First published in 1983, Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women - toward a unitary theory  is regarded as one of the founding texts of Marxist Feminism.  It has now been relaunched, and Pod Academy was at the relaunch.

Lisa Vogel was joined on the platform by Dr Tithi Battacharya, Purdue Liberal Arts University, in US, Dr Sue Ferguson, Laurier Brantford University in Canada  and Kate Davison, Melbourne University

Tithi Battacharya said she had first read the book in the early 1990s, when 'Marxism was not common parlance in academia', and she kept going back to it for several reasons.  Firstly, it was a book that was explanatory rather than descriptive.  To her, Lise Vogel's book was one of the clearest explanatory texts to speak of the relationship between the capitalist system as a whole and the oppression of women.

Secondly, Battacharya said the word 'unitary' had resonance for her - it countered the growing view at the time that patriarchy was a system of oppression that was independent of capitalism -  the view that there was capitalism, and then there was racism and sexism etc.  Vogel's book uses the word 'unitary' to reject this notion of autonomous tracks of social relations, Vogel asserts that capitalism is a unitary system and we need to explain it.  She also suggested that 'unitary' was a fantastic word to use in an age of the celebration of 'the fragment', 'the cult of the particular' [see also our podcast on Beyond the Fragments here]. In that age the book brought thinking back to a unitary way of thinking.

Tithi Battacharya said that Lise Vogel restored to prominence the role of the family within the system as a whole. The book explored why the family is a source of oppression within its role in capitalism.  It theorised the role of the family in capitalism, at the level of production, rather than simply at the level of exchange. Vogel, she said, takes some of Marx's insights in Capital, and builds on them, exploring the gaps and silences. She looks at what labour power is, how it is regenerated, and what it means to labour under capitalism.

Thirdly, in Tithi Battacharya's view, this thinking is of strategic importance because it looked outside the workplace.  This is particularly important, she said, now that 40 years of neoliberalism has denuded the labour movement.  She suggests we will see much struggle starting outside the workplace (such as that in Ferguson), and to misunderstand these struggles as not class struggle would be a strategic error for this generation of the left.

Next up was Kate Davison who started by saying she had felt star struck when she realised who else would be on the panel, 'But', she added to laughter, 'I dealt with it!'  Quoting Sue Ferguson, she described the ideas put forward by Lise Vogel as 'The path not taken', and said that had they known, in the 1980s, about Vogel's work, feminists might have avoided 'much blood letting'.  At that time, she said, if you had been able to stick with the label 'socialist feminist' and brave the attacks from adherents of identity politics, you nevertheless often developed distrust of Leninism and by extension of Marxism altogether.  A small group turned towards socialism or anti-capitalist politics at the end of the 1990s, and undertook a re-evalutation of identity politics, eventually abandoning it in favour of the uniting power of the working class or the anti capitalist movement.  Kate said that she herself has dropped the 'feminist' from Marxist-Feminist when describing herself.

She went on to say that the book is being re-published at a time of the re-emergence of struggles around sexual and gender based violence (eg the Slut Walks), sexism etc.  But many activists and revolutionary Marxists, she said, have little knowledge or understanding of these debates.  While some of the issues have come up around gay and lesbian issues (eg the campaign for equal marriage rights),

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