Maxine Molyneux, “Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate”

“Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate”

Maxine Molyneux

New Left Review I 116, [July-August 1979]

It is nearly a decade since the first texts in the recent domestic labour debate appeared, and since then over fifty articles have been published on the subject of housework in the British and American socialist press alone.¹ This interest in domestic labour has arisen from a wide range of orientations, both feminist and Marxist, yet despite this variety they all involve a common underlying assump­tion: namely that investigation of this previously neglected topic can contribute to an understanding of women’s subordination and to the formulation of a politics adequate to its supercession. Two main concerns can be identified in this literature. The first aims to show how the subordination of women, variously described as oppression, subjugation or exploitation, is, although often seen as ‘extra-economic’, in fact founded on a material basis and is linked into the political economy of capitalist society. This approach has attempted to demonstrate housework’s economic contribution to maintaining the capitalist system by providing labour necessary for the reproduction of labour power. It has raised the question of to what extent the development of capitalism has itself created the present domestic system and has, in particular, created ‘housework’.² This perspective has often involved the attempt to apply to the sphere of housework concepts previously restricted to the analysis of the more general, conventional and public, features of the capitalist economy.

Women’s Work Study Group, “Loom, Broom and Womb: Producers, Maintainers and Reproducers”

“Loom, Broom and Womb: Producers, Maintainers and Reproducers”
Women’s Work Study Group
Radical America Volume 10, Number 2 [March-April 1976]

HISTORY: WOMEN’S WORK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
Women’s work and the development of American capitalism can
be examined in three historical phases: the pre-capitalist phase
prior to 1820; the phase of competitive capitalism between 1820
and 1890; and the monopoly capitalist phase from 1890 to the present.
In this section each period is briefly described in terms of the
organization of production and the implications of the organization
of production for the lives of women.

Linda McDowell, “Life without father and Ford: the new gender order of post-Fordism”

“Life without father and Ford: the new gender order of post-Fordism”

Linda McDowell

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp.
400-419. 1991. (PDF)

ABSTRACT

The coincidence of a set of economic changes in new industrial areas in advanced capitalist societies has initiated a tremendous debate about the features of post-Fordism, flexible accumulation and new industrial spaces. While the distinguishing features of the new production methods and the new industrial geography are widely debated, far less attention has been paid to gender divisions. This paper examines the assumptions made about gender relations in variants of restructuring theory, draws out the similarities and differences between these and socialist-feminist theory and argues that both sets of theories rely on a particular view about the relationship between the spheres of production and reproduction. Despite the assumed marginality of women’s labour in conventional approaches to restructuring and its centrality in the work influenced by feminist theory, it is argued here that both perspectives misconstrue current changes. A new gender order is emerging with post-Fordism.

Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”

“Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”
Judith Halberstam
from In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives [PDF]

 

 

How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life? … To be “gay,” I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life.
-Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life”

There is never one geography of authority and there is never one geography of resistance. Further, the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination-if only because each is a lie to the other, and each gives the lie to the other.
-Steve Pile, “Opposition, Political Identities, and Spaces of Resistance”

 

This book makes the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space.” Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification. If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault’s comment in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex” (310). In Foucault’s radical formulation, queer friendships, queer networks, and the existence of these relations in space and in relation to the use of time mark out the particularity and indeed the perceived menace of homosexual life. In this book, the queer “way of life” will encompass subcultural practices, alternative methods of alliance, forms of transgender embodiment, and those forms of representation dedicated to capturing these willfully eccentric modes of being. Obviously not all gay, lesbian, and transgender people live their lives in radically different ways from their heterosexual counterparts, but part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space.

