Introduction
I celebrate Frigga Haug’s Thirteen Theses on Marxism Feminism (Haug 2015), which she regards as the unfinished product of a collective process. This Special Issue in Capital & Class testifies to the inspirational nature of the theses and the ideas they elicit for debate, enabling us to seek new answers to old questions and pose new ones. In thesis 7, Haug points to the limitations of traditional Marxism for Marxist Feminism, specifically for considering the working class and the labour movement as the subject of revolutionary transformation. Traditional Marxism, writes Haug, ‘is neither receptive to the new feminist questions nor those of ecology. Therefore, we must keep working on it . . . Marx’s legacy requires a continuous investigation’ (Haug 2015; see D’Atri 2024).
In this intervention, I oblige by addressing a silence in Haug’s theses: the ‘internal colonialism’ within feminism. By internal colonialism, I mean the discrimination and the ‘condition of superiority that Euro-Western feminism assumes towards South American [and other] feminisms’ (Guzmán Useche & Triana Moreno 2019: 23; Paredes 2013) from the Global South. However, this internal colonialism is not only from the North to the South but exists among feminists in the South too, where some sectors of the latter follow feminist liberal agendas, thus ‘reproducing the othering against women of colour and indigenous women’ (Espinosa Miñoso 2009: 4; see Castro Varela and Dhawan 2024). The quietness implicitly disregards the emergence, growth and/or strengthening of diverse feminisms, that is, decolonial (Curiel 2009; Curiel et al. 2016; Icaza Garza 2021; Vergès 2021), communitarian (Cabnal 2010), indigenous (Hernández Castillo 2010) and Buen Vivir feminisms (Varea & Zaragozin 2017). It also reveals a ‘colonial difference’ (Anzaldúa 1987) between White and non-White women as a political and epistemological problem that is weakening feminism. This occurs in times of the expansion ‘environmental’ struggles against extractivism and the intensification of the struggles against violence against women, led by indigenous women, many of whom are of African descent and Latin American. The Zapatista Women are an example of the latter. The Zapatista’s ‘Declaration for Life’ (EZLN 2020) was inspired in the defence of life proposed by Zapatista women at their First International Gathering of Women Who Struggle, in Chiapas, Mexico, 2018 (Gies 2018). It brought together 7,000 women of all ages, ethnicities and beliefs to discuss feminism. They consider themselves feminists in a way for they distance themselves from ideological, strategic and political divisions of the feminist movement. Feminism for them ‘is practical and comes from women’s experience’ (Gies 2018). At the gathering, one of the participants stated that ‘it is not necessary to call yourself feminist to have an exceptional capacity to organize . . . Sometimes ideological fractures have not allowed us to manage to listen’ (sic)(participant, cited in Gies 2018). The Second International Encounter of Women who Struggle (27–29 December 2019) (EZLN 2019) aimed to focused on the violence against women only. The invitation in the form of a ‘Letter to Women in Struggle Around the World’ the Zapatista Women (Zapatista Women 2019) highlighted that the possibility of life on the planet depended on the real eradication of this violence which, rather than being an anomaly, ‘pertains to “their” capitalist, colonial and patriarchal society’. The question what feminism can learn ‘from these emancipatory struggles (Motta and Seppäla 2016: 7) like the Zapatista women is yet to be answered.
The presence of ‘racialised hierarchies’ (Lugones 2003) within the feminist movement is not new. In Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks explains that ‘in those days, White women who were unwilling to face the reality of racism and racial difference accused us of traitors by introducing race. Wrongly they saw us deflecting away from gender’ (hooks 2000: 57). Wekker’s (2016) term ‘white innocence’ highlights the trouble of White women to relate to women from the South, indigenous and women of colour. Historical research into the ‘similarities’ in terms of the necessity to control, subjugate, shape and classify, in both Europe and the Americas (Federici 2018; Mies 1998), and in new forms of global solidarity practices (Ventura Alfaro 2022) reflected in the Women strike of 2017 and 2018 (Ni Una Menos 2018), where the strike is outlined as ‘a tool that we reinvent to dismantle the scheme of violence against us . . . to investigate and activate resistances and disobediences, the production of alternate forms of life and rebellious bodies’ (Ni Una Menos 2018). However, in everyday practice, the coloniality of power (Quijano 2008), of knowledge and being (Maldonado & Torres 2007) and of gender (Lugones 2008; Radcliffe 2015) persists ubiquitously in the postcolonial world, permeating society and feminism today. These terms explain colonial practices that penetrate social, cultural, economic and political interactions and relations that exist between countries and people all intertwined by class and gender discriminations. Let us face it: bel hooks’ those days are not over.
