Stabile, Carol A.
Postmodernism, feminism, and Marx: Notes from the abyss.
Monthly Review. 47(3):89-107. 1995 Jul. [References]
Abstract
The points at which postmodernism intersects with contemporary feminism
and the political implications of that intersection are examined. The
capitalist system has worked against socialist politics and will continue
to do so.
For over a year now, the trial of O.J. Simpson has been headline news not
only for the tabloids, but for the mainstream press as well. In the days
following the grisly murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the
case was the hot topic on almost all television or radio talk shows; it
appeared on the covers of popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and
was featured regularly on the front page of major newspapers. Shock radio
host Howard Stern, after playing the now infamous 911 tapes, suddenly
discovered domestic violence, while millions of television viewers tuned
in to watch the Los Angeles Police Department's stately pursuit of
Simpson's white Bronco.
The story had a surrealistic air to it even from the beginning, a distance
from the real event that ended the lives of Simpson and Goldman. As the
weeks lengthened into months, the distance between the event and media
coverage grew wider, while the case itself overshadowed healthcare, the
passage of Proposition 187, and the "Contract with America."
Domestic violence dropped out of the picture as coverage focused on the
trial as game, sporting event, or performance. The question became less
and less Simpson's guilt or innocence--what really happened-and more and
more how the defense and prosecution would play their respective hands.
Few in the mainstream media mentioned economic privilege, but race and
gender were repeatedly raised as "issues," first in relation to Simpson
and Nicole Brown Simpson, then as the court became a battleground between
Johnnie Cochran, the African-American head of the defense team, and Marcia
Clark, the white chief prosecutor. In the coverage of the case, the lines
between information and entertainment, reality and fiction, weren't just
blurred: they disappeared.
Welcome to postmodernism: world of the media spectacle, the disappearance
of reality, the end of history, the death of Marxism, and a host of other
millenarian claims. While celebrity trials have provoked sensationalized
coverage historically, few would deny that the media themselves have
undergone massive changes in the past decades, or that the media now
control and manipulate vast flows of information. But while some of us
might want to offer a historical and materialist explanation for these
changes, for postmodernists the collapse of reality into its
"representations," the disappearance of the line between reality and
fiction that allegedly constitutes "popular culture" today, actually is
the reality of the late twentieth century. There's nothing to explain, in
other words, because the media's representations and fictions are all
there is to know, all we can know. Society has moved to the edge of a now
flattened world, postmodernists claim, and the only fact we can know with
certainty is that we cannot understand what has moved us there or what
lies down below, in the abyss.
It would be easy to dismiss or explain postmodernism's apocalyptic vision
of society as just another instance of the intellectual's divorce from
reality. In this essay, however, I want to treat this trend not just as an
intellectual abstraction, but as a historical phenomenon and as an
intellectual retreat from politics. In particular, I want to consider the
points at which postmodernism intersects with contemporary feminism and
the political implications of that intersection.
WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
Let me first try to define these two very broad and often incoherent
terms, "postmodernism" and "feminism," at least as they are used today in
the academy. Postmodernism is loosely used to identify a historical epoch,
the condition of postindustrial, post-Fordist, or even postcapitalist
society. The relations of production (if one can still call them that) of
this epoch are variously described as fragmented (this applies to both the
social fabric and the mode of production), diffused or disorganized (in
the sense that systemic power relations are everywhere and nowhere,
pervasive but with no identifiable source), and ultimately unhinged from
history. Consumption has overtaken production, making class struggle (or
even the notion that society is antagonistically divided into workers and
capitalists) an obsolete concept. People no longer identify themselves
with, or as, a class, but through various, more particular identities
(e.g.,woman, lesbian, gay, African-American, Latina), identities that are
not only, or not at all, economically defined. Oppression has no systemic
material foundation.
Central to the postmodernist understanding of society is the belief that
the "grand," or totalizing, principles of modernity and the
Enlightenment--including appeals to rationality, progress, humanity,
justice, and even the ability to represent reality--have been fatally
undermined. This line of reasoning emerges from poststructuralist
critiques of language, subjectivity, and representation; but where
poststructuralism refers to theory, postmodernism is the practice. In
other words, where poststructuralists criticized the foundations of
modernism, postmodernists read these critiques as mandates for rejecting
foundations altogether.
For postmodernists, then, the system--rarely (if ever) named as
"capitalism"--has become so diffuse and heterogeneous that it not only
surpasses understanding but no longer offers any point from which it can
be opposed since power is allegedly everywhere and polymorphous. Indeed,
capitalism's "disorganization" signifies that there is no central point,
or system, to oppose. In a media-saturated age in which no one knows, with
any degree of certainty, what's really real, representation--whether
political or artistic--has become impossible. Capitalism, now fragmented
and lacking any organic unity, is no longer comprehensible as a system;
and, in any case, the very grounds for understanding or knowing have been
swept away.
European postmodernists, like Jean-Francois Lyotard, have expressed the
belief that Marxism, like the Enlightenment in general, culminated in
Stalinism because of its "totalizing" impulses. Some postmodernists,
especially in the United States, have gone much further than this
identification of Marxism with Soviet-style systems, holding Marxism
responsible for all kinds of oppression. "Twentieth-century Marxism,"
maintains Linda Nicholson, "has used the generalizing categories of
production and class to delegitimize demands of women, black people, gays,
lesbians, and others whose oppression cannot be reduced to economics."(1)
This kind of judgment dramatically displays yet another feature of
postmodernism: its historical amnesia. An argument like Nicholson's not
only represses a rich history of democratic class politics it is
remarkably insensitive to the simple fact that Marxism and socialist
organizations in general have been repeatedly marginalized and
delegitimized by capitalism. The transplantation of postmodernist modes of
thought from Europe to North America has tended to be doubly ahistorical,
divorced from the historical and material conditions that first produced
them, and then, in a climate of backlash against class-based political
struggles, appropriated by a society whose history of class struggles has
been assiduously repressed. It would seem ironic, if the political stakes
weren't so high, that both postmodernists and the likes of George Bush and
Dick Armey seem to be arguing that we don't have classes in the United
States.
Postmodernist social theory, and postmodernism in general, exist for the
most part in humanities and social science programs in the university.
Eschewing empiricism and quantitative methods (which assume the existence
of some form of reality that can be represented), most postmodernists rely
on interpretive methods borrowed from Saussurean linguistics and
hermeneutics to support their often contradictory claims. Postmodernist
social theorists, in replaying traditional debates within philosophy about
idealism and materialism, haven't transcended the terms of the debate laid
out by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. Rather, they claim an
absolute victory for idealism, as materiality and the economic base are
consigned to the dumpster of history, and only language remains. Working
from this foundation, postmodernist social theorists argue that politics,
in the waning years of the century, can only work haphazardly, or through
the fragmented, divided, and often conflicting categories with which
people identify.
Despite its many contradictions and confusions, postmodernism does have
some unifying principles: an uncritical and idealist focus on the
discursive construction of the "real" (i.e., what is "real" is constructed
in and by language, although no one really explains what this means) and a
related privileging of the notion of "difference." If, in the end, we
cannot point to any "real" interests that might unify "us," then the only
form of political action conceivable is one based on "differences" in
identity. As opposed to Marx's notion of unity in difference, or E.P.
