Theda Skocpol, “A Society without a ‘State’? Political Organization, Social Conflict, and Welfare Provision in the United States”

“A Society without a ‘State’? Political Organization, Social Conflict, and Welfare Provision in the United States”

Theda Skocpol

Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Oct. – Dec., 1987), pp. 349-371

This article was originally presented at the Institute on ‘Foreign Perspectives on the U.S. Constitution,’ sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies at the Wingspread Conference Center, Racine, Wisconsin, on 29 September 1987. It draws upon some material presented in the introduction to The Politics of Social Policy in the United States,  edited by Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

‘State and society’ are terms of reference bound to seem out of place in a discussion of the Constitution and governance of the United States of America. As an insightful observer once put it (Pollard 1925, 31), ‘Americans may be defined as that part of the English-speaking world which instinctively revolted against the doctrine of the sovereignty of the State and has … striven to maintain that attitude from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers to the present day.’ Citizens of the United States view themselves as fortunate not to be subject to any overbearing ‘State.’ And foreign observers rightly have trouble identifying elements of concentrated sovereignty in the American political system – except, perhaps, when the USA acts aggressively on the world stage.

This article will touch upon historical reasons why Americans lack a sense of the state. Primarily, however, I shall argue that we can learn a surprising amount about American society and politics by treating state-society relationships in more analytical terms. It is an ethnocentric illusion to imagine that the United States has been a dynamic society and capitalist economy ‘unencumbered’ by any state. Instead, the specific organizational forms that state activities have taken in America have profoundly affected the social cleavages that have gained political expression, and helped to determine the sorts of public policies that US governments have – and have not – pursued from the nineteenth century to the present day. Drawing upon my own current research, I can illustrate this argument by exploring why US patterns of public social provision differ from those associated with European welfare states. If the US constitution is construed broadly to mean not just a document drawn up in 1787-8 but an entire configuration of governance with associated cultural meanings, then this constitution has much to tell us about why American social policies have come to be as they are.

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.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women’s Autonomy and Remuneration for Care Work in the New Emergencies”

“Women’s Autonomy and Remuneration for Care Work in the New Emergencies”

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

PDF posted on The Commoner Oct. 2010

This paper has been presented at the international Conference on: “La
autonomia posible” (The Possible Autonomy). Universidad Autonoma de la
Ciudad de Mexico, October 24-25-26, 2006. It has been translated from Italian into
English by Silvia Federici.

 

 

Every construction of autonomy has its own history that evolves in a specific context
and must face specific obstacles and battles. Yesterday I mentioned the first stages of
this history through the initiatives of that feminist movement in which I directly
participated—initiatives necessary for women to regain the availability of their body.
I have also recalled how, on a planetary level, this battle is far from being concluded.
Here I would like to consider other aspects of this history, starting again from the
initial moments of that political experience, to assess what is the relation between
women and autonomy today with respect to some emergent problems, and also to
ask, in relation to the latter, what has happened to both the demand that housework
(or care work) be remunerated and to women’s economic autonomy.

Gwendolyn Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp (II): Feminist Welfare Politics, Poor Single Mothers and the Challenge of Welfare Justice”

“The Lady and the Tramp (II): Feminist Welfare Politics, Poor Single Mothers and the Challenge of Welfare Justice”

Gwendolyn Mink

Feminist Studies, Vol. 24 No. 1 (Spring, 1998). pp. 55-64.

I have worked in various political venues on welfare issues for ten years-for about as long as I have been researching and writing about women and U.S. social policy.’ Most recently, I worked as a Steering Committee member and cochair of the Women’s Committee of 100, a feminist mobilization against punitive welfare reform. I signed up with the Women’s Committee of 100 in March or April of 1995-roughly a year after completing a book on welfare policy history and around the same time as the book’s publication.2

I have always done both politics and scholarship, so directing my activism toward my field of professional expertise at first did not seem especially odd or problematic. However, I had just published a book critical of experts like me-a book which, among other things, faulted solipsistic women welfare innovators of the early twentieth century for building a welfare state harmful to women and to gender equality. The book was barely between covers, and I had already embarked on a path of policy advocacy that veered disturbingly close to the reformers I had criticized. There I was, consorting with a group of supereducated, do-good feminists, most of whom would never need a welfare check. And there we were, using our social and professional positions to gain entry into congressional offices, where we spoke against reforms that would affect not us but poor women. It seemed to me that maybe I hadn’t really internalized the lessons I had drawn from early-twentieth-century welfare history.

