Tithi Bhattacharya | Comments on Manifesto(s)

By Tithi Bhattacharya

[Note: this is a draft, please do not quote without the author’s permission]

The Communist Manifesto first published in 1848 and famously revised in 1871 in the wake of the Paris Commune enclose within it traces of the uprisings that birthed it.  It is a document whose theories arise from and are amended by social movements. Importantly, it is written for the ordinary worker, who as Engels commented in its 1888 English preface, acknowledged it as their “common platform…from Siberia to California.” It is in this specific sense of a document arising from a movement that we chose to call our work a “manifesto”, for, although in a less grand scale, our manifesto too arose from the wave of feminist strikes, and both contributed to and were recalibrated by them. In this brief reflection I hope to draw out some of the ways in which our Manifesto stands in the tradition of Marxist theorizing of capitalism, and in one key way makes a contribution to it.

Is the Manifesto About the Capitalist Economy?

A significant feminist criticism aimed at the Communist Manifesto is that it focuses on economic production at the expense of social reproduction and consumption. Feminists such as Alison Jagger and Heidi Hartmann have made a strong case about this neglect on Marx and Engels’s part, going as far as to say that they have defined “even the nonprocreative part of women’s household work not only as being outside the market, but as being outside production altogether.”[1] The charge of economism is important because it extends beyond feminist theorists and is significantly widespread. It is also significantly misplaced.

Marx’s subject matter is capitalism, including but not limited to its historical origins, its philosophical underpinnings, its political expressions and the roots of its social power over human beings and nature. In his Paris Manuscripts, for instance, Marx takes up cudgels against those he calls “crude communists,” who believe that replacing private property with collective ownership was sufficient to establish a communist society. In sharp contrast, Marx shows “crude communism” to be an “abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization” here the alienated form of labor “is not done away with but extended to all men.” Instead of private capitalists all it does is creates a society in which “the community [is] the universal capitalist.” Significantly, for our purposes, in such a society claims Marx, “a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property.”[2]

One cannot, according to Marx, substitute this or that aspect of capitalism, it has to be overhauled as a system, the law of value which guides capitalist world making must be abolished. Thus, Marx criticizes the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who sought to replace money with time-chits which would express “the real value” of commodities. Following Ricardo, Proudhon believed that since the value of a commodity represented the value of labor that produces it, time chits representing that value would eliminate parasites like bankers and middlemen and be the true representation of the worker’s labor. To this Marx writes, “the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society is the conceived of as an abstract capitalist.”[3] In other words, without abolishing the division of labor in production, without abolishing the basis of capitalist production, the value form, any attempt to alter capitalism, is precisely that, a tinkering with the system, not the conditions of emancipations. Later in the Grundrisse Marx consolidates his polemic against this tendency, calling it an idealized vision of capitalism without capitalists.

These analytical moves by Marx, as well as his explicit reference to capitalism as “the entire world of culture and civilization” should make it clear that Marx has not an economic, but a civilizational critique of capitalism, and consequently Marxist theory, unlike its bourgeois counterparts, categorically refuses, in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s classic phrase, “the separation of the economic and the political.” Instead, as Wood puts it rather elegantly, Marxist theory is “uniquely capable of illuminating the principles of historical movement and, at least implicitly, the points at which political action can most effectively intervene.”[4]

We can distill two critical ideas from this discussion; first that Marxist theory is primarily concerned with explaining the world in order to change it, in other words, it is a movement-theory; and second, that being a theory of capitalism as a civilization, it contains within it, either in developed or underdeveloped forms the analytical resources for understanding the fundamental, or metabolic relationship between human society and nature.

It is thus absurd to claim that Marxism is incapable of explaining this or that phenomena, such as imperialism, gender, racism or climate change. We extend Marx, we develop Marx, we pull and push at Marx, but we always return to his insistent call to arms to uproot the system as a whole. And it is with this context in mind, that some of us in the feminist movement are still excavating Marxism to develop further Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) which forms one of the key theoretical bases for our Manifesto.

