Gendercraft: Marxism-Feminism, Reproduction, and the Blind Spot of Money PDF

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Science & Society, Vol. 85, No. 1, January 2021, 38–65 Gendercraft: Marxism–Feminism, Reproduction, and the Blind Spot of Money ELENA LOUISA LANGE* ABSTRACT: The plausibility of “gendered exploitation” as a sine qua non of capitalism, as articulated by both classic Marxist–feminism since the 197...

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Science & Society, Vol. 85, No. 1, January 2021, 38–65

Gendercraft: Marxism–Feminism, Reproduction, and the Blind Spot of Money ELENA LOUISA LANGE* ABSTRACT: The plausibility of “gendered exploitation” as a sine qua non of capitalism, as articulated by both classic Marxist–feminism since the 1970s and more recently by authors of social reproduction theory, stands or falls with the evaluation of Marx’s theory of value. From the standpoint of both Marx’s monetary theory of value and the problem of quantification, the use of “women’s oppression” in capitalist social reproduction appears to be questionable. This also necessitates a deeper analysis of the use of “gender” in the wider field of pertinent Marxist–feminist literature. Arguments for “gendered exploitation” often hinge on unsound premises that introduce a naturalizing view of social relations. Analogous to Barbara and Karen Fields’ intervention against “Racecraft,” the term “Gendercraft” may represent this argumentative move. The notion of gender as the site of specifically capitalist exploitation is thus challenged and countered with a new emphasis on struggles against the wage relation as the site of anticapitalist resistance. KEYWORDS: Marxism–feminism, Social Reproduction Theory, Marx’s monetary theory of value, real abstraction, quantification, David Ricardo

Introduction: Marxism–Feminism and the Problem of Money

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EN YEARS AFTER INTEREST IN Marxian critical theory has been rekindled by the breakdown of financial capitalism in 2010 and the debates surrounding it, we can acknowledge that among its different strands, Marxism–feminism has prevailed as the *

Thanks to Joshua Pickett-Depaolis for reading and commenting on an early version of this paper.

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most successful: not only did the Women’s March and the International Women’s Strike between 2017 and 2019 mobilize political activism and solidarity deeply into the liberal camp on an unprecedented scale, but a new enthusiasm for feminist theory found expression in many publications, re-publications, edited collections and book series.1 In the literature of recent years, however, the dual-systems approach of second-wave feminism (roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s) was outshone by a reappraisal of the “woman question” as it related to the role of domestic or household reproduction within capitalist production as a whole in what has once been known as Unitary Theory (Vogel, 2013) and politicized within Lotta Femminista and Silvia Federici’s and Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James’ “Wages for Housework” movement in the 1970s.2 While sharing some of its theoretical cornerstones, though not its political initiative of demanding wages for housework, the role and function of women’s reproductive labor today is most prominently discussed under the name of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). SRT arguably forms the most influential strand within the newer streams of Marxism–feminism. Yet, as Julia Dück and Katharina Hajek point out, even within the literature focusing on the role of reproduction within capitalism, we can differentiate among “value-theoretical, subsistence-theoretical, patriarchy-logical, historical-reconstructive, regulation-theoretical, political–economic, as well as biopolitical and queerfeminist approaches” (Dück and Hajek, 2019, 501). In the first part of this article I shall limit myself to a discussion of the value-theoretical3 approach, before I problematize the use of the category “gender” in Marxism–feminism more broadly in the second part of this essay. Despite its different articulations, the common denominator within the SRT strand of Marxism–feminism is the focus on the unpaid/unwaged labor of women in the household as the ultimate source of “women’s oppression” (Vogel, 2013). However, as I will 1 To name but a few: Arruzza, 2013; Fraser, 2013; Arruzza et al., 2019; Bhattacharya, 2017 and the Mapping Social Reproduction Theory book series at Pluto; Toupin, 2018; and Vogel‘s 1983 seminal work Marxism and the Oppression of Women, reissued in 2013 with the Historical Materialism book series. In 2009, Vogel’s book was published in Chinese, and in 2019 in German translation. For related issues, see the Symposium on Intersectionality in Science & Society in 2018 (Eisentein, et al., 2018). See also Quick, 2018. 2 For an overview, see Toupin, 2018. 3 For reasons of space, I bracket the discussion of German “value-theoretical” feminist Roswitha Scholz, whose “value-dissociation theory,” which I consider untenable, merits separate discussion.

