Introduction
What, exactly, happens in
the working-class family? Are there any elements in common across the centuries
since capitalism began and the diverse forms taken by the family across
countries, religions and cultures? How has capitalism interacted with families
inherited from pre-capitalist societies? Marxists and feminists have debated
these questions at length, and these debates are examined here, starting with Karl
Marx, Frederick Engels, and the Marxists who followed them. Many participants
in the domestic labour debate of the 1970s and 1980s argued that it contributes
to the production of labour-power, the only commodity that can create surplus-value
and thus profit for capital, but also reproduces the workers in whom this
capacity is embodied, human beings with agency and the ability to work against
capitalism. Social Reproduction Theory added a wealth of empirical information,
but at the cost of great confusion about Marx’s method and categories. Black American
feminists developed an analysis of interacting systems of oppression, encapsulated
in the metaphor of intersectionality. The working-class home, as the
predominant site at which both labour-power and human beings are produced, is
thus a critical node of the struggle for social transformation.
Marx on labour-power
Marx begins Volume 1 of Capital
with the commodity, which is, in the first place, a use-value: ‘the usefulness
of a thing makes it a use-value,’ and this is conditioned by its physical
properties (Marx, 1976: 126). But it also has exchange-value or value, on the
basis of which it can be exchanged with completely different use-values, and
this is determined by the socially necessary labour-time it contains: ‘Socially
necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value
under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the
average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society’
(Marx, 1976: 129). This requires abstracting from the concrete character of the
use-value being produced and the labour producing it. Simple commodity
production and sale – by peasants, artisans and service providers like domestic
workers – was widespread in Marx’s time. He expected it to die out, but that
did not happen.
Thus far, Marx’s analysis
is similar to that of the best classical political economists, as he calls
them, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Where he departs from them and makes his
great breakthrough is in his characterisation of the transaction between
capitalists and workers: what workers sell to capitalists is not their labour
but the commodity labour-power, the capacity to labour, which has the unique
use-value of being able to produce more value than it has itself, i.e.
surplus-value (Marx, 1976: 300–305). The method by which he arrives at this
breakthrough is important. He says that in political economy, it seems to be
correct to begin with the concrete, for example the population. But this, he
says, would be
a
chaotic conception… of the whole, and I would then… move analytically towards
ever more simple concepts…, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner
abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the
journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population
again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich
totality of many determinations and relations. (Marx, 1973: 100)
In the Postface to the
second German edition of Capital Volume 1, he further clarifies that the
first part of this journey corresponds to the method of inquiry, while the
second part corresponds to the method of presentation (Marx, 1976: 102–3). This
is why Capital starts at the highest level of abstraction to establish
that labour-power can produce surplus-value over and above its own value.
Yet when he comes to
analysing the production of this unique commodity, his account is confused and self-contradictory
(Hensman 1977). He comes closest to a description in the chapter on ‘The Sale
and Purchase of Labour-power’ in Capital Volume 1:
Given the existence of the individual, the
production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his
maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of
subsistence. Therefore the labour-time necessary for the production of
labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of
subsistence… If the owner of labour-power works today, tomorrow he must again
be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and
strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him
in his normal state as a working individual… The owner of labour-power is
mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, … the seller
of labour-power must perpetuate himself “in the way that every living
individual perpetuates himself, by procreation”… Hence the sum of means of
subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means
necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e. his children… The costs of
education vary according to the degree of complexity of the labour-power
required. These expenses… form a part of the total value spent in producing it.
The value of labour-power can be resolved into the value of a definite quantity
of the means of subsistence’ (Marx, 1976: 274–6).
Unlike his
descriptions of the production of other commodities, here there is no
description of a labour process or mention of instruments of production (such
as a stove, pots and pans, broom, bucket and mop). Just raw materials – means
of subsistence – and the finished product: labour-power. Apparently, all that
is required to convert those means of subsistence into labour-power is a
process of individual consumption. Yet the worker would not be maintained in
his or her ‘normal state as a working individual’, nor be replaced when he or
she died, unless somebody carried the raw materials and instruments of
production home from the market or shops, cooked the food and washed up after
the meal, dusted, swept, mopped floors and washed clothes, fed the baby,
changed it, etc.
