The term ecofeminism was coined in the 1970s when the emerging large‐scale environmental movement intersected with the various social‐justice movements such as feminism. Ecofeminism continued to develop as a theoretical and political platform throughout the 1980s and produced groundbreaking analyses on the intersecting oppressions of women and nature.Footnote 1 However, in the 1990s it began to be strongly criticized for essentialism, ethnocentrism, and anti‐intellectualism. Instead of becoming an integral aspect of feminist theory complementing and correcting its anthropocentric critiques with ecological perspectives, “ecofeminist” became almost a label of derision. As the American ecofeminist Greta Gaard provocatively writes, ecofeminists came to be viewed as “anti‐intellectual goddess‐worshippers who mistakenly portray the Earth as female and issue totalizing and ahistorical mandates for worldwide veganism” (Reference GaardGaard 2011, 32).
A radical re‐evaluation of ecofeminism appears vital today, however, for both political and theoretical reasons. First, a viable feminist critique for our time requires confronting head‐on the severe ecological crisis that we are currently living through. Environmental problems, particularly human‐induced climate change, pose arguably the greatest political challenge humanity faces today, and no political movement can therefore afford to ignore their significance. My wager is that if feminism does not seriously engage with ecology and think through its relationship to environmentalism, it is going to be difficult to recognize it as a relevant political force shaping our future in a meaningful way in the twenty‐first century.
Second, there has been a theoretical shift within academia: environmental issues are no longer considered solely the realm of the natural sciences. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences have been waking up to the realization that most of the environmental issues today have profound social, political, and ethical significance. Environmental issues also have important gender dimensions, as well as concrete political consequences for gender equality. This is true of such varied issues as climate justice, food security, and energy justice: they require both ecological and feminist analyses. It is thus important that feminist theory forms a strong voice in the developing discussion of environmental issues in the humanities and social sciences today.
Third, a promising route for bringing feminism and environmentalism together today is emerging through contemporary feminist critiques of capitalism. Feminist theorists today are increasingly returning to the insight that capitalism must constitute the critical frame for understanding contemporary forms of women's subordination. As Nancy Fraser writes, after decades in which the term capitalism could scarcely be found outside the writings of Marxist thinkers, commentators of varying stripes now worry openly about capitalism's sustainability, and activists throughout the world mobilize in opposition to its practices (Reference FraserFraser 2014, 1). Rather than understanding this as a mere shift in intellectual or political fashion, Fraser sees it as “a symptom of the growing intuition that the heterogeneous social ills—financial, economic, ecological, political, social—that surround us can be traced to common structural underpinnings, and that reforms that fail to engage with these are doomed to fail” (1). My contention is that this resurgence of Marxist and socialist feminist scholarship opens up interesting avenues for the re‐examination of the theoretical connections among feminism, capitalism, and ecology.
The aim of my article is to lay down the philosophical groundwork for such projects. The argument proceeds in four stages. I will take the existing tradition of socialist ecofeminism as my starting point and outline two different ways that the connections among capitalism, the subordination of women, and the destruction of the environment have been made in this literature. I distinguish between materialist ecofeminism that is empirically grounded and Marxist ecofeminism that puts forward a structural argument about the connections among capitalism, gender oppression, and environmental destruction. These two theoretical positions are necessarily simplifications of much more complex and varied discussions, and their function here is merely to expose to critical scrutiny the different philosophical grounds for defending anticapitalist ecofeminism. In the third section I will argue that the Marxist ecofeminist position needs to be both updated and revised in order to account for the different, sometimes contradictory mechanisms for the capitalization of nature that have become prominent today. I will underscore two developments in particular: the dominance of neoliberalism and the development of biotechnology. I will conclude by summing up the theoretical grounds on which a contemporary political alliance between feminist and ecological struggles against capitalism can be built.
Materialist Ecofeminism
The critiques of ecofeminism targeted chiefly its alleged ontological and methodological essentialism. With the dominance of poststructuralist modes of thinking in the 1990s, the unity of the category of women had already come under heightened critique. Ecofeminism not only seemed to take the category of women as a given, it also affirmed the equation of women and nature. Whether the connection between women and nature was understood as biological or as socially and historically constructed, it had traditionally operated as a key instrument of women's oppression. Feminism had fought hard against the idea that women were somehow closer to nature than men, and therefore less rational, cultured, and capable of moral and political deliberation, for example. Ecofeminism seemed to reverse these arguments by emphasizing the inescapable link between women and nature and thereby merely reinforcing forms of patriarchal domination.
