On the relation between the patriarchy and capitalism: a Marxist feminist approach 

By Noor Suwwan

Abstract

This paper argues that capitalism as an economic, cultural and moral system is fundamentally predicated on the continued perpetuation of the patriarchy, a system dominated by men. It forwards the hypothesis that capitalism is so dependent on the patriarchy that any threats to the patriarchy are by extension existential threats to capitalism as well. The paper’s main premise is built on leading Marxist feminism theoretician Federici’s work, who argued that capitalism reinforces the patriarchy. It applies an abductive reasoning method to her ontological observations to forward this new hypothesis. 

Introduction 

Indispensably, capitalism is an economic system. It is predicated on the principles of private property and a free-market economy to produce both profit and product to benefit capitalists and their societies. This traditional definition, however, does not move beyond giving a low-resolution, pixelated image of a revolutionary portrait. While capitalism may have initially emerged as a collection of sober economic principles, it can now be better described as a framework of contemporary logic. With the economy only as its most convincing argument. 

More importantly to this essay, capitalism is a cultural system, capable of introducing, propagating and normalizing new values. For instance, American historian T.J. Jackson Lears demonstrated the shift of American cultural values between 1880 and 1930 from frugality and self-denial to periodic pleasure, compulsive spending and self-fulfillment (Fox & Lears, 1983). Similarly, anthropologist Richard Robbins famously demonstrated that capitalism constructs consumers (Robbins, 2005). Robbins’ (2005) work was significant because it disproved that capitalism is the solution to the problem of unmet demand. Rather, it is the problem of unmet demand (Robbins, 2005).   

To this, Federici (2018) adds that a new market of unmet demand is being increasingly normalized; that of the human body. It is being targeted as an assembly of pieces from which parts can be added and subtracted, for profit (Federici, 2018). She cites the normalization of surrogacy as evidence for the commercialization of human bodies (Federici, 2018). She also gives an example of how the US Department of Defense is now increasingly seeking drugs and biochemical products to enhance soldiers’ endurance and decrease their food dependence in battle (Federici, 2018). Furthermore, she claims that while gender reassignment surgery is admittedly evoked by individual want, capitalism has a clear stake in introducing and normalizing the demand for new human forms  (Federici, 2018). Federici’s assertions are in line with Bowie (2022)’s finding that one of the main products of capitalism is culture itself (Bowie, 2022). Making capitalism a lethal tool for shaping and reshaping societal logic.  

Capitalism as a vessel for cultural values of Patriarchy

Just as capitalism introduced new cultural values including professionalism, competition, entrepreneurship and innovation (Halliday, 1983), it has also interacted with the patriarchy in new and old ways to produce a spectrum of cultural values lacking in consensus. For instance, Marx critiqued capitalism for being the fundamental mechanism through which men of the bourgeoise class treated women as private property (Marx & Engels, 1848).  Similarly, in his German Ideology, he claimed that capitalism perpetuated the value of “slavery within the family”; enforced by economic dependence on a patriarch favored by the market (Marx & Engels, 1846, p. 33). It was this wage-lessness that had been a key element in constructing hierarchies and normalizing the exploitation of women working in households while underscoring their centrality to capital accumulation (Costa & James, 1975). 

However, analytical feminist Ann E. Cudd (2011) proposes an alternative reading of this phenomenon, in which she attributes more women empowerment to capitalism than to feminism (Cudd, 2011). To her, capitalism is associated with perpetuating values of reproductive control by facilitating the invention of the birth control pill, longer life expectancy by improving living conditions and lowering the demand on female reproduction by decreasing infant mortality rates (Cudd, 2011). She also argues that new market opportunities for surrogacy and unplanned parenthood are two examples of how capitalism actually facilitated greater control for women on their reproductive discourse, even if profit-driven. 

Slavery within the family, hierarchy within familial relationships, intentional wage-lessness, economic dependency, the normalization of women's exploitation, the assignment of domestic work to women and deemphasis on the economic value of domestic work to the overall society are all cultural values attributed to capitalism. So are increasing female control on their own reproduction, longer life expectancy, better living conditions, women empowerment in absolute terms and deemphasis on the maternal role exclusively.  The sharp contrast between these different values all argued to have been propagated by capitalism captures the divergent opinions on how capitalism and the patriarchy interact in non-static ways to produce new and old normals. The section below focuses on Silvia Federici’s work and other scholars to analyze the school of thought that capitalism reinforces the patriarchy through an abductive reasoning method. 