Queer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic. In his memoir of his lover’s death from AIDS, poet Mark Doty writes: “All my life I’ve lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes” (Doty 1996, 4). The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment and, as Doty explores, squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand. In his poem “In Time of Plague,” Thom Gunn explores the erotics of compressed time and impending mortality: “My thoughts are crowded with death / and it draws so oddly on the sexual/that I am confused/confused to be attracted / by, in effect, my own annihilation” (Gunn 1993, 59). Queer time, as it flashes into view in the heart of a crisis, exploits the potential of what Charles-Pierre Baudelaire called in relation to modernism “The transient, the fleeting, the contingent.” Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS, for example, by rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity, and by making community in relation to risk, disease, infection, and death (Bersani 1996; Edelman 1998). And yet queer time, even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing. In the sections on subcultures in this book, I will examine the queer temporalities that are proper to subcultural activities, and will propose that we rethink the adult/youth binary in relation to an “epistemology of youth” that disrupts conventional accounts of youth culture, adulthood, and maturity.l Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience-namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.

These new temporal logics, again, have emerged most obviously in the literatures produced in relation to the AIDS epidemic. For example, in The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s beautiful rewriting of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham takes the temporal frame of Woolf’s novel (life in a day) and emphasizes its new, but also queer rendering of time and space. In deed, Cunningham rationalizes Woolf’s authorial decision to have the young Clarissa Dalloway “love another girl” in terms of queer temporality. He explains: “Clarissa Dalloway in her first youth, will love another girl, Virginia thinks; Clarissa will believe that a rich, riotous future is opening before her, but eventually (how, exactly, will the change be accomplished?) she will come to her senses, as young women do and marry a suitable man” (Cunningham 1998, 81-82). The “riotous future,” which emerges in Woolf’s novel from a lesbian kiss ,in Clarissa’s youth, becomes, in Cunningham’s skillful rewrite, a queer time that is both realized and ultimately disappointing in its own narrative arc. Cunningham tracks Woolf’s autobiographical story of a descent into madness and suicide alongside a contemporary narrative of Clarissa Vaughn, who has refused to “come to her senses” and lives with a woman named Sally while caring for her best friend, Richard, a writer dying of AIDS. Cunningham’s elegant formulation of queer temporality opens up the possibility of a “rich, riotous future” and closes it down in the same aesthetic gesture. While Woolf, following Sigmund Freud, knows that Clarissa must come to her senses (and like Freud, Woolf cannot imagine “how the change [will] be accomplished”), Cunningham turns Clarissa away from the seemingly inexorable march of narrative time toward marriage (death) and uses not consummation but the kiss as the gateway to alternative outcomes. For Woolf, the kiss constituted one of those “moments of being” that her writing struggled to encounter and inhabit; for Cunningham, the kiss is a place where, as Carolyn Dinshaw terms it in Getting Medieval, different histories “touch” or brush up against each other, creating temporal havoc in the key of desire (Dinshaw 1999).

While there is now a wealth of excellent work focused on the temporality of lives lived in direct relation to the HlV virus (Edelman 1998), we find far less work on the other part of Cunningham’s equation: those lives lived in the “shadow of an epidemic,” the lives of women, transgenders, and queers who partake of this temporal shift in less obvious ways. Furthermore, the experience of HIV for heterosexual and queer people of color does not necessarily offer the same kind of hopeful reinvention of conventional understandings of time. As Cathy Cohen’s work in The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics shows, some bodies are simply considered “expendable,” both in mainstream and marginal communities, and the abbreviated life spans of black queers or poor drug users, say, does not inspire the same kind of metaphysical speculation on curtailed futures, intensified presents, or reformulated histories; rather, the premature deaths of poor people and people of color in a nation that pumps drugs into impoverished urban communities and withholds basic health care privileges, is simply business as usual (Cohen 1999). Samuel Delany articulates beautifully the difficulty in connecting radical political practice to exploited populations when he claims, “We must remember that it is only those workers-usually urban artists (a realization Marx did come to)-whose money comes from several different social class sources, up and down the social ladder, who can afford to entertain a truly radical political practice” (Reid-Pharr 2001, xii). And yet, as Robert Reid-Pharr argues in Black Gay Man, the book that Delany’s essay introduces, the relation between the universal and the particular that allows for the elevation of white male experience (gay or straight) to the level of generality and the reduction of, say, black gay experience to the status of the individual, can only come undone through a consideration of the counterlogics that emerge from “the humdrum perversities of our existence” (12). In a Queer Time and Place seeks to unravel precisely those claims made on the universal from and on behalf of white male subjects theorizing postmodern temporality and geography.

