Companion to Feminist Studies. Группа авторов
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Social Reproduction, Imperialism, and Revolutionary Subjects
As neoliberalism solidified its global hegemony in the twenty‐first century, Marxist feminist debates frame revolutionary struggles from women returning to the commons, in revolutionary collective forms of land‐based survival. The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil have developed Marxist feminist critiques of global capitalism (Desmarais 2007; Zapatista Women of the Caracol of the Tzotz Choj Zone 2018). They combine older reproductive forms of subsistence farming and home‐based production of basic goods, without patriarchal gender relations. In Argentina, worker‐collectives revived stagnant factories with profit‐sharing and worker‐based ownership of the means of production rather than consolidation of wealth into the hands of a few. As theories of praxis, these examples of solidarity economies address two interconnected sites of struggle. First, they combat imperialism through their refusal to give up land, labor, and lives to the capitalist demand for new markets. Second, they fight against the primitive accumulation of their lands, refusing to cede the remaining commons through maintaining cooperative landholdings and the shared means of production. In Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the Kurdish Workers Party, through its regional semi‐autonomous governance in northern parts of West Asia, has sought to redefine the family, foster equitable decision‐making, and support women's independence (Ocalan 2013). Divides between home and work, private reproduction, and public production overlap in many of these alternatives to capitalism.
Another significant debate with Marxist feminism relates to the role of the state. Those who took a position that solutions to economic and gender oppression need to take place outside of the nation‐state or formal political structures were promoted by anarchist and syndicalist feminists (see, for example, Ackelsberg 1991). Syndicalists were active in the labor movement and argued for the importance of local union organizing and strikes to effect radical social change. Feminists in the anarcho‐syndicalist tradition from Brazil, Argentina, Italy, and the US theorized the emergence of new political subjectivities and new collectivist projects residing within neoliberalism's contradictions. These scholars theorize a subject of resistance that hollows out the compliance of the ideal subject of neoliberal capitalism: the entrepreneur. As Miranda Joseph and Carla Freeman describe, the entrepreneurial subject is configured as autonomous from its social fabric and thus flexible, with time, space, self, and survival (Freeman 2014; Joseph 2014). Lynn Marie Tonstad raises the possibilities of ending capitalism through queering the entrepreneurial practices of self, including “risk‐taking, vulnerability, openness to failure, unexpected forms of affiliation” (Tonstad 2018, p. 227). Cristina Morini suggests that women workers in particular provide ideal subjects for navigating the precarity of these entrepreneurial conditions of work, making them both “more resistant and more reactive” (Morini 2007).
When capital meets the limit of mechanizing the working subject's experiential knowledge, the possibilities for liberation from work begin. For Kathi Weeks, the precarity of work mutates into the post‐work state of finance capitalism (Weeks 2011). In this context, the politics of antiwork can imagine new horizons for collectivity, value, and revolt. Heather Berg explores the refusal of “social necessity debt,” that is, how workers “are evaluated based on the perceived necessity of their work to the reproduction of society” (Berg 2014, p. 163). Antiproductivism, for Berg rejects how feminized labor demands greater sacrifice from workers due to this social necessity debt of these workers' affective reproductive labor. Instead, these theories recenter the demands of workers, particularly those in the service sector, to hold capital, rather than workers, accountable to the burden of work left undone.
As a politics, antiwork centers those subjects that were at the margins of industrial capitalism: the landless, rural communities, women, the indigenous, the incarcerated. Sandro Mezzadra and Veronica Gago herald autonomous politics of the flexible revolutionary subject as the engine for new political forms that exist on the razor's edge of neoliberal capitalism. These revolutionary subjects balance between shoring up the crises of capitalism and creating new collectivist social forms in its wreckage (Mezzadra and Gago 2017). As Gago argues extensively, an alternative of what she calls “baroque economics” arises from creative forms of collectivism across informal and formal economies, paid and unpaid work, affective and material economies (Gago 2017).
Intersectional Organizing
Experiments with popular front movements in Europe and the Americas in the 1910s through the 1930s spawned a theory of Marxist‐feminist praxis that organized wide coalitions built on the recognition of differences among people, and took into account the oppressive character of these relations. Beginning in the 1930s, Louise Patterson, a Harlem‐based activist in communist circles led the mass campaign for the Scottsboro defendants (Howard 2013). Against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s legal strategy of defense, Patterson built an international movement to demand justice for the seven black young men who were accused of sexually assaulting two white women on a train in Alabama. To build a mass movement for their release, Patterson had to undermine centuries of racial segregation based on abject violence, cross adversarial class lines, and bridge thousands of miles between urban and rural communities, all the while keeping the movement's leadership in the hands of African American working people in rural areas.
Patterson developed a theory of Marxist feminist praxis that held that in the context of US capitalism, black women faced multiple oppressive relations that resulted in their greater exploitation under capitalism: of class, race, and gender (Gore 2011; McDuffie 2011). In her essay, “Toward a brighter dawn,” she wrote, “over the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, as Negroes” (Patterson 1936). Claudia Jones, a communist party member who worked on the Scottsboro campaign, further elaborated Patterson's invocation of historically specific relationships to exploitation (Davies 2008). Jones saw these complex relations as locations for greater strength among workers, rather than solely sites of division to be overcome by class solidarity: “The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressive seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti‐imperialist coalition, is enhanced” (Jones 1995, p. 108). Jones argued that Marxist feminist struggles shaped by what Patterson called the “triple exploitation” faced by black women in the US could best lead the communist movement for liberation as a whole. As an early theory of intersectional praxis, Patterson and Jones proposed a Marxist feminist politics guided by the differential sites of oppression and exploitation faced by women of color, rather than simply by women workers. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective members theorized the liberatory possibilities for this praxis: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Jones 1995).
The praxis of intersectional organizing on the left informed movements for reproductive justice and the movement for welfare rights, led by poor women of color in the United States in the 1960s (Ransby 2003). Both movements attacked ethics of women's place in dominant regimes of heterosexuality, marriage, and the family (Tillmon 1972). The reproductive justice movement sought bodily autonomy for women's reproductive decisions, and material state support to fully realize those choices (Ross and Solinger 2017). In addition, it linked reproductive justice to dismantling the carceral state that strictly policed (as it constituted) the class politics of gendered, raced, and ethnicized embodiment within capitalism (Davis 1981). The welfare rights movement demanded a basic income from the US state that historically had excluded them from the postwar social wages for single mothers. These sites of praxis further pushed Marxist feminism to analyze different histories of oppression as co‐constitutive in sites of reproduction and production.
In India, Australia, and South Africa, indigeneity and caste as well as race shaped Marxist feminist praxis: what the All India Democratic Women's Association called intersectoral organizing in the 1990s (Armstrong 2013). Marxist feminists based in South Asia theorized the centrality of landless and land‐poor farmers' unfreedom to the working class and agrarian politics of women in particular (Ghosh 2009; Karat 2005; Patnaik 2007). They argued