blog three chole005
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels state that power in our society is based on a class system, the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who works within the means of production to create value. Though Marx and Engel’s analysis is more complex, this simple relationship could be viewed in terms of Plumwood’s outline on dualism and difference, being that one group is valued above the other and much effort is poured into exaggerating and maintaining this separation. The main problem with this analogy is that although male and female sexes (though not genders) are required for the continuance of the human race, it is debatable whether or not the bourgeoisie serve any worthwhile purpose to this system other than maintaining the status quo and exploitation of the working class (which doesn’t seem to be a very worthwhile goal).
Although this analysis of Marx and Engels in this assignment was meant just to brush on the ideas of class struggle and how it relates to gender, and was limited in terms of detail in the interest of addressing so many philosophies on gender and power in a short span of time, I felt it was somewhat inaccurate. It states that Marx wrote during “a time when many (poor) women left the home to work� when explaining about how the audience of Marx is mostly male. This is certainly true for some of his work, specifically when he was addressing the working class in his time, which was mostly male, but I feel that Marx made it clear that although women weren’t a huge part of the paid labor force at the time, they were still laborers. That is, they wouldn’t need to leave home to work; they had been working, though unpaid, in the home the whole time. Marx and Engels addressed this issue extensively in Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State, which would have been the best work to reference to gain a Marxist perspective on women and power. Origins mentions that a women’s traditional work has been devalued over time by our prevailing economic system. I’m already over my word limit, so if anyone out there wants to know what Marx said about women, you should read that for sure.