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.

Alisa Del Re, “Women and Welfare: Where Is Jocasta?”

“Women and Welfare: Where Is Jocasta?”

Alisa Del Re

Chapter Seven, Radical Thought in Italy. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds.

In the Oedipus myth, Oedipus’s body and his desires significantly contribute to
the making of the individual’s free will, his autonomy as well as the relationship
between knowledge and will. Yet the other body at stake, that of his mother, Jocasta,
is hardly visible. We know nothing about her, neither her desires, nor her guilt,
nor whether she is self-aware.1 She is the Mother, unself-conscious and loving, and
nothing is said about her concerns, her aspirations, and her needs. She has no desire:
in Oedipus’s drama she endures and disappears. Not even Freud is interested in
Jocasta, and in his interpretation of the Oedipus myth he disingenuously disregards
the mother, who must have certainly suffered, as well as felt emotions and
desires. The relationship between mother and son is so asymmetrical, and the interpretation
of their desires so incommensurable, that in both the myth and contemporary
psychoanalytic interpretations of it, we are presented with a mutilated reading
of the situation. The Oedipus myth thus stands as the most blatant emblem of
the phallocentric bias of an interpretation that claims to be “scientific.” This type
of reading denies the question of sexual difference as it is inscribed in the story and
refuses to acknowledge Jocasta as a constitutive element of both reality and the formation
of thought.

As of today, things have not really changed. In a recent issue of
the French journal Sciences Humaines, a long series of articles proposed that the
human sciences are founded on a few constantly reformulated themes, questions,
and myths that continue to fuel research in the humanities.2 The articles do not
take into account, as a crucial fact, the question of sexual difference. None of the
pieces in the collection acknowledges that the object of analysis, the human being,
is gendered, that gender is instrumental for the human being’s social constitution,
or that gender concerns and informs the categories of race, class, and ethnicity. The
fact that sexual difference does not invest only one minority, to which fundamental
issues can be referred, but rather is per se a fundamental issue is never mentioned
at all. The question of sexual difference is thus emptied of meaning in the name of
a subject who, in the symbolic order of the researcher, is imagined as masculine
and in the name of a society whose power and organizational structures are founded
on this subject. To think the difference between man and woman as incommensurable
and asymmetrical implies an interpretation of reality and of the production
of discourse that acknowledges sexual difference as the foundation of social reality.
This difference constitutes a necessary value, capable of producing change; as such,
it represents a tool of analysis superior to the current paradigms of research. It is
worth stressing that we are not dealing with the mere task of “adding” women here
and there in our studies; such a move would only have the effect of assimilating a
new element within an unchanging symbolic order. Feminist discourse in the social
sciences has already offered suggestions and pointed to new directions for an analysis
that could confer meaning and human value upon the real.3

Carlo Vercellone, “The Anomaly and Exemplariness of the Italian Welfare State”

“The Anomaly and Exemplariness of the Italian Welfare State”

Carlo Vercellone

Chapter Six, Radical Thought in Italy. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, eds.

In many respects, the experiences of the Italian Welfare State represent a particular
case. The comparatively late industrial development, the continuity and ferocity
of the workers’ struggles and social movements, the high levels of Mafia activity and
political corruption, and above all the radical division between the northern and
southern parts of the country all make Italy an anomaly with respect to the rest of the
developed capitalist countries. Precisely because of these anomolous conditions, however,
the Italian experience may paradoxically prove to be exemplary for the future
of all welfare systems. The need to manage an internal relationship between North
and South, for example, has now become a generalized condition for all capitalist
economies. Most important, the Italian experiences, especially those emanating from
the social movements of the 1970s, show the possibilities of alternative forms of
welfare in which systems of aid and socialization are separated from State control
and situated, instead in autonomous social networks. These alternative experiments
may show how systems of social welfare will survive the crisis of the Welfare State.

Precarias a la Deriva, “Four Hypotheses on the sex-attention-care continuum”

“Four Hypotheses on the sex-attention-care continuum”

Precarias a la Deriva

Translation by Nate Hawthorne

 

1. Affect knows a historically determined social stratification, which materializes in the chain sex-attention-care. This stratification:

a) counterposes sex and care

b) disincarnates affective communication and converts it into attention (communication based on uninvolved empathetic listening)

c) capitalizes fractions, isolated functions, of each one of these elements, opening new modalities of the sexual contract (buying and selling of spouses, rented mothers, children for order, proliferation and virtualization of sexual services…);

d) continuing to assign the tasks linked to this chain to women, but introducing new stratifications among them, linked, above all, to race/ethnicity and country of origin.

