noWhy Feminism Needs to Abandon its Bourgeois Illusions about the Concrete

Jennifer Cotter

One of the most important analytical contributions to feminism is the historical materialist theorization of the relation of the abstract and the concrete. In this essay, I discuss Marx's "The Method of Political Economy" from the Grundrisse (Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58). More specifically, I analyze Marx's analytics and its double moves: from the concrete to the abstract and his argument for the abstract as a mode of conceptual knowing and explanatory critique of historical and material relations. My interest in Marx's discussion of the abstract is in part because the main tendencies in contemporary feminist theory argue for the singularity of woman, the uniqueness and "irreducibility" of her subjectivity, lived experience, bodily sensuousness, relationships, and situation in the social. In fact, almost all feminist theories have, in different idioms, rejected the abstract and abstraction as a perversion of the concrete by the masculine.

A telling example of this are the remarks of posthumanist feminist Rosi Braidotti, who, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, moralized that any effort to contribute to an explanatory critique of the underlying causes of the pandemic and its rising death rates—e.g., in the social relations of capitalism—is "obscene and unethical." She writes:

This is not a time for grandiose theorizing but for collective mourning, affective resistance, and regeneration. We need to mourn the dead, humans and non-humans and not build theories on their dead bodies—that would be a shameless abuse of intellectual power. But over and above all else, we also need to develop different ways of caring. (466)

Abstraction and "theory," according to Braidotti's narrative, are forms of uncaring and violence and, she further intimates, are the work of "the Man of reason that feminists, anti-racists, black, indigenous postcolonial and ecological activists have been criticizing for decades." Abstraction, on these terms, is "based on a simple assumption of superiority by a subject that is: masculine, white, Eurocentric, practicing compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction, able-bodied, urbanized, speaking a standard language" (466) and must be replaced by the concrete labor of caring for the singularities of (dead, dying, diseased) bodies.

Briadotti's treatment of concrete conditions of life as "in excess" of the conceptual—i.e., her opposition to conceptual explanation of the social relations behind concrete bodily experience and her equation of theoretical explanation with violence—is a metaphysical matterism which reifies the concrete by disconnecting it from the social relations that produce it. Braidotti's writings, of course, are not unique in this respect, they are part of a larger trajectory of metaphysical matterism in contemporary feminism that sees conceptual explanation of as well as any collective human social intervention into material relations as "masculinist." Such a view is also evident in the remarks of new materialist feminist Samantha Frost, who argues for a form of "new materialism" in feminism that seeks to separate "the insights of historical materialism from their basis in a critique of political economy" and, instead, proposes that the only way to address the consequences of capitalism is to challenge "the aspiration towards cognitive and practical mastery over the world" (78).

What this anti-abstraction does is reduce feminism, and other theories for social change, into moral lessons in adjustment to living and coping with the ruins of capitalism, instead of working to collectively transform it. The opposition to abstraction is an opposition to systemic explanation and critique of social relations which, in turn, puts the question of social transformation in ideological suspension. At most, what is offered by this feminism is, as Braidotti proposes, a proliferation of "ways of caring" or, to put this in different terms, the expansion and diversification of reproductive and caring labor as a way to "cure" the crises of daily life under capitalism and its production for profit, but without addressing the abstract property relations and "the silent compulsion of economic relations" based on production for profit, within which reproductive and caring labor takes place in capitalism (Marx, Capital vol. 1, 899). However, positing the proliferation of "ways of caring" (i.e., of reproductive labor), as the "cure" for the contradictions of capitalist exploitation in worker's lives, but without ending production for profit for the owners (which is based on exploitation of worker's labor), is quite consistent with the ways in which capitalist production for profit has always pawned off the cost of reproduction ("caring") onto the working class and the way in which "the advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws" (Marx, Capital vol. 1, 899).

My argument is that the "concrete" material conditions of women's lives in capitalism are not objectively analyzed without conceptualizing them and conceptualization is abstraction. Moreover, conceptual abstraction is necessary in feminism to explain the immediate conditions of women's lives and labor under capitalism, including reproductive and caring labor, not as isolated singularities and autonomous "events," but in relation to their underlying causes in the systemic material relations of production based on wage-labor/capital relations. There is no change of women's "concrete" conditions of life, without understanding the social relations that bring these conditions about. Rather than the bodily sensuous and singular, what is needed in feminism is a method that can explain the dialectical and material relationship of women's lives and labor to the ensemble of social relations of production in capitalism not treat individual women as "autonomous" singularities. In contrast to metaphysical materialisms, which analytically isolate concrete conditions from the abstract material relations in which they are produced, Marx's "Method of Political Economy" is necessary for this because it understands the "concrete" as a complex set of historical and social relations—not the empirical or individual. As Marx argues, "the concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse" (Economic Manuscripts 38).

To elaborate further, in outlining the dialectical materialist understanding of the "concrete" in the "The Method of Political Economy," Marx argues that:

It would seem right to start with the real and concrete, with the actual presupposition, e.g. in political economy to start with the population, which forms the basis and the subject of the whole social act of production. Closer consideration shows, however, that this is wrong. Population is an abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn remain an empty phrase if one does not know the elements on which they are based, e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price, etc. If one were to start with population, it would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and through closer definition one would arrive analytically at increasingly simple concepts; from the imagined concrete, one would move to more and more tenuous abstractions until one arrived at the simplest determinations. From there it would be necessary to make a return journey until one finally arrived once more at population, which this time would be not a chaotic conception of a whole, but a rich totality of many determinations and relations. (Economic Manuscripts 37)

In other words, what Marx is arguing for is not treating "immediate" or "concrete" conditions of life (or "experience") under capitalism as autonomous, self-evident, and self-explanatory (which is the "imagined concrete" and a "chaotic conception of the whole"), but for investigating and explaining (through concepts) their underlying social and historical causes in the "simplest determinations" and, in turn, the totality of material and social conditions and relations in which these determinations come about. What is immediately apparent in the concrete conditions of life in capitalism, in other words, is not a self-evident and transhistorical fact, but the product of a totality of social and historical determinations and relations. Why is this important for feminism? It is important owing to the fact that immediate conditions of life, including for women, cannot be fundamentally transformed without changing the root of these conditions in the social relations that produce them and, moreover, to effectively collectively change these relations in practical life, they must be understood conceptually.

It is important to note, however, that Marx's argument in "The Method of Political Economy" is widely distorted in contemporary cultural theory and turned into a point that is quite the opposite of what Marx argues. More specifically, Marx's argument has been deconceptualized to mean that the "concrete" is indeterminate and, therefore, "in excess" of social totality. One of the main "influencers" of this distortion can be found in Antonio Negri's reading of the Grundrisse in Marx Beyond Marx in which Negri argues that the concrete in Marx is the product of "determinate abstraction" (47). In contrast to "naïve methodology that begins with the concrete as a presupposition," Negri proceeds, "Marx's methodology takes the concrete as a result," by which Negri means that the concrete is the product of "the development of a 'process of synthesis' of the givens of intuition and representation" (47; emphases added). In other words, 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; emphases added). "Therefore," Negri concludes, 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, by arguing that epistemological abstractions are what enable us to arrive at the "concrete" and even constitute the "concrete." Negri attributes to Marx a metaphysical explanation of the "concrete" that, in actuality, Marx critiques in his critique of Hegel's dialectical idealism. In "The Method of Political Economy," Marx writes:

Hegel accordingly arrived at the illusion that the real was the result of thinking synthesising itself within itself, delving ever deeper into itself and moving by its inner motivation; actually, the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is simply the way in which thinking assimilates the concrete and reproduces it as a mental concrete. This is, however, by no means the process by which the concrete itself originates. (Economic Manuscripts 38)

Marx means by this that the concrete does not "originate" through what Negri calls "determinate abstraction" (i.e., from consciousness), but from material social relations. Marx rigorously distinguishes between the process of mentally grasping the concrete through the production of abstract concepts—which is necessary for understanding the concrete as the product of a totality of material (rather than epistemological) relations—and the totality of those material relations themselves, which constitute the real basis of the concrete. To this end, Marx further argues that "[t]he real subject" of abstract theoretical conceptualization "remains outside the mind and independent of it [...] Hence the subject, society, must always be envisaged as the premise of conception even when the theoretical method is employed" (38-39; emphasis added).

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 dialectical and historical materialist critique. Marx does not argue that the "concrete" is determined or "constituted" by "epistemological abstraction." On the contrary, he argues that the "concrete" is determined by a totality of historical material relations. In Marxism, the "concrete" is not a metaphysical abstraction—the empirical, the experiential, the bodily sensuous, the singular, irreducible, individual, or epistemologically indeterminate—as it is represented in contemporary cultural theory. Rather, in Marxism, the "concrete" is a materialist abstraction of the ensemble of social relations of production. What contemporary (bourgeois) cultural and feminist theory represents as the "concrete" (i.e., the empirical, the bodily sensuous, the singular, the irreducible, etc.) is what Marx calls the "imagined concrete," by which he means that it is not the underlying cause, but is itself the effect and "concentration" or "synthesis" of a totality of historical and material relations and determinations, which must be explained through explanatory critique of these relations.

The "imagined concrete," Marx argues, is an empty "abstraction" when it is analytically severed from the totality of material relations that produce it. In Marxism, it is necessary to explain the "imagined concrete" through abstract concepts that lay bare the totality of social and material relations of production. Moreover, this unpacking and explanation requires materialist abstraction that "arrive[s] analytically at increasingly simple concepts [...] from the imagined concrete [...] to the simplest determinations," which would have to be retraced but "which this time would be not a chaotic conception of a whole, but a rich totality of many determinations and relations" (Economic Manuscripts 37). Another way of stating this is that the "imagined concrete"—e.g., the singularities of differences or women's so called "particular" experiences—is not what explains the social situation of women, but what needs to be explained through dialectical materialist analysis of the underlying totality of social relations of production in capitalism that produce it. The "concrete," understood as a materialist abstraction of the ensemble of social relations, is a concentration of the totality of historical and material 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 the ensemble of social relations of production.

Historical and materialist explanation of the relationship of the "concrete" of women's lives to the totality of social relations of production in capitalism, as I mark above, is by and large deconceptualized in much of contemporary feminist theory. This is not only the case in arguments made by metaphysical matterists such as Braidotti and Frost and other feminists of the "ontological turn" who outright reject conceptual explanation and collective social transformation of the abstract social relations of capitalism. It is also the case in such theories as social reproduction theory (SRT), which proposes to explain the relationship of women's labor and lives to capitalism and claims to contribute to a theory of social transformation. A key point of difference between the Marxist theory of feminism and social reproduction feminism is the concept of class. Social reproduction theorists see Marx's binary theory of class—e.g., class as determined by one's relation to ownership of the means of production—as "one of Marxist-Feminism's greatest weaknesses" (Ferguson et al., Introduction 30). Instead, social reproduction theory argues that the "root" contradiction in capitalism is not the class contradiction between owners of the means of production who exploit workers and workers who do not own the means of production and are exploited but the contradiction between "productive" and "reproductive" labor, which is frequently articulated by social reproduction feminists as a contradiction between what Marx calls "abstract labor" (i.e., surplus-value producing or "productive" labor) and "concrete labor," which is taken to mean reproductive labor by social reproduction theory.

