Labour question as an identity question - direct and indirect market mediation

Neto, Jeanne and Maya Gonzalez. 2013. The Logic of Gender. Endnotes (3).

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Summary

Claim: Marxist feminism categories are no longer enough to understand why humanity is inscribed into one or the other gender, they need clarifying and transformation, because "reproductive" activities no longer occupy the same structural positions within the capitalist totality.

Keywords: feminism, social reproduction theory, value, labour-power

In conversation with: Marx, Capital, chapters on Labour power and social reproduction. Follow Judith Butler in the criticism of the sex/gender binary coming from pre-1990s feminism. seeing value in Silvia Federici's contribution to marxist feminist debate, however opposing the position influential in the commons that reorganisation of reproductive work is not a question of identity but a question of labour. It is argued, on the contrary, that the labour question is an identity question. Julia Kristeva's theorisation of abject in Essay on Abjection, 1982.

Aim: to debunk the established gendered forms of domination under capitalism - productive/reproductive, paid/unpaid, public/private, sex/gender, offering a new social reproduction theory reading to these categories

Method: Establishes two new shperes for theorising gender, IMM and DMM. Then performs comparative analysis of those four traditional categories (listed in the aim) within those two new spheres.

Why important

To academics: contributes to understanding why and how gender is used in today's society

To general public: explains why traditional feminist categories are no longer sufficient to explaining the processes taking place in today's society.

Relevance to my research:

- the view of the worker as a commodity is important in my analysis of subject and object in both industrial and software production models.

- articulates the difference between IMM and DMM, which is crucial for developing imaginations of same processes that function in and out of capitalist modes of production

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Notes:

1. PRODUCTION/REPRODUCTION

1) On labour-power as a distinctive commodity. There is a sphere dissociated from the value production, where the dead labour of means of subsistence is transformed into the living labour found in the market.

Picks up from the Marx's quote as something to build argument with: "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" (Marx, 1976: 711). They note then the contradictory character of commodity, whereby one the one hand it stands via its use-value, as a particular object different from the next, while on the other it contains an aliquot portion of "total social labour" within society. The latter notion is important, since it umbrellas both productive and reproductive labour.

The labourer confronts the capitalist mode of production as a commodity, at the same time as the subject meeting the object. Further, it is argued that while labour-power is a unique commodity, Marx does not distinguish its production from other commdities, merely claiming that it is valued as the value of production of its means of subsistence. However, to Gonzalez and Neto, means of subsistence on their own do not produce labour-power as a ready made commodity. This is where they see the gap - Marx does not consider labour that transforms raw materials, eg means of subsistence, into labour-power commodity as necessary labour at all. G&N explain the lack of interest in Marx to this labour by the fact that it takes place in "a sphere of the capitalist mode of production which is not directly mediated by the form of value". Using a principle that in order for value to exist, it needs to have an exterior,

2) Separation into two different spheres. In order to understand how labour-power is produced, it is necessary to differentiate not by theorising a "reproductive sphere" but by rather drawing a divide between commodified and non-commodified activities: the directly market-mediated sphere (DMM) and the indirectly market-mediated sphere (IMM).

DMM is characterized by the productivity, efficiency and product uniformity (for software, not necessarily "uniformity" but rather compliance with client/other requirements). The return on investment is paramount to all activities. Outside of DMM, there is no market-determination.

IMM has different temporality, different from capitalist working day (check M. Postone's abstract time).

G&N also define different forms of domination: DMM has impersonal, abstract domination, which organises it via the value-comparison in terms of socially necessary labour time. IMM, on the contrary, is socially determined - including direct domination, violence or hierarchical forms of cooperation.

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2. PAID/UNPAID

This is a categorisation used by marxist feminists, which needs to be replaced by a more precise waged/unwaged. Wage here is a price for which the worker sells his labour-power. G&N point out that wagd /unwaged does not map neatly to IMM/DMM scheme - while all of unwaged labour is IMM, some of IMM is in fact waged - those are the activities organised by the state sector. There is also a refrence to social validation that happens through wage, which is seen as social form of value (more on this, Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression. Hutchinson, 1984).

What does the wage buy? eg which element of the wage constitutes exchange-value of labour power. It buys commoditiies necessary for the reproduction of labor-power. The non-waged activites located outside of value exchange are necessarily dissociated to make a production of value possible - this sphere for G&N is a gendered sphere. These activites are non-labour and are naturalised. As it says in Grundrisse, "the increase of population is a natural force of labour, for which nothing is paid. From this standpoint, we use the term natural force to refer to the social force. All natural forces of social labour are themselves historical products.)" (Marx, 1973:400).

