By Laura Fitzgerald
According to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum, it will take 134 years to reach gender equality. This preposterous projection is itself an indictment of capitalism, but the sunny optimism of the World Economic Forum, that it will take over a century to get gender equality, fails to recognise that in fact capitalism has us hurtling backwards.
The far right and fascism are on the rise globally, promoting an ideology wedded to patriarchy and rigid gender roles, including abortion bans and a view of women’s role as ‘in the home’. This rise is unfortunately no fringe aberration, it is capitalism today – with the system pushing back on the gains made by the feminist and LGBTQ movements of the 2010s. Capitalism is a system that cannot tolerate gender equality.
Social reproduction theory
“If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?” In this quote, Tithi Bhattacharya sums up very well the Marxist feminist theoretical framework of ‘social reproduction theory’ – an insightful, unified analysis of the interconnection between worker exploitation and gender oppression, explaining how capitalism as a system, at its roots, is inextricably enmeshed with the patriarchal gender-binary.
A central contradiction of capitalism as explained by Marx is how the working class sells its labour for a wage to the capitalist class. Worker exploitation is innate to capitalism because the uncompensated labour of workers is what constitutes profit for the capitalist class. The profit motive of capitalism means it’s a system hinged upon worker exploitation. Conversely, it means united, organised and politically conscious workers have a potentially unique source of power, if they act together to withhold their labour, to take on capitalism.
Social reproduction theory concerns itself with the often unpaid and unrecognised labour that is done to ensure that the workforce is capable of showing up every day in a fit state to do the work essential to turning a profit for the bosses, as well as the work done to ensure future labour forces for capitalism are in formation. This is highly gendered. Women do $11 trillion worth of unpaid care work per annum globally.
Care work and resistance
The elements of the capitalist state that also aid in reproducing the workforce, such educational and healthcare institutions, also employ a disproportionately female workforce.
Care work is a vital part of this reproduction. Care is something antithetical to the ideology and modus operandi of the profit-motive. Care by its nature resists seamlessly fitting into the capitalist model. What Marx called socially necessary labour time – the average time a skilled worker needs to complete a task – is often elusive when it comes to care. While it may apply to the time it could take to dress a hospital bed, it cannot be applied crassly, for example, to home-help for an older person who largely requires some human interaction to combat the loneliness that is worsening their health. Care, its provision, its commodification and the failures of care that emanate inevitably from the same, is itself a source of systemic crisis – and a major site of social struggle, often by predominantly female workers.
On this island, we’ve seen industrial action and campaigns of school secretaries, special needs assistants, and nurses in recent years. The contradictions and faultlines in the capitalist system and all sites for the reproduction of the labour force for capitalism, all become potential sites for resistance – from abortion, to gender violence, to healthcare workers’ strikes.
Heroic Irish socialist, James Connolly, wrote in the early 20th century that “the worker is the slave of capitalist society” and that the “female worker is the slave of the slave”. Connolly, in linking the reproduction of the labour force for capitalism, to the exploitation of the working class at capitalism’s heart, also anticipated how vital it is that the socialist movement is intertwined with a feminist analysis that also seeks to make the male worker conscious of the gender oppression dynamic in capitalism, and reject and fight against it too. We may add a further note. The binary of “man” and “woman” and all that this evokes is moulded by a system reliant on this false divide, and all the social control and economically lucrative benefits it accrues for the capitalist system.