2. We call this chain the sex-attention-care continuum, on one hand, in order to emphasize  the elements of continuity that exist under this stratification and, thus, to challenge the stratification and to open possibilities of alliance and of transversal conflict. On the other hand, because we detect three processes (the sexualization of work, the crisis of care, and the capitalization of attention) that are blurring the neat distinctions making the fixed traditional positions of women more mobile and creating new positions.

An example: through the instauration in almost all countries of the western world of laws that penalized sexual services for money, those services remained restricted to determined places, spaces, and subjects. The whore was opposed in sharply to other good women; during Franco-ism, if a woman was ‘lost’ (or of a strange sexuality or a single mother or one of those that like to fuck) then she was called a whore and thus a clear barrier was established that
excluded her from other options (most obviously, the functions of the wife and the dignified mother). Even though at first she did not have this profession, she could wind up having it. She left from the matrimonial market and ended up either in some institution (prison for lost youth…) or on the street, “doing the street”. Now, in contrast, sexual service has a more uncertain place and those who behave badly are not immediately headed for the other side of the gate, to another profession, to a specific mode of life. Sex as a mercantile exchange impregnates other spaces and the subjects that exercise it can enter and leave with greater ease, they can even include women student-whores or phone sex operators and things like that…

The word continuum speaks of the breakdown of the borders in sex, care, and attention: internal borders in the “world of the sex industry” (porno-sex, street-sex, phone-sex); external borders (sex in relation to other supposed worlds: sex-fashion, sex-marriage, sex-domestic work, sex-care services). And in this breakdown of borders is where sex joins with attention and care: whores care, telephone operators masturbate, students attend, caregivers are girlfriends…

What do the three processes that we allude to and what continuities are there among them?

The sexualization of work: alludes to the expansion of sex as commodity exchange the strict bounds of the sex industry, and at the same time its expansion and diversification. Sex appears in play in the world of fashion and the spectacle, in job interviews, in the sexualized performance that is demanded of all women (and increasingly also of men) (in an expanding service sector), etc.

At the same time, sex, inserted itself into the chain pleasure-consumer, produces a specific value that adds to the value of the commodity/service to which it is associated. Thus, sex becomes a force of production. And bodies discipline themselves increasingly in function of this permanent demand for sexual performance. A demand that comes to saturation of a fixed and exclusively heteronormative plain (heteronormativity as a political regime) and that at the same time generates hetero, hypervisible and hypersexualized bodies, organized in unifamilar models of cohabitation. This assures its social intelligibilty and control, at the same time that it excludes or neutralizes other forms of organization of care, intimacy, and space. Which connects the sexualization of work with the following process:

The crisis of care: due to the feminist flight from the tasks of mother and spouse, to the increase of demand for feminine workers (because capital has learned to exploit the “feminine difference” for its profit), to the laboral deregulation and the dismantling of the welfare state, the informal networks of women, which in “private” had assured the sustainability of life supported by familial unities and in the welfare state, in the countries where that  has existed), they are destructuring, without the creation of a new organization to assure the care of persons, opening an authentic crisis, that experiences a conservative closing through three processes:

a) Replacement of the welfare state and its universal rights with the EMERGENCE OF A THIRD SECTOR whose principal task is the containment of risk(y) subjects;

b) Contracting of immigrant women workers, for the most part from the south of the world, to cover the tasks of care, on occasions in situations of semislavery, introducing into the bosom of the home the international division of labor and its tensions (affective flows in the south-north direction and creation of so-called global chains of affect);

c) Lack of time, resources, recognition, and desire to take charge of the labor of nonremunerated care (which notwithstanding continues to fall onto the shoulders of women), which ends up  translating into a powerful uncertainty for periods or illness or old  age;

d) Capitalization of attention delinked from affective bonds. With this the crisis of care connects to the third process to which we made reference:

The capitalization of attention: three heterogeneous phenomena come together in order to create an emergent market for the sale of “listening” and “empathy”:

a) The sensation of uncertainty that produces the crisis of care (which  feeds such things as confessional radio programs, sessions with psychics and psychologists…);

b) The centrality that the relationship with the client acquires in the process of production, in order to facilitate the adjustment of production that takes demand as its point of departure (for example, the market of telephone services which provide attention to the client or consulting services and causes the proliferation of figures such as the cool-hunter or the commercial…);

c) The need to trim public expenses, “filtering” the demand for assistance (which translates into the creation of things like emergency phonelines, phonelines for abused women, etc…).

