I have a general distaste for puns, though I do maintain two exceptions: sexual innuendo for those prime “That’s what she said!” moments, and puns which are communist themed. For example, pet names based on communist ideologues are one of the few acceptable uses of a play on words: Karl Barx, Fidel Cat-stro, Meow Zedong, Pol Pup, and Kim Jong Gill for all the fish aficionados. With this in mind, I find there to be absolutely zero hypocrisy when I had a socialist epiphany in the form of a pun: “I don’t see how you can be a feminist and not be a socialist. You are literally demanding control over the means of production.” This originally started out as one of the rare examples of a hilarious pun, and… it is a good one. I mean, consider the follow up that if you do not have control over the means of production, you become alienated from your labour. The puns basically write themselves. However, the more I thought about how brilliant and hilarious I am, the more I realized that the similarities between feminism and socialism are quite abundant.

Let’s first spell out a basic feminist premise. Women ought to have control over their reproductive rights. She ought to have a say in the conditions within which that reproduction takes place (eg. consent is important), and she ought to be able to have direct control over the reproduction itself (eg. birth control or an abortion). From here it is a simple matter of replacing reproduction with production; after all, producing something with her hands compared to producing something with her uterus is only superficially different based on what part of the body is doing the production. If she crafted a perfect AI, indistinguishable from human consciousness and passing anything Alan Turing could concoct, the differences would become even more minute.

The quality of the product is not important. Whether the woman begets the next brilliant physicist or endures a tragic stillbirth, it is the means of that production that she has the rights to; the outcome is irrelevant. Similarly, if she handcrafts an AI brain-chip or merely pushes a button to have a machine do it for her, she is still producing something, be it the action of pushing the button or the brain-chip itself. Regardless of how menial the labour, she still ought to have a right to direct control over the conditions of her production and the nature of that production itself.

Now hold on, you might say, the person pressing the button shouldn’t have the same rights in brain-chip manufacturing as the person who designed it. There is a huge production process with each person contributing something different with scaling value regarding the finished product. The designer has contributed more energy than the button pusher. And you’re absolutely right, but that still doesn’t disprove the initial point, it just adds more people to the process. Each person has their own right to their individual labour, but production is a collective action, which is why collective ownership over the means of production is literally the definition of socialism. It’s simply applying democratic principles to labour rather than autocratic ones. Dads don’t contribute very much to the production of a child, but typically they want a say in how the baby is raised.

There are going to be critics who say that the person who puts the money upfront for production ought to have the lion’s share of control. Except that person is not generally a person but a bank, and banks usually recuse themselves once the money has been repaid. We’ve already established that the idea for a product and its production doesn’t negate the necessity for worker ownership since everybody is contributing collectively, so the foundation of a company really ought not to bear on its collective ownership. It’s like a judge saying that they have the right to decide how women ought to reproduce since they are the ones dictating the legal recourse for rape. That’s apparently how it works in our current system, but that doesn’t mean that that is the most morally righteous way of doing things.

Perhaps there are libertarians out there who believe that ownership of personal production is great, but that production can be contracted out to companies willing to pay for it. My first response is that this immediately puts the two in conflict; the contractor will try to get as much from the company for as little as possible, while the company will do the same with the contractor. If they were willing to work cooperatively rather than against each other then they would be socialists, so the conflict stands. This also puts our contractor in a predicament, since they are likely to need the job to eat and keep a roof over their head, and so desperation would negate any bargaining equality between the two. It’s the premise behind and the counter-measure to strikes. Each side is waiting for the other to run out of enough money to become desperate enough to agree to a biased deal.

My second response is that we started out this article by comparing production to reproduction, and we already have a slur for the women who contract out their reproduction: whore. Personally I believe that if everything else is commodified, and the woman has control over her production of sexual pleasure, then there are no problems since a service job is a service job. However, many people still feel that prostitution is a cheapening act. Perhaps this is no different from classical liberal philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt’s criticism that every instance of renting one’s labour is a cheapening act:

“…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness…

…we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”

So there you go. Not only do you have to dabble in anarchism to be a feminist, but it turns out that socialism is necessarily required as well.

Post-script: If I’m equating feminism to socialism, I think feminist ideologues ought to have an equal right to pet names, like Mary Woofstonecraft, Simone de Bow-wow, Emma Goldman Retriever, and maybe bell hoofs if you’re lucky enough to get a pony.