Does this form of modern subjectivity constitute an ideology or a reality? I like to say that it structures, at a more fundamental level, both our way of looking and our practices. It therefore refers both to a set of dominant ideological representations that are effective in naturalizing the reality of domination, and at the same time this ideology finds its rationality in social reality itself, since it is effectively marked by the domination that it naturalizes. Thus, the domination of men over women, of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, of white people over the rest of the world, and every other structural hierarchy appears falsely “evident” under the ideological gaze.
To understand this subjectivity, we have to understand the social form that produces it. This reality of the modern subject is certainly that of a dissociation between one pole of modernity oriented towards production, exchange, activity, even aggressiveness, but also instrumental, technical and scientific rationality, and a pole oriented towards the tasks of reproduction, caring for others, “passivity”, benevolence, as well as feeling and emotion. This division, which privileges certain characteristics in order to form an ideal of a productive and available subject, is modeled on the capitalist production of value. This dominant pole of value production, insofar as it produces social representations, is itself the fantasized shadow of a socially dominant figure, often white and certainly proprietary, a shadow that seeks to make itself desirable: “when you want to, you can!”
This division is not arbitrary. The capitalist form of society is at the root of this form of modern subjectivity, of which it constitutes the essential matrix. Indeed, the capitalist form of organizing social life recognizes as “real” production only what produces commodities capable of making capital profitable. It therefore divides all activities necessary to society in two. The so-called “productive” activities are always practices that produce commodity value, and thus reproductive activities are relegated to simple underpaid tasks, or even excluded from the sphere of commodity circulation, to be relegated to the household. These poorly valued activities coincide with an overrepresentation of “feminine” activities, dominated by the cycles of capitalist accumulation and by “real work” (intellectual or industrial!).
In the ideological imaginary of patriarchal capitalism, the value pole grounds the dissociated pole, while in reality, without the activities fundamentally associated with care work that maintain the minimal conditions of praxis, no value-producing activity would be possible, and capitalism would quickly collapse. The excellent work of the Marxist and materialist feminist tradition, of which we offer an illustration here, mainly grounded in the critique of value-dissociation formulated by Roswitha Scholz, provides a compelling framework for explaining the division of praxis in modernity, and opens paths towards social transformation beyond the value-form, beyond the dissociated form of modern subjectivity, beyond capitalism and patriarchy that ground them.
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But from what is this subjectivity abstracted, if not from reproductive activities, or even from productive activity as a whole? Its praxis is dissociated, and therefore it is dissociated from itself and from its own body.
The abstraction in question is not opposed to the concrete as one side of a coin is opposed to the other. For example, the category of exchange-value is not opposed in a binary way to the category of use-value: rather, the two are contradictory and complementary sides of every commodity that can be capitalized. Yet use-value itself already constitutes an abstraction of utility: it is already far from representing a natural pole, but rather a capitalist shaping of practical uses. Its concrete side is only the concrete side of the capitalist commodity.
Is it not the same with subjectivity? Use-value already constitutes a form of socialization through the commodity. The subject, abstracted from its world, finds itself in the capitalist use of itself and of its productions, separated from itself.
We can now see this in the buying and selling of labour-power, and in the proprietarian ideology.
Tronto, in Moral Boundaries: a new relation of distancing in modernity. This is also a distancing from the practices of production, and especially from reproduction.
What becomes particularly powerful here is that the quality of a practice becomes a criterion for evaluating what must be liberated, transformed or abolished.
It has been a long time since materialist feminist currents, and Marxist feminism in particular, brought to light not only productive labor but also reproductive labor, that is, precisely that part of social activity which often takes place outside the sphere of capitalist valorization, but which is necessary for the perpetuation of the system itself. Sylvia Federici, for example, has described our society as “patriarchal capitalism”. The split in value does not affect women equally; racialized women are even more likely to perform unpaid reproductive tasks.