Attention, exchanged for money in a temporal pattern of measure, isolates itself from incarnated communication – which produces an enduring relationship, trust and cooperation – and becomes an empty and uninvolved exchange of codes (words and gestures).

3.  In the context of uncertainty and deterritorialization imposed by the precarization of existence, a securitarian logic triumphs as a mode of taking charge of bodies, based on fear, individualiation, and containment. The two principal agents of this logic are private security services and NGOs. Care appears here as a mode of taking charge of bodies opposed to the securitarian logic and based on cooperation, interdependence, the gift, and social ecology.

Seeking a definition of care, which would take into account the form in which it is given today, but also its possible virtualities, we are given to the following formula:

task + attention + X + everydayness = care

Where we define the X in principle as affect, but affect not understood as that which you want or love, but rather as an ethical element and a criterion for social ecology. We speak of a virtuosity that happens in the juncture between attention and task and that produces care, empathy, intersubjectivity. This affective component has an indispensible creative character and constitute the part of the labor (nonremunerated as much as remunerated) that can not be codified. What escapes from the code situates us in what is not even said, opens a terrain of the thinkable and livable, is that  which creates relationships.

4. One of the fundamental biopolitical challenges today consists in inventing a critique of the present organization of sex, attention, and care, and a practice that, taking these – as elements inside a continuum – as point of departure, recombining these elements in order to produce new more liberatory  and cooperative forms of affect, that place care in the center but without separating it from sex nor from communication.

Tiqqun #2, “Sonogram of a Potential”

“Sonogram of a Potential” [echographie d’une puissance]

Tiqqun #2 [PDF]

What hinges on something defends it.

Italian Proverb.

 

When I was born, my mother still didn’t know what gender her child was.

A nurse came into the room she was lying in, half asleep after a long labor, and said to her:

“Madam, you have suffered a disgrace. It’s a girl.”

That’s how she was told of my birth.

F., born in Naples, 1975

Francis Wheen, “The Megalosaurus” (excerpt)

“The Megalosaurus” (excerpt)

Francis Wheen

Excerpt from Karl Marx: A Life, p. 169-177

His living conditions might have been expressly designed to keep him from lapsing into contentment. The furniture and fittings in the two-room apartment were all broken, tattered or torn, with a half-inch of dust over everything. In the middle of the front living room, overlooking Dean Street, was a big table covered with an oil cloth, on which lay Marx’s manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children’s toys, rags and scraps from his wife’s sewing basket, several cups with broken rims, knives, forks, lamps, an inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes and a thick veneer of tobacco ash. Even finding somewhere to sit was fraught with peril. ‘Here is a chair with only three legs, on another chair the children have been playing at cooking  – this chair happens to have four legs,’ a guest reported. ‘This is the one which is offered to the visitor, but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away; and if you sit down, you risk a pair of trousers.’

One of the few Prussian police spies who gained admission to this smoke-filled cavern was shocked by Marx’s chaotic habits:

He leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world.

Marx’s reluctance to go to bed seems eminently reasonable, since his whole menage – including the housekeeper, Helene “Lenchen” Demuth – had to sleep in one small room in the back of the building. How Karl and Jenny ever found the time or privacy for procreation remains a mystery; one assumes that they seized their chances while Lenchen was out taking the children for a walk. With Jenny ill and Karl preoccupied, the task of preserving any semblance of domestic order fell entirely on their servant. ‘Oh, if you knew how much I am longing for you and the little ones,’ Jenny wrote to Karl during her fruitless expedition to Holland in 1850. ‘I know that you and Lenchen will take care of them. Without Lenchen I would not have peace of mind here.’

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.

Ruth Milkman, “Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression”

“Women’s Work and Economic Crisis: Some Lessons of the Great Depression”

Ruth Milkman, 1976 [PDF]

I. Introduction

Most people in this society view paid work and
family life as two clearly distinct spheres of activity,
as indeed they have become. In general, men are
associated with work and women with the family.
Though there is considerable overlap in practice –
women frequently work outside the home and men
often play an important role within it – American
culture clearly defines men as the “breadwinners”
and women as the people socially responsible for
managing housework and family life. Women’s
production within the family, because it is not paid
labor, is often not recognized as valuable, but the
work done within both spheres is clearly crucial to
the functioning of the economy. Unpaid houseworkers
produce and socialize children and efficiently
provide many important personal and
social services. Paid workers produce profits and
also some useful commodities.