Thompson's "identity of interests," in which people share widelycommon
interests which can be represented by political agencies, postmodernists
reject any such representation in favor of particular and localized
differences.
WHAT IS FEMINISM?
Feminism seems at first a more accessible category than postmodernism,
since it apparently refers to women as a political category with an
identifiable constituency. Although the dominant trends in feminism
generally share with postmodernism a rejection of historical materialism
as a method and Marxism as a political critique, poststructuralist
critiques within feminism have followed a distinctive trajectory. Most
significantly, and unlike postmodernism, contemporary feminist theory
began not by rejecting the very idea of system or "totality" but, on the
contrary, by elaborating its own systemic analysis, in which, at least at
first, "patriarchy" was proposed as an alternative to, or occasionally the
accomplice of, capitalism. In this theoretical framework, women were
oppressed by a patriarchal system and had a common interest in opposing
it. The project for feminism has been both intellectual and political: to
raise women's consciousness of their oppression as women and promote
social change around gender issues, through collectively organizing women
as a distinct revolutionary class.
From the beginning, however, this project was rife with problems. The
concept of women as a uniform group proved an inadequate foundation for
feminists, either as a theory or a framework for activism, for although it
cannot be denied that most women experience the effects of a profoundly
misogynist system, they do so in various ways and to varying degrees. An
academic's experience of sexism, for example, however viscerally lived, is
mitigated by the resources she possesses by virtue of her class position
and is far different from that experienced by a working-class woman or a
woman on welfare. By substituting "women" for "working class," feminism
tends to deny that not all women share an interest in liberation, much
less a common ground for political action. African-American feminists have
pointed out that exclusions and oppressive practices were built into the
category of women as defined by white feminists, that certain groups of
women benefit from the oppression of other women, and that women, like
men, participate in racist, sexist, and homophobic practices. Postcolonial
feminists have argued that not all "patriarchal" systems are the same:
that "patriarchy" encompasses qualitatively different relations within
different societies and that these relations are themselves subject to
historical changes. Furthermore, for feminists to place exclusive emphasis
on division between women and men was not only to deny divisions among
women, but to reproduce a stereotypical view of female nature as caring,
nurturing, and relational. In short, the concept of patriarchy has run the
risk of reproducing sexist understandings of what it means to be female or
male and could, therefore, be yoked to antifeminist, reactionary politics,
as in the case of antiporn feminists' alliance with the reactionary Meese
Commission in 1986.
During the 1980s, the debate within feminist theory revolved around
essentialism (the argument that there is some foundation for the category
"women," grounded in female nature) and antiessentialism (the argument
that "women" is a historically specific and socially constructed
category). For essentialists (and it is instructive that few feminists
would claim this label, since it functions as a pejorative), women share
common characteristics upon which political action can be based. For
antiessentialists, categories such as "female" and "male" are not fixed by
nature and cannot be located in some unchanging natural essence. Instead,
they are socially constructed and vary considerably across cultures and
historical moments. If essentialism emphasizes differences with a capital
"D," or the absolute difference between male and female, antiessentialism
stresses the plural, lowercase "differences" within the category "women."
The critique of essentialism has been important in identifying the
exclusions upon which much feminist theory and practice were based, but
the opposition between essentialism and antiessentialism has exhausted
whatever utility it once had. It is here that we can begin to notice the
convergence of the dominant tendencies in academic feminism with
postmodernism, insofar as both lead to the same political dead end.
Anti-essentialist feminism, having taken note of the differences among
women, has now moved on to something like the postmodernist blindness to
anything but difference. In other words, just as postmodernists argue that
"the real" no longer refers to any concrete, objective reality, current
trends in feminism are dissolving the category "women" into a "discursive"
construct, so fragmented and variable that it is hard to see how it could
be the basis for a political project. It is not surprising that, as
feminism adopts postmodernism's emphasis on language and discourse, the
abstract opposition between essentialism and antiessentialism has produced
much theory, but has precluded practice.
However, despite these points of intersection between postmodernism and
anti-essentialist feminism, some would argue that the main distinction
between the two is that where postmodernism's critique culminates in the
impossibility of politics, feminism remains committed to the emancipation
of women (though by what means is unclear). Postmodernism is and always
has been a hyper-intellectualized movement, while feminism's trajectory
within the U.S. academy has maintained some connection to a political
constituency. Where postmodernism can be dismissed as an elite disavowal
of social and political realities, feminism's continuing political
validity is guaranteed by its original, if now quite tenuous, connection
to oppositional politics.
But as a word referring to an approach or even a political position,
"feminism" has become ever more vague in recent years. One can be an
explicitly postmodernist feminist, with a focus on gender-constitution,
language, and representation. One can also be a socialist-feminist, an
antiporn feminist, an anti-antiporn feminist, a liberal feminist, a
cultural feminist, or an ecofeminist. And while it was once understood
that feminism unilaterally stood for abortion rights, there are now
anti-abortion feminists within the academy and "Feminists for Life"
outside.
Despite these seemingly contradictory impulses within feminism, certain
commonalities can be observed at the intersection of anti-essentialism and
postmodernism. For example, although antiessentialists claim a connection
to feminist politics, the category "politics" (like the term "women") is
often emptied, as is postmodernism in general, of any connection to
material struggles or, indeed, any connection to social relations, since
the "social" is collapsed into the "discursive," and social relations into
linguistic patterns. In arguing for differences, individualized power
relations are emphasized, to the exclusion of their systemic
interconnection; and, of course, as any systemic source of power
disappears, so too does the capitalist mode of production (not to mention
any understanding of how academic feminists themselves fit into it) . The
upshot of this micropolitical focus is that a politics of identity based
on "life-style," consumption, and individualism has replaced a politics of
common interest and collective social struggle.
When political struggle is reduced to abstractions based on language and
language-games, there is no way to identify the system against which
people must struggle or the revolutionary agencies that might conduct such
a struggle. Postmodernists openly concede-in fact, they insist--that there
will be no site from which any antisystemic struggle can emanate, because
(even if "systems" exist) identities are infinitely fragmented and mobile.
Feminists attempt to avoid such nihilism by invoking patriarchy, a system
of masculine power against which women can struggle; but some fundamental
differences among women must be set aside if all women are to be treated
as primarily and uniformly oppressed by the patriarchal system. It will
seem a truism to those working within socialist organizations (or,
incidentally, those who are working class) to observe that those groups of
women who benefit from the exploitation of other human beings occupy a
more privileged class position than those who are exploited. But
anti-essentialist feminists can only take class position into account by
introducing a theory of economic determination that they have worked very
hard to deny, which would undermine their own theoretical foundations.
WHY NOT MARXISM?
To explain the origins of postmodernist trends, we would have to explore
both the successes of capitalism in the 1950s and the 1960s (the rise of
"consumer capitalism," or the so-called "affluent society") and its
failures in the 1970s and 1980s. We would also have to examine changes in
the conditions of academics in those decades. These complex developments
are beyond the scope of this article, but it is not so difficult to
describe the conditions in the academy today that have helped promote the
intellectual centrality of language and "identity," divorced from
economic, social, and political contexts.(2)
The trend away from "economistic" concerns has a long history on the
intellectual left. The current displacement of productive activity by
intellectual practice can be traced to earlier, more prosperous periods of
capitalism, when many people were convinced that consumer capitalism had
won the hearts and minds of the working class. Since then, the changing
structure of capitalism, the increased mobility of capital, and the growth
of the "consumer society' have contributed to a conception of identity as
shifting and variable, subject to changes in "life-style" and consumption
patterns (at least for those who can afford it). For others, the power of
capital, and its vicious attacks on the working class and the poor, have
made change appear to be impossible. But if capitalist success had
something to do with current trends, today these tendencies have been
strengthened by capitalist decline, not least by the financial squeeze on
the academy itself.
As education itself is increasingly subject to commodification and the
economic imperatives of capitalism, job opportunities for academics are
becoming much more limited and insecure. While the academic profession
remains a privileged career, graduate students today, many of whom have
already worked in low-wage and insecure jobs outside the academy, are
likely to end up in debt, in temporary and insecure academic work, or in
chronic unemployment. There is a powerful incentive for junior faculty to
"distinguish" themselves by adopting ever more fashionable, sexy, and
"cutting-edge" theories. Theories that elaborate the grim, monotone
realities of class struggle and capitalist exploitation don't sell very
well, especially when contrasted with, say, Madonna's "resistant"
feminism. And this kind of "resistance," based on life-style and
consumption, seems radical without being threatening. In addition, the
pressure to publish has speeded up the production process, favoring sheer
quantity over quality, as well as an emphasis on topical, contemporary
issues which are easier to produce than carefully researched analytic
work, based on historical accounts or fieldwork.
Given this more direct experience of economic realities, academics today,
and feminists in particular, should find a critical analysis of capitalism
especially compelling, since the contradictions confronting them are
becoming ever more evident But in the academy, it has become a kind of
intellectual common sense to dismiss Marxism and its methods in toto as
"totalizing" (because it seeks to explain society through an analysis of
its mode of production-capitalism), "reductive" (because economic
structures are said to shape legal and political structures), or
"universalizing" (because class is said to shape consciousness).A main
feminist critique has been that women and female labor were excluded from
analysis. These knee-jerk responses have become so pervasive that it is no
longer necessary to explain what "totalizing," "reductive," or
"universalizing" mean--in fact, they are just understood. For a younger
generation of scholars, whose formative political experiences have been in
various feminist movements, the rejection of Marxist-oriented political
activism is based on a set of myths about the masculinist virulence
inherent in Marxism.
How justified is this rejection of Marxism? Let's look at the three main
charges leveled against it by many feminists: that it is "reductive," that
it is too "universalistic," and that it fails to consider female labor. On
the first point, the general claim is that historical materialism reduces
structures of oppression to class exploitation, thereby ignoring or
minimizing sexism, racism, and homophobia. While it is certainly true that
historical materialism places relations of production at the foundation of
society, there is nothing simple or reductive about how these relations
structure oppressions. Rather, historical materialist analyses, instead of
examining only one form of oppression--like sexism, racism, or
homophobia--would explore the way they all function within the overarching
system of class domination in determining women's and men's life choices.
Sweatshop workers in New York City, for example, experience sexism and
racism that are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from those
experienced by middle-class women. The racism directed at poor
African-American youths occurs in a different context than that directed
at African-American women in the academy. This is not to claim that the
latter forms of oppression do not exist or are inconsequential, but by
situating both forms within the material context and historical framework
in which they occur, we can highlight the variable discriminatory
mechanisms that are central to capitalism as a system.
The charge of reductivism might be leveled more accurately against
anti-Marxist feminism. For although feminists have been forced to confront
the inequalities that exist among and between women, some have been less
than careful in considering the inequalities that exist among and between
women and men. Isn't it reductive to suggest that the oppression I
ostensibly suffer as an educated, middle-class woman should be accorded
primacy over the oppression of working-class men It may very well be the
case that some working-class men are sexist, but to what extent does a
focus on "their" sexism work to erase my class privilege, as well as the
fact that the most powerful and oppressive forms of sexism are wielded by
capitalists rather than disempowered workers? In short, while experiences
of sexism, racism, and homophobia vary in intensity and extremity across
class lines, those very class lines (demarcated by relations of
production) remain much more rigid and inflexible. It takes a certain
distance from economic hardship to claim that relations of production and
class position are unimportant, so it is not surprising that the claims of
economic reductivism invariably issue from more privileged class
positions.
The charge of "universalism" is closely related to that of reductivism.
This objection starts with the critique of modernity (including Marxism)
on the grounds that its conceptions of truth, reason, and justice (in
fact, its conception of "humanity" itself) are too universalistic, too
insensitive to the many differences among human beings (for that matter,
"humanity" has often been an exclusive category, like the "people" in the
U.S. Constitution, which excludes anyone but white males). This critique
has been valuable in challenging the oppressive uses of concepts like
"justice" and "reason," or the destructive applications of science and
technology in the name of rationality and progress. But at the same time,
it poses some serious problems for feminists. First, if there can be no
standards of truth, justice, or reason, we cannot appeal to them as
criteria of judgment or action. In fact, postmodernists, including
postmodern feminists, have often been criticized on the grounds that,
without the kind of standards they are so swift to reject, they themselves
can have no basis for supporting or justifying resistance to oppression.
Second, the possibility of opposition to oppression is also undermined by
the presumption that the common interests among human beings are so narrow
and fleeting that any politics beyond the most particularistic and narrow
forms of resistance are impossible. Accordingly, people can struggle
against "power" (defined provisionally and contingently) only through
single-issue politics, and the best that can be hoped for is piecemeal
reform. Since power can no longer be located or identified, since "real"
unifying interests are a colonizing fiction, part of a uniformly
oppressive Enlightenment world view (to which Marxism also belongs), an
organized opposition is neither feasible nor desirable. Politics, let
alone revolution, is reduced to a turf war among "discourses."
The third charge against historical materialism--that it has excluded
female labor from its analysis--has always been debatable. While it may be
true that women's unpaid domestic labor wasn't systematically integrated
into classical Marxist analyses of the mode of production (although both
Marx and Engels discuss the sexual division of labor),from the 1970s on
there have been Marxist revisions of this concept, particularly within
anthropology and economics. In addition, while antiessentialist feminists
have been swift to appropriate and revise poststructuralist theories (that
either neglect gender or deal with it in profoundly sexist ways) in order
to further analyses of gender, only Marxism seems to be singled out for
rejection on the grounds of this alleged omission.
At any rate, the development of contemporary capitalism has to some extent
made this question moot. With the increased blurring between the public
and private spheres, the heightened commodification of previously unpaid
female labor (care of the elderly, child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.),
and the wholesale entry of middle-class women into the labor force,
women's conditions are more obviously determined by relations of
production in a very Marxist sense. Non-Marxist feminism, with its lack of
attention to relations of production, is beginning to look far more
inadequate than even the most gender-blind Marxism in explaining the
conditions of women.
THE LIMITS OF CONVENTIONAL FEMINISM
The inadequacies of conventional feminism, both in explaining the
conditions of women as workers and in constructing a foundation for
effective political action, are illustrated by the narrowness of the
struggle over abortion rights. This has, of course, been the central issue
for mainstream women's movements for the last thirty years. There is room
for argument about the importance of this issue in relation to others that
affect women, but the point I want to make here has to do not so much with
the relative importance of this question but with the angle from which it
is being approached. For example, the passage of the Hyde Amendment in
1977 (which effectively closed off economic access to abortion for poor
women) generated very little feminist op position compared to the more
recent Webster Decision (1990). Abortion "rights," in this context, seem
to mean the rights of more privileged women. The very fact that abortion
rights have emerged as the defining focus of mainstream feminist activism,
to the exclusion of both economic access to abortion and economic support
in the form of day care and subsidies for those women who continue to
mother, suggests a narrow and skewed conception of feminist interests.
