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Title: The Logic Of Gender Author: Endnotes Date: September 2013 Language: en Topics: communisation, gender, abolition, feminism, Endnotes Source: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/endnotes-the-logic-of-gender
Within marxist feminism we encounter several sets of binary terms to
analyse gendered forms of domination under capitalism.[1] These include:
productive and reproductive, paid and unpaid, public and private, sex
and gender. When considering the gender question, we found these
categories imprecise, theoretically deficient and sometimes even
misleading. This article is an attempt to propose categories which will
give us a better grasp of the transformation of the gender relation
since the 70s and, more importantly, since the recent crisis.
The account that follows is strongly influenced by systematic
dialectics, a method that tries to understand social forms as
interconnected moments of a totality.[2] We therefore move from the most
abstract categories to the most concrete, tracing the unfolding of
gender as a “real abstraction”. We are only concerned with the form of
gender specific to capitalism, and we assume from the outset that one
can talk about gender without any reference to biology or prehistory. We
begin by defining gender as a separation between spheres. Then, having
done so, we specify the individuals assigned to those spheres.
Importantly, we do not define spheres in spatial terms, but rather in
the same way Marx spoke of the two separated spheres of production and
circulation, as concepts that take on a materiality.
The binaries listed above appear to limit one’s grasp of the ways in
which these spheres function at present, as they lack historical
specificity and promote a transhistorical understanding of gendered
“domination”, which takes patriarchy as a feature of capitalism without
making it historically specific to capitalism. We hope to delineate
categories that are as specific to capitalism as “capital” itself. We
argue that these binaries depend on category errors whose faults become
clear once we attempt to illuminate the transformations within
capitalist society since the 70s. Forms of domestic and so-called
“reproductive” activities have become increasingly marketised, and while
these activities may occupy the “sphere” of the home, just as they did
before, they no longer occupy the same structural positions within the
capitalist totality, despite exhibiting the same concrete features. For
this reason, we found ourselves forced to clarify, transform, and
redefine the categories we received from marxist feminism, not for the
sake of theory, but to understand why humanity is still powerfully
inscribed with one or the other gender.
Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be
a continuous process, must continue to go periodically through the same
phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to
consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and as flowing on
with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the
same time, a process of reproduction.[3]
When Marx speaks of reproduction he does not refer to the production and
reproduction of any commodity in particular; rather, he is concerned
with the reproduction of the social totality. However, when marxist
feminists speak of reproduction, what they often aim to specify is the
production and reproduction of the commodity labour-power. This is
because, in Marx’s critique, the relationship between the reproduction
of labour-power and the reproduction of the capitalist totality is
incomplete.
a distinctive character, unlike any other
Although Marx speaks of the specificities of the commodity
labour-power,[4] there are some aspects of this specification which
require more attention.
First, let us investigate the separation between labour-power and its
bearer. The exchange of labour-power presupposes that this commodity is
brought to the market by its bearer. However, in this particular case,
labour-power and its bearer are one and the same living person.
Labour-power is the living, labouring capacity of this person, and as
such, it cannot be detached from the bearer. Thus the particularity of
labour-power poses an ontological question.
Going back to Capital, at the outset of Chapter One we encounter the
commodity, and it is only a few chapters later that we will fully
discover its most peculiar manifestation, that is to say, labour-power.
In accord with Marx, it is correct to begin with the naturalised and
self-evident realm of commodity circulation, in order to render the
commodity a curious and unnatural thing indeed. We will not, however,
enquire only about what organises these “things”, these objects; but
rather — in terms of a gender analysis — we will enquire into these
other bodies, human objects, which bumble about in their own “natural”
way, and who, like the fetishised commodity, appear to have no history.
Yet they surely do.
For at the heart of the commodity form is the dual character of labour —
both abstract and concrete — and accordingly, Chapter One of Capital
introduces the contradiction between use-value and (exchange) value.
This is the contradiction which unfolds from the first pages of Marx’s
critique to the very end. Indeed, the split between these two
irreconcilable aspects of the commodity form is the guiding thread that
allows Marx to trace and disclose all the other contradictory forms that
constitute the capitalist mode of production.
Let us summarise briefly this contradiction. On the one hand, the
commodity in its aspect as use-value stands, in all its singularity, as
a particular object differentiated from the next. It has a definite use
which, as Marx claims, is necessary for its production as
exchange-value. In addition, because it is singular, it is a single
unit, one of many which add up to a sum, a quantity of individual
things. It does not amount to a sum of homogeneous labour-time in the
abstract, but a sum of concrete individual and separable labours. On the
other hand, in its aspect as exchange-value, it represents an aliquot
portion of the “total social labour” within society — a quantum of
socially necessary labour time, or the average time required for its
reproduction.
This contradiction, the contradiction — far from being specific only to
“things”— is fundamentally the very condition of being in the world for
a proletarian. From this standpoint, the proletarian confronts the world
in which the capitalist mode of production prevails as an accumulation
of commodities; the proletarian does this as a commodity — and therefore
this confrontation is at once a chance meeting between one commodity and
another, and at the same time an encounter between subject and object.
This ontological split exists because labour-power is neither a person
nor just a commodity. As Marx tells us, the commodity labour-power is
peculiar and unlike any other. The peculiarity of the commodity
labour-power is what gives it a central place in a mode of production
based on value, as the very use-value of labour-power (or living labour
capacity) is the source of (exchange-) value. Furthermore, the
contradiction between use-value and (exchange) value has additional
implications, when we consider the very production and reproduction of
labour-powers. This peculiar “production” is specific enough to deserve
extra attention, for, as far as we know, at no time does a labour-power
roll off an assembly line.
How then is labour-power produced and reproduced? Marx identifies the
particularity of the use-value of labour-power. But does he adequately
distinguish the production of labour-power from the production of other
commodities? He writes:
the labour-time requisite for the production of labour-power reduces
itself to that necessary for the production of [its] means of
subsistence.[5]
When raising the problem of the value of labour-power, Marx concludes
that it is equal to the labour-time necessary for its production, as is
the case for any other commodity. However, in this case, it is
mysteriously reduced to the labour-time necessary for the production of
the worker’s means of subsistence. But a cart full of “means of
subsistence” does not produce labour-power as a ready-made commodity.
If we were to compare the production of labour-power with the production
of any other commodity, we would see that the “raw materials” used for
this production process, i.e. the means of subsistence, transmit their
value to the end product, while the new labour needed to turn these
commodities into a functioning labour-power adds no value to this
commodity. If we were to push this analogy further, we could say that —
in terms of value — labour-power consists only of dead labour.
In the above quote, Marx reduces the necessary labour required to
produce labour-power to the “raw materials” purchased in order to
accomplish its (re)production. Any labour necessary to turn this raw
material, this basket of goods, into the commodity labour-power, is
therefore not considered living labour by Marx, and indeed,in the
capitalist mode of production it is not deemed necessary labour at all.
