Sex, Class and Individual Psychology

Raleigh Miller

I. Outline of Objectives

a) Stipulation of Essential Terms

This paper aims to establish an affinity of method that marxism1 and feminism ought to share.

Before identifying that affinity, I want to make clear the meaning of three terms introduced in the first

sentence: marxism, feminism, and “affinity of method.” By marxism, I refer to a category of political

and social thought that interprets history as the development of modes of production and interprets

society as organized according to the relations established by those modes. Marxism interprets

capitalism as necessarily exploitative insofar as, under capitalism, the owner of the means of

production creates surplus value by paying the laborer a percentage (<100) of the exchange value that

her labor produces. By feminism, I refer to a category of political and social thought that interprets

society as organized according to sex disparities in the distribution of power. The overwhelming

percentage of male world leaders, the disparity in pay for equal work by men and women, and the

tendency of the media to reinforce gender identities as unequal and naturally (biologically)

constituted—these are the types of social organization that feminism is concerned with. Feminism

interprets the contingent, present-day organization of civilized society as patriarchy. By patriarchy I

refer to systematized exploitation and oppression of women, with special respect to, but not exhausted

by, the denial of women an equal role in the distribution of power. Marxism and feminism share in

common the aim of making explicit particular impetuses of social control, which otherwise remain

veiled by the invalid deduction from what is to what naturally is. Marxist feminism, feminist marxism,

socialist feminism—these attempts at synthesizing the methods of marxism and feminism seek to

1 I will follow feminist writers in choosing to not capitalize marxism. This may appear strange, as Marxism derives its
name from a particular individual, Karl Marx, and proper names are typically capitalized. However, the problems
addressed by marxist feminism derive in part from the dominance of Marxist thought in liberation theory, at the expense
of the unique contributions of feminism (and other liberation theories). The difficult goal of putting these two positions
on equal footing will be helped by resisting the convention of capitalizing marxism, and thus resisting the tendency to
grant marxism a unique claim to legitimacy over feminism.
establish some non-coincidental connection between capitalism and patriarchy.2

When I claim that I am establishing an “affinity of method,” I am making my position

intentionally weak. I do not wish to say that capitalism and patriarchy are conceptually inseperable, or

that one is merely a fall-out of the other. I do not wish to argue, or to commit myself to the view, that

by pursuing marxist ends (even doing so “well”), one is necessarily working in service of feminist

ends, or vis versa. Rather, my analysis takes for granted that feminism and marxism each pursue a true

understanding of society, and that each identifies a villain (patriarchy and capitalism, respectively).

The argument has been made that these villains are one and the same, but I take no position on whether

this conclusion is correct. My only goal is to make explicit a guiding methodical principle which each

approach should embrace, if their payoff is to be satisfying.

b) Objective

I will conclude that marxism and feminism should share a particular affinity of method. I will

claim that both marxism and feminism should develop their analysis, insofar as it is possible (which

may or may not be entirely), without reference to particular human psychology. Georg Lukács has

made this point with respect to marxism. In section two, I shall explicate Lukács' reasons for making

this claim. In section three, I will discuss Iris Young's contribution to marxist feminist thought, which

encourages a shift in attention from “class analysis” to “division of labor analysis.” While I do not

wish to unconditionally accept Young's position, I will argue in section four that her suggestions

appropriately identify the need for feminism to guard itself from grounding its conclusions, or its

conditions of success on the psychologies of particular persons.

II. Lukács, Class Consciousness, and Individual Psychology

Lukács writes:

The essence of scientific Marxism consists, then, in the realisation that the real motor forces of history

2 This characterization of marxism feminism (&etc.) is intentionally weak, so as to include all positions that aspire to one
of these labels. The affinity I am identifying between is between feminism and marxism. I aim to provide a potential
conceptual tool that may be helpful in a successful synthesis of marxism and feminism, but I don't desire to commit
myself to any particular synthesis yet suggested, even that of Iris Young, on whom I rely heavily in this paper.
 are independent of man's (psychological) consciousness of them.

The parenthetical is important, for soon after Lukács writes

It is true that the conscious reflexes of the different stages of economic growth remain historical facts of
great importance; it is true that while dialectical materialism is itself the product of this process, it does
not deny that men perform their historical deeds themselves, and that they do so consciously. But...this
consciousness is false. However, the dialectical method does not permit us to simply proclaim the
falseness of this consciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false. On the
contrary, it requires us to investigate this 'false consciousness' concretely as an aspect of the historical
totality and as a stage in the historical process.

