Three

Theories that approach materialism as a matter of language, as discourse, base their argument on the assumption that discourse/textuality have an opacity and density of their own, a physicality, which makes language "mean" not simply by the "intention" of the author and speaker or by her conscious "control" but by its own autonomous and immanent laws of signification. This understanding of "materialism" is transhistorical: it refers mostly to the material in the sense that I have already described as inert matter, "medium" or "thingness" and is, in short, a form of "matterism" rather than materialism. Or as Marx says in his "Theses on Feuerbach," "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism" — and we can add poststructuralist materialism to the list — "is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice" (The German Ideology I 21). And "human sensuous activity" is above all, for Marx, labour: the way people "produce their means of subsistence" and thus "indirectly produce their actual material life" (The German Ideology, 42).

It is, then, especially surprising to see a neo-socialist-feminist like Michele Barrett define materialism in Marxist thought as "the doctrine seeing consciousness as dependent on matter" without realising that "matter" in Marxism is not inert mass but the praxis of tabor and the contradictions and class conflict.,; in which it is always involved. Barrett goes on to pose the poststructuralist debate over materialism as one between "words and things," "matter" and "meaning' ("Words and Things" 202, 201). However, "words and things," to use her terms, are not finished a-historical entities: they are the product of the social relations of production. To pose the question the way Barrett does is to erase the dialectical projector Marxism and to occlude the structure of conflicts in capitalism. Historical materialism is an explanation of these conflicts. Barrett's misreading is symptomatic of a more serious problem over the issue of materialism within Marxist and socialist feminism. This is fundamentally the problem of the place of the relations of production in feminist theory and political practice. It is the question of whether feminist knowledge should give priority to the way people "produce their means of subsistence" (labour) — to the material reality and historical struggles of the relations of production — or whether, as Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell argue, "the confrontation between twentieth-century Marxism and feminist thought requires nothing less than a paradigm shift ... the 'displacement of the paradigm of production"' (Feminism as Critique 1). This is not simply a debate among materialist feminists. The "displacement of the paradigm of production" by a majority of postmodern, Anglo-American neo-socialist feminists has significantly contributed to the occlusion of the economic and suppression of the problem of exploitation in most other feminist theories and consequently in contemporary social theory in general. It has produced a ludic or post-al socialist feminism without Marxism, turning it into a general left-liberalism, and has participated in the ludic substitution of a discursive politics of individual, libidinal liberation for a revolutionary politics of collective socioeconomic transformation.

Why should this displacement matter? The erasure of Marxism from feminism and (ludic) postmodern knowledges has become so pervasive that the importance of these issues has been largely suppressed, and the question itself can no longer even be asked without requiring extensive explanation. It matters because, as Marx and Engels say, "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (The Communist Manifesto 75), and there can be no "free development" unless the fundamental needs of each person are met: unless production fulfils needs instead of making profits (Marx, The Gotha Program 10). Making profits, in short, is the denial of the needs of the many and the legitimisation of the desires of the few. As a revolutionary (not a post-al) socialist feminist, Nellie Wong argues,

Without overthrowing the economic system of capitalism, as socialists and communists organise to do, we cannot liberate women and everybody else who is also oppressed.

Socialist feminism is our bridge to freedom.... Feminism, the struggle for women's equal rights, is inseparable from socialism.... (Socialist Feminism, 290).

A revolutionary socialist feminism is based on historical materialism. It insists that the "material" is fundamentally tied to the economic sphere and to the relations of production, which have a historically necessary connection to all other social/cultural relations. The "material," in other words, contrary to ludic theory does not simply exist autonomously as a resisting mass, side by side with autonomous discourse. Materialism, as Engels puts it, means that "the degree of economic development," in a society forms "the foundation upon which the state institutions ... the art and even the religious ideas ... have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained instead of vice versa ('The Funeral of Kari Marx" 39). It is — to repeat what is so violently erased in idealist theory — therefore, not "the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 21). In short, Marx argues that "the nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production" — "both with what they produce and with how they produce" (The German Ideology 42).