Labour G&N propose to define broadly in opposition to non-labour as an activity that is socially validated as such, because of its specific function. However seemingly banal, such definition is seen as more productive for understanding the character of unwaged activities rather than exchange between man and nature or expense of energy.

3. PUBLIC/PRIVATE

Public/private as the way of distingusihing between economic and political, civil society and the state (these two categories are also held as opposites in Marx). G&N argue that it is only in the pre-modern relations that private was limited to the household. From the advent of capitalism, "the scope of private spans the entire social landscape".

Public, in Marx, is the abstraction from society in the form of the state. Public in this shape is required for the capitalists to accumulate the capital in an independent way, rather than being controlled by the state - and abstract community of "equal citizens". Thereby, the relation of public/private to DMM/IMM is as follows: in DMM citizens defined by the state manage their labour-power directly, while in IMM through those with formal equality.

How does sex/gender map to these spheres? When in the capitalist mode of production the abstract formulation of the "citizen" and "other" came about, these categories were mapped on "white male"/"non-white non-male" positions.

G&N argue that what constitutes the citizen/other binary though is not slavery, but "free" labour - which to Marx is a technical definition of freedom for the wage labourer. Free labourer is the one who has their labour-power for sale, but is short of anything else in order to realise it (Marx, 1976:272-273).

Please revisit the section on Public/private later, because it is quitedense and some bits, like the idea of freedom and the mapping sex/gender on IMM/DMM is not entirely clear

Women here occupy the position of someone who were free fro the means of production, but were not free from selling their labour-power as their own. Only recently they became the owners of their labour-power (a "double freedom", political and "public"). G&N note here, however that a new form of analysis of proletarian identity is also required. Such an identity as an abstraction based upon the common form of unfreedom, was never going to account for everyone.

Women in their fight for freedom were caught between, using G&N own terms, the freedom as "citizen" and freedom as "other", fighting for human and civil rights on one side and for reproductive rights on the other. But the gender distinction has persisted even when the "differential" freedom of women was abolished. However, if that differential freedom was what anchored women to the IMM sphere, why didn't this abolishion also free them from category of "women"?

DOUBLE-FREEDOM AND THE SEX-BLIND MARKET

G&N see the reason for that in that the mechanism of unfreedom in the "private sphere of the economic", the labour-market was inscribed so deeply that it appeared as a mysterious "natural law". Market, it is argued, have to be "sex-blind" because it functions via the comparison of abstract values.

It doesm, on the other hand, reinforce a concrete attribute, such as gender difference, because women, defined as those who bear children, are seen as coming to the market with a potential disadvantage. This anchors them to the IMM sphere. In other words, the contradiction here is that abstract capital punishes women for their concrete sex attribute, even though this sex difference is necessary for the reproduction of capitalism itself. Female labour-power thus has a higher social cost, and, contradictory, cheaper market price.

In the addendum on women, biology and children, conflation of three definitive factors of child-bearing agent (particular body biology, fact of bearing a child and specific relation to the result of this bearing) obscures two things. On one side, the mechanisms that regulate childbirth - marriage, contraceptives, shame of non-child bearing forms of sex activity. On the other, the changing definition of what a child is.

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4. SEX/GENDER

Sex is defined as anchoring a specific group of individuals to specific spheres of activity. As well as the process of anchoring, it is the process of reproduction of two separate genders.

Going back to Butler for the critique of gender/sex binary, G&N observe that "gender" is socially tethered to culture, and sex is driven equally towards nature. Butler's counter proposition to this dynamic that G&N align with is that "sex is the naturalisation of gender’s dual projection upon bodies, aggregating biological differences into discrete naturalised semblances" (not sure I get that fully at this point, need to study Butler's 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.’ ) G&N however, arrive to this notion not via the critique of the existentialist ontology of the body, as Butler, but via the alternative route, through value. They draw the analogy between the sex/gender relation (of the social body) and the value/fetishism dualism of the commodity.

Sex is then the use-value that attaches itself to gender as (exchange-) value. Gender is the abstraction that determines the body to which it is attached, in the same way as real abstraction of value transforms the material body of the commodity.

