Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen, ”Domestic Workers Organize!”

“Domestic Workers Organize!”

Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society Vol. 11 Dec. 2008, pp. 413–43. [PDF]

This article traces the history of domestic worker organizing in the U.S. It challenges the long-standing assumption that these—primarily women of color—cleaners, nannies, and elder care providers are unorganizable and assesses the possibilities and limitations of recent organizing efforts. The nature of the occupation—its location in the home, the isolated character of the work, informal arrangements with employers, and exclusions from labor law protection—has fostered community-based, social movement organizing to build coalitions, reform legislation and draw public attention to the plight of domestic workers. Their successes, as well as the obstacles they encounter, hold lessons for other low-wage service sector workers in a new global economy. Domestic workers have integrated an analysis of race, class, culture, and gender—a form of social justice feminism—into their praxis, thus formulating innovative class-based strategies. Yet long-term reform has remained elusive because of their limited power to shape state policy.

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Slave Market”

“The Slave Market”

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke

From The Crisis 42 (Nov. 1935).

The Bronx Slave Market! What is it? Who are its dealers? Who are its victims? What are its causes? How far does its stench spread? What forces are at work to counteract it?

Any corner in the congested sections of New York City’s Bronx is fertile soil for mushroom “slave marts.” The two where the traffic is heaviest and the bidding is highest are located at 167th street and Jerome Avenue and at Simpson and Westchester avenues.

Symbolic of the more humane slave block is the Jerome avenue “market.” There, on benches surrounding a green square, the victims wait, grateful, at least, for some place to sit. In direct contrast is the Simpson avenue “mart,” where they pose wearily against buildings and lampposts, or scuttle about in an attempt to retrieve discarded boxes upon which to rest.

Again, the Simpson avenue block exudes the stench of the slave market at its worst. Not only is human labor bartered and sold for slave wage, but human love also is a marketable commodity. But whether it is labor, or love that is sold, economic necessity compels the sale. As early as 8 a.m. they come; as late as 1 p.m. they remain.

Rain or shine, cold or hot, you will find them there – Negro women, old and young – sometimes bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed – but with the invariable paper bundle, waiting expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a day at the munificent rate of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, or, if luck be with them, thirty cents an hour. If not the wives themselves, maybe their husbands, their sons, or their brothers, under the subterfuge of work, offer worldly-wise girls higher bids for their time.

Who are these women? What brings them here? Why do they stay? In the boom days before the onslaught of the depression in 1929, many of these women who are now forced to bargain for day’s work on street corners, were employed in grand homes in the rich Eighties, or in wealthier homes in Long Island and Westchester, at more than adequate wages. Some are former marginal industrial workers, forced by the slack in industry to seek other means of sustenance. In many instances there had been no necessity for work at all. But whatever their standing prior to the depression, none sought employment where they now seek it. They come to the Bronx, not because of what it promises, but largely in desperation.

Paradoxically, the crash of 1929 brought to the domestic labor market a new employer class. The lower middle-class housewife, who, having dreamed of the luxury of a maid, found opportunity staring her in tee face in the form of Negro women pressed to the wall by poverty, starvation and discrimination.

Where once color was the “gilt edged” security for obtaining domestic and personal service jobs, here, even, Negro women found themselves being displaced by whites. Hours of futile waiting in employment agencies, the fee that must be paid despite the lack of income, fraudulent agencies that sprung up during the depression, all forced the day worker to fend for herself or try the dubious and circuitous road to public relief.

As inadequate as emergency relief has been, it has proved somewhat of a boon to many of these women, for with its advent, actual starvation is no longer their ever-present slave driver and they have been able to demand twenty-five and even thirty cents an hour as against the old fifteen and twenty cent rate. In an effort to supplement the inadequate relief received, many seek this open market.

And what a market! She who is fortunate (?) enough to please Mrs. Simon Legree’s scrutinizing eye is led away to perform hours of multifarious household drudgeries. Under a rigid watch, she is permitted to scrub floors on her bended knees, to hang precariously from window sills, cleaning window after window, or to strain and sweat over steaming tubs of heavy blankets, spreads and furniture covers.

Fortunate, indeed, is she who gets the full hourly rate promised. Often, her day’s slavery is rewarded with a single dollar bill or whatever her unscrupulous employer pleases to pay. More often, the clock is set back for an hour or more. Too often she is sent away without any pay at all.

María Isabel Casas-Cortés, “Towards a Theory of Care / Hacia una Teoria del Cuidado: Ethnographic Accounts of Changing Political Subjects and Strategies”

“Towards a Theory of Care / Hacia una Teoria del Cuidado: Ethnographic Accounts of Changing Political Subjects and Strategies” 1

María Isabel Casas-Cortés

Chapter 7, Social Movements as Sites of Knowledge Production: Precarious Work, the Fate of Care and Activist Research in a Globalizing Spain. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. [PDF]

Introduction

Shortly upon our arrival to the Lavapies neighborhood, and after attending a couple of meetings organized by Precarias, I received a mysterious email in my inbox:

Precarias a la Deriva ha Muerto, Viva Precarias a la Deriva!

Precarias a la Deriva is dead, long live Precarias a la Deriva!
(email on PD list-serve, March 15th 2007)

The “death notice”, as they called it, explained the transition period that Precarias was at the time going through. Since 2006, this feminist project engaged in a new experiment under the name of “Agencia de Asuntos Precarios”. Under this institutional sounding name -Agency of Precarious Affairs-, they made an attempt to formalize many of the relationships, resources and knowledges gained during the previous research phase. The Agency has currently an office space available every Saturday afternoon at Embajadores Street, a few blocks down from the previous squatted building that had to be evicted by order from the Madrid municipality. The new locale of Eskalera Karakola, the mythical women’s social center, is now located right across the street from Traficantes de Sueños, the alternative bookshop and publishing house, close to the local fresh food market, the muslim mosque and one of the libraries of the Universidad Nacional a Distancia, itself located in an old monastery destroyed during the Spanish Civil war.2 The new Eskalera Karakola, in contrast to the previous old building, is rented at an affordable price from the municipality and after a process of re-construction, now has a contemporary look, with a large meeting room, a radio studio, telephone line and a series of archives and basic technological support.3 Having this space available regularly and open to the public, makes this phase more prompted to act locally. This is in contrast with the previous phase, in that even if that phase had been a place-based research project, their material and effects ended up being more internationally oriented than expected. In this sense, La Agencia might be thought of as part of “the current process of territorialization of global justice movements” – meaning a tendency towards local concerns and organizing at the level of the lived territory, shared by many global justice initiatives at least in Europe (interview with MayDay Sur organizer, April 2008).

