The Cheap Strategy of Capitalism: Devaluing Nature and Women
Written by Fran Woodworth
From capitalism’s inception, women—along with Indigenous peoples and people of color—were cast outside of humanity, their lives and work deemed unimportant. Capitalism simultaneously cheapens the environment and women, designating both as subhuman resources and allowing their subsumption into capital. The climate crisis, a consequence of extractive capitalism, is inherently tied to these historical and ongoing, gendered and racialized tropes of difference.
Extractive capitalism was predicated on a conceptual split between Nature—what was savage and needed to be controlled—and Society, its civilized foil. This logic was fundamental to capitalism and settler colonialism from the outset (although not invented by capitalism, it was turned into a rigid organizing principle): colonizing people had to be separate from and superior to their natural surroundings to map, dominate, and profit from them. That Europeans “rendered [themselves]”, in Descartes’ words, the “masters and possessors of nature” made possible the rampant extraction, exploitation, and consumption of natural resources that has facilitated capitalism and generated the climate crisis.
The Nature/Society split, as a capitalist tool, depended on the Cartesian ‘thinking beings’/’extended beings’ division. Subaltern human lives were grouped with the ‘extended beings’, part of the Nature category that was existentially separate from humans and meant to be mastered. This logic demanded the banishment of many people from the ‘human’ category (those groups who Frantz Fanon describes as the “wretched of the Earth”): colonial subjects, Indigenous peoples, slaves, and women. The colonial project involved capturing of the land, resources, and labor of this supposedly inferior Other, defined as such in a self-referential distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’.
The construction of the cheapened, colonial Other, the ‘savage’ who needed to be controlled, was racialized from the beginning. The term racialization describes how people of color are dehumanized or expelled from humanity: it is the process by which anyone who does not fit within the ‘human’ category—as defined by the privileged (white) groups—is ascribed the characteristics of race. This dialectical process entails assigning meaning to real or imagined biological characteristics (such as skin color) to designate a subject as an Other, contra the purportedly neutral Self. For the Other to be marked as different, it only appears so in relation to a supposedly neutral, white subjectivity – what Hazel Carby calls “the (white) point in space from which we tend to identify difference”. As Audrey Kobayashi argues, whiteness is a historically constructed subjectivity that is associated with privilege and power (e.g. citizenship, modernity, and agency); to be racialized, then, is to embody values that contradict privilege and power (e.g. noncitizenship, underdevelopment, helplessness). This hierarchy was foundational to the distinction colonial powers made between colonizer/colonized, and thus to their justifications for the violences of colonization. Andrew Baldwin explains that historically, there was no distinction between the racial and colonial Other: “the colonial Other was deemed as such precisely because it was racialized, precisely because it was made to stand outside the category of the human.”
Similarly, the colonial Other was feminized – a process that shares a similar genealogy with racialization. Women, particularly women of color, have historically been positioned as the objects of colonial intervention due to their supposed debility, based on infantilizing stereotypes that equate both nonwhiteness and femininity with vulnerability, immaturity, and intellectual incapacity. Patel and Moore note that the “binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup”; both ‘extended beings’, women and Nature have been designated as savage and subordinate. It’s no coincidence that the two things most often raped are nature and women (e.g. Francis Bacon’s extensive use of sexual, rape, and torture metaphors to describe the conquest of nature). As Jenn Shapland points out, “Neither entity, woman nor wilderness, existed on its own terms, and both were and are feminized, fetishized.”
The savage Other—women, people of color, and Indigenous peoples—was excluded from humanity and exiled to the ‘natural’ realm. As Fanon notes of the French colonization of Algeria, “The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French.” By cheapening Nature and humans deemed to be ‘savage’, capitalism could subsume them into profit. Raj Patel and Jason Moore explain this cheapening strategy as “a violence that mobilizes all kinds of work–human and animal, botanical and geological–with as little compensation as possible”, transforming “relations of life making into circuits of production and consumption.” In this process, Nature—as a concept antithetical to Society—was not just a physical set of things, but a “strategy that allowed for the ethical and economic cheapening of life.” The colonial stories that justified this strategy, where women, minorities, and Indigenous peoples are figured as closer to Nature than Society, are still salient. As Edward Said argues: “there is no just way in which the past can be quarantined from the present. Past and present inform each other and…each co-exists with the other.”