This means that however necessary these activities are for the
production and reproduction of labour-power, they are structurally made
non-labour. This necessary labour is not considered as such by Marx
because the activity of turning the raw materials equivalent to the wage
into labour-power takes place in a separate sphere from the production
and circulation of values. These necessary non-labour activities do not
produce value, not because of their concrete characteristics, but
rather, because they take place in a sphere of the capitalist mode of
production which is not directly mediated by the form of value.
There must be an exterior to value in order for value to exist.
Similarly, for labour to exist and serve as the measure of value, there
must be an exterior to labour (we will return to this in part two).
While the autonomist feminists would conclude that every activity which
reproduces labour-power produces value,[6] we would say that, for
labour-power to have a value, some of these activities have to be cut
off or dissociated from the sphere of value production.[7]
separation of two different spheres
As articulated above, there is a sphere of non-labour or extra-necessary
labour which envelops the process of transforming dead labour, that is
commodities purchased with the wage, into the living labour capacity
found on the market. We must now look at the specificities of this
sphere.
Terms like the “reproductive sphere” are insufficient for identifying
this sphere, because what we are trying to name cannot be defined as a
specific set of activities according to their use-value or concrete
character. Indeed, the same concrete activity, like cleaning or cooking,
can take place in either sphere: it can be value-producing labour in one
specific social context and non-labour in another. Reproductive tasks
such as cleaning can be purchased as services, and prefab meals can be
bought in place of time spent preparing meals. However, to fully
appreciate how — beyond labour-power — gender is reproduced, it will be
necessary to differentiate reproduction that is commodified, monetised,
or mass produced from that which is not.
Because the existing concepts of production and reproduction are
themselves limited, we need to find more precise terms to designate
these two spheres. From now on we will use two very descriptive (and
therefore rather clunky) terms to name them: (a) the directly
market-mediated sphere (DMM); and (b) the indirectly market-mediated
sphere (IMM). Rather than coming up with jargonistic neologisms, our aim
is to use these as placeholders and to concentrate on the structural
characteristics of these two spheres. In the course of our presentation
(see Part 2) we will have to add another set of descriptive terms
(waged/unwaged) to sufficiently elaborate the nuanced characteristics of
these spheres.
The production and reproduction of labour-power necessitates a whole set
of activities; some of them are performed in the directly
market-mediated or DMM sphere (those that are bought as commodities,
either as product or service), while others take place in that sphere
which is not directly mediated by the market — the IMM sphere. The
difference between these activities does not lie in their concrete
characteristics. Each of these concrete activities — cooking, looking
after children, washing/mending clothes — can sometimes produce value
and sometimes not, depending upon the “sphere”, rather than the actual
place, in which it occurs. The sphere, therefore, is not necessarily the
home. Nor is this sphere defined by whether or not the activities taking
place within it consist of those that reproduce labour-power. It is
defined by the relationship of these reproductive tasks to exchange, the
market and the accumulation of capital.
This conceptual distinction has material consequences. Within the
directly market-mediated sphere, reproductive tasks are performed under
directly capitalist conditions, that is, with all the requirements of
the market, whether they are performed within the manufacturing or the
service sector. Under the constraints and command of capital and the
market, the production of goods and services, regardless of their
content, must be performed at competitive levels in terms of
productivity, efficiency and product uniformity. The index of
productivity is temporal, while that of efficiency pertains to the ways
in which inputs are economically utilised. Furthermore, the uniformity
of the product of labour requires the uniformity of the labouring
process, and of the relationship of those who produce to what they
produce.
One can immediately see the difference between tasks performed in this
sphere, and that outside of it. In the DMM sphere, the rate of return on
a capitalist investment is paramount and therefore all activities
performed — even if they are “reproductive” in their use-value character
— must meet or exceed the going rate of exploitation and/or profit. On
the other hand, outside the DMM sphere, the ways in which the wage is
utilised by those who reproduce the use-value labour-power (via the
reproduction of its bearer) is not subject to the same requirements. If
those ways are uniform at all, they are nevertheless highly variable in
terms of the necessary utilisation of time, money and raw materials.
Unlike in the DMM sphere, there is no direct market-determination of
every aspect of the reproduction process. (In Part 2 we will address the
indirectly market-mediated sphere of state-organised reproduction).
The indirectly market-mediated sphere has a different temporal
character. The 24-hour day and 7-day week[8] still organise the
activities within this sphere, but “socially necessary labour time”
(SNLT) is never directly a factor in that organisation. SNLT applies to
the process of abstraction occurring through the mediation of the
market, which averages out the amount of time required within the labour
process to competitively sell a product or service. Bankruptcy and the
loss of profit are factors weighing on this process; likewise the
innovative use of machinery in order to decrease the time required to
produce goods. Thus, the increase of profit or market share dominates
the DMM sphere. Of course, mechanisation is also possible in the IMM
sphere, and there have been many innovations of that sort. In this case,
however, the aim is not to allow the production of more use-values in a
given amount of time, but to reduce the time spent on a given activity,
usually so that more time can be dedicated to another IMM activity. When
it comes to the care of children, for example, even if some activities
can be performed more quickly, they have to be looked after the whole
day, and this amount of time is not flexible (we will return to this in
part 5).
In addition, different forms of domination characterise these spheres
respectively. Market dependency, or impersonal abstract domination,
organises DMM relations of production and reproduction, through the
mechanism of value-comparison in terms of socially necessary labour
time. The kind of “direct market-mediation” within this sphere is
abstract domination, and as such, it is a form of indirect compulsion
determined on the market (“behind the backs of the producers”). Hence,
there is no structural necessity toward direct violence, or planning, in
order to allocate labour per se.
In contrast, there is no such mechanism comparing the various
performances of the concrete activities occurring in the IMM sphere —
which is to say, as being socially determined. They cannot be dictated
by abstract market domination and the objective constraints of SNLT,
except in an indirect way such that the requirements of production
transform the requirements of labour-power’s maintenance outside of the
DMM sphere. Instead, other mechanisms and factors are involved in the
division of IMM activities, from direct domination and violence to
hierarchical forms of cooperation, or planned allocation at best.[9]
There is no impersonal mechanism or way to objectively quantify, enforce
or equalise “rationally” the time and energy spent in these activities
or to whom they are allocated. When an “equal and just” sharing of these
activities is attempted, it must be constantly negotiated, since there
is no way to quantify and equalise “rationally” the time or energy
spent. What does it mean to clean the kitchen, what does it mean to look
after a child for one hour: is your hour of childcare the same as my
hour of childcare? This allocation cannot but remain a conflictual
question.