Lukács clarifies an important distinction: on the one hand, an analysis may take particular

psychological facts about people to represent the goal of social analysis. The goal may then be to make

people happier, to reduce pain and suffering. It is tempting to understand Marx this way in his

explication of alienation. To argue that the worker is alienated seems to be observing a psychological

fact about her. But to pursue this argument has dangerous conciliatory consequences. If the worker's

alienation is wrong because she is unhappy, or uncomfortable, or in pain, then that alienation ceases to

be wrong when the worker's psychological well-being is satisfactorily attended to. To accept this as

acceptable is to renounce the radicalism of marxist thought, and to embrace a revisionist liberalism.

Approached this way, social analysis has no way to account for the exploitation of happy people, and

no way to account for the claim that the comfortable capitalist is himself alienated.

On the other hand, particular facts about individual consciousness may be understood as

situated within, and constituted by, the contingent actualities in which the worker finds herself.

Bourgeois ideology encourages the worker to understand her position as the natural consequence of her

own volitional choices. As Lukács writes, historical materialism “does not deny that men perform their

historical deeds themselves.” Lukács introduces “false consciousness” as a social phenomenon by

which persons become blind to their own alienation. When the worker accepts her position as natural,

it is predictable that she will not be unconditionally unhappy. Her conscious reflection on her position,

consequently, provides an inadequate indicator of whether her placement in the web of production

relations is just. The worker's belief that she is not oppressed operates as means of maintaining
relations of productions as they currently stand. The disposition to accepts one position in society is

not only reinforced by bourgeois ideology, but is presented to the worker as “natural.” The worker is

now the victim of a subtle, bi-directional attack upon her capacity for revolutionary thought. She is

made to feel as though her position in the world is natural and necessary (rather then contingently

constituted by the opposition of proletariat interests and bourgeois interests), and that, by virtue of a

“natural” and “normal” human psychology, she ought to “make lemonade with lemons.” She discovers

happiness, as if on her own, because she has been made to think that being content with one's social

situatedness is the way normal people get by.

For Lukács, class consciouness is a class' ability to see itself as a class, with interests that are

homogeneous in ways relevant to the goal of restructuring society. Thus, the proletariat's class

consciousness is a function of its ability to recognize shared interests among proletarians qua

proletarians. There is no particular, distinctive feature of the structure of a class's self consciousness

which indicates their “ripe[ness] for hegemony.” This class consciousness may or may not come in the

form of particular individuals maintaining an awareness of their identity with the class. Lukács writes,

Everything hinges on the extent to which [members of the class] can become conscious of the actions
they need to perform in order to obtain and organise power. The question then becomes: how far does
the class concerned perform the actions history has imposed on it 'consciously' or 'unconciously'? And is
that consciousness 'true' or 'false.'....and here it becomes transparently obvious that class consciousness is
concerned neither with the thoughts of individuals, however advanced, nor with the state of scientific
knowledge.

While it may not be as “transparently obvious “as Lukács claims, this passage helps us to make

sense of the conceptual segregation of individual psychology and class consciousness. In order to

understand of the way in which class consciousness operates upon the dialectic of social relations, the

marxist is not beholden to the way particular individuals see themselves within the social structure. As

was conceded above, Lukács (i) does not deny that particular persons do particular things because they

are motivated to do so. At the same time, as a historical materialist, he is committed to the view that

(ii) class action is necessarily teleological, insofar as it is directed towards the resolving of
contradictions in the relations of production. It may seem that (i) and (ii) appear to jointly commit

Lukács to the view that class action is dialectical (in some sense) intentionally. But this is a mistake.

The proletariat is “ripe for hegemony,” that is, she/they is/are prepared to seize the means of production

and restructure society in the service of proletariat interests, when the proletariat comes to recognize

themselves qua class. Once this recognition is achieved, the proletariat recognizes self-interest as

proletariat interest, and her pursuit of proletariat interest falls out of her instinct for self-preservation.

But the psychological process by which a worker becomes aware of the affinity between her own

interests and proletariat interests may be entirely masked to that particular worker. For her action to

contribute to the resolution of contradictions in the distribution of power does not entail that she is

herself aware of those contradictions, or that she is consciously doing anything other then pursuing her

own particular interests. Her motivation for action could potentially be no different then her motivation

for inaction prior to entering into class consciousness. The emergence of a revolutionary class

consciousness presupposes no particular, necessary transformation of individual psychologies; it is

importantly a transformation of the distribution of power by which society at large is organized, and

particular human psychologies are conceptually independent of the success conditions of that

transformation.