A further problem concerned the methodological essentialism inherent in much of the ecofeminist theorizing of that time. It appeared unaware of the ways that its own claims and theories were socially constructed and embedded in particular, often specifically Western social and political contexts. The common charge was that it promoted an idealist and uncritical understanding of third‐world women's purported “embeddedness” in nature and their supposedly more holistic understanding of it.Footnote 2 Hence, ecofeminism was, at best, an irrelevant distraction from feminism's real work of addressing social injustices, or, at worst, a form of oppression itself.
Materialist ecofeminists were able to subvert these pitfalls by making a more limited, empirical argument. They avoided the charges of essentialism by rejecting all spiritual, abstract, and totalizing connections between women and nature, and emphasized instead the actual material conditions of women in specific geographical and cultural contexts. On the basis of such an emphasis, it was possible to argue that women in many parts of the global south, for example, were “closer to nature” only in the very concrete and material sense that they, typically, had to fetch water and firewood, as well as being responsible for the small‐scale subsistence farming ensuring the survival of their families. This meant that they were often the first victims of environmental destruction.
In their defense of materialist ecofeminism, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen, for example, acknowledge that environmental degradation affects all people and is not exclusively a women's issue. Their argument is that it is nevertheless a feminist issue because women and children are the first to suffer its consequences. “Globally, women produce approximately 80 percent of the world's food supplies, and for this reason women are most severely affected by food and fuel shortages and the pollution of water resources” (Reference Gaard, Gruen, Zimmerman, Callicott, Warren, Klaver and ClarkGaard and Gruen 2005, 163). According to them, it is thus not necessary to evoke metaphorical or essentialist ideas about women's greater propensity for protecting nature because for women living under harsh material conditions, environmental activism is simply a form of self‐defense (see also, for example, Reference MellorMellor 1992, 7). Similar ideas are put forward in the United Nations Population Fund's (UNFPA) study of the consequences of climate change: “Women—particularly those in poor countries—will be affected differently than men. They are among the most vulnerable to climate change, partly because in many countries they make up the larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer income‐earning opportunities…. Drought and erratic rainfall force women to work harder to secure food, water, and energy for their homes” (UNFPA 2009). In other words, materialist ecofeminism can be understood to build on the acknowledgment that specific groups of women have a distinct connection to the environment through their daily interactions with it. In these specific instances at least, there is a clear strategic incentive for feminism and environmentalism to join forces: protecting the environment also directly improves the lives of poor women.
Although such contextual and empirically grounded arguments might be politically and strategically important, they provide insufficient theoretical grounds for ecofeminism. Instead of exposing a systemic or structural connection between gender oppression and environmental destruction, they merely describe their current intertwinement. Environmental problems tend to exacerbate already existing social problems because the weakest and the most vulnerable groups have the fewest resources for mitigating them. When more systemic explanations of the link are provided, they are often formulated in frustratingly vague terms and are based on the idea of the twin dominations of women and nature. The historical and conceptual association between women and nature is understood to be politically significant because it has formed an important justification for patriarchal domination: the feminization of nature and the naturalization of women are two aspects of a single historical process that has functioned as an ideological requisite for women's and nature's ensuing subordination.
Gwyn Kirk, for example, argues that “in the service of capital accumulation, white‐dominated, capitalist patriarchy… creates ‘otherness’”; it oppresses both women and nature, but also “people of color and poor people worldwide…. This continual process of objectification is the central mechanism underlying systems of oppression based on class, race, gender, and nation” (Reference Kirk, Hennessy and IngrahamKirk 1997, 349). Mary Mellor expounds that “Industrialism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy are the different manifestations of a many‐headed Hydra that has its fingers around the throat of women, poor people, and the planet” (Reference MellorMellor 1992, 155). Gaard and Gruen write similarly that “the current global environmental crisis is the result of the mutually reinforcing ideologies of racism, sexism, classism, imperialism, speciesism, and naturism.” These ideologies are best understood as “force fields that intersect with one another… to create complex interrelated and mutually reinforcing systems of oppression” (Reference Gaard, Gruen, Zimmerman, Callicott, Warren, Klaver and ClarkGaard and Gruen 2005, 170).
Listing oppressive ideologies and noting that they are intersecting or connected to one another is obviously valid in the sense that they must occur in some kind of social totality. Such all‐encompassing explanations may help feminists to describe experiences or instances in which different axes of domination intersect, but they do not explain how and why they occur together in specific forms.Footnote 3 If ecological feminism seems to cover all forms of oppression and injustice, it further risks losing a clear theoretical focus and political aim. Materialist ecofeminism would, at best, amount to an instance of “affinity politics,” a flexible formation that was able to accommodate many different theoretical and political positions behind the twin goals of “planetary survival and an egalitarian future” (Reference CarlassareCarlassare 2000, 101).
