Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 38

The Marxist feminism that emerged from these struggles integrated an attention to feudal social forms of gender relations in order to better understand imperialist strategies for capitalist accumulation. Late capitalism spawned a twofold method: the systematic disarticulation of production from one region or location, so that factories roam the earth in relentless search of unorganized workers, coupled with the global integration of capital in time, money, and space. Workers have lost power as capital has gained. Imperialism in late capitalism mobilized rural women from subsistence agricultural economies as workers, through land eviction and policies of peasant immiseration. As a result of mass migration from small landholdings, away from livelihoods based on subsistence farming, those previously marginal regions formed the basis for new markets as they became more fully integrated into global capitalism. In the words of Patricia Fernández‐Kelly, the question about the gender relations of the political economy asked, “how women were becoming the new face of the international proletariat” (Fernández‐Kelly 2007, p. 509).

The second question about social reproduction as a site for both capitalism's renewal and its downfall focuses on the ongoing centrality of primitive accumulation – variously called tribute, debt payment, theft, resource extraction, and oppression, depending on the context – to the accumulation of surplus value (or profit) in capitalism (Federici 2012). Social reproduction looks to the lives of workers beyond the workplace: of leisure, vices, love, and ethics. These pursuits outside of the sphere of production are still threaded with ideologies of capitalism and their commodification, including emotions, pleasure, and family. Analysts of social reproduction seek to better understand these linkages between workers and their lives. Theories of gender and political economy necessarily overlap with those about social reproduction in vital ways, not least because imperialism is predicated upon the primitive accumulation of unpaid work and the earth's resources (Simpson 2009).

In the early twentieth century, socialist feminists argued for the social wage to bridge the divide between paid productive work and unpaid reproductive labor. The social wage sought to give material value to reproductive labor. Kollantai's early work to provide greater state support for reproductive work, spread from the USSR in the early twentieth century to nations across Europe, Iran, Cuba, and other state socialist governments (Bier 2011; Moghadam 2003). Paid time off for childcare, maternity leave, subsidized food for childbearing women, and other pro‐maternalist policies emerged from Marxist feminist analyses, particularly in socialist state formations of the USSR and Eastern Europe (Ghodsee 2015). Efforts to collectivize reproductive labor, also championed by Kollantai, through state‐run childcare and collective living arrangements sought to encourage women's political participation and lessen their workloads spread to China in the 1950s and Tanzania in the 1960s.

In the 1930s and 1940s, another strategy to link production to reproduction developed in the United States. In the late 1930s, Mary Inman, an American communist challenged the Marxist feminist focus on women as workers. She argued that the reproductive labor of middle‐class women should be recognized as productive work (Inman 1940). While her analysis did not change the Communist Party's position on the woman question, she continued to write about the importance of women's reproductive labor to waged work through the 1960s (Weigand 2001). Socialist feminists from the Caribbean, Italy, Germany, France, and the UK revived Inman's recognition of reproductive labor as productive work (Benston 1971; Mies et al. 1988). Like Inman, they directly challenged the separation between production and reproduction in traditional Marxist feminism. “Labor power is a commodity produced in the home,” wrote Selma James. “Women are not marginal in the home, in the factory, in the hospital, in the office. We are fundamental to the reproduction of capital and fundamental to its destruction” (Dalla Costa and James 1972, p. 19). Beginning in Italy, demands for payment in the Wages for Housework movement sought the downfall of capitalism through bankrupting its reliance on women's unpaid reproductive labor. The movement also sought to collectivize women who were atomized by the work's invisibility hidden within the domestic sphere. Women, as the primary subjects of this unpaid labor, could realize their own power as a collective force to dismantle the capitalist system that exploited them.