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THE RED CRITIQUE |
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The Class Regimen of Contemporary FeminismJennifer Cotter
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One In
the "Foreword" to her recent book Arts
of the Possible (Norton 2001), Adrienne Rich, a long time advocate
of contemporary feminism's rejection of Marxism, calls for contemporary
feminism to re-examine its own "uncriticized and
uninvestigated" anti-Marxism. When she first invoked Marx, she
recalls, it was "to dismiss Marxism 'for women'" and, in doing
so, she, along with the dominant part of the U.S. feminist movement, was
"echoing the standard anti-Marxism of the postwar American cultural
and political mainstream" (4). In the meantime, the feminist method
of "the personal is political" which was meant to show that
the "personal" and "daily" lives of women were not
of their own choosing and individual making but were the product of a
totality of social relations that themselves needed to be transformed
has, in the wake of the suppression of Marx's explanatory critique of
the social totality, turned into the understanding that personal
"choice" is the root of women's position in society.
"Personal anecdote was replacing critical argument" as the
means by which to investigate the conditions of women's lives and the
class desires of some women were displacing the needs of all women for
economic equality and social justice. While "personal narrative was
becoming valued as the true coin of feminist expression", she
observes, "at the same time, in every zone of public life, personal
and private solutions were being marketed by a profit-driven corporate
system, while collective action and even collective realities were
mocked at best and at worst rendered historically sterile" (2).
Articulating feminism on the terms of collective struggles for the
social emancipation of all persons from the exploitation of labor in
capitalism, from imperialism and racism, in this context, has been
overtaken by a "growing middle-class self absorption" (3) with
one's own life, pleasures, experiences. Indeed,
contemporary feminism has by and large abandoned any notion of the
relationship of gender, sexuality, and the daily lives of specific women
to collective needs, capital, labor, and their relation in the mode of
production (that is, exploitation). It has disconnected
"feminism" from the struggle to transform the fundamental
economic and social relations of production that shape women's lives.
Contemporary feminism has taken the "unrealizability of
emancipation" that postmodern feminist Judith Butler declared in
the early 1990s as an uncontestable truth (8). Instead it has (at most)
resigned itself to offering codes of affect and caring and rules for
"civil" and "ethical behavior" as the only means for
addressing economic inequalities and social injustice around the globe. What
is striking is that, in large part, this shift and the growing myopia of
contemporary feminism have occurred in the very name of an engagement
with the "material" conditions of women's lives.
"Materialism" to be clear, has itself been rearticulated in
the wake of "post" theories—from postructuralism to post-marxism—to
mean what Teresa Ebert has called "delectable materialism". As
Ebert explains, "delectable materialism" is "the theory
of the material put forth in late capitalism to displace dialectical
materialism" (280). "Delectable materialism" places a
great deal of emphasis on what it calls the "concrete". But by
"concrete" it means not the materiality of the totality of
social relations and the
conditions of necessity that can explain why women's conditions of life
are being deteriorated around the globe, but the materiality of the
sensuous, erotic, and tactile—particularly the sensuousness of the
body and its pleasures and pains. For example, in her book Volatile
Bodies, "delectable materialist" feminist Elizabeth Grosz
argues for the "primacy of corporeality" in explaining the
material conditions of women's lives and as a means to "transform
women's social subordination to men" (viii).
According to Grosz, "Bodies have all the explanatory power of
minds. Indeed, for feminist purposes the focus on bodies, bodies in
their concrete specificities, has the added bonus of inevitably raising
the question of sexual difference" (vii).
The "concrete" of gender, sexuality, "questions about
which kind of bodies, what their difference are, and what their products
and consequences might be" are all to be explained by the sensuous
singularities of the body that "resist" conceptualization and
exceed explanation (vii). This
notion of the "concrete" as "sensuous singularity",
I argue, is a far cry from the dialectical
materialism that is actually needed for feminism to explain the social
relations of production that are confronting women in capitalism
now—and to see through the local differences of its strategies for
exploitation—so that it can effectively "transform the social
subordination of women" to private property around the globe. The
success of "delectable materialism" within feminism and
cultural theory in general is in part owing to the fact that it claims
to go beyond what it calls the "reductionist",
"abstract", and "totalizing" logic of classical
Marxism, which is now declared to be outdated in the face of
triumphalist capitalism. These claims have, in fact, become trademarks
of contemporary cultural theory after the "post" and are so
much a part of the contemporary "commonsense" that they go
unquestioned. But herein lies the problem. They have received a great
deal of publication space, funding, and university support in the North
precisely because they articulate the interests of transnational
capitalism by covering over its "trouble spots" and
representing the actual conditions of labor and need in capitalism as
"unsayable". Delectable materialism all but eliminates class,
production, social totality, labor, collectivity, etc. from the
explanatory vocabulary of contemporary feminism and reduces world
historical concerns for women in transnational capitalism—the
exploitation of their labor—that have brought about the deterioration
of their financial income, health, nutrition, economic security, and
social well being to matters of individual choice, taste, and
preference. A
case in point
is Elpeth Probyn's Carnal
Appetites: FoodSexIdentities, in which she applies Grosz
"corporeal feminism" to questions of "food" and the
"gendered, eating body". For Probyn, the concrete
"materiality" of gender, sexuality, food and eating is located
in "alimentary assemblages": the alimentary and erotic
"sensations" of the body and its multiple surfaces. Eating,
Probyn argues, is at root a "radically solitary" and
"physical act". Thus, the "concrete" of food and
eating is constituted by its "physicality" and
"singularity": the feelings and sensations of the body in
taking in and expelling food, from touch, texture, and taste to
"hunger, greed, shame, disgust, and pleasure" (11). Using this
delectable materialism, Probyn's "sensuous" reading of
"food" marginalizes burning social questions about the
material relationship of women to the social relations in which food is
produced and distributed in transnational capitalism. Probyn argues for
what she calls "gut ethics"—or thinking "with our
stomachs"—as the "method" of social change for women.
