Date: Wed, 09 Nov 1994 10:49:38 -0500 From: quilty-AT-philos.umass.edu (Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters) Subject: Re: dual systems and adaptation in general There has been some good discussion around this dual-systems issue (or tri-, etc.). My director, Ann Ferguson, has mentioned the work of Hartmann, as well as her own, which I find to be a good basic approach. There is one issue stated by several in this thread which I think rests on an important misunderstanding. Justin Schwartz, for example, writes: Second, there is a good argument that women are exploited by men, if by exploited we mean forced to do unpaid surplus labor outside market relations. The stats, compiled by people like Hochschild (The Second Shift), are quite clear that women do the lionesses' share of housework and childcare. This labor is unpaid in that women have no legal right to compensation for it. And they are forced to do it, even if they want to, because of their weakened social and economic position relative to men. The basic facts are right. Women certainly do disproportionately much housework, especially relative to their disproportionately low incomes (even after accounting for who typically *controls* household income, quite aside from who is directly paid it). Overall hours of women's work are typically significantly more than men's in the US (and elsewhere), especially for women who participate in both wage and non-wage work. The problem is with naming this situation "exploitation." It just plain isn't if we give any heed to the Marxist category. Of course, there is a non-Marxist sense of the word 'exploitation' which just means 'unfair' or something like that. No doubt this non-Marxist sense describes economic relations of patriarchy. But the Marxist sense requires something more specific. Someone is *exploited* insofar as they are paid a wage for their labor-power which is (tendentially, i.e. abstracting from actual firm-level profit) less than their labor contributes to the increase in value of a produced product. There's is nothing *moral* or *critical* per se in this appellation, it's merely an economic description of exchange relations. Under this economic description, not all wage-laborers under capitalism are exploited either, only *productive* ones. So for example, personal servants are not exploited because they do not produce an alienable commodity owned by their employers. In an example which I had great trouble once explaining to a Marxism instructor, neither is everyone producing physical, alienable things exploited. There's an old bias about *productive* labor being *industrial* labor which is just wrong. On the one hand, in my employ as a Kelly-Girl, I am exploited, because my labor-power is reimbursed less than my LABOR is paid for. On the other hand, if we imagine hypothetically two industrial items -- say two Lear jets -- produced one for the purpose of sale, the other for the purpose of direct use by the factory-owner, we imagine two sets of workers, one exploited, the other not exploited. For example, if Ross Perot hires workers to build a plane for him which is strictly for his own use, not for sale, those workers are not *exploited*. This even though the two sets of workers may make the exact same wages doing the exact same activities, in conditions (wage and otherwise) determined by the self-same societal pre-conditions. With an eye (mind?) on the real contingencies of exploitation, we really cannot say that "women" are exploited by "men" -- at least not vis. housework and the "second shift". Since no exchanged good is produced, in general, by this housework, it simply doesn't enter into the category. There are at least two approaches to understanding, in Marxist (or at least not anti-Marxist) terms the wage, power and work differentials between men and women. Probably this is pretty closely analogous to what one might say about race also. First, one can analyze the situation of super- or hyper- exploitation. This is the notion that the capitalist wage structure is not neutrally a question of class, but that class is itself gendered and raced. Thereby women (blacks, etc.) are confined largely to even lower waged work, possibly thereby with an even higher rate of exploitation (though that does not follow automatically from the lower wage). The household inequalities exist in a social pre-condition determined by these wage inequalities. Basically the lack of options for better wage-work force women into a willingness to accept worse housework. Second -- not necessarily contradicting the first approach -- we can analyze the "woman question" as falling under a different dynamic altogether. One can split hairs endlessly over whether this *other* parallel social dynamic is a second base, or is "merely" superstructural. I think it really doesn't matter how you name that. The only reason it was once important was because a lot of people have been trapped in an "epiphenomenal" notion of superstructure in which everything superstructural is merely reflectively determined by the base. I don't like that conception, both because the Althusserian in me believes in "relative autonomy", but also because of remarks I have made here that insofar as *Ideology* necessarily belongs to the base, the picture of causality is complicated anyway. Perhaps ultimately the whole issue rests on a category mistake anyway: base/superstructure is a meaningful distinction of Marxist analysis of economic evolution, but insofar as different parallel dynamics may operate, there is no reason to suppose they must be categorized according to this same conceptual scheme. Yours, Lulu... quilty-AT- _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ THIS MESSAGE WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY:_/_/_/_/_/_/ v i philos. _/_/ Postmodern Enterprises _/_/ s r umass. _/_/ MAKERS OF CHAOS.... _/_/ i u edu _/_/_/_/_/_/ LOOK FOR IT IN A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU_/_/_/_/_/_/_/ g s ------------------
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