In this intervention, I posit that the reason why traditional Marxism is inadequate for Marxism-Feminism is not just because it posits that the working class as the subject of radical transformation leaving out feminists and ecological struggles (Haug, thesis 8) but because it is Eurocentric and, therefore, clenches onto a narrow conceptual interpretation of Marx’s work, value, subjectivity and temporality. I propose to articulate a decolonising Marxism that challenges Eurocentric/Western traditional Marxism and Western Marxist feminism by recuperating Marxism as a ‘philosophy of liberation’ (see Goikoetxea 2024; Monzó 2019; also, Anderson 2016; Anderson et al 2021; Brown 2013; Dunayevskaya 2000 (1958); Kitonga 2021). A decolonising Marxism is a radical praxis that de(con)structs colonial, class and gender classifications by joining them in an all-encompassing open critique. A decolonising Marxism draws on ‘late Marx’ (Shanin 1983), open Marxism and recent important but neglected Marxist and feminist theoretical developments that are rescuing Marxism from Eurocentric interpretations. Following Clarke, we must not fall for a raw ‘application’ of Marx’s categories without confronting them with the ‘everyday experience of contemporary capitalisms, and especially with the lessons learned through struggles against capital in all its forms’ (Clarke 1979: 6). Rather than being ‘reductionist’, that is, ‘a view that collapses the significant differences between world-historical class analysis’ (Moore 2022), this approach opens a space for a discussion of capitalism towards the enhancement of the feminist struggle. In the following, I discuss four tenets of a decolonising Marxism and discuss their implications for Marxism-Feminism, mainly assisting feminism in articulating an anti-racist and anti-liberal understanding of diversity against internal colonialism. I then propose a potential thesis 14 on Marxism-Feminism.
Value theory, coloniality and gender
Let us start with value theory. To situate women’s social reproduction activities into the class domain, recent versions of the social reproduction theory (SRT) argue for the unity between production and social reproduction as two sides of the same coin, the separation of which is historically produced (Bhattacharya 2015). This is a constructive aspect of the unitary SRT: with the broader understanding of ‘work’ as existing in both domains – production and social reproduction – and its understanding of capitalism as a totality, the struggles around social reproduction (food, housing, water, shelter), which addresses the ‘conditions of possibility of labor-power’ (Ferguson & McNally 2015), are class struggles without which capitalist work would not exist. But the significant downside in SRT is that it deploys a ‘labour’ theory of value (De’Ath 2018; Lange 2021) arguing for the point of production as the ‘spaces for the production of value’ and the household ‘as the spaces for reproduction of labor power’ (Bhattacharya 2015). Why is this a problem?
To start, SRT reproduces traditional Marxism’s misleading labour theory of value. Marx never and nowhere used the term ‘labour theory of value’ (Harvey 2018; Lotz 2015; Nail 2020). The labour theory of value belongs to Ricardo who had no concept of abstraction to explain capitalism as Marx did in Capital. Ricardian theory of value posits that value is represented by the amount of labour time directly embodied in the commodity. As Lange suggests, SRT uses ‘bourgeois theoretical framework of use-value centred (non-monetary) social reproduction, similar to that of David Ricardo, which fails to grasp the specific character of capitalist subsumption’ (Lange 2021: 39). The political implications of the labour theory of value is that with the embodied labour argument deceives us into regarding ‘the working class as the subject to break from exploitation ‘by plac[ing] demands upon capital via the labour movement to redistribute the wealth work creates and reward and recompense workers for the expanse of value they produce’ (Dinerstein and Pitts 2021: 11; Scholz 2009; see De’Ath, 2018). The ‘conceptual problems in the Marxist tradition’ (Holloway 1995: 157) are the result of the naturalisation of the working class as a trans-historical subject and the insistence on the organisation of the working class’s struggles against capitalist exploitation through trade unions and political parties (Dinerstein 2012: 528; Holloway 2010).
Following Neary, Marx’s investigation into labour was not intended to offer a critique of capital from the perspective of labour [in the identity of the working class], the position adopted by traditional Marxism and SRT. Marx’s critique was ‘an exposition of the very developed totality of relations . . . through a value theory of labour . . . where value is not merely an economic category but is the social substance out of which capitalist society is derived’ (Neary 2012: 163–164; author’s italics).
