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.
Source: Capturing the human heart., Group of toddlers on the school with teacher teaching, Unsplash
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?
