Marxism is an approach to the study of society (also called ‘historical materialism’) in which analysis of the totality of social relations of production and reproduction is central. At the same time Marxism is a political movement that aims at transforming society so as to eliminate all exploitation and oppression through the conscious, self-organised activity of the working class in alliance with other oppressed groups. Its founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, first approached the issue of gender by way of the concept of the ‘natural division of labour existing in the family’, which they saw as the starting point in the development of property (Marx and Engels 1976:33). Later Marxists have developed their analysis of masculine identities and behaviour in interaction with other paradigms: psychoanalysis, feminism and gay liberation.
The Marxist emphasis on the agency of oppressed people has particular implications for the study of men and masculinities. Attitudes towards masculinity in classical Marxism, with its predominant focus on class, must often be read between the lines in discussions of workers, whom early Marxists tended to view implicitly as male. More recently Marxist feminists have considered men mainly as oppressors of women, who to a lesser extent themselves suffer from this oppression and can contribute to ending it. They also analyse men through the lenses of homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender and transsexuality; gay, bisexual and transgendered men are seen to varying degrees as beneficiaries of sexism yet also as women’s allies in the struggle against it.
All this helps explain why Marxists stress the importance of analysing society as a complexly structured, contradictory whole. It means that ‘intersectionality’, the ways in which identities and power relations based on class, gender, race and ethnicity, disability, religion and other identities overlap and interact (Brenner 2000), is crucial to a Marxist analysis of masculinities. Marxism cannot have a ‘men’s theory’ parallel to and separate from ‘women’s theory’, or oppose a materialism based on reproduction to one based on production (cf. Hearn 1987). A Marxist politics of masculinity is necessarily a rainbow politics: workingclass, feminist and sexually liberating.
Engels
While several of Marx and Engels’s works contain scattered comments on how capitalism distorts relations between men and women, the classical Marxist reference on gender is Engels’s 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The book emphasises that the development of social institutions is conditioned not only by relations of production but also by relations of reproduction in the family—including physical reproduction of human beings, the ideological reproduction required for children to become workers, and the nurturance workers need to keep on working. Drawing on the anthropology of his time (critically re-examined later by Marxist feminist anthropologists, e.g. Coontz and Henderson 1986), Engels describes the replacement of a supposed original matrilinealism by a still existing patrilinealism, an event he describes as ‘one of the most decisive [revolutions] ever experienced by mankind … the world-historic defeat ofthefemale sex’ (Engels 1972:67–8). While economic interest still prevails in bourgeois family life, he argues, mutual affection is the main factor in relations between working-class men and women. Failing to question the sexual division of labour in the home, Engels sees women’s full integration into the waged labour force and the elimination of capitalism as preconditions for fully free and equal relations between men and women.
Engels’s analysis went largely unchallenged and underdeveloped during the period of the Second International (1889–1914). During the 1917 Russian Revolution Marxist ideas about women’s emancipation were initially put into practice to a limited extent and further radicalised. Alexandra Kollontai, the first Bolshevik commissar for social affairs, argued (1977) in a series of articles between 1919 and 1923 that mothers’ specific responsibilities included giving birth, breastfeeding and nothing more—not even changing nappies, washing the baby or rocking the cradle. Men can share equally in children’s education, she says, as well as take part in collective cleaning teams. Kollontai’s influence declined rapidly, and most attempts to collectivise domestic labour were abandoned after early 1921. Stalinism, while increasing women’s participation in waged labour, involved in most respects a return to a more traditional conception of masculinity, a pattern characteristic of later Communist regimes as well.
Bolsheviks’ initial radicalism on gender issues did stimulate some innovative thinking, however, first in early Communist parties and later among dissident Marxists. The Sex-Pol movement sponsored by the mass Communist Party in pre-Nazi Germany was particularly noteworthy. Its leading figure, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, warned that a sense of family responsibility, all-male clubs, sports, militarism and particularly bourgeois sexual morality and men’s power over their wives and children helped depoliticise men (Reich 1972). But he had an orthodox Freudian conception of healthy male sexuality as active and dominant, and was less nuanced than Freud in seeing homosexuality as pathological. The Frankfurt School’s synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism was in some ways more radical, particularly Herbert Marcuse’s portrayal of a paternal authority diffused throughout society, his plea for a reconciliation of’man’ and ‘nature’, and his championing of play and ‘polymorphous perversity’ (Marcuse 1966).
Feminism
The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, more than anything else, has stimulated Marxists to integrate gender and reproduction into their analysis, however incomplete and unhappy the marriage of Marxism and feminism has remained. Socialist feminists have in particular gone beyond earlier Marxist—Freudian accounts of male personality formation. They have analysed marriage’s positive effect on men’s mental health and negative effect on women’s, and how mothering and later distancing stimulate boys’ thirst for achievement and hunger for authority (Chodorow 1979).
Socialist feminists have produced many studies of the economics of gender relations, based on the premise that ‘the working class has two sexes’. They have described the still profound though shifting gender segmentation of the global labour force and its role in keeping men’s wages higher than women’s. They have also illuminated historical processes of economic restructuring, as in the industrial revolution—when men’s craft labour (often organised in exclusively male guilds) was often devalued by capitalists employing women and children at low wages in factories—and later when male workers in developed countries helped push women out of the industrial work force as they laid claim to a ‘family wage’. African—American women even appealed to this ideology to claim higher wages for their husbands (Mullings 1997). The result was a working-class paternalism in which ‘the man must be the sole provider for the family, pass on his trade to his son and keep a stern eye on his apprentice’ (Rowbotham 1979:123). Waged work, particularly work seen as ‘conquest of nature’, has been key to ideas of masculinity (Hearn 1987).
