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The Woman Question
Reflections on Feminism and Marxism
Mary E John
The entwined and conflicted histories of feminism and
Marxism could yield new understandings of the
problems besetting the women’s movement in 21st
century India, particularly issues concerning sex work,
and caste. Spanning the socialist feminists of early 19th
century Europe, Marx’s own writings on the “woman
question,” and the scholarship that emerges from the
1960s and 1970s, this paper suggests that recent
post-Marxist work can offer a fruitful site for pushing
the boundaries of feminist approaches to capitalist
development in India today.
This paper began as an extended interview with Mini Sukumar that was
then translated by her into Malayalam and published in 2015 in Marx
Vayanakal, edited by T V Madhu (Kozhikode: Raspberry Books). I thank
them for having invited me to be a part of that volume. Thanks also to
Nivedita Menon for insisting that the article be brought out in English
as well. I am indebted to the anonymous referee’s incisive comments,
which helped sharpen some of my arguments. The usual
disclaimers remain.
Mary E John (maryejohn1@gmail.com) is with the Centre for Women’s
Development Studies, New Delhi.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW DECEMBER 16, 2017 vol liI no 50
C
oncerns relating to Marxism and feminism are not mar-
ginal, or of interest only to those who identify them-
selves as Marxist or feminist, but are pertinent to some
of the most challenging and vexed issues in social and political
theory today. Both Marxism and feminism are theoretical–
political movements and ways of thinking that have thrown up
the largest questions of our times. Their complex relationship,
and its extraordinary history, is a demonstration of this.
Unfortunately, much of this history (which traversed the last
two centuries across most parts of the world) has been lost to
us, even to those who claim its legacy. The present moment
has become quite inhospitable to productive debate on these
issues, turning too many into defensive “believers” or hostile
rejecters. I would like to think, however, that it is precisely
during such moments of danger that exploring the entwined
and conflicted histories of feminism and Marxism could yield
something new.
This paper is an attempt—from the vantage point of 21st
century India—to revisit some of the most significant histori-
cal and theoretical dimensions of the relationship between
feminism and Marxism. The initial section traverses the early
19th century, which witnessed the first expressions of socialist
feminism, before moving on to Marx’s own articulations of
“the woman question.” Subsequent sections explore the legacy
of the 1960s and 1970s, when a new era threw up major schol-
arly engagements between Marxism and feminism, in order to
explore some of the problems that have been besetting the
women’s movement in India. Major differences and conflicts,
to the point of stand-offs, have characterised issues concern-
ing sex work, on the one hand, and caste, on the other. These
would benefit from a careful examination of the possibilities
and limits of Marxist feminist frames of analysis. Finally, it
suggests that post-Marxism provides a particularly productive
set of resources for pushing the boundaries of contemporary
analysis of capitalism and development in India today.
A History Largely Forgotten
To get started, it is important to set the historical record
straight. When Marxism and feminism are thought of together,
they are rarely granted a symmetrical or mutually equal sta-
tus. Marxism invariably comes first, considered a “master
narrative,” and then come questions about how feminists have
responded to Marxism. In much writing, including by schol-
ars, it appears as though feminism emerged much after Marx-
ism in world politics and the history of thought. This is, quite
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simply, wrong. Even though the term “feminism” was first
used in late 19th century France, from where it spread rapidly
to other parts of the world (including China, Japan, India, Tur-
key, the United States (US) and several European countries),
the ideas associated with feminism took public shape much
earlier. Some historians argue that the first beginnings of fem-
inism go as far back as 14th century Europe, where a number
of women publicly debated with leading male intellectuals
about whether women were inferior to or equal to men. Others
point to the late 18th and early 19th century writings and
movements for women’s rights that accompanied the other
revolutions of those times, both political and economic, espe-
cially the French Revolution. Interestingly, the feminism of the
early 19th century was not simply “bourgeois” as some Marxists
have claimed, but fed into and was shaped by the early
socialisms of that period.
Socialist Feminist Ideas Predate Marxism
Therefore, the first point that needs to be made is that socialist
feminist ideas predated the development of Marxism, and that
Marxism is itself indebted to this prior legacy. Let us also not
forget that this was the period of colonialism for large parts of
the world, including the Indian subcontinent, which therefore
meant that ideas of social change, social reform, or revolution,
including those related to women and their rights, were being
mediated in India through the experiences of a colonised peo-
ple. In India, too, ideas about women’s rights and the first ma-
jor women’s rights organisations were formed before Marxist
or communist groups emerged in the early 20th century.
The early European feminist socialists in the 1830s included
men and women who were followers of Robert Owen, and
especially William Thompson, in England, and Charles Fourier
and Count de Saint-Simon in France. Their theory and practice
revolved around how to reject the system of institutionalised
male dominance (patriarchy) which was the chief cause of
women’s oppression, together with the system of institutiona-
lised property ownership (capitalism), which was the basis not
just of the oppression of workers but of human oppression
more generally. Only by rejecting both could a new world be
created where all would be free from the bonds of private
ownership and class struggle. Of course, there were socialists
who resisted feminism and women’s equal participation in the
movement. During these years, workers’ unions and cooperatives
were formed, with working class women creating special forums
for themselves. Socialist-feminists linked the economy and
gender relations in their thinking and writing in terms of private
property, the ownership of women by men in the institution of
marriage, and the exploitation of workers. This extended at
times into their personal lives, with some women having (het-
ero) sexual relationships and children outside marriage, at
considerable cost to themselves. The radicalism of these early
movements under adverse circumstances also spelt their de-
mise as they suffered governmental and social repression.1
These battles changed over time, as economic and political
conditions as well as socialist theory evolved further. Certainly,
by the middle of the 19th century, Karl Marx had reshaped
72
socialism with his theories of capital, historical materialism, and
the end of capitalism through communism via the dictatorship
of the proletariat. However, Marx was very conscious of the
way the “woman question” had been put in place by socialists
and feminists before him. Various essays by him, including
sections in the Communist Manifesto, bear witness to this legacy.