"Gut ethics" requires acting on the body's physio-psycho-social
reaction—that is, feelings of appetite, desire, greed as well as
dread, repulsion, shame, and disgust—that underlie and belie our
reasoned decisions. Thinking with our stomachs and with our bodies
requires abandoning so called "reductive" scientific and
theoretical inquiry as a means to explain the material conditions of
life for our "gut feelings" and "drives". Probyn
argues that "gut ethics" is a "non-reductive"
understanding of the "concrete" of gender and food because it
does not prescribe a set of moral rules and regulations that restrict
others; rather,
it is a matter of what Foucault calls the "care of the self". Instead
of being more "concrete" and "innovative" Probyn's
theory is a re-articulation of Ernst Mach's nineteenth century
"subjective idealism" that Lenin critiqued in Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism. As Lenin shows in his critique of Mach, when
the body is theorized as a "complex of sensations" whose
materiality does not exist independent of these sensations then all that
is left is a "naked abstract I, an I infallibly written
with a capital letter and italicised" (35). What is offered as
"concrete", in other words, is the height of bourgeois myopia:
the abstract and ahistorical monadic individual of "civil
society" who is autonomous from the external world and its social
relations. The
consequence of Probyn's "care of the self" and "monadic
subject" of civil society is that collective needs, and the
position of the majority of women as collective producers—exploited
labor-power—who are denied access to basic needs (such as food) is
unsayable. Instead, Probyn translates important social questions for
feminism over food, hunger, starvation, and economic inequality—that
is, who eats well and who eats not at all—into a frivolous matter of
individual preferences, tastes, and choices. As a basic necessity,
without which human beings cannot live and no social formation can
exist, "food" and the social relations that shape the
production of food and citizens' access to it is an urgent social
question for feminism. Food is an important index of whether a society
is organized so that the material resources and social products belong
to all members of society or whether they are privately appropriated by
a few who own the means of producing these resources for profit. Under
capitalism in which articles of necessity are
produced as a means for profit not need, control over the world food
supply means control over world development, the supply of labor-power
and the rate at which workers can be exploited. This question of the
organization of ownership and control of means for producing material
resources and necessities such as food is
crucial for feminism at a time when the expansion of global capitalism
has widened the gap between classes and, moreover, these increased class
contradictions have significantly deteriorated the material conditions
of women's lives in the international division of labor. According to a
1995 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) report, at
the same time the global economy produces enough food to feed 6 billion
people, 2 billion suffer from malnutrition and of these people 840
million—disproportionately women and girl children—suffer long term
malnutrition (FAO 1). A Global Health Council report indicates that
"nearly a half billion women are stunted from malnutrition"
(Mathis, Nancy, Women's E-News,
June 2001). The
turn away from the relation of women to basic necessities such as food
under the wage-labor/capital relation is an extremely disenabling view
for feminism because it steps backward from decades of the struggle to
re-understand the material conditions of women's lives as social and
historical, and therefore changeable, and instead reduces unequal social
and economic arrangements to personal differences—a matter of taste,
preference, and consumption. The
erasure of collectivity has led many feminists, including Rich, to
question "whatever happened to feminism" and where is it going
without Marx? As Maya Jhansi has put it, "Feminists need to rethink
the relationship of women's liberation to Marx, so that we do not fall
into the same blithe reiterations of post-Marx Marxism". Moreover,
"until the women's movement confronts Marx" she continues
"it will not be able to move 'beyond' anything—let alone
capitalism" (Jhansi 1). What the reflections of Rich, Jhansi and
other feminists who are now "questioning" the rejection of
Marxism and the turn away from class, labor, and production in feminism
points to is that the history of contemporary feminism is proving that a
feminism not founded on material
conditions—on the relationship of gender and sexuality to the social
relations of production, wage-labor/capital, imperialism, and the
international division of labor—has been completely ineffective for
transforming the material conditions of women's lives in transnational
capitalism. However,
Rich and other contemporary feminists who are now formally objecting to
the "post-" logic of much of contemporary feminism still have
a very divided understanding of the use of Marx for feminism. On the one
hand, Rich and others argue for the need to "return to Marx"
and understand "women" on the basis of a totality of relations
in capitalism, on the other hand, they want to restore Marx without
using his dialectical materialist theory of political economy to explain
the "concrete" conditions of women's lives. One exemplary
articulation of this is Nancy Holmstrom's "The Socialist Feminist
Project" in which she argues that: Marxism's
basic theory does not need significant revision in order to take better
account of women's
oppression. However, I do believe that the theory needs to be
supplemented [...] [by] a social theory that gives a fuller picture of
production and reproduction than Marx's political economic theory does,
one that extends questions of democracy not only to the economy but to
personal relations (46). On
these terms, Marx's theory of the totality of social relations of
production cannot serve to explain the "concrete" of women's
lives. Instead, Marx is mainly "(re)turned" to as a
philosopher of ethics, morality, and caring. Like the
"postmodern" feminism that they critique for its abandonment
of collectivity, Rich, Holmstrom and others see the "personal
relations" of women as separate from the economic relations of
class society. Despite their deployment of concepts of "class"
and "capitalism" and their gesturing to the growing social
inequalities, these concepts are emptied of any meaning. Rich, Holmstrom
and other "socialist" feminists are not "returning to
Marx" as much as they are attempting to re-write the history of Red
Feminism—of the revolutionary theorization of gender as determined by
class and the social division of labor enabled by the wage-labor capital
relation. The are, in short, trying to make Red Feminism more palatable
and reconcile it with the imperatives of the "upper middle
class" feminism that they claim to critique. They do so by
advancing a theory of feminism in which the "daily" aspects of
women's lives cannot be explained except by the "sensuous" and
"experiential", and thus by a theory of class as lifestyle and
not as one's relation to the means of production. This
"humanist" reading of Marx leads Rich to read the
"crisis" of contemporary feminism and its complete incapacity
to help emancipate women, its absorption with "upper-middle
class" lifestyle and "self-improvement" over collectivity
and the material needs of all, as the product of a "moral",
"ethical", and "psychic" crisis in American culture:
"a cognitive and emotional dissonance, a kind of public breakdown,
with symptoms along a spectrum from acute self-involvement to extreme
anxiety to individual and group violence" (147). However, it is
not, as Rich contends, a "moral", "ethical" or
"cultural" crisis that lies behind the transformation of
feminism into a "self-absorbed" discourse in which
collectivity is at best ridiculed and "mocked". Rather, it is
the economic crisis endemic to
capitalism. The monadic subject of private property advanced in
contemporary feminism is needed by capitalism in crisis. In order to
stave off a decline in the rate of profit transnational capital has
embarked on a war on any notion of collective needs, social welfare, and
economic well being—to re-privatize social resources, cheapen the cost
of labor-power, and raise the rate of exploitation. Far from being a
matter of "cognitive" or "emotional" confusion,
contemporary feminism has been a most effective ally of transnational
capitalism. The
development and heightening of the economic crisis in capitalism is,
moreover, at the root of the "renewed interest" in Marxism on
the part of feminists and cultural critics who have spent the last
several decades denying the relevance of "Marxism" and
"class" to the study of culture. The economic
"buffer" of higher salaries, retirement investments, health
insurance for some, that once helped to support the illusion that
"we are all middle class now" in imperialist nations is
quickly becoming eroded as economic crisis heightens class
contradictions around the globe and the conditions of workers lives both
in the North and the South are being severely deteriorated. As
unemployment grows in the North it has become increasingly clear that
the "middle class" only exists on paper: usually in the form
of credit card bills, mortgages, bankrupt retirement investments, HMO
statements denying coverage of prescription drugs and necessary medical
procedures, rising grocery receipts... As more wealth is being
transferred from workers to the ruling class, those who were once part
of the so-called "upper middle-class" and thought class was
irrelevant to their lives are now having to take a second look. But
the question for feminism remains: is feminism going to focus on the
"local" conditions of some women's lives (the formerly
"upper middle class" of the North) in isolation from the
"global" (all workers in the international division of labor)
and, therefore, consider class, exploitation, production only so long as
"our way of life" (as right-wingers put it) in the North is
threatened by the current wave of economic crisis? Or is it going to be
a practice that is capable of weathering the local strategies of
capitalism in crisis, seeing through them by grasping their historical
relation to the laws of motion of capitalism, and advancing emancipation
of all persons from exploitation? Only a grasp of gender and sexuality
in relation to the social totality of the capitalist relations of
production is going to enable feminism to be a transformative practice
capable of bringing about economic equality and social justice for all.
