Marxism and Feminism: A critique of Lise Vogel’s social reproduction theoryPresentation to the Social and Political Thought Conference 2015: Feminism and Critical Theory, University of Sussex, June 20th 2015.Ross SpeerThe Queen’s College, University of Oxfordross.speer@queens.ox.ac.uk

This paper is a draft. Please do not cite without permission from the author.

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This paper presents some criticisms of Lise Vogel’s recently

republished book Marxism and the Oppression of Women. I

begin by setting out what I think is at stake in the confrontation

between Marxism and Feminism. Following that, I try to provide

some exposition of Vogel’s theory of social reproduction, before

making three points of criticism. Finally, I make use of the work

of Michèle Barrett, from her book Women’s Oppression Today

and, in particular, it’s Althusserian influenced approach, in

order to provide the necessary supplements to Vogel’s theory.

Both the thinkers in question here wrote in response to a 1970s

milieu in which the feminist movement had begun exposing

issues with Marxist understandings of women’s oppression.

Engagement with Marxism by feminists demonstrated a lack of

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convincing means with which to understand the oppression of

women in classical Marxism. Western Marxism, at this point

only a recently entry into the Anglophone world, had done little

to take this up as an area of investigation in its right. However,

it did, as we shall see, generate useful tools with which to take

up the problem.

The relevant concern here for Marxists was that if Marxism was

unable to offer a picture of what patriarchy is, where it came

from, and how it could be removed, then Marxism would have

failed in its pretension to provide a comprehensive

metanarrative of the social world. If Marxists had once thought

it enough to tack on a theory of women’s oppression to already

existing Marxism, without permitting feminism’s influence to

proliferate throughout the theory, then it soon became clear

that the problem was more intractable than it had first

appeared to be.

The issue hinged on whether it was possible to integrate a

theory of the oppression of women into historical materialism,

or if patriarchy should be understood as an independent

structure. It could be the case that patriarchy was indescribable

by, and thus not understandable through, the categories of

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class antagonism. This position became known as ‘dual

systems theory’. The alternative, that patriarchy and class

antagonism could both be parts of a single theory, and that

proposed by both the authors under discussion here, was

dubbed ‘unitary theory’.

The problem here is not a peripheral one for Marxists, a place

to which it has sometimes been relegated. Accepting a dual

systems theory – as has probably been the most common

position amongst feminists inclined to the political left – saddles

Marxists with a profound problem. If it is true that patriarchal

relations operate separately from class relations then

Marxism’s claim that the working class is the uniquely

privileged emancipatory agent is in trouble. Women as women,

rather than as workers, would be an equally important

emancipatory agency. Socialism could not be understood as a

general solution to oppression, but would be restricted only to

the end of class antagonism without affecting other areas of

social life.

Integrating an explanation to the problem of the oppression of

women is critical if Marxism is to present itself as a viable and

necessary political project to all those in positions of

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subordination, and not just the working class. Additionally,

Marxism is unlikely to be able to succeed on its own terms,

even if we allow for a reduction in its scope, if it unable to knit

together a collective agent that encompasses the full array of

subordinated groups. And yet a unitary theory has proved to be

an elusive piece of the puzzle.

There is also an immediate conjunctural concern. Too often it is

taken for granted that Feminism is a part of the left, when it is

in fact incumbent on the left to demonstrate that it can provide

a route out of patriarchy. If Marxism is to make headway within

the Feminist movement it must be able to show why a

challenge to gender oppression is best articulated through a

Marxist framework. It is not enough to suggest that because

one is concerned with one area of oppression one should then

also be concerned with others for reasons of ethical

consistency. This may be persuasive for the purpose of

theoretical rigour, but it is hardly unreasonable that social

agents seeking ways out of their situations of oppression will

concentrate their efforts on those that they perceive to be

harming them the most. What Marxists are obliged to do is to

show is that the oppression of women is intimately bound up

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with other forms of oppression and exploitation, and in such a

way as that it is by consequence a strategic error to

compartmentalise one off from the others and try to strike out

at it alone.

It is in this context that Vogel and the concept of social

reproduction is gaining a new lease of life.

