The Resurgence of Marxist Feminist Analytics.

• Date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Ward, Mako Fitts
• Published date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Ward, Mako Fitts

Martha E. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (Haymarket Books, 2019)

Seminal writings of a given feminist social theorist are rarely anthologized, highlighting how modes of knowledge production render silent the important contributions of these scholars. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe (1978, 3,6) observed the need for "theoretical practice" that bridges social movement activism with "the very urgent and specific need for constructing an analytical and effectual understanding of women's situation ."Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays by Martha E. Gimenez challenges the material conditions of women's historic erasure from genealogies of knowledge. The collection spans the course of her academic career from 1973 to 2007. Gimenez critiques different aspects of feminist theorizing while taking on the anthology as a critical methodological tool, disrupting practices of intellectual bypassing that limit the longevity of feminist modes of knowledge production.

Feminists have long engaged Marxist analyses of the material conditions of capitalist economic production and distribution. This system dictates the conditions of labor that create extreme forms of social inequality and individual alienation. With the expansion of neoliberal social policies, Marxist feminist scholars have steadfastly registered structural changes vis-a-vis women's labor participation. There are intellectual disagreements among scholars around the nuances of Marxist economic philosophy and the expansion of the theory to include other modes of difference (e.g., race, sexuality, disability, citizenship status). However, feminists have interrogated gendered labor conditions in ways that reflect transdisciplinary, transnational perspectives.These scholars include Ann Ferguson, Lise Vogel, Angela Davis, Maria Mies, Heidi Hartmann, Chandra Mohanty, J. K. Gibson-Graham, and Tithi Bhattacharya.

Gimenez is a pioneer in theorizing the intersection of capitalism, labor, and feminist politics, and her work is rooted in an orthodox Marxist feminist analytic. In this collection, Gimenez presents her work as critical analytical tools that center structural class analysis beyond discourses on the gender binary or how gender is coconstitutive of other modes of social group formation. Gimenez (2018, 24) focuses on defining social reproduction as "the economic survival of the working classes, their access to their conditions of reproduction, [which are] subordinate to changes in capital accumulation that constantly create a surplus population or reserve army of labour." She claims that under late capitalism, globalization results in "the polarisation of income and wealth ownership everywhere" and that phenomena such as migrant labor exploitation and the feminization of labor "indicate that global capitalism is changing the relationships between men and women, and among women both in Western and non-Western countries ... creating a very complex terrain" for advancing Marxist feminism (ibid., 25).

Gimenez's rich body of work advances social reproduction theory. As a system that dominates modes of exchange and consumption across geopolitical systems, capitalism creates the conditions whereby "production determines reproduction" (ibid., 16, emphasis in original). In...