Feminism

Feminist interpretations of capitalist modes of production build upon those of Marxist and anarchist critiques. Specifically in conjunction with the Anarchist view that divisions within society – explicitly gender divisions – are socio-culturally constructed (Peter 2003; Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Feminism as a movement is “oriented towards more radically democratic societies” (Peter 2003: 107), and “feminist economists” bring to light difficulties in traditional gender roles, as well as racial, class, and national hierarchies, that create “biases and distortions in masculinist views of the economy” (Barker and Kuper 2003:3). The goal then of feminist economics is to recognize the notion of economics as a social institution that is an integral part of culture, power relations, and change which emerge from “diverse lifeworlds” that are “not simply manifestations of singular core logics” but rather “are generated by particular social and historical experiences” (Bear 2015:5; Barker and Kuper 2003:3). For example, class could not exist without gender, race, sexuality, and kinship structures (Bear 2015:3).

Economics (and the study of capitalism) has historically been done by men and under the guise of masculine world views and priorities for the economy, and as Joyce Jacobsen points out there are few females and minorities that have been widely read and respected in the field of economics (Jacobson 2003). As such, “Feminist economics is concerned with the many ways in which economic life is shaped by gender as well as other significant categories of identity,” and “its goal is to reveal the gender-blindness of existing economic analysis, and to bring into the debate issues which have previously been ignored” (Peter 2003:105).

To this end, feminist scholars J.K. Gibson-Graham have illuminated the “capitalocentricity” of both economics and the study of capitalism. Capitalocentricity means “that other forms of economy (not to mention noneconomic aspects of social life) are often understood primarily with reference to capitalism: as being fundamentally the same as (or modeled upon) capitalism, or as being deficient or substandard imitations; as being opposite to capitalism; as being the complement of capitalism; as existing in capitalism’s space or orbit… capitalism is both the negative and the positive precondition” (Gibson-Graham 1996:6-7). In short, we have become socialized into a world based on a capitalist system where virtually everything we know and understand of life is through the lens of capitalist production, markets, societies, and processes – processes feminists scholars see as gender, class, and racially biased (Barker and Kuper 2003). The most famous notion of this is “homo economicus,” a metaphor implying an innate (species level) and biologically rational, economic agent with “no necessary obligations or responsibilities” who “interact[s] contractually with others only when it is in their best interests to do so” (Barker and Kuper 2003:2-3). This rational, self-interested actor however, fails to adequately account for a multitude of important aspects to not only women and men’s lives (Barker and Kuper 2003:2-3), but also, by focusing on the “generative processes of production, distribution, and consumption” removes broader human and non-human relations” from our analysis of capitalism (Bear 2015:4). This level of analysis reflects a privileged, masculine world-view in economic and capitalist studies (Barker and Kuper 2003: 2-3). Capitalism is seen as ideologically hegemonic, and so deeply ingrained in our communal psyche that we are incapable of even questioning or rethinking notions of economics, society, and community.  Society, or communities more locally, become groups of individuals coming together to not question things – especially the primacy of individuality, markets, private property, and capitalist production. People seemingly become incapable of rethinking or reenvisioning what to do with the fruits of their production (Gibson-Graham 2006). 

“the virtually unquestioned dominance of capitalism can be seen as a complex product of a variety of discursive commitments, including but not limited to organicist social conceptions, heroic historical narratives, evolutionary scenarios of social development, and essentialist, phallocentric, or binary patterns of thinking… This we see as a first step toward theorizing capitalism without representing dominance as a natural and inevitable feature of its being. At the same time, we hope to foster conditions under which the economy might become less subject to definitional closure… heterogeneous… hegemonic… (Gibson-Graham 1996: 4)

This is socially constructed in a way that creates the appearance of a “totalizing and coherent” and all-consuming capitalism (Bear 2015:3) that is seen as “triumphant, encompassing, penetrating, expansive…” within which “other forms of economy are vanquished, marginalized, violated, restricted” (Gibson-Graham 1996:6) amidst presumption of them being subordinate and inferior (Safri and Graham 2010:103). This view becomes cyclical as we view the economy in a way that makes common practices appear inherent, and then recreates the same systems for lack of the ability to imagine another. Yet if we re-envisioning how we see “economy” and ourselves we can reimagine the possibilities of different economic relations for ourselves and our communities (Gibson-Graham 2006). To this extent much of feminist scholarship in the economy and capitalism is about “developing alternative ways of thinking economy outside of dominant capitalocentric conceptions” (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003:146) and “does not begin with markets and explicit economic practices. Rather it focuses instead on the diverse and wide-ranging practices of life and production that cross-cut social domains,” (Bear 2015:3), and approaches “class as a process” within which we can create “a language of economic diversity, highlighting the many different ways that enterprises organize the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor” (Gibson-Graham 2006:66).