It is, therefore, all the more imperative for feminism to (re)examine
the explanatory materialist critique of social totality offered by
Marxism and to distinguish this from the "hybrid" renditions
of Marxism in the contemporary which represent it as a "moral"
and "ethical" code of conduct. While "post-"
theories have made these kind of sharp distinctions "unsayable"
in the contemporary by representing them as an articulation of "reductivism",
"totalization", and "exclusivity", they are exactly
what is necessary to move feminism out of its impasse.
Contrary
to the "sensuous", "empirical", and
"individual", what is needed in feminism is a method that can
explain the relationship of specific women's lives to the social
relations of production in capitalism and the international division of
labor—not treat individual women as "autonomous"
singularities and isolated monads. Dialectical materialism is necessary
for this because it understands the "concrete" as a complex
set of historical and social relations—not the empirical or
individual. The "concrete", as Marx argues in the
"Introduction" to the Grundrisse,
"is concrete because it is the concentration of many
determinations—hence, unity of the diverse" (101). It
is important to note here, before proceeding, that this argument is
widely (mis)construed in contemporary cultural theory and turned into a
point that is quite the opposite of what Marx argues: that the
"concrete" is indeterminate and, therefore, in excess of social totality. One
extremely influential reading that ultimately leads to this conclusion
can be found in Antonio Negri's reading of the Grundrisse
in Marx Beyond Marx. Among
other things, Negri argues that the concrete in Marx is the product of
what Negri calls "determinate abstraction". In contrast to
"naïve methodology that begins with the concrete as a
presupposition", Negri proceeds, "Marx's methodology takes the
concrete as a result", which he regards to mean that the
concrete is the product of "the development of a 'process of
synthesis' of the givens of intuition and representation" (47).
According to Negri, Marx argues that the concrete is the result of
"the cognitive process" and that the determination of the
concrete "is the product of a theoretical approximation which
utilizes general abstractions, polarities and dimensions for this
end" (47). "Therefore", Negri proceeds, the necessary
method goes from "the abstraction to the concrete, to the
determination" (47). To
put this another way, Negri uses Marx as an endorsement of idealizing
the concrete, arguing that epistemological abstractions are what enable
us to arrive at the "concrete" and constitute it. Negri
attributes to Marx a metaphysical explanation of the
"concrete". In effect, Negri argues that the
"concrete" only has an ideal existence, not a material
existence, and, in doing so, he puts forward a binary between
"concrete" determinations and "abstract" universals
that Marx actually subjects to a historical materialist critique. Marx
never argued that the "concrete" is determined by
"epistemological abstraction". On the contrary, he argued that
the "concrete" is determined by historical material relations.
In contrast to this metaphysical reading, in outlining the dialectical
materialist understanding of the "concrete" in the Grundrisse,
Marx argued that: It
seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the
real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g., the
population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social
act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The
population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of
which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am
not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour,
capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of
labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour,
without value, money, price, etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the
population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung]
of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move
analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner
abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From
there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived
at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of
a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations
(100). In
Marxism, the "concrete" is not a metaphysical
abstraction—the empirical, individual, or epistemologically
indeterminate—as it is represented in contemporary cultural theory.
Rather, it is a materialist
abstraction of social relations, which must be explained through
conceptualization of these relations. The "concrete" is a
concentration of the totality of historical and praxical relations
in which human beings enter into conditions of production independent of
their will and produce their conditions of life. A materialist
explanation of the "concrete" requires explaining how and why
it is situated in these historical labor processes and praxical
relations of production. On
the one hand it is surprising to see a theorist, such as Negri, who is
regarded as having in-depth and nuanced knowledge of Marxism, put
forward such a superficial (mis)reading of Marxism. On the other hand,
Negri's reading is particularly revealing of the "post"
condition in contemporary cultural theory, which represents the actual
contradictions of private property—in which some people own the means
of production and therefore command over the surplus-labor and lives of
the majority who are exploited—as epistemological contradictions and
language games. The
reason that such readings of "Marx" have been so dominant is
because they help to provide explanations of transnational capitalism
that present the fundamental conflict between capital and labor as
"solvable" outside of any question of transforming private
ownership, and simply by the expansion of the market and of global
capitalist production. The basing of the "concrete" on
"determinate abstraction" is at the core of Negri's theory
that the "knowledge economy" has displaced labor as the basis
of production. It is telling that Negri, along with his collaborator
Michael Hardt, argues not for the emancipation of people
"through" labor—through the transformation of the relations
of production in which labor processes take place—but for
"liberation from waged and manual labor" (Hardt and Negri
280). To be clear, for Hardt and Negri, this means a liberation from
labor "as such"; a "post-labor" economy. What Hardt
and Negri put forward is a reading of capitalism quite useful for the
labor needs required for transnational capitalism to stave off a decline
in the rate of profit. On the one hand, it serves the need of
transnational capitalism for the skilled labor necessary to expand the
market by representing the "service" and "technical"
labor in the North as "free" from wage-labor; on the other
hand, it conceals the private property relations that continue to
determine both "skilled" advanced technological labor as well
as "unskilled" labor, making them both occasions for the
private appropriation of surplus-labor. Negri's notion of
"determinant abstraction" actually returns to the same notion
of the "empirical concrete" that he claims to avert, by
fetishizing the local conditions of production in the North as an
explanation of the global relations
of production in capitalism. By moving from "abstraction to the
concrete, to the determination", Negri's "post-" theory
does not de-idealize the "concrete" rather, it is an
articulation of the pursuit of the concrete over the global totality of
relations. But
what does this understanding do for feminism? How does it articulate the
"concrete" of "women" and their "needs"?
One can see how the "determinate abstraction" is really a
version of the "empirically concrete"—and that both are
idealist abstractions—by examining the "concrete" of social
needs such as "food" in contemporary feminism. In her reading
of food, for instance, Probyn deploys Negri's notion of the
"concrete" as "determinate abstraction". Probyn
maintains that a "non-reductive" understanding of the
"concrete" of food sees "food" as indeterminate.
