Marxist Feminism: The Fall of Capitalist Oppression/ The Rise of Proletariat Personhood

"Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property,

a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange,

is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom

he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce

is but the history of revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production,

against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie 

and of it rule. "(Marx's Communist Manifesto, p. 6)

Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is a very important part of the building-blocks for many feminist theories. Marx was the first philosopher to assert that gender roles are not predetermined by nature, but rather by environmentally driven social forces. He argues that as capitalism progresses more rapidly, different needs arise for the human condition such as the distribution of labor, which changes societal implications for both genders. We saw this happen during the 1950's during WWII and then again in the 1970's and after the Vietnam war. During WWII many men were away at war for a long period of time, and women were needed in the workforce. After the Vietnam war, our depressed economy led to many mothers taking up jobs to support their families.

Marx's critique of capitalism has come with many modifications and critiques. Reading Marx during my Junior year in high school, I agreed with most of what he said, but severely questioned his prophesies regarding what capitalism would inevitably amount to. After all, Marx does not have a crystal ball that reads into the future of capitalism. After a few more years of higher education and a sharpened eye for injustice and oppression however, I see his prophesies becoming true all around me. Every year our  world seems a little different, every year the richer get richer and the poorer get poorer, every year cooperations get larger and family-owned businesses get smaller.

Every decade, society's expectations for women inflate and get more difficult to fulfill. Regardless of women's rights to vote and have a place in the workforce, these rights still did not grant women, especially pregnant women, subjectivity in the eye of the law. Yes a woman shall work, as long as it's a pink collar job (and now we're back to marx's division of labor). Yes a woman may vote, but they'll never be fit for presidency. Yes a woman is equal to men, except for when she's pregnant, in that case, she's not even an actual person.

In Susan Bordo's "Are Women Persons", she describes case after case of pregnant women being treated as "fetus incubators" in the eyes of the law and the medical world. They are denied their personhood and subjectivity because they are carrying a life. Bordo does not offer an explanation of why a fetus is seen as more of a person than the woman who is carrying it, heck, pro-lifers can't even explain that themselves, but I think Marx can be very helpful in giving us a backdrop on how the aims of capitalism are equal to that of the American dream, and how this leads to a disdain for "selfish" women who do not want children.

See, when pro-lifers say a fertilized egg has the potential for life, what they are actually saying (mostly unknowingly) is that a fertilized egg is a potential consumer, another little one to fit in the assembly line chain and carry his father's lineage. Another little one that parents need to buy diapers for, christmas gifts, a college education, an iPhone, etc.  We know this due to our country's long horrid history of eugenics and forced sterilization. If a family is well-off, that fetus rules over anyone who is opposed to letting the pregnancy go to term, usually a woman who was not planning for a baby in the near future. However, when a family is deemed poor or "un-fit to care" for a future child in any way, several states have gone through lengths to ensure that they will be incapable to bear children. They will not be good consumers, they are too poor to buy macbook pros and contribute to our capitalist economy, therefore they are unworthy. Their subjectivity vanished.

There is one thing in our society that is valued more than the personhood of women and the poor, and that one thing is money. The invent of capitalism has created a society that runs on a green piece of paper. Individual craft is gone, everything is mass produced for bigger profit. Workers are not people, they are commodities who serve in a business while receiving relatively little in return. Women are not people, they are commodities who serve the men in our society, forced to create for them that American dream. While the men work the assembly lines, the women are the fetus incubators, hatching out the working man's seeds, giving him something to work harder for. Trapping them both, so that a man must work with capitalism to feed his children, and a woman must work with capitalism to keep the home expensively beautiful and clean for the working man to come home to.

Capitalism, the American dream, the emphasis on family, and lack of abortion rights in the US are all highly intertwined. Capitalism feeds off of a family's needs to keep up with society's ideals. These ideals are upheld by the media portraying really expensive upper-middle class homes as the norms of society. The media tells us that babies are the epitome of purity and innocence and they must be protected above all cause. Capitalists want us to believe that the family and that white picket fence is the most important thing, that it'll bring true happiness because this is how they make their money. A decently well-off  white mother getting an abortion is unheard of, a waste, a selfish act, she's a witch. Her subjectivity is nulled in the eyes of profit-based bureaucracy. But mass sterilization of poor minority women is justifiable, subjectivity non-existent. This is not a coincidence. One can look at any evil done by the US government since its birth, and trace back every single one of those evils to the greedy aspirations of wealth and production.