Marxist Analysis of Gender, Race, and Corporate Ideology

Marx and the Ideology of the Ruling Class

Karl Marx, although famously ignorant of his own wife's domestic suffering while he labored in the British Library, still provides an ideologically coherent model for examining how materialism, commercialism, and the oppression of women and other marginalized groups invisibly operates within our class-bound society. One of Marx's most basic claims — and one particularly dear to post-modernists — was that although ideas are historically changing and in flux, these ideologies invariably reflect, or are a material product of, their time and the dominant political economy.

The Deserving and Undeserving Poor

For instance, during the time period when Marx was writing in Victorian England, the ideological products of bourgeois society included, among its virtues, the value of "hard work" and the notion of the "deserving poor" as morally superior to the non-deserving poor. Thus, the exploitation of workers by a factory owner, for example, was not viewed — within its ideological context — as an individual profiting from the enslavement of laborers at subsistence wages. Rather, the laborers were supposed to accept their conditions, even to be thankful for them. Proof of their moral excellence and wisdom came not from challenging the ruling authority, but from falling into bed at night with little food and even less money for their efforts, grateful for what they had earned and secure in their ideological superiority to those poor individuals who did not work for their daily bread.

The ideology of the "deserving poor" versus the "undeserving poor" suggests that the deserving poor works, but never rises above its station. The bourgeoisie provides a subsistence donation to the poor during, perhaps, Christmas bonus time, or through charity. These monetary confirmations of the impoverished individual's status as deserving helped to quash any immediate discontent or whispers of revolution. The "undeserving poor" provides an ideological template against which the "deserving poor" can feel superior. The undeserving poor refuses to work due to inadequate monetary compensation, engages in more personally profitable petty criminal enterprises, and threatens the ideological and personal safety of the bourgeoisie. Because the undeserving poor are not virtuous, the virtuous poor are supposed to take moral and even religious comfort from this situation.

Although members of the underprivileged classes and the bourgeoisie might genuinely believe, on a surface level, the ideological fiction that hard work confers moral virtue on the impoverished, Marx's famous declaration that "the ruling ideas of every epoch...are the ideas of the ruling class" is confirmed by this state of affairs. Only the bourgeoisie materially benefits from the impoverished individual's deserving, hard work. The factory owner, in Marx's view, does not really work hard, yet he values hard work. An aristocrat may value hard work in his servants while not working at all. The factory owner may hold himself superior to the aristocrat, but not to his employees who work with their hands. And the owner's wife, who does not work, does not acquire the status of "undeserving" because of her designated class — even if servants perform her household work.

Gender, Ideology, and the Invisible Worker

In terms of the undeserving poor, both the bourgeois factory owner and his deserving poor laborers may disdain crime, but crime actually benefits the poor in material ways — albeit imperfectly — unlike the bourgeois class, who are often materially threatened by it. Thus, as Marx observed, "law, morality, religion are...so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests."

Gender provides a particularly interesting illustration of the paradoxical nature of moral ideology. After all, what of poor women? Do they "work," given that, according to the hegemonic ideology of the bourgeoisie, women are not supposed to work? Women supposedly simply "exist" as child-bearers and caretakers of the home — angels of the hearth. Many poor women did work; else why would women's and children's working hours have needed to be limited by specific acts of the English Parliament? The most insidious dimension of the ideology of the "hard-working poor" is visible here: the supposed truth that women should not have to work (except at home, and not for pay) rendered actual working women ideologically invisible. This invisibility and supposed nonexistence of women as workers, particularly in laborious professions, justified women receiving less pay and less advancement than their male counterparts, as well as less societal recognition and approval.

Yet, despite this self-serving ideological fiction, women were still engaged in heavy labor in Marx's day — labor women were supposedly unfit for — and they continue to labor in such occupations today, including as maids and nannies. Working-class women employed as cleaners, cooks, and nannies performed physically demanding work, in contrast to the male and bourgeois pursuits of government, law, and the church. Although women's ultimate destiny was supposed to be childbearing, women of the serving class in Marx's time were often dismissed upon marriage, forfeiting their right to cook and clean and perform duties in the household of a bourgeois or aristocratic wife — as if, by marrying, they had betrayed their employer and abandoned their proper "hard-working" status as a deserving member of the poorer class. This was so even though sustaining that deserving status required them to sacrifice their recognized identity as women, fully sexed through marriage and children.

Conclusion: Critique from Within

Marx's equation of economics with dominant ideologies — ideologies that dominate the mind and body of workers and encourage machine-like conformity — also carries a strong gendered and racial component. Marx may not have stressed these aspects as explicitly as feminist, queer, or post-colonialist theorists do today. Still, the ideas suggesting that women, gay people, and post-colonial subjects remain materially suppressed by ideologies of money and the body are certainly complementary with Marxist ideology of class.