Rees' Ontology: An Obfuscation - On Marx, Gender & Trans Liberation
Contesting Marx's application to gender, women's oppression and trans liberation: I respond to John Rees.
John Rees, a leading member of Counterfire with no recognisable credentials in materialist or Marxist feminisms, has decided to insert himself into the debate on gender in Marx’s ontology: a clarification. Holly Lewis penned a blistering response: Against Bad Arguments for Terrible Things. I’m not going to repeat Holly’s arguments, but I do want to make a few additional points.
An Obfuscation
Rees’ intervention does very little to clarify anything, let alone Marx’s theory of social being. In fact, he cherry picks and decontextualises quotes, stripping them of a more faithful reading.
Take his suspect use of Capital and The German Ideology. According to Rees, Marx argues that nature, and our needs in relation to it, are fixed. Rees describes “nature-given biological needs” that are “everlasting”. Notice how ‘nature-given’ is being used as a rhetorical, rather than a theoretical, device: tacitly communicating the idea of something unchanging, but without any analytical substantiation. Throughout the article he repeats the phrases ‘nature-imposed’, ‘natural environment’ and ‘natural basis’ to appeal to, and leverage, a common sense notion of the natural world - as immutable, and beyond human influence. This vulgar reading of Marx is used to reach his principal conclusion:
A properly dialectical account of women’s oppression refuses to ignore the natural basis on which women’s oppression arose…
The most charitable reading of this is it’s a careless and lazy way of saying something approximating the idea that the capacity to bear children underpins women’s oppression under capitalism. But this doesn’t mean the basis of women’s oppression is natural: this is a very specific claim within feminist scholarship, and it’s not a claim anyone on our side makes.
If our understanding of a phenomena having a natural basis is that it involves something a human body does, then everything has a natural basis. Exploitation has a natural basis because workers use their bodies to transform raw materials. Slavery and colonialism have natural bases because melanin is in the skin. If I gave John Rees’ head a wobble it would have a natural basis because I’d be vigorously using my hands. At best, his formulation is redundant; at worst, he uses it to give succour to arguments that marginalise trans liberation by appealing to the discursive authority of the natural world.
Marxists understand the bases of women’s oppression to be social relations; these social relations organise human capacities in exploitative, oppressive, and ugly ways. Marxists have no business defending such imprecise ramblings as ‘the basis of women’s oppression is natural’, and it’s especially sad to see this being done for the purpose of attacking an oppressed group.
As one of my favourite materialist feminists notes, the stakes involved in Rees’ formulation are high:
…by admitting that there is a ‘natural’ division between women and men, we naturalize history, we assume that men and women have always existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible.
Monique Wittig One is Not Born a Woman (1980)
When you read the full quote Rees haphazardly excavates from The German Ideology to reach this conclusion, the tenor is somewhat different:
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydrographical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men. [Emphasis added]
Marx talks of our physical organisation; Rees talks of our physical nature in abstraction. Marx talks of our relation to nature; Rees talks of our emanation from it. Marx highlights the capacity of human labour to modify nature, Rees prefers to view nature as everlasting. In a debate where the battle lines are so often drawn around how changeless nature is or isn’t, this is a particularly pernicious and dishonest manoeuvre.
If clarity is what you’re after, reader, let’s return to Capital Vol 1. Here Marx makes the lucid case for an “exclusively human” capacity that differs from the “primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal” - the same primitive forms of labour that underpin Rees’ argument:
By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. [Emphasis added]
Marx’s theory of what makes us human fundamentally differs from Charles Darwin’s gradualism; classical theories like Plato’s idealism, or Aristotle’s teleology; and enlightenment theories of rationalism. It is a social theory of being: the natural world, and our relationship to it, is not fixed but relational.
In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx writes:
…the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.
This makes sense of how something that can at times feel so embodied, rooted, and natural - what it means to be a woman in the world - is so changeable, and contradictory, throughout time and history. Virgin verses whore. Witch verses wife. Native verses civilized. Ma’am vs mammy. Sometimes these contradictions developed sharply and rapidly: like the transition from 1940s war-ready woman worker, to the obedient service of the 1950s housewife. Sometimes the shift was more gradual: such as the transition from chastity to sexual freedom. In all cases at the heart of what defines womanhood is the struggle between those with power and wealth, and those without; a constant, dialectical relationship between the human, and the world.
