Feminism is doubtless many things, and there are, as I have said, three recognized waves of it. One might however understand any valid expression of feminism as the assertion of the dignity and well being of the individual woman. Broad support will certainly be found for such a proposition so much so that modern feminism can find no complaint here.
What, however, characterizes modern feminism is its treatment of women as a discernible social grouping in contradistinction to men as a discernible social grouping, which together comprise all of society, and whose claims must be evaluated not in any absolute sense but in comparison to the other grouping, men.
So structurally, there are two features to modern feminism. First, there is the identification of the grouping and its corollary, the identification of those not within who therefore form a second grouping, men. And secondly, there is the notion that the goal is to achieve equality of the first grouping relative to the second.
Just to state that proposition suggests a high degree of abstraction in the analysis. In this deep abstraction, is it certain that the uncontroversial goal, the dignity and well being of the individual woman, will be served? Not really. This common sense goal becomes a sort of accidental by-product of equality between the groupings.
If the female grouping obtains equality with the male grouping, it may or may not occur that the individual woman will enjoy well being and dignity. Thus if individual A, attached to the female grouping, becomes CEO of Bombardier, the goal of modern feminism is advanced, without regard to the well being and dignity of individual B, also attached to the female grouping, who for economic reasons stoked by modern feminism needs to leave the home at 6:30 am to drive her twin infant daughters to the day care across town to start her eight-hour shift inputting data for Bombardier at minimum wage.
Feminism certainly has no answer to any claim for equality between individuals A and B. At most it can only criticize the situation of poor B vis-à-vis that of the male grouping. So for example feminism might take issue with the fact that B earns less than a male colleague performing the same role at the same hourly rate, but who earns time and a half pay on overtime that he has the ability to work since he does not have to pick up twin infants at the daycare exactly 8 and a half hours after depositing them there. Feminism cannot even take cognizance of the lack of material commonality between its members once it has chosen them. For example, if C is a trans-woman who has no children, feminism may still treat C as a woman and therefore disclose indifference as to any inequality as between A and C.
Since feminism conceptually seeks the equality of the female grouping and the male grouping, its content is a notion of equality with the male grouping, and exclusively so. If feminism accepted that equality meant dignity and well being, then one might excuse its abstract, formalist structure. One applies the mechanism in the confidence that in some form or other dignity and well being will issue.
But feminism does not proceed in such manner. Rather, its curious fixation is that equality is essentially about earning power, the power to secure economic resources through personal activity, classically therefore employment. To modern feminism nothing else matters, not the individual woman’s interest in non-economic matters, like assisting her fellow members of society through volunteer work, nurturing her children, developing her musical talents, or developing a political opinion in any degree at variance to the tenets of modern feminism.
Moreover, as seen in our example above, feminism is conceptually blind to its earning-power equality between any individual women, or even the absolute earning power of any individual woman. It just cares about earning power equivalence between the female grouping as an aggregate and the male grouping as an aggregate.
Whilst this all must sound familiar, it must also ring as thoroughly bizarre. Why do we not just concern ourselves with the well being and dignity of the individual woman? Maybe that individual woman herself does not care about earning as much as the average of the male grouping, or maybe she cares more about global warming.
So the question is, how did we get here? How is it that this inordinately conceptualistic and narrow thinking has moved so vigorously to the forefront of social ordereing?
The answer is that this same thinking is in fact hegemonic in thinking in the West generally. The analysis is applied ubiquitously to explain social organization generally. This analysis is Marxism.
One might say, Marxism has been rejected, since states that espoused it have done so poorly, like the states of the Soviet Union. It may indeed be asserted that the Soviet Union was a disaster, which one might assess as a function of whether it delivered dignity and well being to individuals. One might indeed trace the calamity of the Soviet Union back to Marxism. But oddly none of this seems to rub off on the pull of Marxist analysis in feminism. This is a pity, since when one looks around, this Marxist analysis is every bit as much a calamity in feminism, and has wreaked havoc on individuals’ dignity and well being as much as has political Marxism.
The fundamental features of modern feminism in their structure and content express Marxism philosophy. Marxism is an offshoot of a deeply-rooted enquiry into social organization, and a mechanism to describe societal evolution, the pivotal proponent of which was the 19th century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.
Hegel focused on tensions in society as the motor of societal evolution. Hegel adapted to societal evolution a method of philosophical enquiry from the Greek philosophical tradition, associated in particular with Socrates and Plato, known as the “dialectical” method. Under this method two opposites, known as “thesis” and “antithesis”, are in tension, and the resolution of this tension results in a new, more evolved state, known as “synthesis”, in which new tensions would crystallize, and in turn be resolved, and so on, until perhaps some end state occurs in that the increments towards perfection in the successive stages become ever smaller.
