2.1. Genesis

The capital in capitalism derives from the Latin root caput, meaning “head” as in “head of livestock.” The words cattle and chattel share that etymology and were once also used as general terms for movable property or wealth. The derivation makes sense: The important attribute of animals as a type of property is that they are productive: barring a catastrophe, an owner of livestock can expect the number of heads they own to increase with time as the animals reproduce; and since the rate of births will be roughly proportional to the total number of animals, the rate of increase will be exponential.

From an investor’s point-of-view, modern capital is a generalization of livestock which works on identical principles. An investor makes an investment, their invested money goes forth and produces additional value (as if reproducing on its own), and it then returns to the investor along with their share of the increase. But things are very different from the workers' point-of-view from whence capital does nothing productive on its own. It is only by applying human labour that capital can be made to produce wealth. And that capital, in the form of tools and other material inputs, was itself created or mined by workers. In turn, much of the newly created value will be taken by owners and re-invested into more capital to be worked. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

Capital does not reproduce autonomously like livestock, but people do. All economic wealth is the result of human labour, and all labourers are the result of the arduous work of human reproduction. Tracing this relation backwards reveals a motive for some of the most horrific organizing forces in our species' history: to control humans is to control the production of wealth, and to control young women is to control future, exponentially increasing wealth. From these two dynamics derive the various forms of exploitation and patriarchy as they’ve been invented and adapted by societies around the planet over the millennia.

The ancient Israelites had a myth about the origin of civilization: when the first human couple first disobeyed God, they were expelled from paradise to live a life characterized by wearing clothes, agriculture, the enduring anxiety of death, moral knowledge, separation from the divine, and most significantly to our current discussion, the sexual division of labour. In the version of the narrative recorded in Genesis 3, God says to the man:

cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; […​] By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread

Class societies which are built on some form of economic exploitation have discovered a partial “solution” to this curse: make most people do extra work so that a small parasitic class may have bread for free. In pre-capitalist societies, these class distinctions are clear: everyone knows the master appropriates what the slave produces. Capitalism doesn’t change the fact that economic wealth is created by human labour, of course, or that bread must be bought with somebody’s sweat. But the extraordinary thing about capitalism is the degree to which it manages to obscure such a basic fact. The great innovation of wage labour is that it hides the underlying exploitation with the illusion of a voluntary and equal exchange of work for money. The idea that it is money rather than work that produces wealth or that investors play a role equal (or even primary) to workers in the production process is always current in the ideology of capitalist societies. It wasn’t until Marx articulated his theories in the middle of the nineteenth century that philosophy could even offer a clear look behind the appearances of the wage system to reveal how profit is the result of paying workers less than what they produce, a tax cleverly hidden and extracted by paying as wages what labour costs rather than the full value it produces.

But to the woman in the myth, God gave this curse:

I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.

The Hebrew word rendered in the above passages as both “toil” for the man and “pangs” for the woman is 'itstsabown (עצבון) meaning “worrisomeness, i.e. labor or pain: sorrow, toil.” A translation which preserves the repeated word and so the generalization across the division of labour would have been to use in both verses the English word labour which has historically been used to describe specifically both the pain of tilling the ground and of childbirth. But 'itstsabown seems to be even more general than labour, indicating mental anguish as well as physical pain and is specific to neither manual labour nor childbirth. The word rendered “pain” in the next part of the line directed to the woman (“in pain you shall bring forth children”) is 'etseb (עצב), from the same root as 'itstsabown and with an almost synonymous meaning (in modern Hebrew it means “sadness”).

A translation of the first lines which follows the underlying Hebrew more literally than most other English versions (taking the above and other lexical considerations into account) is provided by biblical scholar and archaeologist Carol Meyers:

I will greatly increase your toil and your pregnancies; (Along) with travail you shall give birth to children.

Meyers uses this translation to argue her thesis that the pronouncement is fitting to the conditions of an emerging Israelite civilization during the early Iron Age (around 1200 BCE) when maintaining an existence in the thorny Canaan highlands would have given rise to an anxiety about underpopulation and the demand for women to contribute significantly to both food production as well as to caring for children. She also observes that though the division of labour and balance of power between the sexes varies greatly across societies, “The continuum of possible relative contributions of males and females to societal chores can be correlated with the status of women. […​] Within certain parameters, societies in which women enjoy relatively high status are those in which women bear a quantitatively large portion of the roles which comprise the productive labor of the community.”

In other words, according to the anthropological model espoused by Meyers, when women as a class perform both their maternal duties and contribute significantly to food production they enjoy a higher social status. However, because women are preoccupied with their pregnancies and domestic chores, they can never contribute to the material needs of society as much as men can (Meyers gives a maximum estimate of 60%:40% man:woman balance of contributions) so “women are never valued as a class more than men.”