Marx is not
unaware of all this, but there are times when he forgets it, as when he says
that ‘the ultimate or minimum limit of the value of labour-power is formed by
the value of the commodities which have to be supplied every day to the bearer
of labour-power, the man, so that he can renew his life-process’ (Marx, 1976:
276). But should the value of labour-power fall to this level, it will not be
reproduced at all beyond a certain point in time, even if ‘the man’ does all
his own housework, because once he dies, there will be no one to replace him.
Given that a man cannot carry out biological reproduction on his own, and that
children cannot survive without being fed and cared for, it is evident that the
rock-bottom value of labour-power is the level at which workers’ families can
subsist.
Elsewhere,
Marx seems to recognise this. Labour-power is a commodity, he says, and ‘Like
all other commodities it has a value’, and its value is determined, ‘as in the
case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production,
and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article’ (Marx, 1976:
274). Moreover, ‘its value, like that of every other commodity, is already
determined before it enters into circulation, for a definite quantity of social
labour has been spent on the production of the labour-power’ (Marx, 1976: 277).
And again, ‘Its exchange-value, like that of every other commodity, is
determined before it goes into circulation, since it is sold as a capacity, a
power, and a specific amount of labour-time was required to produce this
capacity, this power’ (Marx 1976: 1066).
Indeed,
hundreds of hours of labour-time are required to raise workers from birth until
their labour-power can be sold, and this labour contributes to its value. Once
we acknowledge that domestic labour contributes to the value of labour-power,
the division of the working day in the workplace into necessary labour, which
pays for the individual worker’s labour-power, and surplus labour, which is
appropriated by the capitalist, collapses. This is obvious if the generational
reproduction of labour-power is taken into account, because the labour-power of
adult members of the family would have been produced by their own parents, who
worked for different employers, while their children, whose labour-power they
produce, would be working for yet other employers. In other words, necessary
labour and surplus labour can only be calculated in relation to total social
capital, making it possible to bring into the picture state contributions to
the production of labour-power through public-sector education and healthcare.
When we
examine the production of the commodity labour-power as a labour-process, it is
clear that means of production (raw food, fuel, brooms, mops, needle, thread,
etc.) are converted into the product (labour-power) through the labour-process
which takes place in the working-class home and whose components are cooking,
cleaning, washing, mending, childcare and so on. If we examine it as a process
of production of value, then the living labour performed in the final process
of production is no less part of the total social labour objectified in the
commodity labour-power than the labour which has previously been objectified in
means of production. It can be seen as simple commodity production, many of
whose products enter into capitalist production.
All this is
completely compatible with the theory of value and surplus-value outlined in Capital,
so why is domestic labour, which, it is true, does not directly produce surplus-value,
treated by Marx as though it does not produce value?
Batya
Weinbaum’s (1978: 43) explanation for Marx’s failure to identify the home as
the site not only of individual consumption but also of production,[1] both
of which are necessary for the production of labour-power, is his ‘patriarchal
position’. His characterisation of the worker as a man, at a time when women
and children were flooding the labour-market, lends weight to this allegation. This
passage on the effect of the introduction of machinery is revealing:
The value of labour-power was determined, not
only by the labour-time necessary to maintain the individual adult worker, but
also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every
member of that family onto the labour-market, spreads the value of the man’s
labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates it. To purchase the
labour-power of a family of four workers may perhaps cost more than it formerly
did to purchase the labour-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four
days’ labour takes the place of one day’s… (Marx, 1976: 518, emphasis added.)
Marx’s
assumption that only the man’s labour-power has value, at a time when his wife
and children are also employed, is a denial of their personhood, and although
he then goes on to acknowledge their existence as separate persons, they are
still subordinate to ‘the head of the family’. However, this is one of the few
places where he explicitly mentions domestic labour: ‘Domestic work, such as
sewing and mending, must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles.
Hence the diminished expenditure of labour in the house is accompanied by an
increased expenditure of money outside’ (Marx, 1976: 518 n.39). Marx supplies
us with the categories and method to analyse the production of labour-power in
the working-class family, but fails to use them consistently.
The domestic
labour debate: the production of labour-power
One trigger
of the domestic labour debate that broke out in the 1970s was surely
frustration among socialist (including Marxist) feminists at being told by male
comrades that the oppression of women would be tackled ‘after the revolution,’
and raising the issue before that ‘divides the working class’ (e.g. Matthaei
2018). Against the background of growing knowledge about the Hitler-Stalin pact
and Soviet gulags, the Chinese Communist Party’s support for Pakistan’s
genocidal assault on East Bengal in 1971 and relationship with the Pinochet
dictatorship, and reports of the continued subordination of women in both
countries, the authority of male spokesmen of the left was challenged.