Capitalism has cheapened and subsumed women’s lives and work through the appropriation of their unpaid care work, a kind of labor that was relegated to women and made invisible by 1700. Without women’s unpaid domestic labor, wage work would simply be too expensive, and capitalism wouldn’t function. It’s for this reason that Patel and Moore describe patriarchy not as “a mere by-product of capitalism’s ecology”, but rather “fundamental to it.” Since what they call the ‘Great Domestication’ following European enclosure and the emergence of the patriarchal, nuclear familial structure, women’s domestic and childrearing work has been confined to the private sphere and overwhelmingly uncompensated. Domestication facilitated the transition from communal living to wage work, done by men; meanwhile, women took care of the home and the next generation of wage earners and inheritors to pass down and amass wealth. The nuclear family emerged as the primary framework of social organization: a single household unit was headed by the man, who controlled private property (including the wife). This arrangement cemented the notion that domestic work is women’s ‘natural’ duty, done without compensation.
Marriage, historically closely intertwined with property law, has been one policing mechanism to ensure the domestic servitude that is integral to capitalism. As numerous socialist theorists have pointed out—including Freidrich Engels, Emma Goldman, Alexandra Kollontai, and Simone de Beauvoir—women’s sexuality had to be controlled through monogamous marriage in order to legitimate heirs to pass on wealth. With male heads of households traditionally bearing the role of the guardian of possessions, married women have been excluded from inheritance lineages and economic rights more broadly. Although women’s situation has changed considerably since the inception of capitalism, Simone de Beauvoir reminds us that “Modern marriage can be understood only in light of the past it perpetuates.” Indeed, women continue to shoulder more domestic labor within marriage than men, with negative effects on their economic power. Along with prisons, schools, and madhouses, the institution of marriage has shored up the capitalist requisite of cheap care, policing women’s bodies and work to do so.
In addition to women’s unpaid domestic labor within marriage, many capitalist states depend on the cheap reproductive work provided by migrant women. Neferti X. M. Tadiar explains that foreign maids “are employed to help reproduce the intellectual-managerial classes serving the demands of global capital”, often while experiencing “subhuman treatment”. As Clark and Bettini note, the demand for care work provided by migrant women from low-income regions (e.g. the Philippines and Bangladesh, whose state policies emphasize labor export and remittances) arises largely because of market undervaluation of their work, which ensures that their (tractable) labor has a surplus of value. The growth of the care economy—driven by the absence or withdrawal of state-provided institutional care, along with aging populations—and increasing employment opportunities for female migrants have contributed to a ‘post-feminist paradigm’: the work/family rift is reconciled by outsourcing care work to migrant women. In effect, this perpetuates the gendered division of domestic work while exploiting women in precarious legal and economic positions. Carmen Gonzalez points out: “Hyper-exploited racialized women generally perform the waged domestic and care work that enables more privileged women to enter elite labor markets in addition to performing unpaid domestic labor in their own homes.”
Devalued as workers and bundled with extra-human nature, women were (as Maria Mies puts it) the “last colony.” Jason Moore explains that the dispossession of women of ‘culture’, and the designation of their activity as ‘natural’, has allowed them to be treated cheaply. Along with Indigenous peoples and minorities, women’s devaluation has functioned in support of global capital accumulation: by cheapening women’s bodies and labor, capitalism has subsumed their lives and life-making practices into itself, alongside all kinds of other human and nonhuman life. The cheapening of women’s labor was predicated on the division of Society and Nature, human and nonhuman, where women have been relegated to the latter categories.
The devaluation of women’s work, cheapened and put in service of capital, alerts us to the cultural roots of the climate crisis. Extractive capitalism is based on racialized and gendered stories of difference, which have sustained centuries of categorizing people into human and less-than-human positions. To confront the climate crisis, it is not enough to hope for a technological silver bullet; indeed, “Wishing only for an alternative energy solution, instead of making preparations for cultural change” is analogous to “turning away from reality.” These proposed solutions are limited, given that absolute decoupling (of economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions) has yet to be proven possible at a global scale. They also prevent us from pursuing more just and effective solutions. To assume that technology can save us would suppose that there is no need to challenge the human/subhuman logic that underlies extractive capitalism, the climate crisis, and differential vulnerability to both. Instead, we must contend with the growth-oriented economic and political conditions—underwritten by Nature/Society binary logic—that simultaneously subjugate women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, and the natural world. As we confront the climate crisis, it is imperative that we challenge the racialized and gendered tropes of difference that comprise the cultural origins of capitalism and its violence against the earth and many people. A more relational positionality with the natural world is in order, along with careful attention to the concept of ‘human’ – from which some people are systematically excluded.
Members and supporters from a coalition of organizations supporting domestic workers, rally outside the Indian consulate on Friday, Dec. 20, 2013 in New York.
(Bebeto Matthews / AP Photo)