Li-Fang Liang, “The Construction of Global City: Invisible Work and Disposable Labor”

“The Construction of Global City: Invisible Work and Disposable Labor”

Li-Fang Liang [PDF]

Ph. D Candidate, Sociology Department Maxwell of Public Affair School, Syracuse University

In 1992, in order to satisfy demographic necessities and increasing double-salary families, the Taiwanese government allowed the immigration of domestic workers and caregivers as part of the short-term contract labor force to shoulder the responsibilities of caring for patients, the elderly and younger children. The number of domestic workers and caregivers has reached 151,747 in 2006, more than one-third of the population of migrant workers. Around one third of migrant domestic workers and caregivers are concentrated in the metropolitan area of Taipei, the largest city in Taiwan. In this essay, I situate Taipei as an emerging “global city” that is the theoretical concept proposed by Saskia Sassen to explain the relationships between global capital mobility and the flows of labor migration. On the one hand, I elucidate the increasing availability of domestic and care work in order to satisfy the physical and emotional needs of white-collar and professional class workers in global cities through the gendered-racialized division of labor. On the other hand, I emphasize the role of state in terms of facilitating to create the gendered-racialized market that serves the economic interests of receiving state and the specific class privileged group. I explore how the coordination of state’s migrant labor policy, regulations and bureaucratic procedures that marginalizes these female workers’ lives and treats them as disposable labor in the context of improving economic development.

Amaia Pérez Orozco, “Spain: 2002 General Strike – Feminist Perspectives”

“Spain: 2002 General Strike – Feminist Perspectives”

Amaia Pérez Orozco

November 2002 [link]

On 20th June the fifth general strike in Spain since the restoration of democracy in 1977 took place. It was organised by the two main Spanish trade unions (CCOO and UGT) and other minor ones, in response to the approved governmental decree RD-L 5/2002 “Reform of the protection of unemployment and the basic law on employment”, approved in the 27^th May with the only favourable votes of the governing People’s Party . This strike led to the reversal of some of the most criticised points of the new law and in that sense was quite successful. But diverse and seemingly contradictory positions within feminism arose in the debate. For some feminist groups one of the major impacts of the general strike was highlighting the lack of a unitary and coherent discourse and thus the need to start a process of reflection and discussion.

The evolution of economic policy in Spain has not differed from the global trend towards freer markets, progressive privatisation and decreasing Welfare State provisions. Among those increasingly deregulated markets is the labour market (national labour markets, but not international ones, where more restrictive migration rules are being established; Spain is relentlessly playing its role of gatekeeper of the “nearest to Africa European door”!). So more precarious and unsafe forms of contracting have emerged, dismissals have been facilitated and became cheaper, unemployment protection has been weakened, and general social protection has been damage. Through this long ongoing process five general strikes have been organised: 20^th June 1985, 14^th December 1988, 28^th May 1992, 27^th January 1994 and 20^th June 2002. Only the second of the first four strikes achieved its goals, namely reversing the Plan for Youth Employment, the defining features of which were nevertheless approved some years later The last one was the first against a conservative government, while the others occurred under a socialist one. It occurred in a context of progressive erosion of remunerated workers’ rights, some of them sanctified by the agreements reached between the Government and the two largest unions. Thus, although the decree was what triggered the protests, other events such as unpopular changes of the educational system and financial scandals within state agencies meant that the climate was already created for popular unrest.

Arlie Hochschild, “Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses”

“Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses“

Arlie Hochschild

Chapter Six, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983. [PDF]

 

If they could have turned every one of us into sweet quiet Southern belles with velvet voices like Rosalyn Carter, this is what they would want to stamp out on an assembly line.
Flight attendant, Delta Airlines

On PSA our smiles are not just painted on.
So smile your way From LA To San Francisco
PSA radio jingle

When you see them receiving passengers with that big smile, I don’t think it means anything. They have to do that. It’s part of their job. But now if you get into a conversation with a flight attendant . . . well . . . no. . . I guess they have to do that too.
Airline passenger

When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses, what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her face? When worked-up warmth becomes an instrument of service work, what can a person learn about herself from her feelings? And when a worker abandons her work smile, what kind of tie remains between her smile and her self?

Display is what is sold, but over the long run display comes to assume a certain relation to feeling. As enlightened management realizes, a separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods. A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work. Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce this strain by pulling the two closer together, either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign. When display is required by the job, it is usually feeling that has to change; and when conditions estrange us from our face, they sometimes estrange us from feeling as well.

Take the case of the flight attendant. Corporate logic in the airline industry creates a series of links between competition, market expansion, advertising, heightened passenger expectations about rights to display, and company demands for acting. When conditions allow this logic to work, the result is a successful transmutation of the private emotional system we have described. The old elements of emotional exchange – feeling rules, surface acting, and deep acting – are now arranged in a different way. Stanislavski’s if moves from stage to airline cabin (”act as if the cabin were your own living room”) as does the actor’s use of emotion memory. Private use gives way to corporate use.

In the airline industry of the 1950s and 1960s a remarkable transmutation was achieved. But certain trends, discussed later in this chapter, led this transmutation to fail in the early 1970s. An industry speed-up and a stronger union hand in limiting the company’s claims weakened the transmutation. There was a service worker ”slowdown.” Worked-up warmth of feeling was replaced by put-on smiles. Those who sincerely wanted to make the deeper offering found they could not do so, and those who all along had resisted company intrusions on the self came to feel some rights to freedom from it. The job lost its grip. When the transmutation succeeded, the worker was asked to take pride in making an instrument of feeling. When it collapsed, workers came to see that instrument as overused, underappreciated, and susceptible to damage.