Most
participants in the debate agreed that domestic labour transfers the (exchange)-value
of the commodities bought with the wage to the end product, labour-power. But does it also create value?
For Margaret
Benston (1969); Margaret Coulson, Branka Magas and Hilary Wainwright (1975); Jean
Gardiner, Susan Himmelweit and Maureen Mackintosh (1982); Susan Himmelweit and Simon
Mohun (1977); and Lise Vogel (2013: 23), domestic labour in capitalist
societies produces use-values but not exchange-value. Vogel (2013: 149, 158–9) argues
convincingly that unwaged domestic labour is necessary for the production of
labour-power, yet cites Paul Smith (1978: 208), who denies that it is socially
necessary labour and equates cooking with eating, housework with sleeping, to
conclude that ‘as concrete, useful labour, [it] simply transfers the value of
the commodities purchased with the wage to the labour-power borne by the
worker’ (2013: 164).
The
assumption, contradicting Marx, is that unlike every other commodity, the value of labour-power is determined not
by the labour-time socially necessary for its production but by the value of
the commodities that enter into its production. If this were true, the
labour-power of the worker who gets her washing done at a laundry would have a
higher value than that of another worker doing the same job at the same
workplace for the same wage who does her own washing at home; and the
labour-power of a worker who hires domestic workers to wash, clean and cook would
have a higher value than the labour-power of a worker doing the same job at the
same workplace for the same wage, whose wife performs all these tasks. But to
the extent that domestic labour is a necessary part of the production process
of labour-power, a commodity sold on the (labour) market, it must produce part
of the value of labour-power. Wally Seccombe (1973: 10) argues that domestic
labour does contribute to the value of labour-power, and the labour-power of
the worker who pays a housekeeper to perform domestic tasks has the same value
as that of the worker whose wife performs those tasks.
Founding
members of the Wages for Housework campaign Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma
James (1975), Silvia Federici (1975) and Leopoldina Fortunati (1995) contend
that domestic labour produces both value and surplus-value. Fortunati draws on
Marx’s writings but criticises them for failing to acknowledge that housework
is a process of commodity production, and therefore must also be a process of
value creation (1995: 78). She argues that houseworkers, as she calls them,
also produce surplus-value: the capitalist buys the worker’s labour-power below
cost because he doesn’t pay for the socially necessary housework labour-time
required to produce it. The male worker uses the wage to buy the female
houseworker’s labour-power, and she then produces greater value than the value
of her own labour-power; in reality, this is a relation of production between
the houseworker and capital, mediated by the male worker, and surplus-value is
extracted from him in the workplace and the houseworker in the home (Fortunati,
1995: 84–5).
The
Bolivian women’s leader and miner’s wife Domitila Barrios de Chungara aptly
compared the work performed in the home with the cost of the same
services bought on the market.
One day I got the idea of making a
chart. We put as an example the price of washing clothes per dozen pieces and
we figured out how many dozens of items we washed per month. Then the
cook’s wage, the babysitter’s, the servant’s… Adding it all up, the wage
needed to pay us for what we do in the home… was much higher than what
the men earned in the mine for a month. (Barrios de Chungara
with Viezzer, 1978: 35)
Therefore,
if a miner’s wife died or stopped working, and the man was compelled to buy the
services that she formerly performed, his wage would not have been sufficient,
showing that it was less than the value of labour-power; indeed, the shortfall
would have been even greater, because Domitila, with help from her children,
also made and sold small pies to supplement the family income. Thus, the
women’s surplus labour allowed the mine owner to appropriate more surplus-value
than he would otherwise have been able to. This example calls attention to the
fact that the working-class home is often also a site of homeworking, either as
a self-employed worker or for a capitalist; in the latter case, the houseworker
directly produces surplus-value for her employer.
Whether
unwaged domestic labour contributes to the extraction of extra surplus-value seems
to depend on two possibilities. One is grinding poverty: a very low wage for
the employed spouse and dreadful living conditions, leading to long hours of
work simply to sustain life. In India, for example, millions of working-class
households in rural areas and urban slums have no electricity. Women spend
hours each day collecting water, rations, and fuel for cooking on primitive
stoves, while lack of sanitation causes widespread illness and death from
water-borne and mosquito-borne diseases.[2]
The other possibility is where there are very small children, when round-the-clock
care work done by their mother could certainly be seen as subsidising the cost
of labour-power for capital. However, if a spouse’s wage is decent and there
are no children at home, a houseworker may spend part of her time studying for
a degree or writing a novel, in which case she would not be contributing to the
appropriation of extra surplus-value.
