The Poverty of Patriarchy Theory



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The Poverty of Patriarchy Theory

By Sandra Bloodworth



Originally published in Socialist Review (Australian), Issue 2, Winter 1990, pp. 5-33

Online edition prepared by marcn@comcen.com.au in June 2003


The theory of patriarchy, which says that there is a fundamental division between men and women from which men gain power, is ac­cepted without question today by most of the left.1 The theory was developed by feminists such as Juliet Mitchell and Miriam Dixson who, in her book The Real Matilda,2 was inclined to blame Irish working class men for women’s oppression, using the theory of patriarchy as the basis for her argument. Anne Summers helped to popularise the ideas in her book Damned Whores and God’s Police in the early seventies. She wrote “Women are expected to be socially dependent and physically passive be­cause this state is claimed to be necessary for their maternal role. In fact it is because it enhances the power of men.”3

But there was some resistance to the idea that all men have power over women, especially from women and men influenced by the Marxist idea that class differences are fundamental in society. Heidi Hartmann, in her essay The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union, attempted to provide a bridge between what are fundamentally opposing views.4 Hartmann purported to provide a materialist analysis of patriarchy. While capitalists exploit the labour of workers at work, men gained control over women’s labour in the family. This has been the theoretical starting point for much of Australian feminist writing over the past ten to fifteen years. However, Hartmann did not challenge the central idea of Mitchell and others, which is that there is such an identifiable social relation as patriarchy. Patriarchy, Hartmann says, “largely organizes reproduction, sexuality, and childrearing.” 5

The arguments of patriarchy theory have been adequately dealt with by the British Socialist Workers’ Party.6 The purpose of this article is to begin the much-needed task of examining the theory of patriarchy by drawing on the Australian experience from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism. I will briefly outline the theoretical method underlying Marxism and how it differs from the theory of patriarchy. It is necessary to do this because most feminist arguments against “Marxism” are in fact replies to the mechanical “Marxism” either of the Second International from the early 1890’s to 1914 or of Stalinism. Secondly I will show that the histori­cal arguments made by feminists do not stand up to any objective ex­amination. Their determination to make facts fit an untenable theory leads them to distortions and misinterpretation. So I will look at the origins of the family in Australia and the role of the concept of a family wage in the workplace.

Finally, but most importantly, I will show that the ideas of male power and patriarchy have led the women’s movement into an abyss. They have no answer to how women’s oppression can be fought. Rosemary Pringle, in her book Secretaries Talk, expresses a sentiment common in feminist literature today: “no one is at all clear what is in­volved in transforming the existing (gender stereotyped) categories”.7 Is it any wonder the women’s movement is plagued by pessimism and hesita­tion? An analysis which says half the human race has power over the other half must in the end question whether this situation can be changed. A theory which says capitalism could be replaced by socialism, but women’s oppression could continue, ends up sliding into the idea that men naturally and inevitably oppress women.

The Marxist analysis is that the historical roots of women’s oppres­sion lie in class society. The specific forms this oppression takes today are the result of the development of the capitalist family and the needs of capital. Therefore the struggle to end the rule of capital, the struggle for socialism, is also the struggle for women’s liberation. Because class is the fundamental division in society, when workers, both women and men, fight back against any aspect of capitalism they can begin to break down the sexism which divides them. Their struggle can begin to “transform the existing categories”.

Theory


In The German Ideology Marx argued that social relations between people are determined by production. The various institutions of society can only be understood as developing out of this core, productive interaction. His argument applies as much to women’s oppression as to any other aspect of capitalist society.