Probyn claims that by "reducing"—that is, explaining—that
bodies and the food they consume are determined by one's conditions in
the social relations of production, class analysis re-enforces the
existing "alignment of tastes, food, and class, that threaten to
colonise the body in fixed identities" (31). Moreover, according to
Probyn, the "problem" with class analysis is that it leads to
the understanding that "food can only confirm identity" (31).
Instead, she wants to articulate a theory in which food "can open
up new avenues" of subjectivity, to "answer back" (31).
In short, for Probyn, "food" is indeterminate and, therefore, can work to realign the relationship
between gender, class, sexuality, and the body. This
is itself a very abstract and highly commodified notion of
"food" which makes food its own independent agency endowed
with "special powers". Probyn's notion of "food" as
"indeterminate" is basically a form of commodity fetishism
that abstracts the "power of food" from the social relations
that determine its production: from the labor relations based on private
ownership of the means of production and exploitation of labor. Instead,
Probyn presents "food" as its own agency: as an independent
source of "wealth" and "value", outside of labor,
that can "resist" and "change" the class relations
in which it is produced. In fact, it is precisely private property relations that enables the "commodity fetishism" of food.
As Marx explains, "this fetishism of the world of commodities
arises from the peculiar social character of the labour which produces
them" (Capital, Vol. 1
165). It is under private property relations in which workers do not own
the means of production and therefore, do not have access to and control
over the products of their own labor, that "things" appear to
inherently produce wealth without the intervention of labor. Even
a brief look at world historical conditions reveals that
"food" does not have an independent agency and in itself it
does not radically transform conditions of life for the majority in
capitalism. In Indonesia, for instance, economic inequality and class
contradictions have not decreased or been reversed by a greater
abundance of food. A 1999 report of the South East Asian Food Security
and Fair Trade Council (SEAFTC) that examines Indonesia's food crisis
shows that citizens' unequal access to
food is not the result of food shortages brought on by natural disaster,
warfare, or even to lack of food production. In fact, not only
Indonesia's participation in transnational agribusiness, but also its
small-scale farming has increased significantly over the last decade.
What has not improved are its levels of malnutrition and poverty. In
like manner food production around the world has been on the rise and
the concurrence of hunger and starvation alongside huge food surpluses
has intensified. The abundance of food and the agricultural and
technological capacity to produce food does not, in itself, produce
wealth and transform the class position of the majority. This is
precisely because food is not
an autonomous agency or a "thing" invested with special
value-producing powers outside of the dialectical praxis of labor and
the totality of social relations of production in which it takes place. The
main problem, according to the SEAFTC and many other reports on similar
situations in India and Africa, is widespread poverty and the inability
of people to purchase basic needs such as nutritious food (1). That is,
on the one hand, while workers have increased their productivity in
agriculture and related food industries, on the other hand, their access
to the resources that they produce has declined. What remains
un-assessed here, however, is why
poverty, payment for basic necessities, and the inability of those who
produce basic needs to pay for them continues to persist—especially
when there is no lack of their abundance? What lies underneath the
"concrete" of "food" and the alienation of direct
producers from the products of their own labor is private ownership of
the means of production and social production for profit. Under such
conditions food, like any commodity, is merely a means for surplus-value
extraction and the realization of profit, not need. What determines
wealth—what "changes" class position—is not access to food
(and other articles of consumption) but access to the means of
production. To
isolate the "concrete" of needs such as food (its consumption,
exchange, distribution,...) from the totality of material relations in
capitalist production and to represent it as an autonomous agency is to
produce a "one-sided" abstraction—an imagined
concrete—that has very little to do with the real conditions of labor
and need confronting the majority, including the majority of women, in
capitalism. At best what such a method enables is the
"negotiation" of specific women's individual relationship to
food, poverty, and class relations, but it leaves all questions of why
poverty, class relations, and the production for profit not needs must
persist, and thus treats them as inevitable. It
has now become "commonplace" in feminism to represent
Marxism's emphasis on "labor" and the social relations of
production as a method that dehistoricizes "women". One such
argument is articulated in the ecofemist arguments of Maria Mies and
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen in their book The
Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy. Here Mies
and Bennholdt-Thomsen offer a similar reading of Marx as does Negri:
that is, they understand his emphasis on "labor" to be an
instance of "determinate abstraction"—an idealist
understanding of the concrete—that erases the actual conditions of
women's lives. The "difference" from Negri is that they use
their formal rejection of "abstraction" in order to reject
"Marx" for feminism. Labor, they argue, is a destructive and
monolithic force that "exploits" nature, by treating it as a
"free good" for human consumption and, in doing so, exploits
women's labor as part of nature. The reliance of Marxism on the category
of "labor", they argue, makes it participate in the same
exploitation of nature by capitalism. Like Negri, Mies and
Bennholdt-Thomsen argue that the key to emancipating women is not the
emancipation of women through labor—through the transformation of the
social relations of production based on private ownership of the means
of production. But, in contrast to Negri, they argue that women are
freed from economic inequality through their liberation from the service
industry and advanced technological labor. At
the core of their of their book is the understanding that the "root
problem" with capitalism is an "evidently ineradicable male
fixation on technology" (180). Science, growth, and
"technology" inevitably lead to hunger, exploitation, and
violence against women, they assert, because they ultimately rest on the
colonization and expropriation of nature as
a "free good". For Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, exploitation is
founded on "the development of the productivity of human labour
[power]" through its transformation of nature, not the private
ownership of the means of production, which enables owners to command
over the workers surplus labor (34). Moreover, they claim, it is the
expropriation of nature as a "free good" that is the basis of
the exploitation of women's reproductive and "life giving"
labor. This is, for Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, a "failure" of
both bourgeois ideology and Marxism in accounting for women and nature.
