Marxism and Social Reproduction

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

[Editors’ Note: This piece was originally uploaded without the author’s footnotes. The footnotes have been added back to this digital version since its original digital publication.]

During the 19th and early 20th century, the majority of Marxists assumed that, alone among all social relations, the division of human beings into sex-categories was natural. It was not until Simone de Beauviour’s 1949 Le Deuxieme Sexe (“The Second Sex”) that a well fleshed-out challenge was issued to the essentially physiological definition of sex. Monique Wittig carried this further with “The Category of Sex”.¹ The question has finally, thoroughly, been answered in the firm ground of social reproduction theory, which, when properly applied, entirely eliminates the naturalism of earlier Marxists as well as the racialism and bio-essentialism of Beauviour and Wittig.

To put it simply: there is no “woman” question, there is only the question of social reproduction.

One is Not Born a Woman — Or a Man

First, we must address the science. Biological sex is not an ontological category, but rather a label assigned by a medical professional at birth based on the physical characteristics of a child’s genitals.² There is no simple sex binary. There are groups of characteristics defined as primary (genitalia and reproductive organs) and secondary (body hair and breast development, among others), but these groups are shaped not only by genetics, but also by the hormonal environment in the body. These traits all vary widely among individuals, even with the same “chromosomal” sex. It is common for individuals to have atypical combinations of chromosomes, hormones, or anatomy that do not map to the binary model of sex assignment.³ There is, it turns out, no sex binary in nature.⁴ Even which traits or variations are considered typifying for “male” or “female” bodies differ between different cultures and different cultural contexts.

The categories of man and woman are not found in non-human nature, but rather created by human beings and imposed on nature as a result of the sexual division of labor. Pre-sedentary humanity knew and admitted no sexual division of labor. There was, therefore, no division into sexes among people. Expression of sexual traits, identity, and desire was an affair with no social meaning, something shared entirely between individuals.

What began the regime of divided labor is still unknown. It may be that the mastery of animal domestication gave rise to the sexual division of labor, or that it arose simultaneously with slavery. Whatever the cause, the sexual division of labor was a social technology that caused (and required) early human beings to begin to gender bodies and assign those newly-gendered bodies roles in social reproduction: inferior roles, subject to the expropriation of their labor. At around this time, either the sexual division of labor or the “invention” of slavery (itself predicated on advancements in productive tools, horticultural technology, or a more complete understanding of animal husbandry, which allowed for a single person to produce sufficient food to feed themselves and another, to produce the first surpluses) gave rise to private property (my woman, my slave) and thus, to class society.

Sex as we understand it is a creation of the sexual division of labor. It preceded the advent of class society and became one of its social foundations. Sexual mores, the social oppression of non-heterosexual relationships, and the subordination of all gender and sex expression to the heterosexual, patriarchal family, are all the result of this original and archaic sexual division of labor. It is not possible to complete the social revolution without attacking and uprooting this relation. Any revolutionary movement that fails to contemplate the total emancipation of all sexes and sexual orientations is doomed; doomed to failure in carrying out the liberation of all peoples, and doomed to reproduce class society from its very root.

Sex Orders Class

The economic relation of sex is characterized by the expropriation of the labor of social reproduction. This includes not only the bearing and rearing of children, but all domestic labor necessary for the reproduction of society: the preparation of meals, purchasing of clothing, cleaning and ordering of the household, caretaking of children, disabled, or elderly family members, even the psychological relief of soothing and processing the events of life.

This economic expropriation led to juridical oppression throughout most of European history and is the source of the social oppression faced by marginalized and oppressed sexes. Sex has cut across classes throughout history. It is itself a quasi-class, in that members of any social class may be subject to its relations (economic, social, or even juridical where they still exist). However, because members of the ruling class have historically been able to dictate the ways in which economic relations are imposed, the entry of a person of oppressed sex into the political and economic strata of the ruling class often permits that person to avoid the economic relations of sex (labor expropriation). The bourgeois woman purchases the labor of the proletarian woman — a nanny for child care, a maid for house maintenance, etc. To the extent that an individual is fully bourgeois, they cease to be, in the economic sense, a member of that quasi-class. Social oppression, however, may and does remain.

In essence, under capitalism, only the proletarians are fully members of any oppressed sex or sexuality. The pressure of the patriarchal system often demands individuals reach a separate and individual accommodation with power to avoid  the economic effects of their sex-position; however, in exchange, because these individual accommodations acknowledge the overall schema and actually reinforce, reproduce, and permit the wider oppression of marginalized sexes and sexualities, and because social oppression is a direct consequence of this broader economic relation, these individuals essentially become complicit in their own sexual oppression.

Sex is Found in the Base and the Superstructure

Sex is not simply economic (labor appropriation) or social, but rather is a complex of relations that are dialectically intertwined. Labor appropriation is the basis for sex definition and the social oppression of sex, but once the superstructural elements were created to identify and sort human beings into different sexes (the act of gendering), the superstructural element took on a role of their own in this process.

Identification of individuals as “belonging to” one of the social/economic categories of sex created a cluster of traits that can be sorted, graded, and experienced by other actors. This includes those primary and secondary sexual characteristics listed above, but also includes less concrete traits such as conversational strategies, social behaviors, etc. Sex is not a class but a regime, and the sex-regime that has grown up alongside class society violently genders everyone, at all times.

Not only is there no such thing as a natural, ontological woman (or man), the process of being gendered into one (or more) genders is one that is continuous and ongoing. Gendering, like racialization, is a process that requires effort and violence from the individuals engaged in the social structure.⁵

Adaptation and Synthesis of the Gender Ternary

The most advanced articulation of this theory is the Gender Ternary (coined by the Sizhen System on their substack). This divides the gendered social categories along two lines: the socially legitimized sexes and the subaltern sexes as the first division, and the division between oppressed/oppressor sexes as the second division. Although Sizhen collapses the final two categories, they retain analytical power.

It’s important to stress that these categories are constantly being created and recreated through social (superstructural) interactions and rules. It is possible to move between these quasi-classes — indeed, the functioning of the gender/sex system requires individuals to be moved through these quasi-classes over time in order to function. These are not medical/biological categories, but rather social categories onto which medical/biological ideology is mapped.

This creates the following arrangement, in which the overarching categories remain man and woman, but are divided along a second, normally “hidden,” axis along which the question is whether they are legitimized or subalternized:

• The legitimized oppressor sex: the heteronormative man.
• The legitimized oppressed sex: the heteronormative woman.
• The subaltern⁶ oppressor sex: Any male-sexed individual who exhibits traits outside of the heteronormative becomes subalternized.⁷
• The subaltern oppressed sexes: Any non-male-sexed individual displaying a  non-heteronormative sexual identity or trans person is subalternized.⁸

Quoting Sizhen at length:

“The Subaltern Gender exists as the Punitive Gender: in service of the need to keep the [legitimized oppressed sexes] in check, should they start to “get ideas” in the sense of political consciousness, in their eternal dialectical contradiction with the [oppressor sex]; and in service of the need, broadly, to curtail class traitorism by reifying the superstructural elements of the Gender-Class Ruling Ideology, by maintaining the integrity of the boundaries between these gender-classes [ED: here, we use the term sex quasi-class], and to act as one of the mechanisms by which gender-class mobility is controlled and mitigated.

Gender is a class system. Gendered violence exists to control the movement within and between those classes. The Subaltern Gender Class is one peculiar form [ED: this should be “particular form”] of gender[ed] violence, which exists to be a punitive class in which one is thrust upon sufficient transgression of gender-class ideology or correct protocol.

….

To derive gender-class from “identity,” which is to say “how one Identifies,” is itself an idealist error, which locates the origin of gender class as a manifestation of a spiritual ritual of identification, and which retroactively creates a past experience of gender class after identity is achieved. This is necessarily incoherent. Gender is never a choice. To say “Trans men are men” is as much of a tautology as to say “I am a transgender woman because I Identify as such.” It is a liberal analytical concession to the prevailing discursive technologies of the Transgender Tipping Point-era, which were strategic decisions which prioritized the legitimization of “validity” rather than a correct, materialist analysis of gender….”⁹

Total Liberation Requires Liberation of the Forces of Social Reproduction

This is the ultimate conclusion of the “Woman Question” addressed by Marxists over the past two hundred years. Freedom for any individual requires freedom from the oppressive class-system of sex and gendering. In order to achieve this liberation, we must ground our analysis on firm materialist bedrock. The material basis of sex is the expropriation of labor — the sexual division of labor. The entire superstructure of sex and the gendering of human bodies rests on the bedrock of the sexual division of labor; although it operates, at times, without direct reference to this bedrock, with the end of the regime of divided labor, it will be possible to abolish the superstructure of sex-oppression.

The social revolution must uproot the property relations of sex and gender as a special task. This will see the complete depatriarchalization of world society, the abolition of all regressive and outmoded views on sex, sexuality, and human interaction. It will establish real equality between sexes, alleviate the inordinate weight of domestic and reproductive labor on oppressed sexes, and guarantee the right of existence of those sexes and sexualities that are under threat by the patriarchal capitalist order.

Gender, sex, sexual preference, and sexual expression will become entirely an affair for individual expression, and cease to have any political or economic meaning.

1. (1982). ↩︎
2. American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Just the Facts: Biological Sex”. ↩︎
3. Id. ↩︎
4. That is, sex is not an ontologically-existing category found natively. Mechanical Marxism sees ontologically-existing categories everywhere, which is a relic of primitive Enlightenment-era scientism. This is the same process of reification that we can see in, for instance, scientific racism. It is marked by the social creation of an analytical category, then the privileging of the analytical category over material reality. ↩︎
5. It is important to note that the radical feminist proposition that being a man is characterized by being a rapist or an abuser and that being a woman is characterized as being subject to sexual violence is incorrect, in that it sites the division of labor only at the level of sexual violence and obliterates the superstructural elements. ↩︎
6. Here, Sizhen (and I) use the term, as Gramsci did, to indicate someone who is denied control over the hegemonic social forces. ↩︎
7. By sexed, we mean anyone subject to the social process of gendering who is sorted into the category of “man,” and who is therefore able to appropriate the labor of those sorted into the social category of “women.” This includes passing trans men, but does not include trans women. ↩︎
8. On the social nature of sexing, see note 4 above. ↩︎
9. (emphasis mine, editor’s notes in brackets). ↩︎