Independence

The definition denies that the state exists and then sets out how the appearance of it is produced. Nobody lives free of dependencies, since a self is constituted by interactions and a body is sustained by other people's work, so what presents itself as independence is always a simulation running on two mechanisms. Currency abstracts the dependency. Paying for something removes the relationship from view, leaving a transaction where a dependence was, which is the first sense of currency in Marsh's account, abstract dissociated approval granting access to all the benefits of a society without contribution, membership or acceptance of its values. Endosocialism supplies the second mechanism by denying the labour of the negative image outright, so work done by people cast outside the group is not registered as work and the dependency on it is not registered as dependency. Both together make a person who depends on hundreds of others appear self-sufficient. Marsh points to the propaganda that accompanies the arrangement. People were taught that since they did not ask to be born they owed nothing to society, though that convenient absence of obligation for things one did not ask for never extended to aging, sickness or disaster. The corollary about labour is unavoidable. Domestic and caregiving work has been the clearest case of dependency denied, since it is uncompensated, freely traded between family endogroups and not counted as contribution at all.

Feminist economics has made this argument at length, with Marilyn Waring showing how national accounting excludes unpaid domestic work and the social reproduction literature tracing what the formal economy depends on and does not count. The ethics of care after Carol Gilligan and Eva Kittay holds that dependency is the human condition rather than a deviation from it, and disability scholarship makes the same case through the concept of interdependence. Marsh's contribution is the mechanism rather than the observation, since these traditions establish that independence is a fiction and she specifies the two devices producing it, currency abstracting the relation and endosocialism disqualifying the labour.