At the heart of the class struggle under capitalism is the fact that for capital, labour-power (the capacity to labour) is merely an element of production and source of profit, whereas for workers, it is inseparable from themselves as living human beings. Struggles over wages, the duration and conditions of wage-work and control over it have been recognised by Marxists as important aspects of class struggle; yet the relations and conditions under which labour-power is produced have received far less attention, except from Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists. Given the centrality of labour-power to capitalism – since as the only commodity that can produce surplus value over and above its own value, and therefore profit, it is the sine qua non of accumulation – it is somewhat surprising that Marx nowhere describes its production. Engels recognised the existence of domestic labour and the gendered relations within it, but did not take the analysis further. The domestic labour debate of the 1970s was an attempt to fill this gap, but left many of the crucial issues unresolved.
Marx and Engels on Domestic Labour
Marx comes closest to describing the production of labour-power 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, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes this, 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 (exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power) 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: 274–276).
Marx gives examples of means of subsistence like food and fuel, which need to be replaced daily, while others like clothes and furniture can be purchased at longer intervals. But that is all. Unlike his detailed 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. He assumes that 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, gave it a bath, and so on and so forth.
The home is therefore a site of individual consumption but also of production;[2] both are necessary for the production of labour-power. In fact, Marx’s confusion of production with individual consumption leads to bizarre contradictions. For example, he writes of domestic labour that:
The largest part of society, that is to say the working class, must incidentally perform this kind of labour for itself; but it is only able to perform it when it has laboured ‘productively’. It can only cook meat for itself when it has produced a wage with which to pay for the meat. (Marx, 1963: 161).
If we generalise this proposition to all commodities, it would state that until a commodity has been sold, it cannot be produced. But commodities are usually sold only after they have been produced, and this is especially true of labour-power, which cannot be sold for the first time until many hundreds of hours of labour-time have been spent on its production, as Marx recognises elsewhere: ‘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, emphasis added).
Under capitalism, according to Marx, labour is either productive – in the sense that it directly produces surplus value – or unproductive, in the sense that it is exchanged with capitalists’ revenue or workers’ wages, and does not produce surplus value (Marx, 1976: 1038–1039). According to this definition, domestic labour is unproductive. However, when analysing luxury production, Marx implicitly makes a distinction between socially useful reproductive labour producing means of production and labour-power, which re-enter capitalist production, and unreproductive labour, producing products which do not re-enter production (Marx, 1976: 1045–1046). Seen from this standpoint, domestic labour is socially useful reproductive labour. (Marx is here referring to social, not biological, reproduction, although biological reproduction, without which there would be no new workers to replace those who die, is a necessary element of social reproduction.)
Engels not only recognised the existence of domestic work and the gender division of labour within it, but even observed that the reversal of gender roles during the industrial revolution, and the distress caused by it, occurred ‘because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning’ (1975: 439). He did not carry the analysis further, however.
The Debate of the 1970s
The intensive debate around domestic labour (i.e. housework and childcare) that erupted in the 1970s developed the analysis considerably. Let us look at the issues taken up which throw light on the production of labour-power. Most participants in the debate agreed that domestic labour is socially useful – i.e. it is useful not just to other members of the family, but to society as a whole – and that it transfers the (exchange)-value of the commodities bought with the wage to the end product, labour-power. But does it also create value?
According to Margaret Coulson, Branka Magas and Hilary Wainwright (1975), domestic labour does not create value because only wage-labour produces (exchange)-value, but this would mean that the labour of millions of petty commodity producers (farmers, artisans, etc.) produces no value, and contradict the whole starting-point of Marx’s analysis of capital, namely the determination of the value of the commodity by all the labour-time socially necessary for its production (Marx, 1976: 129, 294). For Margaret Benston (1969), Jean Gardiner, Susan Himmelweit and Maureen Mackintosh (1975), Susan Himmelweit and Simon Mohun (1977), and Lise Vogel (2013: 23), ‘domestic labour in capitalist societies does not take the social form of value-producing labour’. Vogel argues convincingly that unwaged domestic labour is necessary for the production of labour-power (2013: 149, 158–159), yet following Paul Smith (1978: 211) reiterates 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); in other words, it is not abstract value-producing labour, despite the fact that the labour-power which it has contributed to producing is then sold as a commodity to capitalists.
