Marx’s ethical presuppositions rest on inadequate evidence about women’s labor and childbirth.

Evidence

In order not simply to make an exception to man’s legal right, or to add a footnote from a feminist perspective to the Marxist text, we must engage and correct the theory of production and alienation upon which the Marxist text is based and with which it functions. As I suggested above, much Marxist feminism works on an analogy with use-value, exchangevalue, and surplus-value relationships. Marx’s own writings on women and children seek to alleviate their condition in terms of a desexualized labor force. If there were the kind of rewriting that I am proposing, it would be harder to sketch out the rules of economy and social ethics; in fact, one would see that in Marx there is a moment of major transgression where rules for humanity and criticism of societies are based on inadequate evidence. Marx’s texts, including Capital, presuppose an ethical theory: alienation of labor must be undone because it undermines the agency of the subject in his work and his property. I would like to suggest that if the nature and history of alienation, labor, and the production of property are reexamined in terms of women’s work and childbirth, it can lead us to a reading of Marx beyond Marx. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 471

Categorization

• XREF: Her ‘reading of Marx beyond Marx’ is methodologically the same move as reading a theory against itself — parallels how strategic essentialism claims to use essentialism against essentialism.