Why Abductive Reasoning

Abductive reasoning is a form of reasoning that involves generating hypotheses to explain observations (Behfar & Okhuysen, 2018). It is often used in scientific inquiry to generate hypotheses, initial explanations or ‘possible models’ that can be further tested for validity through other scientific methods (Behfar & Okhuysen, 2018). Abductive reasoning is particularly useful when observations are inconsistent, contradictory, incoherent, lacking in consensus, pattern-less or simply under-explored. It is an intentional method used to expand spheres of knowledge (Wagner, 1996). 

Federici on capitalism and the Patriarchy: submission through normalized female vulnerability

According to Federici (2018; 2004) capital accumulation is dependent on land dispossession, the destruction of communal relations and the accelerated exploitation of women’s bodies and labor (Federici S. , 2018) (Federici S. , 2004). In this sense, the core building unit of capitalism is violence, with a particular appetite for women. Nowhere is this more evident than in the war of capitalist expansion against women under the guise of the infamous witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century (Federici S. , 2004). The violence that erupted eradicated large numbers of women, removing the last barrier to a massive workforce.  The tortures and executions of women accused of witchcraft served as a strong deterrent for women from displaying any forms of social irregularities. In this sense, witchcraft was a synonym for social deviance. The specific act of naming and shaming so-called ‘witches’ was significant to enforcing conformity amongst women and paving the way to the confinement of women to unpaid domestic labor for generations to come (Federici S. , 2004). 

The power dynamic of unpaid domestic labor in relation to paid labor outside the house added new justification to why women should be subordinate to men. In this sense, it not only legitimated women’s oppression and reinforced the patriarchy, it also set the tone for women’s subordinate position beyond the family, for example, in relation to the state. Domestic work was categorized as inferior by deemphasizing its centrality to the overall process of capitalist accumulation. Its continuation would have been long interfered with through the forces of capitalism, had it not been seen as beneficial (Federici S. , 2018). The power dynamic that rose from the waged-unwaged dichotomy triggered the emergence of a supervisory relationship of men over women in relation to domestic work (Costa G. F., 1978). It was this pivot to a supervisory relationship that made violence a continuous possibility within the nuclear family (Costa G. F., 1978). 

With the rise of female integration into the workforce, Federici claims that violence within nuclear families has actually intensified as women are now being supervised for two tasks: performing their unnegotiable domestic duties and bringing home a wage (Federici S. , 2018). Modern-day conditions for the eruption of violence include performing either of the two tasks insufficiently or demanding a renegotiation of the power dynamic (Federici S. , 2018). Women’s precondition to participation within the workforce includes the need to bring their reproductive work to their waged workplace such as in the case of pregnancy. This makes women more vulnerable at the workplace; for the risks associated with any category of violence, including accidental, verbal and emotional. It also puts women at the disadvantage of being viewed as a liability for their maternal commitments (Federici S. , 2018). This is observed in the need for the majority of employers to inquire about female candidates’ maternal status.   

Women’s vulnerability at the workplace isn’t limited to pregnancy. For instance, a study conducted in Albania found that about 92 percent of the respondents claimed to have been violated at least once in the workplace (Kacollja, 2020). Similarly, Latin American female migrants have been famously known to take contraceptive pills, in anticipation of border rapes (Federici S. , 2018). Scholars have argued that as opposed to eradicating violence against women for the motive of more workers, capitalism simply shifted the location of violent incidences from the house to beyond. Furthermore, it has compounded the problem of women’s servitude from one man to many men (Falquet, 2011). 

