The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. One guest today,

Tithi Bautacharya, editor of the collection Social Reproduction Theory,

remapping class, re-centering an oppression, which was published in October by

Pluto Press.

Her day job is as a professor of South Asian history at Purdue University in Indiana.

In the late 1970s, the economist Heidi Hartman wrote a classic essay on what she called the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism.

The core of Hartman's critique was that Marxism and class politics more generally always ends up on top.

As she says in the opening line, the marriage of Marxism and feminism has been like the

marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law.

Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism. Gender in her view always

ended up subordinated to class in both analysis and program. Hartman proposed

instead that the two perspectives become something of a marriage of equals.

As she wrote, we argue that a materialist analysis demonstrates that patriarchy is not simply

a psychic but also a social and economic structure.

We suggest that our society can best be understood once it is recognized that is organized

both in capitalist and in patriarchal ways."

Close quote.

But are these two spheres operating semi-independently, or are they a complex unity?

Over the decades, many socialist feminists have addressed these issues, not always agreeing on an answer.

The collection including the family and other highly gendered relations produces the worker and it's a mistake

to treat these as isolated systems.

The collection consists of 10 essays, two of them by the editor, one an overview of the

...