A case in point is social reproduction feminist Susan Ferguson's argument that the "dual nature of labor—the origin of abstract labor in concrete labor, and their lived simultaneity—is [...] the crux of capitalism's internal contradiction and the reason it is prone to crisis" (122-123). According to Ferguson, however, while "abstract labor dominates production, [...] it cannot ever fully subsume concrete labor" ("Children" 122). In a similar vein to Braidotti's "metaphysical matterism" of the concrete as in "excess" of abstract conceptualization, Ferguson also treats the concrete labor of reproduction and the "bodily sensuousness" of the reproductive laborer as in "excess" of the abstract property relations of capitalism in which workers' surplus-labor is produced and exploited. Drawing on John Holloway's argument that "capital's drive to fully subsume labour, to instrumentalise it, to strip it of all embodiment and subjectivity, runs up against its dependence on concrete, living labour—sentient, embodied, thinking, self-conscious labour" (Holloway 914), Ferguson claims that "the body and hence the concrete practical human activity it performs, exceed abstraction even as they are dominated by it" (Ferguson, "Children" 123). Far from contributing to a theory of social transformation of capitalism, Ferguson's social reproduction feminism ends up in the same ideological place of adjustment to (and at most reform of capitalism) as Braidotti's metaphysical matterism. More specifically, Ferguson argues that "bodies at play or engaged in concrete labor" (by which she means reproductive labor outside of direct production, such as in the family), "retain some control over their conscious, practical human activity" and, she concludes, are "the basis for an immanent critique of capitalism" and "signal an alternative to the mode of being upon which the reproduction of capitalism depends" (123). By arguing that concrete labor and the body of the living laborer are "in excess" of abstraction, Ferguson is arguing that they are beyond social relations of exploitation and, in effect, that reproductive labor (particularly away from the workplace) is a site of resistance and non-alienated labor within capitalism. In other words, Ferguson's social reproduction theory leads to the same reformist argument as metaphysical matterism by advocating that the bodily sensuous and reproductive labor (including "play time") taking place outside of direct production (the site of surplus-value production) is the "cure" to exploitation.

As Tithi Bhattacharya explains in her Introduction to Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, "This sort of interpretation"—i.e., of reproductive labor as "non-alienated" because it does not directly produce surplus-value—"conflates the relationship between 'work' and 'leisure' in commonsensical terms with abstract and concrete labor in Marxist terms" (Introduction 10). However, as a social reproduction theorist, Bhattacharya also argues that the Marxist theory of class is too restrictive and in the name of "expanding" what she calls the "two-dimensional" view of class (i.e., class as the social relations of production between wage labor/capital) she theorizes the social relations of production and reproduction—what she calls "workplace" relations and relations in the home, schools, hospitals, etc.—as coextensive and "co-produced" ("How Not to Skip Class" 74). In her argument, Bhattacharya draws from yet, ultimately, deconceptualizes Marx's argument for the need to abolish capitalism as a totality rather than limit class struggle to battles against "specific" capitals. Bhattacharya notes that "Marx does not talk of individual capitalists and the workplaces they command, but capital as a whole" and acknowledges that there is a fundamental class antagonism between wage-labor and capital, in that the goal of the capitalist is always to increase the amount of surplus-value appropriated from workers and the goal of the worker is to increase their means of subsistence and life (82-83). However, according to Bhattacharya, "The 'uniqueness' of labor power lies in the fact that, although it is not produced and reproduced by capital, it is vital to capital's own circuit of production" (80). On this basis, Bhattacharya contends that in addition to what Marx refers to as a "circuit" of capital (i.e., M-C-M' as outlined in Capital vol. 1), Marxism needs to be revised so that "A second circuit of production then must be posited, distinct from that of capital, though in relation with it" (80-81). By a "second circuit of production," Bhattacharya means what she calls the "circuit of reproduction" (80; emphasis added). However, as I explain in detail further below, by understanding production and reproduction as co-constitutive, Bhattacharya and social reproduction feminism more generally end up substituting struggles over the means of subsistence and the reproduction of labor-power within capitalism for the class struggle over ownership of the means of production to abolish capitalism. Bhattacharya is in effect advocating for reforms that ultimately keep capitalism itself intact and adjust workers to accepting their own exploitation.

