Marxism and Feminism: A critique of Lise Vogels social

reproduction theory
Presentation to the Social and Political Thought Conference
2015: Feminism and Critical Theory, University of Sussex, June
20th 2015.
Ross Speer
The Queens College, University of Oxford
ross.speer@queens.ox.ac.uk
This paper is a draft. Please do not cite without permission from
the author.
I
This paper presents some criticisms of Lise Vogels recently
republished book Marxism and the Oppression of Women. I
begin by setting out what I think is at stake in the confrontation
between Marxism and Feminism. Following that, I try to provide
some exposition of Vogels theory of social reproduction, before
making three points of criticism. Finally, I make use of the work
of Michle Barrett, from her book Womens Oppression Today
and, in particular, its Althusserian influenced approach, in
order to provide the necessary supplements to Vogels theory.
Both the thinkers in question here wrote in response to a 1970s
milieu in which the feminist movement had begun exposing
issues with Marxist understandings of womens oppression.
Engagement with Marxism by feminists demonstrated a lack of
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convincing means with which to understand the oppression of

women in classical Marxism. Western Marxism, at this point
only a recently entry into the Anglophone world, had done little
to take this up as an area of investigation in its right. However,
it did, as we shall see, generate useful tools with which to take
up the problem.
The relevant concern here for Marxists was that if Marxism was
unable to offer a picture of what patriarchy is, where it came
from, and how it could be removed, then Marxism would have
failed in its pretension to provide a comprehensive
metanarrative of the social world. If Marxists had once thought
it enough to tack on a theory of womens oppression to already
existing Marxism, without permitting feminisms influence to
proliferate throughout the theory, then it soon became clear
that the problem was more intractable than it had first
appeared to be.
The issue hinged on whether it was possible to integrate a
theory of the oppression of women into historical materialism,
or if patriarchy should be understood as an independent
structure. It could be the case that patriarchy was indescribable
by, and thus not understandable through, the categories of
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class antagonism. This position became known as dual

systems theory. The alternative, that patriarchy and class
antagonism could both be parts of a single theory, and that
proposed by both the authors under discussion here, was
dubbed unitary theory.
The problem here is not a peripheral one for Marxists, a place
to which it has sometimes been relegated. Accepting a dual
systems theory as has probably been the most common
position amongst feminists inclined to the political left saddles
Marxists with a profound problem. If it is true that patriarchal
relations operate separately from class relations then Marxisms
claim that the working class is the uniquely privileged
emancipatory agent is in trouble. Women as women, rather
than as workers, would be an equally important emancipatory
agency. Socialism could not be understood as a general solution
to oppression, but would be restricted only to the end of class
antagonism without affecting other areas of social life.
Integrating an explanation to the problem of the oppression of
women is critical if Marxism is to present itself as a viable and
necessary political project to all those in positions of
subordination, and not just the working class. Additionally,
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Marxism is unlikely to be able to succeed on its own terms,

even if we allow for a reduction in its scope, if it unable to knit
together a collective agent that encompasses the full array of
subordinated groups. And yet a unitary theory has proved to be
an elusive piece of the puzzle.
There is also an immediate conjunctural concern. Too often it is
taken for granted that Feminism is a part of the left, when it is
in fact incumbent on the left to demonstrate that it can provide
a route out of patriarchy. If Marxism is to make headway within
the Feminist movement it must be able to show why a
challenge to gender oppression is best articulated through a
Marxist framework. It is not enough to suggest that because
one is concerned with one area of oppression one should then
also be concerned with others for reasons of ethical
consistency. This may be persuasive for the purpose of
theoretical rigour, but it is hardly unreasonable that social
agents seeking ways out of their situations of oppression will
concentrate their efforts on those that they perceive to be
harming them the most. What Marxists are obliged to do is to
show is that the oppression of women is intimately bound up
with other forms of oppression and exploitation, and in such a
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way as that it is by consequence a strategic error to