In the winter of 1994, I was involved in organizing a reproductive rights
coalition, the goal of which was to break out of the
abortion/anti-abortion deadlock by emphasizing economic issues such as
health care (including both prenatal and postnatal care, as well as
abortion services), day care, and welfare. Several members of the
coalition, sympathetic to NOW and Planned Parenthood, suggested that we
focus our energies on supporting the passage of the Freedom of Access to
Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). Others objected, voicing concern about how
this legislation might be used against striking workers and political
protesters in general. Although this predictably elicited heated
commentary about unions and sexism, what emerged most forcefully from this
debate was that the "rights" we were being asked to endorse were viewed
from a privileged perspective. Because the state was perceived simply as
an ally which promoted the particular interests of the more economically
privileged, these women could overlook the fact that at the same time (and
often in the very same places), the state was brutally dismantling and
repressing the rights of the vast majority of women and men. The struggle
for "rights" was being viewed apart from the larger system of power and
privilege in which those rights were situated.
Similar points could be made about the struggles against sexism and
homophobia in the military. Of course, struggles for the democratization
of any institution should be welcomed by socialists, but there is
something profoundly disturbing about an attempt to democratize the inner
workings of an institution like the military while ignoring, even
accepting, the antidemocratic and oppressive functions of the institution
itself. And lifting the ban on combat cannot change the fact that many
women (who may have little interest in career advancement within the
military) enlist because it is, as a friend of mine once put it, a steady
gig with good benefits for those who have few economic opportunities.
The defense of "rights," abstracted from historical, political, and
economic contexts, has weakened feminist politics and contributed to a
general sense that feminism serves only narrow and privileged interests.
Historical materialism offers the possibility of coalitions based on a
broader understanding of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations
of production, enlisting women and men in struggles against family
violence, further cuts to already severely diminished social programs,
and, moreover, against the system that benefits from these ills.
Furthermore, it proposes that women's liberation--if indeed it is to
include all women--is incompatible with capitalism.
Historical materialism has the advantage of offering the kind of
self-reflexivity--so lacking in postmodernism and contemporary
feminism--that I've tried to underscore in this essay. It at once forces
us to understand our theories, our practices, and our positions in
relation to the dominant structure of power and provides a much more
effective basis for an understanding of the positions of both women and
men within multinational capitalism and of contemporary shifts in these
positions.
Consider, for example, the debate about "family values." The conventional
feminist argument is that the New Right's call for a return to family
values is simply a backlash. On the one hand, this backlash is said to
represent an attempt to reinstate a traditional version of the nuclear
family in order to force women out of the labor force and back into the
home. On the other hand, it is seen as a measure of the effectiveness of
the feminist movement, insofar as women now have the "choice" of working.
What disappears from view in these analyses is the fact that economic
conditions have forced upon middle-class women the dubious advantage of
working one or more full time jobs in addition to domestic labor, and that
this social change benefits capitalism, and not individual men. Poor and
working-class women (many of them women of color) have long worked outside
the home, although few of them would call their alienated and often
desperate labor a matter of "choice." What is being represented as a gain
for women simply means that middle-class women are now being compelled by
the necessities of capitalism to make the "choice" that has traditionally
been available to poor and working-class women. To argue that the debates
about family values are intended to force women back into the domestic
sphere overlooks the fact that there can be no return to the traditional
nuclear family because it is no longer economically feasible. To argue
that these debates about family values were provoked by feminist successes
is to accept the ideological mystification that treats the economic
mandates of capitalism as if they were free life-style "choices."
I would like to believe that feminists are, in fact, committed to
revolutionary social change, but there's another, less pleasant
possibility to contemplate--one that points to the dangers of ignoring
class position. It could be that many who call themselves feminists are
interested only in maintaining their own class privilege or in gaining
celebrity status. From that point of view, Marxism is a serious threat not
only because it represents a challenge to the theoretical foundations of a
postmodern feminism, but also because it reveals the historical, material,
and class foundations of certain forms of knowledge. It is fairly clear
how women such as Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Camille Paglia use
feminism as a marketing strategy to promote their books, images, and
careers, instead of promoting equality and social justice. But as long as
so many feminists refuse to acknowledge their own privilege and the ways
in which we all "benefit" from the exploitation of less privileged women
and men, feminism in general will be in danger of becoming a professional
strategy rather than a political project.
Let's return briefly to the world of the media spectacle and the trial of
O.J. Simpson. The trappings of stardom and courtroom melodrama aside, the
courtroom seems to stand in for a multicultural society--a place where
identities abound and flourish. Most of the jury members are
African-American, the key participants in the debate are a woman and an
African-American man, and a kindly but stern Asian-American presides over
the courtroom. But do people really buy into the spectacle at a time when
a massive consolidation of capitalism is taking place at the top of
society? Do people actually buy into the image of the multicultural
society at a time when black unemployment is more than twice that of
whites, when the rights of women, men, children, and their families are
being dismantled in such an open and brutal manner, when lesbians and gays
are under attack throughout the United States, when striking workers are
being pepper-gassed by police in places like Decatur, Illinois?
In the end, the media spectacle tells us nothing at all about what people
want or how they identify. Few, in fact, can afford to blur the division
between reality and fiction during a time in which reality bears so little
resemblance to its media representations. Those who continue to believe in
the possibility of revolutionary social change cannot abandon a belief in
the power of critical consciousness and the tools that enable people
(particularly those facing an unstable economic future) to make sense of
their situation and learn how best to fight against it, and not simply
make their peace with it. If feminist analyses are to maintain any claim
to analytic and political coherence (not to mention efficacy), then we
need to understand better how the projects some of us
promote-postmodernist, feminist, or some combination thereof--may actually
feed into and reinforce capitalism. By repudiating the very categories of
analysis that might enable understanding, these projects obscure our own
positions within relations of systemic exploitation and preempt any
project of social transformation.
Instead of seeing the fragmentation of identities as a cause for
celebration, we should try to understand how identity has been transformed
into a commodity for those with the capital to consume it and how the
capitalist system has worked (and will continue to work) against the
organization of socialist politics. In place of an identity politics that
serves only to pit groups against one another in a never ending litany of
competing claims to oppression, we need a more cogent understanding of the
systemic nature of oppression. We need to consider the extent to which the
politics of identity represents not a challenge to, but a product of, the
system, a manifestation of market segmentation and the commodification of
identity produced by the globalization of capital as a world system. What
appear to be oppositional strategies may very well turn out to be the
symptoms of oppression.
NOTES
1. Linda Nicholson, Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.
11.
2. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986)
for the most sustained analysis of these points. See also Wood, "A
Chronology of the New Left and Its Successors, or: Who's Old-Fashioned
Now?" Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1995).
Carol A, Stabile teaches media criticism at the University of Pittsburgh
and is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix: (New York:
Manchester University Press, 1994), She would like to thank Mark Unger,
Sudeep Dasgupta, Johnathan Sterne, the members of her graduate seminars on
postmoderism at the University of Illinois and the University
Postmodernism, feminism, and Marx: Notes from the abyss.