I have mentioned this period before Marx at some length
because it is hardly remembered today. It is not possible to go
into the details of the evolution and entanglements of socia-
lism, Marxism and feminism, though it is a fascinating story
with many characters and plots. All that I would like to
emphasise is that some of the basic questions and links
between the structures of capital and those of patriarchy
were already articulated by these pioneering intellectuals
and activists, and ranged across questions of work, family,
marriage, sexuality and motherhood. This was the terrain
that occupied succeeding generations of those who engaged
in both the theory and politics of Marxism and feminism.
By the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the
20th century, the possibility of revolution and ideas of c
ommunism had begun to reach well beyond countries like
Germany, to Russia, Japan, China, India and elsewhere. One
remarkable example from China stands out. He-Yin Zhen was
a pioneering feminist in China whose writings have recently
been discovered and translated into English (Liu et al 2013).
Here was a woman who not only offered her own “transna-
tional” theorisations of feminism for women and men in
China and elsewhere, but who was also the first person to
translate the Communist Manifesto into Chinese at the turn of
the 20th century.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries are somewhat better
known in the history of Marxism and left movements, on the
one hand, and in women’s movements on the other. The extra-
ordinary political upheavals during this period included the
rise of communism, where leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Clara
Zetkin and later Alexandra Kollontai articulated socialism as
the horizon for their feminist politics, albeit in very divergent
ways. Far too little is known of the fortunes of the “woman
question” in Russia after the October Revolution, while the
world wars and the rise of fascism in parts of Europe were not
conducive to the furtherance of feminist ideas. Most historians,
therefore, agree that it is from the 1960s that a palpably new
phase of organising and writing, speaking the language of
“women’s liberation,” took the world by storm. This is the period
that witnessed social and political movements such as the
civil rights struggles in the US, a revival of interest in Marxism
and socialism in most parts of the world, apart from the com-
munist countries, decolonisation and the rise of the “third
world,” and much more. What is relevant here is that this
political reawakening was accompanied by a fresh body of
writing both within the academy and beyond. Much of the
debate around Marxism and feminism pertains to this period
which peaked in the 1980s, when feminists—whether in politi-
cal organisations or as academic scholars in the university—
wrote much more extensively about the nature of women’s
oppression and explicitly offered their own theorisations in
DECEMBER 16, 2017 vol liI no 50 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

relationship to other forms of oppression. Here too, the canvas
is vast and it would be impossible to provide a proper overview
of all the major writers and trends.
Feminism Enters the Classroom
Already in the 1970s, but certainly by the 1980s in countries
like the US, women’s studies centres were established and new
courses on feminism and feminist theory created. Such courses
invariably considered two major political theoretical lega-
cies—liberalism and Marxism—in terms of their influence on
feminist thinking and practice. This is how feminist writings
were categorised as falling within liberal feminism, Marxist
feminism or socialist feminism, and radical feminism. Those
who took women’s oppression to be the single most important
issue were called radical feminists, and before long the list
kept growing—third world feminism, black feminism, post-
modern feminism, queer feminism and so on were added. Ali-
son Jaggar’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983) sum-
marised this tendency and soon became a textbook on femi-
nist theory, including in India. It is here that we find the now
commonplace tendency to first discuss “Marxism” and then
introduce Marxist feminism or socialist feminism.
It is indisputable that in the 1970s and 1980s, Marxism en-
joyed the status of a “grand theory” in several academic and
political circles, though it must be remembered that this was
highly uneven across the globe. (This situation was to change
drastically from the 1990s, which I will discuss later.) Precisely
because it possessed such status, there are several ways in
which the relationship and influence of Marxism in relation to
feminism developed. To begin with, there were those who con-
tinued to adhere quite closely to the views expounded by early
Marxists like Friedrich Engels, for whom Marxism provided a
sufficient perspective and ideology to encompass the emanci-
pation of women. This involved a primary emphasis on women
in the public world of work—mainly in industry, but also in
agriculture in third world contexts. In many ways, we might
say that this focus on women labouring in fields and factories
continues to be the major concern for many left-defined wom-
en’s organisations, including in India. The overall framework
is provided by Marxism, with its emphasis on productive work.
It is then largely a matter of expanding women’s participation
in employment, and of finding ways to organise women along
with the organisation of male workers. The relative marginali-
sation of women as workers takes centre stage, including prob-
lems related to their conditions of work, the discrimination
faced by women workers (especially when pregnant or requir-
ing maternity leave) in the payment of wages, and so on. In
countries like India, where the labour force participation of
women continues to be very low, the emphasis becomes all the
more that of demanding an expansion in women’s options in
the public world of work.
