realities of women but will show them to be defined largely within the context of patriarchal and capitalist needs. Women as women share like economic status and yet are divided through the family structure to experience real economic class differences. Such an examination should seek to realize woman’s potential for living in social community, rather than in isolated homes; her potential for creative work, rather than alienating or mindless work; her potential for critical consciousness as opposed to false consciousness; and, her potential for uninhibited sexuality arising from new conceptions of sexuality.
4. Some Notes on Strategy
What does all of the preceding imply about a strategy for revolution? First, the existing conceptions of a potentially revolutionary proletariat are inadequate for the goals of socialist feminism. Second, there are serious questions whether the potential defined in classical Marxist terms would ever become real in the United States. And, although I think the development of theory and strategy should be interrelated, I see them as somewhat separate activities. Theory allows you to think about new possibilities. Strategy grows out of the possibilities.
This discussion has been devoted to developing socialist feminist theory and I am hesitant to develop statements of strategy from it. Strategy will have to be fully articulated from attempts to use theory. When one tries to define strategy abstractly from new and developing statements of theory, the tendency to impose existing revolutionary strategies on reality is too great. Existing formulations of strategy tend to limit and distort new possibilities for organizing for revolutionary change.
The importance of socialist feminist strategy, to the extent that it exists, is that it grows out of the daily struggles of women in production, reproduction, and consumption. The potential for revolutionary consciousness derives from the fact that women are being squeezed both at home and on the job. Women are working in the labor force for less, and they are maintaining the family system with less. This is the base from which consciousness can develop. Women need to organize political action and develop political consciousness about their oppression on the basis of an understanding of how this connects to the capitalist division of labor. As Nancy Hartsock says: “the power of feminism grows out of contact with everyday life. The significance of contemporary feminism is in the reinvention of a mode of analysis which has the power to comprehend and thereby transform everyday life.”52
We must, however, ask whose everyday life we are speaking about. Although there are real differences between women’s everyday lives, there are also points of contact that provide a basis for cross-class organizing. While the differences must be acknowledged (and provide political priorities), the feminist struggle begins from the commonality that derives from the particular roles women share in patriarchy.
Many socialist feminists were radical feminists first. They felt their oppression as women and then, as they came to understand the role of capitalism in this system of oppression, they became committed to socialism as well. Similarly, more and more houseworkers are coming to understand that their daily lives are part of a much larger system. Women working outside the home, both professional and nonprofessional, bear the pressures and anxieties about being competent mothers and caretakers of the home and are becoming conscious of their double day of work.
Male leftists and socialist women often say that women as women cannot be organized because of their isolation in the home and their commitment to their husbands’ class. Although cross-class organizing is not possible on all issues because of class conflict among women, it is possible around issues of abortion, health care, rape, child care. Cross-class organizing is worth a serious try if we deal consciously with our class differences and set up priorities in terms of them instead of trying to ignore them. At the same time, the lives of women are remarkably similar given patriarchal controls. We just need to be more conscious of how this works and then structure our political action in terms of it. A strategy to reach all women has never been tried. That its implementation will be difficult goes without saying. But a beginning is already in process as women try to take some control over their lives.
Notes
1. Sheila Rowbotham, in Women, Resistance, and Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1972), makes clear that both the social relations of production and reproduction need to be dealt with in any revolutionary theory.
2. For our purposes dialectics help us focus on the processes of power. Hence, in order to understand power one needs to analyze the relations that define power rather than treating power as an abstract thing. Any moment embodies the relations of power that define it. The only way to understand what the moment is, is to understand it as a reflection of the processes involved in it. By definition, this requires one to see moments as part of other moments rather than as cut off from each other. Seeing things in separation from each other, as part of either/or options, is the dichotomous thinking of positivism. By trying to understand the elements defining the synthesis of power as it is embodied in any particular moment, one is forced to come to terms with the conflict embodied within it, and hence the dialectical processes of power. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973) and Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
3. For this discussion see Mariarosa dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” and Selma James, “A Woman’s Place” in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol, England: Falling Wall Press, Ltd.); Ira Gerstein, “Domestic Work and Capitalism” and Lise Vogel, “The Earthly Family” in Radical America 7 (July-October 1973); Wally Seccombe, “The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism,” New Left Review 83 (January-February 1973); B. Magas, Margaret Coulson, H. Wainwright, “The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism—a Critique” and Jean Gardiner, “Women’s Domestic Labour,” New Left Review 89 (January-February 1975), and, for the latter, in this volume.
4. I do not think the dichotomized view of the early “Hegelian Marx” and the later “materialist Marx” is a helpful distinction. Rather, I think the theories of alienation and exploitation are integrated throughout Marx’s work although they are given different priority in specific writings. The Grundrisse stands as persuasive proof of this position. See Marx, Grundrisse and David McLellan’s discussion of the importance of the Grundrisse in Karl Marx, His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
5. For a discussion of species being, see Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964); The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947); “On the Jewish Question,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. Kurt Guddat and Lloyd Easton (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). See also Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); and Ollman, Alienation.
6. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), p. 152. See also Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Chicago: Gateway Press, 1954), pp. 48–49.
8. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 17.
9. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” p. 246.
10. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 133.
11. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 50.
12. Friedrich Engels, The Early Development of the Family (a Free Press pamphlet), p. 65. The selection is also the first two chapters of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942).