Lisa Dodson and Rebekah M. Zincavage, “‘It’s like a family’: Caring labor, exploitation, and race in nursing homes”

“‘It’s like a family’: Caring labor, exploitation, and race in nursing homes”

Lisa Dodson and Rebekah M. Zincavage

Gender & Society December 1, 2007 21: 905-928 [PDF]

This article contributes to carework scholarship by examining the nexus of gender, class, and race in long-term care facilities. We draw out a family ideology at work that promotes good care of residents and thus benefits nursing homes. We also found that careworkers value fictive kin relationships with residents, yet we uncover how the family model may be used to exploit these low-income careworkers. Reflecting a subordinate and racialized version of being “part of the family,” we call for an ethic of reciprocity and for concrete change toward valuing equally the humanity of those who need and those who give care.

AUTHORS’ NOTE: We are very grateful to Christine Bishop and the Better Jobs Better Care research team members for their collaboration in this project, sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. We thank Wendy Luttrell, Marjorie DeVault, and Catherine Riessman for early comments and ongoing support. We also wish to thank the anonymous Gender & Society reviewers and Dana Britton for their thoughtful comments on this article. We are indebted to the men and women who participated in this study for trusting us enough to share their experiences and insights with grace and honesty. Finally, we want to recognize the outstanding contribution of the late Susan Eaton who believed that good care of vulnerable people is essentially tied to decent jobs for careworkers.

 

“[T]he same way I think about my mother, this is the same way I’m thinking about these residents. I consider them like they are my own. But it’s a very hard job, we don’t get paid enough for the job, and sometimes you feel like every day you do more and more and more, and the money is less.”
-Certified Nursing Assistant

Over the last two decades a “crisis in care” has provoked difficult questions and a complex critique about the meaning and value of purchased care in contemporary society. Historically family relationships and the market had been seen as separate worlds; one did not trespass onto the other. Yet carework, historically a taken-for-granted female activity, has increasingly demanded market valuation as millions of women left homemaking for paid employment, expanding the need for hired care providers. Today in the United States, with an ever-growing population of elderly and chronically ill people, long-term care has become an urgent and complex care demand.

As in the past, those who enter the low-paid care labor market tend to be poor women, often native-born women of color and immigrants (Dawson and Surpin 2001; Duffy 2007; Glenn 1992; Romero 1992). This paper draws from interviews, focus groups, observational data, and a survey from research in 18 long-term care residential facilities in Massachusetts. From these multiple sources, we explicate an ideology of family that consistently emerged as integral to the design and understanding of care for residents. Further, we examine how family ideology drives expectations of the kind of care provided by certified nursing assistants (CNAs) who, as one facility director put it, are “the backbone of the nursing home industry.” As theorized in scholarship on caring labor across disciplines (DeVault 1991; Folbre 2002; Kittay 1999; Stone 2005; Uttal and Tuominen 1999) our research uncovers the tension experienced by careworkers as they manage their work as both a job and as a commitment to care for fictive family members.

We begin this paper by situating our discussion in recent scholarship at the intersection of family ideology and purchased carework. This is followed by a brief description of the growing demand for long-term care, the nature of the work, and an overview of the workforce. Turning to our research, we identify a family model posited by both nursing home managers and CNAs as essential for providing good care to frail and dependent people. We reveal, however, this model of kinship is “one way,” benefiting the residents and nursing homes but essentially denying reciprocity to CNAs. We also explore the racialization of the occupation of the CNA, a dynamic that brings to mind the historical image of women of color working as domestics, servants, and nannies, expected to willingly sacrifice themselves and their families to take care of those who employed them (Glenn 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Omolade 1994; Romero 1992; Rollins 1985; Wong 1994).

Finally, we challenge the use of an institutional culture of family that is specifically designed to extract more work from the lowest-paid workers- often native-born women of color and immigrants. We join others who argue that meeting a growing public need for long-term care demands an ethic of reciprocity: considerate, high-quality care for those who need it, and respect and decent compensation for those who provide this critical labor.

Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, “Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in the Welfare State”

“Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in the Welfare State“

Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein

Politics and Society, Vol. 34 No.1, March 2006, 81-107. [PDF]

Commemorating the death of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1988, a hundred Los Angeles home care workers marched to demand union recognition. “This is Memphis all over again,” civil rights leaders addressed the mostly female and minority crowd. “We are saying again today, ‘We are somebody.’ We’re men and women who deserve to be treated with dignity”! For over a decade, all across the nation, these caretakers of the frail elderly and the disabled had been asking for “respect, dignity and an increase in our wages.”2 They were a hidden workforce, located in the home and confused with both the labor of domestic servants and the care work of wives and mothers.3 After 74,000 entered the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 1999, media celebrated these minimum-waged, predominantly Latina, Black, and immigrant women, who pulled off the largest gain in union membership since the sit-down strikes of the 1930s.4 This organizing, however, depended on the welfare state location of the labor-that is, on the prior organizing of home care through law and social policy during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market”

“Women on the Market”

Luce Irigaray

Chapter Eight, This Sex Which Is Not One [PDF], 1985.

This text was originally published as “Le marche des femmes,” in Sessualita
e politica, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978).

The society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women. Without the exchange of women, we are told, we would fall back into the anarchy (?) of the natural world, the randomness (?) of the animal kingdom. The passage into the social order, into the symbolic order, into order as such, is assured by the fact that men, or groups of men, circulate women among themselves, according to a rule known as the incest taboo.

Whatever familial form this prohibition may take in a given state of society, its signification has a much broader impact. It assures the foundation of the economic, social, and cultural order that has been ours for centuries.

Why exchange women? Because they are “scarce [commodities] . . . essential to the life of the group,” the anthropologist tells us.1 Why this characteristic of scarcity, given the biological equilibrium between male and female births? Because the “deep polygamous tendency, which exists among all men, always makes the number of available women seem insufficient. Let us add that even if there were as many women as men, these women would not be equally desirable … and that, by definition. . ., the most desirable women must form a minority. “2

Are men all equally desirable? Do women have no tendency toward polygamy? The good anthropologist does not raise such questions. A fortiori: why are men not objects of exchange among women? It is because women’s bodies-through their use, consumption, and circulation-provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown “infrastructure” of the elaboration of that social life and culture. The exploitation of the matter that has been sexualized female is so integral a part of our sociocultural horizon that there is no way to interpret it except within this horizon.

