Resisting Capitalism with Beauvoir: Economic Facticity, Freedom in Question

Modern capitalism is ambiguous: it appears as profoundly normative - with accumulation at its core - and thus highly constraining, yet it rests upon a theory of freedom and emancipation shaped as an absolute promise. In this light, it is surprising that Simone de Beauvoir's work - and existentialism more broadly - has not been more widely mobilised as a way to (re)think capitalism, even though it powerfully interrogates and describes the problem of freedom within an economic world structured by power relations. Indeed, her writings, along with the living exegesis of her thought, question the authentic (or inauthentic) dimension of freedom through a phenomenology in which economic power plays a central role - without reducing her analysis to economism in the way some readings of Marx might, nor reducing freedom merely to material conditions; this is all the more important as the capitalist discourse of individual freedom becomes increasingly visible. The Second Sex shows, in fact, how the economic dimension contributes to the shaping of women's situation: on the one hand, through capitalism as facticity, and on the other, through capitalism as a framework of experience that reveals it. Thus, everything unfolds as if, within lived experience - despite social struggles and victories - a tension persists between the freedom to live and the life of freedom, where freedom is shaped as accumulation, that is, as reproduction, with capitalism no longer a distant adversary but rather a constitutive force. Far from being a passive backdrop upon which structures of domination are grafted, the economic emerges as an active regime of experience - one that Beauvoir's work is particularly capable of illuminating. We therefore argue that her writings - and the various uses to which they have been put - make possible an existentialist and critical reading of capitalism in-the-making by returning it to the phenomenological field, without renouncing any of the rich and necessary contributions of poststructuralism. This, in turn, allows us to consider how one might resist economic power in the living present.