within each individual a dialectic between essence and existence which is manifested as revolutionary consciousness in society. Both the criticism of class existence as alienating and exploitative and the revolutionary ontology of the theory make Marxist analysis critical to developing a feminist theory which incorporates but moves beyond a theory of class consciousness.
When extended to women, this revolutionary ontology suggests that the possibility of freedom exists alongside exploitation and oppression, since woman is potentially more than what she is. Woman is structured by what she is today—and this defines real possibilities for tomorrow; but what she is today does not determine the outer limits of her capacities or potentialities. This is of course true for the alienated worker. While a worker is cut off from his/her creative abilities s/he is still potentially a creative being. This contradiction between existence and essence lies, therefore, at the base of the revolutionary proletariat as well as the revolutionary woman. One’s class position defines consciousness for Marx, but, if we utilize the revolutionary ontological method, it need not be limited to this. If we wish to say that a woman is defined in terms of her sex as well, patriarchal relations define her consciousness and have implications for her revolutionary potential as a result. By locating revolutionary potential as it reflects conflicts between people’s real conditions (existence) and possibilities (essence), we can understand how patriarchal relations inhibit the development of human essence. In this sense, the conception of species life points to the revolutionary potential of men and women.
The social relations defining the potential for woman’s revolutionary consciousness are more complex than Marx understood them to be. Marx never questioned the hierarchical sexual ordering of society. He did not see that this further set of relations made species life unavailable to women, and hence that its actualization could not come about through the dismantling of the class system alone. Nevertheless, his writings on women are important because of his commitment to uncover the tensions between species life and capitalist alienated forms of social experience for both men and women.
There are partial statements on the family and women’s exploitation in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology, and Capital. Marx states his position on the bourgeois family in The Communist Manifesto, where he sees the family relation as having been reduced to a mere money relation.
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain…. The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting the more, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and then children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.7
The relations of private property become the mode of exchange. The development of these bourgeois priorities transforms social relations in the family, and, as Marx makes clear in The German Ideology, the family, which is seen as the only truly social relationship, becomes a subordinate need.8 The concerns of private property and possession pervade man-woman relations. In “On the Jewish Question,” Marx writes: “The species relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of commerce. The woman is bought and sold.”9 The mentality of “having” twists species relationships into those of ownership and domination, and marriage into prostitution. And so in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Marx writes:
Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the animal form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property…. Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s subjective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community.10
Marx saw women’s problems as arising from their status as mere instruments of reproduction, and thus he saw the solution in the socialist revolution. In the Manifesto he wrote that “the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution, both public and private.”11 The bourgeois family is seen in Marx’s writings as an instrument of capitalist society, with no dimensions particular unto itself. Woman’s oppression is her exploitation in a class society through bourgeois marriage and the family. Woman is perceived as just another victim, undistinguished from the proletariat in general, of the pernicious class division of labor. The sexual division of labor as the sexual definition of roles, purposes, activities, etc., had no unique existence for Marx. He had little or no sense of woman’s biological reproduction or maternal functions as critical in creating a division of labor within the family. As a result, Marx perceived the exploitation of men and women as deriving from the same source and assumed that their oppression could be understood in the same structural terms. Revolutionary consciousness is limited to understanding the class relation of exploitation.
There is no reason to doubt, however, that in communist society (where all are to achieve species existence) life would still be structured by a sexual division of labor which would entail different life options for men and women. Sex roles would preassign tasks to women which would necessitate continued alienation and isolation. Essence and existence would still not be one. Marx did not understand that the sexual division of labor in society organizes noncreative and isolating work particularly for women. The destruction of capitalism and capitalist exploitation by itself does not insure species existence, i.e., creative work, social community, and critical consciousness for women.
2. Women’s Exploitation Throughout History
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels discuss the division of labor in early precapitalist society in familial terms. The first division of labor is the “natural” division of labor in the family through the sex act. The act of child-breeding begins the division of labor.12 It is through this act that the first appearance of property arises within the family. For Marx and Engels, this is when wife and child become the slaves of the husband.
This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour power of others. Division of labour and private property are moreover identical expressions….13
Here are seeds of an early, albeit a crude, insight into the nature of sexual division of labor, although there is no discussion of it as such. What weakens and finally limits the insight is that, for Marx and Engels, this division of labor deriving from the sex act is coincidental and identical with the birth of private property—hence, “division of labor and private property are moreover identical expressions.”14 The division of labor has no specific quality of its own, and property arising from a division of labor in the act of procreation is not differentiatied from property arising from the relations of capital. Reproduction and production are seen as one, as they come to be analyzed in relation to the capitalist division of labor in society. There is no notion here that inequalities might arise from the sex act itself. Although reproduction is acknowledged as the first source of the division of labor, it never receives any specific examination. The German Ideology presents, then, a skeletal analysis of women’s condition as it changes through material conditions.
The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour imposed by the family. The social structure is therefore limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains; below them the members of the tribe; finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually.15
The division