To combat this narrow view of the economy and capitalism, feminist inspired work on the economy focuses its attention on “diverse economies” (Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006, 2008) or “multiple economies,” (Pavlovskaya: 329) that challenge the “boundlessness of the domain of “the economic” (Bear 2015:1) and draw attention to “non-capitalist” aspects of capitalist (and other) economies. These non-capitalist aspects of economic society include formal and informal economic practices (both within and beyond households) and “paid work, informal work for cash, unpaid domestic labor, and help in kind, labor, and cash from networks of extended family, friends, and neighbors” (Pavlovskaya: 329). This analysis focuses on nontradeables, measuring intrahousehold interactions and resource allocation, the effect of family-structures on labor-market outcomes, and caring work (Jacobson 2003). These aspects of life (found all over the world) do not readily fit into formal economic models, accounting practices, legalized boundaries, or market devices. They contradict the above notions of capitalism as “a priori… an already determining structure, logic, and trajectory,” and allow feminist scholars “to focus on the unstable, contingent networks of capitalism that surround us” and are more fragile and intimate than mainstream economics would lead us to believe (Bear 2015: 2).

Feminist scholars have been very successful illuminating diverse economies by including domestic work in economic studies. This combats the “gendered and raced division of labor” that “is explained in terms of the individual choices of rational agents,” as such, scholars focus on “the provision of nonmarket, caring labor (such as parenting, caring for the sick, housework, etc.),” that has either been ignored “or analyzed in the same terms as the provision of paid labor” (Barker and Kuper 2003: 2-3). Or as Safri and Graham enunciate it: “One of the major challenges confronting feminists has been the relative invisibility of women's unpaid labor as an economic contribution, particularly in wealthier nations where capitalism and markets are presumed to flourish unrivaled” (Safri and Graham: 101).  To this end the “household” is a key point of non-capitalist departure with incredible economic power, yet is largely ignored by both the capitalist remuneration system and mainstream capitalist economic analysis.  

“In the aggregate, the global household produces and distributes a large quantum of social wealth in the form of unpaid household labor, household-based business income, monetary and in-kind remittances, and gifts. It thus participates in international production, finance, and trade in addition to the coordination of international migration. Yet despite its potential to shape and alter economic indicators and processes such as gross domestic product (GDP), the balance of payments, the relative valuation of currencies, economic development, and the gender and social division of labor, the global household is seldom viewed as an economic actor. This is not only because those who recognize its existence generally see it as acted upon by other economic and governmental institutions; more fundamentally, it reflects the fact that the operations of the global household in the global economy are seldom accorded theoretical standing or empirical attention” (Safri and Graham: 100).

This notion is conceptualized by critiquing the economy “as a dualistic whole comprised of a masculinized realm of paid work and a feminized realm of unpaid domestic, child-based, nurture-oriented, voluntary and community work” (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003:147). It is a goal of feminist scholarship to “feminize the economy” by adding this sector to the economy or attributing a monetary value to women’s unpaid labor (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003:145). This type of labor is “as socially productive as industrial labor” (Bear 2015:7), for without the contribution of the reproductive sphere of life – which includes women’s unpaid domestic and community work, as well as their work at home for the market – there would be no social reproduction of labor power, and therefore eventually no production at all (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003:147).

Behind this feminist analysis and feminizing of the economy is a fundamental critique of capitalist modes of production that originates in and critiques Marxist analysis of capitalism. And while “Marxist approaches—however otherwise productive—used gendered, sexualized, and racialized figures in the making of even its earliest critical analyses” (Bear 2015: 3-4), the core to feminist critiques of capitalism rests in Marx’s notion of surplus. Which Gibson-Graham interpret as follows:

“The distinction between necessary and surplus labor cannot be seen as grounded in the ostensible reality of the body's "basic needs" for subsistence, but reflects a socially embedded ethical decision. What is necessary to survival and what is surplus is not predefined or given, in some humanist or culturally essentialist sense, but is established relationally at the moment of surplus appropriation itself. The boundary between necessary and surplus labor is an accounting device, inscribed on the body rather than emerging from within it, and the desire to move this boundary can be seen to have motivated political struggles historically and to this day” (Gibson-Graham 2006: 89).