Marxist feminists have often added to the distinction between production
and reproduction another one: that between paid and unpaid labour. Like
many before us, we find these categories imprecise and we prefer to use
the waged/unwaged distinction. As we further explicate the spheres of
DMM and IMM in relation to that which is waged or unwaged, we elucidate
the overlapping of these spheres through the principle of social
validation. En route we will explore the ways in which the activities in
question can be called labour or not; that is, if they qualify as labour
or not in this mode of production.
The difference between paid/unpaid on the one side, and waged/unwaged on
the other is blurred by the form of the wage, by what we must name the
wage fetish. The wage itself is not the monetary equivalent to the work
performed by the worker who receives it, but rather the price for which
a worker sells their labour-power, equivalent to a sum of value that
goes one way or another into the process of their reproduction, as they
must reappear the next day ready and able to work.[10] However, it
appears that those who work for a wage have fulfilled their social
responsibility for the day once the workday is over. What is not paid
for by the wage appears to be a world of non-work. Therefore, all “work”
appears to be paid tautologically as that which is work, since one does
not appear to get paid for that which one does when not “at work”.
However, it is imperative to remember that Marx demonstrated that no
actual living labour is ever paid for in the form of the wage.
Obviously, this does not mean that the question of whether an activity
is waged or not is irrelevant. Indeed, she who does not go to work does
not get a wage. Wage-labour is the only way the worker can have access
to the means necessary for their own reproduction and that of their
family. Moreover, validation by the wage qualitatively affects the
activity itself. When an activity that was previously unwaged becomes
waged, even when it is unproductive, it takes on some characteristics
that resemble those of abstract labour. Indeed, the fact that
labour-power is exchanged for a wage makes its performance open to
rationalisations and comparisons. In return, what is expected from this
labour-power is at least the socially-average performance — including
all its characteristics and intensity — regulated and corresponding to
the social average for this kind of labour (clearly the absence of value
makes it impossible to compare it with any other kind of labour). An
individual who cannot deliver a proper performance in the necessary
amount of time will not be able to sell their labour-power in the
future. Therefore, the wage validates the fact that labour-power has
been employed adequately, whilst universally recognising it as social
labour, whatever the concrete activity itself might have been, or
whether it was “productively” consumed.
Now we must consider this distinction between the waged and unwaged,
insofar as it intersects with that between the IMM and DMM spheres. When
we consider those activities which are waged, we are referring to those
which are social[11]; those which are unwaged are the non-social of the
social: they are not socially validated but are nonetheless part of the
capitalist mode of production. Importantly, however, these do not map
directly onto the spheres of IMM and DMM.
We see that within the interplay of these four terms there are some
waged activities which overlap with those of the IMM sphere: those
organised by the state (the state sector). Within this imbricated set of
categories, the sphere of IMM activities intersects with the sphere of
waged labour. These waged and IMM activities are forms of
state-organised reproduction that are not directly market-mediated (see
figure 1). These activities reproduce the use-value of labour-power but
are waged and thus socially validated. Nevertheless, these activities
are not productive of value, nor are they subject to the same criteria
of direct market-mediation (see above). They are social because they are
remunerated through the social form of value. Because they are not
productive of value, they are the forms of reproduction which are a
collective cost to capital: they are paid indirectly through deductions
from collective wages and surplus-value in the form of taxes.
Let us now turn things round one more time and look at what the wage
buys; that is, what is an element of the wage, what constitutes the
exchange-value of labour-power. The wage buys the commodities necessary
for the reproduction of labour-power, and it also buys services which
participate in this reproduction, whether directly (by paying a private
nanny, for example) or indirectly (for example, by paying taxes for
state-expenditure on education, which is part of the indirect wage).
These services, whether they are productive of value or not,[12] have a
cost that is reflected in the exchange-value of labour-power: they
imply, in one way or another, a deduction from surplus-value.
What remains are the activities that are non-waged, and that therefore
do not increase the exchange-value of labour-power. These are the
non-social of the social, the non-labour of labour (see Addendum 1).
They are cut off from social production; they must not only appear as,
but also be non-labour, that is, they are naturalised.[13] They
constitute a sphere whose dissociation is necessary to make the
production of value possible: the gendered sphere.
In the next part we will finally turn to the individuals who have been
assigned to this sphere. However, we should first consider another
binary: public/private.
Figure 1: A graphical representation of the relation between the DMM/IMM
and waged/unwaged spheres.
For us, labour will be defined, in its opposition to non-labour, as an
activity that is socially validated as such, because of its specific
function, its specific social character in a given mode of production.
Other bases for definitions of labour are also possible, to cite a few:
exchange between man and nature, expense of energy, distinction between
pleasant/unpleasant activities. However, we think that none of these
definitions can help us understand anything about the character of
unwaged IMM activities. These definitions only take into account their
concrete characteristics, and in the case of unwaged IMM activities,
this leads to banal or absurd descriptions. Is comforting a child an
exchange with nature? Is sleeping a labour that reproduces labour-power?
Is brushing one’s teeth labour? Brushing somebody else’s teeth? We think
that our definition of labour, while it may seem banal at first glance,
is the only one capable of passing over these meaningless questions, and
that it constitutes the right starting-point for research into the
specific character of these activities.
Many people use the category “public” to designate the state sector. And
marxist feminists often use the concept of the “private” sphere to
designate everything within the sphere of the home. We find it necessary
to hold fast to the traditional dichotomy of private/public as that
which separates the economic and the political, civil society and the
state, bourgeois individual and citizen.[14] Prior to capitalism the
term “private” referred to the household, or oikos, and it was
considered the sphere of the economic. With the advent of the capitalist
era the private sphere moved outward beyond the household itself.
Here we begin to see the inadequacy of the concept of “the private
sphere” as a place outside of “the public sphere” that includes the
economy, as for example in feminist theory. For the private is not
merely that which is located in the domestic sphere, and associated with
domestic activities. Rather, it is the totality of activities inside and
outside of the home. As a result of the structural separation between
the economic and the political (political economy) — corresponding to
the spread of capitalist social (production) relations — the private
sphere becomes increasingly diffuse, rendering the home only one amongst
many moments of “the economic” or “the private”. Therefore, contrary to
most feminist accounts, it was only within the context of pre-modern
relations — prior to the separation of the political and the economic
under capitalism — that the private sphere constituted the household. In
contrast, in the modern capitalist era,the scope of private exploitation
spans the entire social landscape.
Where then is “the public” if the private is the totality of productive
and reproductive activities? Marx claims that the public is an
abstraction from society in the form of the state. This sphere of the
political and the juridical is the real abstraction of Right separated
from the actual divisions and differences constituting civil society.