In still other words: all the systems of exchange that organize patriarchal societies and all the modalities of productive work that are recognized, valued, and rewarded in these societies are men’s business. The production of women, signs, and commodities is always referred back to men (when a man buys a girl, he “pays” the father or the brother, not the mother … ), and they always pass from one man to another, from one group of men to another. The work force is thus always assumed to be masculine, and “products” are objects to be used, objects of transaction among men alone.

Domestic Workers United, “Domestic Workers and Collective Bargaining: A Proposal for Immediate Inclusion of Domestic Workers in the New York State Labor Relations Act”

“Domestic Workers and Collective Bargaining: A Proposal for Immediate Inclusion of Domestic Workers in the New York State Labor Relations Act”

Domestic Workers United, Oct. 2010 [PDF of full report]

 

 

I. The Backdrop: Moving Forward from the New York State Domestic Workers Bill of Rights

I kept waiting for the law [Domestic Workers Bill of Rights] that would benefit us to come into effect…to sit down with her [employer]. I was thinking because I had been working for almost three years that I could ask for my vacation or sick days. So I was waiting for the law. And because I had overheard so many conversations about the mother wanting to fire me, I thought that if I talk to them now, before the law, if I talk to them about such a thing, they would tell me to leave. –Domestic Worker #2

Since 2000, Domestic Workers United (DWU), a community-based organization of 4000 nannies, housekeepers, and elder caregivers, has organized for power and fair labor standards, building a movement for change.1 This summer, DWU’s efforts culminated in a historic victory: New York became the first state in the nation to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.2

In accordance with this new law, the New York State Department of Labor (DOL) is to prepare a report by November 1, 2010 on the feasibility of collective bargaining in the domestic-work industry.3 As domestic workers are currently excluded from collective-bargaining laws, DWU has begun to study what inclusion would mean and which models of collective bargaining would function best in this industry.

Based on DWU’s research and as an appropriate next step after the passage of the Bill of Rights, DWU recommends that the New York State Legislature amend Section 701(3) of the State Labor Relations Act (SLRA) by December 31, 2010 to eliminate the exclusion of domestic workers.4 The DOL and the Legislature should also ensure that the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), the SLRA’s governing body, has the flexibility and authority necessary to determine bargaining structures for this sector.

This report documents the inconsistent, informal, and uncertain nature of domestic employment and concludes that domestic workers need the right to collectively bargain. Inclusion under the SLRA would represent more than a symbolic gesture: the law’s important protections would allow New York State’s domestic workforce to lead the way in exploring collective bargaining.

bell hooks, “Women at Work”

“Women at Work”

bell hooks

Chapter Nine, Feminism is for Everybody, South End Press, 2000. [PDF]

More than half of all women in the United States are in the workforce. When contemporary feminist movement first began the workforce was already more than one-third female. Coming from a working-class, African-American background where most women I knew were in the workforce, I was among the harshest critics of the vision of feminism put forth by reformist thinkers when the movement began, which suggested that work would liberate women from male domination. More than 10 years ago I wrote in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, “The emphasis on work as the key to women’s liberation led many white feminist activists to suggest women who worked were ‘already liberated.’ They were in effect saying to the majority of working women, ‘Feminist movement is not for you. ” Most importantly I knew firsthand that working for low wages did not liberate poor and working-class women from male domination.

Silvia Federici, “The reproduction of labour-power in the global economy, Marxist theory and the unfinished feminist revolution”

“The reproduction of labour-power in the global economy, Marxist theory and the unfinished feminist revolution”

Silvia Federici

Reading for Jan. 27, 2009 UC Santa Cruz seminar “The Crisis of Social Reproduction and Feminist Struggle”

 

Women’s work and women’s labor are buried deeply in the heart of the capitalist social and economic structure.
(David Staples, No Place Like Home, 2006)

It is clear that capitalism has led to the super-exploitation of women. This would not offer much consolation if it had only meant heightened misery and oppression, but fortunately it has also provoked resistance. And capitalism has become aware that if it completely ignores or suppresses this resistance it might become more and more radical, eventually turning into a movement for self-reliance and perhaps even the nucleus of a new social order. (Robert Biel, The New Imperialism, 2000)

The emerging liberative agent in the Third World is the unwaged force of women who are not yet disconnected from the life economy by their work. They serve life not commodity production. They are the hidden underpinning of the world economy and the wage equivalent of their life-serving work is estimate at &16 trillion.” (John McMurtry, The Cancer State of Capitalism, 1999)
The pestle has snapped because of so much pounding tomorrow I will go home.
Until tomorrow Until tomorrow… Because of so much pounding Tomorrow I will go home.
(Hausa Women’s Song, from Nigeria)

INTRODUCTION

This essay is a political reading of the restructuring of the [re]production of labor-power in the global economy, but it is also a feminist critique of Marx that, in different ways, has been developing since the 1970s, first articulated by activists in the Campaign for Wages For Housework, especially Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, among others, and later by the feminists of the Bielefeld school, Maria Mies, Claudia Von Werlhof, Veronica Benholdt-Thomsen. (1) At the center of this critique is the argument that Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hampered by its almost exclusive focus on commodity production and its blindness to the significance of women’s unpaid reproductive work and the sexual division of labor in capitalist accumulation. (2) For ignoring this work has limited Marx’s understanding of the mechanisms perpetuating the exploitation of labor, and led him to assume that capitalist development is both inevitable and progressive, on the assumption that scarcity is an obstacle to human selfdetermination, but capital’s expansion of the forces of production, through large scale industrialization, would in time lead to its transcendence. Marx had apparently second thoughts on this matter in the later years of his life. As for us, a century and a half after the publication of Capital, we must challenge this view for at least three reasons.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Capitalism and Reproduction”

“Capitalism and Reproduction”

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Chapter 2, Bonefeld, W., Holloway, J., Psychopedis, K. (ed.),Open Marxism – vol. 3: Emancipating Marx. 1995 [PDF]

This Chapter was presented at the seminar ‘Women’s Unpaid Labour and the
World System’, organised by the Japan Foundation, 8 April 1994, Tokyo, as
part of the Foundation’s ‘European Women’s Study Tour for Environmental
Issues’ .