In this section I have attempted to explicate the argument, presented by Lukács, that marxist

analysis should operate independently of particular human psychologies when identifying the

revolutionary potential of class consciousness. In what follows, I shall show that Iris Young's

explication of “division of labor” analysis correctly picks out a similar virtue of successful feminist

theory.

III. Young and Division of Labor

In this section, I will explicate Iris Young's defense of division of labor analysis as a theoretical

tool for synthesizing marxist and feminist analysis. In the following section, I will show that Young's

analysis correctly picks out the benefits of analyzing sex oppression independently of individual
psychologies, demonstrating a parallel with Lukács' discussion of class consciousness, and establishing

a methodical affinity that marxism and feminism should share.

Iris Young is writing in the midst of a dispute over the relationship of feminism and marxism.

At the time, radical feminists were demanding a theoretical divorce from marxism, due to marxists'

dismissive approach to questions of sex. As Young writes,

The left was male dominated, blatantly sexist and dismissed feminist concerns as merely
bourgeois. Angry and frustrated socialist women began forming all women's groups and
arguing for the need for an autonomous women's movement to correct the problems of the left
and to develop the practice and theory of feminism. The dual systems theory arose in part as an
element in this argument for an autonomous women's movement. If capitalism and patriarchy,
classism and sexism, each have a source in distinct social systems, then the necessity for a
women's movement autonomous from the mixed left follows most reasonably.

The dual systems theory was a popular response from marxist feminists (&etc.) at the time,

dissatisfied with the background role that gender analysis was playing within a marxist-dominated

liberation politics. The dual systems theory, as this passage illustrates, understands capitalism and

patriarchy as separate systems of domination. Though it may be interesting to note historical and

conceptual similarities, the dual systems theory takes it as important to maintain that they are separate

systems, and to resist the subsumption of one by the other.

Young opposes the dual systems theory, but she writes from a unique position. She knows that

in order to endorse a monosystemic approach to marxist-feminism, she must do so in a way that deals

with the warranted complaints of previous thinkers, who have endorsed the dual systems theory as a

solution to the problem of sex-blind marxist analysis. From this tension, Young concludes that

...we need a theory of relations of production and the social relations which derive from and
reinforce those relations which takes gender relations and the situation of women as core
elements. Instead of marrying marxism, feminism must take over marxism and transform it into
such a theory.3

Young occupies a unique position among her contemporaries. She hopes to absorb the wisdom

of dissatisfied marxist feminists that want to restore sex-analysis to a fundamental role in interpreting

3 Ibid. 50 My emphasis.
systems of domination. At the same time, she is optimistic about understanding patriarchy and

capitalism as conceptually connected, and approaching the restructuring of society with a single,

coherent system of thought. Her solution to this tension is to suggest that division of labor analysis

replace class analysis as the basic heuristic of marxist analysis. Young points out that class and

division of labor play equally prevalent and equally ambiguous roles in Marx's own writings. Class

analysis, however has the disadvantage of arbitrarily unifying the proletariat and bourgeois classes as

the objects of investigation. This method ignores the non-arbitrary ways in which classes are dividing

according to who does what, i.e. division of labor. Understanding marxism as the analysis of class

provides limited theoretical tools for making sense of jobs and social roles that are largely occupied by

persons of a particular sex or race, because all wage-laborers (regardless of sex, race, etc.) are

proletariats.

This is the sense in which class is a sex-blind category. Understanding differences between

women and men, while fundamentally understanding them as members of a single class, leads one to

the conclusion that psychological explanations provide the best account of resilient disparities. This is

especially a risk, given the flattening effect of capitalism that Marx observes. We have observed that

capitalism has a tendency to flatten society, to make it one-dimensional, to create the illusion of

freedom of choice while homogenizing the choices genuinely available to the proletariat. Class

analysis suggests that differences among sexes and races would have been ironed out by now.

Evidently they haven't, and the psychological account is the most ready explanation as to why.

