Nancy Hartstock Should Follow Karl Marx's Feminist Standpoint

That Nancy Hartstock should follow Karl Marx’s lead in developing her “Feminist Standpoint” - the perspective of the oppressed in a ‘phallocratic’ regime in order to describe the oppressive dynamics of the ruling gender – did not surprise me. After all, as she explains, it is only through his use of a proletariat perspective that enabled Marx to accurately view and describe the exchange of values that ultimately benefits the bourgeoisie with surplus value, much to the detriment of their workers, subsequently left to survive on subsistence-wages. Given its historic standing, political credentials and academic regard, Marxist understanding of capital and capitalism would be the logical blueprint upon which to build a more modern analysis
To construct a suitable analysis, she follows Karl Marx’s lead to seek out the perspective of the most oppressed class to from which to describe the subjugation that structures their social relations. In a patriarchy that class are females since, as she argues, “like the lives of proletarians according to Marxian theory, women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point that can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy” (284). This unique vantage point, “a feminist standpoint (will) allow us to understand patriarchal institutions and ideologies as perverse inversions of more humane social relations…”
It is no mere point-of-view, she reminds us, but rather a political positioning that “carries with it the contention that there are some perspective on society from which, however well-intentioned one may be, the real relations of humans with each other and with the natural world are not visible” (285) Such a location will inherently carry certain arguments: that social relation are made into dichotomous binaries which see in the other “inversions” of themselves; that the dominant ruling class structures all social relations, so in turn the view of the subjugated class which witnesses the full breadth of oppression will only be known through science and evolved from via education. (CITE) Such a vantage-point reminds us that reality has been bifurcated into higher (“surface”) and lower (“deeper”) levels of existence, the former explaining the latter while the latter inverts the former. (CITE). Therefore, if one hopes to reveal the scope of the structures of oppression, the view from the bottom-up becomes salient, as it brings into focus the dominant group in a way the latter cannot do