1. Crisis of Reproduction
In the short film, Loin du 16e (Far from the 16th), Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas evocatively portray what we might identify as a contradiction within social reproduction. Lasting less than five minutes, the film depicts an otherwise unremarkable day for the nameless young woman that is its central protagonist: she awakens in the suburbs of Paris before sunrise in order to bring her infant to a large, institutional daycare facility, where she must then immediately leave the baby in order to undertake her long commute, using various forms of public transportation, into the city center. There, she arrives at the home of an affluent family where she works as a nanny. While most of the film silently depicts her dreary commute, the key to the film lies in the two scenes that bookend her journey. At the beginning, despite her apparent haste, hearing her baby cry as she leaves, she briefly returns to the crib to sing a lullaby to her child; in the final scene, now in someone else’s home, hearing their baby cry, she enters the nursery where she sings the same lullaby to comfort the infant of her employer. While the film offers neither an explicit thesis nor makes any direct claims, its critique is crystal-clear. There is something heartbreaking in the juxtaposition of these two scenes that forces us to examine the way in which we as a society organize the labor that is necessary to care for and maintain human beings—i.e., the labor of social reproduction.
In myriad ways, capitalism subordinates the labor of caring for human life to the labor of economic production. Moreover, insofar as the sphere of social reproduction has and continues to be predominantly the province of women, and particularly women of color, capitalism generates a specifically gendered and racialized form of subordination. Neoliberalism, our current economic order, is typified, among other things, by disinvestment from and the erosion of the welfare state as well as increases in both labor hours and the precariousness of labor. It is also characterized by a shift in the relationship between gender and waged labor, namely a universal injunction for women to enter the waged-labor force. The decimation of the welfare state means that the labor of social reproduction is either off-loaded to the private sphere or “reorganized as value-producing services that workers must purchase and pay for.” This increased level of waged-labor participation erodes the capacity of individuals to perform this labor in their private lives, while only the wealthy can afford to purchase the reproductive labor of others.
This crisis social reproduction is symptomatic of a broader moral lacuna that is immanent to capitalist modernity: when stripped of the veneer of liberal morality, we find a society in which human life is ontologically worthless, i.e., human life—and organic life more broadly—has no inherent value and accrues value only to the extent and for as long as this life produces surplus value. Drawing from Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004) and Simone de Beauvoir’s play Useless Mouths (1945), this post addresses the way that this generalized condition of ontological worthlessness within capitalism is sutured to women via reproductive labor.
2. Reproductive Labor
Capitalism separates “economic production” from “social reproduction.” Prior to the advent of capitalism, even in societies where we find a rigidly gendered division of work, there was no division between productive and reproductive work, i.e., no concept of the existence of two separate spheres—economic production and domestic life. Confined largely to the home and outside the production of surplus value, domestic work became naturalized as a women’s propensity and vocation and devalued such that it was largely invisible as labor. While wage labor produces surplus value for capitalism, unwaged reproductive activities produce only use values (e.g., meals, a cleaned house, children who are nurtured, etc.). To the extent that, within capitalism, the production of surplus value serves as the metric of value as such, women’s domestic work does not count as productive, valuable labor at all, even if capitalism cannot function without it. From the standpoint of capitalism, then, women’s work produces no value—this “work” is literally worthless.
In Caliban and the Witch, Federici points out that the transition to capitalism was preceded by centuries of struggles against feudalism. She notes that already by the thirteenth century, a process of proletarianization—an expansion of wage dependence—and monetization of economic life had begun. With the development of capitalism, a series of enclosures separated people from the means of subsistence, driving them to the labor market and instituting their dependence on a wage. As Federici shows, the monetization of economic life resulted in increased poverty and dispossession for many women as they were increasingly prevented from inheriting or possessing land. These conditions incited a massive migration of women from rural to urban areas, with newly-emigrated women often making up the poorest members of urban society. According to Federici, this growing mass of dispossessed, landless people ultimately coalesced as the driving force behind various anti-feudal heretical movements. Federici’s analysis establishes a connection between the creation of a new sexual order—one that culminated in what she calls the “patriarchy of the wage”—and the destruction of these revolutionary social movements. She points to the emergence throughout Europe from the fourteenth century of laws designed to divest women of access to any independent means of subsistence and forcibly attach them to reproduction. Her analysis thus points to this suturing of women to “worthless” work as a driving force for the development and consolidation of capitalism.
3. Useless Mouths
Useless Mouths is usually considered a marginal work by Simone de Beauvoir. Performed in occupied France, it is obviously intended as a critique of Nazism that functions allegorically in order to evade censorship. As the first and only play she ever wrote, its critical reception was mixed, and Beauvoir herself is quite critical of it in her later reflections on this period of her thought. To date, there is relatively little scholarship that engages with this play. Without weighing in on its dramaturgical merits, I suggest that Beauvoir articulates the problem of the devaluation of women’s work, and of the ‘useless’ in general under capital.