During his discussion of political economists’ perspectives on capitalist work, Marx returned to the problem of labour and made his ‘most brilliant discovery’ (Najafi 2022: 5) a discovery that has been missed by traditional Marxists whose narrow focus is on exploitation: in capitalist societies, labour exists in a specific historical form as both concrete and abstract. Unlike Ricardo’s value theory, Marx’s value theory of labour (Elson 1979a) captures both the concrete and the abstract qualities of capitalist work, emphasising the importance of the abstract aspect as the dominant form (Elson 1979a: 149). Labour exists in the concrete form of alienated work performed during the labour process and in an abstract and invisible form – abstract labour – a social necessary labour time that is calculated regardless of the form of expenditure of the concrete labours. The former, rather than the latter, constitutes the substance of value. Although both forms of labour, concrete and abstract, are inseparable (Dinerstein and Pitts 2022), Marx ‘de-associated value with concrete labour and connected it to abstract labour, that is, a social abstraction central to value that is mediated in money’ (Dinerstein and Pitts 2021: 8). Marx studied capitalism as a de-humanising expansive global system whose most significant feature is the subordination of the reproduction of human and non-human life to money, the latter attaining a historical specific capitalistic form, representing the ‘abstract power through which social reproduction is subordinated to the power of capital’ (Clarke 1988). However, note that abstract labour should not be equated with immaterial and unmeasurable value because value has always been a determinate social process rather than a measurable thing (Pitts 2017). Abstract labour indicates that ‘the abstraction that validates labour as productive and cooperative comes after the process of production in exchange . . . the ultimate arbitration of value is in the exchange abstraction rather than production’ (Dinerstein and Pitts 2021: 74–75). Contra-traditional Marxism and SRT’s arguments, concrete labour does not produce value at the point of production but anticipates it, for value is expected to be socially validated and appear materially in the form of its monetary expression in exchange or in the form of commodities (Dinerstein and Pitts 2021: 74). Consequently, ‘there can be no a priori determination of value, for not until commodities are exchanged on the market can the products of individual producers satisfy the needs of others’ (Himmelweit & Mohun 1994: 158). Furthermore, in today’s world, the circumstances of production, the introduction of technology, and other matters create a gap ‘between the actual labour time required to produce a commodity and the socially necessary labour time [which] disables producers from controlling their immediate activity’(Najafi 2022: 8). This does not mean that the of exploitation is irrelevant. It means that while our experience is one of exploitation, the pain, suffering and misery concrete labours are abstracted into a measure of time regardless of our experience. Value is a mysterious process that is not completely created at work.
Marx’s value theory ‘provide[s] a basis for showing the link between money relations and labour process relations in the process of exploitation’ (Elson 1979b: 172). Marx’s value theory elucidates how the expansion of value in motion generates an indifference ‘toward any specific kind of labour [which] presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant’ (Marx, Grundrisse: 103). Indifference, writes Cleaver, ‘is not that of the workers, who may have very distinct preferences, but is that of capital’ (Cleaver 2002: 14, authors’ italics). Capital expands by homogenising concrete labours into abstract labour, thus creating a universal abstract time. Abstract labour or the form of existence of labour in capitalism facilitates the capitalist ‘social synthesis’ (Holloway 2010). Existing differences produced by domination and exploitation, in form and content, are synchronised. Being essential for the survival of capital, synchronisation aims at the management of different temporalities in a way that slavery and free labour can exist side by side: They ‘are always re-synchronised through the violence of the state’ (Tomba 2013: 405).
If value is not produced at the point of production, how do we theorise gender discrimination? Scholz’s value dissociation offers an alternative to SRT’s production/social reproduction unitary approach without abandoning Marx’s value theory. To Scholz what matters is not ‘whether housewives produce value or not, or whether production and social reproduction are forms of expression of one reality’ but the fact that ‘value itself must define as less valuable and dissociate domestic labour, the non-conceptual, and everything related to non-identity, the sensuous, affective, and emotional’ (Scholz 2009: 131–132). Scholz’s ‘feminist twist’ to value theory suggests that value has a gender dimension, that is, gender constitutes a pillar in, and it is inherent to, the formation of capitalism. The categories of value and abstract labour are not enough to explain capitalism (Scholz 2009: 127; see Goikoetxea 2024). We need to look at those dimensions of capitalism that are dissociated from the expansion of value: Female-determined reproductive activities are necessarily dissociated from value and abstract labor (Scholz 2009: 127). According to the author, value dissociation is a precondition for the formation of capitalism, the expansion of value and capitalist accumulation: ‘the gendering and subsequent dissociation of an entire range of broadly reproductive activities’ is not as a side effect of capitalism and its value form but a necessity’ (Larsen et al. 2014: xxiv).
