Sunday, August 8
1:30pm EST
Maya Gonzalez
Real Abstraction and the Logic of Gender
This paper begins with an analysis of the exchange abstraction as the form of value under capitalist conditions of social reproduction. It then conceptualizes the separation of productive and reproductive spheres--as directly and indirectly mediated by the market-- resulting from the real abstraction of social labor in the process of exchange. The paper then expands an analysis of separate spheres as well as public and private temporalities found in Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour: a Critique of Epistemology. Although critical of his historicization of commodity exchange, the paper considers the relationship between Sohn-Rethel's theorization of real abstraction and the abstraction of the value form under capitalism specifically, as well as the spatial and temporal separation of spheres throughout the circuits of production and reproduction; and lastly, it concludes by analyzing modern sexual difference as a conceptual distinction arising from the division of intellectual and manual labor, appearing as a real abstraction through the performance and activities of gender.
Maya Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness program at University of California, Santa Cruz working on the Marxist Feminist Critique of Political Economy. She has written for Endnotes journal and ViewpointMagazine.
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