The Disappearing Children

As Capitalism Fails Another Threat to Women Looms

In her 2022 book, Cannibal Capitalism, political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that Marx was wrong to regard capitalism as merely an economic system. It is, she writes, an institutionalized society-wide System.

The economic aspect is just the front face of it – in the background lie the four “inputs” to the economic system. These are the social/reproductive, the ecological, the political, and the imperialist core/subjugated outlier paradigm. All of these “inputs” are actually zones which exist within any civilization. All intersect with the economic front face, but within capitalism, all are unacknowledged and disavowed – even as they are cannibalized by the capitalists of the economic zone. Hence they exist in tension with economics, predictably and regularly needing to be realigned to keep the whole civilization running.

She points out that the covid pandemic , just fading as the book was published, had “revealed capitalism’s structural contradictions for all to see: capital’s inherent drive to cannibalize nature, up to the very brink of planetary conflagration; to divert our capacities away from the truly essential work of social reproduction; to eviscerate public power to the point where it cannot solve the problems the system generates; to feed off the ever-decreasing wealth and health of racialized people; to not only exploit but also expropriate the working class. We could not ask for a better lesson in social theory.”

In the book Fraser argues that we have reached another in a long series of crises brought about by this cannibalism, and that this time the crisis is epochal and threatens all civilization.

She doesn’t have a solution, only the belief that the capitalism system that prioritizes economics must be replaced. I argued this myself in my last article and suggested that it can only be replaced by re-placing women at the centre. Another way to put that is to use Fraser’s term, and advocate that the social/reproductive zone of human society, which Fraser notes is largely occupied and run by women, be prioritized.

The capitalist system has always refused to require the financial/economic zone of society to pay for its maintenance – it refuses to pay for the maintenance of people as people, as citizens, as workers or as consumers. And that is largely because capitalism has relegated the social/reproductive to a side ally, away from the thoroughfare where males still dominate, the traffic lanes where money circulates. The public world and the private world, men have decreed. One belongs to women and should best be seen and not heard, and the other, the important one, belongs to men.

In a similar way the world’s financiers choose to regard nature from a distance, as a site where the natural resources necessary for profit-making production can be dug up or harvested (preferably for free), and another site where the waste resulting from that production can be dumped (again for free).

No society can prioritize economic interest – still largely coded masculine -- at the expense of the interests of the other zones. Social constructions, whether tribes or industrial nation states, exist to support reproduction, the continuance of the species, and that means that the needs of the social reproductive zone – even though it’s still largely coded feminine -- must occupy the dominant position.

Capitalism organizes society around the well-being of males. It makes no sense. Male-dominated systems, patriarchies, fail because they turn the tables on the natural order.

The capitalist patriarchy is failing so catastrophically now because the financial zone has all but consumed the ecological zone, the social zone and the political zone. Ecologically we are on the verge of making large portions of the planet uninhabitable; socially we are in all out wars of men against women, religion against religion, ethnicity against ethnicity, value against value; politically the elite profiteers of the world claim their “stakeholders” can replace voters and hold elected politicians in their pockets.

Now some prominent men are growing alarmed over falling birth rates. Why? Because the economic zone requires growth, which requires both workers and consumers be constantly replenished. Yet the planet’s health would benefit from a reduction in the human population. It looks like we can choose money or a habitable world. Which will it be?

Evolutionary psychologists and fertility experts are hard at work trying to figure out why birthrates are falling. This means they have to address the question of why women aren’t having children. Norwegian author Mads Larsen, who specializes in human mating ideologies, recently spoke to podcaster Chris Williamson about it.

Larsen identifies two “bottlenecks” to reproduction: finding suitable partners and deciding to have children in environments where women’s equality is a high priority. (Reproduction is higher in countries where women are not regarded as equal to men). Where women are empowered and can choose their own partners, they are choosey enough to pick high quality men who share their values, including monogamy. In Norway, women consistently complain that men are not good enough to trade in the perfectly happy lives they can have as single women.

