In this episode, we are joined by George Washington University Associate Professor Vanessa Wills to discuss her article “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism’?” We try to figure out why critics badly understand the Marxist concept of causation as it concerns identity-based oppression, why labor and production provide the conditions of possibility for science, and whether the abolition of capitalism would automatically mean the end of racism and sexism (no, but it sure would help!). And as a treat, Hegel shows up to school us on the appearance/essence distinction!
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Vanessa Wills, “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?’” Philosophical Topics 46 no. 2 (2018): 229-246.
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
In this episode, we are joined by George Washington University Associate Professor Vanessa Wills to discuss her article “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism’?” We try to figure out why critics badly understand the Marxist concept of causation as it concerns identity-based oppression, why labor and production provide the conditions of possibility for science, and whether the abolition of capitalism would automatically mean the end of racism and sexism (no, but it sure would help!). And as a treat, Hegel shows up to school us on the appearance/essence distinction!
leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil
References:
Vanessa Wills, “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?’” Philosophical Topics 46 no. 2 (2018): 229-246.
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
Gosh, why do these Marxists only care about workers? Why do they think workers' suffering is more important? Than anybody else's suffering and of course, nobody ever said that right.
Will:If you think you made up a guy. You did make up a guy, Absolutely made up a guy MUSIC.
Owen:Somebody's coming.
Will:MUSIC. Hello, this is what's Left of Philosophy I'm Will. Here with me today is Gil, Lillian and Owen Hello. Hi, hey everyone, and for today's episode, we're excited to be joined by a special guest, professor Vanessa Wills. Hey, vanessa, thanks for coming on the show.
Vanessa:Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to join you folks.
Will:We're excited to have you. So today we're going to be discussing Vanessa's article. What Could it Mean to Say? Capitalism Causes Racism and Sexism. Personally, I'm very excited to talk about this article. As I told Vanessa over email, I've taught it no less than three times in three different classes. I think it's an extraordinarily rich text that I'll try to boil down rather quickly than we can hear from Vanessa.
Will:So, basically, in this article, vanessa wants to challenge critiques of Marxism that it is quote unquote class reductionists and thus can only think of sexism and racism as either epiphenomenal or think that there is something special about the identity of class that justifies using it as the analytic framework. Pretty much the way that Vanessa perceives is. She tries to show that these critiques actually misunderstand the fundamental premises of Marxism, which, as she puts it, is a class-centered theory but can be better clarified as a production-centered theory. The idea is that Marxism pays attention to one the fact that for any society to persist, it must meet certain organic needs. These organic needs can be met in a variety of forms and manners, and so, if we're going to understand how society meets these needs, we look at how production is formed. When we look at how production is formed. Vanessa pushes us to see that the historical materialism of Marxism pushes us to look at what form labor takes in historically specific societies. And so part of what Vanessa I take her to be doing is one we need not understand Marxism as talking about an abstract labor as such. Rather, what Marxism pushes us to ask is given what a society needs to do in order to persist, what particular form does this labor take? Once we look at that, we can also see that the ideas people have about the form labor takes can be diverse and can certainly have effects on our social practices. And so from there, she kind of builds the idea that we're going to answer the question of what could it mean to say that capitalism causes racism and sexism?
Will:I take her point to be we'll have to understand what it means for capitalism to be, in my sort of technical language, a formative cause. And what she pushes us to see is that we need not think that capitalism causes racism and or sexism in these three ways. We need not think that what we're saying is that capitalism is essentially racist or sexist. We need not think that capitalism is the agent that causes there to be racism and sexism, and we also need not think that the purpose of capitalism is the perpetuation of racism and sexism. So once we take those three options off the table, what are we left with? What she thinks we are left with is that capitalism shapes the social conditions under which sexism and racism happens, and what that would mean.
Will:If we think that there is no labor in itself, there is labor in particular forms, that means that there's no sexism or racism in itself, there's sexism and racism in particular forms. And given that we live in a capitalist society that's mediated by class relations, we should look at how that forms and shapes sexism and racism, even though sexism, you know, antidates capitalist societies, and sexism cannot simply be reduced to the ongoing need to extract surplus value. This also allows her to justify using Marxism as an antelig frame, because it allows us to make a distinction between oppression that may be accorded to sexism and racism based on identity categories, and exploitation that happens in this particular form of labor that's mediated in class relations. And so in that rather cursory overview of what Vanessa does and I hope I didn't butcher the argument too much we can see her meeting the two types of fundamental critiques Epiphenomenalism, insofar as she says we have no reason of thinking that racism and sexism can't have effects in society or that they are simply derived from capitalism.
Will:And she answers the second critique, which is justifying why class actually does have a different theoretical role in how we understand racism and sexism, and that's through understanding the distinction between oppression and exploitation, between understanding, you know, injustices related to identity and injustice that emerges from the definite form and social relations of labor. So I hope that that was, you know, a clear enough overview. I'm really excited to talk about this article because it seems, you know, there's always perennially discussions of how do we think about other isms in relation to capitalism, and the first question I'd like to ask you all you, vanessa, to get us going is so why did you want to write this article? What is like the one takeaway you would like our listeners and a reader of your article to get from what you put down? Thank you.