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argue, they also share a common lack — an adequate theorization of the significance of capitalist social relations as monetary, as well as the form of reproductive labor adequate to these relations, namely moneyed wage labor. For a theoretical literature whose main concern is the conditions of possibility of capitalist reproduction in its social totality, this lack is quite astonishing. However, it significantly informs their view of “gender” and the deferral of levels of abstraction on which both hypotheses — a general view of social reproduction regardless of its (monetary) form on the one hand, and a supplementary view of “gendered exploitation” (Gonzalez, 2013, 1) within its specific locus in the household and family — are grounded. The dismissal of the specifically capitalist form of social reproduction through money and the monetary form of wages within this literature is reminiscent of bourgeois and vulgar political economy’s declaration of “the wages system to be an external and irrelevant formality in capitalist production from which we may deduce what an F. Bastiat understands about the nature of capitalist production,” as Marx polemically asserted (Marx, 1973, 1006). As I will show, the absence of money as a theoretical problem in SRT not only renders their analysis ahistorical with regard to the specificity of capitalist reproduction and the function and substance of money within it, but also implies the bourgeois theoretical framework of use-value centered (non-monetary) social reproduction, similar to that of David Ricardo, which fails to grasp the specific character of capitalist subsumption. In the first part of this article, “Labor Power: Not a Capitalistically Produced Commodity?,” I will question the main hypothesis of SRT that labor power is not a capitalistically produced commodity, and confront it with Marx’s monetary theory of value and social reproduction through the wage form as a form of value. Drawing on Ricardo’s view of use-value–mediated reproduction allows us to highlight its convergence with the SRT approach, as well as to demonstrate SRT’s failure to capture the specifically capitalist form of reproduction. The aim of this argument, developed in the second part, “The Logic of Gendercraft,” is to demonstrate that convincing theoretical evidence of women’s oppression as inherent to the logic of capitalism cannot be reconstructed from the examined texts and theories in the Marxist–feminist literature. Introducing the critical heuristic of “Gendercraft” — leaning on Barbara and Karen Fields’ critical notion

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of “Racecraft” — I review eminent Marxist–feminist historical and sociological studies, and their use of “gender,” “gendered exploitation,” and “women” by which they intend to deepen an understanding of the nature of women’s oppression as specific to capitalism. I will show that the conjuring of conceptual determinisms in the form of “biological facts” (Brenner, 1984; 2000, 26) and the view of an alleged “resilience of gender as a principle of human differentiation” (Salzinger, 2003, 25) are based on an anti-materialist and de facto Platonic framework that re-enacts rather than deconstructs the naturalisms associated with gendered housework, despite their advocates’ intention. This gender determinism also influences the view of an alleged “irreducibility” of certain household tasks within the sexual division of labor (Brenner, 1984; 2000), which I will question for advanced capitalist societies under conditions of real subsumption and the production of relative surplus value, i.e., the commodification of domestic services under a competitive price system. I contend that the aim of the SRT strand in the Marxist–feminist literature, namely to demonstrate women’s oppression and the gendered division of labor in the household as a sine qua non of capitalist sociation — “gender is re-created along with value” (Weeks, 2011, 10) — remains unconvincing. To sum up my intervention at the end of this essay, I will critically evaluate the plea for de-emphasizing workplace struggles in favor of “a broader movement,” e.g., struggles “for cleaner air . . . or for fairer housing prices” (Bhattacharya, 2017, 92) and question the efficacy of such a shift for the struggle against wage labor that constitutes the essence of capital.

