People are means of production

Patriarchal control of women’s bodies is frequently explained as an issue of property ownership. Not just the women themselves but also any offspring were considered assets to be disposed of and therefore a source of power. Any attempt by women to limit reproduction was seen as a threat to the potential wealth of the family and society.

Today, there are far easier ways to control people than by reproducing them. Waged labour combined with institutional work slavery such as prison labour, university interns or forced volunteer work for those on social assistance gives the ability to demand labour from others with no social relation to the masters. Very little of the world’s population is now employed in direct service to the very rich in any case. Most are looking for a share of resources themselves and increasingly, posing a threat to the lifestyles of the very rich, particularly now that mass communication and organization enable great crowds in the streets worldwide pointing out their superior numbers. Increasing automation and overpopulation mean industry no longer needs the population growth we are experiencing so both motherhood and children have experienced a sharp devaluation in society. Industry has gone from punishing contraception, abortion and infanticide by death to trying to forcibly sterilize women. Women are caught in a war between those still dictating that women must have children and those dictating that they must not. China forces abortions[cite] while Ireland refuses them[cite]. Choice is lost and children are economic pawns instead of part of a society. At neither side is the support of motherhood or childhood considered at all, only the power to reproduce or not.

Women’s reproduction can be regulated by limiting access to birth control and forbidding its use, as well as making it impossible for women to survive without a family structure which includes heterosexual sex, but this only serves to increase reproduction. A society that wishes to decrease reproduction typically needs to make it disastrous to reproduce, historically by making it impossible to protect yourself while pregnant or to protect small children once they are born. Today, children are killed by states constantly and very publicly and dismissed as simply ‘collateral damage’. A very short time ago, the death of a child was considered by western society to be a non-debatable tragedy, an evil so pure and complete its evil was never questioned. This mindset was first altered by a persistent campaign during the US war against Iraq to depict Iraqi children as bomb carrying subhumans created by their parents only for the purpose of death. ‘They do not value life’, ‘They would rather die than live’, and ‘Iraqi children are not like ours’, became the new truths that western society was convinced to accept.

As always, the minority persecution then spread much more easily to a societal truth. Israeli soldiers are taught to kill anything that moves[cite]. The US military boasts of new guidelines that “opened the aperture” to considering children of any age legitimate targets[cite]. The children lost their humanity in the eyes of society and become objects. This change is probably illustrated nowhere better than on the U.S. police targets depicting “non-traditional threats” including pregnant women and children. Societal dissociation is complete with the police officer who stated he enlarged images of his own children for target practice “so that he would not be caught off guard with such a drastically new experience while on duty.”[cite] If not his own children, what society is it his duty to defend? The message is clear. People are paid to kill people. People are not paid to give birth. It is more socially acceptable to kill people than to give birth to people. Genocides are being fueled the world over on the premise that populations are growing too quickly and women are under particular attack as the source of population growth.

The increasing amount of slave labour involved in producing the labour force is also an effective deterrent to lifegivers and caregivers. Most workers are required for knowledge industries so caregivers are directed by the state to train their children to a far higher level, still with no compensation for their labour and at much greater expense to themselves. Giving birth no longer entitles the parents to any assistance from the people they raise, as those obligations are theoretically taken care of by systems of dissociation such as retirement funds and insurance. The work, risk and financial burden of producing the work force is all on the parents and the benefit is all for corporations.

While a capitalist who invests in anything that produces income is entitled to a return on investment, women who produced the entire work force have received none. In a world where society has been commodified, the return on investment is highly discouraging. Economic freedom is more available now (although unequal) for women but not for children and dependents who are still left unaccounted for by the economic systems imposed on society. In Japan the declining birth rate has reached a crisis point in a state that refuses to ease immigration restrictions. It has been suggested that women should be forced to contribute to society in another way if they refuse to give birth. Since Japanese women already work in the trade economy exactly like men, it would be interesting to see what social contribution would be considered comparable to lifegiving and caregiving, and whether it would receive pay[cite].

Not only is the trade economy structured to make lifegiving and caregiving very costly choices, mothers are depicted as parasites on society and a despised class. The term single mom today is as derogatory as unwed mother was in the past, the morality offended being not in the lack of marriage but in the possible dependency on social support. In the west, women supposedly have lifestyle choices but only if they make the choice to have extremely few or no children and a career or a wealthy partner. A single mother on welfare is treated as the most contemptible creature within the law. Parasites are hated as they weaken the host. The trade economy does not recognize that all men and women parasited off of their mothers in a very physical reality in order to exist. Underlying every patriarchal society and the trade economy is the idea that lifegivers should be grateful to the society for letting them and their offspring live. This is a complete reversal of biological fact.

Who gets to decide when dependency is to be despised? The excuse that infants did not consent to being born so are exempt from judgment is disingenuous as no one chooses to be dependent on society. Dependency is a natural part of the human experience and mothers are not creating dependency, they are relieving society of the vast majority of responsibility for it. Unlike every other dependency, society would not exist without infants. The propaganda depicting mothers as parasites is coming from the true economic parasites, deflecting blame onto their victims. The statement that people did not ask to be born is an attempt to diminish the mother’s contribution, or make it something to condemn in order to deny any reciprocal obligation from society.

The continual humiliation of living in a society which views them as parasites leaves women vulnerable to even more capitalist scams to force more free labour from them[cite]. For women conditioned through generations and written history to believe they are parasites and expect slavery, it is harder to recognize and fight off these predators. Most women with dependents pride themselves in their ability to survive in the system while obeying all the ridiculous rules, and condemn other women who refuse. They have accepted the trade economy’s zero valuation of their labour.

No human achievement would have been possible without the lifegivers and caregivers that raised and enabled those achieving. Mothers receive instant blame for failures of their adult offspring, as seen in the media coverage of tragedies like the Sandy Hook massacre[cite] or the Boston bombing[cite], both in the United States. Even a case that could seemingly not possibly be blamed on a woman, such as the Sandy Hook massacre, apparently can. The U.S. media and president aligned to exclude the killer’s mother from the recognized victims[cite] and media instantly began to question her parenting as a cause of his actions[cite]. Victim blaming is a phenomenon that occurs in all violence directed at a lower class, but only in violence against women can the victim be held to blame for the character of the killers. As soon as a woman is found to blame, this search for root causes stops; the discussion is never continued to find a man causing the supposed misbehaviour of the woman and hold him accountable for her actions. Teachers are also punished for student failure and disrespected like mothers are, more where students are younger and there are more female teachers. Lifegiving and caregiving both carry only the risk of loss of societal approval and no possibility to gain approval, at least for women.

This blame is not a recognition of the greater influence of mothers in caregiving as any credit is far more likely to be assigned to fathers. Gillian Triggs, the Australian justice given the position of president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, was depicted in Australian media as the daughter of a tank commander[cite] as though her father’s experience driving a tank was somehow more relevant to her legal post than her own five decades of legal achievement. Even a completely absent father like former U.S. president Barack Obama’s gets an autobiography entitled Dreams From My Father in which the mother who raised Obama is reduced to “a white woman from Kansas”.[cite]

Women as mothers are also derided as coercion to stop reproduction. The act of giving birth instantly triggers a demotion in status to a level of no sexual attractiveness, intelligence or interest to society except as a consumer of household products. Mothers, like prostitutes before them, are expected to not participate in society. Mothers have their children threatened if they disobey power as Pussy Riot members and many others have discovered[cite]. “You have a four-year-old daughter, and you must have known going into your performance in the church that arrest was a real possibility. Wasn’t that irresponsible toward your child?” Der Speigel scolded[cite] Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, in glaring contrast to their fawning coverage of Julian Assange, also a parent of young children. In today’s society, any reminder of female physical attributes comes with a perception of lesser intelligence. Women are described as a mom as a demeaning dismissive. In the technology fields currently hailed as our future in every aspect of society, mom is a euphemism for imbecile and some self-proclaimed feminists still sneer at other women as breeders. Respect and perception of intelligence decreases for women with the number of children born, while for men more children still adds to the perception of leadership.[cite]

Western media have gone from a frenzy of approbation for the Dionne quintuplets in the 1930’s to death threats for a U.S. mother of octoplets. In 1934, a poor farmer with five children gave birth to quintuplets and then three more children, for a total of thirteen. People all over the world sent assistance to them, to the point that Canada passed the Dionne Quintuplets’ Guardianship Act in 1935 making them state wards and a significant tourist attraction and government income source[cite]. In the United States in 2009, a single mother of six gave birth to octoplets. She received death threats, protests outside her home, and a baby seat thrown through the back window of her minivan[cite]. In an interestingly medieval turn, she also appeared in a strip show labeled “The Final Humiliation” to pay the bills for her children[cite].

Mothers are subjected both to suspicion that they are in some way dependent on society and suspicion that they are in some way not doing all the caregiving work expected of them. Even the Sandy Hook killer’s murdered single mom was subject to instant speculation over whether she earned her own money and how while also being vilified for her adult son’s actions[cite]. People seem terrified that any money or support for lifegiving or caregiving would encourage people to give birth for the wrong reasons. Oddly, this reasoning is not applied to journalism, politics, medicine, killing people or even dissociated caregiving by teachers, social workers or foster parents.

The old patriarchal idea that women were property has combined with the new idea that lifegiving and caregiving are anti-social acts. Industrialized states support rights applied by gender instead of role. Societies that profess to protect women’s rights still treat lifegivers as slaves to society and regulate their behaviour as such. The aggressive master morality considered appropriate for workers in the trade economy is replaced by slave morality demanded of anyone working as lifegivers, caregivers or in service to society. Humility, no expectation of reward, and unrequited respect and devotion to those they serve are demanded with the roles.

