A philosophical analysis of the relationship between marxist humanism and feminism

Abstract

Abstract Feminist movement has been viewed as the instrument used to challenge the traditional position of men in society with the hope of realising gender equality. This is in response to what has been portrayed as exploitation of women by their male counterparts. It goes without saying that such a theory must enjoy some connections with several other theories of liberation. Our study was triggered by the claim of gender imbalance in society, and the curiosity to understand how feminists have gone about tackling the problem. In so doing, we utilised our know ledge of the nature of Marxist theory and tried to relate it with feminism in order to understand whether a connection exists between them. Our selection of Marxist theory was deliberate taking into consideration the fact that it has historically proved to be popular with groups of people struggling to liberate themselves from various forms of discrimination. We then looked for the most appropriate branch of Marxism for our purposes and settled on humanism, which we discussed alongside various forms of feminism. The main objective of this study was to find out how far feminism can go without the solid foundation provided by Marxist humanism in its endeavour to challenge the position of women in the capitalist society. Data was collected mainly from secondary sources exploiting both the historical and contemporary literature and also the current topical issues that revolve around the same topic. This data was studied using the philosophical method of analysis, v ._ .' vi which is both deductive and inductive, and also employing the methods of dialectics to arrive at the most objective results. Going by the above, we managed to shed some light on the two subjects (feminism and Marxist humanism) by investigating what feminism and Marxist humanism separately stand for. We started off by discussing Marxist theory in general the narrowed down to Marxist humanism which is part of the larger Marxist theory. We then proceeded to discuss what feminism stands for and discussed most of the feminist forms. By so doing we managed to discover that Marxist humanism has a lot in common with feminism and that feminism itself has borrowed a lot in terms of strategy and content from Marxist humanism. We therefore concluded that feminism is but a beneficiary of Marxist and other forms of humanism though Marxist humanism provides a better understanding of it by utilizing the character of the capitalist society in its analysis. Our thesis was therefore approved in the light of pursuit of equality, fairness, justice and freedom for all in society.