ABSTRACT
ALTHOUGH MARXIST FEMINISTS HAVE MUCH in common with socialist feminists (see Chapter 6), at least one major point divides these two traditions. Whereas socialist feminists believe that gender and class play an approximately equal role in any explanation of women's oppression, Marxist feminists believe that class ultimately better accounts for women's status and function(s). Under capitalism, they say, bourgeois women will not experience the same kind of oppression that proletarian women will. What is distinctive about Marxist feminism, then, is that it invites every woman, whether proletarian or bourgeois, to understand women's oppression not so much as the result of the intentional actions of individuals but as the product of the political, social, and economic structures associated with capitalism. D
thought, the Marxist concept of human nature is present in Marxist feminist thought. As I noted in Chapter 1, liberals believe that what distinguishes human beings from other animals is a specified set of abilities, such as the capacity for rationality and/or the use of language; a specified set of practices, such as religion, art, science; and a specified set of attitude and behavior patterns, such as competitiveness and the tendency to put self over other. Marxists reject this liberal theory of human nature, emphasizing instead that what makes us human is that we produce our means of subsistence. We are what we are because of what we do-specifically, what we do to meet our basic needs in productive activities such as fishing, farming, and building. Unlike bees, beavers,
and ants, whose activities are governed by instinct, we create ourselves in the process of intentionally, or consciously, transforming and manipulating nature.)
In his Introduction to Marx and Engels, Richard Schmitt cautioned that the statement "Human beings create themselves" is not to be read as "Men and women, individually, make themselves what they are." Rather, it is to be read as "Men and women, through production, collectively create a society that, in turn, shapes them."2 This emphasis on the collective accounts for the Marxist view of history. For the liberal, the ideas, thoughts, and values of individuals account for change over time. For the Marxist, material forces-that is, the production and reproduction of social life-are the prime movers in history. In the course of articulating this doctrine of how change takes place over time, a doctrine usually termed historical materialism, Marx stated that "the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."3 In other words, Marx believed that a society's mode of production-that is, its forces of production (the raw materials, tools, and workers that actually produce goods) plus its relations of production (the ways in which the production process is organized)- generates a superstructure (a layer of legal, political, and social ideas) that, in turn, bolsters that mode. So, for example, Americans think in certain characteristic ways about liberty, equality, and freedom because their mode of production is capitalist.