The assumption here 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, it would follow that the labour-power of the worker who gets her washing done at a laundry has 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 that the labour-power of a worker who hires a housekeeper to wash, clean, cook and do the washing-up has a much 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. Marx often makes this mistake (Hensman, 1977), but he corrects himself when he asserts that ‘the value of each commodity is determined by… the labour-time socially necessary to produce it…’ (Marx, 1976: 293), and ‘The value of labour-power 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).
Not everything that is done in the home contributes to the production of labour-power: the assumption that it does leads to the opposite error. 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, and this is reproductive labour in the sense that it makes an essential contribution to social reproduction. Thus the labour-power of the worker who hires a housekeeper to perform domestic tasks and that of the worker whose wife performs the same tasks have the same value; in effect, the wages of both men are sufficient to pay for another person to do all this work, and it makes no difference whether this person is a housekeeper whom he pays or a wife whom he supports (Seccombe, 1973: 10).
Once we acknowledge that domestic labour contributes to the value of labour-power, the neat division of the working day in the workplace into necessary labour, which reproduces labour-power, and surplus labour, which is appropriated by the capitalist, collapses. The equation becomes even more complex if the generational reproduction of labour-power and the contribution of state education and healthcare are brought into the picture. The rate of surplus value would then have to be calculated taking into account all the necessary labour (in the workplace as well as the home) done by members of the household that is the unit of production of labour-power, and all the payments made by the capitalist, not only by way of wages, but also in contributions to services such as state education and healthcare.
Founding members of the Wages for Housework campaign Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1972), Silvia Federici (1975) and Leopoldina Fortunati (1981/1995) argue that domestic labour produces not only value but also surplus value. Does it? A housewife is not paid wages, but her labour is paid for out of her husband’s wage, so his employer pays her indirectly. If the amount paid for her labour is the same as or more than what her husband would have to pay to buy the services she performs on the market, then she is not contributing to surplus value. (However, if her husband keeps for himself part of the amount paid by the employer for her labour, he would be exploiting her.) If the amount paid for her labour by her husband’s employer is less than the value of the services she performs, that means the employer is keeping part of what he would otherwise have had to pay out as wages, and her labour is therefore contributing indirectly to his surplus value.
Therefore, although domestic labour does not directly produce surplus value, it is true that when its duration is extended unduly, it allows extra surplus value to be appropriated by subsidising the production of labour-power. The Bolivian women’s leader and miner’s wife Domitila Barrios de Chungara made a precise calculation of this, comparing 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).
Thus, if a miner’s wife died and the man was compelled to buy on the market the services that she had performed, his wage would not have been sufficient, showing that it was less than the value of labour-power. The women’s surplus labour allowed the mine owner to appropriate more surplus value than he would otherwise have been able to; more generally, discounting the value produced by domestic labour helps capitalists to reduce the price of labour-power below its value. But it is impossible to see this effect so long as the production of labour-power (and its value) is seen solely as the activity of waged workers. Only if it is seen as the collective product of the unit of production of labour-power – the working-class household – is it possible to calculate the real rate of surplus value.
The worker sells his or her labour-power for a specified period of time, just as the rent for a flat is for a specified period of time. If a tenant can rent one flat for two weeks with a certain amount of money, but can rent another flat for three weeks with the same amount of money, the latter rent is only two-thirds of the former. Similarly, if one capitalist pays a certain wage for an eight-hour working day while another pays the same wage for a twelve-hour working day, the latter wage is only two-thirds of the former. If working hours are extended beyond a certain point, the price of labour-power falls below its value even if the wage is kept constant (Marx 1976: 343). This calculation cannot be accurate unless all the hours worked by all the members of the family in order to produce labour-power are taken into account.
Labour-power is not a purely physiological entity. ‘In contrast… with the case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element’ (Marx, 1976: 275). Wages must enable the working class to live at an acceptable standard of living. Ensuring that the price of labour-power does not fall below its value, and setting this value at an acceptable level, are both products of working-class struggle. The ‘historical and moral’ element would differ from one society to another, but it seems reasonable to set the minimum value at a level where income covers basic requirements of food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education; where the minimum age for employment complies with the International Labour Organisation norm of fifteen years; and where adults get at least eleven or twelve hours per working day for sleep and recreation, plus paid weekly days off, annual leave and holidays.
