مارکسیزم و فمینیزم . نویسنده : شارون اسمیت

Sharon Smith

I WOULD like to address the question of whether Marxism and feminism are compatible theories--that is, are Marxists for or against feminism? Posing the question in this way must seem absurd to anyone who has not been trained in the International Socialist Tendency (IST) over the last few decades.

For most people, feminism is a straightforward concept, representing a movement and school of thought in favor of winning political and social equality for women; likewise, those who are anti-feminists represent right-wing reactionaries such as Rush Limbaugh and the Christian Right, who want to undo all the progress made by the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s.

I received the same political training as Abbie Bakan in the International Socialist tradition via the Socialist Workers Party-Britain, which holds the contradictory view that in order for socialists to fight for women's liberation, it is necessary to be strongly critical of feminism as a body of theory---thus counterposing Marxism to feminism as if it is not possible to be committed to both.

Although we in the ISO from our founding in the late 1970s have been committed as activists to fighting at a grassroots level for women's liberation alongside feminists--marching and organizing side by side in the fight for reproductive rights, against rape and violence against women, and for a broad range of other struggles for women's rights--we also regarded ourselves not only as outside the feminist tradition but, in many respects, hostile to it.

But the truth is, just as there are different strands of Marxism, some with fundamental political differences, so too there are different strands of feminism--and some of them are self-consciously left wing (including Black feminism, that of other women of color, socialist-feminism and Marxist-feminism), who are as critical of feminism's political mainstream as we are.

Unless we acknowledge these political distinctions between feminists, it is impossible to engage with feminism in any serious theoretical way. In many respects, over the last few decades in the IST, feminism became a straw figure--even a caricature of a straw figure, made up of the unlikely mish-mash of separatists who simply hate all men and bourgeois feminists who selfishly care only about gaining access to corporate boardrooms--against whom we Marxists steadfastly defended the "interests" of working-class women and men.

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ONE OF the most glaring consequences of approaching feminism as such a caricature, which is very obvious in hindsight, is that our own theoretical development suffered--not simply from ignorance of evolving left-wing feminist theory over a period of decades, but also because our own conception of Marxist theory became wooden and mechanical, rather than dialectical and materialist, and crude rather than sophisticated.

Marxism was never intended as a theory that sits and gathers dust, or as a set of phrases to be repeated endlessly regardless of the changes in material conditions, but rather as one that is constantly in the process of development and change according to changes in the material world.

There is no question that the classical Marxism of the 19th and early 20th centuries--of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Zetkin and Trotsky--provides a solid theoretical foundation for understanding the root of women's oppression. Above all, the Marxist method provides the tools for further developing all political theory.

What I'd like to argue here is that: 1) Even a number of the classical Marxists were more nuanced in their approach toward women's oppression than the IST assumes; and 2) Classical Marxists, however far-sighted they often were in both theory and practice, at the same time were also constrained by the limits of their own historical circumstances. It took the women's liberation and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and '70s to broaden the scope of the struggle against women's oppression and advance the theory of women's liberation--and that means, feminist theory.

As to the first point: The IST has explained its approach to "feminism" as modeled on the hostility of classical Marxists to bourgeois feminism, and by extrapolation, feminism in general, in the 19th and early 20th century. This is not quite the case. Marx and Engels were extremely conscious of the oppression of ruling-class women, stating, for example, in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at [by communists] is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

Likewise, Clara Zetkin is one of the classical Marxists who Tony Cliff uses to demonstrate their allegedly blanket hostility to feminism. But the facts are much more nuanced.

Cliff writes of Zetkin: "She was contemptuous of the bourgeois feminists, and repeatedly, in hundreds of speeches and articles, she scorned the label 'feminist.'" In reality, while Zetkin sought rightfully to build a working-class women's movement, she expressed empathy with middle-class and even bourgeois women. As she wrote, family law dictates to all married women regardless of class that their husband "shall be your master." Writing specifically about women of the ruling class, she argues:

The bourgeois woman not only demands her own bread, but she also requests spiritual nourishment and wants to develop her individuality. It is exactly among these strata that we find these tragic, yet psychologically interesting Nora figures, women who are tired of living like dolls in doll houses and who want to share in the development of modern culture. The economic as well as the intellectual and moral endeavors of bourgeois women's rights advocates are completely justified. [Emphasis added.]

As to the middle class, including the intellectual class, she argues that middle-class women:

are not equal to men in the form of possessors of private property as they are in the upper circles. The women of these circles have yet to achieve their economic equality with men and they can only do so by making two demands: The demand for equal professional training and the demand for equal job opportunities for both sexes. This battle of competition pushes the women of these social strata towards demanding their political rights so that they may, by fighting politically, tear down all barriers which have been created against their economic activity.