Sayers Sean, Osborne Peter (ред.). Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy. A Radical Philosophy Reader

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sexes, which accepts the undesirability of the domination of

nature associated with masculinity. This would be a strategy

which rejected the masculine concept of the human, but because

it denied any special significant connection between nature and

the feminine, was not committed to a rival feminine ideal. The

fact that the concept of the human is up for remaking doesn’t

mean that it has to be remade in the mould of either the mascu-

line or the feminine.

Not only can an ecofeminist argument appeal more satisfacto-

rily to the fourth model than the third, that is clearly what it

often does. For example, Rosemary Ruether, one of the pioneers

of the position, is clearly appealing to model 4, not model 3,

when she writes

Both men and women must be resocialised from their tradi-

tional distorted cultures of masculinity and femininity in

order to find that humanized culture that is both self-

affirming and other-affirming. It is precisely in this creation

of a humanity that is truly affirming of all life, both one’s

own and that of others, that the writers seek to find the

deepest connections between feminism and non-violence.

In some writers the adherence to model 4 over 3 is even more

explicit, e.g.

If the masculine character ideal supports militarism, what

can support peace? Femininity? No, for that character ideal

also has been shaped by patriarchy and includes along with

virtues such as gentleness and nurturance a kind of depen-

dency which breeds the passive-aggressive syndrome of cur-

dled violence.

The rejection of the masculine character ideal does not imply

acceptance of corresponding feminine traits, and a critique of

both masculinity and femininity and their complementary charac-

ters may be involved. Further, the rejection of both the masculine

and feminine character ideals is linked with the rejection of the

traditionally associated dualisms of mind/body, rationality/ emo-

tionality, public/private, and so on, which are also rejected as

false choices, so that the transcendence of the traditional gen-

dered characters becomes part of, is linked with the systematic

230 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

transcendence of this wider set of dualisms.

These dualisms are

subject to independent criticism in the ecofeminist literature.

From this perspective, the model which simply replaces the mascu-

line by the feminine is a reactive model which fails to take ade-

quate account of the way in which gender is structured as a dual-

ism. It shares the general inadequacy of the ‘reverse-value’ strat-

egy for dealing with dualisms which simply affirms the underside

—that to do so is implicitly to accept and to preserve, rather than

to challenge, the dualistic structure.

The fourth model for demasculinising the human character

may be developed in various different ways. One of the most

obvious and popular ways to develop it is in terms of androgyny.

Thus Kokopeli and Lakey continue:

We are encouraged by the vision of androgyny, which

acknowledges that the best characteristics now allocated to

the two genders indeed belong to both; gentleness, intelli-

gence, nurturance, courage, awareness of feelings, co-

operativeness…. Many of these characteristics are now allo-

cated to the feminine role which has led some men to con-

clude that the essential liberating task is to become effemi-

nate. We don’t agree, since some desirable characteristics

are now allocated to the masculine role (for example initia-

tive, intelligence).

But androgyny is not the only construction to place on the fourth

model, and it in turn has its problems. The concept of androgy-

nous human character suggests a recipe analogy, in which the

new human ideal is put together from existing ingredients: take

good points of each gender and place in bowl, mix gently, throw

bad points into dustbin.

But such a model is far too simple and shallow, ignoring rela-

tions of exclusion, complementation and so on between traits and

suggesting that their allocation to their respective sex is arbitrary.

It treats the problem as if it could be solved by an amalgam of

certain existing characteristics thrown together, just as the

androgynous human is pictured as a physical composite of male

and female organs. Similarly the androgynous terminology sug-

gests that no significant character differences should remain

between masculine and feminine characteristics, that there will be

WOMEN, HUMANITY AND NATURE 231

a single model for both sexes composed of the same set of charac-

ter traits.