Labor Power: Not a Capitalistically Produced Commodity? The overarching presupposition in SRT is that labor power “is a commodity that is not produced capitalistically” (Bhattacharya, 2019, 113; see also Bhattacharya, 2017, 3). For Bhattacharya, labor power “is the sole commodity . . . that is produced outside of the circuit of commodity production” (Bhattacharya, 2017, 7). “Although [labor power] is exchanged on the market, it is not a commodity like any other, for it is not produced capitalistically” (Vogel, 2013, 157). According to these views, the reproduction of labor power takes place outside direct value production, i.e., during the unpaid or unwaged

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hours workers spend away from the workplace, e.g., at home, or in their private lives more generally. This indirect production of the labor power commodity, which Lise Vogel, remodeling the original terminology, also calls “necessary labor” (Vogel, 2013, 158), takes place in what may accurately be called the “hidden abode of production,” i.e., the sphere of the household, and forms a necessary condition for the production of (surplus) value. What is at stake in the theorization of household labor is the claim that it is structurally hidden from the “plain sight” of the valorization nexus, and that this concealment bears a particular, namely gendered, form: “. . .the reproduction of capitalism daily hides the social character of necessary gendered exploitation” (Gonzalez, 2013). SRT generally agrees that capitalist relations of production really, and not just formally, subsume human needs and practices to the totalizing nexus of value and surplus value production. The social form of capitalist production is defined by the exploitation of the alien and unpaid labor of one class by another. But, as these feminist authors claim, while Marx theorizes and criticizes this nexus, he privileges value production as that which defines class exploitation (Gonzalez, 2013, 1). He absolutizes the direct production of surplus value in the factory as the one defining characteristic of capital, while the activities constituting the reproduction of labor-power in the home are “structurally made non-labor” (Gonzalez/Neton, 2014, 162, original emphasis), obscured from Marx’s theoretical view. The basic ontological claim with regard to value production in SRT is therefore that “there must be an exterior to value in order for value to exist” (Gonzalez, 2014, 153).4 Yet, this claim, aligning with the allegation that “non–valueproducing activities are necessary to capitalist accumulation” (D’Ath, 2018, 1536) is at no point substantiated. A logic from which this contention follows is missing. What, instead, serves as an “intuitive” explanation is the parodic view of capitalist productive relations according to which “at no point does labour-power roll off an assembly line” (Fortunati, 1995, 106–107, quoted in Gonzalez, 2013, 7, and Gonzalez, 2014, 162, original emphasis).

4 See also Brenner, 2000, 56: “ . . . the next generation of workers is produced outside the capitalist system.”

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While the wage buys the commodities needed to reproduce the “male laborer’s” use value as the labor power commodity, the wage basket itself does not reproduce the worker’s labor power: Marx . . . does not realize that the individual male worker’s consumption is not a direct consumption of the wage, that the wage does not have an immediate use-value for the male worker and that consumption of the wage’s use-value presupposes that some other work has taken place — either housework or prostitution. Only work can transform the wage into the use-values required in the male worker’s reproduction; but even then the use-values are not directly or immediately consumable by him. More work is necessary to transform these use-values into use-values that are effectively usable, i.e., ready to be consumed. (Fortunati, 1995, quoted in Gonzalez, 2013, 5.)

This is immediately obvious. Yet, it neither implies anything about the “gendered” nature of this additional work, which renders the qualifier “male” consumption strangely redundant (do women not consume?), nor does it work on the assumption that the additional labor related to transforming use-values into immediately consumable use-values can be subject to commodification. I will return to both points in the next section. More conspicuous with regard to our objections to this version of social reproduction is the question: In what form does the “wage basket” enter the laborer’s household? In SRT’s version of social reproduction, capital may as well pay the workers in natural goods or use-values: the form of the wage is irrelevant to the ways in which it is appropriated to replenish the workforce. This is explicit in Bhattacharya’s neoRicardian concept of the “basket of goods” necessary to “reproduce” a particular worker” (Bhattacharya, 2017, 73). I argue that this is a fatal misrecognition of the specific form the exchange of capital and labor assumes, from which follows crucial insights about the nature of capitalist social reproduction: namely, the monetary form of the wage. SRT’s misrecognition of the monetary form of the wage, however, has its theoretical predecessor in the theories of Smith and Ricardo, and especially the latter’s view of social reproduction: The power of the labourer to support himself, and the family which may be necessary to keep up the number of labourers, does not depend on the quantity of money which he may receive for wages, but on the quantity of food, necessaries, and conveniences that become essential to him from habit,

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which that money will purchase. The natural price of labour, therefore, depends on the price of the food, necessaries, and conveniences required for the support of the labourer and his family. (Ricardo, 1969 [1817], 52.)

