Marxism and Feminsim

Differences:

1. Marxists are primarily concerned about the exploitation of the working class,
Feminists care mostly about the exploitation of women.
2. Marxists tend to favor political-economic dimensions, Feminists tend to favor
social constructivist approaches.

Similarities:

1. World views focus on exploitation

2. Share a holistic perspective that transcends conventional disciplinary boundaries
3. See historical conditions as significantly determining, and therefore explaining,
differing social outcome.
4. Agree that theory and practice are necessarily and appropriately integrated.

Issues and Analysis

- One important issue that both feminists and Marxists identify, but on which they
differ in relative emphasis, is that of production and reproduction. Marxists tend
to consider the production experience as the central determining condition of the
social formation. Marxists have long recognized that the continuous flow of
workers for capitalist enterprises depends on the reproduction processes that are
based in households. The subsistence wage that workers receive must cover all
household reproduction costs. Within households, in most instances, women
provide the services required for reproduction, such as child care, cooking, and
cleaning, without receiving any wage compensation. Thus, in effect, they provide
an unpaid subsidy to the capitalist system.
- In her book A Critical Rewriting, the feminist Spike Peterson proposes combining
Marxist and feminist perspectives into a world view of political economy that
integrates the reproductive, productive, and virtual economies.
- She argues that in the present post-Fordist accumulation regime capitalists are
cutting their labor costs by using more informal, part-time, and flexible working
conditions. Since these are the exploitative conditions that women have
traditionally been forced to endure, Peterson labels this development the
“feminization of the labor force”.
- Peterson argues that limiting the analysis of the global political economy to the
productive and reproductive dimensions is no longer realistic. This lead to the
emergence of a whole new dimension that she calls the virtual economy.
- Virtual economy has three central components: global financial markets,
knowledge and information, and cross-national cultural codes.
- Instantaneously connected global financial markets create huge amounts of
virtual money and power, at least temporarily.
- Knowledge and information, the increasingly important “virtual” element in the
production process, is largely managed and controlled internationally by the
corporate owners of intellectual property.
- Cross-national cultural codes, the third component, are mostly diffused by the
global media.