These assumptions are both unsatisfactory and unnecessary,

and are not an inevitable part of the fourth model. The androgy-

nous way of developing the fourth model should be distinguished

from other ways, e.g. where what is involved is not an amalgam

of genders leading to identical gender roles, but a transcendence

of the dualistic gender characteristics to produce a third set of

characteristics that will often be different from either. The

androgynous model overlooks the fact that the gender contrasts

of existing character traits are often false contrasts. In fact the

gender categories and associated institutions can be seen as a sys-

tematic and related network of false choices. A good example is

provided by the egoism/altruism contrast, associated with mas-

culinity and femininity respectively. If egoism is taken as consist-

ing in pursuit of a person’s own selfish interest, and altruism to

consist in a person’s denying or setting aside their own interest in

favour of that of others, the false contrast standardly presented

between the two overlooks the alternative of interdependence of

interest, the situation where interests are not discrete and discon-

nected but where a person’s interest essentially involves the inter-

ests of others.

Similar points can be made for most of the other

gender-related dualisms.

There are several further ways of developing the fourth model.

One of them is degendered, in that selection of characteristics to

be affirmed is not based on association with one sex or the other

or exclusively on traditional gender characteristics, but aims to

transcend them. Another one might be thought of as regendered

in that it does not aim to eliminate gender and gender difference

as such, but rather to reconstruct it so as to free it from dualistic

construction and in particular to dissolve particular dualistically-

paired traits such as the pairs dominant/submissive and over-

emphasised/under-emphasised ego boundaries. The regendering

alternative would not need to deny difference or assume the neu-

trality of the body, to deny that differently sexed bodies might

give rise to different experiences and different orientations to the

world, although it would resist the attempt to treat such differ-

ence as lacking a social context and as giving rise to fixed

essences not open to change.

Nor does it have to try to create a

unique human character ideal, as opposed to a multiplicity of

such ideals.

232 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

Such a position can also allow room for certain ways of affirm-

ing or valuing the feminine, in at least some senses of this highly

ambiguous phrase, that is for affirming as humanly valuable cer-

tain traits previously treated as of little consequence, confined to

women and excluded from the masculine character or from more

prestigious areas of human life. Such upward revaluing of traits

such as nurturance is an important part of the ecofeminist posi-

tion. But it is important to note the ambiguities and the difference

between, first, valuing all and only feminine traits and valuing

them because or on the grounds that they are feminine, regardless

and in ignorance of what they will actually turn out to be (the

position corresponding to the feminising strategy discussed

earlier), and, second, revaluing, on a selective basis, certain impor-

tant traits which have been devalued because of their association

with the feminine and with nature.

It is important to note the difference too between affirming fem-

inine traits as part of a dualised and patriarchal structure, and

affirming them in a way which challenges such a structure. For

example affirming feminine traits as confined to women and as

exclusively possessed by them leads to an essentially conservative

position, and it is important for a radical ecofeminism to show

how its position differs from this conservative affirmation of fem-

inine traits and roles, which may involve showing how in affirm-

ing them it gives them a different significance from the one they

had in a dualised, patriarchal context. Nurturance, for example, a

trait often affirmed in ecofeminism, has been devalued because of

its links to both femininity and animality, and in a patriarchal

context where it has been confined to women and the private

sphere, is such that women’s exclusive nurturance confirms and

supports male control of the world. But a critical and non-

conservative ecofeminism must affirm it in ways which do not do

this, which remove it from the dualised context, making it a

virtue for men as well as women, and giving it the significance of

nurturing the natural world and others not confined to the

nuclear family. By such transformations of context and signifi-

cance, feminine traits arising from a patriarchal context can

develop into real and radical strengths in a non-patriarchal con-

text.

But although such traits can develop from traditional femi-

nine traits given an appropriate transformation of social context,

they are not identical with them, and representing them as the

same traits (as ‘affirming the feminine’ suggests) can be mislead-

WOMEN, HUMANITY AND NATURE 233

ing about the sense in and extent to which they are feminine. For

they are neither the same as those in the traditional context, and

hence ‘feminine’ in that sense of being part of the traditional char-

acteristics and virtues of womankind, nor feminine in the sense

that it is not possible for men to share them or aspire to them.