Two points
should be clarified about what goes on in the working-class household. The
first is that there is considerable but not complete overlap between the
production of labour-power and the production of people: not all the work
performed by the houseworker is for capital, because she is also a homemaker
with agency to struggle against capital. The extra labour embodied in singing
to her baby, telling stories to an older child, or cooking a dish that the
family loves but requires hours of work, would not count as reproduction of
labour-power; much less would hosting a meeting of friends to discuss
participation in a protest against rising food prices!
The second clarification
is about the category ‘productive labour’. Under capitalism, according to Marx
(1976: 1039, 1044), labour is productive ‘if it directly creates surplus-value’,
and he explains that this has nothing to do with the merit of the work
performed. But this definition is relevant only from the standpoint of
individual capital: labour is or is not productive according to whether it does
or does not produce surplus-value for the individual capitalist. However, as
Marx realised when he considered the capitalist production of articles of
luxury consumption, ‘This sort of productive labour produces use-values and
objectifies itself in products that are destined only for unproductive
consumption. In their reality, as articles, they have no use-value for
the process of reproduction,’ and hence, if there is ‘disproportionate
diversion of productive labour into unreproductive articles, it follows
that the means of subsistence or production will not be reproduced in the
necessary quantities’, and the process of capital accumulation will suffer (Marx,
1976: 1045–6).
We are therefore looking at two distinctions – productive
versus unproductive labour, and reproductive versus unreproductive labour – and
four possible combinations of them. Productive labour is reproductive if it
contributes to social reproduction by producing means of production or labour-power,
or unreproductive if it produces articles (like armaments) that do not re-enter
the cycle of accumulation. Likewise, unproductive labour is reproductive if it
contributes to social reproduction by producing means of production or
labour-power, as domestic labour does, or unreproductive if it produces
articles or services that do not re-enter the cycle of accumulation.
The
conception of the working-class home as a site of production of labour-power as
a simple commodity is compatible with both these points: petty commodity
producers in capitalist society produce value but not surplus-value, and they
also have a degree of autonomy from capital. The conception advanced by the
Wages for Housework feminists correctly argues that domestic labour produces
value, but insists that it is productive labour and that all the work done in
the home is for capital, denying it any autonomy. The conception that domestic
labour produces no value and the wage constitutes the value of only the
wage-worker’s labour-power is least satisfactory. It fails to understand that
the sale of labour-power on the labour-market renders all the labour
producing it abstract, value-producing labour, and either justifies a wage insufficient
for the generational reproduction of labour-power, or assumes that the value of
the male worker’s labour-power includes that of his wife and children, denying
their autonomy as persons.
The
domestic labour debate: the oppression of women
There was
almost unanimous agreement among participants in the debate that being burdened
with the bulk of domestic labour constitutes oppression of working-class women,
but disagreement over whether capital alone is responsible for it (a ‘unitary’
system of oppression) or a separate system of male dominance over women, which
they called ‘patriarchy’, is also responsible (‘dual’ systems of oppression). Many
thought that a working-class family in which women were mostly confined to
domestic labour served the needs of capital, for example, acting as part of the
reserve army of labour, which could be recruited into wage-labour when needed
by capital or the state and expelled back into the family with minimal costs
when no longer needed (Benston 1969; Beechey 1978). Members of the Wages for
Housework group believed that it allows capital to extract more surplus-value
from the working class.
However,
this view doesn’t explain capital’s onslaught on the working-class family
during the early period of industrialization, touched upon by Marx but
described in much greater detail by Engels (1969: 110–16): families destroyed
by both parents working 12–13 hours a day while children, left to themselves,
suffer numerous fatal accidents; or children, too, forced to work long hours under
brutal conditions, leading to stunting, deformities and premature death. This
situation is still prevalent today, especially in the form of migrant labour
within and between countries. Many migrant women workers do domestic work in
richer families, but they also work in industry, agriculture, the service
sector and sex work, and may suffer long hours and physical, psychological and
sexual abuse, including fatalities. If we include human trafficking, especially
of women and children, the total would add up to several hundreds of millions
(United Nations Women, 2016; Vital Signs 2022; UNODC n.d.).