Queer time and space are useful frameworks for assessing political and cultural change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (both what has changed and what must change). The critical languages that we have developed to try to assess the obstacles to social change have a way of both stymieing our political agendas and alienating nonacademic constituencies. I try here to make queer time and queer space into useful terms for academic and nonacademic considerations of life, location, and transformation. To give an example of the way in which critical languages can sometimes weigh us down, consider the fact that we have become adept within postmodernism at talking about “normativity,” but far less adept at describing in rich detail the practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification. I try to use the concept of queer time to make clear how respectability, and notions of the normal on which it depends, may be upheld by a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality.
And so, in Western cultures, we chart the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation; and we create longevity as the most desirable future, applaud the pursuit of long life (under any circumstances), and pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity. Within the life cycle of the Western human subject, long periods of stability are considered to be desirable, and people who live in rapid bursts (drug addicts, for example) are char acterized as immature and even dangerous. But the ludic temporality created by drugs (captured by Salvador Dall as a melting clock and by William Burroughs as “junk time”) reveals the artificiality of our privileged constructions of time and activity. In the works of queer postmodern writers like Lynn Breedlove (Godspeed), Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls), and others, speed itself (the drug as well as the motion) becomes the motor of an alternative history iils their queer heroes rewrite completely narratives of female rebellion (Myles 1994; Breedlove 2002).

The time of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples. Obviously, not all people who have children keep or even are able to keep reproductive time, but many and possibly most people believe that the scheduling of repro-time is natural and desirable. Family time refers to the normative scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing. This timetable is governed by an imagined set of children’s needs, and it relates to beliefs about children’s health and healthful environments for child rearing. The time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability. In this category we can include the kinds of hypothetical temporality-the time of “what if” -that demands protection in the way of insurance poliCies, health care, and wills.

In queer renderings of postmodern geography, the notion of a body-centered identity gives way to a model that locates sexual subjectivities within and between embodiment, place, and practice. But queer work on sexuality and space, like queer work on sexuality and time, has had to respond to canonical work on “postmodern geography” by Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and others that has actively excluded sexuality as a category for analysis precisely because desire has been cast by neo-Marxists as part of a ludic body politicS that obstructs the “real” work of activism (Soja 1989; Harvey 1990; Jameson 1997). This foundational exclusion, which assigned sexuality to body/local/personal and took class/global/political as its proper frame of reference, has made it difficult to introduce questions of sexuality and space into the more general conversations about globalization and transnational capitalism. Both Anna Tsing and Steve Pile refer this problem as the issue of “scale.” Pile, for example, rejects the notion that certain political arenas of struggle (say, class) are more important than others (say, sexuality), and instead he offers that we rethink these seemingly competing struggles in terms of scale by recognizing that while we tend to view local struggles as less significant than global ones, ultimately “the local and the global are not natural scales, but formed precisely out of the struggles that seemingly they only contain” (Pile 1997, 13).

A “queer” adjustment in the way in which we think about time, in fact, requires and produces new conceptions of space. And in fact, much of the contemporary theory seeking to disconnect queerness from an essential definition of homosexual embodiment has focused on queer space and queer practices. By articulating and elaborating a concept of queer time, I suggest new ways of understanding the nonnormative behaviors that have clear but not essential relations to gay and lesbian subjects. For the purpose of this book, “queer” refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. “Queer time” is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. “Queer space” refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics. Meanwhile, “postmodernism” in this project takes on meaning in relation to new forms of cultural production that emerge both in sync with and running counter to what Jameson has called the “logic” of late capitalism in his book Postmodernism (1997). I see postmodernism as simultaneously a crisis and an opportunity-a crisis in the stability of form and meaning, and an opportunity to rethink the practice of cultural production, its hierarchies and power dynamics, its tendency to resist or capitulate. In his work on postmodern geography, Pile also locates post modernism in terms of the changing relationship between opposition and authority; he reminds us, crucially, that “the map of resistance is not simply the underside of the map of domination” (6).