Marxists should be using Marx’s tools to explain, and navigate through, the current conjuncture. There is much theoretical work to be done on the connection between a deepening capitalist crisis, and reconfigurations of global power; restrictions on immigration as a method to socially reproduce the Western working class, and the wildfire-like spread of xenophobia; and a return to the nuclear family, resurgence of gender essentialism and transphobia, and the backlash against abortion.
Instead we get John Rees: chirpily settling for a bastardisation of Marx’s tools so he can shake a disapproving finger at some of the most vulnerable people in society.
A Clarification
Marxist feminists didn’t need John Rees to explain that the historic control and coercion of sexual reproduction underpins women’s oppression. Social Reproduction Theory provides a rich and generative theory of the day-to-day reproduction of existing workers, the reproduction of their capacity to work, and the generational reproduction of the working class as a whole. As well as building on the foundational tools of Marx and Engels, it sharpens the work of Marxist-influenced feminists - such as Simone de Beauvoir - by deepening our understanding of the social construction of gender in relation to the reproduction of capitalist social relations.
Between materialist feminisms and Social Reproduction Theory there is a lively body of critique that probes that critical question Marx raises: how are we physically organised? Why is capitalism so heavily invested in strictly demarcating the roles of men and women? What function does this play in the reproduction of the working class? How does this manufacture consent to oppressive social structures? What does this mystify about the structure of capitalism? Marxism, properly applied to feminism and the question of women’s oppression, problematises the very notion of gender.
But Marxism also troubles the notion of biological sex - not as a denial of human bodily capacities, but as an inquiry into why we classify and organise ourselves socially according to those bodily capacities. Remember what Marx notes in The German Ideology:
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals. [Emphasis added]
Why are we so attached to grouping and designating human bodies into male and female in a way we don’t do for other human capacities, or body parts? What makes sex classification socially, politically, and economically salient? How do linguistic categories become reified as types of people, and social structures? Why do our bodies need to be sexually visible and intelligible, to whom, and to what end? How does biological essentialism masquerade so successfully as social and political truth? These are useful questions Marxists should be asking. Nature doesn’t care for our words: in many ways it resists our desire for order, classification, and neatly boxed up taxonomies. But we care about categorisation, and so does capitalism - why?
A Symbiosis
Marx’s theory of social being is the springboard for his theory of alienation. What makes us different to amoeba - which also eat, rest, and reproduce - is our ability to purposefully transform nature. This, Marx argues, is the fundamental mechanism of self and collective actualisation. Under capitalism our labour is not our own: work is not an expression of our creative, conscious activity. It is compelled externally, while we are rinsed of what we produce, leaving us as cogs in a someone else’s machine: dehumanised and alienated from our true human potential.
But the point of production isn’t the only site of compelled labour. Socially reproductive labour is compelled, too. While there isn’t a line manager or foreman (although too often there is a patriarch at home), there is a colossal ideological machine that uses everything from social norms and expectations, punishments for transgressions, and spatial and architectural design to police, coerce, and gender our socially reproductive labour.
Gender - that is, the diktats that structure our socially reproductive labour - is alienated labour under capitalism: trapping and ensnaring how we relate to ourselves, and each other. Marx’s theory of alienation, expanded into the sphere of social reproduction, is a spirited case for freedom, for subjectivity: it is a polemic against the grip capitalist collectivity has over the classed and gendered individual.
The fight against women’s oppression is the fight for trans liberation. Both movements are fundamentally invested in resisting the violent sorting of human beings into rigid categories. These are not parallel - or worse, conflicting - struggles: they are one and the same. Any Marxist who opposes exploitation and alienation but turns their back on gender rebels - those who refuse to labour according to capitalism’s script - needs to go back to basics. And fast, as the world crumbles beneath us. To stand with the working class, all the working class, means standing with the undesired and maligned: those who refuse to be productive and obedient. Anything less is complicity. Anything less certainly isn’t Marxism.
Thank you for laying out this rebuttal so clearly and concretely!
This was wonderful