Orthodox Marxism reduces woman’s oppression to economic capacity and class

Evidence

Thus woman’s fate is intimately bound to the fate of socialism as seen also in Bebel’s vast work on women. “Women and the proletariat,” he writes, “are both oppressed.” And both must be set free by the same economic development resulting from the upheaval caused by the invention of machines. The problem of woman can be reduced to that of her capacity for work. Powerful when technology matched her possibilities, dethroned when she became incapable of benefiting from them, she finds again equality with man in the modern world. Resistance put up by the old capitalist paternalism prevents this equality from being concretely achieved: it will be achieved the day this resistance is broken down. It already has broken down in the U.S.S.R., Soviet propaganda affirms. And when socialist society is realized throughout the whole world, there will no longer be men or women, but only workers, equal among themselves. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 144

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the reductionism Beauvoir will challenge — her own existentialist account insists on situation beyond economics. — connects to: Historical materialism cannot explain woman’s oppression because it reduces man to the economic abstraction — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 145; Marxism is not economic reductionism and requires attending to ideas in their own terms; Soviet women gained economic equality yet remained bound to domestic roles — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 286 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Flag the utopian premise that socialism erases gender difference entirely; Beauvoir likely resists this.

Broader Connections

• Historical materialism cannot explain woman’s oppression because it reduces man to the economic abstraction #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 145
• Marxism is not economic reductionism and requires attending to ideas in their own terms #contradicts (0.80)