The below addresses the issues raised in The German Ideology you mention.
Charles Brown
>>> Alec Ramsdell <a_ramsdell at yahoo.com> 12/26 8:33 PM >>>
I'm gearing up for Judyfest on LBO, and looking for question of sex in
Marx, Engles, Lenin, etc. Can anyone direct me to writings that
follow similar lines to those quoted from the German Ideology below?
Or any other writers addressing Marx et al on these questions? I hope
the content of my inquiry isn't too open-ended.
Alec
"With these there develops the division of labour, which was originially nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division of labour which develops spontaneously or "naturally" by virtue of natural predisposition (e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment with a division of material and mental labour appears."
. . .
"the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband."
The German Ideology, Part One
__________
For Women's Liberation
By the Communist Manifesto every Marxist knows the A,B,C's of historical materialism or the materialist conception of history. The history of all hitherto existing society, since the breaking up of the ancient communes, is a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressed. Classes are groups that associate in a division of labor to produce their material means of existence.
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels asserted an elementary anthropological or "human nature" rationale for this conception. In a section titled "History: Fundamental Condtions" they say:
... life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation ,
clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production
of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act. a fundamental
condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must
daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.
Production and economic classes are the starting point of Marxist analysis of human society, including in the Manifesto, because human life, like all plant and animal life must fulfill biological needs to exist as life at all. It is an appeal to biologic ( which I support, all anti-vulgar materialist critiques to the contrary notwithstanding, but that's another letter). Whatever, humans do that is "higher" than plants and animals, we cannot do if we do not first fulfill our plant/animal like needs. Therefore, the "higher" (cultural, semiotic etc.) human activities are limited by the productive activities. This means that historical materialism starts with human nature, our natural species qualities.
Yet, it is fundamental in biology that the basic life sustaining processes of a species are twofold. There is obtaining the material means of life and subsistence or success of survival of the liviing generation, for existence ("production"). But just as fundamentally there is reproduction or success in creating a next generation of the species that is fertile, and survives until it too reproduces viable offspring. Whoever heard of a one genearation species ? In fact, one test of two individual animals being of the same species is their ability to mate and produce viable offspring. We can imagine a group of living beings with the ultimate success in eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. But if they do not reproduce, they are either not a species or they are an extinct species (unless the individuals are immortal).
Thus, having premised their theory in part on human biology, our "species-being", Marx and Engels were obligated to develop historical materialism, the theory of the Manifesto, based not only on the logic of subsistence production, but also on the logic of next generation reproduction.
In The German Ideology , they do recognize reproduction as a "fundamental condition of history" along with production. However, they give reproduction, or at least, "the family" a subordinate "fundamental" status to production when they say:
the third circumstance which from the very outset, enters into historical
development, is that men, who daily remake their own life begin to make
other men, to propagate their kind: the relation between man and woman'
parents and children, the family. The family, which to begin with is the
only social relationship, becomes later, when increased needs create a
new social relations and the increased population new needs, a
subordinate one...
My thesis in this comradely critique ( I really do love Big Daddy Karl and Uncle Fred overall) is that the mode of reproduction (in the broad sense, including, but not limited to social institutions called "the" family) of human beings remains throughout human history even when classes arise equally fundamental with the mode of production in shaping society, even with the "new social relations" that come with "increased population." For there to be history in the sense of many generations of men and women all of the way up to Marx, Engels and us today, men had to do more than "begin to make other men." Women and men had to complete making next generations by sexually uniting and rearing them for thousands of years. Otherwise history would have ended long ago. We would be an extinct species. An essential characteristic of historyis its existence in the "medium" of multiple generations. Thus, with respect to historical materialism, reproduction is as necessary as production. The upshot is women's liberation must be put on the same footing with workers's liberation in the Marxist project.
Not only that .
Not only did Marx and Engels in The German Ideology give reproduction a "subordinate" fundamental status compared with production. They did it by the following sleight of hand: in part population increase or the success of reproduction somehow makes reproduction less important in "entering into historical development" as a "fundamental condition" (or "prmary historical relation" in another translation; also, "basic aspect of social activity"). This is quite a misogynist dialectic, given that "men" are in the first premise and the third premise, but women only are mentioned explicitly in the latter. It is also an idealist philosophical error, because the theory now tends to abstract from the real social life of individuals in reproduction.