Multiple wage-earners
What happens when there are two or more wage-earners in the family? We can examine this by looking at a family consisting of a man, a woman, and their three children: a girl and boy who are school-going and a toddler. In situation A, the man is able to support his wife and children with his wage. The woman does the housework and cares for the toddler; she is at home when the other children come home from school, and can spend time with them even while she does other chores. In situation B, wages are lower, and the man and woman both need to engage in wage-labour in order to make ends meet. The woman may become a homeworker, or the toddler may be left with grandparents while she is out at work, in which case the grandparents’ labour too would contribute to the value of the family’s labour-power. The woman would have to do domestic labour as well as wage-labour, so her working hours would be extended, and if wages go down further, they would be extended even more: Amrita Chhachhi (2005: 247–249) showed that in response to a cut in real wages between 1994–95 and 1999–2000, the total time expended on wage-labour and domestic labour by women workers in Delhi increased from 13–14 hours to 16–17 hours a day, as they spent more time shopping around for the cheapest goods, queuing up at the ration shop, and cleaning inferior rice. The family’s standard of living may not have fallen, but the price of their labour-power had fallen, because they now had to work more hours collectively in order to reproduce it.
In situation C, the girl is taken out of school to do the housework and care for the toddler while her parents are out at work. In this case, not only has the price of labour-power fallen due to the longer hours worked collectively in order to reproduce it, but the standard of living has fallen too, because the girl is not getting an education. Finally, in situation D, the boy may be taken out of school and sent out to work to supplement the family income: yet another fall in the standard of living and in the price of labour-power, which is by now well below its value. At each of these stages, the capitalist class as a whole extracts more surplus value out of this household, embodied in the additional surplus value extracted by the employers of the man, the woman and the boy, and the reduction in payments for the education of the two older children.
Situation D was the predominant one when Marx was analysing capital in the nineteenth century: ‘everywhere, except in the metallurgical industries, young persons (under 18), women and children form by far the most preponderant element in the factory personnel’(Marx, 1976: 577); even a steel and iron works ‘employs 500 boys under 18, and of these about a third, or 170, are under the age of 13’(Marx, 1976: 371). Left to itself, capital’s ‘werewolf-like hunger for surplus value’ (Marx, 1976: 353) pushed wages down so low that all members of the family, excluding only the smallest children, worked long hours in wage-labour simply in order to survive. If at any time it needed to retrench workers, it dismissed men rather than women and children. The state, acting in the interests of capital, used legislation to force reluctant workers to labour long hours; it was only when capitalists extended these hours to such an extent that it ‘produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself’ (Marx, 1976: 376) – in other words, when the supply of labour-power for capital was threatened – that the state stepped in again to limit working hours and ensure that labour-power was not ‘maintained and developed only in a crippled state’; in such a situation, the price of labour-power is below its value, since ‘the value of every commodity is determined by the labour-time required to provide it in its normal quality’ (Marx, 1976: 277, emphasis added).
In the twenty-first century, studies in the United States and OECD countries showed that the majority of families with minor children were dual-earner ones, and the employment of married women was increasing (Pew Research Center, 2015; OECD, 2011: 38). The employment of mothers is not necessarily a consequence of falling real wages: many women, especially once their children go to school, prefer going out to work rather than staying at home and being dependent on a partner’s wage. However, in most cases a second wage is needed to maintain the standard of living, and neoliberalism has increased the total number of hours that have to be worked in order to reproduce labour-power by extending working hours, slashing social security and welfare benefits, and raising the retirement age.
In Third World countries, with informalisation and neoliberalism attacking the living standards even of the small section of the working class which had earlier won decent wages, the crisis in the reproduction of labour-power is dire. Child labour is rampant, and hundreds of millions of migrants, both within and between countries, split families apart. Men may migrate, leaving their families behind; although their remittances contribute to the production of labour-power, their wives and other relatives must contribute not just domestic labour but also, often, agricultural labour. Women who migrate to work in other parts of the country or abroad are often verbally, physically and sexually abused; such cases are reported occasionally, but most are unreported, and serious crimes go unpunished. Women migrant workers in foreign countries are especially vulnerable because they may not speak the language of the country where they work or know anyone to whom they can turn for help, may be illegal immigrants or on visas that allow them to work only for a specified employer, and may have had their passports confiscated by employers (Heyzer et al., 1992; Young, 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003). Finally, there are cases where both parents migrate, leaving children with grandparents or other carers. The impact of parental migration on children is mixed. Remittances, especially from fathers working abroad, help to feed and educate children. However, the migration of mothers or both parents may have adverse effects on the children’s education, health and emotional well-being; it may expose children, especially girls, to physical or sexual abuse by fathers or other male relatives, or neglect by fathers or grandparents, with some cases of girls dropping out of school to take up the domestic labour formerly performed by their mothers (Jayasuriya and Opeskin, 2015: 608–616).