I do see how sex and gender are historically determined, but it is unclear how is it that both are "purely social". Likewise, this is arguable that both use-value can be abolished in the process of communisation together with exchange-value - since, supposedly, people will still need things for something, even after communisation?

Sex and gender are seen as two side of the same coin, and the more the abstraction of gender becomes denaturalised, the more natural and biological sex appears. Female gender in essence signifies a lower price tag. Extending the gender/sex/use value/exhange value allegory, gender relations are constantly renegotiated, reimposed and re-naturalised in a dialectical process.

5. THE HISTORY OF GENDER WITHIN CAPITALISM

The section offers a periodisation in order to break down this dialectical movement, on the example of the family.

1) Primitive accumulation (18th-19thc). The two genders and the IMM/DMM spheres de facto did not map to one another, even though women were responsible for the IMM and wage was the responsibility of men.

2) Nuclear family and Fordism (19thc). Fordism introduced new standards for production and consumption, and the crisis of reproduction of labour force at the beginning of this period has necessitated a more rigid gender coding, strictly confining women to the IMM. House work became doable by one woman alone because of the home appliances.

3) The 70s: real subsumption and commodification of IMM activities. While many IMM activites becoming rationalised, the time spent on childcare could not be reduced (still 24 hours a day), and instead redistributed to poor immigrants and women of colour. Thus, there is an abject - something which either cannot or not worth subsuming.

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6. CRISIS AND AUSTERITY MEASURES: THE RISE OF THE ABJECT

Why do G&N propose to differentiate abject and the IMM activities conceptually, even though in practice the two can be one and the same? Abject, comgin from Julia Kristeva's theorisation in Essay on Abjection, is defined as activities that were waged but becoming unwaged because they are too costly for the state or capital. IMM is a "purely structural category, independent of any dynamic".

In conclusion, G&N argue that if gender, through the process of denaturalisaion, is becoming an external constraint, it is, if not necessairily less powerful, but does present a possibility to abolish. Can this externality be seen as purely accidental?

Situated knowledge: the world as the trickster

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

0. Introduction.

Claim: Situated knowledge for Haraway is embodied feminist objectivity, which means "a view from somewhere" (590). It is the knowledge that opposes transcendence and splitting of subject and object. (583) There is no way to be in all, or wholly in any, positions structured by race, class and gender. This means that knowledge, instead of going towards universality, needs to strive to become partial (while nevertheless rigorous). However, that does not mean rejection of Science all together - that would mean to lose rigorousness in favor of total relativism.

Method: The truth claims (of science) can be deconstructed by showing historical specificity and so contestability (578). A usable doctrine of objectivity can be devised by comparing radical constructivism (successor science project) with feminist critical empiricism (postmodernist accounts of difference). (580)

Her usual analytical tool is a table of the common themes in scientific/ideological discourses. She puts them side by side to visualize how within each theme the opposing elements structure each other dialectically. However, she also points out that the table view implies that the terms are mutually exclusive or simply alternative (588, 599). She explains the terms rather as nodes in the network of meanings.

STS critique of objectivity. Haraway aligns with Social constructionists in her claim? Equals science to rhetoric. Ideological doctrine of scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology, she claims, were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world effectively by practicing the sciences.

Feminist critique of objectivity: Marxism polluted at the source because its theory is structured around the domination of nature in self-construction of man and inability to acknowledge the things women did outside of wage labour (eg ignoring social reproduction). Haraway finds it helpful though because of its provides the tools for nuanced theories of mediation and critiquing hegemony without disempowering positivisms and relativisms.

She points out though that object relations theory in psychoanalysis has given feminism in the US much more than Marx or Althusser (578).

Objectivity in postmodernism, she notes, cannot be about unproblematic objects, but about specific prosthesis and partial translations. It is about crafting a comparative knowledge (597).

Feminist empiricism - Haraway is critical of that too, since to her it is quite positivist and also insists on legitimate meanings of objectivity.

She sees a problem is to balance the account of radical historical contingency of all knowledge claims and knowing subjects with a faithful account of a 'real' world.

We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life (580).

Science to Haraway is a discourse contained in English language and is reductionist in the same way as money is reductionist in capitalism: "What money does in the exchange orders of capitalism, reductionism does in the powerful mental orders of global sciences" (580) - hence the call for "successor science projects" (quoting Sandra Harding, 1987).

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1. Vision

Method: "Parallel dissections". In order to crack open mystified units like science or woman, Haraway finds the common ideological aspects of discourse on science and gender.