Evidently
capital has no qualms about destroying working-class families so long as the
supply of labour-power is adequate for its needs. It was workers,
through their struggles for higher wages, abolition of child labour, and
restriction of working hours, who won back time and space for the family. But
this was accompanied by promotion of the ‘family wage’ norm of a male
breadwinner earning enough to support a dependent spouse and children, with
women losing jobs or being left with very poorly-paid employment options. Jane Humphries
(1980: 144) argues that within ‘traditional family structures… the working
class was better equipped to exercise some jurisdiction and control over the
supply of labour. The withdrawal of certain members of the working class from
the labour market, in conjunction with a campaign for “a family wage,” … could,
by raising the real wages of the remaining workers, improve the working-class
standard of living.’ But this model meant that wage differentials between men
and women remained, women-headed households had no alternative to poverty, and
dependence on a man’s wage ensured the subordination of women. It also fostered
a gender division of labour in which women were expected to do the bulk of
caring work. How did this happen?
According
to Engels (2000: 30–1), ‘The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical
defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was
degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere
instrument for the production of children… With the patriarchal family, we
enter the field of written history…’ While his account has been questioned,
feminist historian Joan Kelly-Gadol (1976:
814, 816) agrees that ‘[f]rom the advent… of history proper as distinct
from prehistorical societies, the social order has been patriarchal’, and
continues, ‘We have made of sex a category as fundamental to our analysis of
the social order as other classifications, such as class and race.’
It follows that
women around the world entered the capitalist labour-market already
subordinated, which is why they could be used as cheap labour. According to
Hartmann (1981: 20–4), the large-scale induction of women and children into the
labour-force simultaneously undermined patriarchal authority relations in the
family and kept wages low for all workers. This was resisted by male workers,
and capital adjusted to their resistance when it introduced the family wage,
buying off male workers by allowing them to retain their wives’ services at
home. In other words, capitalism adjusted to pre-existing patriarchal forces,
but patriarchy also adjusted to capitalism; both were changed in the encounter.
Engels
(2000: 38–40) deduced, therefore, ‘now that large-scale industry has taken the
wife out of the home onto the labor market and into the factory, and made her
often the bread-winner of the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy
is left in the proletarian household’, concluding that ‘the first condition for
the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public
industry’; with the socialist revolution, ‘[p]rivate housekeeping is
transformed into a social industry,’ in theory doing away with the need for
domestic labour.
This is
what many Marxists believed, and exactly what was done after the Russian
revolution. Russian feminists Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand created a
Department of Women’s Affairs within the Bolshevik Party to bring about
equality between the sexes. Significant advances were made, with legal equality
for men and women and new family laws. Statistician S.G. Strumilin denounced
the ‘bourgeois prejudice’ that had in the 1920 census left out the time spent
in housework, saying that forming an idea of ‘the social value of the
reproduction of the workforce was unthinkable without taking domestic labor
into account’. He made detailed time-use surveys between 1922 and 1924 and
found that women spent 14.5 hours a day working and had 9.6 hours of free time
per week while men had 30.1. This inequality in the division of household tasks
meant that men could participate more in social life and educational activities
and advance more in their careers. Another survey found that women’s domestic
workload remained more than 2.5 times that of men’s in the late 1960s (Mespoulet
and Rundell, 2015). Large-scale induction of women into the wage-labour force,
the abolition of private capitalism, and partial socialisation of domestic
labour had not led to equality in the home.
Social
anarchist feminist Carol Ehrlich (1981: 113, 118) agrees with Hartmann that
radical feminism doesn’t account for the fact that women are divided by class,
race, age, nationality, and sexual orientation, while Marxism cannot account
for patriarchy. However, she disagrees with Hartmann’s contention that the
material base of patriarchy is only men’s control over women’s labour-power.