In The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey demonstrates that our conceptions of space and time are social constructions forged out of vibrant and volatile social relations (Harvey 1990). Harvey’s analysis of postmodern time and space is worth examining in detail both because he energetically dec onstructs the naturalization of modes of temporality and because he does so with no awareness of having instituted and presumed a normative framework for his alternative understanding of time. Furthermore, Harvey’s con cept of “time/space compression” and his accounts of the role of culture in late capitalism have become hegemonic in academic contexts. Harvey asserts that because we experience time as some form of natural progression, we fail to realize or notice its construction. Accordingly, we have concepts like “industrial” time and “family” time, time of “progress,” “austerity” versus “instant” gratification, “postponement” versus “immediacy.” And to all of these pifferent kinds of temporality, we assign value and meaning. Time, Harvey explains, is organized according to the logic of capital accumulation, but those who benefit from capitalism in particular experience this logic as inevitable, and they are therefore able to ignore, repress, or erase the demands made on them and others by an unjust system. We like to imagine, Harvey implies, both that our time is our own and, as the cliche goes, “there is a time and a place for everything.” These formulaic responses to time and temporal logics produce emotional and even physical responses to different kinds of time: thus people feel guilty about leisure, frustrated by waiting, satisfied by punctuality, and so on. These emotional responses add to our sense of time as “natural.”

Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot can be read, for example, as a de familiarization of time spent: a treatise on the feeling of time wasted, of inertia or time outside of capitalist propulsion. Waiting, in this play, seems to be a form of postponement until it becomes clear that nothing has been postponed and nothing will be resumed. In Beckett’s play, the future does not simply become diminished, it actually begins to weigh on the present as a burden. If poetry, according to W. H. Auden, “makes nothing happen,” the absurdist drama makes the audience wait for nothing to happen, and the experience of duration makes visible the formlessness of time. Since Beckett’s clowns go nowhere while waiting, we also see the usually invisible fault lines between time and space as temporal stasis is figured as immobility.

The different forms of time management that Harvey mentions and highlights are all adjusted to the schedule of normativity without ever being discussed as such. In fact, we could say that normativity, as it has been defined and theorized within queer studies, is the big word missing from almost all the discussions of postmodern geography within a Marxist tradition. Since most of these discussions are dependent on the work of Foucault and since normativity was Foucault’s primary understanding of the function of modem power, this is a huge oversight, and one with consequences for the discussion of sexuality in relation to time and space. Harvey’s concept of time/space compressions, for instance, explains that all of the time cycles that we have naturalized and internalized (leisure, inertia, recreation, work/industrial, family/domesticity) are also spatial practices, but again, Harvey misses the opportunity to deconstruct the meaning of naturalization with regard to specific normalized ways of being. The meaning of space, Harvey asserts, undergoes a double process of naturalization: first, it is naturalized in relation to use values (we presume that our use of space is the only and inevitable use of space-private property, for example); but second, we naturalize space by subordinating it to time. The construction of spatial practices, in other words, is obscured by the naturalization of both time and space. Harvey argues for multiple conceptions of time and space, but he does not adequately describe how time/space becomes naturalized, on the one hand, and how hegemonic constructions of time and space are uniquely gendered and sexualized, on the other. His is an avowedly materialist analysis of time/space dedicated understandably to uncovering the processes of capitalism, but it lacks a simultaneous desire to uncover the processes of heteronormativity, racism, and sexism.

We need, for example, a much more rigorous understanding of the gendering of domestic space. Harvey could have pointed to the work within feminist history on the creation of separate spheres, for one, to show where and how the time/space continuum breaks down under the weight of critical scrutiny (Cott 1977; Smith-Rosenberg 1985). Feminist historians have claimed for some thirty years that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the European bourgeoisie assumed class dominance over the aristocracy and proletariat, a separation of spheres graphically represented the gendered logic of the public/private binary and annexed middle-class women to the home, leaving the realm of politics and commerce to white men (McHugh 1999; Duggan 2000). Furthermore, as work by Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach has shown, histories of racialization cannot avoid spatial conceptions of time, conflict, or political economy (Gilroy 1993; Roach 1996).