Unaccompanied migrant children, who are fleeing an abusive home or violent conflict or have been recruited by an ‘employment agency’ which may in fact be engaged in trafficking, are at greatest risk of ending up as industrial, domestic, or sex workers in slave-like and extremely abusive conditions (Van de Glind and Kou, 2013). Children are less likely to face abuse when they migrate for work along with their parents, but may then be subjected to long working hours and hazardous working conditions. We can identify a situation E, where the girl who was staying at home to do the housework and look after the toddler is now additionally engaged in wage-labour. This can result in horrific accidents, like the case where a ten-year-old brick-kiln worker ran to catch her little sister, who had stepped onto the weak plastic lid of the furnace; both girls fell in and were burnt alive (Banerjee, 2016). Living in shacks or tents that barely protect them from the elements, without running water, sanitation, electricity, or access to healthcare, these families are exposed to serious health risks. For some working children this is forced labour, for others their contribution to the survival of their family is a labour of love, and for many it is a combination of the two, but in all cases it is performed at a heavy cost to themselves.
In India at the beginning of the 21st century, malnutrition and ill health among informal workers resulted in a maternal mortality rate of 540 per 100,000 live births. Maternal malnutrition resulted in 30% of infants with ‘low birth weight’, creating health risks that would last the rest of their lives. The infant mortality rate was 67 and under-five mortality rate 93; 47% of under-five-year-olds were severely or moderately malnourished, resulting in a large number of children dying or becoming disabled as a result of contracting preventable and curable diseases (UNICEF, 2004: Tables 1, 2, 5 and 8; Krishnakumar, 2004; Pelletier et al., 1995). In other words, exceedingly low wages, long working hours and unhealthy working conditions resulted in the production of labour-power in a crippled state.
The working-class family
Most contributors to the domestic labour debate explained women’s full-time domestic labour in working-class families by its usefulness to capital: Dalla Costa and James (1972), Federici (1975) and Fortunati (1981/1995) argued that it produces surplus value; Veronica Beechey (1977, 1978) that housewives constitute a reserve army of cheap labour; and Zillah Eisenstein (1978) that capitalism needs patriarchy in order to operate efficiently. Yet if capital needs women’s full-time domestic labour, why would it undermine the working-class family so grievously during the industrial revolution? Why is it that in the twenty-first century, with technology vastly reducing the demand for labour-power while globalisation and migration guarantee a plentiful supply of it, neoliberal attacks on the working-class family are so rampant? Jane Humphries argues that ‘the endurance of the family reflects a struggle by the working class for popular ways of meeting the needs of non-labouring comrades within a capitalist environment’ (1977: 250). It was workers who, through their struggles for a family wage, abolition of child labour, and restriction of working hours, won back time and space for the family, including fictive kin.
So was the reconstitution of the working-class family a victory or defeat for women in particular? The working class as a whole? The answer to these questions, unsatisfactory though it may seem, is ‘both’. It is indisputable that ‘the retreat of certain family members from the labour force, in conjunction with an organized attempt to secure a “family wage”’ (Humphries, 1977: 252), resulted in a very welcome rise in the standard of living. Men might have taken the lead in this struggle, and one of their objectives might have been to eliminate competition for jobs from women; but some women workers too were happy to escape from heavy labour and have more time to spend on home-making, like the woman miner who was glad she had left her job because she did not have to come home exhausted from a day’s wage-labour before doing domestic work (Pinchbeck, 1930: 269). While children often want to help with domestic work, and both girls and boys should be encouraged to do so, the withdrawal of children from the labour market is an unmixed blessing, not only securing for them adequate time for rest, play and education, but also democratising the family and increasing the bargaining power of adult male and female workers (Hensman, 2011: 194–201). Humphries (1977: 254–256) also points to cases where family ties can promote class solidarity and class struggles. These are gains.