Value dissociation can be traced back to the historical time of the devaluation, dissociation, discrimination and annihilation of indigenous people, people of colour, especially female, during the imperialist expansion of the Spanish Kingdom of Castilla and Aragón and the conquest of the Americas since 1492. This violent and brutal process of classification and the damaging actions towards females were central to class formation in both the region and in Europe (Federici 2018). As Nail pertinently argues, ‘Marx’s thesis is that the condition of the social expansion of value is and always has been the prior expulsion of people from their land through devalorization, appropriation, and domination. Without the expulsion of these people there is not expansion of private property and thus, no value’ (Nail 2020: 179).
Indeed, Marx criticised fervently classical political economists’ naturalisation and mystification of primitive accumulation, revealing instead the violent and bloody process of expropriation at stake. Capitalism was racial from start (see Bhattacharya 2018; Robinson 2019; Virdee 2019). Singh suggests that Marx’s consideration of colonialism and slavery permits further thinking ‘about the ongoing development of (. . .) the social reproduction of race as an ascriptive relationship anchored in ongoing violence, dominion and dependency’ (Singh 2016: 33). As the authors of Feminism for the 99% argue, ‘[c]apitalism was born from racist and colonial violence’ (Arruzza Bhathacharrya & Fraser 2019: 40). However, Marx did not address the colonial violence and the ‘primitive’ accumulation as a gender problem.
Lugones’ term coloniality of gender (Lugones 2008) accounts for the ‘invention of gender and the distinction between “women” and “non-human females”’ by the conquerors as a necessary step to the subjugation of indigenous. Like Davis who wrote about the ‘genderless’ feature of slaves in the eyes of their traders (Davis 1981: 4). Inspired by Oyěwùmí’s (1997) approach to gender as a historical construct, Lugones portrays the des-humanisation of females during the period of the Spanish conquest as something much more than the ‘classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender’ (Quijano’s argument), she portraits it as an active dehumanisation and subjectification, that is, ‘the attempt to turn the colonized into less human beings’ (Lugones 2008: 4). Colonised females were not considered women (Lugones 2010). This fact is most evident in the ‘brutal access to people’s bodies by the ‘civilizational mission’ and its ‘unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror (feeding people alive to dogs or making pouches and hats from the vaginas of brutally killed indigenous females)’ (Lugones 2010: 744). In the same vein, Federici’s seminal work Caliban and the Witch (2004) offers an unprecedented historical analysis of the systematic vicious practice of violent control over the female body in both Europe and the new world and the classification of females into witches, women, prostitutes, mothers, slaves, workers and inhuman, also essential to the conquest and further expansion of capital into an imperialist phenomenon. Federici powerfully connects the obliteration of indigenous people with the population crisis and the problem of reproduction. The conquerors dreamt of an infinite labour supply (Federici 2018: 93), and they were confronted with a severe population decline of 75 million in South America and the largest holocaust in human history, with eight million people killed (Dinerstein 2015). The later ‘turned reproduction and population growth into state matters’ (Federici 2018: 97). A ‘war against women’ (Federici 2018: 97) to control the female body was unleashed: the control over procreation and reproduction, witch hunting in Europe and the new World (Federici 2018: 254), subjugation, brutalisation, expropriation of knowledge. The ‘war’ also involved social degradation, demonisation, demoralisation, humiliation, hostility to female wage workers, prostitutes, domestic workers and slaves. All women were controlled and manipulated for the purpose of growth of the population, development of science, political power, economic growth and expansion and male entertainment, services and sexual satisfaction. The was hidden through the establishment of the ‘myth of modernity.’ As Dussel explains, it permitted that the modern (European) civilisation understood and established itself as the ‘most developed, superior, civilization’, [which] obliged it to develop ‘the more primitive, barbarous, underdeveloped, civilizations (Dussel 1993: 75). If the ‘barbarian resisted the civilising redemptive action of the modern and advanced, violence was applied [again]so that the victims became guilty of resisting development, while modernity remained innocent (Dussel 1993: 75). This is still a commonplace in the twenty first century modern world (Dinerstein 2015).