Marx, Gender and Social Reproduction Theory

If we begin with the feminist critique of Marxism as an inadequate theory of the processes of consumption we will have to agree only partially. It is true that Marx does not develop a “theory” of gender as such, nor does he pay sufficient attention— he pays some— to how gendering smooths the workings of the system. Nevertheless, we can scavenge from Marx’s writings enough material to build our own Marxist extensions (like Google extensions) to understand gender under capitalism.

Let us consider his reflections on the relationship between production and consumption in Volume 1 of Capital:

The worker’s consumption is of two kinds. While producing he consumes the means of production with his labor, and converts them into products with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labor-power by the capitalist who has bought it. On the other hand, the worker uses the money paid to him for his labor-power to buy the means of subsistence; this is his individual consumption. The worker’s productive consumption and his individual consumption are therefore totally distinct. In the former, he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist. In the latter, he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital functions outside the production process. The result of the first kind of consumption is that the capitalist continues to live, of the second, that the worker himself continues to live.[5]

Capitalist social relations then contain, albeit in concealed form, “the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker.”[6]

This insight provides the scaffolding for SRT which concerns itself with life-making in capitalist societies. It proposes that capital’s process of accumulation depends upon the daily and generational reproductive work that working class people do – some of it performed outside the immediate circuits of commodity production – to ensure that a steady flow of labor power is made available for capitalists to exploit.

The two moments, productive consumption at the point of production, and individual consumption away from it, are not in mutual opposition but two dialectical moments of the circuit. Social Reproduction of labor power, therefore, also conceals this systemic contradiction, labor power is reproduced both as Marx points out, under the “regulation” of capital, as well as to satisfy and speak to genuine human needs and affects. We raise children with love and care, but also teach them to be safe, productive citizens of capitalist society; for example, I had to teach my then four-year-old, that even when she is hungry, she cannot just “take” a chocolate bar from Target to eat in the car!

If the reproduction of labor power, whose normative goal in capitalism is the reproduction of the wage relation, is the primary concern of SRT, then it is impossible to claim that any real understanding of the capitalist family or gendering can be achieved without placing those institutions and social relations squarely within the systemic workings of capitalism. Thus, we write in our Manifesto:

In capitalist society, the organization of social reproduction rests on gender: it relies on gender roles and entrenches gender oppression. Social reproduction is therefore a feminist issue. But it is shot through at every point by the fault lines of class, race, sexuality, and nation. A feminism aimed at resolving the current crisis must understand social reproduction through a lens that also comprehends, and connects, all those axes of domination.[7]

In conclusion, I would like to bring our attention back to how Marx’s critique of capitalism goes beyond the phenomenal level; his alternative to the system is thus also not restricted to surface phenomena or correcting the wrongs and injustices that are produced through and constitutes the system. He is interested in replacing the system.

And here I will end with a provocation. I propose that only through social reproduction we can we have a partial vision of futurity for the human subject. It is true that systemic alienation and the wage form produces the worker as an object. But she is neither born an object nor in reality is one. As Peter Hudis has argued if “human subjectivity were fully absorbed by the object, Marx’s Capital would be a totalizing system that locks us into a circle from which we can never escape. The transitory and historical character of capitalism would have to be denied.” Labor is accorded the value form under capitalism, but it is not at such the source of value.

Even though they do not contravene the law of value, decommodified social reproduction relationships in our here and now— love between individuals, caring for our beloveds, commoning, collective decision-making bodies in resistant political spaces—can be treated as prefigurative templates of the future, making Social Reproduction Theory not merely a tool for explaining the world but a partial manifesto for changing it.

Notes

[1] Jagger 1982, p. 75.

[2] Marx, Karl. [1844] 1975. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” in Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 3. New York: International Publishers, pp. 294–295.

[3] Marx, Karl. [1844] 1975. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” p. 280.

[4] Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Separation of the Economic and Political in Capitalism, in Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (CUP, 1995), pp. 19 – 48.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 717.

[6] Ibid. p. 718.

[7] Feminism for the 99% A Manifesto, p. 22.