Another passage in The German Ideology demonstrates the same sort of magical rather than scientific use of "dialectic" with respect to reproduction, and in this case the impact on the materialist philosophical consistency of their argument is more direct and explicit. They say:
Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of primary
historical relations,do we find that man also possesses "consciousness". But
even from the outset this is not "pure" consciousness. The "mind" is
from the outsed afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which
here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds,
in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness...language
like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of
intercourse with other men...Consciousness is, therefore, from the very
beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.
Consciousness is at first of course, merely consciousness concerning the
immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited
connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is
growing self-conscious... This sheep-like or tribal consciousness receives
further development or extension through increased productivity, the
increase in needs, and , what is fundamental to both of these, the increase
in population. With these there develops the division of labor, which was
originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act, then the division of
labor which develops spontaneously or "naturally" by virtue of natural
predisposition (e.g. physical strength, needs, accidents etc., etc.) Division
of labor becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and
mental labor appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can
really flatter itself that it is something other than ocnsciousness of existing
practice, that it really represents something without representing
something real (as the semioticians' signifier is abitrarily related to what it
signifies -C.B); from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate
itself from the world and to proceed to formation of "pure" theory, theology,
philosophy, morality, etc.
In this long paragraph (only partially quoted), we see Marx and Engels's early formulation and explanation of the origin of what Engels later famously dubbed the fundamental question of philosophy -materialism or idealism ? - is rooted in the "second" original division of labor. For some reason, the "first" original division of labor, which gives women equivalent complementary status with men, just disappears and is replaced by a productive division of labor, between "men's" minds and hands. And to make it worse, once again, the "reason" the reproductive division of labor disappears as an ongoing fundamental determinate throughout history is its own success in creating a population explosion. This seems to be an error of substituting a negative and destructive dialectic in thought for what in being and becoming is the most fundamentally positive nad fruitful dialectic in human history - reproduction.
Here is a key connecting point: then Marx and Engels (whom I love dearly) substitute for the reproductive division of labor a productive division of labor as the fundamentally determining contradiction of historical development. This division of labor, between predominantly mental and predominantly physical labor, becomes the root of development of classes, the importance of which is declared in the first sentence of the Manifesto. Yet, Marx and Engels commit the same error of abstraction at one level that they criticize at the next level: the error of mental laborers in abstracting from the concrete reality of physcial labor. This is also seen from the fact that they keep depending on "population increase", which is another name for reproduction and "the sexual act", to explain the origin of increased "productivity" and "needs", which seem to be the "premises" for the division between material dn mental labor (and are because of the role of material surpluses in making possible creation of the class of predominantly mental laborers). Thus, we might say that the original idealist philosophical inconsistency of Marxist materialism is abstraction from reproduction.
For a fuller historical materialism , the theories of workers liberation and women's liberation must be integrated. This may be done on the basis of Marx and Engels's fundamental logic carried out more consistently. Feminism need not be added on to , but derived from the original premises.deed by 1884, with the impact of anthropological studies ( and perhaps greater interaction with women in his maturity) in the Preface to the First Edition of The Origin, Engels says:
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in
history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of
immediate life. This, again ("again" ? C.B.) , is of a twofold character: on
the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing
and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side,
production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the
species. The social organization under which the people of a
particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined
by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor
on the one hand and of the family on the other.
This formulation and the change in it from that in The German Ideology support the basic idea I am trying to get across in my several comments: that reproduction is an equally fundamental, not a subordinate, process with production in shaping society from its origins to modern (and post-modern) times. But Engels's formulation in The Origin is after Marx's death and late in their heroic joint project in developing Marxism. Thus, the main classic writings of Marxism, and Marx and Engels's political activity focussed in production and political economy not the family and the other institutions of reproduction.
The Origin's is the best scientific formulation of the materialistic conception of history even after "the" family is surrounded by larger social institutions in later stages of human history, as asserted in the passage from The German Ideology, quoted in an earlier comment. Even under capitalism, many of the social relations and institutions that are quantitatively greater then those in the "nuclear" family (See anthropologist G.P. Murdock on the "nuclear" family) are part of reproduction, such as school and training, and even medical services and recreation.