Subsumption and social formation
The second tenet of a decolonising Marxism, against traditional Marxism, addresses the concept of real subsumption. In Capital, Marx explains real subsumption as a process that takes place as the production of relative surplus value took the form of large-scale industry within which workers become part of the machine and their nature is transformed into something other than human. In this process, the concrete material character of labour is no longer recognisable or feasible as an independent form of existence and is completely overwhelmed by capital’s abstract-social dimension. Real subsumption is a qualitative social change from ‘formal subsumption’ by which not only did capital became totalising but the process intrinsically became capitalist. More importantly, it is at this point when the logic of accumulation is considered as evading human control, that the capitalist large-scale industry took over not only human capacities but also the institutions through which human life is dominated (Dinerstein and Neary 2002). To Marx, real subsumption indicates that ‘the entire development of socialized labour . . . in the immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labour’ (Capital, Vol. 1: 1024; author’s italics). As we can see, real subsumption does not mean only the subsumption of labourers in the production process but the subsumption of all social relations under money. To describe this process, early Negri coined the term ‘social factory’ to also consider those who were excluded from the process of production but were subsumed under the law of value (Negri 1984). Workers had become part of ‘the machine’ within the factory, but outside it, those not at work ‘were actively put to work in the circulation and reproduction of capital. [Since capital was now exercising its] ‘endless command over society’ (Cleaver 1992: 116), Negri assumed that total submission of life to capital was now ‘complete’ (cited by Menozzi 2021: 126). However, while real subsumption creates a totality, it cannot be generalised to all societies and to all sectors of the same society, for there are clear differences in the North and the South and within each of them (see Harootunian 2015; Menozzi 2021; Tomba 2017).
In The Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg criticises Marx’s focus on the internal logic of capitalist accumulation by which he disregarded the constant need for capital to expand by conquering, absorbing and destroying non-capitalist economies and territories to survive and reproduce, producing environmental devastation. To Luxemburg, the capitalist global expansion was a necessity (see Dunayevskaya 1991; Hudis 2018: 62–63). The continuing process of external expansion was for Luxemburg, and many others after her, the way in which the North constantly subordinates the South to comply to a destructive [and extractive] world economy (De Angelis 2001). Luxemburg’s critique permits to regard ‘primitive accumulation’ as a capitalist ongoing process ‘of dispossession’ (Harvey 2004), rather than an initial stage in the formation of capitalism. Why is this important for Marxist feminism? Because together with the real subsumption of labour and society in capital, there are formal, partial and exclusion-like forms of subsumption, which have an impact on the formation of radical subjectivity. Like Marx, Bolivian Marxist Zavaleta Mercado (1937–1984) views the law of value as a movement creating a horizon of visibility and marking a historical epoch. While value constitutes an expansive totality, Zavaleta observes the social reality of Latin American countries from the ‘borders of abstract labour’ (Tapia 2016). In those territories where capitalism has been the product of colonial expansion, there has not been a total generalisation of the law of value, and therefore, capital creates ‘blind spots’ that need to be explored to capture the composition of radical subjectivity, such as the formation of the ‘national-popular’ elements of radical subjectivity in Bolivia and other Latin American countries. These types of society combine different forms of subsumption (real, formal and subsumption by exclusion) (Dinerstein 2015), which Zavaleta Mercado (1986) called sociedades abigarradas (motley societies), coining this term to designate those societies where there is a combination of different forms of subsumption under the law of value. One of the most important aspect of the sociedades abigarradas is that they produce a ‘superimposition of several historical times in the same territory’ (Tapia 2016: 69). Aiming to capture the ‘multitemporal character of abigarramiento’ through the notion of ch’ixi’ (McNelly 2022: 113), Rivera Cusicanqui (2018: 75–77) provides the example of modern-day Bolivia which exposes the ongoing articulation of pre-conquest, colonial, liberal and national-popular elements. Ch’ixi, she writes,
is a colour that is the product of juxtaposition, in small points or spots, of opposed or contrasting colours: black and white, red, and green, and so on . . . [it captures] the Aymara idea of something that is and is not at the same time . . . A ch’ixi color grey is white but is not white at the same time; it is both white and its opposite, black . . . Ch’ixi draws attention to the patchwork of incommensurable pieces that form sociedades abigarradas (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012: 105).
Finally, Zavaleta Mercado’s methodological nationalism has been taken forward by those aiming at explaining transnational abigarramiento: a ‘transnational process of subsumption over territories and populations which not so long ago were only formally or downrightly not at all integrated into nation-state arrangements’ (Lagos Rojas 2018: 148; McNelly 2022: 110).
