The most compelling question for feminism is this: what are the concepts that are necessary now inthe struggle for social justice? This may seem like an odd claim, perhaps even an outrageous one.But pause to consider it for a minute. Often the enterprise of feminist theory has been dismissed asthe work of ‘elite academics’ – abstract, obscure or, even worse, irrelevant to the pressing concernsof women and men. While it may be that some – even most – feminist theory is not even read bymany of the world's women, this is not to say that the work of thinking about what and how weknow does not matter. Quite the contrary. Although they are rarely made visible, theories inform theways of making sense on which organizing, education and all forms of action and ‘activism’invariably depend. Theories – or explanations of how and what we know and live – rely on conceptsthat are embedded in them. These concepts are like the scaffolding for building social movement or,to use another metaphor, they are the directionals for charting any course of action. Often invisibleas guides, concepts undergird our ways of making sense, from the profound and visionary perspective to the most mundane and obvious. When we ask ‘what are the concepts feminism needsnow?’ we are indeed asking a ‘philosophical’ question that is also and necessarily a practical one asit is a question that speaks to a very basic and inevitable component of feminist practice.Feminists in the over-developed world have struggled to make spaces where people can take timeout to consider the concepts that inform and enable their practice. Universities have now becomethe institutions that most allow these spaces; their provision of the resources and institutionalstructures for the work of feminist theory is the result of years of feminist struggle. Universities arenot, of course, the only places where feminist reflection and writing are done. Many non-governmental and non-university organizations foster this work as do alternative media. But theseinstitutions struggle harder for funding and are institutionally much smaller and often lessestablished than the academy. While the time and structures for intellectual work may be mostreadily provided by universities, it is important to remember that theories and concepts circulatethroughout other institutions: in the media, in social movements, in common sense.When we ask ‘what concepts does feminism need?’ or ‘where will we find the concepts that arenecessary to explain the historical conditions we are trying to change?’ these questions imply someconsensus on common aims for feminist work. In other words, answering these questions willinevitably, if at times only implicitly, speak to what feminism strives to accomplish, its visions andgoals. In considering the concept of class, for example, we might want to take into account how itspeaks to the general objectives of feminism. We might want to ask: ‘Can this particular concept or

this particular formulation of it explain aspects of social life and human relations in a way thatadvances the struggle for social justice and for the equitable meeting of human needs that feministsare committed to?’

Class: The ‘Lost Continent’ in Feminist Theory

Keeping these questions in mind, let us proceed to consider ‘class’ as a concept. In order to assessits usefulness for feminist work, we might first look at some of the ways in which class has beenunderstood and used by feminists. For feminists in the over-developed world especially (that is, inthe US, Canada, the EU), class is both an invisible and a contentious concept. When it appears asthe overlooked member of the ‘race, class and gender’ trinity or when it appears as an ‘obvious’indicator of a person's social status, class is often under-conceptualized. What I mean by this is thatmany times when the term ‘class’ is discussed as an empirical reality, it is not really explained as acritical concept that might advance the aims of feminist movement.Why is ‘class’ this sort of ‘lost continent’ in feminist theory? One answer lies in the historicalconditions that shape the dominant ways of knowing under capitalism. In the past three decades anew phase of capitalism has developed. Some of its notable features are evident in the ways inwhich the regulation of capital accumulation and the organization of production and consumptionhave been modified. We see this in the erosion of the welfare state's regulation of capital greed, inthe expansion of the ‘free market’, the intensified search for cheap labour, the emergence of transnational corporate agencies and a global civil society devoted to entrepreneurship andconsumption. Under this phase of capitalism, consumption in the over-developed world has becomethe main source of wealth, of citizens’ political power and, for some, the primary arena for socialchange. There has also been a fragmentation of traditional relations of labour both in terms of working conditions and attitudes.These changes in capitalism have been called ‘postmodern’ or ‘advanced capitalism’, and the policies guiding them are referred to as neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies help protect theunregulated accumulation of capital through national and international treaties – such as the NorthAtlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) – or through transnational organizations like the World Trade Organization, the International MonetaryFund and the World Bank which are not accountable to the democratic processes of any nation. Neoliberalism holds that economic crises are the result of excessive government intervention andregulation and they can best be remedied by returning state-supported economic ventures to the private sector (for example, by privatizing public education and health care, social services, prisons), re-establishing the family as a cushion to absorb the social effects of hard times andrepersonalizing economic dependency, savings, work. Neoliberalism is not just a set of economic policies, however; it also entails ways of knowing that promote a range of values and beliefs, among them competition, individualism and the notion that‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism. Neoliberal forms of consciousness will tend to keep thestructures of capitalism from view; for example, in offering ways of knowing the world that sever the cultures of capital and consumption from relations of labour. In academic circles, postmodernknowledges of various sorts have bolstered neoliberalism by aggressively discouraging analysis thatreveals links between new cultural forms and changing relations of labour. To the extent that thesevalues claim to be irrefutable, they dismiss the possibility of other ways of meeting human needsand the critical concepts for advancing these alternatives. Class is one.More and more it has become commonplace to assert that class as a concept no longer carries any political weight, to accept as a given that differences of race, sexuality, gender, national and ethnicidentity or religious diversity have replaced class realities as sites for political analysis and struggleor to claim that the ‘failure of socialism’ is empirical evidence of the limitations of class analysis.

