Arruza, Cinzia, 2016, Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and Its Critics
Arruza, Cinzia, 2016, Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and Its Critics
Arruza, Cinzia, 2016, Functionalist, Determinist, Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and Its Critics
CINZIA ARRUZZA*
ABSTRACT: The notion of social reproduction articulated by Marx-
ist feminists within a unitary theory of gender oppression and
capitalism has been accused in the past of being either functionalist
or economic and biological determinist. These accusations were
based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Marxist notions
of production and reproduction and on a reified understanding
of what a capitalist society is. Moreover, often those who have
criticized the Marxist feminist understanding of social reproduc-
tion have not been able to offer a solid alternative and have ended
up in even greater theoretical impasses, particularly exemplified
by dual and triple systems theories. On the contrary, the notion
of social reproduction has the potential to avoid these impasses,
while at the same time suggesting a nonreductionist account of
the capitalist mode of production: one in which capital is not seen
as the subject of a strictly economic process.
T
HE NOTION OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION, introduced
into the debate by Marxist and socialist feminists more than
three decades ago, was meant to offer a sophisticated, non-
reductionist account of the relation between gender oppression and
capitalism without falling into the impasse of dual and triple systems
theories. Marxist feminists have stressed the fact that a mode of pro-
duction and a certain structure of class relations set the framework
* This text was presented at the Workshop on Crisis, Critique, Capitalism, held November
2123, 2013 at the Maison Suger in Paris, and organized by Nancy Fraser: I wish to express
my gratitude to her and all the participants for their insightful comments. I am grateful to
Johanna Brenner, Nancy Holmstrom, Sue Ferguson, and Felice Mometti for their helpful
comments on previous versions of this text, to Jeffery Webber for inviting me to present it at
Queen Mary University in London, and to my students Marcello Kilani and Juniper Alcorn
for editing my English.
In the early 1980s, a small number of socialist feminists argued that a unitary,
materialist social theory was indeed possible. Dissatisfied with simply add-
ing gender or race on, theorists of social reproduction aimed for a truly
integrative analysis. They suggested such a theory could avoid the pitfalls of
economic reductionism and functionalism if its material foundations were
conceived as social and historical, not abstract, narrowly defined economic
relations. According to the proponents of social reproductionism, early so-
cialist feminism relied on an unduly narrow, ahistorical conceptualization of
the economy; it treated the economy as a self-sufficing arena of commodity
production existing independently of the daily and generational production
of peoples lives. (1999, 4.)
the last decade (Ferguson, 1999; 2008; BG, 2003; Katz, 2004; BL,
2006). In order to reassess the notion of social reproduction within the
framework of a unitary theory of gender oppression and capitalism,
I will first address the limits of notions of interplay between different
systems of social relation (class, gender, and race), which reproduce,
for example in materialist feminism, the limitations of dual or triple
system theories. Then, I will address some of the critiques advanced
against the notion of social reproduction as it had been articulated by
Marxist feminists within the perspective of a unitary theory. My aim is
to show that accusations of biological and economic determinism, and
of functionalism, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the
notions of production and reproduction within a Marxist framework.
Marxist feminism has never had an easy life. It has been under
pressure both from radical feminist and postructuralist feminist cri-
tiques of Marxism, and from the Marxist theorists delay in paying
due attention to the issue of the relationship between gender and
capitalism, and in providing convincing answers thereto. Although
flourishing for a short season in the late 1960s and 1970s, it neverthe-
less entered a major crisis in the 1980s under the pressure of a feminist
literature that developed largely in antagonism to a straw Marx char-
acterized by determinism, vulgar materialism, sex blind categories,
and economic reductionism (Gimenez, 2005, 11). The adoption in
socialist feminist literature of dual and then triple systems theories,1
which in their various forms and derivations still heavily influence a
significant portion of materialist feminist literature today, did not help
confront and revise in an adequate way traditional Marxist theory.2 As
1 Dual systems theory was first advanced by Heidi Hartmann, in her famous article The Un-
happy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union (1981). The
basic claim of this article was that patriarchy and capitalism are two relatively autonomous
systems, which interact with each other, sharpening each other. This theory was then cor-
rected into a triple systems theory, for example by Sasha Roseneil (1994) and Sylvia Walby
(1990), in order to include racism as a system on its own.
2 The labels socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, and materialist feminism are used in vari-
ous ways, sometimes interchangeably, for the boundaries among them are often blurred. If
one wants to draw a distinction, one might say that socialist feminism is a label that, in the
English-speaking world, has been applied to a wider range of feminist theories than Marx-
ist feminism: it also includes those who developed a theory of patriarchy and attempted to
combine it with a Marxist analysis of capitalism. Materialist feminism, inspired by the work
Iris Marion Young (Young, 1997) noted, dual systems theory allowed
Marxist theory of economic and social relations to remain basically
unchanged; for, by assuming that Marxist categories are sex-blind, it
only required the addition of a theory of gender relations to Marxist
theory. On the other hand, the difficulty of Marxist feminism (and of
Marxism) in clearly identifying the underlying logic of the relationship
between womens oppression and capitalist dynamics on a theoreti-
cal level favors the affirmation of dual or triple systems theories that
reproduce a fragmented perception of the social world.