Monthly Review. 47(3):89-107. 1995 Jul. [References]
Abstract
The points at which postmodernism intersects with contemporary feminism
and the political implications of that intersection are examined. The
capitalist system has worked against socialist politics and will continue
to do so.
For over a year now, the trial of O.J. Simpson has been headline news not
only for the tabloids, but for the mainstream press as well. In the days
following the grisly murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the
case was the hot topic on almost all television or radio talk shows; it
appeared on the covers of popular magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and
was featured regularly on the front page of major newspapers. Shock radio
host Howard Stern, after playing the now infamous 911 tapes, suddenly
discovered domestic violence, while millions of television viewers tuned
in to watch the Los Angeles Police Department's stately pursuit of
Simpson's white Bronco.
The story had a surrealistic air to it even from the beginning, a distance
from the real event that ended the lives of Simpson and Goldman. As the
weeks lengthened into months, the distance between the event and media
coverage grew wider, while the case itself overshadowed healthcare, the
passage of Proposition 187, and the "Contract with America."
Domestic violence dropped out of the picture as coverage focused on the
trial as game, sporting event, or performance. The question became less
and less Simpson's guilt or innocence--what really happened-and more and
more how the defense and prosecution would play their respective hands.
Few in the mainstream media mentioned economic privilege, but race and
gender were repeatedly raised as "issues," first in relation to Simpson
and Nicole Brown Simpson, then as the court became a battleground between
Johnnie Cochran, the African-American head of the defense team, and Marcia
Clark, the white chief prosecutor. In the coverage of the case, the lines
between information and entertainment, reality and fiction, weren't just
blurred: they disappeared.
Welcome to postmodernism: world of the media spectacle, the disappearance
of reality, the end of history, the death of Marxism, and a host of other
millenarian claims. While celebrity trials have provoked sensationalized
coverage historically, few would deny that the media themselves have
undergone massive changes in the past decades, or that the media now
control and manipulate vast flows of information. But while some of us
might want to offer a historical and materialist explanation for these
changes, for postmodernists the collapse of reality into its
"representations," the disappearance of the line between reality and
fiction that allegedly constitutes "popular culture" today, actually is
the reality of the late twentieth century. There's nothing to explain, in
other words, because the media's representations and fictions are all
there is to know, all we can know. Society has moved to the edge of a now
flattened world, postmodernists claim, and the only fact we can know with
certainty is that we cannot understand what has moved us there or what
lies down below, in the abyss.
It would be easy to dismiss or explain postmodernism's apocalyptic vision
of society as just another instance of the intellectual's divorce from
reality. In this essay, however, I want to treat this trend not just as an
intellectual abstraction, but as a historical phenomenon and as an
intellectual retreat from politics. In particular, I want to consider the
points at which postmodernism intersects with contemporary feminism and
the political implications of that intersection.
WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
Let me first try to define these two very broad and often incoherent
terms, "postmodernism" and "feminism," at least as they are used today in
the academy. Postmodernism is loosely used to identify a historical epoch,
the condition of postindustrial, post-Fordist, or even postcapitalist
society. The relations of production (if one can still call them that) of
this epoch are variously described as fragmented (this applies to both the
social fabric and the mode of production), diffused or disorganized (in
the sense that systemic power relations are everywhere and nowhere,
pervasive but with no identifiable source), and ultimately unhinged from
history. Consumption has overtaken production, making class struggle (or
even the notion that society is antagonistically divided into workers and
capitalists) an obsolete concept. People no longer identify themselves
with, or as, a class, but through various, more particular identities
(e.g.,woman, lesbian, gay, African-American, Latina), identities that are
not only, or not at all, economically defined. Oppression has no systemic
material foundation.
Central to the postmodernist understanding of society is the belief that
the "grand," or totalizing, principles of modernity and the
Enlightenment--including appeals to rationality, progress, humanity,
justice, and even the ability to represent reality--have been fatally
undermined. This line of reasoning emerges from poststructuralist
critiques of language, subjectivity, and representation; but where
poststructuralism refers to theory, postmodernism is the practice. In
other words, where poststructuralists criticized the foundations of
modernism, postmodernists read these critiques as mandates for rejecting
foundations altogether.
For postmodernists, then, the system--rarely (if ever) named as
"capitalism"--has become so diffuse and heterogeneous that it not only
surpasses understanding but no longer offers any point from which it can
be opposed since power is allegedly everywhere and polymorphous. Indeed,
capitalism's "disorganization" signifies that there is no central point,
or system, to oppose. In a media-saturated age in which no one knows, with
any degree of certainty, what's really real, representation--whether
political or artistic--has become impossible. Capitalism, now fragmented
and lacking any organic unity, is no longer comprehensible as a system;
and, in any case, the very grounds for understanding or knowing have been
swept away.
European postmodernists, like Jean-Francois Lyotard, have expressed the
belief that Marxism, like the Enlightenment in general, culminated in
Stalinism because of its "totalizing" impulses. Some postmodernists,
especially in the United States, have gone much further than this
identification of Marxism with Soviet-style systems, holding Marxism
responsible for all kinds of oppression. "Twentieth-century Marxism,"
maintains Linda Nicholson, "has used the generalizing categories of
production and class to delegitimize demands of women, black people, gays,
lesbians, and others whose oppression cannot be reduced to economics."(1)
This kind of judgment dramatically displays yet another feature of
postmodernism: its historical amnesia. An argument like Nicholson's not
only represses a rich history of democratic class politics it is
remarkably insensitive to the simple fact that Marxism and socialist
organizations in general have been repeatedly marginalized and
delegitimized by capitalism. The transplantation of postmodernist modes of
thought from Europe to North America has tended to be doubly ahistorical,
divorced from the historical and material conditions that first produced
them, and then, in a climate of backlash against class-based political
struggles, appropriated by a society whose history of class struggles has
been assiduously repressed. It would seem ironic, if the political stakes
weren't so high, that both postmodernists and the likes of George Bush and
Dick Armey seem to be arguing that we don't have classes in the United
States.
Postmodernist social theory, and postmodernism in general, exist for the
most part in humanities and social science programs in the university.
Eschewing empiricism and quantitative methods (which assume the existence
of some form of reality that can be represented), most postmodernists rely
on interpretive methods borrowed from Saussurean linguistics and
hermeneutics to support their often contradictory claims. Postmodernist
social theorists, in replaying traditional debates within philosophy about
idealism and materialism, haven't transcended the terms of the debate laid
out by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. Rather, they claim an
absolute victory for idealism, as materiality and the economic base are
consigned to the dumpster of history, and only language remains. Working
from this foundation, postmodernist social theorists argue that politics,
in the waning years of the century, can only work haphazardly, or through
the fragmented, divided, and often conflicting categories with which
people identify.
Despite its many contradictions and confusions, postmodernism does have
some unifying principles: an uncritical and idealist focus on the
discursive construction of the "real" (i.e., what is "real" is constructed
in and by language, although no one really explains what this means) and a
related privileging of the notion of "difference." If, in the end, we
cannot point to any "real" interests that might unify "us," then the only
form of political action conceivable is one based on "differences" in
identity. As opposed to Marx's notion of unity in difference, or E.P.
Thompson's "identity of interests," in which people share widelycommon
interests which can be represented by political agencies, postmodernists
reject any such representation in favor of particular and localized
differences.
