Standpoint Epistemology: Marxist and Feminist - PowerPoint Presentation

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Standpoint Epistemology: Marxist and Feminist

Gurminder K Bhambra

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October 2013Slide2

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Capitalism: Marx

Capitalism as a system of production requires, “the confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the

owners of money, means of production

, means of subsistence, who are eager to

valorize

the sum of values they have appropriated by buying the labour power of others; on the other hand, free workers,

the sellers of their own labour power

... with the polarization of the commodity market into these

two classes

, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are present.”

Marx

Capital Volume 1

(Penguin edition) p874Slide4

Marx’s Analysis

There are two key questions for Marx:

How do things become scarce?

How do we understand the particular form of modern subjectivity and the social relationships associated with it?

The answer lies in the move to bourgeois private property and the ‘possessive individual’

Historically,

possession

is based on

dispossession

The process of creating individuals is one of dispossession – taking from people ‘common’ rights and replacing these with ‘individual’ rights Slide5

Standpoint of the Proletariat

Lukacs

, History and Class Consciousness, 1923

Relationship between proletariat as a sociological and as a normative category

Lukacs

is writing after the revolutionary moment in advanced capitalism appears to have passed (i.e. Russian revolution and not German)

What is the explanatory claim of the theory?

Empiricism can be criticised but not by dispensing with the empirical, that would be a form of idealismSlide6

Marx’s Theory of Learning

Marx has a theory of learning:

What the proletariat must become is a theory of learning.

If they don’t learn the lesson, why don’t they learn the lesson?

False consciousness – this undercuts the theory of learning.

Who is to educate the educators?

From class-in-itself to class-for-itself

But does Marx already have the solution?

What if his ‘sociological’ analysis of the contradictions of capitalism is not correct? Slide7

What is Feminism?

‘biology is not destiny’

‘one is not born woman’ (or man) Simone de Beauvoir

Gender is a product of social conventions and relationships

These social conventions have de-valued women’s contribution and restricted women’s roles

First wave feminism largely political

Second wave feminism concerned with obstacles to achieving equality

Third wave feminism, post-feminism, focused on choice and difference

Second wave feminism can be seen to have been characterised, in academic terms, in terms of a feminist empiricism, followed by feminist standpoint theorySlide8

Feminist Empiricism

Discovery of women as ‘missing’ from academic research

Academic research structured by men and men’s experiences

Research based on an address of gender (women) revealed weaknesses in existing approaches and theories

Women were ‘situated’ by feminism to be able to identify that women’s experience was under-researched

There was an implicit ‘empiricist’ understanding of where the problem was located – in the bias created by male sexism

It was believed that ‘sexism and

androcentrism

are social biases correctable by stricter adherence to the existing methodological norms of scientific inquiry’ (Harding, Science Question, p24)

This position, however, is unstable. Slide9

Feminist Standpoint Theory

Social scientific knowledge is produced in relation to values and value positions reflect social positions (Weber)

Feminism should be committed ‘not to truth, objectivity and neutrality, but to theoretical positions openly acknowledged as observer and context specific’ (Grosz, What is Feminist Theory?)

This raises the questions: which context specific positions, and why?

Two responses to this

(1): standpoint theory can be grounded in the contexts of those who are disadvantaged, or more specifically, oppressed

(2): there is no objectivity or universalism and that claims to this disguise a real

particularism

‘The project of women’s equal inclusion meant that only women’s sameness to men, only women’s humanity and not their womanliness could be discussed’ (Grosz)Slide10

Hartsock’s Feminist Standpoint

‘I set off from Marx’s proposal that a correct vision of class society is available from only one of the two major class positions’ – incorrect

Hartsock

draws a parallel with Marxism, arguing that, ‘like the lives of proletarians according to Marxian theory, women's lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy’ (1983:284).

Equating women’s lives to those of proletarians, but there is no basis to that equivalence theoretically

The standpoint of the proletariat for

Lukacs

was a standpoint of theory not of the proletariat; the proletariat were privileged for a theoretical reason, not necessarily an empirical one; their oppression is the basis on which the capitalist system turnsSlide11

Issues to Consider

If the problem of 'male universalism' is the false incorporation of 'different others', what is it that says that all women share the same interests?

Might not standpoint theory be a form of 'essentialism' that falsely incorporates all women under a single position, despite differences among women?

Why should we think that oppression is a source of epistemological privilege?

Which women should be listened to? Or is the standpoint of women just a disguised version of the 'privilege' of the theorist who speaks on behalf of others and, therefore, not really that different to the attitude attributed to male theorists?

If ‘men see the world in one way, women in another; on what possible grounds other than gender loyalties can we decide between these conflicting accounts?’ (Harding ‘Rethinking’, page 86)