The sphere of reproduction today reveals all the original sins of the capitalist
mode of production. Reproduction must be viewed, of course, from a planetary
perspective, with special attention being paid to the changes that are taking
place in wide sectors of the lower social strata in advanced capitalism as well
as in an increasing proportion of the Third World population. We live in a
planetary economy, and capitalist accumulation still draws its life-blood for
its continuous valorisation from waged as well as unwaged labour, the latter
consisting first of all of the labour involved in social reproduction, 1 in the
advanced as well as the Third World countries.

We find that social ‘misery’ or ‘unhappiness’ which Marx2 considered to
be the ‘goal of the political economy’ has largely been realised everywhere.
But, setting aside the question of happiness for the time being – though
certainly not to encourage the myth of its impossibility – let me stress how
incredible it now seems, Marxist analysis apart, to claim that capitalist development
in some way brings a generalised wellbeing to the planet.

Social reproduction today is more beset and overwhelmed than ever by the
laws of capitalist accumulation: the continual and progressive expropriation
(from the ‘primitive’ expropriation of the land as a means of production, which
dates from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in England, to the expropriation,
then as now, of all the individual and collective rights that ensure
subsistence); the continual division of society into conflictual hierarchies (of
class, sex, race and nationality, which pit the free waged worker against the
unfree unwaged worker, against the unemployed worker, and the slave
labourer); the constant production of inequality and uncertainty (with the
woman as reproducer facing an even more uncertain fate in comparison to
any waged worker and, if she is also member of a discriminated race or nation,
she suffers yet deeper discrimination); the continual polarisation of the
production of wealth (which is more and more concentrated) and the production
of poverty (which is increasingly widespread).

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, “Capital and the Left”

“Capital and the Left”

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici

Falling Wall Press, 1975 [PDF]

With its traditional blindness to the dynamics of class movements, the left has interpreted the end of a phase within the women’s movement as the end of the movement itself. Thus, slowly but surely, they are trying to regain the political terrain which in the sixties they had been forced to relinquish. Now that the ground appears to be clear, we increasingly see them drop their ‘feminist’ mask and pour out those dearest beliefs which, though stifled by the movement’s power, were never really snuffed out.

And first and foremost among these is the belief that they, not women, are in the best position to decide what we really need and where the women’s movement should go. In the sixties, when women were leaving the leftist groups in droves, the left had to espouse the validity of autonomy. (They had already gone through the painful experience of complete repudiation by the autonomous black movement.) Reluctantly, they had to concede that women too are part of the revolution. They even went so far as to beat their breasts over their newly discovered sexism. But, most important, they learned to speak in respectful and even subdued tones. Now in the midst of what they perceive as a feminist funeral, their voices are raised again and this time not only to utter the final word, but to pass judgement on our achievements and shortcomings. Their story strikes us with a familiar ring. In the words of one of these self-appointed ‘feminists’: “women also need a socialist movement… and no movement that is composed only of women can substitute for this” (1), which means it was all very well while it lasted, but ultimately we have to be led by them. And in order to do that, they want first to re-establish the correct political line.

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, “Counter-Planning from the Kitchen”

“Counter-Planning from the Kitchen”

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici

Falling Wall Press, 1975. [PDF]

This article was originally written in reply to an article that appeared in the magazine Liberation, entitled ‘Women & Pay for Housework’ by Carol Lopate. Our reply was turned down by the editors of the magazine. We are publishing that reply because Lopate’s article seems to state with more openness and crudeness than most not only the fundamental assumptions of the left, but its specific relation to the international feminist movement at this moment in time. We must add that by the publication of the two articles which appear in this pamphlet we are not opening a sterile debate with the left but closing one.

Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the wage, that is, that the foundation of capitalist society was the wage labourer and his or her direct exploitation. What has been neither clear nor assumed by the organizations of the working class movement is that precisely through the wage has the exploitation of the non-wage labourer been organized. This exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hid it . . . Where women are concerned, their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital. (2)

It is certainly not accidental that over the last few months several journals of the left have published attacks on Wages for Housework. It is not only that whenever the women’s movement has taken an autonomous position, the left has felt threatened. It is also that the left realizes that this perspective has implications which go beyond the ‘woman question’ and represent a clear break with their politics, past and present, both with respect to women and with respect to the rest of the working class. Indeed, the sectarianism the left has traditionally shown in relation to women’s struggles is a direct consequence of their narrow understanding of the way capital rules and the direction class struggle must take and is taking to break this rule.

In the name of ‘class struggle’ and ‘the unified interest of the class’, the practice of the left has always been to select certain sectors of the working class as the revolutionary agents and condemn others to a merely supportive role for the struggles these sectors were waging. The left has thus reproduced in its organizational and strategic objectives the same divisions of the class which characterize the capitalist division of labour.
In this respect, despite the variety of their tactical positions, the left is strategically one: when it comes to the choice of revolutionary subjects, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Anarcho-Libertarians, old and new left, all join hands with the same assumptions and arguments for a common cause.

Claire Fontaine, “Human strike within the field of libidinal economy”

“Human strike within the field of libidinal economy”
Claire Fontaine

Bureau for Open Culture, Descent to Revolution pp. 144-151 [2009]

The possibility of keeping together autonomy and an affective life is a tale that hasn’t been written yet.
Lea Melandri, Una visceralità indicibile, 2007