Where does all this leave the ecofeminist argument and the

notion that women are ‘closer to nature’? Women have been

treated historically as aligned with nature, and this has shaped the

characteristics of feminine identity. But there are problems in

embracing such a feminine alternative, to the extent that it has

involved the confinement of women to activities such as reproduc-

tion and denial to them of capacities for reason, intelligence and

control of life conditions, that is, their exclusion from the valued

features of human life and culture. So a different concept of close-

ness to nature from the traditional one has to be invoked.

But on the other side of the dualism, women’s alignment with

nature has been matched by the development of a masculine iden-

tity centring around distance from nature and such ‘natural’ areas

in human life as reproduction, and around control, domination

and inferiorisation of the natural sphere. Such distance is

obtained by the location of value in the area of human character

and culture that has been taken as both masculine and distinguish-

ing of humans from the non-human world. This is the model of

human life ecofeminists reject, as a model both for men and for

women liberated from the constraints of the traditional position.

Neither model is acceptable, and an acceptable ‘androgynous’

solution cannot be obtained by somehow combining the two

unsatisfactory ones. What is needed is a regendered model, which

realigns the gender power structure, reconstructs the gender iden-

tities and challenges the dualisms on which they have been based.

Thus a sophisticated ecofeminism based on the feminist critique

of gender and of dualism challenges nature/culture dualism, and

the dominant masculine model of human culture and the human

self as separated and maximally distanced from the natural

world, and from features of the human self shared with the natu-

ral world—‘nature within’. On such an alternative model of the

human we would not overemphasise or overvalue the characteris-

tics that set humans apart from the natural world nor attempt

obsessively to maximise the differences as the main source of

virtue. We would be able to see value not only in the natural

world but in the characteristics which we as humans share with

234 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

it, which have been allocated to the feminine and treated as cul-

turally problematic.

NOTES

This chapter, now revised, was first published in Radical Philoso-

phy 48 (Spring 1988)

1 The sex/gender distinction is important in stating ecofeminist positions

but has been under attack recently. It remains, I believe, both defensible

and useful, although often loaded with additional less defensible assump-

tions. As used here it carries no dualistic implications, e.g. that the char-

acter traits involved are purely mental (physical and integrated character-

istics can and normally will be included), or that biological sex is a brute

fact involving no element of social or cultural determination. For a

defence of the distinction and elaboration of some of the issues surround-

ing it see my ‘Do We Need A Sex/Gender Distinction?’, Radical Philoso-

phy 51, spring 1989.

2 p. 297 Dr C.McT.Hopkins, As You Take It, Neptune Press, Geelong,

1985.

3 Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason, Methuen, 1984, and Carolyn

Merchant, The Death of Nature, Wild wood House, 1980.

4 See e.g. R. and V.Routley, ‘Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvin-

ism’, in K.E.Goodpaster and K.M.Sayre, eds, Ethics and Problems of the

21st Century, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979.

5 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Dent,

London, 1982, p. 15.

6 For some account of this see Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western

Political Thought, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979.

7 See, for example, John Rodman, ‘Paradigm Change in Political Science’,

American Behavioural Scientist, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1980). Also Mary Midg-

ley, Beast & Man, p. 40, Methuen, 1979, Ch. 11.

8 These points are developed in more detail in V.Plumwood, ‘Ecofemi-

nism: an Overview and Discussion of Positions and Arguments’, in

Janna L.Thompson, ed., Women and Philosophy, Australasian Journal

of Philosophy, Supplement to Vol. 64, June 1986, pp. 120–38.

9 Wollstonecraft, op. cit, p. 5.

10 For examples see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, Penguin,

1983, p. 41ff.

11 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Foursquare Books, 1965.

12 Ariel Salleh, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Epistemology’,

Thesis Eleven, 1984, No. 8.