A second way of looking at the relationship between Marx-
ism and feminism from a theoretical perspective would be by
way of analogy. Here the noteworthy aspect is not simply to
narrow down the focus on women workers as mentioned
above, but rather to think of women as being analogous to
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(male) workers. Can women be considered a class that is
oppressed by men, just as workers are oppressed by capital-
ists? One formulation of this analogy has been articulated by
Catherine MacKinnon:
Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism, that which is most
one’s own yet most taken away … Heterosexuality is the structure,
gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities gener-
alised to social persons, reproduction a consequence and control
the issue. (1981: 1–2)
In this instance, it is sexuality, or rather heterosexuality, that is
seen to be similarly oppressive for women in their relation-
ships to men as is working under capital for the worker. Several
feminists have drawn on Marxism in this analogous fashion,
often in an effort to demonstrate that the so-called private
domain of gender relations (however understood) is as
central for understanding society and politics as the so-called
public world of work. These function on the premise that the
more prominent theoretical apparatus of Marxism can be
used for the separate theorisation of a group such as women
who lack their own theorisation. In various ways, such
attempts consider women as a “class” whose interests place
them in a conflicted relationship with men as the dominant
“class.” Some of these efforts have been placed under the
label of “radical feminism,” whereby critical aspects of women’s
lives and bodies—be it their sexuality, or their role in repro-
duction—results in the capacity of men as a group or class to
control women, turning women into objects of sexual exploi-
tation or forced motherhood.
A third mode of thinking about feminism and Marxism is to
explore their interrelationship, where each is granted some de-
gree of autonomy in relation to the other. (Notice that there is
an echo here of the concerns of the early socialist feminists!)
For obvious reasons, such an approach is more complex than
the previous two, since there is an explicit consideration that
there might be (at least) two kinds of systems or modes of opp-
ression whose relationship to each other needs to be under-
stood. It is neither a matter (as in the first case) of granting a
single system of Marxism the most space, or, as in the second,
of simply using Marxism to talk about a unitary system of
women’s oppression. This third mode tends to be more histori-
cal in orientation as it looks at how women’s oppression has
been shaped in different historical epochs. Examples here are
discussions on “capitalist patriarchy” (Eisenstein 1979) or on
“the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism” (Hartmann
1981). Consider the latter example, which was the title of an
essay to which several others responded by way of extension
or disagreement. How autonomous is patriarchy from capita-
lism? Should one speak of two systems, close but not necessa-
rily intertwined, or one? Whether or not capitalism is gender
blind, would not one still need to go beyond the framework of
Marxism to account for the origins and persistence of patriar-
chy? How dependent is feminism on using and transforming
Marxist concepts—be it class, the division of labour, or the
nature of history—to make feminism acquire sufficient theo-
retical depth? The problem, of course, has been to find the
right kind of connections between these “systems” or modes of
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oppression, including political demands for liberation, and
how to historicise them. Hence, the image of an “unhappy
marriage” that was threatened by a clearly unequal relation-
ship that might lead to their separation.
Feminism and the Labour Theory of Value
Even though Marx was not the first political economist to pro-
pose the labour theory of value, it is true that he was the first
to grant it such central significance and to analyse it in such
detail. The first volume of Capital, as many would be aware,
begins with the commodity form, and critiques the appea-
rance of equality in the buying and selling of goods to open up
the “hidden” world of production, the nature of labour and
labour power, the reality of surplus value, and the consequent
exploitation of the worker by the capitalist. Much else occupies
Marx’s attention, especially the relationship between capital
and money through the realisation of surplus value, and the
nature of profit under capitalism, as distinct from pre-capitalist
modes of production.
In this vast terrain, which has been subjected to much
debate and critique from many points of view, it is the world of
work, the capital–labour relation, and the nature of exploita-
tion that has most interested feminists. The idea that labour is
central to the value of the commodity has been of major concern
for feminists, precisely because of the numerous ways in which
the labour performed by women has, quite simply, not been
given value. Thus, they have questioned Marxism for its narrow
concentration on particular forms of labour (especially indus-
trial labour, and secondarily agricultural labour) as the major
forms of productive labour, and secondarily, for concentrating
on those forms of labour for which a wage is paid and which
therefore involve a labour market transaction. Much of the
labour performed by women is either considered unproductive
or without value because it does not result in the production of
commodities for a wage in a market. Therefore, feminists have
argued that there is an even more hidden mode of production,
namely the reproduction of the family, hence the reproduction
of workers as adults and children that Marx at times himself
designated as a “natural” domain, rather than one with its
own social and economic structures and dynamics.
The interesting issue here is that women in capitalism are
performing labour that, strictly speaking, is not capitalist.
Some have suggested that women’s labour in the family is
more akin to feudal relations. Others have simply argued that
the existing categories of productive and unproductive labour
do not apply to women in families, who are economically
dependent on husbands.2 However, what is more revealing is
that in comparison to the narrow specification of the capitalist-
labour relation, the relationship of the housewife in much
Marxist writing is very loosely described—sometimes as feu-
dal, sometimes as domestic slavery, and sometimes even as the
“proletariat” under the “bourgeois” husband by Engels. Engels
was quite openly critical of the kind of dominance that men
could exercise over their wives, so much so that he described
such dependence as the “crassest prostitution,” if only to one
person, and acknowledged the husband’s brutality as well. Yet,
74
while Marx and Engels were somewhat sensitised to the
problem of women (recall here the earlier history of socialist
feminism), they do not appear to have been particularly inter-
ested in theorising this with sufficient care, which is why they
use a wide and inconsistent range of descriptions and analo-
gies when it comes to women.
At the present time, Marxist feminists, socialist feminists
and even mainstream liberal feminists, have become less wor-
ried about how exactly the unpaid labour of women should be
designated within a Marxist vocabulary (feudal, slave, domes-
tic, and so on) than with giving more recognition and value to
both the paid and unpaid labour of women. In effect, then,
feminists have taken the broad strokes of the labour theory of
value, even those who do not think of themselves as Marxist.
In India, for instance, an enormous amount of intellectual and
political effort has gone into expanding concepts of work and
its recognition where women are concerned. The Indian econ-
omy is one where only a minuscule proportion of women
engage in labour for a market, for which they receive some
kind of payment, in which remuneration in the form of a regu-
lar salary or wage is an even smaller percentage. As a conse-
quence, only a tiny proportion of women in contemporary
India fall within the capitalist system narrowly understood as
the exploitation of a worker by a capitalist in the classic Marx-
ist understanding. This is not the place to rehearse all the
Marxist theorisations of India’s mode of production and argu-
ments over whether it can be called capitalist, since we have
such a large proportion of peasants, self-employed persons,
and so much unpaid work of all kinds, in which women pre-
dominate. Rather, I wish to point to the heavy emphasis placed
on giving value to women’s labour, and how such labour can
be enumerated without the mediation of money or the market.
There is now an enormous body of work looking at both paid
and unpaid work, trends in employment, the nature of what is
called the “care economy” and so on, which in diverse, some-
times implicit ways, draws on the labour theory of value (for
example, Ghosh 2009; Mazumdar and Neetha 2011; Palriwala
and Neetha 2011).
This kind of loosely Marxist-feminist deployment of a labour
theory of value in the Indian context is significant, but also
harbours a major blind spot. What has not received the atten-
tion it deserves is what I have elsewhere called a stigma theory
of labour (John 2013). A labour theory of value stands in con-
flict with a caste-structured society where public labour repre-
sents not value but stigma and humiliation. Caste-based labour
is degrading labour and cannot be valorised like value-
producing labour. Such labour cannot be abstracted as “labour
power” from the caste-marked stigmatised labouring body,
even though it is public labour for which a wage may be paid.
This becomes even more marked when the labouring body is
that of a Dalit woman. What this means is that it is not enough
to offer a gender or class analysis of women’s paid and unpaid
work, certainly not in the Indian context. Public labour is still
associated with labouring out of necessity, leading to an ongo-
ing tendency to opt out of the workforce when marriage and
the income of the family make that possible. Even more telling
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of the bias involved in much discussion of women’s unpaid
domestic work is the fact that paid domestic work is an inte-
gral aspect of the reproduction of those households that can
afford servants—definitely the middle and upper classes in
India, if to varying degrees. Thus, patterns of labour in India,
and especially women’s labour, have certain very unique char-
acteristics: if labour participation were to be measured in rela-
tion to education or family income, the pattern is a U curve
when plotted as a graph—namely, high labour participation
among the poorest/illiterate as well as among the relatively
well-to-do/those with at least a graduate degree at the other
end of the spectrum, and very low levels for large sections of
women in between (quite unlike most other parts of the world
where women’s labour participation increases with education
and income). This is a harsh empirical reminder of the com-
bined normative and structural effects of caste and class in
India’s economy today, when the dominant view is that the
hold of caste is weakening, especially in the link with work
and occupations. Even more significant is that this pattern
does not appear to have altered to any appreciable extent with
the promises of globalisation and “inclusive”—but effectively
“jobless’—growth.
The second characteristic is the peculiar combination of
both paid and unpaid domestic labour that is involved in the
reproduction of middle-class households. Here we clearly see
the limitation in certain Marxist feminist demands for “wages
for housework” in countries like Italy and England in the 1960s
and 1970s, which hoped thereby to grant value to the uncounted
labours of the housewife. However, what they forgot is the
even more exploitative wage given to paid domestic workers,
whose devaluation is part of the overall problem of valuing
domestic labour itself. An essential aspect of this overall deva-
luation is that “their” domestic spaces need not count for any-
thing in comparison to “ours.” This is the humiliation and fail-
ure every domestic worker knows, as she combines poorly paid
domestic work in the households of others with unpaid labour
in her own. Such a complex domestic relationship of power
and exploitation, that results in making the unpaid oppressed
housewife “the employer” of the paid servant, requires struc-
tures of non-economic forms of discrimination under modern
capitalism—race and ethnicity elsewhere, caste in India (John
2013). The question of what kind of paid domestic work is done
by what castes, in whose households and at what wages req-
uires detailed analysis. However, one can probably risk the
provisional generalisation that the most ubiquitous and basic
work of cleaning other people’s homes is a lower caste if not
Dalit occupation.
To summarise then, when we consider the labour theory of
value in India, what emerges is not just the need to bring in a
feminist lens when the domestic sphere is under consideration,
but also the dimensions of caste, practices of untouchability,
and untouchable labour.