WHAT IS FEMINISM?
Feminism seems at first a more accessible category than postmodernism,
since it apparently refers to women as a political category with an
identifiable constituency. Although the dominant trends in feminism
generally share with postmodernism a rejection of historical materialism
as a method and Marxism as a political critique, poststructuralist
critiques within feminism have followed a distinctive trajectory. Most
significantly, and unlike postmodernism, contemporary feminist theory
began not by rejecting the very idea of system or "totality" but, on the
contrary, by elaborating its own systemic analysis, in which, at least at
first, "patriarchy" was proposed as an alternative to, or occasionally the
accomplice of, capitalism. In this theoretical framework, women were
oppressed by a patriarchal system and had a common interest in opposing
it. The project for feminism has been both intellectual and political: to
raise women's consciousness of their oppression as women and promote
social change around gender issues, through collectively organizing women
as a distinct revolutionary class.
From the beginning, however, this project was rife with problems. The
concept of women as a uniform group proved an inadequate foundation for
feminists, either as a theory or a framework for activism, for although it
cannot be denied that most women experience the effects of a profoundly
misogynist system, they do so in various ways and to varying degrees. An
academic's experience of sexism, for example, however viscerally lived, is
mitigated by the resources she possesses by virtue of her class position
and is far different from that experienced by a working-class woman or a
woman on welfare. By substituting "women" for "working class," feminism
tends to deny that not all women share an interest in liberation, much
less a common ground for political action. African-American feminists have
pointed out that exclusions and oppressive practices were built into the
category of women as defined by white feminists, that certain groups of
women benefit from the oppression of other women, and that women, like
men, participate in racist, sexist, and homophobic practices. Postcolonial
feminists have argued that not all "patriarchal" systems are the same:
that "patriarchy" encompasses qualitatively different relations within
different societies and that these relations are themselves subject to
historical changes. Furthermore, for feminists to place exclusive emphasis
on division between women and men was not only to deny divisions among
women, but to reproduce a stereotypical view of female nature as caring,
nurturing, and relational. In short, the concept of patriarchy has run the
risk of reproducing sexist understandings of what it means to be female or
male and could, therefore, be yoked to antifeminist, reactionary politics,
as in the case of antiporn feminists' alliance with the reactionary Meese
Commission in 1986.
During the 1980s, the debate within feminist theory revolved around
essentialism (the argument that there is some foundation for the category
"women," grounded in female nature) and antiessentialism (the argument
that "women" is a historically specific and socially constructed
category). For essentialists (and it is instructive that few feminists
would claim this label, since it functions as a pejorative), women share
common characteristics upon which political action can be based. For
antiessentialists, categories such as "female" and "male" are not fixed by
nature and cannot be located in some unchanging natural essence. Instead,
they are socially constructed and vary considerably across cultures and
historical moments. If essentialism emphasizes differences with a capital
"D," or the absolute difference between male and female, antiessentialism
stresses the plural, lowercase "differences" within the category "women."
The critique of essentialism has been important in identifying the
exclusions upon which much feminist theory and practice were based, but
the opposition between essentialism and antiessentialism has exhausted
whatever utility it once had. It is here that we can begin to notice the
convergence of the dominant tendencies in academic feminism with
postmodernism, insofar as both lead to the same political dead end.
Anti-essentialist feminism, having taken note of the differences among
women, has now moved on to something like the postmodernist blindness to
anything but difference. In other words, just as postmodernists argue that
"the real" no longer refers to any concrete, objective reality, current
trends in feminism are dissolving the category "women" into a "discursive"
construct, so fragmented and variable that it is hard to see how it could
be the basis for a political project. It is not surprising that, as
feminism adopts postmodernism's emphasis on language and discourse, the
abstract opposition between essentialism and antiessentialism has produced
much theory, but has precluded practice.
However, despite these points of intersection between postmodernism and
anti-essentialist feminism, some would argue that the main distinction
between the two is that where postmodernism's critique culminates in the
impossibility of politics, feminism remains committed to the emancipation
of women (though by what means is unclear). Postmodernism is and always
has been a hyper-intellectualized movement, while feminism's trajectory
within the U.S. academy has maintained some connection to a political
constituency. Where postmodernism can be dismissed as an elite disavowal
of social and political realities, feminism's continuing political
validity is guaranteed by its original, if now quite tenuous, connection
to oppositional politics.
But as a word referring to an approach or even a political position,
"feminism" has become ever more vague in recent years. One can be an
explicitly postmodernist feminist, with a focus on gender-constitution,
language, and representation. One can also be a socialist-feminist, an
antiporn feminist, an anti-antiporn feminist, a liberal feminist, a
cultural feminist, or an ecofeminist. And while it was once understood
that feminism unilaterally stood for abortion rights, there are now
anti-abortion feminists within the academy and "Feminists for Life"
outside.
Despite these seemingly contradictory impulses within feminism, certain
commonalities can be observed at the intersection of anti-essentialism and
postmodernism. For example, although antiessentialists claim a connection
to feminist politics, the category "politics" (like the term "women") is
often emptied, as is postmodernism in general, of any connection to
material struggles or, indeed, any connection to social relations, since
the "social" is collapsed into the "discursive," and social relations into
linguistic patterns. In arguing for differences, individualized power
relations are emphasized, to the exclusion of their systemic
interconnection; and, of course, as any systemic source of power
disappears, so too does the capitalist mode of production (not to mention
any understanding of how academic feminists themselves fit into it) . The
upshot of this micropolitical focus is that a politics of identity based
on "life-style," consumption, and individualism has replaced a politics of
common interest and collective social struggle.
When political struggle is reduced to abstractions based on language and
language-games, there is no way to identify the system against which
people must struggle or the revolutionary agencies that might conduct such
a struggle. Postmodernists openly concede-in fact, they insist--that there
will be no site from which any antisystemic struggle can emanate, because
(even if "systems" exist) identities are infinitely fragmented and mobile.
Feminists attempt to avoid such nihilism by invoking patriarchy, a system
of masculine power against which women can struggle; but some fundamental
differences among women must be set aside if all women are to be treated
as primarily and uniformly oppressed by the patriarchal system. It will
seem a truism to those working within socialist organizations (or,
incidentally, those who are working class) to observe that those groups of
women who benefit from the exploitation of other human beings occupy a
more privileged class position than those who are exploited. But
anti-essentialist feminists can only take class position into account by
introducing a theory of economic determination that they have worked very
hard to deny, which would undermine their own theoretical foundations.
WHY NOT MARXISM?
To explain the origins of postmodernist trends, we would have to explore
both the successes of capitalism in the 1950s and the 1960s (the rise of
"consumer capitalism," or the so-called "affluent society") and its
failures in the 1970s and 1980s. We would also have to examine changes in
the conditions of academics in those decades. These complex developments
are beyond the scope of this article, but it is not so difficult to
describe the conditions in the academy today that have helped promote the
intellectual centrality of language and "identity," divorced from
economic, social, and political contexts.(2)
The trend away from "economistic" concerns has a long history on the
intellectual left. The current displacement of productive activity by
intellectual practice can be traced to earlier, more prosperous periods of
capitalism, when many people were convinced that consumer capitalism had
won the hearts and minds of the working class. Since then, the changing
structure of capitalism, the increased mobility of capital, and the growth
of the "consumer society' have contributed to a conception of identity as
shifting and variable, subject to changes in "life-style" and consumption
patterns (at least for those who can afford it). For others, the power of
capital, and its vicious attacks on the working class and the poor, have
made change appear to be impossible. But if capitalist success had
something to do with current trends, today these tendencies have been
strengthened by capitalist decline, not least by the financial squeeze on
the academy itself.