Young's analysis importantly guards us against this dangerous and regressive conclusion. She

argues that there are important, non-arbitrary discrepancies between sexes and races with respect to

what sort of work they do. It's difficult to make her point explicit with respect to race, while

maintaining the care necessary to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. With sex, on the other hand, making

Young's point explicit is quite simple. Women can reproduce, men can't. This biological fact has
uniquely connected women to child-rearing, and uniquely positioned men in jobs outside the home.4

Even as women entered the workforce, the presumed necessary connection between women and home-

work has served to maintain economic disparities between men and women by justifying lower wages,

and constructing barriers that uniquely hinder women from succeeding in a male world (e.g. sexual

harrassment, or the perception that men are assertive, and women are bitchy). These systemic biases

have made it harder for women to succeed then men, maintaining an environment where systems that

serve to influence ideology (corporations, governments, churches, universities) are overwhelmingly

overseen and administered by men. Young concludes that division of labor analysis provides us with

the theoretical tools to understanding sex-oppression in a way that is faithful to traditional marxism,

without dissolving feminism into marxism.

IV. Young and Individual Psychology

I take no position on the question of whether division of labor analysis is actually superior to

class analysis. In the previous section I tried to explicate Young's position in such a way that it makes

sense why Young would be inspired to introduce this heuristic and argue for its superiority. Even if

Heidi Hartman is right to criticize Young for failing to show a “theoretical reason for the inherent

connection between capitalism and patriarchy” rather then a historical one, Young's analysis serves to

illustrate an important point. Sex oppression is best understood as a structural phenomena, not a

psychological one. It may be true (it, in fact, certainly is true) that particular women suffer particular

psychological hardships as a result of sex oppression. But the happy housewife of the 1950's, even if it

had been an accurate portrayal5, is not a counterexample to feminist analysis. Young's inspiration for

introducing division of labor analysis is to “provide a way of regarding gender relations as not merely a

central aspect of relations of production, but as fundamental to their structure.”6 Division of labor

4 For a fascinating, if slightly fanciful, take on the historical genesis of women's homework, see Al-Hibri (1981)
5 There is some fascinating literature about insanity and depression among women in the 1950's. For more information,
look through my book shelf in my Kansas City home, where you'll find several volumes, which I can't cite because I
don't have them with me.
6 Young, 53. My emphasis.
analysis allows the marxist feminist to explain systemic features of capitalism (not conceptually, but as

it contingently manifests) that introduce, foster, and exacerbate female oppression.

Lukács did not deny that class oppression could have psychological harms, but did deny that we

must understand oppression in psychological terms in order to explain the dialectical nature of class

activity and revolution. Similarly, it would be stupid to deny that sex oppression has psychological

harms, but providing an account of how that oppression came to exist, how it came to be systematized,

and how it can be overthrown—none of these require that the feminist be held hostage to particular

psychologies of particular women. At the risk of sounding too grand, I might suggest that this is one of

the basic problem of liberation theory today: Lukács' account of false consciousness shows that the

oppressed don't always care to be liberated. Whatever system is controlling patterns of domination has

given birth to people who are used to being dominated, and quite pleased to remain where they are.

Some proletariats like their jobs and their bosses; some women like wearing make-up, or being sex

objects; and similar things could be said about persons of particular races or sexual orientation who

derive satisfaction from filling out the role to which they've been socially assigned. None of these need

concern us, because neither feminist analysis nor marxist analysis need be beholden to particular

contingent facts about the psychology of particular individuals. Class consciousness (and sex-

consciousness) is not the conjunction of the consciousness of all class (sex) members. But a

transmission failure, an apparent inability among members of a class (or sex) to recognize their

interests as class (sex) interests, to identify with that class to make revolutionary mobilization possible,

this needn't sink us to understanding the heterogeneity of proletariat (female) dispositions as reflections

of naturally different psychologies. We can understand that very heterogeneity as a function of the

structure of the system, and as an ideological tool by which patterns of domination are maintained,

insofar as the proletariat is carved into apparently opposed categories by virtue of who does what. This

shift from psychology to structure is the goal of Young's analysis, and a proper goal of both marxist

and feminist analysis.

 V. Conclusions

I conclude that feminism and marxism should both aim to conduct social analysis independently

of particular psychologies of class (sex) members. Lukács' explication of false consciousness shows

why this is necessary, and Young's division of labor analysis indicates how we might go about doing

this. Though the specific details of a critical synthesis of marxism and feminism remain unclear, if it is

even satisfactorily possible, I suggest that I have here presented a methodical ideal which each school

of thought should strive for. My hope is that such an affinity of method may have the potential to

define some common ground, out of which a unified theory may emerge.