More recently, issues around prostitution and sex work have
re-emerged as “problems” besetting and polarising the wom-
en’s movement. I would like to suggest that this theme would
benefit from a Marxist feminist analysis.
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Prostitution and Sex Work
Prostitution and sex work (and the differences between these
two terms) have been vexed issues for both Marxism and femi-
nism, though it has been debated more in feminism. The inter-
esting issue here is to what extent both feminism and Marxism
share similar objections to the idea that sex work is work, or
whether there are significant differences between them. Cer-
tainly, in the long history of feminism in the West and else-
where, the visible presence of prostitution in industrialising
cities made it an occupation that feminists believed had to be
abolished, much like slavery. Marx and Engels also used the
image of prostitution as a profession that should have no place
in contemporary society, much less in a future one. It connoted
a particularly deplorable condition that women were forced to
sell sex for money in order to ensure their survival, and hence
this was not “work” in the first place. Historically in India, the
issue of prostitution was made even more complex because it
became entangled with social reform that included distinct
traditions such as the devadasi in South India. Here I am
interested in the renaming of prostitution as sex work, through
a visible movement and new mode of organisation that
emerged in different parts of the world in the late 1970s and
1980s, and in India in the 1990s. Such sex workers’ movements
have been effectively addressing both working class move-
ments and women’s movements for having excluded them and
their concerns.
I think it is particularly useful to think about sex work in rel-
ation to both Marxism and feminism, and that such a com-
bined route will indeed be a way forward. This might seem
like an odd position to take, given what I have said above. The
reason is that much current debate and conflict has become
locked into two polarised positions in most parts of the world
today, including in India, neither of which focuses sufficiently
on problems of women’s labour. The first position views sex
work as a form of violence (which must therefore be abolished
as must all forms of violence against women), and in some
radical feminist accounts, the experience of the prostitute is
not very different from rape. The other side argues that the sex
worker can enjoy a form of agency (the liberal if not libertarian
approach), where emphasis is placed on sex workers as non-
victims, who if granted the necessary rights, can overcome the
stigma and moralism against their profession. With a few exc-
eptions, neither of these prominent approaches has placed
enough emphasis on the nature of women’s sexual labour and
the materiality of their working conditions and the sex work
industry. So, the point I am making is that revisiting Marxism
and feminism together might yield more productive results in
comparison to the relative weaknesses of both the radical and
liberal feminist positions I have very briefly summarised
(Kotiswaran 2010.)
In the previous discussion on the labour theory of value we
have already seen that, especially but not only in India, wom-
en’s labour is quite complex and certainly cannot easily be fit-
ted within a standard Marxist approach to labour and employ-
ment. This calls for a much more nuanced intersectional app-
roach to women’s labour. Such an approach is required in the
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field of sex work as well. Moreover, it would be very useful to
remind ourselves of the larger context within which Marxists
framed their 19th century critiques of prostitution. After all,
whether it be Marx, Engels or Marxist feminists like Alexandra
Kollontai, their critiques of prostitution were connected to a
larger critique of the family and the household. We have
already seen how Engels himself called the oppression of the
housewife that of prostitution to one man. In other words,
they imagined a communist world in which neither prostitu-
tion nor the traditional family form would survive. Domestic
labour would be socialised, private property abolished, and
therefore sexual relations would be liberated from both the
constraints of domestic dependency and the market for sex. It
is, of course, another matter that the more fundamental
critiques of family and marriage “withered away,” while the
critiques of prostitution remained and soon joined other
critiques of the commodification of the body and sex in
capitalist societies.
This means that it is up to Marxist feminists today to revisit
the worlds of sexual labour, both within the family and beyond.
Why has the former almost never come up for scrutiny even
though all the other aspects of household services have (cook-
ing, cleaning, care of children and so on)? Just as it is neces-
sary to connect the question of the unpaid labour of the house-
wife together with the paid labour of the servant, so too let us
consider the sexual services of the wife and those of the sex
worker. So far, feminists have only attempted to protect the
housewife from domestic violence, and most recently sought
to include marital rape as a crime, apart from making mar-
riage a contract allowing for divorce based on mutual consent.
However, the sexual services of the housewife have otherwise
not been addressed. If we are nowhere close to the communist
utopia of a propertyless society beyond alienated labour,
whether public or private, then it is quite unclear why the con-
ditions of labour of the sex worker should not be considered in
all its materiality as much as other forms of exploited and alie-
nated labour. If there is scope for theorising and organising
paid domestic workers around their conditions of work, wages
and so on—and those of scavengers who undertake the most
degraded forms of cleaning public and private dirt—then why
not the conditions of work of the sex worker? It is fundamen-
tally inconsistent from a labour perspective to open the door to
certain forms of labour that an older, narrowly Marxist world-
view had excluded, while continuing to keep others out. Such
an approach will be complex, and will have to take into account
the class, caste and gendered nature of such labour. In other
words, sex work must be subjected to an intersectional analy-
sis that examines processes of exploitation, discrimination and
stigmatisation together. It will have to examine the different
markets for sex work, their modes of organisation, including
the structure of the brothel, the individual sex worker, and so
on, and finally, it will have to recognise the extent to which
this is a form of labour that (like most forms of work today) is
fluctuating and practised in relation to other forms of labour.