Yet the development of the male bread-winner/family-wage norm was also a defeat for working-class women, and thus for the working class as a whole. Women had entered the capitalist labour market as cheap labour due to patriarchy in the pre-capitalist family, and being pushed out of employment by male-dominated unions and classified as dependants or supplementary wage-earners reinforced this position. For large numbers of women-headed households, the acute shortage of decently-paid employment for women means there is no alternative to poverty. Moreover, even when husband and wife are earning, there is no basis for the assumption that his wage pays for basic subsistence while hers is supplementary: indeed, in such situations, as Diane Elson (1995: 183–184) and Sepali Kottegoda (2004: 137–155) point out, women’s wages are usually spent entirely in ensuring family survival, while a variable portion of men’s wages is spent on alcohol, tobacco, gambling and other activities. So there is a negative element in the way that the demand for a ‘family wage’ has been posed, fought for, and won, as Michele Barrett and Mary MacIntosh (1980) and Heidi Hartmann (1981: 20–21) argue: it is oppressive to women, and also disadvantageous to their dependants if they have any (Barrett, 1980: 26–27).
Capitalism and ‘patriarchy’
Ann Ferguson and Nancy Folbre (1981: 321–323) explain that the patriarchal family prevailed in pre-capitalist agricultural societies, where having a large number of children was an asset, child mortality was high, and women breast-fed each child for a year or more; given that they would spend up to twenty years of their lives in childbearing and breast-feeding, it was more efficient for them to do other household tasks as well. But these relations are revolutionised by capitalism. Even in many Third World countries, family planning programmes have reduced the birth rate; child mortality, while still high, is being reduced; and a combination of these two developments means that women need not spend more than two or three years of their lives in child-bearing and breast-feeding. In this context, as Barrett (1980: 16) points out, ‘patriarchy’ comes to mean something different, namely male domination rather than relations of production.[3] Once working-class struggles have won space and time for family life and used it to re-establish male-dominated families, capital makes use of this division, as it makes use of other divisions in the working class, to designate some workers (in this case women) as cheap labour, and to undermine solidarity.
Interviews with pharmaceutical women workers in Bombay in the 1980s revealed a complex dialectic between capital and labour over the constitution of the working-class family. Single young women were recruited in large numbers to work on the packing lines from the 1940s onward. They played an active role in the employees’ unions in these factories, fighting alongside male workers to win struggles against the marriage bar and for equal pay, maternity benefits and workplace childcare. Management retaliated by automating their work, introducing round-the-clock shift-working, and replacing women with men when they retired. It appears that capitalists prefer to employ women when their labour-power is cheaper than men’s, but prefer men once women win rights that make their labour-power more expensive: a pursuit of profit that is typical of capitalist exploitation. On the other hand, many women workers found that after marriage they had difficulty participating actively in the union due to domestic labour commitments, objections from husbands, and prejudice from men in the workplace: typical forms of male domination. Most women wanted both their jobs and family life, including protection from night work, as well as shorter working hours and equality (Hensman, 2011: 214–217, 233–234).
Feminist Marxists who argue that the oppression of women in capitalist society is rooted in capitalism alone are known as ‘unitary’ theorists. In a systematic analysis of this kind, Vogel argues that socialist feminists must answer the questions, ‘What is the root of women’s oppression? How can its cross-class and transhistorical character be understood theoretically?’ (2013: 7). Yet her suggestion that it is women’s ‘differential role in the reproduction of labour-power that lies at the root of their oppression in class-society’ (Vogel 2013: 150) applies only to the labouring classes, and her proposal that the struggle for equal rights can bring together women from different classes and sectors applies only to capitalist society (2013: 174–176). She never explains how cross-class and transhistorical forms of oppression like violence against women, including sexual assault and femicide, can be rooted in capitalism.
On the other side, Marxist feminists who believe that women’s oppression under capitalism stems from both capitalist relations of production and gender relations which they call ‘patriarchal’, have been characterised as ‘dual systems’ theorists, although in principle their framework can be extended to include other systems of institutionalised oppression like race and caste. Batya Weinbaum (1978: 43, 29–30) attributed Marx’s failure to identify and analyse domestic labour as a process of production to his ‘patriarchal position’, and argued that working-class women would benefit, along with other women, from a ‘feminist revolution’ against domestic violence and sexual assault and for equal rights and control over their fertility and sexuality; however, they would find themselves fighting alongside working-class men and against more wealthy women in the struggle for higher wages, better working conditions, shorter hours, and welfare benefits that require higher taxes to be levied on the rich. This class division was highlighted by the Buenos Aires Housewives’ Movement, according to which ‘a housewife isn’t a wealthy woman who doesn’t work inside or outside the house, but only orders another woman to do it,’ and the Chilean working-class Movement of Women Pobladoras, which resented middle-class feminists who ‘pay their domestic employees a miserable wage while they’re having their chats about equality’ (Fisher, 1993: 148, 197).