In 1974 François Lyotard published the surprising book entitled Libidinal Economy where he attacked Marxist and Freudian simplifications and he opened a new perspective on the connection between desires and struggle. What starts to crumble down at that time under the offensive of the two essential weapon-books by Deleuze and Guattari The Anti-OEdipus and A thousand plateaux is the fetishization of consciousness as the organ that will lead the revolution. As the myth of the avant-garde begins to decline, a psychosomatic reorganization arises and its consequences on the relationship between people are brutal and inevitable. Like in an inverted Menenius Agrippa’s speech the head, with all its metaphorical connotations, lost its privilege and the low body could find a new voice full of desire and fear. A new materialism was coming to life inside people’s bodies. At this point the failure of the responsible and pyramidal militant structures becomes blatant: thirst for power, need for leaders and the insufficiency of language to resolve conflicts inside the groups reveal the impossibility of living and fighting in such formations. In ’73 the Gramsci Group wrote in the Proposition for a different way to make politics: “it’s no longer possible to talk to each other from avant-garde to avant-garde with a sectary language of “experts” politicians…and then not being able to concretely talk about our experiences. The consciousness and the explanation of things must become clear through the experience of one’s own condition, one’s own problems and needs and not only through theories that describe mechanisms” (p.508, L’orda d’oro). The language that served the purposes of traditional politics seemed to have lost all its use value in the mouths of these young people; the members of the militant groups felt like they were “spoken,” traversed by a speech that didn’t transform them and couldn’t translate their new uncertain situation. A protagonist of the events describes as it follows his position of leader: “the leader is somebody who is convinced that he has always been revolutionary and communist, and he doesn’t ask himself what the concrete transformation of himself and the others is…The leader is the one that when the assemblies don’t go the way they should either because a silence takes place either because some political positions are expressed which are different from the ones of his own group, he feels that he must intervene in order to fill the verbal space or to affirm his political line against the others.” In this simple and clinical diagnosis we see the groups as spaces where subjective transformation attempts to be funneled into revolutionary efficiency; as a result of this process the positions of the singularities that composed the groups became progressively more and more rigid and the revolutionary space, in order to remain such, imposed the most conservative patterns of behavior within itself.

The term “human strike” was forged to name a revolt against what is reactionary even – and above all – inside the revolt. It defines a type of strike that involves the whole life and not only its professional side, that acknowledges exploitation in all the domains and not only at work. Even the notion of work comes out modified if seen from the ethical prism of human strike: activities that seem to be innocent services and loving obligations to keep the family or the couple together reveal themselves as vulgar exploitation. The human strike is a movement that could potentially contaminate anyone and that attacks the foundations of life in common; its subject isn’t the proletarian or the factory worker but the whatever singularity that everyone is. This movement isn’t there to reveal the exceptionality or the superiority of a group on another but to unmask the whateverness of everybody as the open secret that social classes hide.

One definition of human strike can be found in Tiqqun 2: it’s a strike “with no claims, that deterritorializes the agora and reveals the nonpolitical as the place of the implicit redistribution of responsibilities and unremunerated work.”

Italian feminisms offer a paradigm of this kind of action because they have claimed the abolition of the borders that made politics the territory of men. If the sexual borders of politics weren’t clearly marked in the seventies in Europe, they still persisted in an obscure region of the life in common, like premonitory nightmares that never stop coming true. In 1938 Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas, “Inevitably we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he goes through mystic rites and enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and dominion while we, ‘his’ women, are locked in the private house without share in the many societies of which his society is composed.” Against the chalk marks, already obsolete in 1938 but that still keep appearing under our steps even in the twenty-first century, Lia Cigarini and Luisa Muraro specified in 1992 in a text called Politics and political practice: “We don’t want to separate politics from culture, love and work and we can’t find any criterion for doing so. A politics of this kind, a separated one, we wouldn’t like it and we wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

At the core of this necessity of a politics that transforms life and that can be transformed by life, there wasn’t a claim against injustice but the desire of finding the right voice for one’s own body, in order to fight the deep feeling of being spoken by somebody else, that can be called the political ventriloquism.

A quotation by Serena, published in the brochure Sottosopra n°3 in 1976, describes a modest miracle that took place at the women convention in Pinarella, “Something strange happened to me after the first day and a half: underneath the heads that were talking, listening and laughing, there were bodies; if I was speaking (and how serenely, and with no will of self-affirmation I was speaking in front of 200 women!) in my speak, in a way or another there was my body that was finding a strange way to become words.” What an example of miraculous transubstantiation of the human strike.

* 1890 date of birth of the human strike

In her extensive research around the strike in the nineteenth century, Michelle Perrot talks about the birth of a sort of “sentimental strike” in the year 1890. May 4th of that year, in the newspaper from Lille entitled Le Cri du Travailleur (the worker’s scream) we can read that “the strikers didn’t give any reason for their interruption of the work… just that they want to do the same thing than the others.” In this type of movement, young people and women start to play a very important role, Perrot says. In a small village called Vienne militant women encouraged their female comrades, “Let’s not bear this miserable condition any longer. Let’s upraise, let’s claim our rights, let’s fight for a more honourable place. Let’s dare to say to our masters: we are just like you, made out of flesh and bones, we should live happy and free through our work.” In another small village, Besseges, in the same year a young woman of 32, wife of a miner and mother of five, Amandine Vernet, reveals her vocation of natural born leader, “she never made herself noticeable before May 14th when she started to read a written speech in a meeting of 5,000 people in the Robiac woods. The day after she had started to speak, and the following days, made more self-confident by her success, she pronounced violent and moving speeches. She had the talent of making part of her audience cry.”1

In this type of strike, what Perrot calls the emotional strike, the movement is no longer limited to a specific target: what is at stake is a transformation of the subjectivity. This transformation – and that is the interesting point – is at the same time the cause and the consequence of the strike. The subjective, the social and the political changes are tightly entangled so that necessarily this type of uprising concerns subjects whose social identity is poorly codified, the people that Rancière calls the “placeless” or the “part-less.” They are movements where people unite under the slogan “we need to change ourselves” (Foucault), which means that the change of the conditions isn’t the ultimate aim but a means to change one’s subjectivity and one’s relationships.

According to some interpretations, there have been some components of this kind in the movement of ’68. Young people and women rose up then and claimed new rights that weren’t only political in an acquired sense, but that changed the very meaning of the word “political.” The inclusion of sexuality as an officially political territory is actually symptomatic of this transformation. Sexuality isn’t in fact the right term to be used, because it already designates an artificially separated field of reality. We should rather talk about the rehabilitation of the concept of desire, and analyze how new desires enter the political sphere in these specific moments, during the emotional strikes that we call “human strikes.”

The feminisms that do not pursue the integration in a world conceived and shaped by male protagonists are part of these strikes. We can read on this crucial point in a collective book from 1987 entitled Non credere di avere dei diritti (Don’t believe you have any right), “The difference of being a woman hasn’t found its free existence by establishing itself on the given contradictions, present within the social body, but on searching the contradiction that each singular woman was experiencing in herself and that didn’t have any social form before receiving it from the feminine politics. We have invented ourselves, so to speak, the social contradictions that made our freedom necessary.” Where invented doesn’t mean made up but found and translated the facts that reveal their dormant political dimension.