Vision is crucial for Haraway here because it is a point of convergence of various aspects such as the gaze and point of view. It is about the power to see (587). The gaze is approached critically as something that constructs the idea of male and white.

Haraway talks about irresponsibility of vision, irresponsible meaning unable to be called into account. The way I see it, this argues scientific view which 'irresponsible' because it always seeks suppot from other claims, and thus is not accountable on it own. Point of view goes back to the voice of the subaltern and the discussion of the ways in which such voices are preferred because they are allow for denial and interpretive core of all knowledge. (584) However, Haraway also warns that the 'capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths' (583) also should not be romanticised and needs to be subjected to critical reexamination, decoding and deconstruction.

Haraway opposes relativism equally to totalisation, deeming them both as 'myths in rhetorics surrounding science' (584). She argues that these two positions do not stand in opposition to one another, as it is usually assumed. To her the alternative lies a responsible kind of partial view, something that she defines as "passionate detachment" (587) - this means detachment from dominant axes of knowledge.

Vision is entangled with moral, technological and political discourses. Who gets to see, who gets blinded and who gets multiple points of view? (587)

The notion of location embedded in the definition of "situ"-ated knowledge is gaining a new traction in the context of my project which sees software as the site of ideological production. "Location is about vulnerability" Haraway suggests (590). It resists the politics of closure and finality. The only way to find objectivity, to her is to be somewhere in particular - a view of objectivity as positioned rationality.

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2. Apparatus of bodily production

Claim: there is an ambiguity when referring to "science" because the field is highly heterogenous. Haraway admits that she reduced the whole of this broad field, generally defining it as an institutionalized knowledge production with high stakes in ideological struggles. Haraway's resolution to such ambiguity is that throughout all sciences, no matter how varied, there is a pattern that refers to how faithful the account of object of knowledge is to "real world" - i.e., objectivity (591)

Meanwhile, feminists shy away from doctrines of scientific objectivity (on the basis of the "object" of knowledge being passive), a tendency deplored by Haraway. This, she says, damages the critique because only leads to two understandings such knowledge: either (1) as a reduction of the view of the world to an instrument for destructive capitalist projects, or (2) as masks for certain hegemonic interests.

In her example of sex vs gender, Haraway points out that there needs to be a "productive tension" between the authoritarian biological account of sex and gender as socially positioned difference. To strip gender of any biological category would be to lose too much. Not only would it give up the analytic power of particular Western tradition, but would also assume the body as blank page for social inscriptions. Similar damage from tension happens in other natural sciences. (591) As she mentions earlier in the essay, science is needed precisely because it has always been utopian and visionary (585).

Here Haraway takes time to discuss the position of capitalist colonialism in greater detail: "White Capitalist Patriarchy", a.k.a humanists, need a representation of the world as an object, and nature as raw resource for culture.

She opposes this view by the vision of a world as an actor and agent - something she calls situated knowledge (592). As she explains, the world becomes an agent when it is explicitly shown that politics and ethics provide the grounds for objectivity across all of science, both natural and sociological included (593).

What does Haraway propose instead? (1) view of the world as active subject implies that science will be tricked, yet seemingly no example for such "trickstery" is proposed. (2) "activation" of previously passive objects of knowledge (Haraway's own method used in Primate Visions, 1989). By interpreting the sociological construction of the notion of gender via primatology, the binary distinctions get "permanently problematized" (594). Body is no longer the resource, but an agent. What is important to Haraway here is that such activated image (of the female in this case) creates a situated conversation at every level of its articulation. In other words, embodied feminist objectivity.

Haraway adopts the notion of apparatus from literary theory and applies it to critical scientific discourse. Katie King's (1987) "apparatus of literary production" is a methodological framework she develops to analyse women and writing technologies (595). It is a matrix of art, business and technology from which "literature" is born. Haraway adopts this framework to the analyse production of bodies and other objects in scientific knowledge projects.

She presents bodies as "material-semiotic actors", which, similarly to poems being sites of literary production, are sites of bodily production. In poems, language is an actor intependent of intentions and authors, bodies are too the objects of knowledge all of and in themselves.

This allows her to argue that objects are boundary projects, with boundaries seen as shifting, not entirely reliable parameters. The bodies, to Haraway, emerge at the intersection of biological research and writing, medical and other business practices, and technology, as the visualisation she looks earlier in this essay.