Perhaps the position of working-class women is best captured by the notion of ‘intersectionality’ between different relations of oppression, first developed by African-American feminists, which would suggest that the oppression of working-class women is distinct from that of both working-class men and upper- or middle-class women.[4] The production of labour-power entails both class and gender oppression. How can these be addressed?
Mechanisation, commercialisation, state contributions and socialisation
Moving towards a resolution of this issue requires us to take a closer look at the work performed in the home. It can be divided into work which results in a product that is distinct from a person (like cooking a meal or washing clothes), and work whose product is inseparable from a person (like childcare).
The first kind of production can be mechanised by using labour-saving devices, or taken over by capitalism, thus reducing the workload in the home. (Cleaning is a special case. There is not much scope for mass-production techniques here; it is labour-intensive work even with modern appliances. However, it can be taken over by capitalism, as shown by the rise of cleaning firms.) These processes have probably gone as far as they can go in developed countries and possibly even too far, substituting not only ready-made for home-baked bread and frozen vegetables for fresh ones, but also fast foods of doubtful nutritional value for more nutritious cooked meals. The same cannot be said for developing countries. In India, refrigerators are common among better-paid employees and washing machines somewhat less common, but neither are an option for millions of proletarian households in rural areas and urban shanty-towns which have no regular power supply. Many women spend hours each day collecting water. They sometimes also collect fuel for cooking on primitive stoves, the smoke from which causes respiratory problems in the ill-ventilated shacks they inhabit. Lack of sanitation further undermines the reproduction of labour-power by causing widespread illness and death from gastrointestinal diseases.
This is an area where working-class struggles should force the state to provide such families with housing, electricity, potable running water, sanitation, and modern stoves, which would enormously reduce the time and effort spent on domestic labour as well as avoidable sickness and death. As for reducing domestic labour by buying on the market products formerly made in the home, in many Third World countries the abject poverty of most working-class families prevents them from doing so; but the fact that even in these countries such products are accessible to unionised workers in the formal sector demonstrates the possibility of reducing domestic labour by fighting for higher wages. Campaigns for increased taxation of the rich and corporations in order to provide more resources for the reproduction of labour-power, and against military spending and wars of aggression which slash these resources and destroy the human beings who embody labour-power, are also important.
The demand that the value produced by domestic labour be recognised – for example in statistics such as GDP, settlements on divorce, and allocating pensions to women – is an important one, helping to make this vast amount of labour visible. Counting the time spent in domestic labour as part of the working day would make it clear that women workers in particular have an inordinately long working day. Shortening wage-labour hours to allow for domestic labour would simultaneously improve productivity and expand employment.
The second kind of domestic labour is caring work, where mechanisation is not an option: caring is by its nature labour-intensive. Although the majority of people needing care are children (since everyone begins life as a child), there are also adults who need it. Help with childcare and care of sick, disabled and old people is essential if the burden of domestic labour is to be reduced; sick people need specialised treatment, children need an education, and people with disabilities need support. Provision of these services by the state should make it possible for workers performing them to have decent employment conditions without making the services unaffordable for working-class households.
Radical attempts to socialise housework after the Russian and Chinese revolutions were welcomed by women; in fact, in China, women themselves took the initiative in organising community kitchens, laundries, crèches, cleaning services and repair workshops, thus socialising many of the tasks performed in the home and reducing domestic labour. However, in the Soviet Union, attempts to replace individual homes with communal buildings were unsuccessful because their inhabitants carved out of them spaces for individual families. A more cautious approach in China left families with individual homes (Broyelle, 1977: 46–55).
A solution to the problem of childcare proposed by Lilina Zinoviev shortly after the Russian revolution was state-run child-rearing:
‘Our task now is to oblige the mother to give her
children to us – to the Soviet State.’ The idea was taken up in Kollontai’s
formulation: ‘Children are the State’s concern. She added: ‘The social
obligation of motherhood consists primarily in producing a healthy and
fit-for-life child… Her second obligation is to feed the baby at her own breast’.