I contend that the major contribution of Marxist feminist thinkers to the project of ecofeminism has therefore been the insight that we can identify distinct mechanisms specific to the systemic logic of capitalism that tie together gender oppression and environmental destruction. In other words, Marxist ecofeminism not only repudiates gender essentialism by insisting that the connection between gender oppression and environmental devastation is historically and culturally specific, but through its critical analysis of capitalism, it is capable of providing a rigorous argument for why this connection is nevertheless structural and not merely historically contingent or accidental. The feminization of nature and the naturalization of women do not function merely as ideological justifications for an abstract and general logic of domination, but concretely structure the capitalist society through gendered social and economic practices and divisions of labor. The systemic character of the connection between gender oppression and environmental devastation becomes discernible once we recognize the indispensable function that the naturalization of women's reproductive labor plays in contemporary capitalism.
Marxist Ecofeminism
The majority of the Marxist‐feminist theorists writing in the 1970s and 1980s on women's reproductive and caring work theorized it as a form of labor and appropriated the Marxist framework intent on exposing the mechanisms of exploitation. The domestic labor debates, for example, were essentially concerned with the question of whether women's domestic or reproductive labor was productive work and produced surplus value (see, for example, Reference Benston, Hennessy and IngrahamBenston 1997; Reference FedericiFederici 2012; Reference VogelVogel 2013). A distinct strand in this scholarship, however, focused on the idea of primitive accumulation instead. The idea of primitive accumulation lent itself more readily to ecofeminist theorizing because it was not concerned with the productivity of human labor, but focused instead on its necessary preconditions. It was able to bring into Marxist‐feminist analyses activities and resources that were productive of important use‐values, but not exchange value, and were therefore structurally excluded from commodity markets.
Primitive accumulation refers to the insight that capitalist accumulation has never managed to operate with just the mechanisms of the exploitation of labor power and the appropriation of surplus value. It has always relied heavily on outright plunder and theft. As Marx famously formulates the idea in the first volume of Capital, capital comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Reference MarxMarx 1976, 435). Primitive accumulation is an inherently violent process of expropriation: extracting resources and appropriating them for free or without adequate compensation. Examples include the enclosure of the commons, forced migration, and the slave trade. The domination of nature and the extraction of natural resources can be viewed as another example of primitive accumulation: naturally produced use‐values are plundered for productive consumption as raw materials and treated as commodities in the capitalist circuits of valorization. Colonialism historically functioned as an effective political strategy for this kind of expropriation: resources such as gold, ivory, and rubber were extracted from the global south in order to enrich the global north.
There is an ongoing debate on whether primitive accumulation was a historical process that preceded the establishment of properly capitalist forms of production, or whether it is best understood as an ongoing process. Marx describes it as a historical process of wealth transfer from capitalism's periphery to the center that enabled the emergence of capitalist economies in Europe, but many contemporary Marxist thinkers emphasize its continuous character and its necessary, structural links with capitalism.Footnote 4 The idea of “ongoing primitive accumulation” is central for Marxist‐feminist theorists such as Maria Mies, who argues in her seminal work that both nature and women's reproductive labor are expropriated as a “free resource” under capitalism (Reference MiesMies 1986/1998). Mies forges a historical and structural link among the birth of capitalism, colonization, the subordination of nature through industrialization, and the simultaneous destruction of women's autonomy over their bodies that characterized the witch‐hunts in Europe. Colonies, nature, and women were thus dominated, controlled, and violently expropriated by white capitalist men in a structurally similar way and as part of the same historical process driven by the goal of capitalist accumulation.Footnote 5
The violent subordination of women under men and the process of capital accumulation was first acted out on a mass scale during the witch‐hunts in Europe. But ever since, it has constituted the infrastructure upon which so‐called capitalist production relations could be established, namely the contractual relationship between the owners of labor power and the owners of the means of production. Without this infrastructure of nonfree, coerced female or colonial labor in the broadest sense, the noncoerced, contractual labor relations of free proletarians would not be possible. Women and colonial peoples were defined as property, as nature, not as free subjects who could enter a contract. Both had to be subordinated by force and direct violence. (Reference MiesMies 1986/1998, 170)
Mies uses the metaphor of an iceberg to illustrate the way that capitalist exploitation of wage‐labor relies on violent processes of expropriation: capitalism is an iceberg economy where capital and waged labor form the visible economy counted in GDP and where women's reproductive work, work in the colonies, and nature's production are externalized from the official economy and form the large underwater part (xi). Ideologically, the essential processes of externalization were justified by the “naturalization” of women and the colonies: they were defined as uncontrolled, dangerous, savage nature to be subdued by force (90). “In the course of the last four or five centuries, women, nature, and colonies were externalized, declared to be outside of civilized society, pushed down, and thus made invisible as the under‐water part of an iceberg is invisible, yet constitute the base of the whole” (77). The rationale for this process of externalization was simple: it allowed capitalists to forego costs that they otherwise would have had to cover. When the labor of women and colonial subjects was considered a natural resource, it was freely available like air and water (110).