Vanessa:Yeah, thank you so much for that.
Vanessa:And so there were there's actually two answers to that question, one of them very practical.
Vanessa:So I, again and again in talks or in the course of other work, would happen upon moments in the in dialogue where I had to unteach this received wisdom that Marxism is inherently class reductionist and regards identity based oppression as inessential, immaterial and important. And so I just was tired of doing that and I thought wouldn't it be great if I wrote a paper and then I could point to the paper and take the time to explain in detail what I think the answer to that question is? And the central takeaway for me is that, all ready to think of Marxism as, at bottom, a theory of and about just class, that Marxism is the class theory, and then you need other theories if you're going to understand other categories. That I mean maybe, I don't know, maybe, but that's not what Marx thinks he's doing. It's not what Marxist theorists typically think they're doing. You know, we and certainly I think that we're developing a method and a theory that can explain all of being with a capital B. We don't think you need to go anywhere else for answers.
Will:And so it's a true unitary theory.
Vanessa:if you will, it's a true right right and so if and so I wanted to demonstrate some of my reasons anyway for thinking that that is the case, and it's clearly not plausible if the theory actually does just talk about class. But that's not the sort of the central category actually. The category is labor, production, human self changing and productive interaction with the world. That's the central category. That's the process that encapsulates all of being, and it's through that lens that we're able to make these kinds of judgments and analyses about various aspects of being, including identity and identity based oppression.
Gil:Yeah, I'm a huge fan of the claim that Marxism is actually a totalizing theory of being as such and as a whole.
Owen:You have welcome friends here.
Lillian:I literally wrote in one of the margins Vanessa, are you cooking about totality here?
Will:Yes, it's good stuff Actually, though.
Gil:I did want to ask you to love the article, by the way, and again, thanks for coming. Thank, you.
Gil:I wanted to ask you to elaborate a little bit on a point you make it a few places in the piece and you sort of touched on it a little bit in your answer to Will just now which is that you want to say that Marxist theory is sometimes adequately described as a class based theory, but you suggest that in fact a better, more adequate characterization is that it's a production based theory. So could you explain a little bit what you mean with this distinction and sort of why you see this as a distinction worth making? What sometimes class based leaves out of the picture that you think production based is more apt for describing?
Vanessa:Right, yeah, and class based is, I want to say it's correct, it's not wrong. So to the extent that Marxism is a class based theory, which is a large extent, of course, it's because the emergence of class based society, and in particular its instantiation, and capitalism, this sort of extreme and highly developed form of class based society, that is the economic arrangement that allows certain things about the universal character of human nature to be seen. So it's class based in the sense that it is the emergence of capitalism as a historical phenomenon that places Marx and Marxists and in the position to be able to make these claims now about what human life is, how we make it, how we can change it, etc. And so forth. But what we learn right through that lens is something about the universality of humanity, and the universality of humanity in here's, in labor, in here's in the fact that our lives, our activity, our practices, that these are all things that human beings produce and could produce differently. So that I take to be the relationship between those two terms as I use them.
Will:Yeah, just real quick. What I really like about what you do here is you know, there's one way of understanding Marxism, and I don't necessarily think that this is correct, but you know some of my think Marxism is actually only a study of this version of society. But when you look at you know the German ideology and all of that, marx and Engels seem to think no, no, no, no. We actually have a way of understanding what must hold for all societies and also see what is distinctive and historically specific about those societies. So that kind of widens the ambition of it. But when you say production based, you don't mean only mean, not merely. You don't only mean production of this widget or this commodity, you mean you know the creative character of human labor. And so you say well, we even produce our ideas in order to understand and relate to one another, and so the ambit of production is capacious here. Is that right?
Vanessa:Yes, yeah, I think that's exactly right. I take this paper to be a presentation of the kinds of thoughts you might have if you take seriously the notion that all of human social existence is produced by human beings, and so if you take seriously the notion that the oppression of women and the existence of sexism are not just natural, biologically dictated facts of human existence but themselves have a history and historical emergence. And actually, kind of circling back for a moment to the question you asked me earlier about why write this paper, one of the things that frustrated me was that philosophers are extremely well versed in the vagaries and nuances of causation. Like this is our bread and butter.
Owen:But all of a sudden yeah, it's literally.
Vanessa:It's what we do, and all of us all of a sudden, when it's time to dismiss Marx. The only kind of causation he could have access to is epiphenomenalism.
Owen:That doesn't make any sense.
Vanessa:That's the only thing that Marx and Marxist could mean when they say this thing causes the like. We're the philosophers of physics, you know. Like we're like, we need help, you know. We know that causation works in all sorts of ways and there's various things one might mean by it. And that's, that was part of the rationale behind the title, right? What could it mean? Well, it could mean epiphenomenalism. It could mean a very simplistic and blunt kind of like oh yeah, if you just do away with with capitalism, it's all, it's all, it's all, the bad stuff goes away. Or that somehow, if it weren't for capitalism, the bad stuff would have never been here. And sure it's. I mean, I think it's. It's plain that if that's what Marx means and if that's what Marxists mean, it can't be correct. But but it also depends on a really impoverished and abstract notion of capitalism. So one of the sort of rival interpretations I take up in that article says well, you know, capitalism by definition right or the definition of capitalism right doesn't cause racism.