Indeed, the histories of racialized peoples have been histories of immigration, diaspora, and forced migration. Only a single-minded focus on the history of the white working class and an abstract concept of capital can give rise to the kind of neat scheme that Harvey establishes whereby time dominates critical consciousness and suppresses an understanding of spatiality. Lindon Barrett’s Blackness and Value: Seeing Double provides one good antidote to Harvey’s clean rendering of Enlightenment divisions of space and time (Barrett 1999). According to the account that Barrett gives in his book, Western philosophy can be historically located as a discourse that accompa nies capitalism, and works to justify and rationalize a patently brutal and unjust system as inevitably scientific and organic. So seamlessly has capitalism been rationalized over the last two hundred years, in fact, that we no longer see the fault lines that divide black from white, work from play, subject from object. In true deconstructive form and with painstaking care, Barrett restores the original foundations of Western thought that were used to desigqate black as inhuman and white as human, black in association with idleness, perverse sexuality, and lack of self-consciousness, and white in association with diligence, legibility, the normal, the domestic, restraint, and self-awareness. By tracing this philosophical history, Barrett is able to explain the meaning of blackness in different historical periods in opposition to the seemingly inevitable, transparent, and neutral rhetorics of time and space that govern those periods.

Tsing also criticizes Harvey for making the breaks between space and time, modern and postmodern, economics and culture so clean and so distinct. She theorizes global capitalism much more precisely in relation to new eras of speed and connection, travel, movement, and communication; she lays out the contradictory results of global capitalism in terms of what it enables as well as what forms of oppression it enacts: Tsing reminds us that globalization makes a transnational politics (environmentalism, human rights, feminism) possible even as it consolidates u.S. hegemony. Harvey can only describe the condition of postmodernism in terms of new forms of domination and, like Jameson, can only think about cultural production as a channel for u.S. hegemony. Tsing, an anthropologist, is in many ways an unlikely defender of the nonsymmetrical relationship of cultural production to economic production, but her most important critique of Harvey concerns his characterization of postmodern culture as “a mirror of economic realities” (Tsing 2002, 466). Harvey’s analysis, according to Tsing, suffers first from a simplistic mode of taking cultural shifts and then mapping them onto economic shifts; second, she claims that Harvey makes all of his assumptions about globalization without using an ethnographic research base. Finally, he overgeneralizes the “postmodern condition” on the basis of a flawed understanding of the role of culture, and then allows culture to stand in for all kinds of other evidence of the effects of globalization.

In relation to gender, race, and alternative or subcultural production, therefore, Harvey’s grand theory of “the experience of space and time” in postmodernity leaves the power structures of biased differentiation intact, and presumes that, in Pile’s formulation, opposition can only be an “echo of domination” (Pile 1997,13). But while Harvey, like Soja and Jameson, can be counted on at least to nod to the racialization and gendering of postmodern space, also like Soja and Jameson, he has nothing to say about sexuality and space. Both Soja and Harvey claim that it was Foucault’s interviews on space and published lecture notes on “heterotopia” that, as Soja puts it, created the conditions for a postmodern geography. The Foucault who inspires the postmodern Marxist geographers is clearly the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, but not that of The History of Sexuality. Indeed, Harvey misses several obvious opportunities to discuss the naturalization of time and space in relation to sexuality. Reproductive time and family time are, above all, heteronormative time/space constructs. But while Harvey hints at the gender politics of these forms of time/space, he does not mention the possibility that all kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production.

By doing so, they also often live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed. Perhaps such people could productively be called “queer subjects” in terms of the ways they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned, and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains that other people assign to privacy and family. Finally, as I will trace in this book, for some queer subjects, time and space are limned by risks they are willing to take: the trans gender person who risks his life by passing in a small town, the subcultural musicians who risk their livelihoods by immersing themselves in nonlucrative practices, the queer performers who destabilize the normative values that make everyone else feel safe and secure; but also those people who live without financial safety nets, without homes, without steady jobs, outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purposes of protecting the rich few from everyone else.

