Column: Woman as Reason
October 1999

The unhappy marriage of Hartsock and Marx

by Maya Jhansi

Women worldwide are facing the most rabid forms of right-wing violence, from the anti-welfare and anti-crime hysteria here in the U.S. to outright gender apartheid in places like Afghanistan. Yet while women fight for their lives everywhere, much of what passes for feminist theory satisfies itself by remaining comfortably sequestered within the walled compounds of academia. The postmodernist turn in feminist theory has contributed to the demobilization of feminist politics in the world today. And this is not even to mention the question of revolution, of course. Whatever happened to that?

In her new book, THE FEMINIST STANDPOINT REVISITED AND OTHER ESSAYS (Westview Press, 1998), Nancy Hartsock addresses this, arguing for revolutionary feminist perspectives.

The book, a compilation of her essays written over the past twenty years, is divided into three parts, the first on political movements and theories, the second on "reoccupying Marxism as feminism," and the third on structuralism and post-structuralism. While I cannot take up everything in the book here, I want to focus on Hartsock's discussion of Marx, which is central to the book as a whole.

Hartsock is known for her insistence that Marx is important for feminism and for her theory of the feminist standpoint. Unfortunately, however, the Marx she goes back to is the post-Marx Marxist caricature. It is telling and unfortunate that Hartsock fails to mention the only woman Hegelian-Marxist and feminist philosopher, Raya Dunayevskaya, who spent a lifetime working out the meaning of Marx's philosophy for the post-World War II world. Indeed, this "oversight" is obvious in her own reductive reading of Marx as an essentially Eurocentric and masculinist thinker concerned only with a narrowly defined class division.

The core of Hartsock's project is to theorize a "feminist standpoint" based on Marxist ideas. A standpoint, Hartsock argues, is a "technical theoretical device that can allow for the creation of better (more objective, more liberatory) accounts of the world" (236). Central to her concept of the feminist standpoint is Georg Lukacs' 1923 essay, "Reification and the Standpoint of the Proletariat." Though Lukacs, an important Hegelian-Marxist philosopher, was interested in the standpoint of the proletariat in this essay, he collapsed the reification (thingification) of labor as an activity into the reification of the laborer. Thus the subjectivity of the proletariat is subsumed by capitalist labor process, and the laborer himself becomes an object.

Citing Lukacs' own 1967 self-critique of this essay for equating objectification with alienation, Hartsock proposes to theorize a feminist standpoint that bypasses Lukacs' original error and not only sees women's work as a source of alienation but also of utopian vision. Her project begins with her critique of Marx for eliding the importance of the sexual division of labor. Where Marx supposedly only wrote from the standpoint of the male proletariat, she wants to "follow out the epistemological consequences of the sexual division of labor" (112).

Women's labor, Hartsock argues, is similar to men's labor to the extent that it is alienated and repetitive. However, because women produce more use-values than commodities, are more interested in quality of products (for their families etc.) than quantity, and are engaged in reproduction of human beings and not just objects, their vantage point is not as bound by capitalist ideology. "The unity of mental and manual labor," Hartsock writes, "and the directly sensuous nature of much of women's work leads to a more profound unity of mental and manual labor, social and natural worlds, than is experienced by the male worker in capitalism" (120).

As many have pointed out, Hartsock is on shaky grounds in her discussion of the sexual division of labor. In effect, she falls into the very biological determinism that feminists have so long fought, arguing at one point that:"The unity [of mental and manual] grows from the fact that women's bodies, unlik e men's, can be themselves instruments of production: in pregnancy arguments about a division of mental from manual labor are fundamentally foreign" (120). Far from challenging the sexual division of labor or that between mental and manual labor, Hartsock, like radical feminists, seems in places to merely reverse their valuation-women's labor over men's labor, manual labor over mental labor.

Marx, unlike his colleague Engels, refused to fall into such biologism. To him, what was key even in the sexual division of labor was the social elements, not biological origins. That is why I cannot take very seriously Hartsock's claim that what is needed is a "more systematic critique of Marx on the basis of a more fully developed understanding of the sexual division of labor" (126). It seems to me that what we need is a more systematic STUDY of Marx. There is much in Marx, especially in his last writings on gender and the Third World, that feminists have yet to seriously grapple with.

While Hartsock is generally right that women add unique dimensions to a critique of capitalist society and to a vision of a new society, she ignores the class, race, ethnic, nationalist realities that complicate women's lives, showing the limitations of an epistemological theory. In response to those who have critiqued her work for ignoring women of color, she writes that "in following Marx's procedure of reducing the world to a two-class, two-man model, I ended up with a problem similar to his own-that is unable to see important axes of domination, even while recognizing their operation" (239). Her solution to the problem is to call for coalition politics of various groups and standpoints for liberation.

However, Hartsock presents a very reductive view of Marx, never challenging the false view that Marx was only and always concerned with a narrow definition of class. It is not that Hartsock's standpoint theory suffers problems similar to Marx-it is rather that she has fallen short of Marx. From his 1844 MANUSCRIPTS to THE ETHNOLOGICAL NOTEBOOKS written in the last years of his life, Marx made the transformation of the alienated man/woman relationship central to his vision of a new human society. Dunayevskaya, one of the very few to have analyzed Marx's last writings, argued that Marx's philosophic method was driven by the search for ways to make revolution total, global, deeper and permanent. If we miss this aspect of Marx's philosophy, as Hartsock has, how are we to move beyond standpoints to a revolutionary philosophy that can truly meet the aspirations of the various, multiple, complex forces of revolution in this world today?

CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS