A key element in the continued social and economic dominance of the capitalist system is its ability to outlast the passing of generations. “The owner of labor-power is mortal.” The solution, of course, is to ignore the individual and, as capitalism has done, engineer a system in which labor transcends its vessel. “If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labor-power must perpetuate himself, in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation.” Marx defines reproduction as only the creation of a source of labor identical to the one it replaces; reproduction encompasses neither the nearly year long process of childbirth or …show more content…
It isn’t possible to economize the reproductive process and the development of a child under the care of a mother. Certainly, a nanny can cover a single 8 hour shift in which a simple set of expectations are laid out and either fulfilled (and compensated for) or unfulfilled. But motherhood cannot be transformed into an exchangeable commodity; a mother cannot simultaneously remain home and focus solely on the welfare of her child while selling her labor or exchanging goods. Taking care of a child is socially necessary and has immense use value, but it cannot be monetized and is therefore deliberately excluded from the system. Capitalism has turned child rearing into a lifetime of subsistence, in which the mother sacrifices the entirety of her labor power neither for compensation, commodity nor social agency. Therefore, a mother must, as witnessed throughout history, become dependent on a man for comprehensive support. Through this devalorization of women’s reproductive labor, gender inequality has been further intensified; not only are women unable to exercise autonomy, but once they are contracted into marriage, they have no footing within the relationship. Women are devalued to the point of nonexistence within the …show more content…
Prostitution seems to be, at least from a Marxist standpoint, the treatment of a women’s body as a monetized commodity. Women, when they chose to literally sell themselves, were much more a part of the capitalist process than when they were relegated to domesticity. Interestingly, both motherhood and prostitution require a woman to transform her body into a commodity. Yet with prostitution, this commodity can be immediately and effectively sold like a male’s labor on the market. A woman can sell herself (or the commodity of sex—what is the actual commodity and what is the medium through which that commodity is sold can be debated) as a prostitute successfully because her services can be transcribed into the capitalist formula. Definitively, childbirth was the most socially necessary of the roles taken on by women during the time of Marx, but its social importance was unrelated to its relationship to capital. The use-value of female reproduction and parenting had no means through which to become efficiently exchanged, and therefore its vitality was enclosed within the isolating borders of the domestic