According to Mies, the same process of expropriation that characterized early capitalism is still ongoing because it is a structural and necessary aspect of capitalism. The prevalence of both direct and structural violence against women, particularly in the global south, should be understood against the logic of ongoing primitive accumulation, which constitutes the precondition for capitalist exploitation. Mies's examples range from such overt instances as slavery and sex trafficking to more complex phenomena such as mail‐order brides, sweatshop labor, and sex tourism.
Nancy Fraser has put forward a similar argument recently. She too emphasizes the necessary and complementary processes of capitalist expropriation, which do not operate through the contractual relationship through which capital purchases labor power in exchange for wages. Rather, expropriation works by confiscating capacities and resources and conscripting them into capital's value circuits. “The confiscation may be blatant and violent, as in New World slavery—or it may be veiled by a cloak of commerce, as in the predatory loans and debt foreclosures of the present era…. The confiscated assets may be labor, land, animals, tools, mineral or energy deposits—but also human beings, their sexual and reproductive capacities, their children and bodily organs” (Reference FraserFraser 2016, 166). Hence, although some subjects have access to labor markets—possess the right to sell their labor and have the ability to compete within markets—others are simply expropriated of their bodies, land, and even life, and treated as disposable. Intersecting with gender, racialization has functioned and continues to function as the key instrument for drawing the boundary between these two groups.Footnote 6
To sum up this section, the Marxist‐feminist argument contends that, in addition to the appropriation of surplus value produced by wage‐labor, capitalism relies on the ongoing and violent expropriation of women, indigenous peoples, nonhuman animals, and the biosphere. The expropriation of women's reproductive labor is therefore structurally analogous to and historically contemporaneous with the extraction of natural resources. At various points in history and to varying degrees today, women have been violently forced to give up autonomy over their bodies and reproductive capacities, and these capacities and the labor connected with them have been extracted from them for free and put to the service of capital accumulation. This process is masked and legitimized by an essentially ideological process that “naturalizes” women—understands them as being less civilized, less rational, and closer to nature.
The theoretical or systemic grounds for linking the oppression of women to ecological devastation are not primarily ideological, however, but functional. Both “women” and “nature” have a similar, indispensable function in the mechanism of expropriation: they occupy analogous positions in the logic of capitalist accumulation in which the mechanisms of exploitation are dependent on the invisible base of expropriation. In other words, women and the colonies are not only conceived of as “nature,” they are expropriated as “nature.”
The Capitalization of Natures
Marxist‐feminist thinkers such as Mies provide a powerful account of the extent of capitalist expropriation by forging a systemic link among capitalism, gender oppression, and ecological devastation. Such an account makes it possible to draw together witch‐hunts, colonialism, open‐pit mines, and sex tourism under the same systemic logic, but the drawback is that we end up with very abstract theorizing about an extremely broad and heterogeneous set of phenomena—geographically, culturally, historically, and theoretically. I contend that this framework therefore requires some revision and updating to make it more precise.
In addition to identifying and analyzing capitalism's drive to expropriate, cut costs, and “free‐ride,” discussed so far, in my view it is necessary also to identify at least two other inherent tendencies that characterize the ways in which capitalism today absorbs both nature and women's reproductive labor into its value circuits: the commodification of nature as nature and the real subsumption of nature. At times these mechanisms strengthen and reinforce each other, but at times they work at cross‐purposes.
Identifying these additional mechanisms should be seen as a response to the shifts that have taken place in capitalism in recent decades. As many theorists argue, capitalism today is more fluid and flexible than the Eurocentric capitalism that led to the colonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Reference Nanda, Hennessy and IngrahamNanda 1997, 366). I want to underscore two developments in particular: the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic paradigm and the spectacular development of biotechnology and its extensive commercialization.
The Commodification of Nature as Nature
According to eco‐Marxist thinkers such as Mies, the key problem with capitalism's expropriation of nature (including women's reproductive capacities) is free‐riding: its failure to pay its bills. Nature is externalized as a costless resource that is implicitly assumed to be infinite and can therefore be expropriated without compensation. As Jason Moore writes, the “free gifts” of nature are not “low‐hanging fruit” that can simply be picked, however. The idea of primitive accumulation effectively conveys how the “cheap natures” are in fact produced: they are expropriated through violent and destructive processes such as slavery or open‐pit mines (Reference MooreMoore 2015, 64).