As education itself is increasingly subject to commodification and the
economic imperatives of capitalism, job opportunities for academics are
becoming much more limited and insecure. While the academic profession
remains a privileged career, graduate students today, many of whom have
already worked in low-wage and insecure jobs outside the academy, are
likely to end up in debt, in temporary and insecure academic work, or in
chronic unemployment. There is a powerful incentive for junior faculty to
"distinguish" themselves by adopting ever more fashionable, sexy, and
"cutting-edge" theories. Theories that elaborate the grim, monotone
realities of class struggle and capitalist exploitation don't sell very
well, especially when contrasted with, say, Madonna's "resistant"
feminism. And this kind of "resistance," based on life-style and
consumption, seems radical without being threatening. In addition, the
pressure to publish has speeded up the production process, favoring sheer
quantity over quality, as well as an emphasis on topical, contemporary
issues which are easier to produce than carefully researched analytic
work, based on historical accounts or fieldwork.
Given this more direct experience of economic realities, academics today,
and feminists in particular, should find a critical analysis of capitalism
especially compelling, since the contradictions confronting them are
becoming ever more evident But in the academy, it has become a kind of
intellectual common sense to dismiss Marxism and its methods in toto as
"totalizing" (because it seeks to explain society through an analysis of
its mode of production-capitalism), "reductive" (because economic
structures are said to shape legal and political structures), or
"universalizing" (because class is said to shape consciousness).A main
feminist critique has been that women and female labor were excluded from
analysis. These knee-jerk responses have become so pervasive that it is no
longer necessary to explain what "totalizing," "reductive," or
"universalizing" mean--in fact, they are just understood. For a younger
generation of scholars, whose formative political experiences have been in
various feminist movements, the rejection of Marxist-oriented political
activism is based on a set of myths about the masculinist virulence
inherent in Marxism.
How justified is this rejection of Marxism? Let's look at the three main
charges leveled against it by many feminists: that it is "reductive," that
it is too "universalistic," and that it fails to consider female labor. On
the first point, the general claim is that historical materialism reduces
structures of oppression to class exploitation, thereby ignoring or
minimizing sexism, racism, and homophobia. While it is certainly true that
historical materialism places relations of production at the foundation of
society, there is nothing simple or reductive about how these relations
structure oppressions. Rather, historical materialist analyses, instead of
examining only one form of oppression--like sexism, racism, or
homophobia--would explore the way they all function within the overarching
system of class domination in determining women's and men's life choices.
Sweatshop workers in New York City, for example, experience sexism and
racism that are both quantitatively and qualitatively different from those
experienced by middle-class women. The racism directed at poor
African-American youths occurs in a different context than that directed
at African-American women in the academy. This is not to claim that the
latter forms of oppression do not exist or are inconsequential, but by
situating both forms within the material context and historical framework
in which they occur, we can highlight the variable discriminatory
mechanisms that are central to capitalism as a system.
The charge of reductivism might be leveled more accurately against
anti-Marxist feminism. For although feminists have been forced to confront
the inequalities that exist among and between women, some have been less
than careful in considering the inequalities that exist among and between
women and men. Isn't it reductive to suggest that the oppression I
ostensibly suffer as an educated, middle-class woman should be accorded
primacy over the oppression of working-class men It may very well be the
case that some working-class men are sexist, but to what extent does a
focus on "their" sexism work to erase my class privilege, as well as the
fact that the most powerful and oppressive forms of sexism are wielded by
capitalists rather than disempowered workers? In short, while experiences
of sexism, racism, and homophobia vary in intensity and extremity across
class lines, those very class lines (demarcated by relations of
production) remain much more rigid and inflexible. It takes a certain
distance from economic hardship to claim that relations of production and
class position are unimportant, so it is not surprising that the claims of
economic reductivism invariably issue from more privileged class
positions.
The charge of "universalism" is closely related to that of reductivism.
This objection starts with the critique of modernity (including Marxism)
on the grounds that its conceptions of truth, reason, and justice (in
fact, its conception of "humanity" itself) are too universalistic, too
insensitive to the many differences among human beings (for that matter,
"humanity" has often been an exclusive category, like the "people" in the
U.S. Constitution, which excludes anyone but white males). This critique
has been valuable in challenging the oppressive uses of concepts like
"justice" and "reason," or the destructive applications of science and
technology in the name of rationality and progress. But at the same time,
it poses some serious problems for feminists. First, if there can be no
standards of truth, justice, or reason, we cannot appeal to them as
criteria of judgment or action. In fact, postmodernists, including
postmodern feminists, have often been criticized on the grounds that,
without the kind of standards they are so swift to reject, they themselves
can have no basis for supporting or justifying resistance to oppression.
Second, the possibility of opposition to oppression is also undermined by
the presumption that the common interests among human beings are so narrow
and fleeting that any politics beyond the most particularistic and narrow
forms of resistance are impossible. Accordingly, people can struggle
against "power" (defined provisionally and contingently) only through
single-issue politics, and the best that can be hoped for is piecemeal
reform. Since power can no longer be located or identified, since "real"
unifying interests are a colonizing fiction, part of a uniformly
oppressive Enlightenment world view (to which Marxism also belongs), an
organized opposition is neither feasible nor desirable. Politics, let
alone revolution, is reduced to a turf war among "discourses."
The third charge against historical materialism--that it has excluded
female labor from its analysis--has always been debatable. While it may be
true that women's unpaid domestic labor wasn't systematically integrated
into classical Marxist analyses of the mode of production (although both
Marx and Engels discuss the sexual division of labor),from the 1970s on
there have been Marxist revisions of this concept, particularly within
anthropology and economics. In addition, while antiessentialist feminists
have been swift to appropriate and revise poststructuralist theories (that
either neglect gender or deal with it in profoundly sexist ways) in order
to further analyses of gender, only Marxism seems to be singled out for
rejection on the grounds of this alleged omission.
At any rate, the development of contemporary capitalism has to some extent
made this question moot. With the increased blurring between the public
and private spheres, the heightened commodification of previously unpaid
female labor (care of the elderly, child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.),
and the wholesale entry of middle-class women into the labor force,
women's conditions are more obviously determined by relations of
production in a very Marxist sense. Non-Marxist feminism, with its lack of
attention to relations of production, is beginning to look far more
inadequate than even the most gender-blind Marxism in explaining the
conditions of women.
THE LIMITS OF CONVENTIONAL FEMINISM
The inadequacies of conventional feminism, both in explaining the
conditions of women as workers and in constructing a foundation for
effective political action, are illustrated by the narrowness of the
struggle over abortion rights. This has, of course, been the central issue
for mainstream women's movements for the last thirty years. There is room
for argument about the importance of this issue in relation to others that
affect women, but the point I want to make here has to do not so much with
the relative importance of this question but with the angle from which it
is being approached. For example, the passage of the Hyde Amendment in
1977 (which effectively closed off economic access to abortion for poor
women) generated very little feminist op position compared to the more
recent Webster Decision (1990). Abortion "rights," in this context, seem
to mean the rights of more privileged women. The very fact that abortion
rights have emerged as the defining focus of mainstream feminist activism,
to the exclusion of both economic access to abortion and economic support
in the form of day care and subsidies for those women who continue to
mother, suggests a narrow and skewed conception of feminist interests.
