Care and Capitalism. Kathleen Lynch

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The role of ideas in legitimating subordination

      The North Atlantic gender order has its roots in the European colonial period beginning in the later 1400s. Empire building was a highly gendered enterprise (Connell 1995). The domination, control, use and abuse of women were endemic to colonization, justified on the dubious philosophical and moral rationale that women were part of nature rather than society, especially if they were women of the colonized peoples (Patel and Moore 2018: 111–37).

      While a commercial dividend was paramount in driving colonization and exploitation, including the exploitation of care work, the role that ideas played in both framing and legitimating the cheapening of things, including caring, was also crucial. Moral concepts and ideas were deployed that not only named the world but created it ontologically, implicitly prescribing as well as describing who and who was not fully human (Patel and Moore 2018: 47).

      One of the sources of inspiration was the work of Descartes (1991). He drew a philosophical distinction between mind and body, between thinking things and extended things, res cogitans and res extensa. Not all humans were defined as thinking, including women and indigenous peoples, and non-humans, so-called extended things, or nature. Nature was subsequently defined as something to be possessed and used by humans; it was to be controlled and dominated by society (Patel and Moore 2018: 45–55). The two laws of capitalist ecology, one distinguishing between man (sic) and nature, and the other classifying nature as a thing to be dominated and controlled by man, provided moral justification for the exploitation of swathes of humanity and the destruction of much natural life.⁸

To justify making care cheap it had first to be defined as worthless, part of nature rather than society. This was achieved through the equation of care labour with femininity and women, people who were not fully human: as women were exploitable things, then by default their caring ‘nature’ was exploitable. Like water, trees and clean air, care was defined as freely available from the nature of women, regarded as being produced without effort or work. Within the binary Cartesian mind/body logic of value, as carers were part of nature, exploitable things, so caring was not an individuality-defining or citizenship-defining activity (Sevenhuijsen 1998; Hobson 2000).

Hegemonic masculinity

      While the concept of hegemonic or idealized masculinity changed over time from rule by physical violence, and the threat of violence, to rule by male-promulgated laws operated within the machinery of the state; and while it changed location, from the colonies to the factories, from the high seas to the financial markets, the boardroom and the stock exchange (Connell 1995: 185–203); the governing principle of control has remained in place as a defining feature of hegemonic masculinity.

      The idea that it is natural and legitimate for men to dominate women informs structures, policies and practices across social, economic, affective and political life (Connell 1995: 73–8). Though hegemonic masculinity is not singular in form, changing with history and culture, from imperial times to neoliberal times, taking localized and globalized forms, and being contested as well as accommodated (Connell 2016), it remains extremely powerful including among the younger generation (Harvey, Ringrose and Gill 2013).

      The patriarchal codes that are bound up with hegemonic masculinity do not just create boundaries between women and men; they also create hierarchies between men, external and internal hegemonies that define some forms of masculinity as subordinate (Demetriou 2001). In neoliberal capitalist times, the powerful transnational business elite epitomize a strong form of entrepreneurial masculinity not just in the Western metropole but in China, India and wider Asia (Connell 2016). Hoang’s (2014) research in Ho Chi Minh city shows how wealthy men demonstrate their status and power over women and other men by socializing in expensive bars and sex venues, while research in multinational-controlled garment factories in Malaysia (Elias 2008) exemplifies the deeply gendered forms of work in these export zones, in which women are persistently subordinate.

Men Leading Capitalism

The Forbes list of the world’s richest people in 2019 showed that almost 90 per cent of the world’s billionaire elite were men.⁹ Although there are now more women billionaires than twenty years ago, they are still a small minority. Most of those who own and control the transnational corporations globally are not only men but also White (Patterson 2013). Though there are local billionaires in several countries, the transnational capitalist class who both own and control much of capital globally form a hegemonic fraction (Poulantzas 1975) and are in an extremely powerful position to become a global ruling class given their dominance of so many fields of production and services, including financial services (Robinson 2012; Murray 2015).

      As wealthy men (and the few women), and their professional allies in the financial, investment, accounting and legal professions (Sklair 2000), move globally, organizing takeovers and forming alliances, new business and allegiances, they are above and beyond the control of most nation states (de Graaff 2020). They are unlikely to renege on their power and wealth without a struggle; indeed, they have developed a sense of entitlement to that power and strongly contest its erosion in both gender and racial terms ((Kimmel 2013; Anderson 2016).

The material dividend of patriarchy

      To understand how capitalism works, we need to go beyond capitalism and explore how it is constitutionally linked to the racial, gender and care ordering of society. The internal dynamics of gender itself are far from binary (Mitchell 1971). While patriarchy is a hierarchical system within which men dominate and control women, it is also a relationship between men. Men are hierarchically constituted within capitalism by class and co-constituted hierarchically by sexuality and race especially (Connell 1995). While hybrid types of masculinities exist, the White, upper-class, heterosexual male is symbolically at the pinnacle of the masculinities’ hierarchy. Men who are poor, working-class, Black or Brown, and/or gay or transsexual are variously located at the nether end of the male hierarchical order.

While some men find new ways to elevate themselves above other men, they often do so in a manner that does not threaten the symbolic boundaries that maintain the patriarchal dividend of their own kind. It is quite common for well-educated White middle-class men to differentiate themselves from ‘traditional’ men by highlighting their gender-aware ideologies, tastes and behaviours, while simultaneously retaining and protecting their male power in the gender hierarchy (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Eisen and Yamashita 2019). As Hondagneu-Sotelo and Messner (1994) observed, White middle-class men want to stop paying a price for being at the pinnacle of the gender hierarchy (including the disrespect and criticism that comes from being defined as part of the privileged, undeserving elite) while at the same time wanting to remain part of that elite. As with all groups who benefit from privileges, they do not want to lose the material benefits of their superior (gender) status.

      Although the vast majority of men do not belong to a normatively prescribed hegemonic group of (White) upper-class males, they benefit from the patriarchal dividend of being part of the male social group per se (Connell 1995: 79). They do not have to be proactive to benefit from the patriarchal dividend, nor do they have to defend it. Just as White people benefit silently from the racial dividend of whiteness, so all men can benefit from the patriarchal dividend of being a man, if they remain passive and silently complicit with its injunctions (Hartmann 1979; Connell 1995). Men’s complicity with the unequal gender order is highly visible in the care field and within families.

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