But no matter how much human diversity may seem to be the most pertinent point of socialstruggle, discrimination and injustice – and changes in the workforce or in more ‘multicultural’representations of national identities might be cited to make that point – these changes still dependon persistent class relationships basic to capitalist production. Patterns of employment,accumulation and consumption may be changing, becoming decentralized and globally distributeddifferently, but the class structures that allow the accumulation of capital to take place remain.Socialism's failures have been real but they have to be measured against the staggering human costincurred by capitalism's advance.We now live in a situation where four-fifths of the world's people suffer under capitalism'sexploitative social relations, where the gap between those who own and control the world's wealthand those who labour and own little or nothing is widening, and where women still perform most of the world's necessary yet undervalued labour. The erasure of the concept of class cannot beconsidered apart from this profile. Issuing primarily from the knowledge industry of the advancedcapitalist sectors, the ‘disappearance of class’ as a concept for explaining our social world is notinnocent. If feminism is not to be fully incorporated into capitalism's ‘free market’ and individualistcorporate-driven consumer logics, feminists will need to seize upon concepts that are useful in the battle against them. Class is one.

Approaches to Class

Fortunately, we already have a rich archive of class analysis to draw upon, some of it central tofeminist struggle for over a century. The most powerful theory of class or class analysis has beendeveloped from the work of Karl Marx, specifically from Marx's critique of capitalism. As acritique of patriarchy, feminism coalesced into a social movement around the same time that Marxwas developing his critique of capital.In fact, it is fair to say that both feminism and the socialist and communist struggle Marx was partof are contemporaneous products of the crisis of democracy spawned by the modern industrialrevolution. Feminists have been engaged with the philosophy of history, or historical materialism,and the critique of capital that Marx and other Marxists developed since the nineteenth century. Attimes, feminism's relationship to Marxism has been one of fraught, critical solidarity, intervening inand working over the concepts of historical materialism, challenging its limits, and extending thereach of its explanations.The signatures that this feminist work has claimed are various. They include socialist feminism,Marxist feminism, red feminism, materialist feminism. The lines of distinction among them are notalways clear or consistent and the terms are open to debate because they are sites of political andideological, even class, struggle. Tracing a genealogy of any one of these terms or using any one of these names to identify your work invariably entails making an argument for what the name means,in the process explaining the concepts it relies on and claiming a (political) standpoint. While labelsare important, then, in themselves they explain little. This is especially so in an historical time whenMarxism as well as feminism are more than ever embattled.In the 1970s in the over-developed world, a new wave of socialist feminist writing began tocirculate, emerging initially out of grassroots organizing and without any national organization or party affiliation. Important in this writing were debates over what came to be called dual systemstheory (Hansen and Philipson 1990). Many socialist feminists in the 1970s argued that there are twointerlocking and mutually dependent systems of oppression – patriarchy and capitalism – and theycalled for analysis that would address both Marxism's class analysis and feminism's analysis of patriarchal oppression. The argument ran that Marxism's class analysis insufficiently addressedwomen's oppression under capitalism and that there are dimensions of women's lives that conceptsrooted in class analysis could not explain: for example, practises like rape or domestic violence, the

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Rosemary Hennessy - Class - A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory - Ed Mary Eagleton

Chapter on Marxist Feminism in A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory - edited by Mary Eagleton

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