In the winter of 1994, I was involved in organizing a reproductive rights
coalition, the goal of which was to break out of the
abortion/anti-abortion deadlock by emphasizing economic issues such as
health care (including both prenatal and postnatal care, as well as
abortion services), day care, and welfare. Several members of the
coalition, sympathetic to NOW and Planned Parenthood, suggested that we
focus our energies on supporting the passage of the Freedom of Access to
Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). Others objected, voicing concern about how
this legislation might be used against striking workers and political
protesters in general. Although this predictably elicited heated
commentary about unions and sexism, what emerged most forcefully from this
debate was that the "rights" we were being asked to endorse were viewed
from a privileged perspective. Because the state was perceived simply as
an ally which promoted the particular interests of the more economically
privileged, these women could overlook the fact that at the same time (and
often in the very same places), the state was brutally dismantling and
repressing the rights of the vast majority of women and men. The struggle
for "rights" was being viewed apart from the larger system of power and
privilege in which those rights were situated.
Similar points could be made about the struggles against sexism and
homophobia in the military. Of course, struggles for the democratization
of any institution should be welcomed by socialists, but there is
something profoundly disturbing about an attempt to democratize the inner
workings of an institution like the military while ignoring, even
accepting, the antidemocratic and oppressive functions of the institution
itself. And lifting the ban on combat cannot change the fact that many
women (who may have little interest in career advancement within the
military) enlist because it is, as a friend of mine once put it, a steady
gig with good benefits for those who have few economic opportunities.
The defense of "rights," abstracted from historical, political, and
economic contexts, has weakened feminist politics and contributed to a
general sense that feminism serves only narrow and privileged interests.
Historical materialism offers the possibility of coalitions based on a
broader understanding of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations
of production, enlisting women and men in struggles against family
violence, further cuts to already severely diminished social programs,
and, moreover, against the system that benefits from these ills.
Furthermore, it proposes that women's liberation--if indeed it is to
include all women--is incompatible with capitalism.
Historical materialism has the advantage of offering the kind of
self-reflexivity--so lacking in postmodernism and contemporary
feminism--that I've tried to underscore in this essay. It at once forces
us to understand our theories, our practices, and our positions in
relation to the dominant structure of power and provides a much more
effective basis for an understanding of the positions of both women and
men within multinational capitalism and of contemporary shifts in these
positions.
Consider, for example, the debate about "family values." The conventional
feminist argument is that the New Right's call for a return to family
values is simply a backlash. On the one hand, this backlash is said to
represent an attempt to reinstate a traditional version of the nuclear
family in order to force women out of the labor force and back into the
home. On the other hand, it is seen as a measure of the effectiveness of
the feminist movement, insofar as women now have the "choice" of working.
What disappears from view in these analyses is the fact that economic
conditions have forced upon middle-class women the dubious advantage of
working one or more full time jobs in addition to domestic labor, and that
this social change benefits capitalism, and not individual men. Poor and
working-class women (many of them women of color) have long worked outside
the home, although few of them would call their alienated and often
desperate labor a matter of "choice." What is being represented as a gain
for women simply means that middle-class women are now being compelled by
the necessities of capitalism to make the "choice" that has traditionally
been available to poor and working-class women. To argue that the debates
about family values are intended to force women back into the domestic
sphere overlooks the fact that there can be no return to the traditional
nuclear family because it is no longer economically feasible. To argue
that these debates about family values were provoked by feminist successes
is to accept the ideological mystification that treats the economic
mandates of capitalism as if they were free life-style "choices."
I would like to believe that feminists are, in fact, committed to
revolutionary social change, but there's another, less pleasant
possibility to contemplate--one that points to the dangers of ignoring
class position. It could be that many who call themselves feminists are
interested only in maintaining their own class privilege or in gaining
celebrity status. From that point of view, Marxism is a serious threat not
only because it represents a challenge to the theoretical foundations of a
postmodern feminism, but also because it reveals the historical, material,
and class foundations of certain forms of knowledge. It is fairly clear
how women such as Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Camille Paglia use
feminism as a marketing strategy to promote their books, images, and
careers, instead of promoting equality and social justice. But as long as
so many feminists refuse to acknowledge their own privilege and the ways
in which we all "benefit" from the exploitation of less privileged women
and men, feminism in general will be in danger of becoming a professional
strategy rather than a political project.
Let's return briefly to the world of the media spectacle and the trial of
O.J. Simpson. The trappings of stardom and courtroom melodrama aside, the
courtroom seems to stand in for a multicultural society--a place where
identities abound and flourish. Most of the jury members are
African-American, the key participants in the debate are a woman and an
African-American man, and a kindly but stern Asian-American presides over
the courtroom. But do people really buy into the spectacle at a time when
a massive consolidation of capitalism is taking place at the top of
society? Do people actually buy into the image of the multicultural
society at a time when black unemployment is more than twice that of
whites, when the rights of women, men, children, and their families are
being dismantled in such an open and brutal manner, when lesbians and gays
are under attack throughout the United States, when striking workers are
being pepper-gassed by police in places like Decatur, Illinois?
In the end, the media spectacle tells us nothing at all about what people
want or how they identify. Few, in fact, can afford to blur the division
between reality and fiction during a time in which reality bears so little
resemblance to its media representations. Those who continue to believe in
the possibility of revolutionary social change cannot abandon a belief in
the power of critical consciousness and the tools that enable people
(particularly those facing an unstable economic future) to make sense of
their situation and learn how best to fight against it, and not simply
make their peace with it. If feminist analyses are to maintain any claim
to analytic and political coherence (not to mention efficacy), then we
need to understand better how the projects some of us
promote-postmodernist, feminist, or some combination thereof--may actually
feed into and reinforce capitalism. By repudiating the very categories of
analysis that might enable understanding, these projects obscure our own
positions within relations of systemic exploitation and preempt any
project of social transformation.
Instead of seeing the fragmentation of identities as a cause for
celebration, we should try to understand how identity has been transformed
into a commodity for those with the capital to consume it and how the
capitalist system has worked (and will continue to work) against the
organization of socialist politics. In place of an identity politics that
serves only to pit groups against one another in a never ending litany of
competing claims to oppression, we need a more cogent understanding of the
systemic nature of oppression. We need to consider the extent to which the
politics of identity represents not a challenge to, but a product of, the
system, a manifestation of market segmentation and the commodification of
identity produced by the globalization of capital as a world system. What
appear to be oppositional strategies may very well turn out to be the
symptoms of oppression.
NOTES
1. Linda Nicholson, Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.
11.
2. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986)
for the most sustained analysis of these points. See also Wood, "A
Chronology of the New Left and Its Successors, or: Who's Old-Fashioned
Now?" Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1995).
Carol A, Stabile teaches media criticism at the University of Pittsburgh
and is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix: (New York:
Manchester University Press, 1994), She would like to thank Mark Unger,
Sudeep Dasgupta, Johnathan Sterne, the members of her graduate seminars on
postmoderism at the University of Illinois and the University
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