ABSTRACT
This chapter traces Beauvoir’s critique of utility in Useless Mouths and The Ethics of Ambiguity to understand the fraught positioning of senescence in her late work, Old Age (La vieillesse). Following this analysis, I turn to current work on aging labour in the United States. In particular, I explore Jessica Bruder’s recent work on transient labour in the United States. Her book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, portrays mostly elderly nomadic workers forced to adapt to precarious life without societal support. I use this study to chart a meaningful shift from Beauvoir’s assessment 50 years prior by arguing that late-stage capitalism turns the uselessness of old age into something useful through the extraction of labour from what is otherwise positioned as an impediment to the production of capital. Like Beauvoir, Bruder concludes on a note of moral condemnation for the capitalist system that crushes those it has exploited from birth to death for the benefit of the ever shrinking few. Yet, there remains a crucial difference between Beauvoir’s analysis and the observations of contemporary investigations into aging labour. Beauvoir regarded the elderly as useless and silenced. While there remains a great deal of silencing, we are now witness to the awesome ability of capitalism to make the elderly useful for the continued exploitation of the working class and the protection of capital. This is a reformulation of the utility of old age. Rather than increasing government and private industry’s responsibility to care for the vulnerable—in particular, the vulnerable on whose backs both institutions continue to function—we find a strategy devoted to making them useful far into senescence.