In the Indian context, the fact that sex work remains closely
caste-marked, must also be addressed, as Dalit women
76
(including those who are sex workers themselves) never cease
to remind us.3
Class, Feminism and Identity Politics
The issue of identity politics, as it has been called, is one that
suffers from some confusion and even misrepresentation. A
major source of confusion, I believe, is precisely the way in
which it has been set off against the politics of class. The term
“identity politics’ has been used in the Western world in rela-
tion to issues of race and ethnicity, and in India in relation to
minority issues, caste and Dalit issues in particular. Among
feminists, it has also been used in connection with black women in
the US and Dalit women in India, precisely because these
women fall between the cracks of gender, race, caste and Dalit
movements. Therefore, it is important to recall that the term
“identity politics” first emerged not in opposition to class poli-
tics but rather to name those who were getting lost at the inter-
sections of different structures of oppression. (For an excellent
early articulation of such an identity politics, see the Combahee
River Collective statement 1979.) This has not been sufficiently
appreciated or understood. Marxists have not just been critical
but even dismissive of identity politics, referring to it negative-
ly and in a derogatory fashion.
Let me therefore orient this discussion with a useful frame-
work provided by Nancy Fraser. She has contrasted broadly
two kinds of perspectives in politics: one that she calls the
political economy of redistribution, and the other the cultural
politics of recognition (Fraser 1997). To put it very briefly,
Marxist theories of class would be an example of a politics of
redistribution that aims for the abolition of a class identity
formed through unjust socio-economic structures. On the
other hand, a politics of recognition involves the revaluation
of a disparaged identity through processes of affirmation.
Examples of the latter would be reclaiming a black identity
through slogans such as “black is beautiful,” certain kinds of
lesbian and gay politics that seek to give dignity to people
whose sexuality has been marked out as deviant and abnor-
mal, and so on. Fraser believes that both of these perspectives
need to be given their due, if not integrated, even though they
pull in opposite directions.
I think it would therefore be unfair to simply characterise
identity politics as “static” as certain Marxist analyses do. The
point is rather that their dynamic is different—it is a move-
ment for the transformation of identity from one of disparage-
ment to one of dignity. It would also be wrong to claim that
only Marxism harbours a politics of a future society beyond
identities, since Babasaheb Ambedkar also called for the anni-
hilation of caste, and many feminists believe that we must
fight for more than just gender equality towards a world
beyond gender binaries. Also, many theorists of race are
“against race” and queer theory seeks to go beyond “LGBTI”
demands for recognition. Finally, let me also say that for all
the claims that Marxism is based on overcoming class rela-
tions, the fact remains that historically, Marxism has not come
anywhere close to realising such an aim. If we look at the
mobilisation of Marxist parties, for instance, most of their
DECEMBER 16, 2017 vol liI no 50 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

efforts have been to improve the conditions of workers and
peasants. Barring brief revolutionary moments in Russia and
China, nothing like a fundamental transformation of class has
been witnessed. This means that the situation is far more
complex on both sides, and therefore an outright disparaging
attitude towards identity politics on the part of Marxists
is problematic.
The really difficult theoretical questions today come down
to this: what do we mean by “class” or “caste” or “gender” at this
point in time? After so many decades of theorising and mobi-
lising around these issues, what kind of clarity do we actually
have? What do we mean by an identity, as distinct from a posi-
tion or a standpoint, and how do these relate to social struc-
tures? I believe that both philosophically and politically, all
these issues remain unanswered, or at least are themselves in
a state of flux, and in processes of redefinition. This does not
mean that there are not real differences in theoretical and
political perspectives. That is why I brought up the frame-
work used by Fraser. However, we are not well served at this
point by simply opposing class politics to identity politics
without much more exploration about what we mean by these
in the first place. Theoretically and politically, we would be
better off using both of these and pushing at their respective
differences, rather than choosing one over the other.
Postmodern Marxism and Feminism
As mentioned earlier, during the 1960s and 1970s, Marxism
enjoyed a certain theoretical dominance in many parts of the
world. Large numbers of scholars and activists were engaged
in various aspects of Marxist theory and practice, and from a
whole host of perspectives. Some took up detailed analyses of
different Marxist texts in relation to other philosophical
trends; others discussed modes of production and economic
regimes, especially in third world countries; still others atte-
mpted to practise Marxist politics within different kinds of left
political groups, from left-identified political movements,
Maoists, communist parties within electoral democracies, to
more anarchist groups.
However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989, among other reasons, the theoreti-
cal fortunes of Marxism suffered a definite setback. It should
not need reiterating now that there has been a rightward shift
in politics since the 1980s the world over. Another reason for
the loss of authority of Marxism has been put down to the rise
of other theories during this period, especially theories of
post-structuralism and postmodernism. Many Marxists have
in fact clubbed together post-structuralism and right-wing po-
litical ideologies to the point of claiming that post-structural-
ism harbours right-wing tendencies.
On the other side, there have been scattered efforts among
some Marxists and socialists to take on board certain aspects
of post-structuralist theories and rethink Marxism in the pro-
cess. It is interesting that feminists have been somewhat more
open-minded in this regard. Some of these theorists have
adopted the label of “postmodern Marxism” or “post Marxism.”