*The plan of consistency of human strike

“They call it love. We call it unpaid labour. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every time that we become pregnant against our own will, it’s an accident at work. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both work conditions. Homosexuality is just the control of the workers on the production, not the end of the exploitation. No more smiles? No more money. Nothing will be more efficient to destroy the virtue of a smile. Neurosis, suicide, desexualization: professional illnesses of housewives.” Silvia Federici, The right to hatred, 1974

“1) The house where we make the most part of our work (the domestic work), is atomized in thousands of places, but it’s present everywhere, in town, in the countryside, on the mountains, etc.
2) We are controlled and we depend on thousands of little bosses and controllers: they are our husbands, fathers, brothers etc., but we only have one master: the State.
3) Our comrades of work and struggle, that are our neighbors, aren’t physically in touch with us during the work as it happens in the factory: but we can meet in places that we know, where we all go when we can steal some free time during the day. And each one of us isn’t separated from the other by qualifications and professional categories. We all make the same work.
(…) If we went on a strike we would not leave unfinished products or raw materials untransformed etc.: by interrupting our work we wouldn’t paralyze the production but the daily reproduction of the working class. This would hit the heart of the Capitalist system, because it would become an actual strike even for those that normally go on strike without us; but since the moment we stop to guarantee the survival
of those which we are affectively tightened to, we will also have a difficulty in continuing the resistance.” Coordination from Emilia Romagna for the salary to the domestic work, Bologna, 1976

“The worker has the possibility of joining a union, going on strike, the mothers are isolated, locked in their houses, tightened to their children by charitable bonds. Our wildcat strikes manifest themselves as a physical and mental breakdown.” Adrienne Rich, Born of a Woman, 1980

The situation of not being able to draw the line between life and work that beforehand only concerned housewives is now becoming generalized. A strike isn’t possible to envisage for most of us, but the reasons we keep living the way we do and can’t rebel against anyone but ourselves are to be searched in our libidinal metabolism and in the libidinal economy we participate to.

Each struggle has become a struggle against a part of ourselves because we are always partly complicit with the things that oppress us.
The biopower, under which we live, is the power that owns our bodies but allows us the right to speak.
According to what Giorgio Agamben writes in The Coming Community

the colonization of physiology by industry started in the ’20s and it reached its peak when photography allowed a massive circulation of pornography. The anonymous bodies portrayed were absolutely whatever and because of this very reason generically desirable. Images of real human beings had become for the first time in history objects of desire on a massive scale, and therefore objects.

Stuart Ewen explains very well how advertising starts to target heavily women and young people in the fifties, right after the war; women and children were the absolute majority of the bodies portrayed in a promiscuous proximity with goods of consumption. The intimacy between things and human beings creates all sort of symbolic disorders since the very beginning. Since then the consumption shapes the actual life form of human beings – not only what is called life style. In the case of women the confusion and enforced cohabitation with objects within the sphere of desire – male and female desire – is clear for everybody. Advertisements talk to the affects, and tell tales of a human life reconciled with things, where the inexpressiveness and the hostility of object is constantly obliterated by the joy and the beauty that they are supposed to bring to their owners.

Work is never really present and life has no gravity in advertising: objects have no weight, the link between the cause and the effect of gestures is governed by pure fantasy. The dreams engendered by capitalism are the most disquieting of its products, their specific visual language is also the source of the misunderstanding between the inhabitants of the poorly developed countries and the Westerners. These dreams are conceived as devices of subjectivization, scenes from the life of the toxic community of human beings and things. Where the commodity is absent, bodies are tragically different.

If brought to its last consequences this implicit philosophy leads to the complete redundancy of art – and in this sense the message that we all know so well and that we all receive every day in the streets of the cities or from the television screen must be taken seriously. The artwork is no longer the humanized object – this change started to take place in the nineteenth century with the industrialization of life in general. Duchamp himself explains the birth of the readymade in 1955 in an interview with James Johnson Sweeny by declaring that he came to conceive the readymade as a consequence of the dehumanization of the artwork. The task of making the objects expressive, responsive to human feelings, that for thousands of years has been taken in charge by artists, is now performed by capitalism essentially through television. Because what is at stake in the capitalistic vision of the world is a continuous production of a libidinal economy in which behaviors, expressions and gestures contribute to the creation of this new human body.

*The irreversible anthropological transformation in Italy (and elsewhere)

“I think that this generation (…) of the people that were 15 or 20 years old once they have made this [revolutionary] choice between 1971 and 1972, which in the following years becomes a generalized process in the factories and the schools, in the parishes, in the neighbourhoods, they have gone through an anthropological transformation, I can’t find a better definition, an irreversible cultural modification of themselves that you can’t come back from and that’s why these subjects later, after ’79, when everything is over, become crazy, commit suicide, become drug addicts because of the impossibility and the intolerability of being included and tamed by the system.”2

That’s how Nanni Balestrini describes a form of tragic human strike that took place during the eighties, when the movement of ’77 fell under the weight of a disproportioned repression.

The bleed of revolutionary lives from the country makes Italy a nation of disappeared. Without needing a genocide nor a real dictatorship, the strategy of tension and a modest amount of State terrorism achieved this result within a few years.

One should consider that what doesn’t happen isn’t a disgrace or the legitimate source of resentment against the anonymous and submitted population, but as a consequence of what has happened before.

The space of politics where Berlusconi rose without encountering any resistance was a territory where any opposition had been deported since the repression started to function directly on the life forms, since people couldn’t desire in the same way anymore because the libidinal economy they were part of went bankrupt.

One question that still isn’t considered with the adequate attention in the militant context is the one of the struggle-force. The struggleforce, like the love-force, must be protected and regenerated. It’s a resource that doesn’t renovate itself automatically and needs collective conditions for its creation.