For Marx, this abstraction or separation must exist in order to attain
and preserve the formal equality (accompanied, of course, by class
inequality) necessary for self-interested private owners to accumulate
capital in a manner uninhibited rather than controlled or dictated by
the state. This is what distinguishes the modern state, which is
adequate to capitalist property relations, from other state systems
corresponding to other modes of production, whether monarchical or
ancient democratic.
This means that the modern capitalist state and its “public sphere” is
not an actually existing place, but an abstract “community” of “equal
citizens”. Hence, the differentiation between the sphere of economic
relations and that of the political — including relations between
unequals mediated by relations between “abstract equal citizens”—
renders “citizens” only formally equal according to the state and civil
rights. As a result, these “individuals” appear as equals on the market
— even though in “real life” (the private sphere of civil society) they
are anything but.[15] This abstraction, “the public”, must exist
precisely because the directly market-mediated sphere is mediated by the
market, a space of mediation between private labours, produced
independently from one another in private firms owned and operated by
private (self-interested) individuals.
What then is the relationship between on the one hand, the spheres of
public/private, political/economic, state/civil society, and on the
other hand, the spheres of direct and indirect market-mediation? The
meeting-point of these spheres marks the moment of their constitutive
separation, and defines those anchored to one as distinct from the
other, as different. This difference is determined by whether those
individuals defined by the state directly exchange the labour-power
commodity they bear within their person as their own property, or — if
that exchange is mediated indirectly — through those with formal
equality.
Now we are ready to look at the individuals who have been assigned to
each sphere. What we see at first, when we look at the dawn of this mode
of production, is individuals who have different rights, which are
defined by the law as two different juridical beings: men and women. We
will be able to see how this juridical difference was inscribed on the
“biological” bodies of these individuals when we come to analyse the
sex/gender binary. For now, we must see how the dichotomy between public
and private does the initial work of anchoring individuals as men and
women to the different spheres reproducing the capitalist totality
through their differential right not merely to private property, but to
that property which individuals own in their persons.
This peculiar form of property is necessary to generalised
wage-relations because value presupposes formal equality between the
owners of commodities so that “free” exchange (capital and labour-power)
can occur despite the fact that there is a structural “real” inequality
between two different classes: those possessing the means of production
and those dispossessed of that form of property. However, “free
exchange” can only occur through a disavowal of that class difference,
through its deferral to another binary: citizen and other, not between
members of opposed classes but between those within each class. In order
to found the bourgeois mode of production, it was not necessary for all
workers to be given equality under the sign of “the citizen”.
Historically, “citizen” only names a specific category to which both
property owners and certain proletarians are able to belong. As
capitalist juridical relations disavow class through the reconstitution
of the difference between citizen and other, the historical conditions
under which the bourgeois mode of production was itself constituted were
various forms of unfreedom. For this reason we have citizen and other as
mapping onto: male (white)/ non-(white) male.
For instance, under the conditions of slavery in North America, the
classification of white was necessary to maintain the property of
masters over slaves. Women were also classified as other, but for
different reasons, as we shall see. One factor worth mentioning here is
that within this relation of white/person of colour/woman, the
preservation of the purity of the “white master”, as opposed to the
“black slave” is of the utmost importance — as well as the strict
preservation of the dominant master signifier of equality (“white blood”
and therefore “white mothers”) across future generations of the
bourgeoisie. Therefore the division between white and non-white women
was also closely regulated in order to preserve such a taxonomy, within
the mixed context of both plantation-based commodity production in the
New World and the rise of industrial capitalism.[16]
However, what constitutes the citizen/other binary in this mode of
production is not based upon a negative definition of slavery but rather
upon “free” labour, consisting of those with, as opposed to without, the
same formal freedom. “Free labour” as Marx identified it — that is, the
technical definition of freedom for the wage labourer — requires what we
might call “double freedom”:
For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of
money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double
sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own
commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for
sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his
labour-power.[17]
Nevertheless, haven’t women always been wage-labourers? Of course, since
the origin of capitalism, women have been bearers of labour-power, and
their capacity to labour has been utilised by capital; but they have
only quite recently become the owners of their labour-power, with
“double freedom”. Prior to the last quarter century, women were indeed
free from the means of production, but they were not free to sell their
labour-power as their own.[18] The freedom of ownership, which includes
mobility between lines of work, was historically only for some at the
expense of others. Those struggling for political and “public” freedom,
or double freedom, were caught in a double-bind. They were forced to
make arguments on behalf of their (“but-different”) equality, while at
the same time having interests in contradiction with those of others who
identified with the same fight for equality on different terms.[19]
This is especially true in the case of women, who were caught between
demanding freedom as the ideal, equal human, and freedom as different.
This is because their “real difference” under capitalism is not ideal or
ideological but embodied, and structurally reproduced through the
practices which define women as different. This “real difference” is
entangled within a web of mutually constitutive and reinforcing
relations which necessarily presuppose the citizen, state and public
sphere to which women might appeal for human and civil rights on the one
hand, and reproductive rights on the other.
Therefore, even if it is true that formal freedom itself was a
precondition for value production and exchange, nevertheless, what it
organised — the civil society of bourgeois individuals — was necessary
for the continuing reproduction of the public or legal sphere. The right
to “be equal” and thus equally free, does not itself reorganise the
distribution of property, nor as we shall see, the conditions of
possibility for capital accumulation. These spheres work in concert. If
this were not the case, it would be possible to abolish the actually
existing forms of historically-specific “difference” through legal and
“political” actions, within the state. This would amount to the
abolition of the private through the public sphere — a revolution
through reform which is structurally impossible.
“Equality” as double-freedom is the freedom to be structurally
dispossessed. This is not to say that it is not worthwhile. The question
is, can it also become “worthwhile” to capital, the state and its
attendant apparatuses of domination? As most of us will have experienced
first-hand, the gender distinction has persisted long after differential
freedom was abolished for the majority of women. If this differential
freedom was in fact what anchored women to the indirectly
market-mediated sphere, why did its abolition not “free” women from the
category “woman” and the gendered sphere of reproduction?
When looking at the history of the capitalist mode of production, it is
striking that, in many cases, once inequalities have been secured by
juridical mechanisms, they can take on a life of their own, making their
own basis in law superfluous. As women in many countries slowly but
surely received equal rights in the public sphere, the mechanism that
reinforced this inequality in the “private sphere” of the economic — of
the labour-market — was already so well established that it could appear
as the enactment of some mysterious natural law.
Ironically, the reproduction of dual spheres of gender and the anchoring
of women to one and not the other is perpetuated and constantly
re-established by the very mechanism of the “sex-blind” labour-market,
which obtains not for the man/woman distinction directly but rather for
the price distinction, or the exchange-value of their labour-power.
Indeed, labour markets, if they are to remain markets, must be
“sex-blind”. Markets, as the locus of exchanges of equivalents, are
supposed to blur concrete differences in a pure comparison of abstract
values. How then can this “sex-blind” market reproduce the gender
difference?
