Report on week 4 of Solidarity’s class on socialist strategies in the labor movement, “Socialist feminist struggle from equal rights to wages for housework”
BY IVAN DRURY ZARIN
The characterization of womens’ labor in the twenty-first century that has really stuck with me is that it is “degendered.” I found this argument counter intuitive because it seems to me that labor has adapted new forms of gendering; that every reform since the partial victories of the second wave has further entrenched and perfected the gendering of class and of classed divisions of labor.
I first encountered the “degendered” labor framing in social reproduction feminist Sedef Arat-Koc’s writing about “global care chains” that transfer northward the labor power of women in the global south. Arat-Koc argues that professional women in the US and Canada have moved into careers only so far as they have been able to slough off the gendered demands of socially reproductive labor dumped on their shoulders by patriarchy. A characteristic of this maneuver-to-career is that it is facilitated by neoliberal states, which have attacked, defunded, and disorganized social wage institutions like parental leave, employment insurance and welfare, social housing, and schools, while providing incentives in the form of tax breaks and family benefits so that individual professional women can fulfill their gendered responsibility for ensuring socially reproductive labor is done, whether they do it themselves or find another worker to do it in their stead.
The most important contribution that the neoliberal state makes to the upward mobility of some women citizens is its temporary foreign worker, non-status worker, international student, and other migrant worker programs. Within the global labor market, the border manages the factory that includes reproductive labor in the households of professional women and families. That unwaged labor remains gendered –– even when it’s done by men, its remains devalued and invisibilized by its feminization.
There are two principle conditions that women must fulfill to access these career paths: first, that they have enough money to pay other women to do their reproductive work. Even if those sub contracted women work long hours for low wages, there is still a cost that must be privately borne, so not all women workers can afford to hire out this work. And they don’t get a complete out: the work of hiring and managing these paid caregivers also falls to women. This first condition remains sharply and distinctly gendered: it represents a transfer of reproductive responsibility and fulfillment from one woman to another, or another group of women; their task load defined by other gendered rubrics of class, race, and citizenship status.
The second condition is that these professional career women must act like men. This is the “degendered” part. Anti-discrimination laws protect women as equals in the workplace; a workplace that exists through a patriarchal structure that assigns reproductive labor by gender. The male-identified worker-default is defined as that wage worker who can work through the day without being distracted by the demands of social reproduction because capital assumes each man has a woman carrying out this work off camera. The capitalist-patriarchy nexus winds like a DNA strand.
Professional women must compete on this gendered terrain, which demands that they “degender” themselves, behaving like male-defaulted wage workers. The example I use to illustrate this is about a friend who told her dissertation supervisor she was pregnant in the fourth year of her PhD. He said that he’d never had a student graduate after having a child. And then got red-faced when she replied by asking: have you had a male student graduate with a kid? His woman grad students were expected to dutifully return to their studies weeks after birthing a child, with that child cared for by someone else, exactly as his male students had successfully done. The professional worker is expected to act as his male students have: without gendered responsibilities of reproductive care.
I read Silvia Federici’s Patriarchy of the Wage as conversant with this critique, from the illuminating angle of critiquing the gendered incompleteness of Marx’s view of capitalist totality. It is the capitalist market that so-genders labor processes, but, because Marx skips over the whole well of social reproduction from which wage labor springs, Marxism tends to contribute to capitalism’s mystification of the gendered character of class.
Federici writes, “In Capital, they [women] remain shadow figures, only represented as victims of abuse, an image in stark contrast with that projected by contemporary political reformers who pictured them—especially when single and not burdened with children—as enjoying a new sense of freedom, thanks to having a wage, leaving home at an early age ‘to be their own mistresses,’ and behaving like men.” (81)
For me, this was the starting point for our class discussion on socialist feminist struggles — the fourth class in Solidarity’s summer reading group series on socialist strategy in the US labor movement. We were fortunate to have Silvia Federici, author of “wages against housework,” Caliban and the Witch, and the recent collection Patriarchy of the Wage, from which we drew the primary reading for this discussion.
Federici’s talk is well worth hearing in its totality. I thought she presented social reproduction theory in an accessible and sophisticated way, reckoning with its history in socialist feminism, and its present in the world. You can listen to her presentation here, and watch it here.
The origins of wages for housework
Silvia Federici began by explaining the premises of the “Wages For Housework” campaign in the 1970s, which, said said, in part, “revolutionized women’s work.” Wages for housework activists confronted “a whole leftist tradition that looked at what was known as ‘women’s work’, which was, until the 1970s, the largest amount of work that women performed, even within developed countries.”
Housework, she said, was seen as the natural terrain of women. But “the theories and struggle of anticolonial movements decentered wage labour as the sole driver of capitalist accumulation, highlighted the role of wageless, enslaved labor. This had a tremendous impact on feminist thinking.”
Extending the insights of anti-colonial thinkers and fighters into the household, “There was a whole analysis that reexamined domestic work as a specific form of capitalist production. It is labor that produces and reproduces, on a daily basis, the workforce. Far from being marginal or outside capitalist production, it is the most important work of capitalism. It is the precondition for all of capitalism. It was a completely Coperninan revolution that transformed how we understood reproductive labor.”
