The 2nd International Marxist Feminist Conference
Building Bridges – Shifting and Strenghtening Visions – Exploring Alternatives
Vienna, October 7-9, 2016
Introduction to the 2nd Marxist Feminist Conference
The first international Marxist-Feminist Conference was organised in Berlin in 2015. In the introduction, the organisers wrote:
”More than 40 years ago, feminists among Marxists in many countries spoke out. They criticized the concept of labour that was then commonly used in Marxism, they criticized value theory, views on domestic labour and the family, the way of dealing and interacting with each other and with nature around us, the economy and wars; and they discussed their visions of the future and raised their voices for women’s liberation.
They triggered passionate debates and their criticism was not totally ignored. But the work they have carried out on an international scale is far from complete. For some decades feminist Marxist debates subsided because neoliberalism, stumbling from one crisis to another, had brought other issues into focus”.
The conference in 2015, which intended to pick up the threads of past Marxist-feminist research and engagement was – even to the surprise of the organisers – a great success. More than 500 people attended the workshops, panel discussions and lectures, the speakers and participants spanning several generations and countries as well as political and academic fields of intervention. One of the suggestions for a second conference was to diversify the issues and Marxist-feminist approaches to theories and organising even more. We have tried to take that advice to heart by inviting speakers from different parts of the world and with diverse visions of what Marxist-feminist theorising and organising can be.
Given the frightening state in which we find ourselves in a neoliberal world, full of violence, rising fascist movements and environmental destruction, and given the weakness of alternative thoughts and movements, we believe our task is twofold: to develop and strengthen Feminist-Marxist theory as a specific tool for understanding and transforming reality and to learn from others to broaden our perspectives and strengthen our visions for a future that we can only achieve through alliances.
Thanks to the passion, resourcefulness, and competences of the Viennese women from ‘Transform! europe’ and their many friends and supporters and thanks to the generosity of Eva Blimlinger, director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, we are able to present the second conference only one and a half years later. With the number of speakers, the range of countries they come from and the areas of analysis they cover have multiplied. A stream of Marxist-Feminist theory includes analyses of labour, Antonio Gramsci’s feminist questions, Marx’ value theory, the ‘care revolution’, Critical Theory and Marxist-Feminism, Rosa Luxemburg, and Marxist Ecofeminism. Another stream devoted to Marxist-Feminist organising across the globe includes analyses from the Middle East, Latin America, the USA, South Africa, India, France, Spain and Greece. These streams are reinforced by a range of additional themes like Marxist-Feminist analyses of motherhood, racism, European governance, intersectionality and lesbian-led movements, nature and gender, and feminist resistance against fundamentalism.
A multi-genre fiction film invites us to look at feminism’s™ unfinished business from the bottom up and the ‘arge blumen’ artistic work-community will perform Fragment #3, Poltergeist, from their latest work, Cutting Edge. IN-VISIBLE-IN, a multi-media performance, especially produced for the 2nd International Marxism-Feminism-Conference 2016 in Vienna by Aiko Kazuko Kurosaki and visual artist starsky, uses common clichés and patterns in order to break and deconstruct them and to evoke multi-layered emotional spaces of association.
One task that we have set ourselves is to release a manifesto with a few basic theses which shall serve to establish our group as a diverse, international movement in the making. You can find the theses suggested for such a manifesto by Frigga Haug on the basis of our first conference at the beginning of this booklet. They will be discussed in a plenary session on Saturday between 16:00 and 18:00.
12 Theses, partly formulated at the first Marxism-Feminism Congress 2014, in hope of future cooperation and a common understanding of Marxism-Feminism. These theses should be jointly discussed, improved or modified in the thesis panel in order to lay the foundation for a stronger theory and movement.
- As Helen Colley emphasizes, Marxism-Feminism are two sides of one coin, but it must be added that this coin itself requires transformation. Feminist Marxism adheres to Marx’s legacy, and thus to the significance of the analysis of work in the form of wage labour and as the driving force of the workers’ movement (as Gayatri Spivak insists). However, in the attempt likewise to put the remaining female activities at the centre of the analysis, MF goes beyond the crippling attempt to conceive domestic and non-domestic activities either completely as one thing or vice versa as completely separate (dual economy debate, domestic labour debate), and poses the fundamental challenge of occupying and further developing the concept of the relations of production for feminist questions.