But as myth the etiological insight offered by the Genesis account is far more general than the specific circumstances in which it may have been developed. The Biblical account of woman’s daily suffering, especially clear in Meyers' translation, is linked to her biological specialization for childbirth beyond its specific, periodic pains. Among the general pains of childbirth is the domestic work it entails according to cultural norms. In most societies this work has included not only giving birth and caring for infants, but washing, preparing food, healing, making clothing, and gardening for the entire family. As a corollary, because women are tied to the home by their work, the tasks that must be done in the distant fields and forests — including farming, hunting, and fighting — traditionally fell to men for which toiling in the cursed land of the myth is a stand-in.

As in the case of the man’s plight to work the ground (which, as noted, can be seen as a consequent of the woman’s own plight), the general trajectory of human civilization has evolved from the configuration described in the myth — in which women suffer the pain of child birth and the bulk of the subsequent care work upon which all societies depend while at the same time being rendered subservient to their husbands — to develop versions which further intensify and mystify the suffering. This basic pattern in which women work twice and are valued less, a cross-cultural fact of modern societies and described by the early Hebrews as an originating characteristic of civilization, is the ancient foundation upon which today’s capitalism has been built.

Nineteenth-century anthropologists developed their own myths of the origins of family and women’s oppression. For several decades into the twentieth century, the ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, a pioneering American ethnologist, became current in both America and the United Kingdom. Through his studies of the matrilineally-organized Iroquois tribes in New York, especially their kinship terminology which he believed held clues to their prehistoric kinship system, Morgan developed a theory of social evolution in which he attempted to reconstruct the universal family forms adopted by human societies as they advanced through historical stages of technological development. Morgan published the most complete version of his theory in 1877 as Ancient Society.

Marx and Engels considered Ancient Society to be an independent development and confirmation of their own materialist conception of history including the origin of class antagonism itself: “The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. […​] It is the cellular form of civilized society in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied.” After Marx’s death, Engels set out to write a book to summarize Morgan’s findings and synthesize them with Marx’s economic social theory which was published in 1884 as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

The most salient feature of Morgan’s conjectured history of kinship groups, as summarized by Engels, is that early societies were built around matrilineal families and matrilocal, communal households where women enjoyed high social status due to their important reproductive role and could count on the solidarity of their sisters and brothers in any dispute with a visiting husband. But then the gradual fall from this pre-pastoral Eden: With “the introduction of cattle breeding, metalworking, weaving and, lastly, agriculture,” it became possible to produce a sizable surplus of wealth. These new methods of production, generally controlled by men, allowed old forms of social obligation to be replaced by purchase, made slavery useful on a wide scale and war profitable for the first time, and provided an impulse to convert the clan’s wealth into private property of the family while replacing matrilineal with patrilineal reckoning of descent.

The success of this patriarchal revolution dissolved the primitive communism of the matrilineal clans and gave rise to varying degrees of what Engels called the monogamous family which “is based on the supremacy of the man,” who alone has the right to divorce. The express aim of the monogamous family is “to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs.” The shift to a society composed of monogamous families was, in Engels' famous words, “the world-historical defeat of the female sex.”

Some modern anthropologists accept matrilineal primacy and primitive communism, but other particulars are now known to be incorrect and the overall Morgan-Engels scheme is challenged on several grounds. Still, Engels’s account remains compelling if only because it is an attempt to find the historical origins of the subordination of women within families and public society. It is easier to confront and undo a historically constituted arrangement than one that is presented as eternal or unchangeably “natural”. And whereas anthropologists have only interpreted culture, in various ways, the point is to change it.

Morgan and Engels’s work on the family can be read in part as an attempt to provide a scientific explanation of the myths of prehistoric matriarchy found in many cultures (they both drew on Johann Jakob Bachofen’s very popular, at the time, Mother Right, which read those myths as history). But there is another, more sinister, interpretation of those myths which doesn’t rely on fragile anthropological evidence and, in fact, describes a process that can be observed to take place every day all over the world and for thousands of years. That is that myths of matriarchy, and male initiation rites which fulfill a similar role, are repeated narrations of the transition from the mother-dominated world of boyhood in the home to patriarchal manhood in public society. In this interpretation, myths of matriarchy work as a tool of education and socialization to help reproduce patriarchy and its existing sexual division of labour. “The myth of matriarchy is but the tool used to keep woman bound to her place. To free her, we need to destroy the myth.”

Whatever their actual prehistory, patriarchal relations — including the control of and ownership rights to women and their fertility — are the prototypical organization for class societies and have been adapted quite well to serve the reproduction of capitalism and its workers. When factory production is thrust upon a population, the gender composition of its employed workforce follows a pattern of development in which the first employees tend to be (sometimes almost entirely) female, followed by a period of de-feminization, and finally, at least as observed in progressive capitalist republics, the re-entrance of women to the wider workforce at rates, in roles, and earning wages on a slow trajectory toward parity with men. The first two phases are especially pronounced in modern export-oriented manufacturing regions, made possible by global capital, where sweatshops on opposite sides of the planet must compete as sites of low wages.

