ABSTRACT
The first version of this essay was a rather rambling paper I gave at the ‘sex and class’ workshop of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) in England in July 1979. Like a good many other socialist intellectuals (if not economists), I had followed the development of socialist-feminist theory through the 1970s with a good deal of excitement. Here, it seemed, were ideas that were not only sharply relevant to current political practice, but also called into question the basic concepts of socialist theory. But by the end of the decade the theoretical movement had got badly bogged. It seemed to me that was partly because it had accepted structuralist notions of class, culture and patriarchy, and consequently was stuck with static and abstracted notions of the relations among them.
This piece was an attempt to show what the problems might look like if they were shifted back towards questions of dynamics. I had been reading Habermas’ Legitimation Crisis with an honours class, and it seemed that a free adaptation of some of his ideas might be helpful, and should be compatible with a practice-based notion of structure.
The paper went down, if not quite like a lead balloon, then at least like a wounded jellyfish. It was trying to do too much, and not getting enough of it right. Later in the year, with the aid of Sibelius and Wagner, I condensed and reworked it. I offered the product to the CSE’s journal Capital and Class, who after long thought rejected it, saying that they might be interested in a literature review instead…