Vanessa:I'm like who said it did?
Will:When did we become linguistic idealists?
Vanessa:Right, yeah, you know, and what I mean by capitalism, or at least when I say that labor has a definite appearance, is that, is that there's literally a guy. There's a guy he signs your checks. Right, I've talked about your, the relationship between you and that guy.
Vanessa:Yeah, exactly Right, this is you know, when we talk about capitalism, I mean this, this, all of this. I'm waiting. You can't. This is a audio podcast, so the listeners cannot see me moving my arm in a in a big circle of being right. I mean, I mean this. I mean our contemporary human social environment, that in which the by far the most dominant economic mode is capitalism. Even those communities that have forms of life that are not capitalist by themselves are heavily influenced by capitalism as it, as it, encroaches into rainforests and boils the earth and right does all the things that it does to destroy and and to bring, and to increasingly bring, people into a capitalist system right. So that's the thing I'm talking about this expansive whole of human life that has as it's, as it's sort of organizing principle, the sale and purchase of labor power and of other commodities. How is it that? How is it that these identity forms of identity based oppression emerge within that?
Will:It'll be real quick. This is this is my smug moment. Any of my students watching. I told y'all Vanessa Wills was talking about complicated questions around causation. I love that you said it because I was going to be like Vanessa, like she's working with those four different types of causation Aristotle like you, material, efficient, final and she's like no, no, no, it's formative causation. Yeah, it's that capitalism. Right, it's this definite shape. So I love that you said I was right. Do my evaluations?
Vanessa:It's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But even though the title is about cause and and I'm saying like here's what it means to cause, I don't actually, in the course of the paper, say you know about cause, yeah, so that's interesting. It remains somewhat implicit and that's yeah, yeah.
Lillian:I mean, it's also, like you know, Marx considered Aristotle a materialist homie, you know. So, right, I actually wanted to ask about epiphenomenalism. It's not, I mean, I think it's kind of a more of a foil in your argument, but just out of curiosity, because I think this is something both our listeners and I've certainly heard. If you've ever talked about these topics in public before, as you say, you will encounter the language of epiphenomenalism.
Lillian:And I'm wondering if, like you know, or anyone knows, like why that that word got attached to Marxist theory, because, like, like where that accusation came from and like why that word, like there's a, there's, there's a number of other words you could use to talk about, like I don't feel like you're thinking about the cause in a sufficiently strong way, but epiphenomenalism is like awfully specific. It's like part of like philosophy of mind, you know, and it's like what happens, like I think that I looked this up recently like when the mind, like the metaphor is of, like a steam engine. Okay, imagine your brain is a steam engine and you like let out steam and then, but the steam isn't gonna like make the engine run. It's the epiphenomenon is, it's like a discharge and or so it's like your emotions aren't like. I don't know. There's some way of talking about this and philosophy of mind that like makes that metaphor make sense.
Lillian:This is obviously not like where I'm comfortable, but it just that's where I first encountered it too though it seems, but like there's something peculiar about this, is not a popular theory of causation in philosophy of mind Right.
Vanessa:You know so Right. So there's something it's completely esoteric, why saddle marks with it?
Lillian:Yeah, it's weird, I'm just curious, like if, to get you to expand on that or hypothesize about why something that like it is a philosophical view. But I remember the reason I think I know anything about this is I like TA'd a philosophy of mind course once and I had, like I read a textbook and it was, like you know, it's the kind of thing that's not favored and I'm like, hold on, how does this reappear for all of us doing all this other work and kind of become this thing in the background? That's, that might be more of like an ethnographical question or an intellectual history question, but it's not obvious that it's like a good fit for the subject matter to begin with, which is why I think, like you bringing that up is you're saying something sort of obvious that these are not really you're not talking about the same thing.
Vanessa:Yeah, I don't so I don't know, I couldn't name sort of historically who originated this criticism as a criticism of Marxist theory, but I do have thoughts about sort of who it benefits and what it's useful for, and it's specifically useful for separating class struggle from other struggles. So if what you're trying to do, if what one is trying to do, is to hammer home the point that hey you anti-racists, hey you anti-sexists, hey you who want queer liberation, you name it, you name it, these are the Marxists. Their explanation about why the thing they're doing is connected to what you're doing is stupid and insulting to your movement. It's very useful in that kind of dialogue and it gets people's hackles up, like I'm reminded of the presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, because she actually through who's not a?
Vanessa:Marxist, but she, through this accusation against him, she said well, if we got rid of capitalism or I think she said the banks or something like that. Yeah, she was like if we got rid of the banks. If we got rid of the banks tomorrow, there would still be sexism and it's like who said that?
Will:What did you?
Vanessa:They're for what?
Gil:Right.
Owen:Ergo right and you saw the qui bono who benefits from this positionally.