Now, under neoliberal globalisation, gender is again being used for purposes of economic restructuring. A crisis of masculinity arose as men were laid off from their jobs in steel plants, left unemployed and feeling useless at home, and then perhaps worked for a lower wage at McDonald’s while their wives often kept primary responsibility for home and children and became primary breadwinners as well. Socialist feminists have analysed how capitalists deploy masculine imagery and competitiveness to raise levels of productivity among male workers, in dependent as well as developed countries.
Male bonding through drinking, hunting and sports can be a specifically working-class male response to the perceived stifling constraints of both work and home. This workingclass masculinity contrasts with other masculine styles characteristic of owning/governing and managerial/professional classes, in which men tend to value wives and families more as career assets. Eroticisms of male power and wealth come into competition with an eroticism of male strength, and inter-male rivalry intersects with class and racial conflict. This rivalry spurs men to consume more products in the ‘masculinity market’ (Burstyn 1999). Yet these patterns are changing as profits are increasingly drawn less from manufacturing and more from reproductive labour, increasingly done by men as well as women, in restaurants, shops, hospitals and schools (Brown 1981). The growth of the male market for perfumes and cosmetics may reflect class-linked shifts in masculinities, as well as advancing consumerism, feminism and increased attention to female and gay male desire.
Families
Shifts in the economy have an impact on changing families. Marxist feminists have intervened cogently in debates between conservatives claiming to defend the ‘traditional’ family and feminists and gays seeking to push on with their emancipation. They have analysed the phenomenon of men fleeing their marriages and deserting their children, as children have changed from an asset that men wish to control to a burden that men wish to avoid. The paradoxical result, despite studies showing that men increasingly draw gratification from family life, is a system of male domination in which fathers are more often absent, a system once condescendingly identified with the ‘black family’ but now more widespread. The exceptional Swedish model, which increased fathers’ role in childcare through parental leave and other benefits, is being eroded by neoliberal austerity—leaving aside questions like mothers’ resistance to fathering and whether more fathering can in some ways reinforce paternal power (Hearn 1987).
In examining male domestic violence, socialist feminists combine a feminist understanding of the role of violence in perpetuating male privilege with an understanding of the helplessness and pent-up aggression that workingclass male batterers and battered women sometimes share.
Abandoning the insistence of earlier Marxists that capitalism alone is responsible for women’s oppression, socialist feminists have concluded that working-class men too (contrary to their own long-term best interests, but in keeping with their immediate interests) help perpetuate women’s inferior position at work and at home. Some have argued, however, that men tend increasingly to defend their superior position less as individuals, by asserting their power over their individual wives at home, and more collectively through the state, professions like medicine and social work, and the market—a change sometimes defined (controversially) as a shift from ‘private’ to ‘public patriarchy’ (Brown 1981). Working-class men in particular may pay a high psychological and practical toll in the process, which joins male power to male pain. The shift to a more diffuse system of male domination makes men’s attractiveness, once of little concern to married working-class men, more important, for example.
Socialist feminist challenges to male chauvinism caused a wave of debate and upheaval in Marxist organisations beginning in the late 1970s. Women have battled against rejection of women’s caucuses as ‘anti-Leninist’, but also against persistent, subtler mechanisms that marginalise women. In the words of one wickedly astute observation, leaders of Leninist groups tend to look ‘over your head when they talk to you’, either ‘taking a long objective view’ or ‘looking for more prestigious “contacts” in the shape of a shop steward or so’ (Rowbotham 1979:130). Black socialist feminists have challenged black nationalist insistence on male leadership in black freedom struggles (Mullings 1997), although engagement in a common struggle sometimes gives women a more positive view of men as allies.
Sexuality
Marxist feminist study of male sexuality can be divided into analyses of male heterosexuality, which have mostly considered its role in limiting women’s reproductive freedom or in rape and other forms of sexual violence, and analyses of gay masculinities. There has been little work as yet on class factors in gay masculinities—studies suggest that gay men are underrepresented both among blue-collar workers and in top management—although black gay men have expressed alienation from the masculinities prevalent among white gay men. Marxists have paid some attention to the development of gay ‘hypermasculinities’ (Burstyn 1999) and some have even defined male homosexuality as such as a fetishisation of maleness.
But Marxist theorists of gay liberation have been more inclined to portray modern gay male identity as a challenge to the sex/gender system and male power and as a symptom of their breakdown, even going so far as to call for the total abolition of gender, seen as linked to growing threats of ecocide and warfare (Fernbach 1981). Analysing the latent homoeroticism in male bonding among straight men and the misogyny implicit in their homophobia, Marxist gays have insisted on the radical potential of open gay and gender-bending behaviour: ‘There is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day, than there is from wearing a suit for life’ (Mieli 1980:193). Studies of male homosexuality in dependent countries, particularly since the late 1990s, have analysed sexual relationships—particularly among workingclass and poor men—between men who have sex with men and transgendered people as class-linked forms of resistance to a Western, consumerist, gender-conformist gay model (Drucker 2000).
Overall Marxist approaches to male sexuality are broadly compatible with widely accepted social constructionist approaches but tend to reject queer theory’s view of sexuality as performance and instead to stress material, social, ideological and psychological factors that contribute to shaping sexuality. Unfortunately the relative eclipse of Marxism since the 1980s has held back a potentially fruitful dialogue between Marxist feminists and queer theorists.
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