For Ehrlich (1981: 123), the material and ideological are blended in patriarchy:
the belief that men are superior to women and have a right to control their
bodies and lives has material consequences that militate against fighting male
dominance, for which it is important to gain the consciousness that women are
oppressed as women. Radical feminists have highlighted the cruelty and threats
of violence that underpin patriarchy in a way that makes it possible to
struggle against it. Marxism cannot account for female infanticide, abandoning
or underfeeding girls so that they die prematurely, female genital mutilation
(FGM), burning of widows and witches, involuntary sterilisation of women,
sexual assault and rape, forcing women and girls to bear unwanted children, persecuting
and killing LGBT+ people, domestic violence, femicide. For that, a feminist
theory of patriarchy is needed.[3]
Intersectionality
The focus
of Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis (1983) is the history of
horrific racist oppression from the 19th century onwards in America,
and the heroic role played by Black women in fighting against it. She
acknowledges the large-scale involvement of white women in the abolitionist
movement, and pays tribute to white women who participated fully in the struggle,
but also criticises white suffragettes who subordinated the struggle against
racism to their demand for the vote, and radical feminists who perpetuated the
racist stereotype of Black men as rapists (Davis, 1983: 42–7, 114–15). She
describes a striking episode when Black sharecropper Capitola Tasker addresses
the 1934 International Women’s Conference in Paris, comparing European fascism
with the racist terror suffered by Black people in the United States, and
quotes Claudia Jones chiding some Communist Party members for exploiting Black
women domestic workers (Davis, 1983: 92, 98). However, Davis (1983: 116)
follows the Party line that ‘the overall oppression of women remains an
essential crutch for capitalism,’ and most of the book sees racism as firmly
embedded in post-civil-war US capitalism.
By
contrast, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) evolved out of the
disillusionment of Black feminists with their experience of racism in the
predominantly white women’s movement but also sexism and heterosexism in
the Black liberation movements and white-male-dominated left. They said that
they ‘see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and
practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are
interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our
lives’ (CRC 1977).[4] They reiterate this
conception of separate but mutually interacting systems of oppression when they
say, ‘The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not
just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to
address a whole range of oppressions’ (CRC 1977). Some ‘dual systems’ white
feminists like Hartmann and Ehrlich mention the possibility of extending their
analysis to other systems of oppression, especially racism, but without the
direct experience and depth of feeling characterising the CRC feminists.
The women
who authored the CRC statement described themselves as subscribing to ‘identity
politics’ stemming from their subjection to racist, sexist, heterosexist and
class oppression, but this term has come to have a very different meaning,
namely that all those who share one form of oppression have the same
interests. Their politics is better described by the term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw: intersectionality. In her paper on
domestic violence and rape, Crenshaw (1991: 1251–2) explains that:
The concept of political intersectionality
highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two
subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas…
Among the most troubling political consequences
of the failure of antiracist and feminist discourses to address the
intersections of race and gender is the fact that, to the extent they can
forward the interest of “people of color” and “women,” respectively, one
analysis often implicitly denies the validity of the other. The failure of
feminism to interrogate race means that the resistance strategies of feminism
will often replicate and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and
the failure of antiracism to interrogate patriarchy means that antiracism will
frequently reproduce the subordination of women.
Himani
Bannerji (2005: 149) sets out to challenge intersectionality, arguing that:
“Race” … is a collection of discourses of
colonialism and slavery, but firmly rooted in capitalism in its different
aspects through time. As it stands, “race” cannot be disarticulated from
“class” any more than coffee can be separated from milk once they are mixed…
This integrity of “race” and class cannot be
independent of the fundamental social organization of gender, that is,
sex-specific social division of labor, with mediating norms and cultural forms…
There is no capital that is a universal abstraction. Capital is always a
practice, a determinate set of social relations… Thus “race,” gender, and
patriarchy are inseparable from class.
Yet Marx’s
method proceeds from the concrete as a ‘chaotic conception of a
whole’, to ever higher abstractions before returning to
the concrete as ‘a rich totality of many determinations
and relations’ (Marx 1973: 100),
and ‘capital’ is an abstraction. The accumulation of capital can account
for the large-scale induction of women and children into the labour-force
because their cheap labour-power allows for a higher rate of surplus-value, but
it cannot account for domestic violence in working-class families, nor for the
denial of abortion rights to women when labour-power is plentiful, nor for FGM.
These are expressions of patriarchal oppression, embodied in powerful religious
and community institutions and embedded at every level of society from the
family to the transnational (e.g. Hensman, 2020; Equality Now, 2020). Capital
cannot account for the involvement of working-class Germans in the Holocaust,
or the recruitment of working-class Dalits in the anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002
in Gujarat (Teltumbde, 2002). These are expressions of racist oppression,
embodied in fascist organisations active in families, communities, and the
state. The accumulation of capital doesn’t depend on lynch-mobs or the Ku Klux
Klan.