Once a group of individuals, women, are defined as “those who have
children” (see Addendum 2) and once this social activity, “having
children”, is structurally formed as constituting a handicap,[20] women
are defined as those who come to the labour-market with a potential
disadvantage. This systematic differentiation — through the
market-determined risk identified as childbearing “potential” — keeps
those who embody the signifier “woman” anchored to the IMM sphere.
Therefore, because capital is a “sex-blind” abstraction, it concretely
punishes women for having a sex, even though that “sexual difference” is
produced by capitalist social relations, and absolutely necessary to the
reproduction of capitalism itself. One could imagine a hypothetical
situation in which employers did not enquire about the gender of an
applicant, but only rewarded those who have “the most mobility” and
those who are “the most reliable, 24/7”; even in this case gender bias
would reappear as strong as ever. As an apparent contradiction, once
sexual difference becomes structurally defined and reproduced, woman as
a bearer of labour-power with a higher social cost becomes its opposite:
the commodity labour-power with a cheaper price.
Indeed, the better-remunerated jobs — that is, those which can
tendentially pay for more than the reproduction of a single person — are
those for which a certain degree of skill is expected. In those skilled
sectors, capitalists are ready to make an investment in the worker’s
skills, knowing that they will benefit from doing so in the long term.
They will therefore privilege the labour-power that is likely to be the
most reliable over a long period. If the worker is potentially going to
leave, then she will not be as good an investment, and will get a lower
price. This lower price tag, fixed to those who look like the kind of
people who “have children”, is not determined by the sorts of skills
that are formed in the IMM sphere. Even though the sphere a woman is
relegated to is full of activities which require lifelong training, this
does not increase the price of her labour-power, because no employer has
to pay for their acquisition. As a result, capital can use women’s
labour-power in short spurts at cheap prices.
In fact, the general tendency towards “feminisation” is not the
gendering of the sex-blind market, but rather the movement by capital
towards the utilisation of cheap short-term flexibilised labour-power
under post-Fordist, globalised conditions of accumulation, increasingly
deskilled and “just-in-time”. We must take this definition of
feminisation as primary, before we attend to the rise of the service
sector and the increasing importance of care and affective labour, which
is part and parcel of the “feminisation turn”. This turn comes about
through the dynamic unfolding of capitalist social relations
historically, a process that we will see in the last two parts of the
text. But first we must summarise what we have learned about gender
until now, and attempt a definition. This requires analysis and
criticism of another common binary: sex and gender.
The definition of women as “those who have children” presupposes a
necessary link between 1) the fact of having a biological organ, the
uterus 2) the fact of bearing a child, of being pregnant 3) the fact of
having a specific relation to the result of this pregnancy. Conflating
the three obscures:
fact that somebody with a uterus will go through pregnancy, and how
often that will occur.[21] These mechanisms include: the institution of
marriage, the availability of contraceptives, the mechanisms that
enforce heterosexuality as a norm, and (at least for a long time and
still in many places) the interdiction/shame associated with forms of
sex that do not risk leading to pregnancy (oral/anal sex, etc.).
level of care a child necessitates. While there was a period in which
children were considered as half-animal, half-human creatures who only
had to be cleaned and fed until they became small adults — that is, able
to work — the modern reality of childhood and its requirements often
make “having children” a never-ending business.
We are now prepared to address the gender question. What then is gender?
For us, it is the anchoring of a certain group of individuals in a
specific sphere of social activities. The result of this anchoring
process is at the same time the continuous reproduction of two separate
genders.
These genders concretise themselves as an ensemble of ideal
characteristics, defining either the “masculine” or the “feminine”.
However, these characteristics themselves, as a list of behavioural and
psychological qualities, are subject to transformation over the course
of the history of capitalism; they pertain to specific periods; they
correspond to certain parts of the world; and even within what we might
call the “West” they are not necessarily ascribed in the same way to all
people. As a binary however, they exist in relation to one another,
regardless of time and space, even if their mode of appearance is itself
always in flux.
Sex is the flip side of gender. Following Judith Butler, we criticise
the gender/sex binary as found in feminist literature before the 1990s.
Butler demonstrates, correctly, that both sex and gender are socially
constituted and furthermore, that it is the “socializing” or pairing of
“gender” with culture, that has relegated sex to the “natural” pole of
the binary nature/culture. We argue similarly that they are binary
social categories which simultaneously de-naturalise gender while
naturalising sex. For us, sex is the naturalisation of gender’s dual
projection upon bodies, aggregating biological differences into discrete
naturalised semblances.
While Butler came to this conclusion through a critique of the
existentialist ontology of the body,[22] we came to it through an
analogy with another social form. Value, like gender, necessitates its
other, “natural” pole (i.e. its concrete manifestation). Indeed, the
dual relation between sex and gender as two sides of the same coin is
analogous to the dual aspects of the commodity and the fetishism
therein. As we explained above, every commodity, including labour-power,
is both a use-value and an exchange-value. The relation between
commodities is a social relation between things and a material relation
between people.
Following this analogy, sex is the material body, which, as use-value to
(exchange) value, attaches itself to gender. The gender fetish is a
social relation which acts upon these bodies so that it appears as a
natural characteristic of the bodies themselves. While gender is the
abstraction of sexual difference from all of its concrete
characteristics, that abstraction transforms and determines the body to
which it is attached — just as the real abstraction of value transforms
the material body of the commodity. Gender and sex combined give those
inscribed within them a natural semblance (“with a phantomlike
objectivity”), as if the social content of gender was “written upon the
skin” of the concrete individuals.
The transhistoricisation of sex is homologous to a foreshortened
critique of capital, which contends that use-value is transhistorical
rather than historically specific to capitalism. Here, use-value is
thought to be that which positively remains after revolution, which is
seen as freeing use-value from the integument of exchange-value. In
terms of our analogy with sex and gender, we would go one step further
and say that both gender and sex are historically determined. Both are
entirely social and can only be abolished together — just as
exchange-value and use-value will both have to be abolished in the
process of communisation. In this light, our feminist value-theoretical
analysis mirrors Butler’s critique in so far as we both view the
sex/gender binary as being socially-determined and produced through
social conditions specific to modernity.
But gender is not a static social form. The abstraction of gender
becomes increasingly denaturalised, making sex appear all the more
concrete and biological. In other words, if sex and gender are two sides
of the same coin, the relation between gender and its naturalised
counterpart is not stable. There is a potential discrepancy between
them, which some have called a “troubling”, and we term
“denaturalisation”.