- Here (as with Marx and Engels) two forms of production are assumed, those of life and those of the means of life. By analysing the two together it is possible to examine specific practices and how they interact. This opens up an enormous field of research, in which the different historically and culturally specific modes of domination must be investigated, but also the possibilities for change.
- It is clear that gender relations are relations of production, not an addition to them. All practices, norms, values, authorities, institutions, language, culture, etc. are coded in gender relations. This assumption makes feminist Marxist research as fruitful as it is necessary.
- Marxism is of no use for capitalist society and the academic disciplines that legitimize domination. Because (with Marx, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Brecht et al.) Marxism-Feminism assumes that people make their own history, or, where they are prevented from doing so, self-empowerment must be gained, Marxism-Feminism is unsuited to authoritarian action from above. It liberates research such as memory work and likewise opens up a historical-critical treatment of oneself as part of a collective. It is thus also a form of self-criticism as a productive force.
- Because through their activity all members of society must participate in relations of domination, a concrete study of the nodal points of domination in the capitalist patriarchy that paralyse or completely shackle the desire for change is needed. Here feminists have the advantage of having fewer of the privileges associated with power. They therefore have less to lose as well as more experience in viewing the world from below.
- All members of capitalist society are damaged by these domination/subjection relations; and to this extent they are still far from living in a liberated society. There are historically passed down forms of domination and violence that do not continuously perpetuate themselves in the present through a primary contradiction. The savage forms of violence (against women), of brutalization, readiness for war, etc. (on which Zillah Eisenstein focused) should be understood as historically uneven horrors stemming from old relations. For Marxist Feminists, these violent relations have to be theoretically and practically grasped as a fundamental part of their struggle for liberation – in order to attain their status as subjects themselves as well as for their revolt against male-human oppression.
- Marxism-Feminism takes a position on the primacy of the labour movement as a historical subject and agent of transformation. Bringing feminism into Marxism, and thereby changing both of these, makes a critical view of traditional Marxism, which refers solely to the labour movement, indispensable. Marxism is Marx’s critique of political economy plus the labour movement – which shows its potential as well as its limits. The fate of the working class also shows its inability to recognize and to further develop questions that transcend the historical horizon of class struggles. This traditional Marxism is neither receptive to the new feminist questions nor for those of ecology (as Rosa Luxemburg emphasised). The wealth of the various movements as well as the still unused wealth in Marx’s cultural heritage require continual critical analysis. This is a challenge for all Marxist feminists, which is a consensus in nearly all contributions.
- The controversy over race, class, and gender (intersectionality) should be taken further. The connection between class and gender in all societies constituted by capitalism should be further specifically researched; what appears as the “race question” should be answered concretely for each society and culture separately and related to the two other kinds of oppression (as Ann Ferguson and Gayatri Spivak emphasize). Nonlinear thinking is required.
- In the upheavals following the crisis of Fordism showing themselves in every new crisis of the rapidly globalizing economy, which are driving people into more and more precarious conditions, women, like other marginalised practices and groups, are the losers.
- The dismantling of the welfare state in a globalized economy leaves the concern for life to women in unpaid housework or in low-paid wage work. We can conceive of this as a ‘care crisis’, as a necessary consequence of a capitalist society that in shifting its economic centre to the service industries has fallen into a profit squeeze, while it resorts to ever more barbaric forms of handling the crises around the unequal levels of creating added value (as Tove Soiland suggests).
- What we all share is to move life into the centre of our struggles (among others Montserrat Galcerán, Lise List) and thus the struggles for collectively self-determined time. We can also follow the suggestion of analysing the crises around life as the consequence of unequal time logic within hierarchically organized areas (Frigga Haug). As for politics, Haug suggests the four-in-one perspective, i.e. policy-making around the question of the time people have at their disposal, thereby not to adapt the areas to each other, but to free them from hierarchy through generalization. Only when everyone is active in all areas is a liberated society possible.
- Our struggles are against domination and are radically democratic – this also requires politics from below. Culturally and temporally, our resistance is situated in different locations. But what unifies us with Marx is the desire “to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being”. Organizing a Marxist-Feminist Congress and finding different approaches to cooperation and conflict in it is a means of translating our resistance into the development of a continuous Marxist-Feminist movement. The formulation of these theses should therefore not be the end point, but is rather an intermediation between theory and practice in our striving towards democracy and a liberated society which here and in the future should be further debated and developed.