Society has never been shy about dictating what type of person should become a mother or the behaviour expected once someone becomes a mother, but these pressures are not shared by the rest of society. While the mother is expected to be an impossible paragon, modern society feels no obligation to provide a safe and welcoming, educational and nurturing environment. A mother that does not love her child is considered an abomination. A society that does not love its children is considered natural and justified. An entirely child free environment is not just possible, it is considered normative and a right, encouraged by segregated public spaces and endless articles asking if children ought to be allowed in social gathering and other public places. A popular theme in parenting blogs for the past several years suggests that caregivers should provide the surrounding society with goodie bags as a preemptive apology for intruding into society. Public spaces regularly ban infants and children. No one can demand a life free of those employed by military or refuse admittance to the elderly. Children and their caregivers are the lowest social class above criminals and they have been outcast, not just from the trade economy but also from the rest of society.

If a caregiver in industrialized states fails to care for a child, if they are addicted, abusive, unwilling or unable, the child is not entitled to just go to a neighbour or family member and expect care. There are dissociated government institutions that will punish caregivers for neglect or abuse and provide food and lodging for children, but there is no society that the child has a right to expect love and caregiving from. If a society refuses to nurture or even accept its young, it is no surprise if the youth grow up to disrespect and even attack the society. From earliest childhood, they are made aware that their ingroup consists of only their family or even only themselves. The group narcissism usually associated with nationalism becomes individual narcissism in a dissociated community.

Caregivers must now attempt to raise contributing members of society while competing with far stronger coercion from media, video games, addiction, mental health issues and a surrounding sociopathic community. Middle aged single mothers or elderly grandmothers are not strong enough to stand up to fully grown adolescents, but they are held solely responsible for the behaviour of their teenage sons and daughters. Not only do they receive no societal support, they are degraded in the eyes of the child. Because lifegiving and caregiving work has no value attached, the old inherent debt of honour to lifegivers, caregivers and community elders has been erased. Children are given allowances instead of chores. Mothers are judged by their capacity to give, love and respect but children and the surrounding community are not. Society has ensured that the job of caregiving is impossible. Caregivers are in service to those they are compelled by society, biology and humanity to love and care for, so going on strike is not an option. When life gets better for others, caregivers are the first to be put off with promises of trickle down human rights. When help is offered, it always serves to diminish the societal support role in caregiving and increase the corporate and state roles.

The world is critically overpopulated and populations are still increasing. The answer to that is to increase education and availability of safe[cite] birth control methods and alternative lifestyles for women, as well as incorporating children more into the societies they are part of. The answer is not to vilify lifegiving and caregiving and those who assume those roles. When children are taught to disrespect their own caregivers for their gifts and for their acceptance of a slave role, they are taught to despise caregiving itself and anyone who acts outside of the trade economy. The approval economy and dependencies that built our societies from our earliest history are being shown as the most contemptible and difficult path from earliest childhood. Caregivers and children are the last unit of social structure to be dismantled and the most physically and socially difficult to separate. The war against this relationship and its isolation from the rest of society is a war against society.

In the capitalist society we live in, corporations are people and people are means of production. The rapidly escalating international industry of human trafficking is a picture of a society which has reduced people to dissociated bodies. Men object to a society which gives them responsibility for childbirth without authority or choice and women object to a society which gives them responsibility without choice, support or acknowledgment. Men and women, old and young, able and infirm have been forcibly ripped apart in an attempt to destroy and commodify society and halt the creation of a horizontal network of inter-dependencies. Caregivers are overwhelmed and unrecognized. Grandparents are receiving back the unemployed, the addicted, the wounded and the sick so that society does not have to deal with revolution. Caregivers are absorbing all of the anger caused by the trade economy injustices from their position at the second to bottom tier of society.

State education takes responsibility for indoctrination of selected history and worldview and preparation for the work force, frequently a compulsory education that parents will go to jail for resisting. Propaganda dictates that the same parents who were capable of teaching nutrition, health, hygiene, speech, safety and so much more to their children are incapable of teaching reading. Capitalism insists every child has a right to daily indoctrination paid for by the state but not a right to food and shelter. To appoint only mothers and caregivers as fully responsible for producing and caring for the entire society and not recognize or support that work is institutionalized slavery. State propaganda is not a social right. Food, safety, shelter and all the benefits of the society are. If the child is to love their society, they must be welcomed by it. If a society is to benefit from caregivers, their labour must be recognized and included in the economic structure.

The root of society, the first dependence, is created when a woman gives birth to a child. The nature of society depends on how it is built out from that core, whether all share in responsibility for the first and all other dependencies or whether the strongest are pulled away to isolate caregivers and commodify dependency.

Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.