Nora Connor, “Welfare, Workfare, Alienation: Early Marx and Late Capitalism”

“Welfare, Workfare, Alienation: Early Marx and Late Capitalism”

Nora Connor

Bad Subjects Issue #53 [January 2001]

 

Welfare, Workfare, Alienation: Early Marx and Late Capitalism

---

In 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), making good on President Clinton’s campaign promises to “end welfare as we know it.” The changes brought about by this legislation are significant. This essay examines the new work requirements and the expansion of the “workfare” program resulting from the 1996 legislation as cases of alienated labor. After a description of the new rules of welfare and of some of the work that is performed under these rules, we move on to look at the concept of alienated labor itself. Some of the questions asked include, what aspects of Marx’s extensive theory are most useful for understanding the welfare reform-labor connection? How are the concepts of labor, production and commodity different for the contemporary example than for those examples Marx used? And, are there elements of the welfare/workfare situation that can’t be adequately critiqued as “alienated labor”?

Karl Marx, “Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)”

“Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)”

Karl Marx

Introduction to Outline of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse) [1859]

1. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)

(1) PRODUCTION

Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-century Ideas.

The object before us, to begin with, material production.

Individuals producing in Society – hence socially determined individual production – is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, ^[1] which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine. As little as Rousseau’s contrat social, which brings naturally independent, autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such naturalism. This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the Robinsonades, great and small. It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate. Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual – the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century – appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day. Steuart ^[2] avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat and in antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more historical footing.

Silvia Federici, “Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work”

“Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work”

Silvia Federici

excerpt from “Precarious labor: A feminist viewpoint” lecture  [2006]

Another criticism I have against the precarious labor theory is that it presents itself as gender neutral. It assumes that the reorganization of production is doing away with the power relations and hierarchies that exist within the working class on the basis of rage, gender and age, and therefore it is not concerned with addressing these power relations; it does not have the theoretical and political tools to think about how to tackle them. There is no discussion in Negri, Virno and Hardt of how the wage has been and continues to be used to organize these divisions and how therefore we must approach the wage struggle so that it does not become an instrument of further divisions, but instead can help us undermined them. To me this is one of the main issues we must address in the movement.

Sandro Mezzadra, “Taking Care: Migration and the Political Economy of Affective Labor”

“Taking Care: Migration and the Political Economy of Affective Labor”

Sandro Mezzadra (Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia – Università di Bologna)
Goldsmiths University of London – Center for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP) March 16th 2005 [PDF]

a) As a starting point for my presentation I would like to take a very particular figure, that is the caretaker (badante). It seems that this neologism, which has been recently introduced in the Italian public discourse and legislation (with the creation of privileged paths of regularization for caretakers themselves), expresses the awareness of the fact that there is a particular sector of the labor market – the care labor market – which is becoming increasingly important in European and Western societies, and that this sector is dominantly, if not exclusively, occupied by migrants. I think that the semantic shift from domestic work to caretaking labor is significant from many points of view. On the one hand, it refers to structural transformations in our societies, such as change in family structure and gender roles, and aging; on the other hand, it can open up a more general discussion on the fact that “care”, in the meaning of an attention which is rooted in a certain kind of sociability and is therefore given for free, is increasingly becoming something rare, unusual. Only something rare, indeed, needs to be purchased on the market and is therefore bound to be commoditized. “Caretakers” are in this sense indeed very specific and peculiar figures within the contemporary composition of living labor, but they share at the same time – on a very abstract level of analysis, of course – a set of characteristics which are increasingly becoming constitutive of labor. On the one hand, this is a point which can be made in regard to other subject positions within labor market, which are themselves increasingly occupied by migrants (and predominantly migrant women) in Europe and in the West: I think of sex workers, but also of the women who sell a very particular kind of “services” – that is, the services of being good wives. On the other hand, if we take a look at the discussion on postfordism, one cannot escape the impression that the affective supplement which seems to be implied by the concept of caretaker is going to become a key feature of labor in general, with the consequence that the boundary itself between labor and life, but also between commodity and not-commodity is being blurred.