More specifically, Bhattacharya argues that fighting against capitalism as a "totality" requires expanding the struggle over the "means of subsistence" allotted to workers from struggles in the workplace over wages to struggles outside of the workplace in the relations of reproduction. What she ultimately argues for is not the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, but waging battles over distribution—that is the working class "demanding its share of civilization" by increasing what she calls the "basket of goods" (i.e., the means of subsistence) "allotted" to the worker from the surplus-value produced by workers (79). On this basis, Bhattacharya argues that battles over the "share of civilization" or "basket of goods allotted to workers," can and should occur not only within the workplace at "the point of production" but in the "circuit of reproduction," e.g., in struggles over education, clean drinking water, housing, etc. (92).

Contrary to Bhattacharya's argument, Marx argues that labor-power is a unique commodity in capitalism because labor-power is the only commodity that—owing to historical conditions of development of the productive forces—is capable of producing a "surplus-value" above and beyond the value equivalent to the value of the means of subsistence (including the contributions made by reproductive labor) needed to reproduce the worker's labor-power as a commodity. Bhattacharya marginalizes the fact that Marx's theory of the "circuit" of capital (e.g., M-C-M') is not the root of his theory of the production of capital. In her references to Marx's discussion of the so called "circuit" of production, she draws on Marx's theory of the movement or "circulation" of capital. For instance, in Capital, vol 1, Chapter 4, Marx discusses the "circuit" through which money is transformed into capital (M-C-M') and how this differs from the simple circulation of commodities (C-M-C). However, what Bhattacharya's theory of "circuit of production" bypasses, is that the movement of capital—i.e., the changing of its form in circulation—is not ultimately the root of Marx's theory of the production of capital. As Marx argues, capital is not produced by means of circulation (i.e., a "circuit" in which money is exchanged for commodities), but through the theft of worker's surplus-labor (i.e., exploitation) in the "hidden abode of production" (Marx, Capital vol. 1, 279), i.e., in which the worker produces "surplus-value" above and beyond the value that is needed for the reproduction of labor power as a commodity. And the worker, precisely because she does not own the means of production, is economically compelled to sell her labor-power under such conditions of exploitation in order to survive.

It turns out that Bhattacharya's understanding of social totality is a "chaotic conception of the whole"—the "imagined concrete." Her entire understanding of class struggle at "the point of production" to begin with, rests on an idealist abstraction of class, labor and production (the "imagined concrete") that analytically severs class from the underlying material relations that produce class: private ownership of the means of production. In doing so, she posits the struggle for higher wages within capitalism as the root of class struggle, and not abolition of the wage form through transformation of capitalist social relations of production. In other words, even when Bhattacharya directly discusses "class" and "class struggle" at the "point of production" she empties it of its meaning by defining it as a struggle over "wages" in the workplace. For instance, when Bhattacharya argues that "built into the fabric of wage labor as a form is the struggle for higher wages: class struggle," she is equating class struggle "at the point of production" with workers' struggle over higher wages within capitalism (83). In effect, social reproduction theory limits "class struggle at the point of production" to a struggle to lower the rate of exploitation (through adjusting the amount of wages) rather than the struggle for the working class to end exploitation altogether by seizing the means of production—i.e., to transform ownership of the means of production from private ownership to collective and public ownership. Her theory of class struggle "at the point of production" is itself reformist. And, in turn, her theory of expanding class struggle to struggles outside of the workplace (such as factory worker strikes) to other sites within (such as struggles over housing, healthcare, childcare, etc.) is also reformist. It is reformist not because she sees struggles outside of the workplace, the factory, as sites of class struggle but because she reduces class struggle itself to reforms of capitalism and changes in distribution.

Ultimately, Bhattacharya's produces an anti-dialectical understanding of class relations and, in turn, of "class struggle" and "class antagonisms." More specifically, Bhattacharya theorizes class, and class struggle, as a relative relation over the amount of "surplus-value" produced by workers that is kept by capital for profit and the amount of the social surplus that is distributed to workers for expanded social reproduction. For instance, she writes: "The position of the working class under capitalism is a relative one; that is, it exists in a relationship with the capitalist class" (79). Theorizing class as relative in turn, results in theorizing "class struggle" as a permanent antagonism between capital and labor over the rate of exploitation. To put this another way, Bhattacharya's theory evacuates a dialectical and historical materialist understanding of class antagonisms as rooted in the dialectical contradiction—not in a permanent relative relation—between those who privately own the means of production and, therefore, are able to "command [an] amount of other people's labor" and workers who only own their own labor-power to sell to survive and are exploited (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 247).

