Marxism Theory Pierre Macherey & Marxist Feminism
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Pierre Macherey
Pierre Macherey was a French Marxist literary critic and a very influential figure in the development of French post-structuralism and Marxism. He was a student of Lois Althusser as well as a collaborator of Reading Capital.
Etienne Balibar, Jaques Ranciere, and Roger Establet are other philosophers who contributed to the work. Reading Capital is a study of Marx’s Das Kapital and Marxist concepts such as the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism.
One amongst the Althusserians is Macherey who was most concerned with philosophy. His study of philosophy includes works on Hegel, Spinoza, and Marx. He treats philosophy alongside literature and sociology and takes into consideration Marxs’ idea that philosophy has no history.
He explains his argument stating that “philosophy has no history: it is precisely because philosophy has no history of its own that it is the site of the intersection of politics, economics, and literature.”
Macherey studies Hegel and Spinoza in his 1979 work Hegel or Spinoza. The work is a philosophical engagement with the ideas of Hegel and Spinoza. Hegel and Spinoza is an effort to understand two lines of thoughts by interrogating the one by the other. Macherey’s effort is not to reconcile the two philosophies but to understand them through their difference.
Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza concerns with the critique of Hegel’s reading of Spinoza. In lieu, Macherey advocates the Althusserian idea of symptomatic reading. It is the idea that Althusser put forth in his contribution to Reading Capital. Macherey considers Hegel’s reading of Spinoza flawed.
It is flawed since it has the task to see the absolute not just as substance but as a subject also. It is flawed since it fails to understand the internal dynamic of Spinoza’s philosophy. However, Macherey argues that Hegel and Spinoza share a similar opposition to the idea of the method applied to the development of knowledge.
The idea is that thought is not a method that lies external to the reality represented. But it is a part of the immanent unfolding of thought. This idea is evident in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which is critical of any method directed towards truth.
For Spinoza too, the method is not antecedent to the development of knowledge, but it is an expression of it. This idea is evident in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise which holds the view that a method for interpretation of scripture can only be developed by its reading.
Marxist Feminism
Marxist feminism is an approach to the analysis of women’s plights in the patriarchal setup of capitalist society. The theory concerns the liberation of women. It emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The concept is an intersection of Marxism and feminism.
August Bebel and Friedrich Engels are credited for the early development of theory dealing with the question of women. Inspired by Marxism, Bebel wrote his book Women and Socialism to argue that women are as equal as men in terms of their economic, social and political rights and duties.
Bebel’s Woman and Socialism was published in Germany in 1879. The book influenced working-class women as much as it opened for them an avenue to their involvement in the German socialist movement. Talking of the women’s plights in a capitalist society, Bebel argues that women are doubly disadvantaged.
On the one hand, there is their societal dependence on the men’s world. On the other hand, there is economic dependence in which women in general and proletarian women, in particular, akin to proletarian men.
He finds the problem of the oppression of women by men rooted in history. Bebel believed that the annihilation of social antagonism could solve the problem of women’s oppression.
Engels is another influential figure as a Marxist who dealt with the question of women. Engels’s book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State is a seminal work that discusses the oppression of women.
The book explores ancient and modern societies in order to analyze the condition of women. In their joint work The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels discuss the women’s oppression in 19th-century capitalist society wherein women were exploited through the workforce.
Three waves of Feminism
The history of feminism can be divided into three waves. The first wave, the 19th and early 20th centuries concerns with the women’s suffrage. The second wave, the 1960s, and 1970s concerns with the women’s emancipation in society with equality of rights. The third wave that began in the 1990s in a reaction to and continuation of the second wave of feminism.
Marxist feminists see the first wave of feminism as a continuation of the bourgeois revolution which talked of equality of all but was hesitant to grant the right to franchise to women.
The second wave of feminism is considered liberal feminism by the Marxist feminists since it supported the economic growth plans of the democratic governments. This shows the Marxist feminists’ effort to trace and examine the blind spots in Marxist theory.
Notable Marxist feminists are Angela Davis, Raya Dunayevskaya, Silvia Federici, Shulamith Firestone, Clara Fraser, Alexandra Kollontai, Sheila Rowbotham, Evelyn Reed, Chizuko Ueno, and Claudia Jones.
