Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction Quotes

“There are no abstract women, whose lives are shaped only or primarily by their gender; in the real world, women have a place in the class, socio-economic, racial and ethnic structures within capitalist social formations.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“While professional women and ‘middleclass’ women in general run the risk of becoming isolated from the needs, concerns, and consciousness of working-class and nonprofessional women, the latter run the risk of falling into an anti-intellectualism that contributes to their oppression because it stands in the way of their attaining a clear analysis of their situation. Pursuing endless theoretical refinements that are never translated into dialogue and practical action is as ineffective as engaging in endless talks about personal problems and feelings without ever looking at them as social problems. These problems are social, not only in the sense of being shared by many women, but more importantly because they are socially determined and are the product of concrete and historically specific class, legal, and political relations and forms of consciousness”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“The prevalence and apparent sameness of the nuclear family hides the qualitative differences between working-class and capitalist families, the different social relations of reproduction within the working class and, consequently, the differences in the sources of male power and in the forms or kinds of oppressions shaping the lives of capitalist and working-class women.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“To be critical of pronatalism is not equivalent to condemning parenthood; it is to shed light on its prescriptive nature and propose that it would be socially and ecologically desirable that parenthood cease to be considered as a natural instinct and/or a religious or a social duty. The ‘biological clock’ that some women claim to hear ticking is also a ‘social clock’ reminding them that whatever else may be going on in their lives, motherhood is their destiny, the road to social acceptance and integration. It is because parenthood is not a
natural instinct, but socially and prescriptively imposed, that many people unsuited for family formation bear or adopt children; domestic violence and child abuse result from the often deadly interaction between sexual inequality and pronatalism. Today, pronatalist ideologies and social pressures continue to curtail women’s opportunities and ability to shape their future, and place them in a disadvantaged position relative to men, thus sustaining the inequality between men and women despite considerable gains in sexual liberation, civil rights, and economic opportunities for women.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“To learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very
illuminating, for ‘ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of (our) actual relations and activities’, because ‘social existence determines consciousness’ [Marx]. Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is unique, personal, insightful and revealing, and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about. Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC [race-gender-class] perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the ‘interlocking’ metaphor.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“Underlying phenomena such as the ‘feminisation’, ‘masculinisation’ and ‘juvenilisation’ of poverty, and other identity ways to describe segments of the poverty population such as the poverty of the elderly, or the ‘feminisation of the proletariat’, the ‘feminisation of migration’, or the disproportionate poverty of racial and ethnic minorities, is the impoverishment the working class, the deterioration in the working class’s standard of living and family stability. Consequently, while policies targeted at different poverty populations are important to help and improve the lives of those who are already poor, it must also be recognised that poverty is not uniquely a women’s issue, or a men’s issue, and so forth: poverty is a class issue which can, at best, be ameliorated – not resolved because it is endemic to the capitalist mode of production – through labour’s collective action, through unionisation and struggles for job training and job creation aimed at creating employment for manual, skilled and unskilled labour, in addition to programmes intended to enhance the health and educational opportunities for everyone, regardless of gender, race or ethnicity.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“But just as the material necessity to produce the means of production and subsistence does not determine the historically specific social relations in which they are produced, the biology of procreation does not determine the mode of reproduction, i.e. social relations in which children are born and raised, although it imposes limits on their variations. (,,,) this family form [nuclear family
unit of parents and children] is prevalent in capitalist societies; it is not, however, universal because those functions can be
fulfilled within a variety of social arrangements”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“The key theoretical and political question is not, therefore, how class (in the Marxist sense) ‘intersects’ with the various identities where individuals are presumably located, but how to differentiate between the effects of capitalist class power upon large and heterogeneous (in terms of identity) sectors of the working class, and the effects of identity-based interactions and conflicts within those sectors.”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“Identities are a contested terrain, both a product of individuals’ spontaneous, common sense self-understanding and political choices that help them make sense of their existence, and a product of labelling from above (e.g. by employers and by the state) or by their peers; i.e. the effects of acts of power. It is important, therefore, to differentiate between ‘legitimating identities’, which are the product of dominant institutions and groups, and ‘resistance identities’, which emerge from the grassroots”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“Denial of the fundamental role of class relations and struggles in the production of oppression and inequality defines intersectionality’s macro-level assumptions about the relationship among its key elements. Regardless of the politicised vocabulary, i.e. references in the intersectionality literature to imperialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, class, and so on, intersectionality – like the RGC perspective that preceded it – is an abstract analytical framework which, like sociology, approaches the study of social phenomena ahistorically, i.e. in abstraction from their capitalist conditions of possibility”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays

“...today class has been reduced to another ‘ism’; i.e. to another form oppression which, together with gender and race, integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorising and research, though, to my knowledge, theorising about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection, etc.)”
― Martha A. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays