File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 232


Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 22:42:13 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Re: Abolish domestic work


In message <199710121541_MC2-23AA-D3EA-AT-compuserve.com>, james m blaut
<70671.2032-AT-CompuServe.COM> writes
>According to Hugh Rodwell, and many other political-economy
>fundamentalists, unemployed women in the household are not in the working
>class because they don't generate surplus value. So obviously they must be
>part of the bourgoisie.
Jim's reductio ad absurdem misses out a few steps of the argument.

It is 'fundamental' to the *critique* of political economy that there
should be a distinction made between productive labour and domestic
work, where that means 'productive of surplus value'. No slur is
intended towards Jim's wife, because Marx's categories are not moral in
their nature. Rather, they are intended as a theoretical abstraction to
isolate the sources of surplus value available for the creation of new
capital.

Note that there is no indication that the distinction is meant to
exclude any section from the working class. The point is only that since
privatised domestic work - the reproduction of the working class - is
given gratis, because the capitalist can assume that the basic instinct
of self-preservation will force the working class to undertake this
work.

Siddarth makes the point that since domestic work contributes to the
value of labour power it thereby enters into the creation of surplus
value. That is a widely held point of view but I read Marx's theory
rather differently. Domestic work is necessary to capital, but it can be
taken for granted. The value of labour power can, in some circumstances,
include a 'family wage'. But domestic work cannot contribute to the
value of the product (and thereby surplus value), because it is always
concrete labour, and never abstract labour, the substance of value.

The view that Marx's theory is hostile to women's burden is a
misunderstanding. The point is that the critique of political economy
gives an account of women's oppression that situates the problem within
the privatised realm of domestic work. The abolition of unpaid domestic
work is a more positive ambition than the alternatives of 'wages for
housework' (which apart from being utopian, would institutionalise
womens' exclusion from social labour) or sharing the housework (which,
while more equitable within the working class family does not remove the
burden of unpaid domestic drudgery, but simply redistributes it).

Fraternally
-- 
James Heartfield


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