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 Capitalism: Gender, Race and Eurocentrism edited by Jokubas Salyga and Kayhan Valadbaygi, pp. 181–200.)