compartmentalise one off from the others and try to strike out
at it alone.
It is in this context that Vogel and the concept of social
reproduction is gaining a new lease of life.
II
Vogels idea of social reproduction, which draws on the
concepts developed by Marx in Capital, can be unpacked as
follows. In any society where human labour is still required to
fulfil human needs, the individuals who make up the labour
force are subject to wear and tear and become too old or infirm
to work and eventually die. Thus for any system of production
to endure over time there must be a means by which the labour
force is replenished. The usual way of achieving this has been
by biological reproduction. This is not the only way it can be
done and the concept of social reproduction has been
fruitfully deployed to analyse slave and immigrant labour that
can replenish a societys labour force from outside. Biological
reproduction is, however, the most common means to achieve
this replenishment. Additionally, the family unit has been the
dominant form in which biological reproduction takes place
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although the contours of this unit may differ significantly

between times and places.
Within the family unit women are accorded a subordinate place
because their role in childbearing leaves them outside the
value-producing labour force for a period of time. Following
from this, a division of labour emerges. Men assume roles of
material provision and women of domestic labour. There is no
biologically-given reason why women should then come to
perform domestic labour tasks. What gives them the greater
responsibility for this, however, is the form in which biological
reproduction has generally taken place in class societies: the
patriarchal family.
From a ruling class point of view, social reproduction is riven by
a contradiction. On the one hand, reproduction must take place
or else in the long-term the prevailing relations of production
will die out. On the other hand, labour freed up from the
process of production for that of reproduction yields no
immediate surplus-value. Therefore, the ruling class is forced to
balance long-term and short-term considerations. In order to
allow for reproduction some potentially exploitable surpluslabour must be given up to the reproduction process.
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Thus the ruling class seeks to minimise the value lost to the
reproduction process, and the family presents a stable format
in which to attain a degree of efficiency in reproduction. Men
are assigned the role of obtaining the means of subsistence for
the family unit, and women take on the domestic labour tasks
which transform these means of subsistence into the required
goods. What are really roles that are only of temporary
necessity become solidified and rendered permanent through
the family form.
For Vogel, social reproduction gives rise to womens oppression
on a contingent, rather than necessary, basis because, whilst
social reproduction itself is necessary for the social system to
function, the means by which it is performed can assume a
variety of forms. The forms that emerge are influenced by the
advantages they might hold for each of the contending classes,
who struggle with the others in order to establish the most
beneficial arrangement for themselves. The results are not a
series of fixed absolutes, but a vast variety of possible
combinations.
This is, on the one hand, one of the great strengths of Vogels
social reproduction theory. On the other, however, it presents
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her argument with some difficulties. In what follows I will give

three areas in which I think Vogels argument requires
modification.
III
The first is Vogels claim that although the cost to the ruling
class imposed by domestic labour and reproduction can be
minimised via commodification, which can free up labour from
reproduction for surplus-value production, there is a limit to the
process. Certain aspects of domestic labour cannot be turned
into profitable sources of accumulation.
However, I do not think there is a good reason to believe that
there are any forms of domestic labour which could in principle
be ruled out of commodification. The emergence of new
technology might, for example, make previously unappealing
areas of investment an enticing prospect for accumulation. By
driving down general living standards or only allowing their
maintenance or increase via debt it is possible for the ruling
class to force extra labour out of working families, which can be
achieved by women entering the workplace. In doing so, the
capacity for women to perform domestic labour is diminished
whilst the need to purchase replacement services on the
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market is consequently increased. Acquiring replacements for

domestic labour on the market could be accomplished either in
the form of outsourcing the labour, or through labour-saving
devices purchased for the home. In such a way, it is possible to
drive forward commodification, and this commodification of
previously uncommodified areas of social life is a common
strategy of the capitalist class as it seeks fresh sources of
profit. This undermines the endurance of the gender-division of
labour, and destabilises that which was posited as the root
cause of womens oppression.
It could also be the case that providing for women involved in
reproduction directly, by way of the state or commodified
services, could be cost neutral from a ruling class point of view.
Enacting a general levy of working class individuals to pay for
this poses no fundamental difficulty, only the method of
distribution would be altered and not the total portion of the
social product controlled by each of the respective classes. If
that were to be done, then there would be no reason for the
ruling class to continue to encourage patriarchy. Indeed,
European welfare states have taken steps in this direction and,
whilst appealing from the point of view of the left, they cannot
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be said to have dealt a killer blow to patriarchal relations.