II

Vogel’s idea of ‘social reproduction’, which draws on the

concepts developed by Marx in Capital, can be unpacked as

follows. In any society where human labour is still required to

fulfil human needs, the individuals who make up the labour

force are subject to wear and tear and become too old or infirm

to work and eventually die. Thus for any system of production

to endure over time there must be a means by which the labour

force is replenished. The usual way of achieving this has been

by biological reproduction. This is not the only way it can be

done – and the concept of social reproduction has been

fruitfully deployed to analyse slave and immigrant labour that

can replenish a society’s labour force from outside. Biological

reproduction is, however, the most common means to achieve

this replenishment. Additionally, the family unit has been the 5

dominant form in which biological reproduction takes place –

although the contours of this unit may differ significantly

between times and places.

Within the family unit women are accorded a subordinate place

because their role in childbearing leaves them outside the

value-producing labour force for a period of time. Following

from this, a division of labour emerges. Men assume roles of

material provision and women of domestic labour. There is no

biologically-given reason why women should then come to

perform domestic labour tasks. What gives them the greater

responsibility for this, however, is the form in which biological

reproduction has generally taken place in class societies: the

patriarchal family.

From a ruling class point of view, social reproduction is riven by

a contradiction. On the one hand, reproduction must take place

or else in the long-term the prevailing relations of production

will die out. On the other hand, labour freed up from the

process of production for that of reproduction yields no

immediate surplus-value. Therefore, the ruling class is forced to

balance long-term and short-term considerations. In order to

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allow for reproduction some potentially exploitable surplus-

labour must be given up to the reproduction process.

Thus the ruling class seeks to minimise the value lost to the

reproduction process, and the family presents a stable format

in which to attain a degree of efficiency in reproduction. Men

are assigned the role of obtaining the means of subsistence for

the family unit, and women take on the domestic labour tasks

which transform these means of subsistence into the required

goods. What are really roles that are only of temporary

necessity become solidified and rendered permanent through

the family form.

For Vogel, social reproduction gives rise to women’s oppression

on a contingent, rather than necessary, basis because, whilst

social reproduction itself is necessary for the social system to

function, the means by which it is performed can assume a

variety of forms. The forms that emerge are influenced by the

advantages they might hold for each of the contending classes,

who struggle with the others in order to establish the most

beneficial arrangement for themselves. The results are not a

series of fixed absolutes, but a vast variety of possible

combinations.

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This is, on the one hand, one of the great strengths of Vogel’s

social reproduction theory. On the other, however, it presents

her argument with some difficulties. In what follows I will give

three areas in which I think Vogel’s argument requires

modification.

III

The first is Vogel’s claim that although the cost to the ruling

class imposed by domestic labour and reproduction can be

minimised via commodification, which can free up labour from

reproduction for surplus-value production, there is a limit to the

process. Certain aspects of domestic labour cannot be turned

into profitable sources of accumulation.

However, I do not think there is a good reason to believe that

there are any forms of domestic labour which could in principle

be ruled out of commodification. The emergence of new

technology might, for example, make previously unappealing

areas of investment an enticing prospect for accumulation. By

driving down general living standards – or only allowing their

maintenance or increase via debt – it is possible for the ruling

class to force extra labour out of working families, which can be

achieved by women entering the workplace. In doing so, the 8

capacity for women to perform domestic labour is diminished

whilst the need to purchase replacement services on the

market is consequently increased. Acquiring replacements for

domestic labour on the market could be accomplished either in

the form of outsourcing the labour, or through labour-saving

devices purchased for the home. In such a way, it is possible to

drive forward commodification, and this commodification of

previously uncommodified areas of social life is a common

strategy of the capitalist class as it seeks fresh sources of

profit. This undermines the endurance of the gender-division of

labour, and destabilises that which was posited as the root

cause of women’s oppression.

It could also be the case that providing for women involved in

reproduction directly, by way of the state or commodified

services, could be cost neutral from a ruling class point of view.

Enacting a general levy of working class individuals to pay for

this poses no fundamental difficulty, only the method of

distribution would be altered and not the total portion of the

social product controlled by each of the respective classes. If

that were to be done, then there would be no reason for the

ruling class to continue to encourage patriarchy. Indeed,

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European welfare states have taken steps in this direction and,

whilst appealing from the point of view of the left, they cannot

be said to have dealt a killer blow to patriarchal relations.

