Essay:Exploitative Relationships in Social Reproduction

When Marxists analyze social reproduction, it is almost always about a man and woman couple. There is no analysis about what falls outside of this. The problem for me is I never see anyone anywhere talking about the practicalities of it, and I've instead been forced to dangerously navigate it entirely on my own for decades. As a trans man and a lesbian, in other words a person who is not a woman and is not attracted to men, I fly in the face of everything society expects. I have observations about gender violence under capitalism, which I experience almost the same way that women do not because of how society perceives my potential to bear children. Times and places and conditions differ, but some things I can talk about consistently. Socio-historical conditions change from place to place, but capitalism has gone worldwide.

I recommend talking to the cis men in your life about this analysis. Raising consciousness is the way.

A friendship is the basic unit of society. There are many forms of human connections, but what makes them real and meaningful (rather than a mere social role) is the quality of friendship that people enjoy in those connections regardless of title.

However, we exist in a context of ongoing social murder. For capitalism and colonialism to exist, deep and meaningful friendship is destroyed, and all life is cut down that does not conform to the dictates of capital. This context distorts our experience of gender in its true form.

As a man, I have an investment in manhood. I have embarked on a journey of building the New Man or in other cases restoring the Real Man from his basic energy. This man that I respect is not even seen as a man, because the enshittification of man has gone that far.

When is a friendship not a friendship, but an extractive capitalist relation?

Objectification: Cishet men treat me as a use-value (for the man's emotional gratification) that is only activated insofar as there is a perceived (in his mind) potential for a sexual relationship. It is the commodity fetishism of intimacy wherein humanity is conditional upon exchange. The man is also not just seeking a use-value; he is seeking to privatize it. He doesn't want general emotional connection; he wants my emotional labor directed at him, exclusively, under terms he implicitly controls. Or he might be a collector of acquaintances, extracting small dividends of each, without ever investing the deep, reciprocal labor required for genuine friendship.
Extraction of Unpaid Labor: I perform the emotional and intellectual labor of maintaining the bond, the majority or maybe even all of it. In return, I receive silence, disappearance, or maybe the bare minimum of acknowledgement. The difference is my surplus personhood that is extracted. This surplus is what sustains the illusion of a relationship, while I bear the real costs.
Gender Assignment: The solidification of one's socio-feminine role is enforced here. Whereas I seek bro relationships that are equal and non-transactional bonds providing gender comfort, but I find myself slotted into a feminized role of the provider of care work that I cannot escape.
Violence: Then, comes the escalation. At this point, I may become the victim of coercive and intrusive actions, which may (and often) include an expectation of sex and a sexualized or romanticized relationship dynamic that I do not want. And I am still alive, but the danger exists that it can escalate into gender-based homicide.

If this resonates with your experiences dear reader, then your socially reproductive labor has been exploited. Hopefully, by raising your own awareness of these dynamics you can identify them faster and avoid such exploitation in the future, especially the violence that comes in the later stages. Note that this is usually an escalator of violence that starts out seemingly harmless or mildly annoying. It always has the potential of escalating into something traumatic and dangerous or even potentially life threatening.

Navigating the Minefield of Social Interactions

Since my standpoint is platonic friendships and non-cishetero life, then I think a threat model is enough or else I would have to literally avoid all cis men in my social life, not to mention cis and hetero women who are also structurally oppressive to queer people. In other words I would have to embrace "lesbian separatism".

In some parts of the world, because of unsafe conditions at night for women, femmes, and people in the socio-feminine role, they have to depend on cis male relatives and friends for night outs and so on. Both of them could recognize consciously this unfairness, but the very reality of being embedded in conditions not of their making perpetuates inequality in the relationship. This is what it means to live under hostile conditions, under conditions of social murder.

While this structural hostility is all around us and shapes our daily lives the relationship between "the genders" in a frustrating way, it doesn't necessarily mean that all individual relationships will be characterized by exploitation. Technically we aren't even talking about gender, because that would be gender identity, and this is more about the coercively assigned roles we are expected to perform.

If we believed that all individual relationships are necessarily exploitative, we would have no basis for building the unity required for struggle, let alone relationships. Unity is formed from struggle against what constrains our relationships. Given our example, in order to counter balance the structural hostility, the socio-masculine side has to take precautions and mindfulness and consideration for the social position and safety of their socio-feminine friend or relative. It reminds me of my experiences where my cis male friends took much less caution with me than they should have, because in consciously trying to treat me as a man, they neglected that I am subject to the dangers supposedly only experienced by women. But nor can this be a pretext to disrespect the person's gender identity, such as my identity as a man.

So when cishets relate to me as a trans man and lesbian, or two spirit person in an indigenous Abya Yalan culture, then I take it as a given that capitalism threatens the egalitarianism in our culture while encouraging extractive gendered divisions to emerge. The obvious answer is abolish capitalism. But in the meantime, navigating individually is necessary, and so the important thing is learning the point at which a relationship becomes extractive.

We can't leave it to the liberals to resolve these contradictions. They always give sweeping decrees, at best in terms of idealist separatism. Queer people can't survive on such principles of course. Hopefully by fomenting critical consciousness in Queer people, we can help them navigate structural violence a little better. The interesting part is by doing so with Queer people you also end up finding solutions for everyone else including cishets, because you focused on the outliers. A society that provides for its outliers is a better designed society. So remember that next time someone insists on the value of suffering all this on the basis of 'culture'; it wasn't always like this anyway.