Something else other than the matter of the imposed cost
burden on the ruling class must be at work here.
The second problem is that it does not seem plausible that
merely by being prevented from working for a few months at a
time women come to assume domestic labour so near
permanently and universally. If ever a case for this could be
made then it is certainly eroded with the arrival of reliable and
widely available contraceptive techniques.
The allocation of domestic labour to women is clearly one
possible outcome of the problem of how to divide up types of
labour, but does not do well to explain why the family is nearly
everywhere in the contemporary world in a patriarchal form.
We are not given sufficient reason to believe that divisions of
labour should map on to gender divisions at all, and certainly
not so persistently.
Third is the issue of the oppression of ruling class women. With
the rise of private property comes a need for some norm of
transferring it after death. What came to dominate was
inheritance through the paternal line. Marriage, in this reading,
is a means through which to ensure that paternity and thereby
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secure the line of inheritance. Here, though, the problem is that

there is no reason apart from the subordination of women that
property should be passed through the male line.
It seems that certain types of arrangements of social
reproduction appear with greater frequency would be the case
in the absence of any additional pull-factor in that direction. If
contingency were the long and short of the matter we would
then expect to find rather more examples of matriarchy, or
even approximations of gender equality, than we do. We lack,
then, strong reasons to believe that social reproduction will be
constituted so consistently on the basis of male domination.
The process does not seem to demand that this should be the
case; it only suggests that it is one possible outcome amongst
others.
That these combinations have tended towards having an
additional unifying feature, male domination, beyond what is
necessary for the process in the most general sense, and also
beyond what is obviously advantageous for any of the
contending classes, implies that a supplementary force is at
work. It is not far from here to the resurrection of the dual
systems theory.
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IV
Barrett, too, is strongly influenced by the concept of social
reproduction as a means with which to reveal the articulation of
capitalism and patriarchy. Her source of attribution is, however,
different from Vogels. Where Vogel invokes the late Marx,
Barrett appeals to the French philosopher Louis Althusser.
Althusser has enjoyed a long deployment in the service of
Feminist theory, and his theory of ideology is the most wellknown component of his work, so I hope I can afford to be brief
in my exposition. Ideology here denotes not only ideas, but
accompanying practices and rituals through which it was
substantiated. For Althusser, ideology, as with other
components of society, had a relative autonomy from the
economy. Contrary to how Marxs base/superstructure
metaphor has often been understood, Althusser sought to
break with a determining role of the economy except in the
last instance. The economy structured the social whole, giving
it a unity, but was not necessarily the origin or cause of each of
its components. Ideologies could arise independently of
economic causes, and become part of the conflictual unity that
was a social formation.
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What Althusser permits Barrett to do is think about patriarchy

as a semi-autonomous phenomenon, preserving the features of
dual systems theory that seem to be persuasive, without
breaking with the idea of the social world as a unified whole.
Patriarchal organisation may be neither optimal nor even
particularly useful for the ruling class. It may only need lend
itself to a state of affairs which is adequate enough for the
overall requirements of social reproduction. The prevalence and
persistence of patriarchy could be understood by its particular
effectiveness in its own reproduction, through the way it
incentivises some agents to secure its continuity.
What Barrett then does is endorse a conception of male
privilege. To put it more specifically, she thinks that men
benefit from womens oppression. This is a move Marxists have
often been hesitant to make. However, the case made here is, I
think, a compelling one.
Barretts claim is that the beneficiary of domestic labour is not
just the ruling class but also men as a cross-class group, and
that these men gain from the privileges conferred on them by
masculinity, which provides a more general set of social
advantages. This occurs independently of whether an individual
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man actually wants these privileges; they are bestowed on him