More importantly, reproduction and production have qualitatively different functions, both fundamental in constituting our species existence, our species-being. In other words, not only are reproductive relations not quantitatively less important in determining history, but from the beginning, from the true original division of labor as in the sexual act , reproduction has had a qualitatively, complementarily necessary relation with production in creating history. From the standpoint of our uniquely human species character (our culture), it might be said that production makes objects and reproduction creates subjects.
Thus, problems in dealing with subjectivity in the history of Marxism (see my "Activist Materialism and the ' End ' of Philosophy") may in part be remedied by rethinking Marxism based on equating and even privileging reproduction over production n interpreting and acting to change the world.. This is seen as even more so when we consider that there is now for Marxism a scientific, materialist, truthseeking need for intellectual affirmative action in using empirical study of reproduction to reexplain history to compensate for the sole focus on production. Reproduction has always been scientifically coequal, as demonstrated by Marx and Engels's clipped comments and "admissions" quoted previously. They never refute their own words about the importance of reproduction in historical materialist theory. They just uncharacteristically fail to develop one of their own stated fundamental materialist premises. Living Marxists must creatively redevelop historical materialism based on this compensation.
Dialectical materialism holds that the relationship between subject and object is dialectical, of course. It is "vulgar" materialism that portrays the subject as one-sidedly determined by the object. Reproduction and production are complementary opposites, and their unity in struggle is the fundamental motive force of history today as in ancient times.
However, when I say "reproduction creates subjects", I mean reproduction in a broader sense than only sexual conception and birth. Reproduction includes all childrearing, from the home through all school and any other type of training. It is all"caring labor" as defined by Hilary Graham in "Caring: A Labour of Love" (1983). Reproduction is all of those labors that have as a direct and main purpose making and caring for a human subject or personality as contrasted with those labors of production which have as a direct purpose making objects useful to humans. Reproduction includes affirmative self-creation.
Under capitalism with alienation, production's impact in making subjects is primarily "negative" or indirect. Conversely, reproduction indirectly makes objects, in the sense that the subject, the human laborer, who is the direct and "positive" purpose of reproduction, is the possessor of labor power, the active factor making objects in production (directly).
This conception of reproduction is consistent with Marx's basic reasoning in Capital (the book). In his famous development of the concept of the labor theory of value and surplus value, he asserts that human labor is the only source of new (underline) value in the production process. The human laborer and the means of production (tools and raw materials) all add exchange value to a commodity. But the means of production add no more value to the commodity than the values added to them by a previous human laborer in the production of the means of production. The human labor power is the only element in the process that can add more value to the commodity than the values that went into producing (reproducing) the labor power. The labor of a worker in one-half day ( in Capital; by now it is one-quarter of a day) produces enough value to pay for the necessities creating the worker's labor power for a full day's work. The value produced by the worker in the second half of the day is the surplus value exploited by the capitalist. The creation of the workers' labor power is done in reproduction,in the broad sense as I have been using that concept in these comments. Thus, reproduction is the "only source" of the only source (that is not a typo) of new value. Subjectivity is the "source" of the unique abiliity (over the means of production) of the human component in the production process to produce more value than went into producing it.
Subjectivity is the source of sort of Marxist "mind over matter". Reproduction is the source of subjectivity. In relation to the discussion, supra, of the primacy of reproduction in the original division of labor over the division of material and mental labor, we might deduce that it was (and is) within reproduction that the mind and matter are non-antagonistically related as opposites (when "men"were simultaneously theoreticians in their practice as mentioned in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)
Sociology and common experience teach that historically, women have been the primary reproductive laborers - from childrearing to housework, from elementary and high school teaching to nursing. Beyond pregnancy and nursing, women's "assignment" to reproductive roles is historically and ideologically caused, not biologically or genetically caused or necessary (see for example Not in Our Genes, by Lewontin, et al.). But as a result, women are a historically constituted, exploited and oppressed reproductive class whose defining labor is as fundamental to our material life as that of the productive laborers (who are women and men) Marx and Engels focussed on. Thus, the materialist conception of history, and the "new" Red Feather Manifesto, must be modified, and women's liberation put on equal footing with workers' liberation in the Marxist project.
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