Vanessa:Exactly, yeah, yeah. So I think it serves this really important purpose of making Marx. I mean anything to make Marxism look dumb, right, unappealing and dumb and then to draw a hard like put up a wall between it and other movements.
Owen:I wanted to ask you just like to come back to just the way you talk about class and how you differentiate class from identity-based oppression, as you call it right. It's because we're very used to seeing those lists with the commas right, like in DEI statements especially. They'll be like we don't discriminate on the basis of like race, gender, ability, class, and it puts class in where it seems like it doesn't actually really belong, or at least maybe part of it does. And so I was interested in the paper in the way in which you actually did something really, really helpful, which is to clearly articulate that part of what class is, does, like, can be made amenable with these identity-based, with these identity-based markers Classism, right, how one speaks, how one looks, where one went to school, and all these where one lives and all this stuff Social signifiers.
Owen:Exactly social signifiers, but it's also, and I think like much more importantly, something else a position in a production process, and so I was just wondering if you could say a little bit about how, what the purpose and effects of embedding it in that identity list is, because I don't think it's an innocent choice to put it in there in that way, and also how, just a little bit more about how you see them being differentiated and why you think it's really important to differentiate. It's still maintaining that question. It was important and not entirely exhausted by capitalism, but still seeing something unique and specific about class.
Vanessa:Yeah. So in that I'll say right off the bat that one of the things that influences me most in my position on this is actually a paper by sociologist Martha Jimenez Marxism and class, gender and race, we think in the trilogy, which is like one of my favorite papers, and so I'm gonna yeah, I love that paper. So I'm gonna say some things in response to that question, but I just wanna flag that like some of it I thought of myself, but mostly very influenced by her paper, which I find very convincing. So there it really goes back to a good old fashioned distinction between matter and ideas and where the sort of emphasis on thinking about class as another form of oppression, just like racism, sexism and so on, is an approach that largely emerges out of standpoint theory perspectives and, for feminist standpoint theory in particular, sort of models itself on the kind of standpoint theory that you find emerging out of somebody like Lou Koch's interpretations of Marx, right, it's a standpoint of the politics, and so exactly.
Vanessa:And so the thought there being well, marxism is doing theory from the point of view of the proletariat, and there's no such a proletariat that there's a particular kind of perspective you get on reality from that point of view. And so then the thought is well, what's so special about the proletariat?
Lillian:Why do they get a privileged point of view?
Will:You know why? Not with-. I see things too.
Vanessa:Right, I see things too. So why not women, why not black people? Why not you name it, you can go down the list. And this also, I think, gets taken up in some intersectionality theory, where there's a strong emphasis on the sort of felt, subjective, lived experience of oppression as a source of data about the world, which it is right for sure, right. But the thing that, in Marxist theory, is supposed to make the proletarian standpoint one that is revelatory, right in some deep way, is not the mere fact that workers are having a bad time right.
Vanessa:It's not just the kind of felt, subjective misery of working for a wage under capitalism. What's distinctive about the working? Class perspective is that it is which does suck right.
Owen:Great.
Vanessa:What's distinctive is not the internal report of a psychological state, it is the ability to do a kind of scientific analysis of the relationship between human beings and their world, of the type that is made possible when you look at the world from the point of view of a productive being right. It's the production that workers are doing that is distinctive, right and that is supposed to give us insight into what kind of method we might pursue in order to know the world right. It's the productive activity of workers that informs Marx's concept of historical materialism and informs things like that. He says, for example, in places like the Theses on Feuerbach right, or anywhere, that he says that sort of abstract contemplation is not going to give us insight into the nature of the world. We have to be involved in the work of actually attempting to change the world right In order to have the scientific knowledge in their Marx's I think thinking about the exact same kind of question that Kant is thinking of right what makes scientific knowledge of the world possible? If it's possible and for Marx the answer is labor. It turns out right, the sort of conscious, interactive activity of human self-changing. Now we've gotten very far away now from like the fact that I feel terrible when I'm exploited at work, when I'm mistreated. All of that is important and useful, but it's not actually the thing that Marx thinks gives a scientific insight into the world.
Vanessa:And so when we talk about class, oftentimes sort of the move to assimilate class as just another form of oppression like the others, all of which are different ways of suffering yes, they are right, and our theory has to include all of that. But that is not. I mean listen, I don't know if it's right or wrong. It's not Marxism right, it's not. You know it's, we can't. And so, and the reason that matters is that once class is assimilated to other, just like a form of oppression and just another way of suffering, then the question comes up gosh, why do these Marxists only care about workers? Why do they think workers' suffering is more important than anybody else's suffering? And, of course, nobody ever said that right.
Will:If you don't know, you made up a guy. You did make up a guy, absolutely made up a guy.
Owen:Yeah, you made up a guy, right.
Vanessa:Nobody ever said that, but you know, because you begin to sort of lose sight of what the target of critique is supposed to be. And then, furthermore, you know the answer to the question why is this person suffering, more interesting or important just because they're a worker? Well, obviously it isn't right. And so you hop, skip and a jump to oh, the Marxists are just on one. They have no idea what they're doing, right.