13 Lloyd, op. cit, p. 104.

14 For example Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Why the Green Nigger: Remything

Genesis, Roundtable Press, Wellesley, Mass. 1979.

15 See Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman New Earth, Seabury

WOMEN, HUMANITY AND NATURE 235

Press, New York, 1975, and Susan Griffin, Women and Nature, Harper

& Row, New York, 1978.

16 Although this may be involved in some cases, e.g. Elizabeth Dodson

Gray, op. cit.

17 See e.g. Leonie Caldecott and Stephanie Leland, eds, Reclaim the Earth:

Women speak out for Life on Earth, The Women’s Press, London, 1983,

and Pam McCallister, ed., Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and

Non-violence, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1982.

18 On complementation see Genevieve Lloyd, op. cit., Ch. 7.

19 Sally Miller Gearhart, ‘The Future—If There is One—Is Female’, in

McCallister, op. cit., p. 271.

20 Ibid., p. 272.

21 Christiane Makward, ‘To Be or Not to Be…A Feminist Speaker’, in Hes-

ter Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds, The Future of Difference, Rutgers

University Press, New Brunswick, 1985, p. 96.

22 Chantal Chawaf, cited in Makward, op. cit., p. 96. in E.Marks and I.de

Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms, Harvester, Brighton, 1980,

p. 103.

23 Claire Duchen, Feminism in France, Routledge 1986, Ch. 5.

24 This seems to be what is being suggested in Moira Gatens, ‘Feminism,

Philosophy and Riddles Without Answers’, in C. Pateman and E.Gross,

eds, Feminist Challenges, pp. 28–9.

25 Quoted in P.McCallister, op. cit.

26 Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey, ‘More Power Than We Want: Mascu-

line Sexuality and Violence’, in P.McCallister, op. cit., p. 239.

27 For an account of these linked dualisms and of how they are treated in

the ecofeminist argument see V.Plumwood, ‘Ecofeminism: an Overview

and Discussion of Positions and Arguments’, op. cit.

28 Kokopeli and Lakey, op. cit., p. 239.

29 For more details see R. and V.Routley, ‘Against the Inevitability of

Human Chauvinism’ in K.Goodpaster and K.Sayre eds, Ethics and Prob-

lems of the 21st Century, Notre Dame University Press, Notre Dame,

1979.

30 The difference between regendering and degendering is explained in

more detail in my article ‘Do We Need a Sex/Gender Distinction?’, op.

cit. For telling criticisms of androgyny see Hester Eisentein, Contempo-

rary Feminist Thought, Unwin Paperbacks, London, 1984, Ch. 6.

31 See Plumwood, op. cit.

32 As explained in Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of

Women, Penguin Books, London, 1986.

236 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

HUMANISM=SPECIESISM?

Marx on humans and animals

Ted Benton

INTRODUCTION

This paper

is intended to form part of a more extended explo-

ration of some key texts of Marx from the standpoint of the so-

called ‘new’ social movements (though some of these pre-date the

Marxist tradition itself!). Here, I shall be focusing on the early

work of Marx—especially the Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts of 1844—and with the concerns of two closely

related recent radical movements in mind.

These movements are modern environmentalism and a spec-

trum of groupings which share concern about human mistreat-

ment of (other) animals—animal welfare, rights and liberation

groups, as well as the more specialist campaigns against vivisec-

tion, factory farming, the fur trade and so on. The value-

orientation which underlies both movements, and which informs

their critique of modern industrial societies, is radically at odds

with a merely utilitarian, or instrumental relation to the rest of

nature. Other animals may be sufficiently like human beings to be

properly considered as moral subjects, and as the bearers of

biographies. Ethical considerations must therefore enter into our

dealings with them. It is evil to continue to treat them merely as

instruments or resources to be exploited for specifically human

purposes.

In the perspective of ‘deep’ ecology,

this argument can be

extended to the whole of nature, which is regarded as having an

intrinsic value, independent of human purposes and requirements.

