A capitalist society values men’s freedom that comes from the devaluing of women’s labor.

The heterosexual, masculinist way of liberation from the subjugating bond of charity is central to the idea of the freedom of labour as independence from feudal conditions of coercion. At the same time, relations of care were not considered profitable spheres, and the reproduction of the labour force had to be guaranteed through heterosexual gender relations within the family. Independence from care is the basis of the idea of a liberal, capitalist masculinity that feminizes and devalues care. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this gender construction becomes entangled with the bourgeois idea of freedom as voluntary subjugation under the now self-made laws of political democracy. This is a social contract that justifies the legal equality of white, male, propertied, free citizens via the social and political bond of fraternity, 15 a masculinist bond that intertwines social independence and juridical subjection. But in its construction of liberal masculinity, the subjectivating ambivalence between freedom and obedience, between self-determination and control, is in no way transparent or obvious; instead, it appears as a paradox – one that can only appear on the ideological stage by suppressing its gendering and the patriarchal, heteronormative dual-gender system of the sexual contract required for that gendering. It is an arrangement of freedom and subjugation that rests decisively on the patriarchal subjugation of women in the private sphere.16 In bourgeois-capitalist society, precariousness is tamed and contained in the private by means of a gender-specific division of social space. Care and reproduction are feminized, de-politicized, devalued, and structured through precarity based on gender, sexuality, and ‘race’. Governmental body relations served the production of a class-specific and heterosexual, racialized dual-gender system, which, through gender segregation, not only guaranteed the maintenance of the labour force, but at the same time ensured generativity for strengthening the nation state.17 On the basis of ideas of one’s ‘own’ body and Christian practices of confession, biologistic and naturalized constructions of the disambiguation of gender and sexuality became manifest in the nineteenth century, as did constructions of a superior ‘white race’, which could not have arisen without the doctrine of ‘possessive individualism’18 and liberal ideas of freedom, self-determination, and civilized life. The social bond of bourgeois-capitalist society and its relation to the world are structured by conditions of domination and exploitation; mutual dependency is striated through precarity, through categorizations based on class, gender, ‘race’, and citizenship. For eighteenth-and also nineteenth-century male workers, however, individualization, the devaluation of the ‘other’, and the feminization of reproduction in the private sphere were not enough to tame precariousness. Smith’s idea that the free labourer must be able to feed a family soon proved to be ‘utopian capitalism’.19 The social welfare state and the organizational structures of a (mainly masculine) workforce made it evident that individualization in liberal democracy was not possible without collective protection and insurance systems. Legal claims and solidarities led to a social compromise that provided a welfare state complement to Fordist individualization which survived intact into the 1970s.20 The idea of male freedom and independence through wage labour could thus be collectively supported and maintained, consolidating the gender-specific divisions between waged productive and unwaged reproductive labour as well as between a public and a private sphere. This welfare state bond of safeguarding was based on massive precarity in the form of structural relations of inequality in terms of origin, class, and gender. In their examination of discourse on welfare mothers in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon showed why the ambivalence of bourgeois, juridical self-government between freedom and subjugation was adamantly perceived as a paradox, and thus, in its specific masculinity, could become economically exploitable. According to Fraser and Gordon, white male workers’ independence is based on their failure to perceive their own subjugation in relations of production. At the moment that white men were politically and legally equal, ‘by definition’, economic inequality among them ‘no longer generated dependency … Thus, dependency was redefined to refer exclusively to those noneconomic relations of subordination deemed suitable only for people of color and for white women.’21 This male form of independence was based on the precarity of others, who were once again differentiated in their subordinate dependency into those who seemed worthy of being protected and those who did not – a ‘ “good”, household dependency, predicated of children and wives’, on the one hand, and a ‘ “bad” (or at least dubious) charity dependency’22 on the other.