The fact is … that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Em­pirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirical­ly, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they actually are, i.e., as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.’8

The history of humanity is the history of changes to the way produc­tion is organised. The new economic relations established with each mode of production exert pressure on other social relations, making some obsolete, remoulding others. So any institution must be examined historical­ly and in its relationship to other social relations. For instance, an analysis of the family needs to be rooted in its economic and social role and ex­amine how it helps perpetuate the existing relations of production. Marx argued that the relations of production of every society form a whole, a concept Lukács took up in his philosophical writings. He wrote:

(it) is not to deny that the process of abstraction and hence the isolation of the elements and concepts in the special disciplines and whole areas of study is of the very essence of science. But what is decisive is whether this process of isolation is a means towards understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated frag­ment retains its ‘autonomy’ and becomes an end in itself. In the last analysis Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent sciences of law, economics or history, etc.: there is nothing but a single, unified – dialectical and historical – science of evolution of society as a totality.9

Today it is very popular for those influenced by Louis Althusser and others to brand this approach as “reductionist”. It is useful to quote Lukács here again, as he can hardly be accused of covering his back after this ob­jection was raised. “The category of totality does not reduce its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity, to identity”. And “the interac­tion we have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwise un­changing objects.”10

Marx’s proposition “men make their own history, but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves”, sums up the interaction we must look for between the ideas women and men use to justify their actions and responses to social events and the material and economic circumstances in which they operate. This differs radically from the theoretical framework of patriarchy theory. The most common versions take two forms. There are those like Juliet Mitchell who see patriarchy in psychological and ideological terms: “We are dealing with two autonomous areas, the economic mode of capitalism and the ideological mode of patriarchy.”11 If you make such a distinction between the economic and ideological, then you cannot explain anything about the development of society. Why do some ideas dominate? And why do some dominant ideas change?

However I do not intend answering these ideas more fully because the arguments which seem to offer a more serious challenge to Marxism are not these but the other version of patriarchy theory argued by writers like Heidi Hartmann. She criticised Juliet Mitchell: “Patriarchy operates, Mitchell seems to be saying, (in Psyche/analysis and Feminism) primarily in the psychological realm … She clearly presents patriarchy as the fun­damental ideological structure, just as capital is the fundamental economic structure.” Hartmann concludes “although Mitchell discusses their interpenetration, her failure to give patriarchy a material base in the relation between women’s and men’s labour power, and her similar failure to note the material aspects of the process of personality formation and gender creation, limits the usefulness of her analysis.”12

However, Hartmann’s own attempt at a materialist analysis is not grounded in the concept of society as a totality in which production forms the basis for all social relations. And so she writes:

We suggest that our society can best be understood once it is recog­nized that it is organized both in capitalistic and in patriarchal ways…a partnership of patriarchy and capitalism has evolved.13

This is a decidedly un-Marxist formulation, for all Hartmann’s preten­sion to Marxist categories. It has much more in common with structuralist and post-structuralist theories which take a mechanical view of society as a series of social structures which can exist side by side. They do not at­tempt to unite the social structures into a coherent whole. In fact, they are often hostile to the very concept of society as a totality, preferring a view of society as fragmented and chaotic. “All attempts to establish a working framework of ideas are regarded with the deepest suspicion.”14

Hartmann, while at pains to distinguish herself from the feminists who tended towards a psychoanalytical explanation of women’s oppres­sion, uses fundamentally the same approach. The similarity is clear when we look at what Juliet Mitchell, influenced by Althusser’s attempt to graft a structuralist theory onto Marxism, wrote:

In a complex totality each independent sector has its own autonomous reality though each is ultimately, but only ultimately, determined by the economic factor… the unity of woman’s condition at any time is in this way the product of several structures [and] each separate structure may have reached a different moment at any given historical time.15

This framework fits neatly with Hartmann’s view of society as both capitalism and patriarchy. And along with all those who have taken on board elements of this method, Hartmann downgrades class as the fun­damental determinant – because in the end you can’t have two structures. One has to be primary, so her analysis does not treat patriarchy and capitalism as two systems in partnership. She argues that it was a con­spiracy between male workers and capitalists which established women’s oppression under capitalism. In other words, patriarchy is more fundamen­tal than capitalism. This is an inbuilt confusion in theories which claim to “marry” Marxism and patriarchy theory. Again and again, they have to read their own prejudice into historical facts to fit the abstract and mechanical notion of patriarchy.



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