As Patricia
Hill Collins (2019: 29–34) explains, the metaphor of intersectionality isn’t
perfect, especially in its sense as a literal crossroads, yet it has analytic and
heuristic value, has helped to generate new knowledge, and has helped people to
imagine social transformation, guiding their intellectual work and political
practice. If intersectionality is seen as recognition of different systems of
oppression, it can explain how these systems interact and change. Unlike the
metaphor of coffee and milk, it can show how people who are oppressed in one
system can be potential or actual oppressors in another. This has contributed
to the emergence of solidarity politics, which ‘has the potential to bring
people together across all inequalities with the shared purpose of
deconstructing all forms of inequality’ (Matthaei 2018). ‘For diverse
social groups, coming together on the basis of their common experiences of
inequality and/or agency without losing sight of their differences,
intersectionality can be a powerful tool for social change’ (Banerjee and
Ghosh, 2018: 8).
Social
Reproduction Theory (SRT)
Tithi
Bhattacharya (2018: 2) explains that ‘social reproduction theorists perceive
the relation between labor dispensed to produce commodities and labor dispensed
to produce people as part of the systemic totality of capitalism’. SRT provides
a wealth of empirical description, especially of Western capitalist societies
and the provision of education, healthcare, and other waged labour contributing
to the reproduction of labour-power. Yet it is based on multiple confusions
regarding Marx’s categories and method. It sees labour-power as a ‘unique’
commodity because it is not produced capitalistically (Bhattacharya, 2018: 3, 8),
yet there are countless other commodities that are not produced
capitalistically and billions of people engaged in such production. They are
swept out of sight because SRT’s persistent confusion between value-producing
socially necessary labour and surplus-value-producing productive labour renders
the former invisible. For example, Bhattacharya (2018: 13) says Marx shows how
surplus-value is produced in the cycle of production of commodities, unaware
that not all commodity production involves surplus-value production.
The
confusion is more explicit in another SRT text, the introduction by Susan
Ferguson and David McNally (2013) to Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression
of Women. They ask, ‘does domestic labour produce (surplus-)value?’; state
that ‘labour in the household… produces use-values, not commodities whose sale
realises surplus-value for the capitalist’; and criticise Vogel for falling ‘into
the trap of arguing that domestic labour is a component of necessary labour in the
sense in which Marx used the term in Capital’ (Ferguson and McNally, 2013:
xx, xxv, xxxiii). They assume that only surplus-value-producing labour produces
value, oblivious that Chapter 1 of Capital Volume 1 deals with socially
necessary labour that produces value but not surplus-value. SRT thus rejects an
extremely important achievement of some participants in the domestic labour
debate – establishing that domestic labour produces value – in favour of the
weakest formulations by others.
SRT departs
from Marxist theory in other significant ways. Paddy Quick (2023) points out:
1) For Marx,
‘social reproduction’ refers to the reproduction of capitalist society, which
must include reproduction of the capitalist class. For SRT, it means only the
reproduction of the working class.
2) The labour
categorised as ‘social reproduction’ in SRT cannot even reproduce labour-power,
because this requires in addition the labour embodied in wage goods.
3) SRT refers
to household labour as ‘unpaid work’, but in Marx’s analysis ‘unpaid labour’
refers to surplus labour performed for capital.
Thus, ‘SRT
fails to situate this work within the social relations of the capitalist mode
of production. Despite its use of Marxist terminology, it is inconsistent with
the most basic Marxist understanding of capitalism’ (Quick, 2023: 448–9).
According
to Bhattacharya (2018: 14), ‘SRT is primarily concerned with understanding how
categories of oppression (such as gender, race, and ableism) are coproduced in
simultaneity with the production of surplus value’, implying that gender, race,
etc. are present at the highest level of abstraction of Marx’s analysis of
capital, and denying the existence of other systems of oppression. This denial
is made more explicit in David McNally’s (2018: 96) rejection of ‘the
ontological atomism inherent in the founding formulations of intersectionality
theory: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression
that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other.’ Yet patriarchy, the
subjugation of conquered peoples, and the caste system – which remains
so all-pervasive that Svati Shah (2023) characterises production relations in
modern India as ‘caste capitalism’ – predate
capitalism; subsuming such systems of oppression under capitalism precludes an
understanding of the complex ways in which they interact with capitalism, and
undermines struggles against them.
By
rejecting the most important gains made by the domestic labour and
intersectionality debates, SRT returns to a time when left-wing white male
academics could say that the struggle against capitalism is the only one that
counts, albeit with an ‘add-and-stir’ policy to sexism, racism, etc.