Lillian:So I think this is one of the kind of most interesting and or provocative ideas in the method you've been presenting, like what makes the analysis scientific and it turns out to be labor. And then from there, I mean, what I just heard and you can tell me if I am hearing this wrong is that there's some kind of separation, like when you start saying we get further afield, when we start asking like, oh, why do they only think this matters? Or what's more important? Like what I hear when those questions occur to me is like a very strong moralism that is primarily thinking that suffering has to be like sufficiently bad in order to see it as oppression. And there is a way in which you can also think about exploitation this way, if you don't think about it in the labor way, which is if you ever read analytical like papers about exploitation or anthologies about exploitation, that there's a couple that exist.
Lillian:Exploitation is like uniformly what happens when we start seeing it as being like really shitty. So like exploitation is happening in sweatshops, like sweatshop labor is exploitation and like this always strikes me as being like really. I mean it is straightforwardly very frustrating, but it strikes me as like largely missing the point. Because in a Marxian analysis, actually the most productive labor is going to be the most exploited rate labor, like the rate of exploitation is going to be higher for the most productive and capital intensive labor. So those are often going to be the most efficient industries. They're going to make the industries that make the most money. So there's like an argument where, like, the most high tech workers are, like, the most exploited workers, right, and they might be not the work they might be far from the worst off workers.
Gil:They could be doing quite well for themselves individually.
Lillian:They could do very well, Not poor but they're exploited.
Lillian:But they're exploited. So I don't. So like there's this interesting thing where, like I do think that exploitation can be a normative term, like there's something wrong with exploitation. I think Marx is like pretty polemical about it. I think that all of our intuitions about it probably not being good or probably warranted, but okay. But it does also have a more scientific meaning. It's a way of talking about extracting surplus and therefore the mode and means of extracting a surplus have laws of motion and so on and so forth.
Lillian:So what it's doing is, as you're putting together a causal story for you, and when I hear people start saying, like when it starts being the you know, so analogously to sweatshop labor, the same story gets told with oppression. So like something just seems worse and therefore somehow then it starts to not fit into the Marxian story and I think it's basically right to be like it's already largely missing the point at that point in the conversation, like it's like already methodologically off track. So I'm going to wind my way to a question, sorry. The winding question is what is it that makes the labor perspective scientific? Cause? I like that idea, I'm quite attached to it, but like actually I think that is sort of difficult to defend. Like that's not totally obvious, but I would like to think it's true.
Vanessa:Yeah, I mean.
Vanessa:So I think that for Marx so I mentioned earlier, sort of in passing, that I think that he's standing in a tradition that is attempting to answer the same question. Kant post, right, what makes science possible? And, and so there's this. So there's this question of, like I have my mind inside here and the world's outside there, right, how do I, how do I know, how can I guarantee that the thoughts that I have match what's really out there, in it, in itself and the?
Vanessa:I think the short story for Marx is that it has to do with what he refers to at some points as the metabolizing character of labor, that I am in the process, that I'm always in the process of humanizing the world, of, of making it part of myself, and we do that at the level of the species, that we are constantly sort of confronting a world that seems alien, but then bringing it under our control, integrating it into our sort of habits and activities and process of of living and and being with one another and being in the world. And that process is something that we can learn about and know about, you know, from the inside and as we relate to it as our own product. And so then, that question of how can I know things about the world? For Marx, the answer is by overcoming that seeming separation between yourself and the world, by by, by alighting it right, by abolishing it right, by doing it. And so I do. And it's through the activity of labor that we, that we do this, that we integrate the objects in the external world into part of a living process with us right, so that we're all part of one. This one sort of integrated process and I think the notion of nature as our inorganic body right is, is is there this idea of sort of expanding, expanding the self, but doing that not in an individualistic way, but in a way that is only possible through a kind of shared life of the species, which is also something that we have to create and produce, this sense of our actually existing as as a single species that is aware of having shared conditions of flourishing and in a position to reason about what we ought to do collectively in order to safeguard our continued existence.
Vanessa:Now, beyond that, I think that for Marx, beyond that, you know the notion that there'd be something that's knowable, but that human beings cannot have that kind of interactive process with right, that productive activity that that overcomes and the and the lines. This kind of apparent gap or space between ourselves and the world. Anything that is not susceptible to being integrated into our life process as a species in that way I think Marx does think is sort of beyond the realm of science. So I think that this is his criticism of atheism, for example. So he says at various points that he's not an atheist. He said in one of my favorite lines of Marx he writes in a letter that the atheists remind him of a child going around bragging that he's not afraid of the boogeyman. Yeah, so he says this is so ridiculous.
Vanessa:And Marx's sort of core, I think, of Marx's criticism there is that the notion of this supernatural God is inherent. It's inherently not the sort of thing that could be integrated into this material process. That is the sort of thing that we could know in the matter of self knowledge, right, or in the matter of producing and reproducing and changing the things. That's integrated with our life activity in a way that makes it knowable for us. So I think science for Marx is closely really. I mean there's a way of saying if I really wanted to be provocative I would say like science and labor are almost the same. For Marx right, it's the same process of knowing and changing and interacting with the world and bringing about changes that we want to see, and doing that in a way that's informed by our past understanding of the world.