Over time gender is ever more abstracted, defining sexuality more and
more arbitrarily. The marketisation and commodification of gender
appears increasingly to de-naturalise gender from naturalised biological
concerns. One might say that capitalism itself deconstructs gender and
denaturalises it. Nature — whose increasing superfluity is in
juxtaposition to gender’s ongoing necessity — appears as the
presupposition of gender rather than its effect. In more familiar terms,
reflecting capital’s “problem” with labour: “nature” (the “natural” side
of the sex/gender binary) becomes increasingly superfluous to the
generational reproduction of the proletariat, while the “cost” assigned
to “female” bodies — or the counter-pole to sex — becomes increasingly
imperative to capital accumulation as the tendency toward feminisation.
Hence, the reproduction of gender is of utmost importance, as
labour-power with a lower cost, while a reserve army of proletarians as
surplus population is increasingly redundant.
What the female gender signifies — that which is socially inscribed upon
“naturalised”, “sexuated” bodies — is not only an array of “feminine” or
gendered characteristics, but essentially a price tag. Biological
reproduction has a social cost which is exceptional to average (male)
labour-power; it becomes the burden of those whose cost it is assigned
to — regardless of whether they can or will have children. It is in this
sense that an abstraction, a gendered average, is reflected back upon
the organisation of bodies in the same way exchange-value, a blind
market average, is projected back upon production, molding and
transforming the organisation of the character of social production and
the division of labour. In this sense, the transformation of the
condition of gender relations goes on behind the backs of those whom it
defines. And in this sense, gender is constantly reimposed and
re-naturalised.
IMM SPHERE TO THE COMMODIFICATION OF GENDERED ACTIVITIES
To understand this dialectical process of de-naturalisation and
re-naturalisation we first have to retrace the transformations within
the gender relation over the course of the capitalist mode of
production, and attempt a periodisation. At this more concrete level,
there are many possible points of entry to take, and we opt for a
periodisation of the family, since it is the economic unit that brings
together the indirectly market-mediated (IMM) and the directly
market-mediated (DMM) spheres which delimit the aspects of proletarian
reproduction. We must try to figure out whether changes in the family
form correspond to transformations in the process of labour’s
valorisation.
During the era of primitive accumulation, a major problem facing the
capitalist class was how to perfectly calibrate the relationship between
the IMM and DMM spheres such that workers would, on the one hand, be
forced to survive only by selling their labour-power, and on the other,
be allotted only enough personal property to continue self-provisioning
without bringing up the cost of labour-power.[23] Indeed, at the moment
when the IMM was constituted, it had to take on as much as possible of
the reproduction of labour-power, to be as big as possible, but just
enough so that the proportion of self-provisioning allowed nevertheless
required the habitual re-emergence of labour-power on the market.
Therefore, the sphere of IMM supplementing the wage was subordinated to
the market as a necessary presupposition of wage-relations and
capitalist exploitation, and as its immediate result.
In the course of the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, the
family — centred in the home as a unit of production — became the
economic unit mediating between the IMM and DMM spheres of
labour-power’s reproduction. However, for the first part of the 19th
century, as long as no retirement benefits existed and as long as it was
also the case that children were expected to go to work before they even
reached puberty, the family comprised several generations residing in
one home. In addition, the activities of the IMM sphere were not carried
out by married women alone; indeed they were done with the participation
of children, grandmothers and other female relatives, even lodgers. If
it was the case that only the “singly free” adult male members of the
family could legally be owners of the wage, this did not mean that adult
women and young children did not also work outside the home.
Indeed, at the beginning of industrialisation, women represented one
third of the workforce. Like children, they did not decide if or where
they would take employment, or which job they would perform; they were
more or less subcontracted by their husbands or fathers. (Marx even
compared it with some forms of the slave trade: the male head of the
family bargained the price of the labour-power of his wife and children
and chose to accept or decline. And let us not forget that in some
countries, such as France and Germany, women only got the right to work
without the authorisation of their husbands in the 1960s or 70s). Far
from being a sign of the emancipation of women, or of the modern views
of the husband, women working outside the home was a blatant indicator
of poverty. Even if married women were generally expected to stay at
home when the family could afford it (where they often did home-based
production, especially for the textile industry), many women never
married — for it was an expensive business — and some were not supposed
to become pregnant, forming their own family. Younger daughters were
often sent to become servants or helpers in other families, remaining
“officially” single. Therefore, even if those responsible for the IMM
sphere were always women, and those responsible for the wage were always
men (one could say, by definition), the two genders and the two spheres
did not map one to one in that period.
In the second part of the 19th century, what some call the second
industrial revolution, there was a progressive move towards the nuclear
family as we think of it today. First, after decades of labour
struggles, the state stepped in to limit the employment of women and
children, partly because it was faced with a crisis in the reproduction
of the work force. Labour-power was expected to become more skilled (for
example literacy increasingly became a skill required to access a job),
and increasing attention was given to the education of children. A new
category emerged, that of childhood, with its specific needs and phases
of development. Looking after children became a complicated business,
which could no longer be provided by elder siblings.[24]
This process culminated with Fordism, and its new standards of
consumption and reproduction. With the generalisation of retirement
benefits and retirement homes, generations came to be separated from
each other in individual houses. The allocation of family
responsibilities between husband and wife became strictly defined by the
separation between the spheres. IMM activities that used to be carried
out together with other women (such as washing clothes) became the
individual responsibility of one adult woman per household. The married
woman’s life often came to be entirely confined to the IMM sphere. It
became the fate of most women, and their entire lives (including their
personality, desires, etc.) were shaped by this fate.
It was therefore with the nuclear family (in a specific period of
capitalism, and importantly, in a specific area of the world) that
gender became a rigid binary, mapping one to one with the spheres. It
became a strict norm, which does not mean everyone fitted into it. Many
feminists who refer to gender as a set of characteristics that define
“femininity” and “masculinity” have the norms of that period in mind.
From this point on, individuals identified as women were born with
different life-destinies than individuals defined as men — they lived
“on two different planets” (some on Mars…), and were socialised as two
distinct kinds of subjects. This distinction cut across all classes.
No longer helped by other members of the family, doing the IMM
activities isolated behind four walls, married women were made to bear
the entire burden of IMM activities on their own. This isolation would
not have been possible without the introduction of household appliances
turning the most extreme physical tasks into chores that could be
carried out alone. The washing-machine, the indoor water-tap, the water
heater — these helped to dramatically reduce the time spent on some IMM
activities. But every minute gained was far from increasing the
housewife’s leisure time. Every spare moment had to be used to increase
the standards of reproduction: clothes were washed more often, meals
became ever more varied and healthy, and most importantly, childcare
became an all-consuming IMM activity from infant care to the
facilitation of children’s leisure activities.
activities
The commodification of IMM activities is clearly not a new phenomenon.
From the beginning of capitalism it was possible to buy ready-made meals
instead of cooking them, to buy new clothes instead of mending them, to
pay a servant to look after the children or to do the housework.