Something else other than the matter of the imposed cost

burden on the ruling class must be at work here.

The second problem is that it does not seem plausible that

merely by being prevented from working for a few months at a

time women come to assume domestic labour so near

permanently and universally. If ever a case for this could be

made then it is certainly eroded with the arrival of reliable and

widely available contraceptive techniques.

The allocation of domestic labour to women is clearly one

possible outcome of the problem of how to divide up types of

labour, but does not do well to explain why the family is nearly

everywhere in the contemporary world in a patriarchal form.

We are not given sufficient reason to believe that divisions of

labour should map on to gender divisions at all, and certainly

not so persistently.

Third is the issue of the oppression of ruling class women. With

the rise of private property comes a need for some norm of

transferring it after death. What came to dominate was 10

inheritance through the paternal line. Marriage, in this reading,

is a means through which to ensure that paternity and thereby

secure the line of inheritance. Here, though, the problem is that

there is no reason apart from the subordination of women that

property should be passed through the male line.

It seems that certain types of arrangements of social

reproduction appear with greater frequency would be the case

in the absence of any additional pull-factor in that direction. If

contingency were the long and short of the matter we would

then expect to find rather more examples of matriarchy, or

even approximations of gender equality, than we do. We lack,

then, strong reasons to believe that social reproduction will be

constituted so consistently on the basis of male domination.

The process does not seem to demand that this should be the

case; it only suggests that it is one possible outcome amongst

others.

That these combinations have tended towards having an

additional unifying feature, male domination, beyond what is

necessary for the process in the most general sense, and also

beyond what is obviously advantageous for any of the

contending classes, implies that a supplementary force is at

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work. It is not far from here to the resurrection of the dual

systems theory.

IV

Barrett, too, is strongly influenced by the concept of social

reproduction as a means with which to reveal the articulation of

capitalism and patriarchy. Her source of attribution is, however,

different from Vogel’s. Where Vogel invokes the late Marx,

Barrett appeals to the French philosopher Louis Althusser.

Althusser has enjoyed a long deployment in the service of

Feminist theory, and his theory of ideology is the most well-

known component of his work, so I hope I can afford to be brief

in my exposition. Ideology here denotes not only ideas, but

accompanying practices and rituals through which it was

substantiated. For Althusser, ideology, as with other

components of society, had a ‘relative autonomy’ from the

economy. Contrary to how Marx’s base/superstructure

metaphor has often been understood, Althusser sought to

break with a determining role of the economy except ‘in the

last instance’. The economy structured the social whole, giving

it a unity, but was not necessarily the origin or cause of each of

its components. Ideologies could arise independently of 12

economic causes, and become part of the conflictual unity that

was a social formation.

What Althusser permits Barrett to do is think about patriarchy

as a semi-autonomous phenomenon, preserving the features of

dual systems theory that seem to be persuasive, without

breaking with the idea of the social world as a unified whole.

Patriarchal organisation may be neither optimal nor even

particularly useful for the ruling class. It may only need lend

itself to a state of affairs which is adequate enough for the

overall requirements of social reproduction. The prevalence and

persistence of patriarchy could be understood by its particular

effectiveness in its own reproduction, through the way it

incentivises some agents to secure its continuity.

What Barrett then does is endorse a conception of male

privilege. To put it more specifically, she thinks that men

benefit from women’s oppression. This is a move Marxists have

often been hesitant to make. However, the case made here is, I

think, a compelling one.

Barrett’s claim is that the beneficiary of domestic labour is not

just the ruling class but also men as a cross-class group, and

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that these men gain from the privileges conferred on them by

masculinity, which provides a more general set of social

advantages. This occurs independently of whether an individual

man actually wants these privileges; they are bestowed on him

without his consent. This does not happen, however, in a

straightforwardly positive manner. Even the privileged gender

experiences negative consequences as a result of the division.

For example, the demands placed on men as breadwinners

locks them in to wage labour and limits access to their children.

