Control women, control wealth: patriarchy as an essential tool of capitalism

Trigger Warning: mentions of sexual violence

Photo courtesy of Harrison Keely/Wikimedia Commons

Ever since I “became a woman” at 13, I was quick to defend reproductive rights in the interest of my own safety and autonomy, as well as that of other girls and women; but I could never answer the essential question of why it was even necessary to do so in the first place and what exactly makes us so vulnerable to the incursion of these rights. But recently, in thinking about the systems which prioritize the comfort and continuity of rapists and pedophiles over the security of everyone else, I feel I have come close to an answer, and that answer has to do with capitalism.

Women are the most essential component in the engine of capitalism. Why? Because they create the workers and consumers which make the system run. So when we see agendas that eliminate sex education, contraceptive access, and reproductive choice, conferring the authority of decision to the rapist or the enabler, it is to reinforce and guarantee control over the producers of the ultimate resources: labor and consumption. 

One of the crucial components of this system of control is manipulating virtue to clarify a feminine model that is conducive to a role that is, by and large, specifically reproductive. When the keepers and supporters of the Heritage Foundation preach “restor[ing] the nuclear family to the center of American life…to reduce both the demand and supply for abortion,” it indicates that the encouragement of “wifely” models isn’t solely about exhibiting the virtue that is supposedly inherent in their desired family structure—it’s about influencing avenues for reproductive choice to ensure that the outputs for labor and consumption are tractable. Look at the language itself: the demand and supply of abortion.

I have no doubt that a system’s existential fear of losing dominion over the production of future generations is what lies at the heart of the endless debate over abortion. The reason that women’s healthcare is first moralized and then politicized is because this process cements two essential elements of control: the patriarchal capitalist class will always retain the final say when it comes to who, where, when, and how people may reproduce, and it will use convenient vehicles like culture, virtue, and religion as the means to create ethical justification for what is ultimately an economic interest.

The mere fact that, under this framework, forced birth for adult women and barely pubescent children alike is at minimum negligible and, in more extreme cases, even morally defensible speaks to the terror of patriarchal capitalism at what it might actually mean to allow girls and women agency. If their reproductive choice were the center of the conversation, would capitalism really be able to guarantee that reproduction would keep pace with the demands of a system that is exhausting itself at an accelerated rate? 

If South Korea’s “4b” movement—which stipulates no childbirth and a refusal to date, marry, or have sex with men altogether as a wholesale rejection of patriarchal systems, according to Britannica—teaches us anything, it’s that girls and women claiming that autonomy really does pose as much of a threat to capitalism as the system’s desperate attempts to smother choice indicate. According to an article in the International Affairs Review, there are now projections that “over half of Korea’s population will be over the age of 65 by 2065,” with “serious implications related to Korea’s economic and military capacity.”

Therefore, in order for the ruling capitalist class to maintain adaptive control over the supply of labor and consumption, it is necessary for them to constantly reassert the power and impunity of the abuser, especially in the face of legal consequences, because it signals that the core priority is always sustaining a patriarchal framework in order to fuel capitalism at any cost to girls and women. It is known that huge swaths of elites of every description, from actors and artists to university heads (see the Times Union on Leon Botstein, president of Bard College here in New York) to the sitting president of the United States, have knowingly facilitated and participated in sexual exploitation of the most gruesome descriptions. It is known that Jeffrey Epstein had a ranch dedicated to forced birthing, and it is also known, as reported by The Guardian, that immigrant children as young as 13, pregnant mostly by rape, are being deliberately moved to a “shelter” in Texas where they are denied abortion and proper healthcare. These things receive no consequences because they reiterate an expectation that is key to the survival of a larger, deeply vicious system.

With this concept of patriarchy as essential infrastructure for capitalism—which, given the predatory character of capitalism, the predation of patriarchy arises as a logical mechanism to serve its aims—it’s not a stretch to postulate that the lack of legal accountability for the some of the most heinous abuses ever witnessed by humanity is intended to send a dual message: patriarchy will remain the dominating authority when it comes to births and deaths, and capitalism will utilize the result to furnish its institutions with workers and consumers and clear populations to make way for testing grounds when it is convenient and profitable to do so.