Useless Mouths is set in medieval Europe in a fictional city-state that has revolted against the Duke of Burgundy. As the play unfolds, the city is under siege and cut off from its allies. This setting brings into focus the founding antagonism of this play, namely the rebellion against the feudal system and struggle for its dissolution. The titular conflict of the play—excising the useless mouths—emerges on the basis of and against the background of this broader social rebellion. It is in this context that, under the threat of mass starvation, the Aldermen decide to expel of the “useless mouths,” the sick, the elderly, children, and women, from the city-state. These two antagonisms—the founding antagonism of social rebellion, on one hand, and the titular conflict (i.e., the division of the rebels into those whose work is value-producing and those who are worthless), on the other hand—constitute the theoretical core of this play.
In naming her fictional city-state Vaucelles—Beauvoir evokes the question: “vaut-elle?”, i.e., does she, woman, have value? Value, in Vaucelles, like under the conditions of capitalist production, is constituted in relation to productive work—i.e., work that produces value. In this situation, value means the production of surplus value, and value exists only to the extent that wage labor produces surplus value for capitalists—i.e., only to the extent that the capitalist is able to expropriate the additional amount of value produced by the worker. From the standpoint of capitalism, the production of surplus value is the sole metric of value. All humans are “useless mouths”—without value and ultimately expendable—unless we can be exploited by capital to produce surplus value. Ontological worthlessness is the human condition within capitalist modernity. Yet if we accept, as Federici has argued, that capitalism was formed and consolidated at least in part through suturing women to unwaged and thus “unproductive” work, then ultimately the gendered division of labor within capitalism solidifies and entrenches the status of women, along with others who are too young or too old, or otherwise unable to sell their labor power, as “useless mouths.”
This insight is the key to understanding the question of “vaut-elle?” that Beauvoir poses. In her fictional setting, men’s work is considered value-producing—the work of men alone produces symbolic value in precisely the same way that waged labor alone produces surplus value for capitalism. In contrast, the women’s work involves the myriad domestic tasks of social reproduction—cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc. While the work of men is considered valuable, women’s work is not considered work at all. Women are thereby devalued as “useless mouths” insofar as their work does not produce value according to the social metric. Under these conditions, those who are worthless constitute a burden that must be excised—i.e., those who are unable to engage in value-producing work along with those whose activities do not rise to the status of work. As such, Beauvoir’s analysis of the “useless mouths” anticipates and resonates with Marxist-feminist analyses that have criticized the way in which capitalism excises unwaged domestic work from the category of productive labor, rendering this work invisible as work as such. Moreover, like these Marxist feminists, the play clearly makes the case that it is by suturing women to “worthless” labor that the generalized condition of ontological worthlessness under capitalist production is hypostasized as the status of women as such. The ontological devaluation of life that Beauvoir brings into focus as the titular conflict of this play emerges from the specific, historical conditions around the formation, consolidation, and development of capitalism. The historically constituted ontological violence of capitalism devalues human life by making productive labor—labor from which surplus value can be extracted—the sole locus of value, and suturing the condition of worthlessness to those who are historically barred from activities that produce value in socially recognizable ways. Beauvoir’s critique of the ontological devaluation of life thus appears to be a critique of capitalist modernity.
With this analysis of the titular conflict in mind, we can return to the founding antagonism of this play, namely the fictional social rebellion that functions as its background. Indeed, the reason that the people of Vaucelles find themselves in this dire situation is that, having rebelled against rule of the Duke, they are now under siege and facing starvation. Federici argues that emancipatory potential of the medieval proletarian rebellions was defeated by the sexual bribe that offered men dominion over women while entrenching their universal exploitation. Beauvoir’s play brings us to a very similar point: the men of Vaucelles are poised to accept a sexual bargain, one that will, however, ultimately solidify their defeat. Beauvoir’s play, however, departs from the historical parallel: the people of Vaucelles reject the sexist, proto-capitalist ideology of value, and they choose to struggle in solidarity against the conditions of their oppression. Thus, in Beauvoir’s play, rejecting the sexual division of labor under capitalism and its concomitant index of value functions as the basis of forging solidarity in a genuinely emancipatory struggle.
4. Conclusion
Within contemporary capitalism, reproductive labor remains largely “women’s work.” The point, however, against the castigation of women as “useless mouths” is not to valorize this work on either an economic or a moral level. At stake is not a call to recognize “women’s work” by bestowing upon it the dubious dignity of a wage, nor is it a call to venerate women for their unpaid sacrifices. In other words, the point is not to valorize or celebrate women’s exploitation as empowerment. Rather the point is that “women’s work” indicates a shared position; not an identity between women but rather a point contradiction and thus place for the formation of solidarity. This, I contend, is the contemporary relevance of Beauvoir’s play: that it points to the contradiction of “women’s work”—work that generates and sustains our existence and social relations—as useless for capitalism and as invaluable for human existence, and thus as a nodal point for the generation and formation of solidarity and struggle.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Anne van Leeuwen
Anne van Leeuwen has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. She is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA. Her research is in twentieth-century continental philosophy. Drawing from traditions like Marxism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, and she is particularly interested in political philosophy and feminism. In addition to various articles on these topics, she is working on a project on reproductive labor as well as a monograph on Simone de Beauvoir. Anne teaches a range of courses at JMU, including Ethical Reasoning, French Political Philosophy, Existentialism, Gender, Race, and Class, Philosophy through Film, and she also runs the Philosophy & Film club.