Violence against women, whether individual or communal, is an expression of their perceived lack of right to autonomy. This view is further exacerbated by media messages, with the continuous hyper-sexualization of the female archetype, resulting in the reduction of female autonomy to sexual provocation, at best. According to MacKinnon, it is this eroticization of women’s subordination that is the root cause of gender inequality (Becker, 1999). To her, the patriarchy is built on a sexuality that eroticizes anything that subordinates women to men. Hence, all forms of social, economic, moral, physical and intellectual domination are key to increasing male’s sexual selection strategies. Similarly, MacKinnon asserts that by making women’s subordination desirable to themselves, the patriarchy creates a powerful payback mechanism for women in their own self-subordination (Becker, 1999). 

In a sense, any ideology that supports men in achieving their multi-dimensional superiority becomes a cultural, institutionalized value in patriarchal systems. This includes occupational segregation (Oren, 1996), the gender hierarchy, technology (Kacollja, 2020), the gender pay gap (Hartmann, 2008). Heidi Hartmann's influential article in Signs in 1976 argued that occupational segregation was deeply patriarchal and attributed its rise mostly to male workers (Hartmann, 2008). She claimed that as productivity increased and the need for specialization became more evident, male workers leveraged their positions of relative advantage on multiple fronts to specialize, claim occupational segregation and argue on behalf of gender hierarchy. Similarly, as the need for accelerated productivity employed technology for industry, it had two main effects. The first was the displacement of a large number of unskilled factory workers, the majority of whom were women. The second was the introduction of highly skilled labor to operate, troubleshoot and improve the newly employed technology. The majority of these highly skilled labor were men who, from positions of privilege, were able to specialize. In this way, science and technology became highly male-dominated domains. In a similar vein, the persisting gender pay gap (World Economic Forum, 2022) is regarded as simultaneously a patriarchal value and a capitalistic one. For instance, following the same logic of how female wage-lessness creates a pragmatic economic dependency on males, so does the gender pay gap. Not only do lower wages allow the continuation of the power dynamics in the female-male relationship, they also allow the emergence of possible female partners of compatible social classes, without eradicating male dominance or the economic advantages of marriage for women (Hartmann, 2008). Meanwhile, the gender pay gap is also reinforced by capitalism. This is because capitalism’s main profit-creation tool is still labor (Federici S. , 2004). Hence, capitalism is inherently interested in raising the ratio of labor to non-labor while lowering production costs. Naturally, the availability of cheap labor and their acceptability to women makes female employment beneficial to capitalism (Kocabicak, 2013). This means that female employment is beneficial because of lower wages, making capitalism a strong performative activist for female economic empowerment, short of closing the gender pay gap.  

The patriarchy only survives through capitalism  

The patriarchy, in a final analysis, is just a passive ideology  (Federici S. , 2018). It cannot survive except through a symbiotic relationship with an active system (Federici S. , 2018). Capitalism offers an active agent that can provide sustenance to a system that sometimes demonstrates symptoms of a dying philosophy. In this sense, capitalism has been the patriarchy’s resurrecting force. In fact, the mysteriously reactive nature of the relationship between the patriarchy and capitalism has allowed both their expansions and their hyperventilation to the same rhythm by mutual value penetration. 

This is evident in the mutually held values of the gender pay gap, the social acceptability of lower wages for women, capital accumulation through female economic integration short of economic equality, the value of domestic work, the gender hierarchy, the commercialized eroticization of women’s subordination, women’s servitude in and beyond the household, the power dynamics of the female-to-male relationship and the threat of violence against women. 

Conclusion

As established within the preceding sections, capitalism is predicated on the patriarchy. Reversing the logic of the scholars’ school of thought that have been examined and following the abductive reasoning method, the following hypothesis is forwarded: capitalism is so dependent on the patriarchy that any threats to the patriarchy are by extension threats to capitalism as well. 

At this point, threats to institutional patriarchal values would be threats of an unknown magnitude to capitalism as well. For instance, compromising patriarchal values would currently mean no mass land confiscations, no free domestic work, no gender hierarchy, no occupational segregation, no cheap female labor and no threat of violence against a significant majority of the labor force. All of which are fundamental profit-generating and optimizing activities for capitalism. So much so that denying capitalism of its patriarchal logic might mean a shift of an unknown magnitude. Possibly expelling it from existence. 

On a final note, more research is recommended on the forward hypothesis, particularly those of the deductive reasoning method and other methods of scientific inquiry in the social sciences to determine the validity of the forwarded hypothesis.  

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