Alessandra Mezzadri (2022) also criticises its narrow focus on waged labour,
arguing that ‘If capital is defined based on the dominance of labour-surplus
extraction, wage-labour stops being the only form in which exploitation may
manifest’, and therefore the vast number of ‘wageless’ workers exploited by
capital around the world need to be included. Indeed, the focus on racism is
also West-centric, leaving out the Russian ethnic supremacism V.I. Lenin hated
so much and dubbed ‘great Russian chauvinism,’ Gulf Arab racism against South
Asians and Africans, Japanese racism against Chinese and Koreans that peaked
during World War II, Han Chinese racism against Uighurs and Tibetans, and so
on. All these determinations would have to be added to arrive at the totality
of contemporary global social relations.
Conclusion
If the definition of ‘revolutionary
socialism’ is expanded to mean a society free not just of capitalism but of all
forms of oppression, and ‘class struggle’ is the struggle to establish it, then
the working-class family, a unit normally but not necessarily bound together by
biological kinship and heterosexual marriage, is at the centre of it. Struggles
against capitalism and the state are certainly indispensable: for wages
sufficient to maintain a decent standard of living, drastically shorter working
hours to increase free time as well as employment, decent affordable housing
supplied with electricity, potable water and sanitation, free healthcare,
education and social care for all who need it, and state contributions to
community kitchens, laundries, etc. performing some of the labour now performed
in the home; and against International Financial Institutions like the IMF, which
in collusion with corrupt governments channel money from working-class families
into the pockets of the rich; militarism and wars of aggression, which destroy
lives, homes and essential infrastructure; and corporations and governments
promoting climate change, which devastates lives, homes and livelihoods by causing
droughts, wildfires, floods, and landslides.
However, struggles against patriarchy are
equally critical: to outlaw violent abuse (domestic violence, sexual
harassment, rape, FGM, femicide, etc.) and replace authoritarian relations
between men and women, adults and children, with relations of mutual respect
and love; against a gender division of labour that assigns a disproportionate
amount of emotional and caring work to women and girls, limiting their
development of other abilities while hindering boys and men from developing the
skills and intelligence required for caring work; and for women’s control over their
own bodies, including what Black feminists have called ‘reproductive justice,’
which would not only allow women to decide if and when to have babies but also
support them when they have them (Hensman, 2020: 167, 182n.3). Some of these goals
entail battling the state and even regime change in cases like
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, but they cannot be achieved without struggles
at the point of production of human beings – the home – to change relations
within the family.
Challenging the gender division of labour
requires special attention. While only people assigned female at birth are
capable of pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding, all other activities can
be performed by people of any gender. The quality of childcare is critical. Countless
studies document the dreadful effect on children of violence and neglect, but milder
forms of disadvantage can also damage them. Some studies of institutionalised
children have been contaminated by physical and social deprivation, but studies
in which the only deprivation suffered by children below the age of two years
was the lack of physical affection and a constant caregiver showed that years
later, many still suffered from competitiveness and hostility to peers and
difficulty forming close friendships with them (Hodges 1996). It is through
early attachment to and non-verbal communication with stable caregivers that
children learn they are recognised and loved as unique individuals and learn to
love themselves; develop the capacity to love others without feeling the need
to compete with, dominate or annihilate anyone; and develop their imagination
and sense of justice. This requires a substantial commitment of time and
attention on the part of caregivers, which brings us back to the crucial
importance of reproductive justice. Bringing up children to resist all forms of
oppression is a critical component of class struggle.
Notes
[1] One way of demonstrating this would be to ask:
is it possible for someone else to substitute for a person in this activity or
not? If someone else eats all my meals for me, I would die of
starvation, whereas if someone else cooks all my meals for me, I would
not.
[2]
I
haven’t come across a reference to Domitila’s testimony in Western
contributions to the domestic labour debate, but it resonated among socialist
feminists halfway across the world in India.
[3]
In India in the 1970s, socialist feminist activists
formed several autonomous groups to read and discuss writings by radical
feminists, finding that although they might have racial and class biases, they also
offered insights which Marxist analyses lacked. I provide a fictional rendering
of the complex situations confronting these activists in my novel To Do
Something Beautiful (Hensman 2018).
[4] Members of the group included Cheryl Clarke, Demita
Frazier, Gloria Akasha Hull, Audre Lorde, Chirlane McCray, Margo Okazawa-Rey,
Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith.
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(This is Chapter 9 of Mode of Production and the Historiography of
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