Gil:That's so great. Can I follow up on that a little bit? So there's like a couple of things come to mind. One is that we've been talking about Marx in a very Kantian mode, which I like, and I'm going to want to actually come back to this, like maybe at the very end of the discussion, but thinking about the conditions for the possibility of science, constantly thinking specifically about the natural science he's looking at like Newtonian physics and his answer to how we know nature is well, it's what we put into it, right, it's the categories that themselves that structure nature as something objective that we can know in this scientific way.
Gil:And that's totally like that's idealist in this obvious sense where we're not actually talking about any material interaction. I do think you're right that Marx is like asking that same question, but it's about material interaction with the real material basis for the possibility of production and reproduction of our lives and existences. And I liked your point that like, in a way, he's kind of Hegelian now, not Kantian, by saying no, that in itself like that's either not a thing or good news. You made that up too. So like what are you talking about, buddy?
Will:It's kind of a non issue, but that's where the point. The importance of history. Yeah right, it isn't any as such. It turns out in different formations. We do still do this, but we accomplish it in different ways, and so we're still knowing what it is we as a society are doing when we're engaging with nature in order to produce something. Yeah, absolutely.
Vanessa:I'll just sorry, I'll just add. I mean, there's another great bit of Marx where he says that the this sidedness of our thinking has to be proved in practice. Right that, and I have a book coming out in a couple months about Marx and ethics.
Owen:And thank you.
Vanessa:And one of the things that I talk about there is this notion that, as I said, that this sidedness of our thinking has to be demonstrated in practice. And one of the things I talk about in the Marx and ethics book is this notion that philosophy can present questions, but in this sort of a constrain, in a way, but like cannot answer them right, cannot answer them, cannot resolve them right, because philosophy is the art of contemplation. That's what it is, that's what it's literally what it is, and ultimately, in order to have a scientific knowledge of the world, you have to get out there and try to change it.
Will:Yeah, it's a great thing to say after a Perry Anderson episode. Yeah, it's true.
Gil:I did want to ask you to expand in a little bit, and this is a nice segue, I think, because in the article in several places you're saying look, I'm talking in some cases about ideas, and the historical materialist position is not that Ideas not real, right, they're not a thing, it's just like material reality is what's what and ideas have no part to play.
Gil:And so we can think in again terms here of what is the specific causal mechanism? Is it supervenient, is it reflecting back on structural over determination? But you use the language in a really interesting moment of intellectual metabolism, right, taking up this idea from Marx that I think he gets from biologists at the time metabolism, and say there's also an intellectual metabolism. There's a way that ideas are things that we consume in the course of our production and produce in the course of our self-reproduction, and that itself has material effects. And this is a way of thinking about a non-reductive, materialistic count of ideas. So I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and why it's important not to collapse into the kind of productive materialism that Marxism is alleged to do sometimes.
Vanessa:Right. So I've been thinking recently more and more about the basin superstructure metaphor and I think that I mean, you know it's handy in a pinch, but I think that it can really. I think so, as people take it a bit too seriously. They think that that sort of captures the all and all of Marxist metaphysics about the relationship to matter and ideas, because I mean, I prefer a kind of understanding of human life as a totality that is permeated maybe is the right word or that is all generated right through this activity of labor.
Vanessa:And if you think about it like in that sense, you know, is this sort of like, I don't know, maybe this like this sort of glowing heart of the forge, you know, at this, at the center, right, and and, and so, then the thought isn't, oh, that there's this kind of this realm of ideas floating above freely, sort of like, you know, like mist off into into the heavens, right, but rather that those ideas are themselves, right, also all created by the very same process that's producing the material stuff.
Vanessa:Right, the material stuff comes from somewhere as well, just like the ideas do, and and so they're, they're, they're unified, they're knit together by their origin in human productive activity. And so the notion that the I mean the, the other thing, that. So before I wrote this paper I think it was the summer before I wrote this paper I did a reading group on Hegel's logic with two other Hegelians, right, and and it wasn't you know, I had read the logic before, but I, when I think about this paper, it's clear to me that this paper is written the way it is because I had recently read, reread the logic.
Vanessa:And and I don't think, I think it would have been hard for me to write this paper in the way I did without reading the logic. So it's very, very Leninist in that sense. Right, let you know this notion that you can't understand Marx, until you sit down and read the read Hegel's logic. And and the reason I say that is because the notion that an appearance that to call something an appearance is to say that it's not real and it don't matter is like banana pants, right, and and it is a completely non Marxist, non Hegelian, not not dialectical, I mean it is. It is like it is just so antithetical to Marxist theory to say like oh well, the Marxist think that racism is an appearance in classes, that they think it's a way that capitalism manifests, and so therefore, they think that racism isn't real and I was like that is.