(Broyelle, 1977: 71)
In a similar vein, Simone de Beauvoir suggested that ‘it would… be desirable for the child to be left to his parents infinitely less than at present, and for his studies and his diversions to be carried on… under the direction of adults whose bonds with him would be impersonal and pure’ (1997: 539), and Shulamith Firestone (1970) argued that women’s liberation requires the application of modern technology to the production of children in order to free women from child-bearing and breast-feeding. In the view of Bolshevik theorists, who shared the capitalist devaluation of the skills involved in domestic labour, ‘the problems posed by children appeared almost identical to those of housework. Their solutions therefore were roughly the same’ (Goldman, 1993: 11–12).
However, the application of mass-production techniques to childcare, unlike their application to cooking and laundering, had drawbacks. Sheila Rowbotham (1974: 168) reports that small children left in full-time nurseries in Russia were found to be more backward than those looked after at home. Another problem, where day-and-night nurseries were tried out in Russia and China, was that women themselves wanted more contact with their children (Rowbotham, 1974: 196; Dunayevskaya, 2019: 73–74). These observations suggest that although psychiatrists like John Bowlby (1965) have been criticised for promoting the model of a nuclear family with a rigid gender division of labour, this does not invalidate the evidence they present that the intellectual, emotional and social development of children suffers unless they receive sustained attention from caregivers who love them. A loving family – defined as a relatively small unit, not necessarily based on biological relations or heterosexual marriage – may have a necessary place in the production of human beings. This does not mean that childcare cannot be socialised at all. However, good-quality socialised care requires a high ratio of caregivers to children being cared for, which makes it expensive. Eli Zaretsky (1982) suggests this is why under capitalism it is not provided without a struggle by both feminists and the labour movement.
The persistence of the gender division of labour
The fact that caring and nurturing continue to be undervalued and seen as ‘women’s work’ despite decades of feminism and centuries of the labour movement needs to be explained. One strand of the explanation is constituted by attempts within working-class movements to eliminate competition between women and men by reinforcing relationships of domination over women by men. Although Marx did not advocate such domination, he helped to create the basis for it by ignoring the socially necessary caring work traditionally done by women.
The other strand is what Linda Gordon describes as ‘a great intellectual and cultural ambivalence within feminism,’ in that it ‘represented both the highest development of liberal individualism and also a critique of liberal individualism’ (1982: 45). The bourgeois ideology of individualism is often confused with the development of individuality, but individualism is as destructive of the full development of individuality as authoritarianism and patriarchy, which crush individuality in a more obvious way. Individuality can develop in a child only if (s)he is surrounded by the loving attention of other human beings; children completely deprived of this – wolf children, for example – fail to develop their human potentialities, while the development of children who are deprived of adequate interaction of this type is severely retarded. Yet providing unstinted love and attention inevitably puts the giver at a disadvantage in a competitive market, and would therefore be ruled out in a purely market-driven economy.
This contradiction within bourgeois ideology – the fact that taken to its logical conclusion it threatens bourgeois society with extinction, and therefore the reproduction of competitive individualism depends on its opposite: the reproduction of self-sacrificing women – is what leads to the right-wing insistence on the family as a separate realm from which the logic of capital is excluded (Thorne, 1982: 19). Carol Gilligan (1993: 164–165) describes how the division is ensured by socialising boys into an ethic of justice based on individual rights, and girls into an ethic of care based on providing for the needs of others, and this happens in working-class as well as bourgeois families. Feminists correctly insist on claiming equal rights for women as individuals, but even among Marxist feminists this is often at the cost of devaluing caring and nurturing; what is necessary, rather, is to see an ethic of rights and justice as complementary to an ethic of compassion and care, and to socialise girls as well as boys using both moral ideologies (Gilligan, 1993). After all, from the standpoint of socialist principles, freely-performed caring conforms to Marx’s ideal of work that is simultaneously an expression of oneself and directly for the satisfaction of another’s need (Marx, 1975: 277–278); therefore, recognising its importance is crucial to the struggle against bourgeois ideology.
The gender division of labour stunts both those involved in round-the-clock caring work, who never get a chance to exercise other skills and abilities, and those who do not engage in it at all, who never develop what Sara Ruddick (1982) characterises as the skills and intelligence required for this work; what is needed, therefore, is an understanding within the labour movement of the value of caring work and the skills and intelligence required for it, and an acknowledgement that these need to be fostered in all human beings. The practical outcome would be movement towards an equal sharing of nurturing between men and women, and a struggle for conditions which would make that possible.