Bhattacharya's "non-dialectical" theory of class relations and class struggle is a version of the North Atlantic Left theories that Teresa Ebert and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh critique in the "Digital Metaphysics of Cognitive Capitalism," when they argue that

The transformative task of dialectics—changing what is—is the target of the war on dialectics in radical theories of the left in the global North. Left theories always advocate social change. However, by embracing a non-dialectical idea of change, the North Atlantic left theories are becoming latter day reformisms based on antagonism without contradictions: a static antagonism between two positive, fixed identities of capital and labor. (399)

Bhattacharya, and social reproduction theory generally, empties Marx's theory of class and, in turn, class struggle from its material basis. This is really the crux of the matter: The basic theory of class advanced by SRT is a distributionist theory. When Bhattacharya discusses the issues of "class struggle" she theorizes the struggle as a struggle over the "basket of goods" allotted to the worker rather than the struggle for the transformation of ownership of the means of production from private to public. Her theorization is ultimately a distributionist and reformist argument because she moves further and further away from understanding that "class struggle" against "capital in general" requires workers seizing the means of production and transforming property relations from private to public and collective ownership to end class relations—not simply increasing the means of subsistence or consumption which is at the point of distribution. Revolutionary class struggle, however, is not simply a struggle over the amount of "surplus-value" allotted to capital and the amount of the "basket of goods" allotted to the worker, rather it is a struggle to abolish class, exploitation, and private ownership of the means of production.

Distributionism as an end-in-itself shifts the rate of exploitation for some workers in specific localities within capitalism, without abolishing exploitation of all workers in global capitalism. Abolishing exploitation requires transformation of the social relations of production by abolishing private ownership of the social means of production. When "class struggle" is reduced to redistribution as an end-in-itself without transformation of the social relations of production based on private property, capital will work to pit the global workforces against each other in order to more heavily exploit the labor-power of one sector of the global workforces to offset or "fund" the cost of a higher rate of distribution to another sector of the working class, who act as managers on behalf of capital. For instance, in Sweden, where there is historically a high rate of social distribution to workers who are citizens, but without the abolition of capitalism rooted in private ownership of the means of production, there is also heavy exploitation of immigrant labor and the rise of racism and national populism as ideological tools to normalize higher rates of exploitation of migrant workers. For instance, Sweden has made further cuts to public benefits to non-European migrant laborers while, at the same time requiring increased work hours for migrant workers to retain work permits in Sweden, thus increasing the amount of surplus-labor time non-European migrant workers are required to engage in (see, e.g., MacGregor).

Social needs—e.g., for healthcare, habitable living environments, housing, education, food, clean drinking water, childcare—are indeed sites of class conflict under capitalism, but this class conflict emanates from the contradictions in the relations of production in which the ruling class privately owns the means of production and exploits the surplus-labor of the working class who only own their labor-power to sell to survive and are exploited. Workers' struggles for a higher level of social distribution in order to meet a higher level of social needs within capitalism—e.g., struggles for housing, food, healthcare, etc.—are not in and of themselves socially transformative. This is owing to the fact that under capitalism meeting social needs is mediated by production relations based on private ownership of the means of production and the theft of workers' surplus-labor for profit.