Put simply, the resort to notions such as that of patriarchal and
racial modes of production, or of a sex-affective mode of production
(Ferguson, 1989), in order to explain the persistence of different
forms of gender discrimination under capitalism on a systemic level,
is equivalent to resorting to a theoretical deus ex machina or to presup-
posing precisely what needs to be explained, thus begging the ques-
tion. The problem is that the insufficiency and underdevelopment of
unitary materialist theories of womens oppression is one of the causes
of the relative success of dual and triple systems theories compared
to Marxist feminist explanations.
In order to show the epistemological and theoretical limits of dual
and triple systems theories, I will address one of their most sophisti-
cated versions, the one elaborated by some French authors who have
produced significant theoretical work along the lines of materialist
feminism. With the aim of overcoming the reductionism of the base
superstructure model on one hand, and the limits of intersectionality
theory on the other, recent materialist feminism has paid par-
ticular attention to the reciprocal interplay between social relations.
Danile Kergoat (Kergoat, 2009) and Jules Falquet (Falquet, 2009),
for example, have suggested the necessity of developing a theory of
coformation, or consubstantiality and coextensionality of gen-
der, class, and race.3 According to these authors, it is certainly true
of authors such as Christine Delphy, Michle Barrett, Annette Kuhn and Anne Marie Wolpe,
was meant to supplement the inadequacies of Marxism through a combination of historical
materialism, radical feminism, and postmodern and psychoanalytic theories of meaning
and subjectivity. Althussers thought (duly revisited) served often as the connecting bridge
among these different strands. See Hennessy and Ingraham, 1997; see also Gimenez, 2000.
3 Consubstantiality is the notion employed by Kergoat and borrowed from the theological
notion of the unity of substance of the three persons of the Trinity. In fact, what was at
stake in the Trinitarian debate was exactly the possibility of thinking diversity and plurality
in identity and unity.
exploitation, and attributes a crucial role to it. But the insistence on the
coformation and consubstantiality of these social relations, animated
by the refusal to attribute a determining role to class exploitation,
upon closer look, ends up reproducing a ceaseless play of relations.
What it fails to explain is the determining logic of such an interaction
among these chemical elements viz., why this kind of interaction
takes place to begin with. Insofar as everything determines everything
else, the notion of determination loses its explanatory function, and
avoiding an infinite regress in the causal chains becomes impossible.
Moreover, it is not clear how the view of consubstantiality can escape
the infinite multiplication of systems of oppression that it condemns
in intersectionality.
Upon closer examination, these developments of dual or triple
systems theories show the fundamental theoretical impasses of such
theories, even in their more sophisticated and historically grounded
versions. It is thus worth trying to reassess a unitary theory, capable
of escaping reductionism and determinism. With this aim in mind,
in what follows I will re-examine some of the criticisms advanced in
the past against such a unitary approach.
This was one logical outcome of the DLD [domestic labor debate], which
produced a covert consensus whereby housework continued to be regarded
as reproducing labour power; to suggest that it produced anything became
almost taboo. This distinction between production and reproduction is spu-
rious, nonsensical something cannot be reproduced without first being
produced and runs counter to Marxs position that every process of pro-
duction is simultaneously a process of reproduction....It also raises the
problem of conflating social reproduction, the reproduction of the labour
force and biological reproduction....When womens work is said to repro-
duce the proletariat or capitalist social relations, the implication is that they
do this work because they have babies. Hence all the complex ways in which
capitalist social relations are reproduced, as well as womens subordination
itself, are reduced to womens reproductive capacities....It might seem
rather curious for feminists to succumb to such blatant biological determin-
ism, to reduce womens oppression to their reproductive capacities without
questioning womens responsibilities for childcare, but this is a common
means of theorising the relationship between capitalism and womens op-
pression among Marxist feminists. (1999, 1920.)
5 The workers 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....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 workers 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 (Marx, 1990, 717).
6 Jackson herself does not provide any precise reference.
Later, Marx also insists that by producing for the capitalist the worker
is constantly reproducing capitalist class relations, so that in this sense
the production process can also be seen as a process of reproduction:
doesnt own the means of production, wage labor is the only way the
worker can have access to the means necessary to her own reproduc-
tion and that of her family. Second, wage labor has the characteristic
feature of keeping the worker in her condition of dispossession sine
die, because of the capitalists constant and repeated appropriation of
the surplus value she produces, not to speak of the process of social
alienation of the workers capacities, which are constantly appropri-
ated and incorporated into fixed capital (Marx, 1990, 75556). By
working, the worker is constantly reproducing capital and capitalist
class relations (ibid., 723724). Moreover, she is not just reproducing
herself as a generic human being with needs and desires; she is also
reproducing herself qua worker, i.e., as a member of a specific class
characterized by dispossession and exploitation and as a human being
with some specific, historically determined and socially produced
features. This observation, once again, does not entail that there is a
perfect identity of production and reproduction, such that any distinc-
tion between them is spurious and nonsensical. Class relations, as
well as human beings, are certainly reproduced within the production
process, but not only within the production process: there are many
aspects of social life that contribute to their reproduction and can be
considered as productive only if one employs the term in a loose
and non-specific way (people also produce nightmares, paranoid
ideas, and gastric acid, often in reciprocal correlation).