Yet Larsen dismisses the reasons Norwegian women give for rejecting men as “minutiae” as well as the idea that maybe the solution requires men to get better. It is just as unfair to tell men as a group to improve themselves as to tell an entire ethnic group to get better he says. After enumerating all the ways that women are supported in Norway, he concludes that merely giving women more money to have children doesn’t work. It’s an intractable problem that the freer and more empowered women are, the less they want to pair up with men. Even more puzzling to him is the fact that surveys show women typically aren’t concerned about the falling birth rates.

(Evolutionary psychologists might want to consider that the deepest feminine instinct might be, not kindness, but the refusal to procreate when the environment seems toxic to the continuance of life.)

What’s missing from the conversation (aside from a woman), what neither man brings up, is the single most important thing that has debased men as a group – inexhaustible access to violent woman-hating pornography. This is what has turned up the heat in the war between men and women. It is making life increasingly unpleasant for women who face increasing rates of femicide and violence. It has led to men even usurping womanhood in a fetishistic ploy to gain entrance to all women’s private spaces, to colonize the social/reproductive sphere in such a way as to destroy it. And to claim that women’s increased presence and power in the economic zone justifies it.

We need only look at South Korea’s 4B movement for a vivid example of women shouting NO to marriage, dating, sex and childbirth. Sakshi Deshmukh reports in a Harpers Bazaar India article that in South Korea “digital sex crimes were on the rise, with hidden cameras and AI-generated deepfake pornography disproportionately targeting young women.” It was a femicide “in which a man killed a woman in the restroom of a Seoul karaoke bar and later testified he did it because she had ignored him all his life” that kicked off the movement, according to DW.com. Larsen predicts that in South Korea, in three generations, only four people will be alive where there are currently 100.

Fraser distinguishes between exploitation and expropriation as she describes the way the financiers of the economic zone use the inputs of the other four zones. To pay workers a wage that can’t sustain them is to exploit them; to forcibly enslave them is to expropriate them. For generations men have exploited women in the social/reproductive zone. As men enter that zone pretending to be women, speaking on behalf of women, dominating discussions and reducing actual women to menstruators and cervix-havers, it should be clear that they have moved beyond exploitation to expropriation.

We should note how elite capitalists are dealing the impending ecological disaster. Having exploited and expropriated nature they are now looking to move people out of the wasteland they have created. Some of the most elite financiers are plotting to move people out of the physical world entirely, to upload human consciousness to the cloud. Others are calculating how to move humanity onto satellites ringing the planet, or onto another planet entirely. These are their visions, no doubt taken from virtual reality games, of how to solve the environmental problem they have created.

If men succeed in expropriating the social/reproductive realm to the point of laying it to waste, how will they deal with women? We’re already seeing what they’re doing. First they’re promoting surrogacy, exploiting women’s desire to be kind to persuade young women to undergo harmful medical procedures to harvest their eggs. They’re paying women in poorer countries to gestate fetuses that are not genetically related to them – to avoid any bonding between surrogate mother and child. They’re conducting laboratory experiments in human cloning, in creating eggs from stem cells, they’re imagining growing babies “ex vivo” (outside the body), they’re giving or selling babies to men, who are praised for “chestfeeding” them.

Some of these experiments exploit women, but others expropriate reproduction, eliminating women entirely. And, although Larsen swears that Norway will never give up its egalitarian mores to force women to reproduce, women know that men still do not accept a woman’s “no.” If their attempts to reproduce without women fail (and heaven help us if they don’t fail) and women refuse to procreate, we can ultimately expect men to enforce their demands for growth.

In South Korea the government has already spent more than 150 billion to persuade Korean women to have children, without acknowledging that money can’t solve the gender war. Korean men are responding as so many men do to women’s complaints— not with self-analysis but with resentment. In fact they are growing so resentful of women they elected a president who promised to eliminate the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Coercive measures have begun.

What if they experimented instead with shutting off all access to porn for, say, ten years as an experiment? Would men become again the kind of people women would be willing to set up house with? Would the social/reproductive zone become a nurturing and safe place for children?

We have to ask what men want most – isolated but unlimited masturbation to porn imagery, or emotional and sexual intimacy with a living, free woman? I have a feeling that our continued existence as a species may depend on how men answer that.

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