oppression as a class antagonism
has led, more often than not, to separatism. Perhaps one of the reasons for conceptualizing
gender oppression as a class relationship is that we want to consider unpaid reproductive work
as exploited work. However, we do not really need to define women as a class in order to
achieve this outcome. Workerist feminists, for example, have conceptualized unpaid care work
as exploited productive work without conceptualizing the relationship between men and

68
women as a class relationship; others, while denying that reproductive work produces value,
have argued that it contributes to both the reproduction of capitalist society and the production
and extraction of value, hence it is exploited.
The second point concerns race. I have never written that the category of social
reproduction circumscribes the essential racializing processes within capital. As a matter of fact,
it does not. We cannot adequately analyze race without addressing numerous determinants
including the international division of labor, colonialism, imperialism, migration, and combined
and uneven development; these determinants cannot be exhaustively conceptualized through
the notion of social reproduction as used by Marxist feminists. While there may and should be
important overlapping aspects, social reproduction theory cannot adequately address these
matters on its own. Consequently, I am skeptical of the fashionable tendency to theoretically
conflate discussions on race and gender: while it is true that racial and gender oppression are
strongly intertwined at some level of analysis, and while it is often the case that one cannot
understand the one without the other, at the level of the theoretical analysis of the
consequences of capitalist accumulation and their determination of the reproduction of forms
of hierarchy and oppression, there are several factors that play a fundamental role for one form
of oppression but not for another.