without his consent. This does not happen, however, in a
straightforwardly positive manner. Even the privileged gender
experiences negative consequences as a result of the division.
For example, the demands placed on men as breadwinners
locks them in to wage labour and limits access to their children.
Given that male privilege is not unambiguously beneficial to its
recipients, the door is left open for resistance to it. There is no
doubt a cost incurred by fighting against something that
penetrates and constructs our very sense of self; but it may
well be possible to demonstrate that there is more to be gained
by doing so than is lost in the short term. What has often
troubled Marxists about this line of thought that if men benefit
by oppressing women it may not be possible to construct a
unified agency crossing gender lines is not then as
problematic as has been assumed.
Vogel tentatively recognises some of this. She identifies the
family-wage as a possible form of male privilege. There is the
occasional nod towards a notion of male supremacy. The
tendency, however, is to place all responsibility on the ruling
class, for both the creation and perpetuation of patriarchy.
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Overall, Vogel seeks to minimise the extent to which the

ideological construction of patriarchal forms of social
reproduction emanates from within subordinated sections of
society, in particular the working class.
However, patriarchy as ideology is persistent because it is able
to appeal to and be taken up by large sections of the
population. It crosses class lines, and even if it could be shown
to be a component of a particular class project originally it
cannot be compartmentalised in such a way any longer. It is not
that Vogel overtly rules out any of this, so much as it is that a
restrictive conceptualisation of historical materialism causes
her to stop short of taking us in this direction. Left to its own
devices, Vogels concept of social reproduction can only deal
with the complex ideological construction of gender identities in
a mechanical and reductionist fashion. It is able to speak very
little to, for instance, cultural representations of gender as well
as to the construction of gendered forms of desire and
subjectivity.
What does seem to be the case is that gender divisions that
preceded capitalism came to influence its development, in that
the main proponents of the bourgeois class project were males
15

because of a preceding state of gender inequality. Thus the

ideology of patriarchy that the emergent bourgeoisie already
bore with them interfused with their direct class interests and
thus the world which they set about constructing. The success
of this project was secured by the further penetration of
patriarchal relations into the early working class, who made
them their own, so as to generate an additional fracture within
that class along gender lines.
Barrett provides examples of how male workers have sought to
protect their sectional interests against the advance of their
female counterparts. Strictly put, capitalism has no in-built
necessity to divide up labour according to gender. A capitalism
born of Immaculate Conception may well not have done so, and
perhaps even ended up being more efficient from a ruling class
point of view as a result. The reality of our present vantage
point is, however, that despite the fact that the possibility of
capitalism without gender inequality is theoretically
conceivable there is not much chance of now reconfiguring it in
such a way as to be gender blind in its workings.
Crucially, what is implied here is that the collapse of capitalism
does not also entail the collapse of patriarchy. What supplanting
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capitalism could do is erode the basis on which patriarchy

thrives, which is the contradictory nature of social reproduction
in class societies. The matter of patriarchys irreducibility to this
basis means that the advent of socialism is better understood
as a condition of possibility for the end of patriarchy rather than
itself being coextensive with that goal. Crafting a society which
is not traversed by class struggle is a prerequisite to ending
womens oppression, but is insufficient by itself. There is no
automatic relationship between the two, for patriarchal
ideology may persist and potentially even find itself a new
lease of life beyond any economic rationale for its existence.

V
Whilst Vogels emphasis on the role of contingency in deciding
the configuration of social reproduction is valuable, she does
not provide sufficient reasons as to why the outcomes of these
contingent events have trended towards patriarchy. Vogel is
hesitant to offer a comprehensive account of male domination,
and her argument suffers as a result. If patriarchy is more
common than contingency would alone allow for, her theory is
in trouble because a resort to dual systems is tempting. In
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return, I have argued that that it can be rescued along the lines
advanced by Barrett, via Althusser, who suggests that a
patriarchal ideology, which persists because men as a group do
indeed benefit from it, structures the social reproduction
processes of contemporary social formations. Importantly, this
ideology is intimately related to class-societies and cannot be
viewed or understood apart from them. The logic of class
antagonism retains its analytical primacy in this schema. The
crucial question that needs answering is why it is women that
nearly always end up in the subordinate, domestic labour, role.
If there were historical reasons for this, it should be clear that
they have become significantly eroded. It does not seem to be
the case that the ruling class benefits from specifically from
women being oppressed, even if it might benefit from some
form of gendered division of labour.
My charge, then, is that whilst not explicitly ruling it out Vogel is
insufficiently attentive to male supremacy as a cross-class
project, and an account of this must be integrated into her
theory in order for it to do the work we need it to.

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