Overcoming the Hyphenation in Marxist-feminism

Marxists and feminists have long debated the question of strategy, among other things. That common goals call for a common struggle turns out in practice to not be all that obvious. University of Toronto professor, Shahrzad Mojab, in this extract from her essay in Red October: The Russian Revolution and the Communist Horizon (LeftWord, 2017; also available as an eBook), argues for the need to keep both short-term and long-term objectives in sight.


Overcoming the Hyphenation in Marxist-feminism

… [A] century of struggle for linking the two major emancipatory projects, Marxism and feminism, involve[s] more than a preoccupation with theoretical interests … resistance against patriarchy in a country like Iran is inseparable from the rest of the world. This struggle is rooted in the material and intellectual conditions that have emerged since the nineteenth century as well as world-wide resistance to class and gender rule. This story reveals both the universality and particularity of oppression (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.), its political and ideological character, as well as the internationalization of feminist knowledge and women’s struggle for emancipation. This account calls into question nativist, nationalist, and religious reductions of social relations of gender to questions of identity. Theory and politics are products of an international division of labour in which capitalism-patriarchy-racism rules.

[There are] two conflictual trends – one that is theoretical and moves away from synthesizing feminism and Marxism, the other political, that is, the escalating gender oppression and class exploitation that calls out for a blending of the two. In hyphenated relations since the 1960s, Marxism and feminism have coexisted, debated, interacted, and maintained their realms. In fact, with or without hyphenation, the two worldviews have shaped each other since the end of the nineteenth century without creating a theoretical breakthrough. A glimpse of this history reveals flexibility for renovation and inclusion more in Marxism than in feminism. Marxism since its inception has incorporated many advances in the (social) sciences, for example, Marx and Engels’ integration of Darwin’s theory of evolution or Henry Lewis Morgan’s anthropological work, or Lenin’s embracing of John Hobson’s study of imperialism, which amounted to a major shift in Marxist theory of capitalism and the strategy for socialist revolution. In fact, this kind of liaison between Marxism and non-Marxist knowledge and art was underscored by Mao when he emphasized that Marxism ‘embraces but cannot replace’, for instance, realism in art or theory in physics.[1]

One may argue along the same lines that Marxism should embrace feminist contributions to the understanding of patriarchy. Feminisms come with their own dynamics, social bases, theories, methodologies, ideologies, epistemologies, and visions. Marxism’s emphasis on oppression and exploitation appeals to some feminists while the epistemological and methodological persuasions of many feminists are in conflict with dialectics, which distinguishes Marxism from other social theories. Feminist theories are, thus, in a difficult position for absorbing Marxism. In addition to theoretical and epistemological incongruity, the political repression of Marxism has left its mark on the theoretical front. For instance, in the wake of the restoration of capitalism in China and the fall of the Soviet Union, many socialist-feminists or feminist Marxists abandoned Marxism,[2] and those still committed to the critique of capitalism tend to identify themselves as ‘materialist feminists’. Materialism, in this context, is often taken to mean ‘political economy’, which is placed in opposition to ‘culture’, ‘language’, or ‘discourse’. However, this understanding of matter and materialism is not Marxist in so far as Marxism understands matter as ‘the external reality’, that is, all that exists outside our mind, thus forming a dialectical relationship of unity and struggle with consciousness; in this philosophical understanding, all cultural, linguistic, and ‘spiritual’ phenomena are, like economic relations, also part of matter or of material or external reality.

My inclination to remove the hyphen in Marxist-feminism should not be interpreted as a desire for parting the two. Rather, I have tried to delineate a more constructive and enduring relationship between these two major realms of knowledge, two sites of struggle, and two horizons of emancipation. Inessa Armand (1874–1920), the Russian Marxist feminist, said what many Marxists have repeatedly said in different words and contexts: ‘If the emancipation of women is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without the full emancipation of women.[3] There was no illusion, at least in theory, about the intricate nature of emancipation.