However, those were privileges of the middle and upper classes. Indeed,
each time an IMM activity is turned into a commodity, it has to be paid
for in the wage. Therefore, the mass-consumption of these commodities
would only have been likely in periods of steady wage increases, since
these services, as long as they were only formally subsumed, increased
the exchange-value of necessary labour in an inverse ratio to
surplus-value.
However, as a result of the possibilities opened by real subsumption,
the value of some of these commodities can decrease at the same time as
they are mass-produced. Advances in productivity make these commodities
more and more affordable, and some of them — particularly ready-made
meals and household appliances — slowly but surely became affordable
with the wage. Nevertheless, some IMM activities are more difficult to
commodify at a price low enough to be paid for by every wage. Indeed,
even if it is possible to commodify childcare, it is not possible to
make advances in productivity that would allow its cost to become ever
cheaper. Even if the nourishing, washing of clothes, and so on, can be
done more efficiently, the time for childcare is never reduced. You
cannot look after children more quickly: they have to be attended to 24
hours a day.
What is possible is to rationalise childcare, for example, by having the
state organise it and thereby reducing the adult-to-child ratio.
However, there are limits to how many children one adult can possibly
handle, especially if, in that process, this adult has to impart a
specific standard of socialisation, knowledge and discipline. This work
can also be performed by the cheapest labour possible; that is, by women
whose wage will be lower than the wage of a working mother. But in this
case, IMM activities are simply deferred to the lowest-paid strata of
the total population. Therefore the problem is not reduced. Rather, its
negative effects are redistributed, often to poor immigrants and women
of colour.
So we see that all these possibilities are limited: there is always a
remainder, which we will refer to as the abject,[25] that is, what
cannot be subsumed or is not worth subsuming. It is obviously not abject
per se — it exists as abject because of capital, and it is shaped by it.
There is always this remainder that has to remain outside of
market-relations, and the question of who has to perform it in the
family will always be, to say the least, a conflictual matter.
With the current crisis, all signs indicate that the state will be
increasingly unwilling to organise IMM activities, since they are a mere
cost. Expenses in childcare, elderly-care and healthcare are the first
to be cut, not to mention education and after-school programs. These
will become DMM for those who can afford it (privatisation), or lapse
into the sphere of unwaged indirect market-mediation — therefore
increasing the abject.
The extent of this remains to be seen, but the trend in countries
affected by the crisis is already clear. In the US, and in most
countries of the Eurozone (with the notable exception of Germany),
governments are cutting their spending to reduce their debt-to-GDP
ratios.[26] Countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain, but also the UK,
are drastically scaling down their expenses in healthcare and childcare.
In Greece and Portugal public kindergartens are closing down.
Infringements on the rights of pregnant women to maternity leave and
benefits, or to resume their jobs after maternity, have been reported in
Greece, Portugal, Italy, and the Czech Republic.[27] In the UK, where
state-run nurseries are closing one by one, the situation is described
by an anti-capitalist feminist group involved in the Hackney nurseries
campaign, Feminist Fight Back:
All over the UK local authorities have begun to announce significant
reductions of funding to social services, from libraries and healthcare
to playgrounds and art groups, from rape crisis centres to domestic
violence services. Of particular relevance to women are the profound
effects that will be felt in children’s services, both in council and
community nurseries and in New Labour’s flagship Sure Start Centres,
which provide a variety of services to parents on a “one-stop”
basis.[28]
In a country where the Prime Minister himself advocates the organisation
of community services on a “voluntary basis”, under the central policy
idea of the “Big Society”, a culture “where people, in their everyday
lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace …
feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own
communities”,[29] anti-state feminists are faced with a dilemma:
Our aim is for provision “in and against the state”. This raises a core
question in the struggle over public goods and shared resources and
labour: how are we to ensure that our autonomous efforts to reproduce
our own communities do not simply create Cameron’s Big Society for him?
— thereby endorsing the logic that if the state will no longer provide
for us we will have to do it ourselves?[30]
The struggle around kindergartens which took place in Poznan (Poland) in
2012 also reflects this dilemma. The municipality is slowly transferring
all the public kindergartens to private institutions to save costs. When
the workers of one of the nurseries protested with parents and
activists, against privatisation, the local authorities came up with the
option of letting the workers organise the nursery, but without
providing them with any subsidies or guarantees. This made it a very dim
option that was eventually rejected by the workers and parents.[31]
However, some marxist feminists seem to glorify the self-organisation of
IMM activities by women as a necessary step in the creation of an
alternative society. For example Silvia Federici, in her 2010 text
“Feminism and the Politics of the Common in an Era of Primitive
Accumulation”:
If the house is the oikos on which the economy is built, then it is
women, historically the house-workers and house-prisoners, who must take
the initiative to reclaim the house as a center of collective life, one
traversed by multiple people and forms of cooperation, providing safety
without isolation and fixation, allowing for the sharing and circulation
of community possessions, and above all providing the foundation for
collective forms of reproduction. […] It remains to clarify that
assigning women this task of commoning/collectivizing reproduction is
not to concede to a naturalistic conception of “femininity”.
Understandably, many feminists would view this possibility as “a fate
worse than death.” […] But, quoting Dolores Hayden, the reorganisation
of reproductive work, and therefore the reorganisation of the structure
of housing and public space is not a question of identity; it is a
labour question and, we can add, a power and safety question.[32]
Silvia Federici is right — we do consider this possibility worse than
death. And her answer to this objection, which quotes Dolores Hayden
rather freely, misses the point: the labour question is an identity
question.[33] Even if we might, in the crisis, have no choice but to
self-organise these reproductive activities — and even though, most
likely, abject reproduction will in the end mainly be foisted upon women
— we must fight against this process which reinforces gender. We must
treat it as it is: a self-organisation of the abject, of what no one
else is willing to do.
It is important here to state that, even if unwaged IMM activities and
the abject might refer to the same concrete activities, these two
concepts must be differentiated. Indeed, the category of the abject
refers specifically to activities that became waged at some point but
are in the process of returning into the unwaged IMM sphere because
they’ve become too costly for the state or capital. While IMM is a
purely structural category, independent of any dynamic, the concept of
the abject grasps the specificities of these activities and the process
of their assignment in our current period. Indeed, we can say that, if
many of our mothers and grandmothers were caught in the sphere of IMM
activities, the problem we face today is different. It is not that we
will have to “go back to the kitchen”, if only because we cannot afford
it. Our fate, rather, is having to deal with the abject. Contrary to the
IMM activities of the past, this abject has already been to a large
extent denaturalised. It does not appear to those performing it as some
unfortunate natural fate, but more like an extra burden that one must
deal with alongside wage-labour.[34] Being left to deal with it is the
ugly face of gender today, and this helps us to see gender as it is: a
powerful constraint.[35]
Indeed, the process of de-naturalisation creates the possibility of
gender appearing as an external constraint. This is not to say that the
constraint of gender is less powerful than before, but that it can now
be seen as a constraint, that is, as something outside oneself that it
is possible to abolish.