The goal of social transformation is not simply to meet human needs within capitalism and its markets, but freedom from necessity—i.e., freedom from the necessity that is imposed on people by the social relations of production in capitalism. In a world in which the forces of production of capitalism and the capacities of collective human labor have developed to the point in which it is possible to provide all persons on the planet with food, clean water and irrigation, clothing, shelter, healthcare, transportation, childcare, and so on... it is the relations of production in capitalism—based on private ownership of the means of production and the theft of workers' surplus-labor in production for profit—that have become fetters to these forces of production and continue to force people to work to live, and live to work to enrich the ruling class. Under capitalist relations of production, the productive forces are "set to work" not for the purpose of freedom from necessity for all, but only for producing private profit for some; i.e., the owners of the means of production. As long a private ownership of the means of production continues, so does the exploitation of worker's surplus-labor.

Bhattacharya's theory of "class," "production," and "labor" is not an exception within social reproduction theory but the dominant logic. Ferguson, for instance, is even more explicit in broadening her understanding of production to encompass any labor, whether it is labor that produces surplus-value and takes place within capitalist relations of exploitation or reproductive labor within or outside the market. According to Ferguson "at the heart of social reproduction feminism is the conception of labor as broadly productive" and such labor includes all "the 'practical human activity' that creates all the things, practices, people, relations and ideas constituting the wider social totality" ("Intersectionality" 48). This "expansion" of the concepts of production and class is actually a flattening of the social and all social relations, none of which have any priority and all of which are co-constitutive. It is in fact an ontologizing of labor as a "supernatural creative power" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme 81) that is a product of abstracting it analytically from its social preconditions. This is not an expansion of these concepts but an evacuation of their historical specificity and effectivity as part of a transformative theory. If all social relations are equally productive and determinative, then there is no need to transform the social relations of production and exploitation and to do so in order to enable the transformation, as well, of relations of reproduction such as gender relations.

By contrast, in Marxism and, in turn, Marxist feminism, labor is not the empty abstraction—the "imagined concrete"—that is presented in social reproduction feminism, which does not challenge the class position of those who own the means of production. Even the "simplest economic category," Marx argued, "can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already existing, concrete, living whole" (Economic Manuscripts 38; 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 historical and material conditions determining their production. As Marx discusses in "The Method of Political Economy," this is even the case with such founding concepts in historical materialism as "abstract labor," i.e., labor productive of surplus-value:

The fact that the specific kind of labour is irrelevant presupposes a highly developed totality of actually existing kinds of labour, none of which is any more the dominating one. Thus the most general abstractions arise on the whole only with the most profuse concrete development, when one [phenomenon] is seen to be common to many, common to all. Then it is no longer perceived solely in a particular form. On the other hand, this abstraction of labour in general is not simply the conceptual result of a concrete totality of labours. The fact that the particular kind of labour is irrelevant corresponds to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one kind of labour to another, the particular kind of labour being accidental to them and therefore indifferent. Labour, not only as a category but in reality, has become here a means to create wealth in general, and has ceased as a determination to be tied with the individuals in any particularity. (Economic Manuscripts 41)

Even as an abstract concept, the historical materialist concept of "abstract labor," i.e., labor productive of surplus-value, is enabled by the historical and material 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: "When the theoretical method is employed," Marx argues, "the subject, society, must always be envisaged as the [premise] of conception" (Economic Manuscripts 39-40).

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 or post-Marxism, etc., a self-producing ideal that erases the complex concreteness of daily life under capitalism, rather, it is founded on explaining the totality of material 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" of production. Far from being the "empty abstraction" that contemporary feminisms attribute 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.

Yet, the main theoretical tendencies in contemporary feminist theory have marginalized understanding of the dialectical relation of gender, sexuality, and difference to the totality of production relations in capitalism. The dominant feminisms are ideological articulations of the fact that under capitalism, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nation, age, (dis)ability, are not autonomous singularities but are socially significant differences owing to their dialectical relation to class and private ownership of the means of production. In capitalism, gender, sexuality, and differences are "instruments of labor, making it more or less expensive to use" (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto 491). More specifically, as "instruments of labor" social differences are produced and used in capitalism as tools to cheapen the cost of labor-power and as a strategy to bolster the rate of exploitation and rate of profit. They are reproduced and used by capital to normalize the lowering of the "exchange-value"—i.e., the wages—of labor-power. In turn, they become ideological justifications for relative increases in the rate of exploitation owing to the fact that, by cheapening the cost of labor-power, they shorten the time the worker spends in the working day reproducing the value equivalent to her wages and increase the time the worker spends producing surplus-value for the profit of capital. They, furthermore, are reproduced to provide a way to teach workers to interpret as natural the social division of labor and the way workers are pitted in competition with one another by capital—a situation in which "labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by doing the work of five, then ten, then twenty" (Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital 44).