One of the earliest uses of the term, to my knowledge, was by
Economic & Political Weekly EPW DECEMBER 16, 2017 vol liI no 50
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their text Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy in 1985. “Post-Marxism” for them meant giv-
ing up any special privilege to the idea of a “universal class,”
and their book was described as “a critique and deconstruc-
tion of the discursive surfaces of classic Marxism” (Laclau and
Mouffe 1985: 3). Whereas until the 1990s, such efforts rem-
ained relatively marginal, there has been renewed interest in
recent years, with significant work emerging from amongst
feminist Marxists in Australia and the West, as well as from
postcolonial scholars in India. Moreover, with the kind of crises
that capitalism has repeatedly witnessed in recent decades,
including severe recessions in East Asia, Europe and the US,
there has been a revival of sorts of Marxist critiques of capitalism,
after the loss of such interest following the 1989 collapse of the
“second world,” the socialist economies of Eastern Europe, and
shifts in China after the Cultural Revolution. While it is not
possible to provide anything like a definition of post-Marxism,
typically, postmodern Marxisms can be characterised by their
use of a post-structuralist theoretical toolkit that emphasises
critiques of foundationalism and ideas of universality, the sig-
nificance of discourses, the production of subject positions and
subjectivities, libidinal investments (via psychoanalysis), and
so on. Some versions can be said to end up at the other end of
the spectrum—that is to say, with a rather limited focus on
discourses in their attempts to correct for the economism of
Marxism. However, the more interesting versions that I would
like to discuss here have been productive precisely because
political economy and the nature of capitalism remain central
to their analysis and political imaginations.
One such work is The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It):
A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, written by J K Gibson-
Graham (the pen name of two feminist geographers, Kather-
ine Gibson and Julie Graham), first published in 1996 and then
reissued 10 years later along with another book called Post-
capitalist Politics. They argue broadly that the biggest obstacle
to the transformation of capitalism into socialism is the false
perception we bring to the nature of contemporary capitalism
itself. They propose a concept of the “diverse economy,” in
opposition to the dominant or hegemonic representation of the
economy, “to include all of those practices excluded or margin-
alised by the theory and presumption of capitalist hegemony”
(Gibson-Graham 2006: xii). They demonstrate that there actu-
ally exist alternatives to the capitalist–labour relation in many
forms—alternative markets (local, fair-trade), alternative
EPW Index
An author-title index for EPW has been prepared for the years from
1968 to 2012. The PDFs of the Index have been uploaded, year-wise, on the
EPW website. Visitors can download the Index for all the years from the
site. (The Index for a few years is yet to be prepared and will be uploaded
when ready.)
EPW would like to acknowledge the help of the staff of the library of the
Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, Mumbai, in preparing the
index under a project supported by the RD Tata Trust.
77
SPECIAL ARTICLE
forms of paid labour (such as self-employment), alternative
capitalist organisations (public sector, environmental, non-profit),
apart from non-market transactions, unpaid labour and non-
capitalist economic relations. So the best way to counter the
discourses of globalisation or the neo-liberal capitalist world
order is to claim that they are wrong—the vast majority of the
heterogeneous forms that local economies are taking, espe-
cially but not only in the third world, are non-capitalist. There-
fore, theorisation and, equally important, political mobilisa-
tions should reflect this, rather than engage in an abstract
battle against a monolithic “capitalism.” Various chapters in
the book present a decentred and non-essentialist view of
the economy and of enterprises, one that does not presume
that all economic activity is governed by profit maximisation
by the capitalist class, but by a range of considerations and
power relations that could disperse surplus value and distribute
it to, say, governments (national or local), communities,
labour unions, charities, as much as to owners, financiers or
advertising firms.
In parallel with this kind of deconstruction of capitalism is a
deconstruction of class. Instead of confining class relations only
to the capitalist labour relation, here the proposal is to consid-
er class in terms of the production, appropriation and distribu-
tion of surplus value, wherever this is occurring. Thus, the un-
paid labour of the housewife at home could well fall within a
class relation with other members of the household who ap-
propriate the surplus of her labour, and it is the exploitation
involved that will define the class processes in each case.
There is one obvious way in which this kind of theorisation
is not Marxist. It opposes the theory of stages of economic
modes of production and the inherently universalising power
of capitalism. (It is another question, of course, whether Marx
himself believed in the universality of capitalism, especially
in his later writings from the 1860s and 1870s.) Far from
believing that feudalism must make way for capitalism,
whose final form is globalisation that will engulf the entire
planet, in order then to fight for socialism, this view is inter-
ested in already existing non-capitalist economic activity and
forms of labour in order to demonstrate viable alternatives to
capitalism here and now. In place of systemic transformation
or anti-globalisation politics, they argue for local socialisms,
to be struggled over on a daily basis, whether at home, at
work or at large.
According to the Indian economist Kalyan Sanyal, the
strength of their analysis is simultaneously a weakness. While
lauding the innovativeness and force of their subversion of the
dominant representation of capitalism as inherent and inevit-
able for all, he also points to its problematic simplicity. His
argument is that their understanding of the workings of
hegemony are too repressive and not allowing for the ways in
which a hegemonic system can indeed encourage “difference,”
including non-capitalist versions. He asked, “Is it possible to
see capitalism as necessarily a complex of capitalist and non-
capitalist production residing in the commodity space?” (Sanyal
2007: 6). As he put it quite provocatively, capitalism may be
producing hegemony as much by excluding vast numbers from
78
the capital–labour relation—who are thus outside capital but
even so inside capitalism. It is surely not accidental that his
theorisations have emerged in relation to processes of deve-
lopment in India.