However, a particularly significant trend characterizing contemporary neoliberal capitalism is the opposite tendency: the attempt to internalize more and more activities and assets into capitalist markets. According to neoliberal economic theory, marketization is a particularly effective means of speeding up economic growth given that GDP is measured in terms of market transactions. Hence, although we can certainly still identify significant processes of externalization operating today—the polluting of the atmosphere with excessive greenhouse gases, for example—we also have to identify mechanisms that seek to internalize the environment more fully into capitalist markets. Whereas in the early phases of capitalism, “virgin territories” still existed for venture capitalists to discover and expropriate, such outsides are hard to find today. Venture capitalism has been forced to take new, imaginative forms.
Neil Smith has put forward the powerful argument that we are currently living through a period in which our socioeconomic relationship with nature has been dramatically transformed: nature has become capitalized to an unprecedented extent. Capitalist nature has always been commodified in the sense that naturally provided use‐values have been plundered for productive consumption. However, today a whole new range of “ecological commodities” has been produced. Smith writes: “Whereas the traditional commodification of nature generally involved harvesting use values as raw materials for capitalist production—wood for tables, oil for energy, iron ore for steel, various corns for bread—this new generation of commodities is different” (Reference SmithSmith 2007, 17). The new ecological commodities, such as carbon or pollution credits, paradoxically commodify nature as nature, as something that is produced as external to capitalist expropriation, but are then internalized into the capitalist economy by giving them exchange value. The value of the commodity produced—for example, an area of rainforest that offsets a certain amount of carbon produced by air travel—rests precisely on the fact that it cannot be productively consumed. “Landowners possessing tracts of forest land (generally in poorer tropical countries) are paid not to cut their forests, while major polluters in more industrial parts of the world can purchase these credits as a means to allow them to continue to pollute” (19).
Hence, we can identify a twin movement: capital externalizes costs—for example, by emitting pollution—which provides opportunities for capital accumulation through mechanisms of internalization by other firms (or sometimes even the same firms) in the form of pollution trading, for example. Capitalism's appropriation of the environment thus uses mechanisms of both internalization and externalization relatively flexibly and depending on the social and political context in order to maximize profits and to fuel economic growth. Neither set of mechanisms is unproblematic from an ecological perspective. Capitalism's free‐riding on nature is obviously problematic, but the attempt to protect the environment by turning it into an internal part of capitalist markets has serious problems too.
First, from the perspective of economics, is difficult to fully internalize the externalities produced by the environment within the self‐regulating market system. The environment is not produced like other commodities; instead it is a complex, integrated whole, which ultimately includes the whole biosphere. As John Bellamy Foster explains, in order to internalize the environment within the market system, complex ecosystems have to be first broken up into distinct goods and services, such as air quality, a specific species of plant or animal, or the maintenance of global temperature, for example. These specific parts are then imputed prices through the construction of supply and demand curves. The process of pricing is also fraught with difficulty, however. In hedonic pricing, consumer preferences are established through the demand for goods and services that are closely associated with a given environmental product. In the contingent valuation method, hypothetical markets are constructed and consumers are asked to indicate their preferences through surveys. Using these survey responses, economists then aggregate the results across the entire population in order to construct demand curves for the hypothetical environmental commodities. Finally, market mechanisms and policy instruments are created in order to either change prices in existing markets or to create new markets. Due to the difficulties in all these stages, markets in environmental protection have not functioned very well, even in their own terms, as markets (Reference FosterFoster 2002, 27–28).Footnote 7
From a philosophical perspective, the problems with the mechanisms of internalization are perhaps even more serious. As the philosopher Michael Sandel, for example, argues, markets do more than allocate goods and services; they also importantly express and promote meanings, values, and attitudes toward the goods and services that are exchanged. Through mechanisms of internalization, the environment becomes a set of distinct, market‐based utilities, the value of which is determined by the egoistic consumer preferences of human individuals. Hence, the philosophical problem is not just that it is technically difficult to establish correct prices through survey methods, for example, and consequently to protect aspects of the environment that have not been assigned proper economic value. The problem is more fundamentally that such methods cannot compute intrinsic values (Reference SandelSandel 2012).