The maquiladora system in Mexico, for example, began with an overwhelmingly female workforce. In the late 1960s, 90% to 95% of production workers were women, while supervisors and higher-paid technicians were mostly American men sent over from the parent companies. As late as 1975, women still made up 78% of the production line workforce (and almost 93% in border maquilas), but only 57% by 1998. Supervisory and technician jobs were increasingly filled by Mexican workers, but were more often given to men; if those positions are counted then the ratio of women to men drops to about 52% in 1998. By 2005 women accounted for only 44% of all maquiladora jobs (with new male hires still going disproportionately to supervisory and technician roles). Similar trends can be seen among the ‘factory girls’ of China’s Pearl River Delta and other Asian manufacturing zones.

Marx was aware of the first stage of this trend in industrializing Europe, which he explained by pointing to mechanized factories which allow the employment of “workers of slight muscular strength” so that the “labour of women and children was therefore the first result of the capitalist application of machinery!” While that might explain why capitalists could employ women and children on a large scale, the reason they did, and did so eagerly, was because women and children made up a vulnerable segment of the population which could be more intensively and reliably exploited. Men not only had more pride, education, and political clout, they were also more likely to already be organized into labour associations which opposed the reduction of wages accompanying automation. Marx also noted this latter point, that women were found by capitalists in a more exploitable position. As an example he quoted the testimony of a member of parliament regarding an owner of power looms who employed exclusively women and girls and who gave “a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessaries of life. Thus are the virtues, the peculiar virtues of the female character to be perverted to her injury — thus all that is most dutiful and tender in her nature is made a means of her bondage and suffering.”

While the idea that women have “peculiar virtues” which can be used against them persists, most sweatshop owners are not as forthright as the Victorian power loom employer quoted above. From the textile factories of Southeast Asia to the assembly lines of Mexican maquiladoras, employers almost always justify their preference for vulnerable women in the rhetoric of naturalization rather than acknowledging the desperate financial situation of the girls they hire: women (and children) make good factory workers because they have “nimble fingers” or are naturally “dexterous” and “diligent,” etc.

But Marx thought the effect of mechanized factories preying on women and children would be the destruction of the working-class family. What happened instead was that men began to make up more of the unskilled industrial workforce while women were relegated back to the informal/service sectors and unpaid domestic work. Thus industrial society — in nineteenth-century Europe as well as its subsequent expansions driven by ongoing rounds of primitive accumulation — swings from extensively exploiting women as the cheapest available labour to a norm in which women are excluded from the factory and are “relegated to a condition of isolation, enclosed within the family cell, dependent in every aspect on men.” It has never actually been the case that most women could afford to do only housework, but that was nonetheless the ideal during the periods in which capitalism claimed to offer a ‘family wage’. The economic conditions which produce these swings include growth outpacing the supply of women — especially as the initial population of women and children are worn out and used up while the survivors begin demanding more respect and legal protection — and the reduction of real wages in the higher-paying sectors making factory work more attractive to unemployed men. Political and moral movements also activate to combat the erosion of family values by industry.

The first phase, feminization of industry, works to destroy whatever is left of pre-capitalist family livelihood, while the second, housewifization, then works to integrate proletarized women into roles as reproducers of the capitalist workforce. The arrangement resulting from housewifization protects women and children from the abuse of factory life, protects the wages of men and their privileged position in the home as the breadwinner, and perhaps most importantly protects the family as an effective means of producing children, vessels of future labour-power, and therefore of reproducing capitalist society. The fact that this arrangement preserves traditional male privileges, a tacit compromise with working-class men who are rewarded with a ‘family wage’ and the possibility of a captive housekeeper, suggests the possibility that men, even Marxists and militant labour activists, might choose a symbiotic relationship with capital in favor of housewifization and other patriarchal perks. As Heidi Hartmann remarked in noting this pitfall of relying on men to lead the fight against capitalism and the oppression of women: “Men have more to lose than their chains.”

The workforces of modern developed capitalist societies are still deeply structured by gender, age, race, and physical ability — in fact, labour markets (especially those in countries like the United States which don’t have a history of strong social democratic movements) are downright sexist, ageist, and ableist, felt most acutely by those without the disposition or experience to insist on whatever legal rights have been nominally afforded to them — but they fall somewhere between the two extremes of working families to death and shutting women away in private homes as dependents of their husbands. In the United states, women’s labour force participation rate remains less than that of men by about 12 percentage points (56.8% to 69.2% in 2016), and that gap more than doubles when considering full-time year-round work which is engaged in by about 34.9% of women and 59.2% of men. The labour force participation rate (including part-time and temporary work) of all women with minor children, though, is about 70 percent. However, while most women including mothers engage in at least part-time work outside the house, it is significant to note that the jobs they find are often centered around care work. The top twenty-five most common occupations for full-time women include teachers, nurses, secretaries, receptionists, maids and housekeeping cleaners, personal care aides, and social workers. In all of those fields, women make up at least 75% of the workforce. Among management positions, which women are less likely to occupy, women predominate in human resources, social services, and education administrators.