The non-linearity of radical transformation
The third principle of a decolonising Marxism is a non-linear conceptualisation of the development of radical transformation. As we know, Gunder Frank, Said and others accused Marx of being a ‘complicit supporter of Western Imperialism’ (Gunder Frank cited by Pradella 2017: 147) and an ‘Orientalist’ who allegedly contributed to the ‘racist orientalization of the non-Western world’ (Said cited in Lindner 2022: 1; see Castro Varela & Dhawan 2024). Initially, Marx suggested that the progress brought about by British rule would work in the direction of the social revolution guided by the resources and interpretations available at the time. However, he reflected on the idea and surpassed this interpretation. Following Linder, Marx reconsidered his views on the colonies when he realised that he had used historical resources from the orientalist historian François Bernier, following his narrative and interpretation of the colonies as being inferior uncritically (Lindner 2022: 13). When his explanation of the colonies is subjected to deep consideration, he shifted his position ‘lead[ing] to his first break with Eurocentrism [for] he no longer credits English colonialism with initiating progressive developments in other regions of the world. Thus, the universalisation of the Western social order . . . begins to crumble’ (Lindner 2022: 18).
‘Late Marx’ (Shanin 1983), that is, the work that Marx developed in the last 10 years of his life, ‘is a major and scandalous neglected resource for socialists today’ (Sayer & Corrigan 2018: 91). During this period that ended too early with him passing away at 64 years of age, this ‘Marx at the Margins’ (Anderson 2016) began to walk a new path to ‘develop[ing] new ideas about multi-directionality and heterogeneity’ and ‘a non-auto-centric conception of change’ (Tansel 2014: 93). It is safe to say that during the last period of his life, Marx experienced a sort of decolonisation of his research. Marx began to be openly ‘more concerned with humanism, . . . with the values and structures of pre-capitalist, non-European societies, and the relationship of the sexes in those societies’ (Rich, Foreword in Dunayevskaya 1991: xvii) and became interested in ‘new research horizons’ (Musto 2020). He read Kovalevsky’s work on the discussions of land ownership, collected data on Spain, Latin America, India and Argel, wrote the Ethnological Notebooks (1880–1881), studied pre-capitalist civilisations (Musto 2020) and, influenced by Chernyskevsky, he deconstructed ‘the idea of inescapable historicity and scientific inevitability tied to the origin and evolution of capitalism and industrial society’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 71).
But it was the letter exchange with the Russian populist Vera Ivanovna Zasulich that prompted a real difference in his thinking, regarding the directionality of the revolutionary process (see Anderson 2007). Zasulich’s letter of February 16, 1881, contained a momentous question as she explained to him that many Russian comrades were studying Capital for its critical role in Russian activists’ discussions on the agrarian question and the rural commune (Zasulich in Marx-Zasulich Correspondence 1881). This was the dilemma:
For there are only two possibilities. Either the rural commune, freed of exorbitant tax demands, payment to the nobility and arbitrary administration, is capable of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organising its production and distribution on a collectivist basis. In that case, the revolutionary socialist must devote all [their] strength to the liberation and development of the commune. If, however, the commune is destined to perish, all that remains for the socialist, as such is more or less ill-founded, calculations as to how many decades it will take for the Russian peasant’s land to pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie, and how many centuries it will take for capitalism in Russia to reach something like the level of development already attained in Western Europe . . . [H]ow do you derive that from Capital?’ (Zasulich in Marx-Zasulich Correspondence 1881).
Marx drafted five responses to the Russian activist reducing his initial 4,500 words to 350 words in a letter sent to her on March 8:
The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia (Marx in Marx-Zasulich correspondence 1881).
In the French edition of Capital, Vol. 1, Marx ensured that he corrected his linear view of revolutionary development to argue that it was only applicable to Europe (Anderson 2002: 87). In his letter to Zasulich, he confirms
the ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe. The reason for this restriction is indicated in Ch. XXXII: ‘Private property, founded upon personal labour . . . is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of the labour of others, on wage labour’ (loc. cit., p. 340)(Capital, French edition, p. 315) (Marx in Marx-Zasulich Correspondence 1881).
In the Preface to The Communist Manifesto of 1882, Marx and Engels addressed Zasulich’s concerns explicitly enquiring whether the Russian obshchina – as a form of common land ownership – could go directly to the highest form of communist common property, considering that in Russia, more than half of its peasants lived on the common property of the land (Marx and Engels, 1882: 56).