Human strike can be read as an extreme attempt to reappropriate the means of production of the struggle-force, the love-force, the life-force.
These means are ends in themselves; they already bring with them a new potentiality that makes the subjects stronger. The political space where this operation is possible isn’t of course the same one that was colonized by the televised biopower. It’s the one that we can foresee in Lia’s words from 1976:

“The return of the repressed threatens all my projects of work, research, politics. Does it threaten them or is it the truly political thing in myself, to which I should give relief and room? (…) The silence failed this part of myself that desired to make politics, but it affirmed something new. There has been a change, I have started to speak out, but during these days I have felt that the affirmative part of myself was occupying all the space again. I convinced myself of the fact that the mute woman is the most fertile objection to our politics. The nonpolitical digs tunnels that we mustn’t fill with earth.”

 

1 M. Perrot, Les ouvriers en grève, France 1871-1890, Mouton, Paris, La Haye, 1974, p.99-100.
2 N. Balestrini, L’Editore in La Grande Rivolta, Bompiani, Milano, 1999, p.318-319.

Frances Fox Piven, “Welfare and Work”

“Welfare and work”

Frances Fox Piven

Social Justice; Spring 1998; 25, 1; Criminal Justice Periodicals pg. 67 [PDF]

 

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT THE BEARING OF THE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND WORK

Opportunity Act (PRWOA) of 1996 on labor markets, and especially on

the low-wage labor market. The nationwide debate that climaxed with the

rollback of federal welfare responsibilities ignored this aspect of welfare policy.

Instead, arguments fastened on questions of personal morality. A lax and toogenerous

welfare system was said to lead women to shun work in favor of habitual

idleness and dependency. Welfare was also said to undermine sexual and family

morality. Together these charges spurred something like a grand national revival

movement to restore moral compulsion to the lives of the poor. Yet, throughout

the long history of relief or welfare, charges that relief encouraged immorality

always accompanied measures that worsened the terms of work for broad swaths

of the population, as I have been at pains to argue elsewhere in work with Richard

Cloward.  Here I will show that this episode of reform is no different.

Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike – Four hypotheses.”

“A Very Careful Strike – Four hypotheses.”

Precarias a la Deriva

Translated by Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren.

Feb. 2005. [PDF]

Translators’ introduction
We are happy to present here a translation of an article by the Precarias a la Deriva, a militant research collective based in Madrid, Spain. We have translated the title of the piece as “A Very Careful Strike.” The title of the piece, “Una huelga de mucho cuidado” is a pun in Spanish, and as such is difficult to render into English. It means, at the same time, something very carefully done, something dangerous (something around which one should take care), as well as referring to the proposal of a strike by those who carry out both paid and unpaid caring labor.

Selma James, “Women, the Unions and Work, Or…What Is Not To Be Done”

“Women, the Unions and Work, Or…What Is Not To Be Done”

Selma James

Radical America Vol. 7 no. 4-5, 1973. [PDF]

This pamphlet has been published by the Notting Hill (a working-class district in West London -ed.) Womens Liberation Workshop group. It was written by one of our members and presented as a paper at the National Confer­ence of Women at Manchester March 25-26. 1972. While many of us have minor or major disagreements with the paper. we feel that the discussion which it generated at the conference was of such importance to the future of the movement that it should be widely read and the discussion continue.

The demands at the end of the paper aroused most interest at the conference. and were discussed. added to and modi­fied there. But there may have been some misunderstand­ing about their purpose. They are not a statement of what we want. finally. to have. They are not a plan for an ideal society. and a society based on them would not cease to be oppressive. Ultimately the only demand which is not co­optable is the armed population demanding the end of cap­italism. But we feel that at this moment these demands can be a force against what capital wants and for what we want. They are intended to mobilize women both “inside-and “outside-the women’s liberation movement. They could provide a perspective which would affect decisions about local and national struggles. After discussion and modifi­cation they could become integrated and far-reaching goals which the women’s movement could come to stand for. A vote taken on the final day at Manchester decided that the demands would be raised on the first day of the next conference. Many groups are planning local discussions before that time.

April 8, 1972.

Jacklyn Cock, “Trapped Workers: The Case of Domestic Workers in South Africa”

“Trapped Workers: The Case of Domestic Workers in South Africa”

Jacklyn Cock

excerpt from Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and Workforce, Sharon B. Stichter and Jane L. Parpart, eds. Boulder & London: Westview Press, pp. 205-219, [1988]

In addition to lessening their employer’s sense of social isolation at the cost of exacerbating their own, many domestic servants take considerable responsibility for the care of their employer’s children.

She gets the children up in the morning, gives them their breakfast, walks the youngest to nursery school, has our lunch ready for us when we return.

This responsibility for child care involves one of the central contradictions in the institution of domestic servants. Several servants interviewed stressed that they had to look after two families and neglect their own in the process.

We leave our children early in the morning to look after other women’s families and still they don’t appreciate us.

We have to leave our children and look after our madam’s children. We have not time to look after them when they are sick.

It is black women who suffer most from the neglect of creches by the state. Furthermore, black women generally and domestic servants specifically are most vulnerable to dismissal on the grounds of pregnancy (Cook et al, 1983). One respondent said that the employment of domestic servants explained “why white people’s children don’t grow up criminals. It is not from having everything they need, but having nannies who watch them every minute of the day and instill discipline.” Often the person looking after the servant’s children is a daughter who is kept out of school to do so. This perpetuates a vicious circle of povety, inadequate child care and interrupted education among blacks’ children (especially females) while white children benefit from the attention of two mothers.

Molyneux has emphasized that it is the work of child care which “is of the most benefit to the capitalist state” (Molyneux 1979, p. 25). Child care is expensive if it emphasizes child development rather than custodial care. Therefore in advanced capitalist societies “the only large scale possibility that could bring  about the socialization of child care would be for the state to expand its provision” (CSE 1975, p. 14). But state organized institutions for the reproduction of labor power are financed by state expropriation of surplus value. Thus since the state provision of childcare centers, kindergartens and creches would add to capital’s costs for reproducing the labor force, this would only be likely to occur in a period of rapid capital accumulation and consequent increased productivity. In such a situation capital would gain from releasing women for wage labor, because that would expand the labor force producing surplus value. But in South Africa the availability of cheap, black domestic labor creates this flexibility, and women can easily be incorporated or expelled from the labor force according to the pace of capital accumulation. Hence this is not a demand likely to be made on the state by the white working class.