The mechanism was in Hegel’s view inevitable and moreover all-encompassing. Everyone within it can therefore only think on the basis dictated by the process. This process of social evolution Hegel referred to as “historical dialectics”.
Marx determined that the essential feature in assessing societal organization was capital, that is, money that was free to invest and did not need to serve a person’s immediate survival. He identified capital as dictating the fault lines between the adversarial elements which would be resolved in the attainment of the next stage of societal evolution. The elements in adversarial relation to each other had therefore to be those with capital and those without.
So for Marx social evolution was a process of ensuring that those without capital got it, or at least controlled it. Equality for Marx was therefore focused on equality of capital. A large part of capital is the ability to earn money. If one earns enough one can save and multiply this capital independently of one’s work. Whilst those earning sustenance will never achieve capital, those who do will achieve ever more, thus intensifying the tension between those with and those without, leading to the resolution of this tension by social evolution.
Because the organizing principle that Marx inserted into the dialectic structure was purely material, his thought is known as “material dialectics”. For Hegel and the ancient Greek philosophers the universe was far bigger than what could be seen and touched. Although Marx’ criterion, unlike theirs, was purely material, Marx too did not think that the effects of material dialectics were felt exclusively on the physical plane. He theorized that they were much broader, in fact they were all encompassing, dictating the philosophical beliefs of the people in the process, no less than Hegel had.
The notion is moreover that philosophical beliefs will reflect the interests of the dominant faction in the dialectic process. This is incidentally why Marxists and their proponents are always going on about “conscious raising” and “deconstructing” anything standing in society. Everything will shunlessly be a construct of this power structure which reflects the more powerful faction’s interests.
Marxism is attractive and some may say intellectually compelling since it inserts itself into a really quite profound philosophical tradition. Moreover most people would agree that money matters. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remark that “the very rich are different from you and me” is not entirely countered by Hemingway’s riposte, “yes, they have more money”.[1] As Marx (with Friedrich Engels) pointed out, the availability of capital allows for its multiplication. In Marx’ example, with capital one can pay workers, and skim off the excess of their production, to reinvest again and increasingly again. So there is, as the French say, a “variable geometry”.
Marxism is attractive secondly because it supplies a sort of ideal or destination which people and their societies can strive toward. Even if they do not reach it a sense of common purpose is achieved, and any progress delivers a psychological reward to the adherents. In this way Marxism functions as a sort of secular religion – there is a collective goal.
One can contrast this with liberalism where there is no collective goal, just the creation of a space where each individual can define their own purposes and independently achieve them. In Jefferson’s phrasing, this “pursuit of happiness” has no objective definition of the open-textured term “happiness”. Society is built on the “low but solid ground” of individual self-interest.[2] Whilst that ground may be propitious for practical ends, it remains unaspirational.
Marxism is attractive, thirdly, because it is a sort of matrix that can be applied in many contexts, for example, as we will see, feminism. One just needs to substitute the criterion of identification of the warring groupings.
Fourthly, Marxism was attractive since it was associated, rightly, with the struggle against fascism. In the first half of the 20th century in Europe it was principally Marxism which combatted fascism, and the purportedly Marxist state Russia was instrumental in defeating German fascism. The thoroughgoing repulsiveness of fascism, in particular its German avatar, certainly contributed to the luster of its perceived opposite, Marxism. Today, however, with the exposure of the prodigious murderousness of Marxist regimes, in particular Stalinism, this element of attractiveness has proven evanescent.
Fifthly, and most practically, it is also attractive since it promotes the identification of groupings who therefore collectively assert their Marxist-inspired claims together. Thereby they not only achieve strength in numbers, but they can purport to show statistically relevant claims. One woman’s low wage may be attributed to her individual characteristics, such as for example that she is a drug addict, and it may be down to accident, like the fact that she did not look very hard for a job and settled on a bad one. But when a whole class of persons can be shown to be unequally treated vis-à-vis another an obvious reason for this inequality is that the feature organizing the groupings is responsible. Where that is genre everyone agrees it is prima facie an irrational basis to pay less.
The actual path by which the feminist stripe of Marxism entered into the mainstream begins with Betty Friedan and her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. The evidence is both in Friedan’s life and in the book itself. Friedan was a radicalized labour organizer and journalist prior to her 1963 book.[3] For Friedan it is axiomatic that not only are women a discernable grouping within society that is entitled to “equality” with the opposite and other grouping, men, but that their interests were fundamentally opposed to those of men. Friedan relied on Friedrich Engels for the central thesis of her book, “that women would achieve emancipation only when they entered into the paid work force.”[4] The “mystique” in the book was precisely the false consciousness bearing down on women that they must be submissive to men and serve in the domestic forum without pay, a construct of the power structure surrounding them.