Despite Marx questioning his previous linear conceptualisation of revolutionary development, traditional Marxism’s continues holding a linear ‘historicist’ approach (Althusser 2015), which is un-Marxist. Chakrabarty highlights that historicism presents capitalism as a system ‘capable of overcoming differences in the long run’ (Chakrabarty 2000) by subsuming them under a linear vision of time rather than understanding difference. Historicism implies binary thinking (e.g. pre-capitalism versus capitalism) and regards difference as ‘incompleteness’, implying, for example, that the uncivilised are expected to become civilised, and the undeveloped are expected to develop (Anieva and Nişancıoğlu 2017: 44). ‘For non-European countries’, argues Tomba, the politics of historicism mean that ‘there is nothing left to do but to accelerate the race towards capitalism and recover the historical stages lost along the course of universal history in as short a time as possible’ (Tomba 2017). As Vera Ivanovna Zasulich implied in her abovementioned letter to Marx, the North/West imposes the rhythm of development, and therefore, ‘entire regions of the world are branded as backward and a multiplicity of modes of production may be regarded as residual’ (Tomba 2017; see Castro Varela & Dhawan 2024).
Abstract time, non-contemporaneity and the multiversum
The final element of my journey into a decolonising Marxism for Marxism-feminism is a critique of traditional Marxism’s abstract universal time and the contemporaneity of everything. Historicism moves along a universal ‘homogeneous empty time’ (Benjamin 2015: 261), the time of capital, of domination (Holloway 2010), and creates what Diestchy names the ‘abstract contemporaneity of capitalism’ (Diestchy in Pineda Canabal and Dietschy 2017). Abstract empty time, wherein all differences are violently synchronised, produces the invisibilisation of ‘the other’, in a way that ‘the social production of oblivion can be understood through the question of time’ (Vázquez 2009: 2–3).
In a famous passage of Heritage of our Time, Bloch states, ‘Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. However, they are thereby not yet living at the same time with others. They instead carry an earlier element with them’ (Bloch 1991: 97). This bewildering idea speaks of the ‘non-simultaneity of the simultaneous’ (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen) (Bloch 1977, 1991) that designates the co-existence ‘of things that express or represent different times or that have different dynamics of development’ (Basaure 2018: 125; Dietschy 2023; Hahn 2007; Kufeld 2002).
Bloch used the notion of non-contemporaneity (Dietschy 2003), also non-synchronicity or non-simultaneity (Schwartz 2005) to understand fascism. The Left did not grasp fascism at the time because, according to Bloch, they could not realise that there were overlapping contradictions that interacted to the antagonism between the bourgeois and proletariat because of the permanence of old strata’s temporalities. Fascism combined different temporalities forming ‘a cultural synthesis’ (Rabinbach 1977). As a philosopher of praxis (Rehmann 2020) and aiming to explain non-contemporaneity, Bloch draws on William James’ psychological concept of the ‘pluralistic universe’ (Morfino 2017) to coin the term multiversum. The multiversum creates an ‘explanatory model of plural temporality’ to understand the formation of Nazism in Germany (Morfino 2017: 137). In the 1950s, Bloch gestures towards decolonialising (Dinerstein 2022: 54) by using the notion of the multiversum to articulate an alternative historiographical paradigm against historicism. Bloch writes,
Instead of linearity, we need a broad, flexible, totally dynamic multiversum, a continuous and frequently linked counterpoint with historical voices. In this way, and to do justice to the gigantic extra-European material, it is no longer possible to work linearly, without sinuosity, in series (order), without a complex and new variety of time (. . .) Thus, we need a framework of a philosophy of the history of non-European cultures (Bloch 1970: 143).
The multiversum does not just point to the plural character of the global world but refers to its temporal diversity. Plurality can co-exist with unilinear time. For diversity to be understood, it is necessary to recognise the non-contemporaneous elements hidden in the unilinear (universal) reality of time (Hahn 2007: 141). Multiversum also transforms our view on history. History is not and ‘advancing linearly, in which capitalism, for instance, has resolved all previous stages [or historicism], but is rather a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity which enough unmastered and yet by no means revealed and resolved corners (Bloch 1962: 62, cited in Schwartz 2005: 112, italics in the original). These unresolved corners are similar to Zavaleta Mercado’s ‘blind spots’ in social formations.