Listening to Federici, I hadn’t realized before how indebted social reproduction theory was to anti-colonial struggles, but it makes sense that the framework of the “social factory,” that relations in the family and community were parts of the capitalist totality, would be thinkable when the global relations of production come into view through anti-colonial struggle. The revolution against capitalist accumulation globally broke open also the problems of accumulation inside the body of empire.
Disciplining working women
“From there,” Federici said, “we came to see the wage as a disciplinary instrument that capitalism used to organize and disorganize the working class. Capitalism has delegated to men, the role of supervisor and disciplinarian of the woman. The wage is an instrument of hierarchy within the working class. Through wages and wage labour shapes the relationship between women and men in fundamental ways.”
Gender relations then echo back and form the conditions of labor, “naturalizing” women’s work. Federici explained, “Women’s work is naturalized as inherent to their character, as essential to womanhood. It also conditioned the sort of work that women do when they enter into paid labour: they are nurses, childcare workers, maids. And these positions are devalued by the fact of their feminization: based on the idea that housework is unskilled work. In fact housework is very complicated and exhausting kind of work.”
The gendering of care and reproductive work has continued even when that work has been done for wages and organized by big corporations. Federici said, “When capitalism turned from industry-focused to service sector work, and women were widely recruited into wage labor, it required a whole reorganization of domestic work. What we’ve seen is a new informational division of labor where a large part of domestic work that had been done by unwaged women is now being done by migrant women workers who were forced, by war and by the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank, to flee their countries for imperialist countries.”
For the reproduction of struggle
Federici concluded by reflecting on the outcomes of years of feminist struggle. She said, “I regret that in the US the feminist movement has not focused on the conditions of reproductive work. When we started Wages for Housework campaigns in the US in the 1970s, we confronted tremendous hostility. We were accused of romanticizing housewives, of entrenching women in the home. And I think we are paying a very high price for not having been able to create the kind of struggles that would have been possible. Reproductive work was a terrain of struggle in which women were involved. Except for a minority of women in the ruling class, most women are interested in struggles to change the conditions of reproduction.”
Because capitalism funds reproduction in its own interest, individual adaptations are not enough to change these conditions, she said. “Sharing the work with men is a tactic, not a strategy. The condition of our reproduction as such reproduces our lives not for ourselves but for future work. So,” she said, “we must transform reproduction: from reproduction of the workforce to reproduction of the struggle.”
It’s this strategic point that really jumped out at me. Because I often find it unclear how to take the radically clarifying arguments made by social reproduction feminists and put them into action. In our readings for this week, there were a few ideas. For example, David McNally’s “mass strike” framework is good conceptually but there have not been many examples of social reproduction demands making the leap into workplace struggles –– aside from the oft-cited example of the Chicago Teachers’ Union’s social good bargaining for housing for their students, which is good, but limited.
In discussion after her presentation, Federici said, “What I think is missing in the US left is taken up in Latin America, where social reproduction is understood as the common point of struggle, the link between issues. In Canada and the US it is in Indigenous communities that I see concern about the land and water and reproduction as central. But outside of Indigenous communities and some Black communities, the left has not moved in this direction in the US. There has been a lack of mobilizing on the question of reproduction and services and the question of land.”
Reframing social reproduction struggles as about land defence seems like a logical return to the original problematic Federici mapped out, insisting on a unity between anti-colonial and social reproduction struggles. But this seems to again sidestep the problem of gender and social reproduction as constitutive of class and capitalist production.
Then Federici spoke to this directly. In the course of struggle, once it reaches a certain point, she said, “reproduction breaks out of the limits of the family. It becomes the responsibility of everyone. People come together in communities, outside of the home and also outside of the workplace.”
This made me think of the discussions we had in our second class, about general strikes in US history. In the great strike wave of 1934, it seemed to me that the main factor that decided how wide the strike would spread and how resolute strikers could stand against the bosses and their armies was how much strikers were able to take over the machinery of reproduction. When a strike remained under the control of the AFL bureaucrats, it tended to remain a picketline in front of a business and would not reach far into communities, and could be demobilized. But when a strike was under the control of workers directly, it could take on feeding those workers, their families, and their communities. The most militant strikes that were most resistant and successful were those whose strike committees took over the social reproduction of the whole city: controlling supply routes, issuing essential work permits, and feeding and caring for whole communities.
Federici said, “In Latin America where women organize their social reproduction, some people say we are replacing the state: no, we are taking control over the conditions of reproduction!” And she said, “For something sustained, there must be a transformation of the conditions of reproduction. The terrain of reproduction has to do with everything. It has to do with life, with love, it has to do with food preparation and social life. It is critical. There must be a transformation of the conditions under which we live; the day to day conditions under which we live.”
While this does not solve the problem of how to institutionalize or sustain struggles over the conditions of social reproduction, it seems to be the truth. Like with other terrains of class struggle, social reproduction struggles can only be revolutionary when the historical movement is revolutionary. But in the total body of revolutionary class struggle, social reproduction may be a universal ligament, whose articulation conducts in synch all other particular parts.