I will give an example from my native country, Finland. The current government intends to meet the EU's energy and climate targets with significant investments in bioenergy. Critics of this strategy have pointed out that because it relies on extensive logging it will in fact end up making climate change worse by diminishing the capacity of the existing forests to act as carbon sinks. In the ensuing debate, a recurring argument in favor of the government's strategy has been that it is possible to increase logging without diminishing carbon sinks by cutting old‐growth forests and then replacing them with younger, faster‐growing forests, which are managed through intensive cultivation systems and which will function more effectively as carbon sinks. Irrespective of whether this claim is true or not, what the example should make clear is that in such a framework, the fact that forests are old and ecologically diverse has no value. Their destruction is not caused by their exclusion from the market mechanisms intended to protect the environment, but rather by their inclusion in them.Footnote 8
When we recognize that the environment and women's reproductive labor have an analogous position in the logic of capitalist accumulation, we can identify a parallel shift in neoliberal capitalism's relationship to women's reproductive labor. It corresponds to the recent attempts to commodify the private realm and to turn women into wage‐laborers. The rapid neoliberalization of our economies in recent decades has resulted in significant changes in women's traditional role as care providers in the home. We have seen the increasing transformation of the affective and care activities that women used to perform at home into paid services, whether in childcare, domestic help, or health services. In other words, today the reproductive labor of women is not so much externalized from the commodity markets into the private realm and then expropriated for free; it is increasingly internalized into the capitalist markets and exploited as productive labor. This has resulted in new forms of gender oppression, as it is often poor, immigrant women from ethnic minorities who now end up providing the commodified care services. The so‐called “global care chains” and the growth in the trafficking of women have become some of the gendered effects of this development (see, for example, Reference Hochschild, Hutton and GiddensHochschild 2000).
The emergence of this feminized service economy is also inherently connected to the current “crisis of care”: the lack of sufficient numbers of qualified care‐workers who actually care. As feminist economists in particular have pointed out, similar to the case of the environment, care work creates important positive externalities that cannot be fully captured in market transactions. It therefore exposes some of the limits of the commodification of care work from an economic perspective. As economists such as Nancy Folbre and Julie A. Nelson, for example, explain, many people share in the benefit when children are brought up to be responsible, skilled, and loving adults. Employers benefit from skilled and cooperative workers, the elderly benefit if a skilled younger generation of workers generates high taxes, and so on (Reference Folbre and NelsonFolbre and Nelson 2000). The problem is that these gains cannot be captured fully by those who created them. Parents, for example, cannot demand a fee from the employers who hire their adult children. This means that, similar to other externalities, those created by care produce an incentive to free‐ride, to let others pay the costs. Folbre and Nelson conclude that markets alone cannot solve the current crisis of care: “in the absence of collective coordination less than optimal amounts of care will be provided, because the care providers are not fully compensated for the social value of their services…. There are limits to the substitutability between family and market provision, limits that our society needs to discuss, define and enforce” (Reference Folbre and NelsonFolbre and Nelson 2000, 137).
In sum, we can identify two opposing ways to connect capitalist economic logic to the gender division of labor—capitalism wants women both to work and to stay at home—and we can find examples of both incentives today. Capitalism externalizes the costs of reproductive labor by expecting women to take care of their homes for free, as well as internalizing them by creating new markets for care work. Again, similar to the environment, neither option is unproblematic. When reproductive work is not commodified, we have the free‐riding problem; when it is turned into paid services, we face the crisis of care.Footnote 9 As I will contend in the conclusion, this suggests that merely attacking neoliberalism in favor of more social‐democratic forms of capitalism is not going to solve the problems of gender oppression or environmental devastation in capitalism. The political and economic transformations required have to be more radical and to contest the core logic of capitalism itself.
The Real Subsumption of Nature
In addition to the mechanisms of internalization prominent in neoliberal capitalism, I contend that the mechanisms of expropriation—the free‐riding on nature—have to be complemented with another distinct set of mechanisms for the capitalization of nature. These mechanisms aim to manipulate and intensify biological productivity by rendering (biologically based) natural assets more profitable or malleable for commercial exploitation. Such mechanisms are theorized in an illuminating way as the real subsumption of nature in an influential article by William Boyd, Scott Prudham, and Rachel Schurman (Reference Boyd, Prudham and Schurman2001). Inspired by Marx's notions of formal and real subsumption of labor, Boyd and his colleagues formulate the concepts formal and real subsumption of nature in order to distinguish between two different ways in which capitalism appropriates nature.Footnote 10
The formal subsumption of nature corresponds roughly to the mechanisms of expropriation or primitive accumulation discussed above in connection with Mies's work. Under the formal subsumption of nature, capitalist enterprises attempt to gain access to or control over natural resources, but they are “unable to control, intensify, manipulate, or otherwise ‘improve’ upon nature to suit their purposes” (Reference Boyd, Prudham and SchurmanBoyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 562). Capital operates with a logic of extraction and confronts the natural world as a given set of biophysical processes and material characteristics. Despite its obvious benefits, such an approach generally means obstacles to accumulation, because companies must adjust their production strategies to address the exigencies of nature. The dependence on natural production schedules, for example, can pose serious challenges to the continuous deployment of labor and machinery. This is why developing mechanisms for the real subsumption of nature becomes essential.