Given that male privilege is not unambiguously beneficial to its

recipients, the door is left open for resistance to it. There is no

doubt a cost incurred by fighting against something that

penetrates and constructs our very sense of self; but it may

well be possible to demonstrate that there is more to be gained

by doing so than is lost in the short term. What has often

troubled Marxists about this line of thought – that if men benefit

by oppressing women it may not be possible to construct a

unified agency crossing gender lines – is not then as

problematic as has been assumed.

Vogel tentatively recognises some of this. She identifies the

family-wage as a possible form of male privilege. There is the

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occasional nod towards a notion of male supremacy. The

tendency, however, is to place all responsibility on the ruling

class, for both the creation and perpetuation of patriarchy.

Overall, Vogel seeks to minimise the extent to which the

ideological construction of patriarchal forms of social

reproduction emanates from within subordinated sections of

society, in particular the working class.

However, patriarchy as ideology is persistent because it is able

to appeal to and be taken up by large sections of the

population. It crosses class lines, and even if it could be shown

to be a component of a particular class project originally it

cannot be compartmentalised in such a way any longer. It is

not that Vogel overtly rules out any of this, so much as it is that

a restrictive conceptualisation of historical materialism causes

her to stop short of taking us in this direction. Left to its own

devices, Vogel’s concept of social reproduction can only deal

with the complex ideological construction of gender identities in

a mechanical and reductionist fashion. It is able to speak very

little to, for instance, cultural representations of gender as well

as to the construction of gendered forms of desire and

subjectivity.

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What does seem to be the case is that gender divisions that

preceded capitalism came to influence its development, in that

the main proponents of the bourgeois class project were males

because of a preceding state of gender inequality. Thus the

ideology of patriarchy that the emergent bourgeoisie already

bore with them interfused with their direct class interests and

thus the world which they set about constructing. The success

of this project was secured by the further penetration of

patriarchal relations into the early working class, who made

them their own, so as to generate an additional fracture within

that class along gender lines.

Barrett provides examples of how male workers have sought to

protect their sectional interests against the advance of their

female counterparts. Strictly put, capitalism has no in-built

necessity to divide up labour according to gender. A capitalism

born of Immaculate Conception may well not have done so, and

perhaps even ended up being more efficient from a ruling class

point of view as a result. The reality of our present vantage

point is, however, that despite the fact that the possibility of

capitalism without gender inequality is theoretically

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conceivable there is not much chance of now reconfiguring it in

such a way as to be gender blind in its workings.

Crucially, what is implied here is that the collapse of capitalism

does not also entail the collapse of patriarchy. What

supplanting capitalism could do is erode the basis on which

patriarchy thrives, which is the contradictory nature of social

reproduction in class societies. The matter of patriarchy’s

irreducibility to this basis means that the advent of socialism is

better understood as a condition of possibility for the end of

patriarchy rather than itself being coextensive with that goal.

Crafting a society which is not traversed by class struggle is a

prerequisite to ending women’s oppression, but is insufficient

by itself. There is no automatic relationship between the two,

for patriarchal ideology may persist and potentially even find

itself a new lease of life beyond any economic rationale for its

existence.

V

Whilst Vogel’s emphasis on the role of contingency in deciding

the configuration of social reproduction is valuable, she does

not provide sufficient reasons as to why the outcomes of these

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contingent events have trended towards patriarchy. Vogel is

hesitant to offer a comprehensive account of male domination,

and her argument suffers as a result. If patriarchy is more

common than contingency would alone allow for, her theory is

in trouble because a resort to dual systems is tempting. In

return, I have argued that that it can be rescued along the lines

advanced by Barrett, via Althusser, who suggests that a

patriarchal ideology, which persists because men as a group do

indeed benefit from it, structures the social reproduction

processes of contemporary social formations. Importantly, this

ideology is intimately related to class-societies and cannot be

viewed or understood apart from them. The logic of class

antagonism retains its analytical primacy in this schema. The

crucial question that needs answering is why it is women that

nearly always end up in the subordinate, domestic labour, role.

If there were historical reasons for this, it should be clear that

they have become significantly eroded. It does not seem to be

the case that the ruling class benefits from specifically from

women being oppressed, even if it might benefit from some

form of gendered division of labour.

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My charge, then, is that whilst not explicitly ruling it out Vogel

is insufficiently attentive to male supremacy as a cross-class

project, and an account of this must be integrated into her

theory in order for it to do the work we need it to.

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