For a red feminism this means that issues about the "nature of individuals" — gender, sexuality, pleasure, desire, needs — cannot be separated from the conditions producing individuals: not just the discursive and ideological conditions but most important the material conditions, the relations of production, which shape discourses and ideologies. Thus the struggle to end the exploitation and oppression of all women, and in particular of people of colour, lesbians and gays, within the metropole as well as the periphery, is not simply a matter of discursive or semiotic liberation or a question of the resisting "matter of the body," but a global social relation: it thus requires the transformation of the material conditions — the relations of production — producing these forms of oppression.

Historical materialism thus means the primacy of women's and men's productive practices — their labour processes — in the articulation and development of human history and in the construction of their own subjectivities. As Marx argues in Capital, through labour the subject "acts upon" external nature and changes it and in this way the labourer simultaneously changes her/his own nature (v. 1, 283). Such a view of materialism also understands 'reality" to be a historically objective process: reality exists outside the consciousness of humans — ideas do not have an autonomous existence and thus reality is not merely a matter of desire of the body, or the operation of language (or, on the other hand, of the "thingness" of things). This does not mean that reality, as we have access to it, as we make sense of it, is not mediated by signifying practices. But the empirical fact that reality is mediated by language in no way means, as Engels and others have argued, that it is produced by language. Social relations and practices are, in other words, prior to signification and are objective. The subjugation of women, then, is an objective historical reality: it is not simply a matter of representation by self-legitimating discourses. The extraction of surplus labour is an objective social reality in class societies and all social difference are produced by it, whether directly or through various mediations. Transformative politics depends on such a view of reality since if there is no objective reality there will be little ground on which to act in order to change existing social relations. Transformative politics, in other words, does not simply "redescribe" the existing social world through different discourses as does ludic politics (e.g., see Rorty, Contingency 44-69), but rather acts to change the "real" social, economic — the material conditions of the relations of production exploiting women and determining our lives.

Theories that approach materialism as a matter of language, as discourse, base their argument on the assumption that discourse/textuality have an opacity and density of their own, a physicality, which makes language "mean" not simply by the "intention" of the author and speaker or by her conscious "control" but by its own autonomous and immanent laws of signification. This understanding of "materialism" is transhistorical: it refers mostly to the material in the sense that I have already described as inert matter, "medium" or "thingness" and is, in short, a form of "matterism" rather than materialism. Or as Marx says in his "Theses on Feuerbach," "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism" — and we can add poststructuralist materialism to the list — "is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice" (The German Ideology I 21). And "human sensuous activity" is above all, for Marx, labour: the way people "produce their means of subsistence" and thus "indirectly produce their actual material life" (The German Ideology, 42).

It is, then, especially surprising to see a neo-socialist-feminist like Michele Barrett define materialism in Marxist thought as "the doctrine seeing consciousness as dependent on matter" without realising that "matter" in Marxism is not inert mass but the praxis of tabor and the contradictions and class conflict.,; in which it is always involved. Barrett goes on to pose the poststructuralist debate over materialism as one between "words and things," "matter" and "meaning' ("Words and Things" 202, 201). However, "words and things," to use her terms, are not finished a-historical entities: they are the product of the social relations of production. To pose the question the way Barrett does is to erase the dialectical projector Marxism and to occlude the structure of conflicts in capitalism. Historical materialism is an explanation of these conflicts. Barrett's misreading is symptomatic of a more serious problem over the issue of materialism within Marxist and socialist feminism. This is fundamentally the problem of the place of the relations of production in feminist theory and political practice. It is the question of whether feminist knowledge should give priority to the way people "produce their means of subsistence" (labour) — to the material reality and historical struggles of the relations of production — or whether, as Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell argue, "the confrontation between twentieth-century Marxism and feminist thought requires nothing less than a paradigm shift ... the 'displacement of the paradigm of production"' (Feminism as Critique 1). This is not simply a debate among materialist feminists. The "displacement of the paradigm of production" by a majority of postmodern, Anglo-American neo-socialist feminists has significantly contributed to the occlusion of the economic and suppression of the problem of exploitation in most other feminist theories and consequently in contemporary social theory in general. It has produced a ludic or post-al socialist feminism without Marxism, turning it into a general left-liberalism, and has participated in the ludic substitution of a discursive politics of individual, libidinal liberation for a revolutionary politics of collective socioeconomic transformation.