Implications of a decolonising Marxism for the renewal of (Marxism) feminism: towards Thesis 14
In this intervention, I critically engaged with Frigga Haug’s Theses on Marxism Feminism by focusing on an existing silence in the theses concerning the internal colonialism within feminism. Despite the feminist accomplishment in creating new forms of solidarity and joint actions like the International Women Strikes of 2017 and 2018, internal colonialism continues creating crude and subtle racialised hierarchies among feminists. Marxism-Feminism is failing to find new ways to understand diversity without reproducing coloniality. In this article, I aimed to contribute to the task of articulating a decolonising Marxism, arguing for the inadequacy of traditional Eurocentric Marxism for Marxist Feminism. To break away from Eurocentrism, or at least to start walking in the right direction, Marxism-Feminism requires a decolonising Marxism. I explored several tenets of a non-Eurocentric critique intending to de-Westernise and de-Eurocentralise Marxism.
There are several connected implications of my journey. First, my critique of Marxist Feminists, including SRT, for their use of a Ricardian ‘labour theory of value’ and the absence of a theory of abstraction that acknowledges the specific form of existence of labour in capitalism–concrete and abstract, opens the possibility to abandon the focus on concrete labour and the belief that value is produced at the point of production, for value materialises through social validation. Hence, we free ourselves theoretically and politically from the interrogation about where to situate gendered social reproduction vis-à-vis the working class’ activity (see Goikoetxea 2024). The use of a wrong value theory constitutes the main deterrent for traditional Marxism to be able to recognise the radical agency of women, the colonised and indigenous people. Marx’s value theory of labour points to the significance of the abstract aspects of labour as a way for capital to organise society through money. Money is not just the means of exchange but the universal representation of the power of capital which expands as value in motion. Interestingly, the substance of value is not concrete labour but abstract labour, a socially necessary labour time at a specific point in the technological development of capitalism. The feminist subjectivity emerges amid, against and beyond indifference, and homogenisation created by the expansion of abstract labour as the substance of value. To contest the ‘male’ value theory of labour, I brought Scholz’s ‘value dissociation theory’ (Scholz 2009) to assist us to move the focus from the ‘exploitation’ of women or ‘unpaid’ work to the violent expansion of value amid which the value dissociation of female activities historically produced and an ongoing dimension of capitalism.
Second, I highlighted that to Marx, capitalism was an inherently colonial global phenomenon, but also that there was a problem with his understanding of the 16th and 17th centuries: He did not reflect on the necessity of capital to bring gender and ‘control the female body and their reproductive roles by classifying female bodies’. Albeit in a brief manner, I engaged with the seminal works of Federici, Davis, Mies and Lugones to explain the beginning of it all: a process of classification and brutality towards the female body for the purpose of control to the point of dehumanisation in the case of genderless slaves. This process of subordination – brutal – continues to be the case in our present day, in different forms.
Third, I discuss different forms of the subsumption of labour and society in capital and argued that absolute real subsumption cannot be generalised to all societies and to all sectors of societies, particularly in the global south. Capital subordinates the social reproduction of human and non-human life to value, but the form of subsumption depends on the development of capitalism in the social formations, where capital creates blind spots. Abigarramiento is mainly an attribute of those societies where capitalism was formed because of colonialism and provides the context for the emergence and development of feminist praxis in, against and beyond different forms of subsumption in one territory (nation state). The feminist struggle is necessarily varied with significant differences between the North and the South and within the North and the South.
Fourth, I claimed that traditional Marxism has neglected ‘late Marx’ and Marx’s abandonment of the linearity of time in processes of radical transformation. Against traditional Marxism’s historicism, the re-conceptualisation of radical transformation as non-linear posits new enquiries about global solidarity, radical subjectivity and the role of the nation state. Non-linearity subverts universality, exposing instead the co-existence of non-synchronous temporalities that resist the violence of abstraction, homogenisation and state’s synchronisation of the multiple temporal experiences and struggles. This way of recognition diversity enables us to dismantle the racialised hierarchies and the internal colonialism that persist within the movement. Each concrete feminist struggle is the result of historical and concrete political, social, cultural and economic processes that shape the former in, against and beyond capital. In the multiversum, concrete means the unity in the diverse (Grundrisse: 101).
In the multiversum, the feminist resistance counterposes recognition to indifference, diversity to homogenisation, naming to classifications and non-synchronicity and non-contemporaneity to violent synchronisation. Motley feminism encompasses a myriad of textures, colours, processes, temporalities and histories that enrich the movement rather than weaken it for with its diversity comes its necessary anti-racism, anti-colonialism and its multiversal features. Motley feminism subverts the abstract contemporaneity of capitalism, rejects universal empty time and articulates diversity in beautiful and powerful coalitions against the expansion of value on motion.