A last thought, to conclude: if it happens to be true that the present
moment allows us to see both our class-belonging and our
gender-belonging as external constraints, this cannot be purely
accidental. Or can it? This question is critical for an understanding of
the struggle which leads to the abolition of gender, that is, to the
reproduction by non-gendered individuals of a life in which all separate
spheres of activity have been abolished.
[1] In the broadest strokes, marxist feminism is a perspective which
situates gender oppression in terms of social reproduction, and
specifically the reproduction of labour-power. Often it considers the
treatment of such topics in Marx and in subsequent marxist accounts of
capitalism deficient, and in light of the ‘unhappy marriage’ and ‘dual
systems’ debates, it generally supports a ‘single system’ thesis. It is
also worth noting that this article is meant to continue a conversation
from the 1970s, the ‘domestic labour debate,’ which turns on the
relationship between value and reproduction, and which deploys Marxist
categories in order to consider whether ‘domestic’ and ‘reproductive’
labour are productive.
[2] See ‘Communisation and Value-Form Theory’, Endnotes 2 (April 2010).
[3] Marx, Capital, vol.1 (MECW 35), 565
[4] Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35), chapter 6.
[5] Marx, Capital vol. 1 (MECW 35), 181.
[6] Such as Leopoldina Fortunati: see The Arcane of Reproduction
(Autonomedia 1981).
[7] On this point, we are very much influenced by Roswitha Scholz’s
value-dissociation theory, even if there remain major differences in our
analyses, especially when it comes to the dynamics of gender. See
Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus (Horleman 2000).
[8] That is, homogeneous time. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and
Social Domination (Cambridge University Press 1993), chapter 5,
‘Abstract Time’.
[9] The gendered internalisation of this allocation of IMM activities,
what we will call ‘naturalisation’, obviously plays a large role in
this. We will look closer at this mechanism in Part 4.
[10] The fact that the wage itself does not come with a training manual
is interesting. One may do with it ‘as one pleases’ – particularly those
who are its direct recipients – and so it is not distributed according
to the specificities of the IMM sphere, i.e. the size of one’s family,
standard of living or the responsible/economical use of a particular
income stream. This point would require more attention, but for now it
will suffice to say: it is just not the capitalist’s responsibility.
[11] Clearly, all activities taking place in the capitalist mode of
production are social, but certain reproductive activities are rejected
by its laws as non-social, as they form an outside within the inside of
the totality of the capitalist mode of production. This is why we use
the social/unsocial binary, sometimes found in feminist accounts, with
caution. A problem with the term is that it can imply that ‘reproductive
labour’ occurs in a ‘non-social sphere’ outside of the capitalist mode
of production, in either a domestic mode of production (see Christine
Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression
[Hutchinson 1984]), or as a vestige of a previous mode of production. It
can even sometimes be used to argue that it is another mode of
production left unsocial because of its lack of rationalisation and that
what is needed is the socialisation of this sphere. We think it is less
confusing, and far more telling, to focus on the process of social
validation itself.
[12] Services that are paid from revenue are unproductive, and, in this
sense, are part of the waged IMM sphere.
[13] Marx provides a useful insight into the process of naturalisation:
‘Increase of population is a natural power of labour for which nothing
is paid. From the present standpoint, we use the term natural power to
refer to social power. All natural powers of social labour are
themselves historical products.’ Marx, Grundrisse (MECW 28), 327.
[14] For Marx, civil society – or what in most political theory is
considered ‘natural’ society – stands opposed to the state.
[15] See Marx, On the Jewish Question (MECW 3).
[16] See Chris Chen’s ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality’ in this
issue.
[17] Marx, Capital, vol.1, (MECW 35), 179.
[18] In France, before 1965, women could not engage in wage-labour
without the authorisation of their husband. In West Germany, that was
not before 1977 – see Part 5 below.
[19] We find the need for a class analysis which can cut through this
thicket of intra-class disparities, while attending to the disparities
of each with regard to their own particular and differential relation to
capitalist domination. In short, proletarian identity, as an abstraction
based upon a common form of unfreedom, was never going to account for
everyone, even at the most abstract level. Another more nuanced analysis
would be needed – one which would come up against the problematic of
workers’ identity itself.
[20] Because the creation of a future generation of workers who are for
a period of their life non-workers is a cost to capital which it
disavows, and because this activity is posited as a non-labour that
steals time away from labour.
[21] See Paola Tabet, ‘Natural Fertility, Forced Reproduction’, in Diana
Leonard and Lisa Adkins, eds, Sex in Question: French Materialist
Feminism (Taylor and Francis 1996).
[22] See her critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘uncritical reproduction
of the Cartesian distinction between freedom and the body.’ Judith
Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge 1990), chapter 1: ‘Subjects of
Sex/Gender/Desire.’
[23] See Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical
Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Duke
University Press 2000).
[24] For the effects of compulsory education on working-class families
see Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from
the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (Verso 1993).
[25] We take this term in its etymological sense: ab-ject, that which is
cast off, thrown away, but from something that it is part of.
[26] https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-misery-and-debt
[27] Francesca Bettio, ‘Crisis and recovery in Europe: the labour market
impact on men and women,’ 2011.
[28] Feminist Fightback Collective, ‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’.
Soundings 49 (Winter 2011).
[29] Speech by David Cameron on ‘the Big Society’, Liverpool, 19 July
2010.
[30] Feminist Fightback Collective, ‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’
[31] Women with Initiative (from Inicjatywa Pracownicza-Workers’
Initiative), ‘Women workers fight back against austerity in Poland’,
Industrial Worker 1743, March 2012.
[32] Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, Housework, Reproduction,
and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions 2012), 147.
[33] This is obviously not to say that we don’t value the whole of
Federici’s contribution to the marxist feminist debate. Along with Dalla
Costa and James’s, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the
Community, Silvia Federici’s texts are surely the most interesting
pieces from the ‘domestic labour debate’ of the 1970s. What we want to
criticise here is a position that is currently influential within the
‘commons’ debate, and that we consider highly problematic.
[34] ‘A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as
it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as
radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing,
either. A “something” that I do not recognise as a thing. A weight of
meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which
curses me.’ Julia Kristeva, Power of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection
(Columbia University Press 1982), 2.
[35] Obviously there are nowadays some men, even if few, who do a
considerable part of the abject. And they get to know what many women
experience: that the abject sticks to one’s skin. Many of these men,
especially when they end up having to do most of the childcare, seem
somehow to be undergoing a process of social castration.