In the space of this paper, it is not possible to go into the
details of Sanyal’s work, and it is unfortunate that his life was
cut short, so that it is now left to others to develop it further.
Very briefly, his version of postmodern Marxism brings together
development theory, Foucauldian considerations of the state
and governmentality, Marxist notions of primitive accumula-
tion, and alternative formulations of a need economy. He beli-
eves the developmental state in countries like ours is engaged
in a double process. On the one hand, the postcolonial state
aids processes of primitive accumulation through land and
resource grabbing and consequent dispossession of those
dependent on such resources. On the other hand, since the
vast majority of the dispossessed or immiserised people
cannot be absorbed as labour for capitalist production, but
also cannot simply be allowed to starve, there is a reversal of
primitive accumulation by the state in the form of government
schemes (such as microcredit groups, rural employment
works, policies for those identified as below the poverty line or
the otherwise vulnerable) that staves off stark poverty and
makes the state appear minimally humanitarian. The critical
purpose of this reversal is to ensure their exclusion from
capital, and this is the power of the capitalist order, that it is
able to produce its own “outside.” Politics must therefore not
be focused on “transition,” but rather on unyoking the need
economy in order to grant it genuine autonomy from capital.
Notice therefore that this politics of exclusion does not proli-
ferate the language of class as did Gibson–Graham in the dis-
cussion above. The excluded, according to Sanyal, inhabit a
dark space of “classlessness,” oftentimes engaged in forms of
self-employment (such as the peasantry) and modes of sheer
survival, as do the poor in urban India, and require a distinct
mode of politicisation compared to the more well-known
Marxist politics of class exploitation. His hope is that the per-
spective of “need” rather than accumulation will bring all
these groups together politically.
Let me bring these rather wide-ranging considerations of
postmodern Marxism to a provisional close. I began the dis-
cussion on postmodern Marxism with the views of feminists
like Gibson–Graham who argued for socialist alternatives to
capitalism in spaces such as the home, but ended with the
views of the Foucauldian economist Sanyal, with visions of a
need economy that does not spell out a particular feminist
agenda. However, it goes without saying that the vast majority
of the excluded in his configuration are women, who are labo-
uring in a multitude of situations—as housewives, of course,
but also in self-employment, in subsistence, and as paid workers
in care economies.
Being True to the Struggles of Feminism and Marxism
I believe that whatever is useful in these postmodern articula-
tions needs to be brought into a more active engagement with
the intersectional analyses I had discussed earlier. In the end,
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 SPECIAL ARTICLE

it does not matter whether class is loosened to encapsulate all
working situations, or restricted to a narrowly defined capital–
labour relation. What matters are the modes of exploitation,
discrimination, exclusion and so on that draw upon and reproduce
relations of gender, caste, and class differences and how we
make them visible both theoretically and politically. Marxism
(whether postmodern or otherwise) must alert itself to these
realities in the 21st century if it is to be both true to the long
history of struggles of feminism and Marxism, and play its
part in alternative feminist and socialist futures.

Notes References John, Mary E (2013): “The Problem of Women’s

1 See Anderson and Zinsser (1988) for a good
account of this early period of socialist feminism.
2 The Marxist distinction between productive and
unproductive labour has been much debated in
the literature (see, for example, Gough 1976).
Feminists questioned the distinction because of
the way in which women’s labour in the home
was summarily relegated to the unproductive
sphere. By way of clarification, it should be not-
ed that unproductive labour is not about the so-
cial usefulness of the labour being undertaken.
Rather, productive labour is that labour which
produces surplus value (largely confined to in-
dustrial labour in Marx’s own writings as distinct
from the sphere of circulation). Others have arg-
ued that what matters is the place labour occu-
pies in the production process, which in turn
would shape such workers’ interests in the per-
petuation of capitalism or its overthrow. From a
feminist perspective, the question would then be
whether it can be said that women’s labour in
the home produces surplus value, and secondly,
what its potential for politicisation would be.
3 For a succinct and evocative statement of the
contradictions besetting sex work for Dalit
women, see the testimonies of Geeta and Sal-
ma of the Sadhna Mahila Sangha, Bengaluru,
in Women against Sexual Violence and State
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tory of Their Own: Women of Europe: From
Prehistory to the Present, Vol 2, Harper and
Row.
Combahee River Collective (1979): “A Black Femi-
nist Statement,” Eisenstein, pp 362–72.
Eisenstein, Zillah (ed) (1979): Capitalist Patriarchy
and the Case for Socialist Feminism, Boston:
Beacon Press.
Fraser, Nancy (1997): Justice Interruptus: Critical
Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition,
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Ghosh, Jayati (2009): Never Done and Poorly Paid:
Women’s Work in Globalising India, New Delhi:
Women Unlimited.
Gibson-Graham, J K (2006): The End of Capitalism
(As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political
Economy, 1996, Minneapolis: University of
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Gough, Ian (1976): “Marx’s Theory of Productive
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Hartmann, Heidi (1981): “The Unhappy Marriage
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(2013): The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential
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MacKinnon, Catherine (1981): “Feminism, Marx-
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