Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism

Bear, Ho, Tsing, Yanagisako 2015

1. What is Gens?
➢ Gens: A collective with feminist ancestry for the study of capitalist inequality.
➢ Refers to roman conception of patriarchal family unit. Engels drew on Morgan to
argue it ended matriarchal systems of community. Ironic
➢ Gens is helpful, shows how social forms appropriate human and non-human life
forces. Reflection on Gens shows how depictions of life forces → social inequality
➢ The contradiction between male authority and female kinship is a microcosm of the
capture and generativity in social power
➢ Gens captures our interest in generative powers of capitalism and how these
powers create inequality
2. Why a feminist manifesto?
➢ Feminist approach: economic domain is bounded and representations of it as such
should be challenged.
➢ More of a focus on how people constitute diverse livelihoods (and from which
capitalist inequalities are captured and generated) as they seek to realize the
potentialities of resources, money, labor, and investment.
3. The economy is not a logic, nor is capitalism its vehicle
➢ The economic is repeatedly and relentlessly imagined as a singular logic that is
derived from a premade domain and expresses itself in historical and cultural
realities
➢ Gibson-Graham = capitalocentrism, assuming economy is bounded, an already
made world
➢ Capitalism is not a priori with its own structure, logic and trajectory but divergent
life projects are what actually form capitalist relations
➢ Heterogeneity + difference, pursuits of becoming certain kinds of
people/communities -----> unstable, contingent networks of capitalism that
surround us
➢ Influence and power of capital is NOT taken for granted. Rather, Bear et al.
emphasized structure is not pre-formed but made from aligning multiple projects in
which one end (of many) is accumulating and distributing capital
4. Class is generated within historically shifting dynamic of gender, race,
sexuality and kinship
➢ Positing “class” as an ideal-type outside such relations obfuscates the analysis,
once again confusing capitalism with some imagined, overlaying economic logic.
➢ How do accumulation processes in which people, labor, sentiments, plants, animals
and life-ways are converted into resources produce inequality? Through
formalisation such as money, contracts, financial models but also through relations
like marriage, gifts, inheritance, parenthood.
➢ Historical encounters make structures rather than the other way around.
5. Conversion devices do not produce reality
➢ formal models emerge from diverse lifeworlds and are not simply manifestations of
singular core logics which make capitalism appear to be a consistent force
➢ Personhood, collectivity and sociality always accompany formal processes. They
should not be erased and appear abstracted through formal models being made to
look “global”.
➢ Conversion devices mediate, but do not determine sociality or human/non-human
relations.
6. Financialisation is a powerful yet heterogeneous and contingent process of
capture and conversion
➢ Financialisation = ‘scaling up and growing influence of finance, and specifically the
increased linking, translation, and interactions between a financial mode of
apprehending the world and other social domains’
➢ Generating capitalism approach tackles both how institutions like education,
government, natural resources become increasingly dependent on finance but also
that processes of financialisation are uneven, specific and contingent.
➢ Financialization is the explicit application of particular financial market values to
new domains, fracturing illusions that capitalism is separate from multiple,
intersecting sites of production, such as the household, corporations, or education.
7. Immaterial and affective labor are old and new
➢ Immaterial labors are services industries in which no tangible products are made eg
healthcare/education. International economy - immaterial labors are increasingly
crucial and more valued, hegemonic
➢ Feminist critiques of marxist labour theories: women’s domestic social work is as
socially productive as industrial labour. However this critique separates immaterial
and industrial labour as one being ‘imbued with affect’ and the latter being devoid,
therefore attributing inherent different creative energies and communicative labour
➢ It should be recognised that distinguishing between ‘instrumental action of
economic product’ and ‘communicative action of human relation’(Hardt and Negri
2000) obscures communicative dimension of all human action including capitalist
production and distribution.
8. The time-spaces of capitalism are heterogenous
➢ First neoliberal capitalism theories - global workplaces compress and accelerate
space and time because of new forms of production and technology
➢ Other authors = all social experience is suspended in shallow present without near
and far future
➢ Ethnographies of workplaces show differently. ‘There is no singular or uniform social
timespace in contemporary capitalism. Instead there are complex timescapes in
which we attempt (through the labor in and of time) to coordinate human and non-
human activities’ thrift and may 2001 Bear 2014
➢ We have yet to trace how ‘polychronies of finance capital, technological
instruments, predictive devices, representations of time, social disciplines, non-
 human resources, and social reproduction are mediated within workplaces and
communities.’
➢ We need to do this otherwise we can't explore e two key elements of contemporary
economic life: the increasing uncertainty of the process of capital accumulation;
and the centrality of the rhythms of credit and deficit to productivity
➢ The time-space contradictions of capitalism are multiple and mediated through the
human labor in/of time.