Conclusion
What, then, can be done to solve the problems for the working-class struggle posed by domestic labour under capitalism? Socialist feminists like Gardiner et al. (1975) have suggested that the working-class family helps to subordinate the working class to capital, and this is indeed true if it is male-dominated. Therefore, eliminating violent and authoritarian relationships between men and women, adults and children in working-class families is essential if they are to become part of the struggle against capitalism. Without this, the labour movement will continue to be subordinated to capital, since, as Domitila barrios de Chungara puts it,
the first battle to be won is to let the woman, the man, the children participate in the struggle of the working class, so that the home can become a stronghold that the enemy can’t overcome. Because if you have the enemy inside your own house, then it’s just one more weapon that our common enemy can use toward a dangerous end. (Barrios de Chungara with Viezzer, 1978: 36).
The struggle for women to control their fertility and sexuality dictates a need for healthcare that ensures safe pregnancy and childbirth, as well as access to safe and effective contraception and medical termination of unwanted pregnancies, which would enable women to have babies only if they want them; this would also help to ensure that children are loved and wanted.
The struggle against the gender division of labour is crucial. The only biological basis for it is the fact that women are capable of child-bearing and breast-feeding whereas men are not. As for other aspects of the gender division of labour, there is no evidence that they have any biological basis, since all the tasks can be performed by either men or women, and competence depends not on gender but on inclination and acquired skills.
Socialising some caring work helps to reduce the huge burden now carried mainly by women within the family, but does not by itself eliminate the gender division of labour, since it is quite possible that carers in the socialised facilities are mainly women, nurturing which continues to be done in the home is done by women, and women continue to be treated as cheap labour. A study of employed men’s participation in housework and childcare between 1965 and 2003 in twenty countries found an average increase of six hours per week over this period, yet globally women continued to perform two to ten times more caregiving and domestic work than men (Levtov et al., 2015: 17–18).
Changing this situation would require challenging the gender division of labour practically and ideologically. Practical measures would include eliminating the gender division of labour in employment; equal pay and protection from night work for both women and men, as Sheila Lewenhak (1977: 287) proposes; the equal sharing of domestic labour between men and women, and leave provisions that allow for this; provision of spaces for collective childcare, and cr̬ches and nurseries for children whose parents need help with childcare; sheltered accommodation or home care for adults who need it; shorter working hours; and regular part-time jobs with pro rata benefits Рif possible with flexible working hours to suit the needs of employees Рfor both men and women who have caring responsibilities (cf. Molyneux, 1979: 27). It would also require demanding that a much larger proportion of social labour time be allocated to this work, which in a capitalist society means state funding, and a reversal of neoliberal assaults on working-class living standards. State support for community kitchens serving cheap, nutritious and tasty food, especially in Third World countries, would help to alleviate widespread malnutrition while also reducing the burden of domestic labour.
However, the ideological struggle in a sense has priority, because without winning that, the practical struggle will not be won. This would entail combating the liberal individualist devaluation of caring and nurturing, and affirming that such work should be shared by women and men. Hartmann points out that women have an advantage in this struggle, to the extent that they recognise ‘both human needs for nurturance, sharing and growth, and the potential for meeting those needs in a non-hierarchical, nonpatriarchal society’ (1981: 33), but it can only be won by the working class as a whole.
Given the centrality of labour-power to the accumulation of capital, struggles to transform the production of labour-power as a commodity into the production of physically and psychologically healthy, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, loving, caring human beings is an absolutely vital part of the class struggle against capitalism. Myriads of such struggles are taking place around the world, and researching, documenting and analysing them so that others can learn from their successes and failures would be an extremely useful contribution to the debate on domestic labour as well as to the struggles themselves.
Notes
[1] This is an analysis of domestic labour and the production of labour-power, and of the workers in which it is embodied, under capitalism. It does not include domestic labour in other classes or other modes of production, nor does it aim to explain the oppression of women.
[2] 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. Thus, in general, if it is possible to substitute one person for another in some activity, it is a process of production, while if that is not possible, it is a process of individual consumption.
[3] The closest Marx comes to describing patriarchal production relations is when he characterises the ‘mode of production’ of ‘small-holding peasants’ in France, isolated from one another as well as from the rest of society, as akin to the way in which ‘potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes’ (Marx, 1852: 62). Obviously ‘patriarchy’ in the working-class family means something radically different.
[4] Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) was the first to coin the term ‘intersectionality’, but the notion of the intersection of multiple, simultaneous oppressions had already been articulated by the Combahee River Collective (1977) and Angela Davis (1983).
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