As an "instrument of labor," gender is also useful for capital as an ideological tool in controlling the rate of growth and development of the surplus-labor producing population, by pushing and pulling women in and out of production and reproduction as a result of what is profitable to capitalism. However, the "usefulness" of gender as an instrument of labor making it "more or less expensive to use"—i.e., to exploit—by capital is not the product of women's "reproductive labor" or gender as autonomous singularities "outside" or in "excess" of the production relations of capitalism. Rather, it is "the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers" that "determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant" (Marx, Capital vol. 3, 927). In other words, the usefulness of gender and other social differences as "instruments of labor" is an effect of the class relations of capitalism in which capital pumps surplus-value out of living labor to make a profit.

In capitalism the social relations of reproduction are at root determined by the social relations of production—e.g., "the system of the family" and more generally social reproduction are "completely dominated by the system of property" and exploitation of surplus labor in production (Engels 36). For example, what has been referred to as a "shecession" owing to high rates of job loss for women in the wake of the global pandemic (see Holpuch) is explained by the fact that gender is still an instrument of labor in capitalism. The pushing and pulling of women in and out of the workforce is a symptom of the fact that the family is still an economic unit of capitalism in which "employers pay workers a wage, but take no responsibility for most of the social costs of maintaining the current generation of workers—or for raising the next generation of workers into adulthood" (Roesch). In capitalism, workers are responsible for bearing the cost and labor of social reproduction of the labor-power that is to be exploited in production. But in order to "make a wage" and bear a cost, workers "must also be over-producers" for capital—i.e., producers of surplus-value in production—"producers above their needs, in order to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs" (Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II 520).

It is not only the "desire" of capital to squeeze more and more profit from the working class that leads it to continue to use gender, sexuality, trans-, race, ethnicity, nation, age, (dis)ability... as instruments of labor to divide the working class and enable deeper exploitation, but the necessity for ever deeper exploitation of the working class in the face of the falling rate of profit that these divisions are reproduced to serve capital. Capitalism has necessitated a reorganization of the global social division of labor, including the place of women as exploited producers of surplus-value in capitalism, from Fordism and post-Fordism (e.g., John Allen) to "bio-" and "cognitive capitalism" (e.g., Carlo Vercellone) in order to gain cheap access to "surplus-value" producing labor, to stave off declines in profit.

The dominant feminisms—from the cultural turn to the new material turn, to the (re)turn to social reproduction theory—are themselves the cultural effects of dialectical contradictions and turns in the material relations of production of capitalism as it seeks new ways to "pump" surplus value out of living labor. The main tendencies in feminism, albeit in different idioms, have continued to theoretically isolate the "concrete" of women's lives and labor, including reproductive labor, from the "abstract" production relations of capitalism and, in doing so, obscure the totality of material relations of production that have turned gender and social differences into instruments of exploitation at the point of production. At most such feminisms fight for a larger share of the exploited surplus for some women through rights and reforms in social distribution to continue to make it "more or less expensive to use." Rather than a theory of social transformation to end capitalism this reformism is the cultural metaphysics of the reproduction of capitalism. What is needed in feminism, by contrast, is to produce a Marxist theory of feminism that prioritizes the fight to end capitalism and the pumping of surplus-value from labor, with the understanding that "rights" and reforms—to higher wages, to a higher level of distribution—"can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme 87).

This essay is developed from my forthcoming book, Feminist Theory in Turns: Marxism, Cultural Theory, Feminism(s) (Routledge).

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