Note that Ricardo’s dismissal of money in favor of a use-value–centered understanding of reproduction (“food, necessaries, and conveniences”) is accompanied by circular reasoning: because he fails to determine the “value of labor” by the money expression of wages — based on the labor time socially necessary for its reproduction, and therefore variable — but by “natural price,” i.e., a fixed (“from habit”) level of wages warranting the reproduction of the worker and her family (represented in various use values), “natural price” in turn depends on the prices of “necessaries.” Ricardo completely disregards the constitutive function of the wage form — its unequal exchange with capital — which would require a value determination in terms of socially necessary labor time, i.e., value, not in terms of use value. Needless to say, Ricardo’s specific shortfall, following from his blind spot of money, consists in failing to understand the exchange between capital and labor as unequal, while SRT does acknowledge unequal exchange. But as with Ricardo and the neo-Ricardians, SRT fails to take note of the monetary form on which this exchange is based, and therefore also of the historical specificity of the social forms of both capital and labor. Wages are a value-form, and thus represented in money. What is the significance of Marx’s insistence that the exchange between capital and labor, as capitalist, has to be understood as monetary? For Marx, the wage as a social relation first and foremost indicates that both the subjective and the objective conditions of one’s labor belong not to the laborer, but to the capitalist. That is, the means of production, but also the means of consumption, confront the laborer as capital. This confrontation, however, must take a monetary form: Money cannot become capital unless it is exchanged for labour-power . . . work can only be wage-labour when its own material conditions confront it as autonomous powers, alien property, value existing for itself and maintaining itself, in short as capital. If capital in its material aspect, i.e., in the use value in which it has its being, must depend for its existence on the material conditions of labour, these material conditions must equally, on the formal side, confront labour as alien, autonomous powers, as value — objectified labour — which treats living labour as a mere means whereby to maintain and increase itself. Thus wage labour, the wages system, is a social form of

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work indispensable to capitalist production, just as capital, i.e., potentiated value, is an indispensable social form which must be assumed by the material conditions of labour in order to be wage labour. . . . Therefore, although the primary process, the exchange of money for labour-power, or the sale of labour-power, does not as such enter the immediate process of production, it does enter into the production of the relationship as a whole. (Marx, 1976 [1863–4], 1006, emphasis added.)

The primary insight of Marx’s critique of the fetish-character of the value forms, of which money is paradigmatic, is that it quantifies the totality of productive and reproductive relations to serve the valorization postulate of capital. Hence it quantifies that which “by nature” had been impossible to quantify in societies where social relations are not entirely mediated by money — the physical and mental capacities of humans. Money however, in its function as the measurer of value in capitalist societies, does not measure value plain and simple, but measures the expenditure of human labor in the abstract as the result of a valorization process — implying the quantitative difference between necessary and surplus labor — in which it “becomes the form of appearance of its opposite” (Marx, 1976, 148), the token of equality, freedom and wealth per se: a fetish. But while money’s fetish-character obscures the exploitative character of the labor it measures as value, it also constitutes itself as value’s only measure. Under conditions of real subsumption, it is the quantification of seemingly “unquantifiable entities” (the recreation of humans, the “natural conveniences” that restore the physical and mental abilities of humans to consume, procreate and, yes, to work) through money in the form of wages that is in fact the very source of profit. Without money’s quantifying role in the reproduction of labor power, its “overgrasping subjectivity” (Marx, 1867/2008, 169), there would be no capital. Reproductive labor, which workers must do in order to live (or provide to their offspring), is not the sine qua non of capitalist accumulation, but the monetary, quantified form conditioning its existence. Marx has time and again emphasized that the wage form is not an “arbitrary” and “external” reality of the capital relation, but its very foundation, its “essential prerequisite” (Marx, 1976, 1006). Neither slavery nor unpaid housework allows capital to incorporate the worker into valorization, for unpaid work renders valorization impossible:5 if unpaid workers seek to live, the owner of 5 Aside from the fact that it would not be capitalist in form.

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the objective conditions of productio...