Intersectionality again: My response to Barbara Foley’s second rejoinder
Barbara,
Again, the inherited terminology is in the way of clarity.
In Marx and Engels, the adjective economic has — as far as I know — a narrow meaning. It designates specifically conditions of commodity production and exchange, including capitalist production proper. The term relates to the pre-Marxist analytical distinction between civil society on the one hand and the state on the other. In civil society, individuals interact as private entities, exchanging their privately-owned wealth (i.e. commodities) in markets. The “anatomy” of civil society under capitalism is “the economy” of the polity, which is to say the political economy. (Marx’s preface to his 1859 Contribution.) In the state, the individuals are directly coerced or constrained through the legal system, e.g. to pay taxes, provide military service, etc.
It is precisely this apparent divorce between the economic sphere (where we are seemingly private, free, and independent from one another) and the legal/political sphere ( where we are transparently associating with one another ) that requires a science of political economy to elucidate. That is because the difference clouds the identity!
In a primitive society, the division of labor is so elemental, that there’s not even a separation between the “household” and, say, the “farm” or the “shop.” At most, there is a division between the cave or temporary dwelling and the foraging grounds: hunting/gathering/roaming areas. In consequence of this basic division of labor, there’s no “economy” separate from the “state.” The state has not yet jelled in contrast with a civil or private economic sphere. What exists is the material reproduction of people in their primitive forms of association, along with the reproduction of this direct and rather transparent mode of association.
It’s in modern bourgeois society that the autonomy or separation between the economic sphere and the state is in full bloom to such a point that the identity underpinning them is lost. Concretely speaking, in a modern capitalist society, the material and social reproduction of people takes places in and through all spheres of human activity; not just in and through the economy, as reproduction of capital proper. For example, reproduction also takes place in and through the state, as a reproduction of legal and political (non-economic) relations subordinated to capital.
Just for context, today in rich capitalist societies, between 1/3 and 1/2 of the material reproduction of people goes through the fiscal mechanism of the state. That is substantial. However, it can be shown empirically that the economic sphere is overwhelmingly dominant, to the point of subordinating to capital the entire legal/political sphere, the state. Consider, as an illustration of this, the grip that the “billionaire class” has today on the U.S. political system.
The coercive appropriation of labor, or exploitation, can be either economic or non-economic. In Marx, labor has a very broad definition as conscious, purposeful, or goal-oriented activity. It is not just wage labor subject to direct capitalist, economic exploitation. The concept production is also broadly defined as the material production of ourselves in a particular social context. This involves the immediate production of ourselves by eating, breathing, wearing clothes, reading books, parenting, etc. — which economists call consumption. But, of course, not only that. What specifically distinguishes humans from the rest of nature is the host of activities not directly consumptive, but in preparation for personal consumption: the making of what we consume, the making of the means of production to make what we consume, and the making of means of production to make other means of production! This ever lengthening chain of activities effectively reduces consumption or direct personal reproduction to a relatively brief link or stage. We humans do not just draw raw stuff from nature to stay as another branch of nature. We produce ourselves under the guidance and regulation of our labor or purposeful activity as humans.
If we accept this broad understanding of material production, then personal consumption, which often takes place outside of shops, factories, and offices (so-called “workplaces”), is a branch of material reproduction overall. Modern personal consumption is not a mindless activity. It is an activity that takes time, organization, and effort. That is, it is a form of production, also guided and regulated by labor. Labor can be and is exploited in this sphere. I am referring here to activities conventionally classified as consumption that take place in households, schools, religious and civic settings, etc. not directly subject to capital.
Furthermore, some of the shops, factories, and offices in which production in the narrower sense (as opposed to personal consumption) takes place are not privately owned by capitalists, but exist under different forms of semi-private, semi-public ownership, and public (state) ownership. There’s no direct surplus value production in them, at least not the typical case that Marx examined in Capital. Yet, empirically, when we look at the totality, reproduction (consumption and production) outside of private capitalist workplaces winds up repurposed and subordinated to capitalist production, falling in its orbit indirectly. In each particular non-economic sphere, whoever winds up exploiting or exploited depends on the overall (economic and non-economic) balance of power.
What do we do with the specific exploitation that takes place in these spheres via non-economic methods of labor appropriation? To repeat, what is involved here is a bunch of socially-objective forms of coercive appropriation of labor via the appropriation of (1) the laborer herself (totally or partially), (2) the products of her labor, and/or (3) her labor activity. Therefore, they are exploitation!
Again, the big issues are (1) the weight that these forms of exploitation have in the totality of exploitation and (2) the historically-conditioned, particular ways in which these different forms of exploitation relate to one another in the structure and dynamics of today’s society. Here, we share the view that the particular capitalist (properly economic) form of exploitation is now overwhelmingly dominant, thus reducing the other forms of exploitation to subservient roles. But this is a general theoretical characterization that needs qualification as we bring it down to the study of concrete historical situations as required by practical political concerns.
If due to this theoretical hierarchy the term exploitation gets assigned exclusively to the capitalist (dominant) form and oppression (or some other term) to each of the other (subordinated) forms of exploitation, and reserve the term class to designate the exploiters and the exploited under capitalist or economic form and groups (or some other term) to refer to the exploiters and exploited under non-economic forms of exploitation, all that is fine with me as long as we recognize the identity involved (appropriation of labor), and not just the difference (how labor is appropriated).
The stay-at-home wife of a worker is a member of the working class in a modern capitalist society even if her exploitation by capital takes place through her domestic or household exploitation by another member of her class. What I call class cleavages or class differences are important to grasp the multi-layered fragmentation of the modern working class. To liberate themselves from capital, workers need to attain a degree of class unity impossible without overcoming these myriad divisions, which means abolishing or substantially reducing these subordinate forms of exploitation. Thus, recognizing the co-existence of multiple forms of exploitation is no denial of the need for class unity. On the contrary, it is indispensable to understand better the obstacles in its way.
Comradely.