Vanessa:I mean it's totally bananas, right? I mean, like you know, those are like in Hegel. Of course, essence appears, right? I mean it's, and it's the only way that is the only way you're ever able to know anything about the essence is by looking at appearances. Are all we got appearances? That's what we see, we encounter the appearances. It's through the appearances that we learn something about the essential nature of things, or of a society, a system or a moment in human history. And so that was, that was a that was hugely sort of generative. You know, like that, trying to trying to explain that to say that this is a manifestation of a, an essential economic process or relation, is not to say that it's not real or that it's just an illusion. That's not what appearances are. True is the whole.
Vanessa:The listeners cannot see me throwing my hands up in, yeah, throwing my hands up in like utter frustration. I'm like that's not what an appearance is.
Will:But I think what's really great about what you do with the appearance, us in distinction is you. I love your, your example of sexism. So one way someone might ding Marxism and say, well, marxist sexism has appeared in all forms of society. So you know, actually nothing really changed with capitalism, you know people still didn't like women.
Will:But the point is you move from the appearance to ask what its essential structure is, and it turns out and you give like concrete examples how sexism you know it's structure in, say, a pre capitalist society, you know will have different, you will have a different foundation in the productive process than, say, in capitalist societies where, in order for a woman to reproduce herself, she has to be mediated by a wage, and sometimes that wage is mediated by being married to a man.
Will:And you know these can generate all sorts of patriarchal relationships of dependency at least. And we want to say that that is definitely at least different than, say, a historical society where no one earns a wage, you just work the land for a Lord who comes around every now and then. And so it's also a way of trying to say, well, what is historically specific about how this form of sexism appears or how this form of racism appears, and that that seems to be how you're answering the question of what could it mean? To say that capitalism causes racism and sexism isn't to say that capitalism instigated it, but it certainly, insofar as capitalism radically reorganizes our productive relations by mediating them through class, in a way that they weren't necessarily mediated, you know, before, in previous versions of society, they weren't capitalist. This can't but have an effect on the structure that sexism and racism obtains, and so, fascinatingly, it turns out the people who try to say that Marxism can't deal with racism and sexism. They're the ones who are being abstract and ideal.
Will:You're either committed to the idea that racism and sexism get him will constant features.
Lillian:I'm cooking, I'm cooking, but it's because of this will You're either committed to?
Will:the idea that sexism and racism are permanent human constants and thus cannot be changed, and so there's nothing that you can do about them. Or you can't explain them because they just randomly appeared in society. No, don't try to say why, but I guess they're there because people just, you know, wanted to be mean to other people. This is at least a coherent framework of saying, well, what is racism doing here, without saying something like, oh, to be capitalist is to be racist. That doesn't necessarily follow at all.
Vanessa:Right, it doesn't mean of any. I mean so you know in.
Vanessa:In actual fact, they mostly are, but yeah, but there's nothing sort of inherent in the category that says something about the psychological makeup of any individual person. And and the you know the hope, the thought is that in understanding how it is that sexism is generated in this particular economic form, we then also have tools that allow us to go backward and understand how it is that other kinds of economic forms of life sustained, other kinds of relationships between men and women, sometimes sexist ones, sometimes ones that were not sexist, of course, right ones that were the oppression of women was actually absent from certain societies and yeah, I think that will.
Vanessa:the point that you made about the permanence is this is one of my big sort of bug bugabares, right of like with race, like one of my criticisms of certain kinds of like whiteness theory is that, you know, whiteness does this, whiteness does that, whiteness is this demiurge that has produced the moderate.
Will:I was like well, damn, right now.
Vanessa:I mean it's like a whiteness in the room, but also, but right, exactly, I'm like well, damn. But you know, if it did all of that, then I don't know like we need to abandon clash.
Lillian:Did you guys ever watch like Buffy the vampire slayer?
Gil:Yeah.
Lillian:Yeah, you know, like the last season where she's talking like it's the we're a bunch of nerds of a certain age, of course, this is really my
Lillian:shit, I was just putting myself out there. But you know, like the last, the season seven, when she it's like the evil, like the evil, the one, and like it's really unclear how to fight it and then like at some point, like at the end, of the season. They do end up like under the school and the Hellmouth, but like it's really unclear up until that point how you were going to do anything about this. Like primordial evil. That's like what I just thought of Absolutely, absolutely.
Vanessa:If it's just this abstract, you know, or the or you know, or it manifests in. I guess it always manifests in reactionary ways, but let's look at the case of women, right. One way that this manifests is in the logic of transphobia, because then, you know, sexism and the oppression of women becomes. Well, it didn't emerge historically, so where did it come from? It must just be something about the DNA of men, right, and that sort of idea that there's something biologically coded about men that makes them dangerous and hateful towards women. That then ends up being the logic that the other, the way they call themselves, gender criticals the gender criticals.
Vanessa:Yeah, that we get ends up being the logic that the gender criticals use to like explain why they're transphobic, right, and why they don't want to recognize the, the gender identity of other human beings and so and so this, this, this like the distinction between understanding these things as historically emergent things that are produced under certain circumstances that human beings have agency over, or understanding them as just these natural, permanent states of affair. You know, it really is the like, this, this question of the historicity of being. It is the decisive question between progressive and reactionary viewpoints.