Armand and [Mary White] Ovington realized, theoretically, that ‘servitude’ and ‘poverty’ would not end within the framework of the regime of bourgeois rights. Equally significant is Lenin’s repeated emphasis, after the 1917 revolution, that the full legal equality of women and men immediately granted by the Soviet government could not and would not bring about extra-legal (social and economic) equality overnight, a goal which could be achieved only ‘in the complete triumph of communism’. This view is rooted in a historical materialist understanding of the past and future and of the nature of socialist revolution, which treats the equality of genders, classes, races, or nations not as a legal question but more profoundly as also social and economic. Building on Marx, Lenin emphasized that socialism is a long period of transition between capitalism and communism, and necessarily combines the features and properties of both systems. Socialism is, in this understanding, a class society, in which the proletariat is the ruling class holding a vision to eventually abolish itself – and all classes – through protracted class struggle. The restoration of capitalism in the USSR in 1956 led Mao to theorize the dynamics of class struggle in socialism; he emphasized that the communist party itself a product of class society and the site where a ‘new bourgeoisie’, is the main ideological and political source for the restoration of capitalism. In these theorizations, (re-)production in capitalism is exceedingly complex, and this mode of production does not readily lend itself to transformation into communism. In sharp contrast to this view, we find more recent theorizations of communism as a new order that is already emerging more or less spontaneously without recourse to revolution and, commanded by the dynamics of capitalism transformed into ‘Empire’, through new production and labour processes.[4] All of this points to momentous theoretical and political struggles under conditions of unceasing change in the contemporary capitalist world order. Today, interpreting the past and present and charting the future is a heavy burden on both Marxists and feminists.

[Keep in mind] the imperialist war of a century ago, when a new phase in the colonization and re-division of Africa, Asia, and Latin America began. Consider the massacre of Gaza by the settler colonial and Zionist state of Israel which only came into existence in 1948 through the forced expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinian population. The birth of the state of Israel is known to Palestinians as Nakba Day (the Day of the Catastrophe). Thinking through the horror of our time, a world that is messy, chaotic, and riddled with injustice, violence, war, and lawlessness, I observe traces of an order in this anarchy. At the core of this (dis-) order is the logic of patriarchal racist capitalism/imperialism, in which women’s bodies and sexuality are its battleground. In this anarchical social (dis-)order, women inhabit contradictory relations of being the subject/object, possessors/dispossessors, or saviours/betrayers of culture and social relations; this social disorder creates both the condition of women’s liberation and of their subjugation.

Resistance to this colonial order and to the states carved up by imperialist powers out of the remnants of older empires began immediately and everywhere on the three continents – and continues in our time. Women participated, actively and on a mass scale, in the uprisings in Arab countries that began in December 2010 in Tunisia and spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. They were organizers, leaders, and cyber-activists. However, most women did not take part in these protests as members of organized women’s movements demanding the dismantling of patriarchal gender relations. They, together with males and side by side with them, called for the replacement of dictators with parliamentary democracy and thus left the socio-economic system and the class structure intact. Even worse was the centre-less and leaderless politics that was proudly advocated by many, including secular youth groups. While the poverty-stricken majority did not gain any ground, women lost even more as they were subjected to male violence even in the streets and squares. Within a period of two years, the dictators were toppled in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya and were succeeded by well-organized groups advocating another form of dictatorship in the form of theocracy. Not long after in Egypt – the main centre of political power in the Middle East and North Africa – the army ignored the popular quest for parliamentarianism and installed a military dictator at the helm of the state. In Syria, the diverse groups opposed to Assad’s regime relied on regional and imperialist powers for military and political support. Within a year, the country turned into a battlefield between the Assad regime, Islamic fundamentalists, Western imperialism, and Arab and Islamic states in the region. In the absence of revolutionary politics, the uprisings led to yet more theocratic rule in which women, the labouring masses, ethnic and religious minorities, and freedom of opinion and association were seriously threatened. It seemed as if people in the Arab streets were replicating the 1979 Iranian revolution.

In the case of both the Iranian Revolution and the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, the absence of revolutionary consciousness – that is, theory, politics, and organizing – made it possible for imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism to suppress any struggle for revolutionary change. The conflict and coexistence of these two obsolete forces have devastated the peoples and countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Here as elsewhere in the world, women and men are ready for a transformation of this horrible reality into a bright future for the majority of the people. However, consciousness or subjective factors lag behind objective reality, playing into the hands of a minority who have monopolized violence as well as political and economic power.

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[1] Mao Tsetung, ‘Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art’, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1971, p. 281.

[2] For instance, Claudie Broyelle, who wrote enthusiastically about progress in dismantling patriarchal gender relations in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in China, failed to make sense of the restoration of capitalism and retracted her writings. C. Broyelle, Women’s Liberation in China, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1977 and then, C. Broyelle, J. Broyelle and E. Tschirhart, China: A Second Look, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1980.

[3] B. Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Alexandra Kollontai, Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1979, p. 155.

[4] These are the ideas of M. Hardt and T. Negri in Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004).


Featured image: 1975 poster marking the International Women’s Day march. Source: See Red Women’s Workshop.