In this regard, as other critiques of capitalism in this paper have (and will) show, anything above the capacity to sustain the social reproduction of labor power is considered excess. Whoever controls that excess – or the surplus labor – has much to gain. Throughout history it has often been “the capitalists, landlords, household heads, and slaveholders/leasers” that have made decisions on distributing the appropriated surplus (Gibson-Graham 2006:67). According to Marx, key to capitalist forms of production, a surplus labor is produced by a laborer and then distributed or exchanged by the capitalist rather than the producer themselves. As with capitalist enterprise, not all of this surplus is available for consumption or accumulation, but must be used to “pay for all the activities that support production” before it become surplus value (Gibson-Graham 2006: 67).

Gibson-Graham see surplus as a wide range of devises and material things that become the essence of possibility in societies and communities and in fact determine class structures and much of the shape of society (Gibson-Graham 2006). The person that has the power to distribute (or keep) the appropriated surplus carries greater power. Within the capitalist system Gibson-Graham (building upon Marx) claims that “many producers have no control over what happens to their surplus labor—it is appropriated by nonproducers who claim a right to the products produced on a variety of grounds. In capitalist firms, workers can be seen to have relinquished the right to their surplus as part of the wage contract and it is appropriated by their capitalist employers” (Gibson-Graham 2006:66). As such, within a capitalist system, neither the community nor the producers of the goods, services, and surpluses actually have control or power over what happens to the outcomes or rewards of their work – the surplus generated by their efforts (Gibson-Graham 2006).

Feminist scholarship points to this surplus as misappropriated within a capitalist system and should be put back into the community and individual’s generating it day in and day out using democratic and participatory decision making processes for allocation and investment. To Gibson-Graham, and as per feminist notions of the economy, capitalism is a social construct that cannot be separated from the rest of society – surplus is a political thing. The concept that a surplus should go to the capitalists, as opposed to the producers of it, is in fact foundationally a political project, not an economic one (Gibson-Graham 2006). As such, Feminists see the economy as an ethical space of decision making, rather than an entity of specific qualities, and as such would allow workers to make decisions about allocation of resources, surpluses, etc. (Gibson-Graham 2006).

Within capitalist – especially neoliberal capitalist – systems, there are two sides to surplus, the appropriation – producers make a surplus that is taken from them – and the other distribution; gifts, allocation, services, etc. A distinction is then made “between labor engaged in capitalist commodity production that is productive of surplus value, and labor that is unproductive of surplus value,” and could include workers in advertising and marketing departments, the financial sector, upper-level management, or domestic servants, who sell their labor power but are not involved in the actual production of capitalist commodities (Gibson-Graham 2006: 91). Every society is also made up of numerous “unproductive” (in material terms) people such as infants, young children, the elderly, disabled, etc. Therefore a “social surplus” may be used to support nonproducing members of the community, as well as “to build and sustain the material and cultural infrastructure of the social order,” and as such, has the potential for ethical decisions and political contestation (Gibson-Graham 2006: 91). If the surplus is politically appropriated by only a few, class divisions arise and society becomes differentiated. Gibson-Graham see this happening within decentered and differentiated capitalist enterprises, “where the process of exploitation (the production and appropriation of surplus value) can be seen as producing a “condensation” of wealth” (Gibson-Graham 1996:22).

To Gibson-Graham this is the problem with capitalist societies, both past and present; and the political project (especially of a feminist economics) should be to reappropriate the surplus back towards communities and producers for the betterment of all rather than for the “unproductive” capitalists (Gibson-Graham 2006: 91). For “whether or not we acknowledge it, our own existence at every level can be seen as the effect of the labor of others” (Gibson-Graham 2006:88). Within this notion lies the key to a feminist critique of capitalism, we all live off each other; working, producing, reproducing; laughing, smiling; male, female; young, old; black, white, we are all working together, living off the fruits of everyone else’s endeavors. So why should a small group of capitalists keep all the rewards? And monopolize even our notions of society to such an extent as to keep us thinking we shouldn’t share the rewards of our own labor.