They suggest that the Marxist argument for freeing the forces of
production from the existing relations of production shares the
"enlightenment" conception of "nature" (and
"women's reproductive labor") as "free" and
"unlimited", which leads to the boundless appropriation of
nature and, consequently, the exploitation of women's unpaid
reproductive labor for private gain and profit. As
an alternative, they advocate for a "subsistence perspective",
which involves rejecting industrial and technological development and a
conservation of local agricultural production controlled by the
subsistence labor of women—what they call "the real
female-maternal, agrarian subsistence practice" (181). The
subsistence perspective, they argue, demonstrates respect for
"nature" by above all, respecting "women's bodies"
and recognizing that "women [are] the beginning, the arkhé,
of human life" (33). Moreover, they argue, that by turning away
from the development of human labor-power, the "subsistence
perspective" promotes "meeting needs" over profit. However,
when Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen collapse "women" and
"nature", they repeat the same patriarchal logic that was used
to naturalize the social division of labor under capitalism and keep
women out of the workforce. Moreover, they put forward an ahistorical
and idealist understanding of oppression that abstracts
out the transformation of nature and the development of the forces of
production from the social relations of production toward which this
development is put: whether labor is used for profit or need. By
suppressing the importance of the relations under which social resources
are produced, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen actually treat nature and
"human need" in a very ahistorical and idealist way. For one,
they presuppose that the resources necessary to meet human needs (and
not profit) ultimately exist in "nature" alone, without the intervention of labor. But even a
"basic" form of satisfying hunger—the gathering of
vegetation grown without human intervention—requires the appropriation
of nature by labor. Moreover, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen do not
"escape" the appropriation of nature with the
"subsistence perspective". "Subsistence production"
requires "agriculture" which itself requires a whole series of
historical developments of the productive forces (the disruption of the
existing ecosystem to clear land for crops, the extraction of metal for
tools with which to plow, the domestication of animals,… ). As Marx
explains: "The earth itself is an instrument of labor, but its use
in this way, in agriculture, presupposes a whole series of other
instruments and a comparatively high stage of development of labour-power.
As soon as the labour process has undergone the slightest development,
it requires specially prepared instruments" (Capital,
Volume I 285). Far
from offering a "materialist" understanding of "meeting
needs", the "subsistence perspective" does not even
account for the "necessary conditions" for its own existence:
that is, the dialectical praxis of labor in which, as Marx explains:
"by acting on external nature and transforming it" to meet
needs, "humankind also transforms its own nature" including
its needs (Capital, Vol. 1, 283). In other words, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen
base their argument for the "subsistence perspective" on an
imaginary independence from conditions of necessity. It
is hardly surprising, owing to their idealist theory, that Mies and
Bennholdt-Thomsen read the dialectical materialism of Marxism as itself
a version of idealism which posits "nature" without limits,
and technology as the basis of emancipation. But what they attribute to
Marxism is actually a reversal of its dialectical materialist
understanding of nature and technology. As Marx argued, nature is indeed
just as much the source of use-values as labor (which is itself only the
manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power) (Selected
Works, V. 3 13). What Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen do not account for
is that, "precisely from the fact that labour depends on nature it
follows that the [one] who possesses no other property than [her] labour
power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of
others who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of
labour. [She] can work only with their permission hence live only with
their permission" (Selected Works, V. 3 13). The
articulation of freedom from the exploitation of "labor-power"
as "too abstract" to be of root importance to women is
actually a highly privileged notion for women who no longer see
exploitation as a problem because they seem to have the freedom to
"live without permission" of others who exploit them: to eat
nutritious, well balanced meals, have access to high quality health
care, to good housing, education, etc. But in Marxism, labor is not the
empty abstraction that is presented in contemporary cultural theory and
feminism in order to maintain the class position of those who own the
means of production. Even the "simplest economic categories",
Marx argued, "can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided
relation within an already given,
concrete, living whole" (Grundrisse
101; emphasis added). This is to say that even the simplest concepts are
made possible on the basis of the material
conditions of production. Concepts and economic categories do not have
their own independent existence. They too are dependent upon the
material conditions determining their production. As Marx makes
absolutely clear, this is even the case with such founding concepts in
historical materialism as "labor": Indifference
towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed
totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer
predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the
midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing
appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a
particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as
such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours.
Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society
in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another,
and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence
indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has
here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to
be organizally linked with particular individuals in any specific form (Grundrisse 104). Even
as an "abstract" concept, "labor" is enabled by the historical
level of development of the forces of production and the social relations of production within which this development takes
place. The "abstract" in Marxism is not an idealist
abstraction disconnected from the actual conditions and relations under
capitalism, but a materialist one:
"in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must
always be kept in mind as the presupposition" (102). In
short, for Marx, "totality" is always explained on the basis
of actually existing relations of production. It is not, as it is in
Hegel and post-Marxism, a "self-producing" ideal that erases
the complex concreteness of daily life under capitalism,
rather, it is founded on
explaining the praxical relations in which people carry out the
production of social life—that is, the mode of production. Totality is
the historical grasping of the
complex social series, what Marx calls "the ensemble of social
relations". Far from being the "evil monolith" that
contemporary feminism attributes to it, the historical grasping of
social totality, and the relation of the seemingly "singular"
and "particular" to social totality is necessary for feminism
if it is going to work to transform existing social relations. It is the
only way to explain on what basis the conditions of life for women are
not simply "personal" or "women's problems". It is,
moreover, the only way for feminism to move beyond the class privileges
of an ever smaller clique of women. Contrary
to the idealist "naturalism" of Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen's
ecofeminism, Minnie Bruce Pratt begins to illustrate the necessity of
social totality for feminism in a recent critique of the imperialist
wars in Central Asia and the Middle East. "Fighting to stop
Pentagon war is a women's issue", she argues: not
because women are instinctively and 'naturally' more peaceful. Not
because women give birth or because women have been the "guardians
of life" while men have been making war. Fighting Pentagon war is a
women's issue because it flows out of the inherent need of capital to
expand its markets and its rate of exploitation in order to
survive—and women's labor, paid and unpaid, is a foundation upon which
this profit system rests. Capitalism wages brutal imperialist wars and
imposes brutal imperialist peace in order to secure those profits,
extorted from working class, oppressed and impoverished people of all
sexes. It
is impossible to understand the relevance of the war to women—and to
resist the cynical appropriation of the "liberation of women"
in the service of imperialist warfare—without a historical grasp of
social totality. Nor can feminism, without social totality, grasp how
"women's labor, paid and unpaid" is not simply a "women's
issue" but is determined by the exploitation of human
labor-power—of "people of all sexes"—and is therefore a
class issue that affects all.
