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Weekly Worker 614 Thursday March 2 2006
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Worker
Capitalism and the family
Standing ovation
We also received three donations via our website - from MC and AC (£10 each) and RM (£5). All in all, exactly £100 over the last seven days, which takes our final total for February to £614 - pretty good for a short month, especially considering we have increased our target by £100 a month in 2006. Also encouraging is the number of hits on our website - we had 15,711 online readers last week. This is another figure that has gradually been creeping up (allowing for some disappointing weeks, of course). However, as Mark Fischer explains, we are not yet out of the woods (see 'Unrealistic target'). Another couple of dozen standing orders would make both of us feel a lot better. Robbie Rix
|
Thanks
to some handy last-minute gifts, we reached our £600 fighting fund
target for February with £19 (and a few hours!) to spare. My mailbag
brought me cheques from FL (£20), ES (£15) and RP (£10), plus three
new standing orders - thank you, HG (£20 per month), JP (£10) and
DL (£5). The last three have helped take us over the £200 mark in
terms of new SOs.
Domestic work is privatised and is traditionally performed by women - cooking, cleaning, laundering, etc. This individual work is essential for the production and the reproduction of labour. However, generally it lies outside the sphere of capitalist production. Capitalists are quite content to leave it to the workers and their self-interest in living some kind of reasonable life. They want to eat; they do not want to live in filth and squalor. So domestic labour is left to the family and in particular women.
While feminists have primarily blamed men for refusing to do their share of the drudgery, Marxists attack first and foremost the economic function of the family, its role as an economic unit in class society, concerned under capitalism with the maintenance of the exploitability of the working class’s labour-power. The family unit has a restrictive and repressive hold on all its members - especially women and children.
The family relationship is formed outside of the wage relation in capitalist society. But it exists as a legally protected entity to enable that exploitative relation to continue. The separation of women’s domestic labour from social labour in general arose with capitalist society and is specific to capitalist society in this form. Domestic labour is therefore labour that is performed gratis, for the benefit of the capitalist class, as it frees that class from some of the expense of reproducing its own workforce.
That is why communists demand the socialisation of housework. This is the necessary prerequisite for the liberation of women, freeing them from the ties of private labour which underpin women’s status in capitalist society. Fighting for the concrete implementation of this demand poses the needs of working class women, and our entire class, against the essence of the capitalist system. Our freedom is entirely counterposed to that system’s very existence.
Fitting in with their domestic role, women also perform another important function for capitalism. Given their often precarious position in the general process of social production, women are ideal candidates to form an important part of a fluctuating reserve army of labour. Such a reservoir of exploitable labour can be sucked into the production process in times of boom or war and expelled from the ranks of the employed when accumulation stagnates.
Women’s specific form of oppression dictates firstly that when employed they are as far as possible systematically regulated and ghettoised into a narrow range of peripheral jobs, and secondly as ‘natural’ wives and mothers they are easier to throw out of work and back into the home. In periods of relative high employment, such as the present, women can be drawn fully into the labour force, although this process does not relieve them from domestic slavery.
David Coaturn