7 See, for example, the way Benston explains the roots of womens secondary status within
capitalism: women are that group of people who are responsible for the production of simple
use-values in those activities associated with the home and the family, where most of work is
precapitalist, outside of trade and the marketplace. Men, on the contrary, are responsible
for commodity production. The devaluation of work which is not immediately or mediately
related to commodity production, is the source of womens inferior status. This explanation,
as is evident, may describe some features of womens oppression, but it has no explanatory
power, because the sexual division of labor is just taken as a given and not explained. See
Benston, 1997 (first published in Monthly Review, 21:4, 1969).
she seeks to find in ideology the answer to the question of the social
meaning attributed to sexual difference. She defines ideology as the
generic term for the processes by which meaning is produced, chal-
lenged, reproduced, and transformed. These processes are always
historically embedded in material practice, they play a role in the
relations of production, and they may become essential for the main-
tenance of the system (Barrett, 1988, ch. 3). In the case of capitalism,
more specifically, the ideology of gender plays a significant role in the
relations of production, while it does not have any essential role in
the reproduction of raw materials, installations, and machinery: the
wage-labor relation and the contradiction between labor and capital
are sex-blind and operate quite independently of gender (Barrett,
1988, 99). The problem with this position is that, while it may avoid
biological determinism and economic reductionism, it does not, in
fact, explain very much: Saying that the root of the attribution of a
specific social meaning to sexual difference is the process by which
this meaning is produced is a tautology, not an explanation. Moreover,
the idea that capitalism has been gendered by a pre-existing ideology
does not take into account that one can plausibly argue the opposite:
namely, that the process of capitalist primitive accumulation has con-
tributed to the creation of gender ideology and of gender inequalities
in a fundamental way.8
Before throwing the concept of social reproduction into the dust-
bin of history, it is worth examining whether it necessarily entails the
kind of reductionism and biological determinism criticized by, among
others, Jackson and Barrett. If we refer back to Brenner and Lasletts
definition of social reproduction given above, what appears evident
is that, for the two authors, biological reproduction is a central fact
of human life, but a fact that is always socially organized and cannot
be considered apart from social and societal reproduction. Class rela-
tions set boundaries within which social reproduction takes place,
and therefore within which biological reproduction is also organized.
This further implies that there are processes of ideological produc-
tion which attribute specific meanings to sex, sexuality, generational
8 This is, for example, Silvia Federicis thesis in her work on primitive accumulation. As she
puts it: Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration
of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within
the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as race and age, became
constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat (Federici, 2004,
6364).
encourage high turnover and can therefore deal more easily and
with fewer costs with the problem of maternity. Gendered outcomes
in the labor market are a function not simply of womens role in
the family, but of intentional efforts by employers to induce high
turnovers among all workers and especially among women (Caraway,
2007, 4445).
Although we may usefully argue that gender division has been built into the
capitalist division of labour and is an important element of capitalist relations
of production, it is more difficult to argue that gender division necessarily
occupies a particular place in the class structure of capitalism. It has not,
at least as yet, been demonstrated that the sexual division of labour forms
not simply a historically constituted but a logically pre-given element of the class
structure that would automatically be reproduced by the reproduction of this
class structure. (Barrett, 1988, 138.)
The aim of this article was to show that the concept of social
reproduction as such does not imply any of the theoretical weaknesses
attributed to it by its critics, whereas it has an enormous explanatory
potential. Moreover, often those who have criticized it have not been
able to offer a solid alternative and have ended up in even greater theo-
retical impasses, particularly exemplified by dual and triple systems
theories. Also, as a consequence of the crisis and of the delay in the
articulation of the concept of social reproduction, the standard form
of explanation of the relationship between gender, race, and capital-
ism became that of the distinction between systems of oppression, their
relative autonomy, their reciprocal articulation or intersection, or
their consubstantiality. The reference to the divine Trinity in the
notion of consubstantiality is most appropriate, since in the end, the
reason why these systems should articulate each other, or why they
should be consubstantial, remains precisely a mystery.
The notion of social reproduction has the potential to avoid this
impasse, while at the same time suggesting a non-reductionist account
of the capitalist mode of production: one in which capital is not seen as
the subject of a strictly economic process. As Daniel Bensad puts it:
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