In the face of objectification, extraction of unpaid socially reproductive labor, forced gender assignment, and violence...and particularly before things escalate too far... We may like to imagine that you can have faith, patience, tolerance, unconditional love and devotion which is a necessary part of true friendships... However, it is a misapplication of a very good impulse, because idealistically it fails to see that this is all part of an escalating ladder of violence played out usually unconsciously. Thus a good thing turns into a bad thing, obscuring an extractive dynamic that if left unchecked ultimately leads to violence. Consciously disengage if the ladder appears.

The Supremacy of the Nuclear Family to the Negation of all Humanity

Have you ever asked yourself why a "Sigma Male" is constructed by male chauvinists as:

Doesn't trust people.
Thrives in silence.
Is always steps ahead of other people.
Develops a mysterious trait.
Speak less and only when necessary.
Don't care about what people think...?

This is the way to extract the most surplus social reproductive labor from your associates (not friends, friends are for women!). I am not saying that men intentionally do this, but that the system is structured to condition them to do this. Here we have examples of what men are supposedly meant to live up to. Being emotionally unavailable is actually maximum sigma alpha blah blah. Be a pendejo and you too can be the best (worst) kind of man, every alpha sigma whatever man literally competing in a never ending race to enshittification.

Here is the dilemma of cis men: how many times has it happened that I had a friend I was chatting with often, and then immediately some third person maybe the wife or girlfriend or family or somebody projects a sexual and romantic dynamic onto it? When not even he wants that actually. This is so unbelievably common. The wife who gives you a look of suspicion. When two cis bros are talking and even then, there's jokes about them being gay.

Capitalist society conditions men this way. And then, it reinforces the extractive dynamic where a socio-feminine person is treated as potentially dangerous if they expect the bare minimum or even emotional engagement with the man and we are talking about friendship.

This all goes back to the sanctity of the nuclear family imposed by capitalism. Men have to be discouraged from forming close bonds in order that they fulfill their role. They are of course disappointed in their girlfriends, who fail to meet their mountainous unmet needs. They seek a single-source solution to a lifetime of emotional deprivation. They seek, in one woman, to find:

The mother who wasn't fully present
The friend they were never allowed to have
The confidant they were never taught to be
The emotional regulator they never developed internally

No single human being can meet all of another's needs. This is a basic truth. And I am not arguing for polyamory or polygamy. The solution, contrary to what I've seen some people insist, is not to promote polyamory. That still sexualizes and places roles on people, and we want to abolish that entirely. But the man, having been produced by the system as a solitary unit requiring a female satellite to complete him, experiences this impossibility not as a structural condition but as her failure. She is not enough. And because he has no other emotional outlets (no deep friendships, no community, no capacity for self-soothing), her inevitable inadequacy becomes a crisis.

This disappointment does not lead the man to seek alternative sources of connection (that would require breaking the prohibition on non-partnered intimacy). Instead, it intensifies his demands on her. She must try harder. She must be more. She must somehow become the single source that can fill the void. This is the dynamic that drives the extraction of emotional labor to exhausting, abusive extremes.

The wife or girlfriend who projects a sexual dynamic onto the friendship with her man has been trained by the system to see all other women/femmes and queers as threats. She has been made entirely dependent on this one man for her economic survival and social status. If he develops a deep emotional connection elsewhere...even a non-sexual one...her entire world is threatened.

The family or peers that make jokes or express concern is enforcing the norm: men's intimate emotional energy should flow only to their designated female partner, and from her back to him and their children. Any significant diversion from this circuit is suspect.

A trans man occupying a socio-feminine position in many interactions (through the imposition and projections of society) becomes a lightning rod for this policing. He is offering what the system forbids: deep, engaged, reciprocal emotional connection with a man that is not channeled into the nuclear family circuit. The system responds by attempting to sexualize and thus contain it. If it can be labeled as latent romance or potential affair, it can be either absorbed into the family structure or expelled as a threat.

Likewise, forcing the trans man to only interact with women has its own contradictions. On the one hand, the trans man might be suddenly assigned as socio-masculine and therefore a competing man who could take away the woman. However, he may also be seen as a personal threat to the woman herself based on her fear/disgust of men. However, he may commonly be gendered socio-feminine and 'one of the girls', hence not a threat but also he loses his happiness! He is forced into the socio-feminine role.

And while trans men can complain about being misgendered (not that anyone even cares), if they pass they could be seen as more 'gay' and therefore competition/threat all the same. But there is an element of uncertainty. Women however, cannot even be granted a shadow of doubt. Women both cis and trans are automatically seen as trying to usurp the relationship.

The solution is abolishing the isolation of the family, the privatization of care, the economic dependency that traps women, and the emotional starvation that deforms men. It means building communal structures of support and connection that spread the labor of care across many people. It means actively reconstructing male subjectivity, women and femmes to refusing the role of single-source emotional provider, demanding that men build friendships, and holding them accountable. It requires men to do the work, to risk vulnerability with each other, to fail and try again.

Society shouldn't force anyone to be the sole source of another's emotional survival because we all have many sources, many connections, many bonds, and we are community. Bring back friendship. Bring back communitude.