It
is important to clearly re-state here that the "problem" with
excluding the dialectical materialist critique of social totality from
feminism is not that feminism does not go "far enough" without
it but that, by erasing the relation of women to the mode of production,
it actually helps
transnational capitalism cover over its "trouble spots", its
fundamental contradictions and the economic crises that result from
them. The gestures in feminism toward "materialism" and
"Marx" without a historical grasping of the social relations
of production are ways to help update ruling class ideology and
dismantle the revolutionary knowledges necessary to emancipate women
from exploitation. Such
"updatings" are driven by the needs of transnational
capitalism in crisis. Transnational capitalism, to be clear, is
increasingly a highly unstable system of production, which requires
desperate and violent "solutions" to help try and create
"stability" and "equilibrium". Not only does this
show up in the daily struggles of workers who are forced to go without
basic needs in health care, social security, education… so that the
ruling class can fund massive military expenditures in order to protect
or gain access to conditions necessary to stave off a decline in profit,
it also shows up within the ruling class itself in the form of increased
bankruptcies and failed business ventures as wealth gets concentrated
into fewer hand. The "root" issue is that the objective
structures of private property in capitalism are based on exploitation
and the accumulation of socially produced wealth (capital) in the hands
of the few and the increased immiseration and impoverishment of the
majority. Crisis
brought on by the concentration of wealth is endemic to capitalism. As
capital accumulates, it becomes increasingly difficult for the ruling
class to maintain its rate of profit, in part because the rate at which
labor-power must be exploited in order not simply to reproduce existing
wealth but to produce new wealth exceeds the historical capabilities of
the proletariat. In short, it "overproduces" capital. As a
response, capitalists must seek new technologies and labor saving
devises and means to raise the productivity of workers and thus increase
the rate at which workers can be exploited. In order to stave off
falling rates of profit, capital must produce labor-saving technologies,
expand production to create new needs (and thus, new sites for profit),
and at the same time export capitalist production to new regions where
access to reserves of cheap labor can be found. All of this requires a
continuous supply of labor-power from which surplus-labor can be
extracted. The transnational ruling class, therefore, has every interest
in battling over the life conditions of workers of the world in order to
control the development and growth of the laboring population and thus,
the rate at which it can be exploited. Contemporary
feminism has served as a most effective ally of transnational capitalism
by helping to inculcate women into the labor needs of transnational
capitalism now. The "differences" between the feminists that I
have discussed thus far—that is, those such as Probyn who see the
"post-" as an enabling condition for women and those such as
Rich, Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen who see it as disenabling for
women—is not all that vast. This is because both positions articulate
the labor needs of transnational capitalism. Their
"differences" are not fundamental differences over the social
relations of production. Rather, they are "differences" that
are the effect of these relations of production: the fact that
capitalism brings about "uneven development", that its
constant quest for profit which requires it to expand production, export
capital, etc. also requires that it have both "skilled" and
"unskilled" labor. Their "differences", in short,
are local differences—specific needs of capital for particular kinds
of labor—that are determined by the general need of capitalism for a
continuous supply of labor-power that it can exploit for profit. The
problem for feminism is not the status of the "post-" (whether
feminists are "for" or "against" it; whether women
are living under "modernity" or "postmodernity",
etc). Rather, it is the private ownership of the means of production
that cuts across the local differences in production for women in the
international division of labor. For
instance, "delectable feminism", with its emphasis on an
"ethics" for "care of the self", is especially
useful for articulating the labor needs of transnational capitalism in
the imperialist nations of the North. In order to turn over a profit,
capital needs to maintain a skilled labor force to work increasingly
complex means of production but at the same time, as a means of securing
high rates of profit, it must maintain such a workforce while still
keeping the social cost of its reproduction low. Delectable feminism
helps with this task by focusing on strategies for women that are aimed,
on the one hand, at expanding the market by creating new
"needs" so that workers can absorb some of the cost of
"overproduction" and, on the other, at reducing the social
cost of the laboring population so that wages can be lowered and the
rate of exploitation can be raised. It articulates a new
"ethics" for transnational capitalism that will enable women
of the North to adjust to the specific historical labor needs that
capitalism requires of them now in order to maintain profit. It
is in the context of the growing crisis of production that Probyn's
theory of "gut ethics" works in theory to legitimate a new
regime for controlling labor costs in the North. Responding to a crisis
of "obesity" among working people that is threatening
corporate profits, what is notable in Probyn's gut ethics is the
emphasis she places on the "productive" powers of
"shame", "disgust", and "restraint".
"Shame" and "disgust", Probyn argues, are
"productive forces" of the body that help to
"remake" gender relations. "In denying their affective
force", she continues, "we stand to lose the acuteness of the
body's own capacities for reflection" (141-142). In a criticism of
the limits of "fat pride" for addressing the
"empowerment" of women who are overweight, Probyn argues that
the "fat pride" movement covers over the "productive
use" of shame and disgust—what they tell us about the limits of
existing social arrangements and what they reveal about our desires. To
this Probyn emphasizes not only the "productive powers" of
shame and disgust but also the "powers of restraint". "Body
weight", according to Probyn's delectable feminism, is a matter of
"self-regulation". She proceeds with sensuous specificity in
describing the "affective and relational possiblilties" of an
"ethics of restraint [...] embodied in the slow caress given to
each detail, each ingredient, the sense of timing and movement so
essential to eating, cooking, loving, and being" (77, 97-100). But
what are the conditions that enable a woman to "eat well" in
the first place, with access to the resources with which to purchase
"each ingredient" and the "freedom" to allow a
relaxed and comfortable sense of "timing" and
"movement" in the preparation of food? Is her time spent on
"each ingredient" and "cooking" owing to the fact
that she has her basic needs met and can view cooking and eating as
"fun" and "exotic" or because her position in the
social relations of production also relegates her to the daily grind of
a strict division of labor that is inflexible regarding gender? Is her
sense of "self-regulation" and "restraint" an effect
of access to an abundance of ingredients and familiarity of cosmopolitan
cuisines gained from travel and access to diverse restaurants? Or is it
the effect of crushing poverty and lack of access to food? The
conditions in question are fundamentally connected to a woman's class
position and her position in the social division of labor. Yet,
delectable feminism proceeds by erasing the class privilege of the
pleasures and pains of the eating body that it celebrates. In short, while
such a theory might explain
the conditions of life for ruling class women who are able to meet their
every desire and can thus selectively determine their eating habits, how
does this theory stand to explain the "concrete" of women's
body weight, nutrition, and health for the majority for whom necessity
is the determining factor? How does this theory, for instance,
stand to explain and address the "concrete" reality of obesity
which is increasing among women and children of the North and,
worldwide, now equals the 1.1 billion people who are facing hunger and
starvation (Worldwatch Institute, March 4, 2000)? One
explanation of this rise in obesity is that the labor needs in the North
have changed as manufacturing and manual labor have been moved to the
south and, as a result, the dietary needs of workers laboring under more
"sedentary" conditions (e.g., telemarketing, data entry,
computer programming, etc.) have also changed. On the terms of Probyn's
"delectable feminism" what is needed is a more
"caring" and "selective" understanding of food in
order to allow women to adjust to these new conditions. But obesity, as
many studies are now showing, cannot be explained by a mere lack of
"sophisticated", urbane, "self-restraint". It is a
form of malnutrition that is the effect of poverty and economic
inequality. As one study from the University of California, Davis
indicates: "women struggling to put food on the table are more
likely to be overweight than those with a reliably full
refrigerator" (Lok 1). As household income "nears the poverty
line", the study states, "the prevalence of obesity increases
among women". In the United States, "Poor neighborhoods often
lack large grocery stores, forcing people, especially those without
cars, to shop at small, local convenient stores which stock little fresh
fruit or vegetables but plenty of high-fat, high-starch processed
food". Contrary to what Probyn implies—that a lack of
"self-restraint" in consumption is at the root of the
problem—it is actually a "lack of control over their food
supply" that is leading to obesity in women. It is not a "diet
of excess" but a "diet of poverty" that has made obesity
rates soar in the United states, especially among African-American,
Mexican-American, and Native American women who are often reduced to
diets high in carbohydrates and fats and low in fruits, vegetables, and
often protein (The National Women's Health Information Center). To
put this another way, women's body weight and (mal)nutrition cannot be
explained entirely by their consumption practices. In fact, it also
cannot be explained entirely by the relationship between their food
consumption and the specific,
concrete labors that they perform for capitalism (i.e., whether they are
required to engage in manual and physical labor or intellectual,
information, etc. type labor). Rather, it is their relationship
to the means of production that determines women's relationship to
food consumption, position in the technical division of labor, and body
weight. When women live in conditions of private ownership of the means
of production and are not themselves owners of the means of production
(as is the case with the majority of women) their surplus-labor and
lives are economically commanded over by those who own the means of
production. In capitalist production, women's position within the
division of labor, their consumption and food intake, their health and
nutrition are all determined by the ruling-class imperatives of profit.