Why should this displacement matter? The erasure of Marxism from feminism and (ludic) postmodern knowledges has become so pervasive that the importance of these issues has been largely suppressed, and the question itself can no longer even be asked without requiring extensive explanation. It matters because, as Marx and Engels say, "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (The Communist Manifesto 75), and there can be no "free development" unless the fundamental needs of each person are met: unless production fulfils needs instead of making profits (Marx, The Gotha Program 10). Making profits, in short, is the denial of the needs of the many and the legitimisation of the desires of the few. As a revolutionary (not a post-al) socialist feminist, Nellie Wong argues,

Without overthrowing the economic system of capitalism, as socialists and communists organise to do, we cannot liberate women and everybody else who is also oppressed.

Socialist feminism is our bridge to freedom.... Feminism, the struggle for women's equal rights, is inseparable from socialism.... (Socialist Feminism, 290).

A revolutionary socialist feminism is based on historical materialism. It insists that the "material" is fundamentally tied to the economic sphere and to the relations of production, which have a historically necessary connection to all other social/cultural relations. The "material," in other words, contrary to ludic theory does not simply exist autonomously as a resisting mass, side by side with autonomous discourse. Materialism, as Engels puts it, means that "the degree of economic development," in a society forms "the foundation upon which the state institutions ... the art and even the religious ideas ... have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained instead of vice versa ('The Funeral of Kari Marx" 39). It is — to repeat what is so violently erased in idealist theory — therefore, not "the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 21). In short, Marx argues that "the nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production" — "both with what they produce and with how they produce" (The German Ideology 42).

For a red feminism this means that issues about the "nature of individuals" — gender, sexuality, pleasure, desire, needs — cannot be separated from the conditions producing individuals: not just the discursive and ideological conditions but most important the material conditions, the relations of production, which shape discourses and ideologies. Thus the struggle to end the exploitation and oppression of all women, and in particular of people of colour, lesbians and gays, within the metropole as well as the periphery, is not simply a matter of discursive or semiotic liberation or a question of the resisting "matter of the body," but a global social relation: it thus requires the transformation of the material conditions — the relations of production — producing these forms of oppression.

Historical materialism thus means the primacy of women's and men's productive practices — their labour processes — in the articulation and development of human history and in the construction of their own subjectivities. As Marx argues in Capital, through labour the subject "acts upon" external nature and changes it and in this way the labourer simultaneously changes her/his own nature (v. 1, 283). Such a view of materialism also understands 'reality" to be a historically objective process: reality exists outside the consciousness of humans — ideas do not have an autonomous existence and thus reality is not merely a matter of desire of the body, or the operation of language (or, on the other hand, of the "thingness" of things). This does not mean that reality, as we have access to it, as we make sense of it, is not mediated by signifying practices. But the empirical fact that reality is mediated by language in no way means, as Engels and others have argued, that it is produced by language. Social relations and practices are, in other words, prior to signification and are objective. The subjugation of women, then, is an objective historical reality: it is not simply a matter of representation by self-legitimating discourses. The extraction of surplus labour is an objective social reality in class societies and all social difference are produced by it, whether directly or through various mediations. Transformative politics depends on such a view of reality since if there is no objective reality there will be little ground on which to act in order to change existing social relations. Transformative politics, in other words, does not simply "redescribe" the existing social world through different discourses as does ludic politics (e.g., see Rorty, Contingency 44-69), but rather acts to change the "real" social, economic — the material conditions of the relations of production exploiting women and determining our lives.