In the course of capitalist development, women
have come to play an increasingly important role
in the sphere of paid labor, and yet participation in
that sphere continues to be ideologically defined as
“male.” This disparity between the cultural definition
of women and the reality of their material
situation stems from a contradiction basic to the
structure of capitalism. On the one hand, there is
the continuing need for the family, particularly
women’s unpaid labor in it, and, on the other hand,
the tendency for an increasing amount of human
activity to be integrated into the sphere of commodity
production in the course of economic growth.

Contra Costa Times, “Parents anguish over child care cuts” [10/19/2010]

“Parents anguish over child care cuts”

Rick Radin, Contra Costa Times [10/19/2010]

[Petition to save Stage 3 childcare and jobs]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s elimination of a child care subsidy, benefiting 8,000 children in the Bay Area and more than 57,000 statewide, has parents and providers upset and worried.

The loss of the subsidy will cost low-income parents hundreds and perhaps thousands of dollars a month, depending on how many children they have who were covered by the subsidy.

The program, known as CalWORKs Stage 3, gives continuing child care subsidies to parents who have been out of the CalWORKs welfare-to-work program for job training and education for at least two years.

California will end Stage 3 payments Nov. 1, but child care providers haven’t been paid since July 1 because of the delay in settling the state budget. The state has promised that it will make up the back payments.

Assembly Speaker John Pérez, D-Los Angeles, announced a proposal this week that would go around the governor and restore funding until a new chief executive takes office in January.

Kamilla Wade, 27, holds her newborn son Kai, as she and her daughters Kalani, 6, and Kiara, 9, look out from their Antioch, Calif. home on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010. Wade is receiving stage 3 childcare subsidies for her girls under the state CalWORKS program which has been eliminated beginning Nov. 1. Wade's two daughters together receive $1,200 a month in childcare under the program and her newborn son will require an additional $1,200 a month after she returns to work. (Sherry LaVars/Staff)

Schwarzenegger killed the program in one of several line-item vetoes after completing a budget deal with the Legislature earlier this month. Eliminating the child care subsidy is intended to save the state about $256 million a year.

About 1,700 children in Contra Costa County and 2,200 in Alameda County will lose their subsidies, according to the Contra Costa Childcare Council, the county’s largest child care network.

Elimination of the program will leave parents who rely on help to stay in the work force with few, if any, options, said council Director Kate Ertz-Berger.

It also may cause children to be yanked from providers with whom they are prospering to face an unknown future with lower-cost providers or even less-stable arrangements, Ertz-Berger said.

Alternatively, some parents may choose to quit their jobs to stay home with their children and apply for county welfare, she said.

“The bottom line is families will be devastated,” Ertz-Berger said. “Children will lose the ability to prepare for school.”

Elimination of the program was part of $962 million in cuts the governor made to restore a state “rainy day” fund to a $1.3 billion balance, said H.D. Palmer, deputy director of the state Department of Finance.

About $1.7 billion in other categories of child care subsidies are still available, Palmer said.

“The reserve (fund) was unacceptably low,” he said. “Not to single out child care, but the reserve was not sufficient.”

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).

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “A General Strike”

“A General Strike”

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Originally published in All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework and the Wages Due. Falling Wall Press. [1975]

[Dalla Costa gave the following speech at a 1974 celebration of International Women’s Day in Mestre, Italy.]

 

Today the feminist movement in Italy is opening the campaign for Wages for Housework. As you have heard from the songs, as you have seen from the photograph exhibition, as you have read on the placards, the questions we are raising today are many: the barbarous conditions in which we have to face abortion, the sadism we are subjected to in obstetric and gynaecological clinics, our working conditions – in jobs outside the home our conditions are always worse than men’s, and at home we work without wages – the fact that social services either don’t exist or are so bad that we are afraid to let our children use them, and so on.

 

Now at some point people might ask, what is the connection between the campaign we are opening today, the campaign for Wages for Housework, and all these things that we have raised today, that we have exposed and are fighting against? All these things that we have spoken about, that we have made songs about, that we have shown in our exhibitions and films?

 

We believe that the weakness of all women – that weakness that’s behind our being crossed out of all history, that’s behind the fact that when we leave the home we must face the most revolting, underpaid and insecure jobs – this weakness is based on the fact that all of us women, whatever we do, are wearied and exhausted at the very outset by the 13 hours of housework that no-one has ever recognized, that no-one has ever paid for.

