Marx's “Das Kapital” in nowadays patriarchy

Jule Goikoetxea. Teresa Larruzea

Marx wrote the Das Kapital's first volume 150 years ago. One of the greatest analysis of our times, no doubt, and a politic-economic key to understand capitalism. However, it's not up to us to explain Das Kapital, but to make a feminist critique of it.

Our main criticism would be the following: that it based the labour that generates value on the production of goods, leaving the reproductive area out of the theory of value. Marx didn't include reproductive labour, labour undertaken by women for which they are paid no wages, on the reasons or characteristics of capitalist accumulation. That is, it does not appear as an explanandum of that accumulation. Therefore, women did not enter into the subjects that suffered neither exploitation through "work" nor the division that the salary creates in the "working class" in a capitalist system; and this is how women, their lives, their work, their history and their value are outside of what will be the political subject of the working class.

According to Das Kapital, production of goods and markets are the only requirements for the creation of the labour force. The value of the labour force is calculated by the goods needed by workers (Housing, food, clothing and others), by the labour time needed to create them, where the only labour taken into account is that done by men, as if commodities, by themselves could generate the commodity of labour force.

During the second feminist wave feminist theorized that reproductive labour makes capitalist production viable. They proved on the 1960s and 70s that to create and recreate labour force we must go further than good consumption, food has to be catered, cloths cleaned and bodies have to be taken care of. And someone has to do that. The reproductive labor takes care of the production of a specific worker, and so, of a specific generation and organisation of family, sexuality, reproduction and private space. That is, the production of the pillars of modern patriarchy. Therefore, a system that systematically oppresses women for the sake of being women ensures, among others, capitalist oppression. For that reason, feminists kept on the struggle in the 80s for the value of domestic labour, not only because it is one of the causes of capitalist accumulation, but because capitalism cannot only be identified with contractual waged labour, since it is based on the work that women do without pay (and therefore without a contract, without rights, without political subjectification).

In addition, the second feminist wave showed how the discrediting of reproductive work was related to the fact that it was women who did it, and argued that women are a subaltern being created through symbolic violence (disrepute and humiliation), such being the base of patriarchal capitalism and capitalist accumulation. Following the analysis of Dalla Costa, Fortunati, Mies and James, Federici argues that the burning of women (called Witches = symbolic violence) was done with the objective of domesticating them and force them to carry on reproduction labour for free. In other words, dichotomous and heterosexual thinking is (re) produced through the sexed division (gendered) of work, and this is the pillar of modern capitalism. Thus, Marxism understands the conflict between capital and wage labor as something consubstantial to capitalist production, while feminism, and specifically Marxist feminism, places this conflict between productive and reproductive work; as Perez Orozco says, capital is in conflict with life, to the extent that capital's valorisation process is in structural contradiction with life's sustainability.

The fact that between 25-35% of European countries’ GDP is generated by labour done by women for free is a direct result of all these. Today, here, women get paid 27% less than men for the same work and do 20% more work than men, via the unpaid domestic labour or care labour. Men do very little unpaid labour: they barely do any unpaid domestic labour or care labour and the reason isn't that they are proletarians, French, Andalusian, Basque, rich or poor. No, men don't do unpaid work because they are men. For that reason, “woman” and “man” are socio-economic classes, that is, women occupy a different place in the chain of production of capital, so their interests are different, but despite that, man-women class struggle has been historically subdued by the proletarian-capitalist class struggle. And therefore, nowadays, women of any society, including activist women, are neither the protagonists of their life nor of finance, government, business organisations, trade unions, universities, streets, industry, economy, media..., because as Flora Tristán said (and Engels afterwards) they are the proletarians of the proletariat.

So anyone on the left knows what it means to "commodify" and how to achieve "de-commodification" (in theory) but nobody knows what "familiarization" is or how to achieve "de-familiarization". It would be interesting to ask why.

Feminism doesn't divide the working class. The working class is divided. And it is divided because, among other things, women and men are political and socioeconomic classes.

We asked Mari Domingi (Ed: Basque character that delivers gifts on winter) on the winter solstice for the following: the necessary curiosity, perseverance and feminist alliances to create a book as elaborated, strong and sophisticated as Das Kapital, called Patriarchal Capitalism.

*Original article in Euskara written for Berria by Teresa Larruzea and Jule Goikoetxea "Marxen 'Kapitala' egungo patriarkatuan"

*Original article in sPANISH written for El Salt: "El capital de Marx desde el patriarcado actual"