Will:And it has consequences, it seems from what you say, not just theoretically but politically, and I'd like you just to say a little bit about that as we're wrapping up, because I one thing I do love about how you wrote your paper is you don't keep us waiting. You're like, so you know, overcoming capitalism all of a sudden make racism and sexism. You know, go out. Most people would be like well, wait till the end of the paper to find out what I'm not gonna.
Will:I'm not gonna like, I'm not even gonna hold you. Your answer is no, but it would help yeah.
Will:I'd like you to say a bit about these political concepts. Clearly, the theory is on your mind, but I think it's also clear that the politics are as well, and so part of what you want to say about sexism and racism is if it was historically emerged and produced by human beings, it is at least logically conceivable that we can also reproduce them out of existence, and so I'd like you to say a bit about that, while you're also saying why is your answer that you're abolishing capitalism, even if it won't solve all of our problems as it concerns racism, sexism, why would it help? What if I'm skeptical? Or what if I'm like someone who just thinks no, once you do that, that's utopia we emerge, we become angels, you know.
Vanessa:Yeah, so it'll help. I think it'll help quite a bit, because we, under capitalism, power is concentrated in the hands of people who have absolutely nothing to gain from the abolition of identity-based oppression and who have everything to lose Identity-based oppression is. I mean, one of the things that follows from understanding the interrelationship between identity-based oppression and economic exploitation is that, of course, identity-based oppression does a lot to condition the material reality of economic exploitation. It makes it more possible, it organizes it, it helps to distract working people from the fact of these power dynamics. It helps them look across at other workers rather than up at their bosses. It's extremely, extremely useful. And so, as long as the power to organize society is concentrated in the hands of people who have nothing to gain from doing away with identity-based oppression, and more than that, one of the things I point out in the paper is that it's probably going to be really expensive. It's probably literally going to cost a lot of money.
Will:We can't do this for free.
Vanessa:We can't do it for free. You're going to have to. You know whether it's just redistributive practices giving people money and giving them resources to have improved housing and education and access. There's also going to be a huge, just like the amount of education you're going to need to train people, to spend time learning history and pedagogy, and then you're going to have people just have literally the time to learn all this stuff that they never knew before. I mean, I've had classes where I've had to explain to my student this is not at GW, this happened at other places but where I had to explain to them what lynching was, where my students didn't know what lynching was, and then their poor little faces when I explained they were like what?
Will:That's probably a bit of a bummer, Dad.
Vanessa:Yeah, they were like what? Yeah, but people are going to have to do that right, and so it's just like a massive undertaking of undoing racism and racist ideas. And so who's going to pay for that right? I mean, who's? Going to pay for this thing. That, by the way, is going to make it a lot harder to vilify ethnic groups and sort of enact this social bullying that keeps workers in their place.
Gil:Not calculus right.
Vanessa:Not Elon yeah probably not Elon, probably not Jeff. Like these people are not going to, do it, not even Jeff.
Vanessa:Right. So, even just on a very basic level, having access to the resources that are actually needed in order to affect this kind of massive change in society we need socialism. We need socialism is totally impossible under capitalism. The resources can only be released for that purpose when we have a society that actually thinks it's important to do things like anti-racist theory and practice. So I said yeah, I say no, but it'll help. And then the reason? So the question is will racism and sexism just fall automatically into the dustbin of history once there's a proletarian revolution? And the answer is no, but it'll help, and the no is because there's. You know, on the one hand, there is part of the conditions of possibility of such a revolutionary moment include that working people have dismantled a lot of their own internal racism and sexism, but it won't be completed for the reasons that I mentioned. It takes the actual doing of it is going to take a ton of resources, so there's no reason to think that it would just be automatic.
Vanessa:Marx himself warns us against thinking that, yeah, that the ideas that people have are going to just kind of automatically be great ones. And again, like any good materialist, he points out that socialism will be a capitalist product. It is something that is produced by capitalist society and, as such, it can't be anything other than what is made possible by a capitalist society, which is quite a limitation. But what that socialist transformation can do is raise values to the four that are not simply the value of profit and instead are values of humanity and of freedom and of real individual flourishing, and can also seize the means of production and the resources that are necessary in order to transform society so that we really can do away with racism, sexism and other forms of oppression.
Will:Fantastic, all right, well, thank you. That was a wonderful place to end it. That does it for us today. We'd once again like to thank Professor Vanessa Wills for joining us. Vanessa, would you like to tell our audience about either where they can find you online or about anything you've got coming up? You mentioned a book.
Vanessa:Yeah, so I'm sighing because I'm on Twitter or X or whatever the hell you call that thing. Yeah, At VCWills V-C-W-I-L-L-S, but I'm a very sort of intermittent Twitterer. But yeah, I have a book coming out as Marx's Ethical Vision. It's coming out with Oxford University Press and the expected release date for the e-book is in early February and hardcover in April. So I'm excited about it and everybody should read it. It's a good book.
Will:I'm sure we are going to read it as well. I'm proud of it.
Vanessa:It's a good book.
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