This is because production for profit (not need) determines what jobs
are "necessary" and what resources are available to workers to
consume. Without freeing women from the conditions of necessity in
capitalism that determine women's lives, the focus on "body
weight" is simply the necessary strategy for capitalism to increase
worker's productivity and therefore profit for some. It is not about
putting the root conditions in place for economic security (including
health and nutrition) for all women. Probyn's
"gut ethics" of "disgust" and
"self-restraint" represents obesity as a matter of
"pedestrian excess" and, in effect, mocks the class relations
in capitalism that reduce millions of women to the diets of poverty and
malnutrition that lead to obesity. Her only imagined alternative to the
limits of "fat pride" is the "agency of anorexia".
Probyn reads "anorexia" as an agency of resistance to the
excesses of commodity culture and social control: "instead of
conceiving of the anorexic as a victim of social forces, it may be that
she is also registering profound disgust at those around her. Rather
than placing her as a hapless cipher, this reveals the strength of the
anorexic's response to the world: 'it/you are disgusting, I will not
take you in'" (141). It
should not go without saying that in this reading Probyn glamorizes an
extremely disenabling and life-threatening effect of the commodification
of women's bodies in capitalism by representing anorexia as
"radical resistance" to commodity culture. But what is most
telling about her reading is the way that it articulates the labor needs
of the ruling class in capitalism now. In many advanced capitalist
nations, such as the United States, where obesity and related health
problems (diabetes, heart disease, osteoarthritis...) especially among
women and children have been rapidly increasing as the physical and
technical requirements of new divisions of labor are changing what
workers must do, obesity is costing the economy an average of $118
billion dollars a year in lost work days, lowered productivity, and
medical bills (Inter Press Service March 7,2000). Probyn's
"ethics of restraint" is a "new" strategy for new
conditions that continues a very old task in transnational capitalism:
to lower the cost incurred by the ruling class for the social
reproduction of the laboring population and increase the rate of
exploitation. In response to the rising social cost of obesity, the
ruling class, the corporate media, and celebrity spokespersons such as
Sarah Ferguson have declared a moral and ethical crisis in food
consumption and the need to transform consumption behaviors. Such
strategies are essentially about protecting the economic security of
ruling class and upper-middle class women who want to reserve greater
amounts of the social surplus for their own use and reduce the social
resources that go to the life conditions of working class women.
Moreover, the notion in delectable feminism that the regulation of one's
"own" regimen is the basis of change follows the same
corporate logic as Republicans who support the cutting of food stamps on
the one hand and authorize tax breaks to individuals and insurance
companies for weight loss programs on the other. The overt ideological
spin for these measures is that they reduce the social cost of obesity
and obesity related disease to the economy and, at the same time, allow
for more "freedom" and "choice" for individuals to
pursue weight loss options in consultation with a physician. In
actuality, they are aimed at transferring wealth in medical benefits and
nutrition away from workers and into the hands of weight loss companies
and pharmaceutical cartels who are already pulling in an average of $33
billion per year (and counting) out of the pockets of workers,
especially women, on weight loss related programs and products while
obesity rates continue to grow. On the one hand, these measures enables
the continuation of obesity and unequal access to nutritious food
brought on by food production for profit and, on the other, they put
forward "solutions" to economic inequality and malnutrition
that help bolster the profits for the ruling class. The
"crisis" of obesity is not a moral, ethical, or cultural
crisis: it is an economic crisis in production for profit. As one study
has put it: "the century with the greatest potential to eliminate
malnutrition instead saw it boosted to record levels" where
"the number of hungry people remains high in a world of food
surpluses" (Worldwatch Institute, March 4, 2000). In short,
production for profit subordinates the production and consumption of
basic necessities such as "food" to what it profitable to
transnational corporations. "Subsistence
feminism", using a different mode, also articulates the labor needs
of transnational capitalism, but not for women of the North. Its
emphasis on a "moral economy" in which people consume less and
economic development is halted, articulates the labor needs of
transnational capitalism for women of the South—where transnational
capitalism relies on a continuous supply of unskilled cheap labor. It
is quite telling in this regard when Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen read the
relationship between the capitalist and wage-laborer as an exchange of
equivalents by taking the legal labor contract at face value. In order
to posit the expropriation of nature, and not the appropriation of
surplus-labor, as the basis of class society, they erase the
exploitation in the wage-labor capital relation altogether and present
it as a relationship of equality. Thus, instead of working to transform
the relations for the extraction of surplus-labor by capital, the
"subsistence perspective" proclaims that what needs to be
changed are consumption behaviors. It is "excessive
consumption" of the North that drives "development" and
causes the dire need in the South and the use of women's labor as an
"unlimited resource". The
subsistence perspective asserts that by opening up pockets of
"resistance" such as community gardens in the city, growing
one's own vegetables alongside farming for corporations in the country,
reclaiming land for common use in subsistence farming, workers, and
women in particular, can gain autonomy from the production of food for
profit and can gradually "edge it out" and reclaim production
for need. The understanding here is that by decreasing
"demand" for food produced by transnational agribusiness and
other transnational industries and increasing the demand for locally
grown and produced food, small scale farming and handicrafts can be
revived against transnational capitalism. But what this conceals is the
way in which "subsistence farming" is itself inculcated into
the wage-labor/capital relation. As one study of rural life in Kenya and
Lesotho puts it: In
Kenya, the tendency of increasing numbers of rural households to become
[integrated into the market economy] […] has been disguised by the
fact that many smallholders cling to small, infertile, degraded plots of
land. They are not 'landless' in the strict sense, but have been forced
into reliance on casual wage-work, non-farm artisanal activities, and
high-value export crops […] [The] resulting paradox: the dissolution
of the peasantry 'takes place precisely at the same time as a highly
weakened peasantry continues to retain relations to patches of land and
hence maintains the illusion of a property owning class' (Wisner 26). The
proletarianization of the peasantry does not require that it ceases to
own land when all means of production necessary in order to work the
land, and all necessities necessary to sustained the life of the
workers, are privately owned and controlled. What Mies and
Bennholdt-Thomsen erase is that ALL needs under capitalism are produced
under conditions of private property. While they might
"control" an immediate plot of land, subsistence farmers are
nonetheless compelled to rely for basic needs on a host of privatized
services including healthcare and veterinary medicine; farm equipment,
livestock and seed reserves; clothing and education… This is the
material reality under capitalism that drives many subsistence farmers