The real subsumption of nature refers to strategies by which capital seeks to intentionally alter biophysical processes in order to overcome obstacles in production, gain competitive advantage, and increase profitability. The logic of extraction is replaced with a logic that seeks to enhance biological productivity itself. “The desired result… is higher yields, shorter turnover times, improved disease resistance, etc. Nature, in short, is (re)made to work harder, faster, and better” (Reference Boyd, Prudham and SchurmanBoyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 564).
A helpful illustration of the difference between formal and real subsumption of nature can be found again in the forestry industry. Whereas early capitalism was characterized by the extensive logging of old‐growth forests and the ensuing deforestation, as the example of Finland shows, today firms and state agencies aim to intervene in the biological basis of forest growth. “Instead of confronting trees as ‘ready‐made’ objects, the logic of plantation forestry involves ongoing intervention in and alteration of tree growth processes” (Reference Boyd, Prudham and SchurmanBoyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 566). The forestry industry involves no longer just felling trees and extracting the timber, but the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, intensive nursery operations for seedling cultivation, hand and mechanical planting of trees, as well as attempts to directly manipulate genetic material (566).
Although the real subsumption of nature by capital is nothing new, the rapid development of biotechnology has provided unparalleled means for its expansion and intensification. In today's biocapitalism, biotechnology is understood to be the key for solving the challenges obstructing capitalist accumulation, such as climate change, the end of cheap energy supplies, and an aging population. Whereas in the case of formal subsumption, profitability could be enhanced simply by establishing property rights over natural resources, the real subsumption of nature necessitates the privatization and commodification of biotechnological knowledge rather than of nature itself (Reference Boyd, Prudham and SchurmanBoyd, Prudham, and Schurman 2001, 564). Complex bioscientific knowledge and technological expertise is required today for the intensification of natural resource productivity.Footnote 11
If we again turn to investigate the parallel developments in the capitalization of women's reproductive labor, what does the real subsumption of nature signify there? I want to suggest that the emergence of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) has transformed the opportunities for the exploitation of women's reproductive labor due to the ability of these technologies to alter radically the biological process of human reproduction. Women's biologically reproductive labor has of course never taken place completely outside of capitalist circuits of valorization. The practice of slave‐breeding, for example, was employed explicitly as a means of expanding the slave‐owners' wealth and labor force (see, for example, Reference DavisDavis 1972). However, today with ARTs, the biophysical processes of human reproduction can be altered in ways that have made possible the creation of a new kind of global fertility market. It is difficult to provide accurate accounts of its size, but even by careful estimates it is significant. Some estimates put the size of the global market for transnational surrogacy alone at six billion dollars annually worldwide (Smerdon 2008, quoted in Reference Mohapatra, DasGupta and Das DasGuptaMohapatra 2014, 147).
ARTs have radically altered the process of human reproduction by completely disengaging reproduction from sex and genetic motherhood from pregnancy. Heterosexual acts of penetration are no longer necessary for biological reproduction because in‐vitro fertilization (IVF) and intra‐uterine insemination (IUI) can lead to conception. The commercialization of these technologies means that if the intended parents are unable to conceive on their own, they can purchase sperm and eggs through intermediaries who control market access to these gametes. Either the intended mother's or donor eggs are fertilized with either the intended father's sperm or donor sperm. If the genetic mother is unable to carry a fetus to full term, it is possible to implant the embryo into the womb of a surrogate mother who will then gestate the fetus to full term. This process is again biotechnologically mediated and increasingly organized through market intermediaries. The commercial clinics will screen and hire the surrogates and prepare their uterine lining for the embryo transfer. This preparation involves lengthy medical procedures and complex drug regimes.Footnote 12
The bodies and reproductive capacities of the women acting as surrogates are thus capitalistically appropriated, but not as external natural resources. Rather, gestational surrogacy can be viewed analogously to the real subsumption of nature by capital: capital is able to take hold of and transform biological reproduction and use it as a source for the creation of new markets and of new forms of capital accumulation. The bodies of the surrogates are effectively produced as exploitable nature and turned into integral components in a sophisticated biotechnological process as well as in the capitalist circuits of valorization. Unlike the reproductive labor of most women, the surrogates' reproductive labor is completely capitalized.
Feminist Ecopolitics against Capitalism
I contend that feminism can develop its critical perspective today only in the context of global capitalism. The new contours of the relationship between life and politics are intimately tied to the expansion of capitalist accumulation: it is impossible to understand the root causes of the environmental crisis today without a critical analysis of global capitalism, just as it is impossible to understand the rapid development of life sciences and their application in biotechnologies outside the framework of biocapitalism. Hence, the feminist theorizing that I am advocating here takes the form of a critique of capitalism. It is essential for feminist theory to recognize that there are imperatives that issue from the systemic features of capitalism—its inherent economic logic or laws of motion. At the macro‐economic level, they importantly include the overriding goal of capitalist accumulation or the imperative of economic growth, and on the micro‐economic level, the imperative of individual enterprises to compete against one another and to maximize their profits in order to survive in this competition. These goals then further explain the imperatives of cheapening labor and expanding markets, the push for constant improvements in the productivity of labor, the innovations in product design, and so on.