Jason Read, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The Politics and Ontology of Living Labor”

What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The Politics and Ontology of Living Labor
Jason Read
from Chapter Two, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, 2003. [PDF]

 

In effect when Marx concerns himself with the essence of capitalism, he begins by invoking
the establishment of a single global and nonqualified subjectivity, which capitalizes
all the processes of subjectification. And this unique subject (“the unique subjective essence
of wealth”) expresses itself in “whatever” object. According to Marx capitalism liberates the
subjectivity of all of the traditional codes which limit it, only to fall back on [rabattre sur]
it in the production of value.
—Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri, “Annex 2”

A B S T R A C T L A B O R
For Karl Marx the two constitutive components of the capitalist mode of production
are labor, or the capacity for labor freed from the means of its employment,
and wealth, freed from the objective means of its investment. The capitalist mode
of production is formed in the encounter between a free flow of labor and a flow
of undifferentiated wealth. The encounter of these two flows, in the form of wage
labor, are sufficient to constitute what Marx calls “formal subsumption,” the initial
stage of capitalism.

Cindy L’Hirondelle, “Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”

“Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”
Cindy L’Hirondelle
Off Our Backs,  Jan/Feb 2004

I’ve worked laying sod, painting cars, selling donuts, and flipping burgers. I have also lived and felt the invisibility of being “only a mom.” Nothing compares with the stress of looking after small children, cooking for them and cleaning up after them. Housework gets no recognition, no status, and is the most wearing job I have ever done.

But the subject of household labor is seen as dull, and gets ignored even by progressive groups. Paid work gets recognition; it is “real” work. Yet the most common, exhausting, and tedious work is done for free and is invisible to those who fight against capitalism for social justice. As an anti-capitalist activist, I have attended countless meetings and protests, read stacks of alternative magazines-but I was unaware of the role that domestic labor played in the larger economic picture.

Valerie Bryson, “Production and reproduction”

“Production and Reproduction”
Valerie Bryson

Chapter Eight, Marx and Other Four-Letter Words (2005)

My starting point in this chapter is the classic Marxist theory of
historical materialism: the idea that the basis of human society,
the key to understanding its history and future potential, lies in
the production and reproduction of material life. While accepting
the value of this approach, I also use feminist theory to argue that
‘malestream’ theorists have interpreted production and reproduction
in unhelpfully narrow ways to produce an analysis which is not only
male based but also male biased. I argue in favour of an expanded
notion of (re)production that includes the socially necessary work
disproportionately performed by women; I conclude that without
such an expansion we can neither understand existing society nor

develop effective strategies for changing it.

George Caffentzis / Silvia Federici, “Notes on the edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism”

“Notes on the edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism”

George Caffentzis / Silvia Federici, 2007. [link]

 

In the framework of the “edu–factory” discussion we want to share some reflections on two concepts that have been central to the debate: the edu–factory and cognitive capitalism. We agree with the key point of the “edu–factory” discussion prospectus: As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. This is to say the university is not just another institution subject to sovereign and governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social struggles are won and lost.

George Caffentzis, “Throwing away the ladder: The universities in the crisis”

“Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in the Crisis”
George Caffentzis

Zerowork I, 1975

Strikes, sit-ins, mass demonstrations? The stuff of the Sixties have appeared on the campuses of the U.S. in the last year. But as the media have pointed out, there is a “hardheaded” economic character to these actions. No more psychodelic guerrillas dropping pig’s blood on the college president. In its place we have “student worker strikes” in Athens, Ohio; a sit-in to protest tuition increases in Cornell; the first statewide college teacher’s strike in N.J.; strikes and demonstrations protesting the cutting of student funds and teacher firings in New York City University of N.Y. The “political” demands of the late Sixties: end university complicity with the draft and war-research, end grading and “free speech” restrictions, institutions of “`alternative” courses, open admissions to all students (“end stratification”) have turned to the “economic” demands of the middle 70’s: no tuition increases, no productivity deals, no firings, wages for schoolwork. From day-glo politics to grey economics all in the space of four years?

Selma James, “Sex, Race and Class”

“Sex, Race and Class”
Selma James, 1975. [PDF]

There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.

Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, “Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001″

“Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001”

Marcy Whitebook, Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley (2002)

View the full report here.

Introduction
In 2001 and 2002, over $100 million dollars will be spent to augment the earnings
of child care teachers and providers across the United States. These financial rewards
will come in the form of annual stipends, health insurance coverage, and, for a small
number, targeted, sustained pay increases.  Driven in part by a robust economy in the late
1990s, combined with a growing demand for child care services and a shortage of trained
child care workers, many states, including California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina,
Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin, have initiated or expanded publicly-funded
programs focused on building a more skilled and stable child care workforce.  Initiatives
are also being developed in Connecticut, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Additionally, workers in Head Start, Department of Defense and some pre-kindergarten
early childhood programs are benefiting from salary enhancements built into those
delivery systems (Whitebook & Eichberg, 2002; Montilla, Twombly & De Vita, 2001).
While most child care teachers and providers continue to earn poverty-level
wages, and many beneficiaries of the above-mentioned compensation initiatives still are
woefully underpaid, there is little argument within the child care field, and a slowly
dawning awareness among policy makers, that improved services for young children in
the U.S. require better compensation for the child care workforce.  This level of
acknowledgment was not present a decade ago, even within the child care community.  In
many communities, the focus is not on whether to raise wages, but on how best to do so,
and a great deal of experimentation and debate is underway (Whitebook & Eichberg,
2002).

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”

“Women and the Subversion of the Community”
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
December 29, 1971 (html markup by Harry Cleaver) [PDF]

These observations are an attempt to define and analyze the “Woman Question”, and to locate this question in the entire “female role” as it has been created by the capitalist division of labour.

We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this female role. We assume that all women are housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives. That is, on a world level, it is precisely what is particular to domestic work, not only measured as number of hours and nature of work, but as quality of life and quality of relationships which it generates, that determines a woman’s place wherever she is and to whichever class she belongs. We concentrate here on the position of the working-class woman, but this is not to imply that only working-class women are exploited. Rather it is to confirm that the role of the working-class housewife, which we believe has been indispensable to capitalist production is the determinant for the position of all other women. Every analysis of women as a caste, then, must proceed from the analysis of the position of working-class housewives.

Philip J. Kain, “Marx, Housework and Alienation”

“Marx, Housework, and Alienation”
Philip J. Kain
Hypatia vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1993)

For different feminist theorists, housework and child rearing are viewed in very
different ways. I argue that Marx gives us the categories that allow us to see why
housework and child care can be both a paradigm of unalienated labor and also involve
the greatest oppression. In developing this argument, a distinction is made between
alienation and oppression and the conditions are discussed under which unalienated
housework can become oppressive or can become alienated.

bell hooks, “Revolutionary parenting”

“Revolutionary Parenting”

bell hooks

excerpt from Feminist theory: from margin to center. [1984]

During the early stages of contemporary women’s liberation movement, feminist analyses of motherhood reflected the race and class biases of participants. Some white middle class, college-educated women argued that motherhood was a serious obstacle to women’s liberation, a trap confining women to the home, keeping them tied to cleaning, cooking, and child care. Others simply identified motherhood and childrearing as the locus of women’s oppression. Had black women voiced their views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women. Racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills or education and a number of other issues would have been at the top of the list – but not motherhood. Black women would not have said motherhood prevented us from entering the world of paid work because we have always worked. From slavery to the present day black women have worked outside the home, in the fields, in the factories, in the laundries, in the homes of others. That work gave meager financial compensation and often interfered with or prevented effective parenting. Historically, black women have identified work in the context of family as humanizing labor, work that affirms their identity as women, as human beings showing love and care, the very gestures of humanity white supremacist ideology claimed black people were incapable of expressing. In contrast to labor done in a caring environment inside the home, labor outside the home was most often seen as stressful, degrading, and dehumanizing.

Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor”

“Affective Labor”

Michael Hardt

boundary 2 2:26 [1999]

Focus on the production of affects in our labor and our social practices has often served as a useful ground for anticapitalist projects, in the context of discourses for instance on desire or on use-value.  Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.  The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization.  Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor.  Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.