out of farming and into the factory and other modes of wage labor:
because "land" without the means to support labor and even
"food" produced on the farm does not pay for medicine, farm
equipment and repairs, plant disease control, irrigation systems... It
also makes subsistence farmers sites for "outsourcing" of some
of the labor of agribusiness and thus involves subsistence farmers
directly in the wage-labor/capital-relation as exploited labor. In
effect this turns many subsistence farmers into "disguised
wage-laborers" whose farms are corporate annexes where even the
minimum of labor laws do not apply. Without confronting the
wage-labor/capital relation—without working to transform the world's
agricultural and industrial production in its
totality—"subsistence feminism" merely puts forward a
"just say no" policy to capitalism: assuming that the
pressures of production for profit on farmers is a matter of consumer
"choice". But
more than "just saying no", subsistence feminism actually is
useful to transnational capitalism and helps to serve its needs for a
continuous cheap labor supply from the South. For one, since the
"subsistence perspective" does not actually eliminate the
objective pressures on farmers and workers of social relations of
production for profit, what its
"anti-development" policy does instead is help to keep the
cost of reproducing labor low, and thus make it less expensive for
transnational capitalism to use. Moreover,
the subsistence perspective is not only a means to normalize the
strategies of transnational capital to make sure that existing
labor-power remains cheap, it also helps to normalize the strategies by
which transnational capitalism works to maintain control over the
continuous supply of labor-power: the rate of growth and development of
the laboring population. This is especially apparent in the way in which
the subsistence perspective attempts to revive the "innate
power" of femaleness and childbirth to produce wealth. According to
Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, "femaleness is more than only a
symbolic metaphor for natural, life giving growth... after all",
they contend, "women's capacity to give birth to children cannot be
separated from women, in spite of all the intellectual acrobatics"
(188). But in fact, reproduction and women's capacity to give birth is
not a "given" or "autonomous" capacity, nor is it an
innately female power requiring, as it were, the involvement of men.
On the contrary, a woman's capacity to reproduce is in dialectical
relation to the social relations of production, her material conditions
of necessity, and her position within the division of labor. For women
of the South, who contribute to producing the majority of the world's
food resources, private ownership of the means of production has led to
a situation in which there are increasing numbers of women reduced to a
diet of less than 1,500 calories/day (1,000 less than the recommended
minimum). Moreover, even when calorie intake is higher, the production
of food for profit has led to a diet severely lacking in micronutrients
and protein. Poverty
brought on by the concentration of socially produced resources in the
hands of a few has made it impossible for workers to afford to buy the
more expensive "protein" and "micronutrient"
rich food. The priority to produce food for profit and keep social
reproduction costs to capital at a minimum has lead to the least
nutritious foods being the most widely available for the proletariat.
Such a situation has led to a rise in the level of anemia, protein
deficiency among women and the increase in rates of infant and maternal
mortality, childhood disease and deformity. Moreover, long term
malnutrition brought on by production for profit has lead to the loss of
menstruation and the capacity of many women to reproduce. Far from being
an "innate power" that women can use to transcend conditions
of dire need, women's capacity to reproduce is historical and depends
upon their position in the social relations of production. The
control of women's diets that is advocated in "subsistence
feminism" is also a strategy by transnational capitalism to control
women's reproductive cycles and control the future labor force and the
"surplus population": how much reserve labor-power is
available for capital to exploit, the cost of its social reproduction,
and whether or not it is "cost-effective" for capital to
invest in the social reproduction of labor-power (i.e., whether it will
receive a "return" of greater profit for its investment or
not). As long as the reproduction of daily life, health, nutrition, and
children takes places within relations of production based on private
ownership of the means of production in which the few can command over
the surplus-labor of others, this reproduction will continue to be
subordinated to production for profit. Although
in different rhetorics, both "delectable feminism" and
"subsistence feminism" ultimately advance a transnational
"ethics" that articulates "freedom" on the terms of
consumption under capitalism, and thus leave intact for women the
material conditions of private ownership in capitalism that
"necessitate" the exploitation of their surplus-labor. In
other words, both put forward the
understanding of freedom as autonomous from conditions of necessity and,
therefore, assume that women are autonomous agents who can be freed from
economic inequality and social injustice without transforming the
fundamental property relation under capitalism. The maintenance of
private property relations and production for profit leads to continuing
economic crisis, insecurity, and instability for both workers and
capitalists (who must compete more aggressively to maintain profit
levels) as the productive forces develop. Unemployment,
starvation, destitution, economic stagnation and decline, bankruptcy,
are all inevitable results of maintaining capitalism. What this goes to
show is that the position of women in society and their relationship to
their bodies, desires, and needs is not a cultural matter of ethical and
moral consumption choices, rather it is the product of economic
conditions of necessity brought about by private property relations.
Capitalism needs to keep workers economically insecure in order to drive
down the cost of wages and make it easier to adjust workers to new
strategies for ruling class profit. But doing so does not actually
"resolve" the contradictions and crises in capitalism: both
the disparity between workers and owners and the instability of
transnational capitalism is growing not diminishing. Changing the
position of women in society is not, at root, founded on the local
strategies of capitalism in crisis, but on transformation private
property relations. It therefore requires not "ethical
consumption" or a "moral economy", but heightening the
fundamental contradictions in capitalism between wage-labor and capital,
bringing them to crisis, and fundamentally transforming them. By
contrast what is needed is a Red Feminism, which grasps the
"local" strategies of capitalism in the "North" and
the "South" in relation to the underlying labor relations in
the international division of labor and thus which advances material
"freedom" for women through fundamental transformation of the
material conditions of necessity not through imagined autonomy from
them. This is because, as I have argued, what determines gender,
sexuality, and women's relationship to their bodies and need (such as
food) is not consumption but class—whether
they are owners of the means of production or exploited surplus-labor.
Without transforming the social relations of production based on private
ownership of the means of production, projects that inculcate women into
changing consumption patterns merely inculcate women into
"structural adjustment" to transnational capitalism in crisis
but do not change their fundamental conditions of economic inequality.
Only with the historical grasping of the totality of relations of
production can feminism work not simply to avoid the conditions of labor
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