Although most theorists of capitalism would agree that these imperatives can be refashioned and take radically different forms depending on the historical, political, and societal context in which they are embedded, they are nevertheless understood as placing distinct constraints on the economic and political activity in societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. That is why they have significant explanatory power. Understanding them and their compelling character provides feminist theory with a robust explanatory framework for making sense of a number of political issues, such as the global reproductive market, for example. Surrogacy clinics are not booming in India because of the sunny weather there.
Feminist theory cannot operate with static or totalizing notions of capitalism, however. The analysis of capitalism has to be complex enough to be able to distinguish among different, sometimes contradictory mechanisms that are nevertheless compatible with the underlying logic of capitalist accumulation. By distinguishing between the mechanism of externalization and internalization as well as formal and real subsumption of nature, my aim is to provide a theoretically more nuanced account on the functional analogues between capitalism's appropriation of women's reproductive labor and the productions of nature. My main motive here is essentially political, not theoretical, however. Recognizing the dynamic and contradictory nature of capitalism is politically important because it implies that although some of these mechanisms might appear, in the short term, to be undeniably good for women, the environment, and developing countries, this does not invalidate the fundamental importance of a feminist critique of capitalism.
It should also be evident now why a political alliance between feminism and environmentalism is not just an instance of affinity politics in which separate political goals might, on occasion, be shared. Rather, my key claim is that feminists and environmentalists share a common political goal in their resistance against capitalism. First, they both share the urgent project of questioning how the line between the processes of market internalization and externalization that I have described above is politically negotiated. As the example of surrogacy, for example, makes clear, a key political issue today is whether different processes of biological life or “nature” are brought within the domain of the markets or whether their appropriate place is considered to be outside of that domain. This has direct consequences for pressing political questions concerning equal access and democratic political control over such processes, but it is also fundamental for the assignment of their moral meaning and value. Just because something can be bio‐technically produced, for example, does not mean that it should be sold. Negotiating the limits of commodification is essentially a political project that requires placing limits on the markets on ethical and philosophical grounds.
Second, the real subsumption of nature introduces thorny political questions about risks, rights, and responsibilities. The problem embedded in the real subsumption of nature, including the application of the new biotechnologies, is that such technologies contain unprecedented risks as well as unpredictable environmental and medical outcomes. These risks may include the potential escape and proliferation of novel life forms such as super weeds or virulent strains of viruses and bacteria, or they may materialize as the medical complications resulting from the hyperstimulation of ovaries with hormone shots or the mandatory caesarean delivery of babies. Such serious, life‐threatening risks must inevitably raise vexing political questions over who should shoulder these risks and provide compensation when things go wrong. Again, this issue implies a pressing need for political struggles that bring together feminism and environmentalism against biocapitalism.
Third, these two issues—the limits of commodification and the risks in the biophysical manipulation of nature—must open into a still broader and deeper political question. If my analysis is correct, then both feminism and environmentalism should have an interest in challenging the whole economic system that is incapable of recognizing the value of “externalities.” Despite the important development of feminist and environmental economics, these fields of inquiry make apparent their own limits: the environment and women's reproductive labor have intrinsic value that cannot be fully monetized and internalized into the circuits of a capitalist market economy. This means that they continue to be undervalued and depredated in the capitalist system of commodity exchange. The absurdity of trying to monetize the unmeasurable becomes obvious once we ask ourselves questions such as what is the economic value of the planet or what would you be prepared to pay for the life of your child. Feminist ecopolitics must thus begin from the recognition that we need an economic system in which values other than profit, consumer preferences, and economic growth have a chance of coming to the fore.
To sum up, in the twenty‐first century, feminists no longer have the option of sticking to forms of environmental politics that attempt merely to preserve an external nature somewhere outside capitalist markets. Rather, the goal has to be more radical: they must challenge the capitalist system itself and the multiple mechanisms through which it attempts to absorb life in its value circuits. Traditional socialist demands for the regulation of free markets and for a fairer redistribution of resources will have to be crucial components of the feminist ecopolitics I am envisaging here, but it nevertheless seems clear that such a political project cannot be subsumed into traditional socialist class struggle. An inclusive movement for feminist ecopolitics cannot be built on the ideology of work, economic emancipation, class‐struggle, or productivism. The reason for calling capitalism into question today is no longer merely our exploitative social and economic relationships to other human beings, but the immeasurable devastation we are causing to the nonhuman world.