Rape laws will thus reflect the interests of the male grouping. So will reproductive issues. Ideas of beauty will reproduce the male vision. The list is extensive, and, as the French say, feminists make fire with all types of wood (“elles font feu de tout bois”). The Marxist pedigree of this thinking is blatant.
The identification of the female-male grouping in this thinking is perhaps unproblematic in terms of there existing a discernible (biological) distinction. Biological distinctions are thus uncontroversial as seen in the facility of Aristotle’s taxonomies, and the contrast with the subtlety of how he defines anything social or political.
But the theory becomes strained in the functional basis of the distinction. What is it that women have in common that should matter in relation to what men have in common? For Marxists this factor needs to have an economic signification. But the position of individual women within this dividing scheme varies wildly and does not depend decisively on gender. Other factors will generally be more operative, like the family a woman is born into, the country she is born into, etc.
Moreover, even where a man earns the money it will often occur that his wife will spend it. Why should spending power not be a more material determinant than earning power? Moreover in a marriage the law will often make money earned by the husband equally the property of the wife, or at least give her some claim to it. And inheritance laws will often equally distribute estates to men and women, in fact in practice more to women, since on average women live longer and men tend to marry younger women.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the woman-man grouping scheme is to find adversariality between the groupings. Men as a grouping have no structural reason to keep women out of the workplace. Many men are glad that someone else shares the burden of earning money.
There is obviously a complementarity between men and women which one does not for example find as between capitalists and labour. There is no zero-sum game between men and women economically, but rather often a true partnership where each brings what is specific and different in themselves to bear for the advancement of a project that is a common one, and certainly no less the woman’s than the man’s.
One can of course find points of opposition of interests between men and women, but they are few and far between, and usually not economic. They tend to flow from the natural differences between women and men and so therefore relate to the regulation of sexuality, for example sexual assault laws, and reproductive rights. But the rules here cannot be understood as an emanation of men’s superior economic power, and the issues are not sufficient to devise an all-encompassing vision upon which to explain the world. Moreover care is indicated in treating all women as being differently impacted in these matters to all men. An 85-year-old woman may well be differently impacted than a 15-year-old woman.
In accordance with the tenets of Marxism, the weaker, challenging grouping, in feminism the women, will need to be found to have suffered by power structures build up around them to their disfavour. Applied to feminism, Marxism cannot fail to identify one of the relevant structures as the family. They rightly see that the family, and having children, is a weight on women’s ability to earn and gather capital. But it is highly improbable that there is no objective value in family for any of the vast majority of women who choose it. It is highly improbable that all women for example are each better off working in a menial, repetitive task for little pay than taking care of their children at home.
The ill effects of feminism are today everywhere to be seen. With it being standard now for everyone to work for pay, both women and men, it has become economically difficult for any individual not to work.
Other activities are correspondingly sacrificed, like having a family. Since these other activities are devalued under Marxism, those who chose them incur economic cost (which society does not recognize as deserving of compensation). Marxist-inspired feminism tends to erode the natural complementarity between women and men, such that each individual is encouraged selfishly to seek their own short-term interests exclusively. Perhaps most damaging, social interactions must be explained and assessed by reference to a rigid intellectual scheme that cannot represent reality. So there is a paralysis of thinking about social ordering, and a stunting of social development in a natural and wholesome way.
The path to a healthier society is to expose feminism’s Marxist borrowings, and to acknowledge that not only is Marxism problematic in its native soil of capitalism but it utterly fails to migrate in any coherent manner to the context of feminism.
The focus should return to individual well being and dignity, of both men and women. Equality should be sought independently of Marxism. The equality so envisioned should be a richer one than mere equality of earning power, and notably should take account of individual’s specific characteristics and choices.
Social structures, in particular the traditional ones like the family, do not necessarily represent the outcome of a “class struggle” between women and men, with the latter being more determinative of the result such that it disfavours women. It is the aggregate of the choices of individual women and men. Because there is no necessary adversariality between a class of women and a class of men, but rather a natural and ineradicable complementarity, those structures reflect the interests of individual women too.
[1] Earnest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, Esquire, August 1936:
“The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, ‘Yes, they have more money.’
[2] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), at 247 :
“By building civil society on the ‘low but solid ground’ of selfishness or of certain ‘private vices,’ one will achieve much greater ‘public benefits’ than by futilely appealing to virtue, which is by nature ‘unendowed’”
[3] Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
[4] Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 at page 201.