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.

Judith Ramirez, “The Global Kitchen: A Speech on the Value of Housework Debate”

“The Global Kitchen: A Speech on the Value of Housework Debate”

Judith Ramirez, 1981 [PDF]

It’s 1981, and I think we can safely assume that all over the world this afternoon there are women who are cooking, and cleaning, and standing over washing machines or by streams, women who are gathering firewood and fetching water, looking after children, sick people and old people, and that in all the countries in which they are carrying out these activities they are not regarded as productive members of society.

They are working alongside men who are building roads and driving tractors, but they are not rewarded economically like their brothers. We live in a world which views women’s work in the home as a merely private activity which occurs outside the marketplace; women’s lives are shaped by this fact, development theories are based on it and national economies both capitalist and socialist – have it at their foundation. The position is succinctly expressed in the observation that ‘a male worker laying a pipe to a house in the city is considered to be economically active; a woman carrying a 40 kilo water jar for one or two hours a day is just doing a household task. (Impact 11/79).

Until recently, the only acknowledgment of housework in discussions of development and economic productivity worldwide has been its lack of acknowledgment. In the United Nations’ ‘State of the World’s Women Report’, 1979 it states: ‘The long busy hours spent in the home where the new generation of workers is reproduced, fed, clothed and cared for are not quantified as work whether in the developed or developing countries. And in many parts of the developing world, women’s work in caring for the family extends beyond the home into other productive activities, particularly subsistence agriculture, which are not considered statistically because national statistics cover only the commercial sector, omitting the subsistence economy where the bulk of women’s work is carried out. ‘

Layla AbdelRahim, “On Objects, Love, and Objectifications: Children in a Material World”

“On Objects, Love, and Objectifications: Children in a Material World”

Layla AbdelRahim [2002]

This work first appeared as a 15-page paper for a doctoral seminar in education at McGill University, Montreal in October 2002. Claudia Mitchell, our professor, challenged us to reflect on the phenomenology of children’s space. My paper for that course focused on my child’s room. I have since incorporated contrastive and reflective elements from my anthropological observations on childhood and edited the form and the content of the first version to present at the CHILDHOODS 2005 conference in July in Oslo.

Before proceeding further, I would like to clarify what may come off as a categorical condemnation of ALL of society or of ALL of ‘civilised‘ ‘Western’ society. When I apply these terms and categories, I refer to the official and the generally valued aspects of social organisation. It is precisely because I understand that all societies are much more variegated than the official or ‘mainstream’ grammar portrays the various ‘nations’ to be that I criticise the attempt to standardise human experience according to the “official party-line” turning this experience into suffering.

Prologue: on Love

How to love a child, asked Janush Korchak, the Polish pediatrician and pedagogue at the beginning of the 20th century, which perhaps meant how to be Human. Yet, most people find it difficult to conceive what it is to be able to listen to a child, to respect a child, and to be there for a child even when not one’s own, even when one feels it is beyond one’s power. The love in your heart will give you the strength, was Korchak’s message. Day or night, he waited by the bedside of a dying child so that when the child’s eyes opened they would meet the doctor’s and the child would know that s/he was not alone in this world and then death would seem less cold, less frightful, less solitary. During World War II, the Germans condemned to death the group of some 200 Orphans in his charge. The doctor had a chance to stay behind. He said that he would not abandon his children at this difficult moment of their lives. He went with them. They all vanished one foggy dawn.

Cheshire Calhoun, “Constructing Lesbians and Gay Men as Family’s Outlaws”

“Constructing Lesbians and Gay Men as Family’s Outlaws”

Cheshire Calhoun

Chapter 6, Feminism, The Family and the Politics of the Closet. 2000. [PDF]

 

 

Constructing Lesbians and Gay Men as Family’s Outlaws

It remains to make good on two promissory notes from the previous chapter.
As I mentioned at the outset of that chapter, lesbian feminists have
constructed extensive and pointed arguments against lesbian marriage, motherhood,
and family. Because those arguments are so compelling from a feminist
perspective, they need to be addressed at length. Second, the previous
chapter invoked, without defending, the thesis that being unfit for marriage
and family has occupied a central position in the social construction of what
it means to be gay or lesbian. Because putting the family at the center of
lesbian and gay politics looks, on the surface, reactionary rather than revolutionary,
some hefty evidence that the subordinating construction of gay and
lesbian identity centers around their being family outlaws is in order.