Concern for the environment, on this view, is properly rooted not

237

in a ‘speciesist’ enlightened self-interest (i.e. the recognition that

short term benefits from ruthless exploitation of the environment

will be paid for in the longer term by the destruction of our own

‘life-support systems’) but rather in a respect for the independent

value of the other species with which we share our planet, and,

indeed, for the whole complex of physical and chemical condi-

tions for their existence and well-being.

At first thought, it seems that there is much in common

between this view of our relationship to the rest of nature and

that of the early Marx. Both perspectives share a vision of

humans as part of nature, and as dependent for their well-being

on unceasing interaction with nature. Consider, for example,

Marx’s striking metaphor for nature as man’s ‘inorganic body’:

Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is in so far as

it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means

that nature is his body, with which he must remain in con-

tinuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical

and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that

nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

And Marx is by no means stating merely a shallow-ecological,

enlightened self-interest of the species. The view of communism

which structures the whole of the Manuscripts gives a central

place to a proper ethical, aesthetic and cognitive relationship to

nature as inseparable from true human fulfilment.

In his later works it sometimes seems as if Marx has retreated

into a view of the overcoming of the opposition between human-

ity and nature as merely the main historical means by which

humans are enabled to achieve fulfilment. This is very much the

kind of picture of Marx’s argument presented in Gerry Cohen’s

very influential defence of Marx’s theory of history.

But the

Marx of the Manuscripts is by contrast clear in his recognition

that a transformation of our relation to nature is a key aspect and

content of the process of human emancipation itself.

This indeed is something I would like to hold on to as a funda-

mental insight which Marx reached in the Manuscripts. But—and

this is the topic of the rest of this paper—it also seems to me that

there are fundamental ambiguities and conceptual tensions in the

overall philosophical position adopted by the early Marx as it

bears on this range of problems. These ambiguities and tensions

238 SOCIALISM, FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY

threaten to undermine what is of value in Marx’s achievement

and have sustained readings of Marx which have been deeply

inimical to environmental values. A serious effort of critical

restructuring and revaluation of the most basic philosophical

ideas and arguments of the early Marx is necesary if their ‘ratio-

nal kernel’ is to be extracted. At best, I can accomplish only a tiny

fragment of that task in this paper, but, as I shall try to show, this

tiny fragment does have very far-reaching implications.

There are two elements in the argument of the Manuscripts

which seem to me to sit very uncomfortably alongside the natural-

ism of the above-quoted passage and its possible ‘deep-ecological’

reading. These elements are, first, the use of the human/animal

contrast as Marx’s central device in the ethical critique of the

estrangement of labour under regimes of private property, and,

second, the specific content Marx gives to his vision of human

emancipation as involving the ‘humanisation of nature’. I shall

say most about the first of these elements, leaving what I have to

say about the second rather underdeveloped.

With regard to the human/animal opposition the argument is,

very roughly, as follows. The estrangement of labour is supposed

by Marx to have disastrous effects on human beings, their rela-

tions to one another, and their relationships to their external,

material world. These disastrous effects can be summed up by

saying that the estrangement of labour reduces human life to the

condition appropriate to that of animals, and, within human life,

inverts the relation between the human and the animal. The over-

coming of estrangement means restoring to human beings their

properly human status, and relationships to one another and to

the rest of nature. But what is the rest of nature? Does it include

other animals? Marx’s use of the metaphor ‘inorganic body’ sug-

gests not. On the other hand, nothing Marx says in connection

with that metaphor can be sustained unless animals are included.

A human life dependent upon the forces and mechanisms of inor-

ganic nature, unmediated by other forms of life, is impossible.

There is no reason to think Marx actually thought it possible.

And notwithstanding the arguments of some that the possibility

now exists of a satisfactory human life which does not rely on the

consumption or exploitation of other animals, the phrase ‘man

lives on Nature’, written in 1844, must have included within its

reference a whole range of uses of animals as a source of energy

HUMANISM=SPECIESISM? 239