(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I do not remember how the conversation took that turn, but I do remember in particular one of my colleagues' appalled and disbelieving reaction. It was over the canteen lunch leftovers on an evening shift in an editorial secretariat; some of us were loosely attached, others were permanent employees and some wanted to be, permanent employees, including him, whose ears had almost fallen off when I said something along these lines:
"Working under capitalism is devastating to people, you die a little inside every time you go to work for someone else." The words may not have fallen exactly like that, but it sounded about as dogmatic – this is how it can go when you are nervous about saying something you sense will be a reasonably vacant position in the context.
By demanding a salary for housework, one could at the same time make visible the possibility of
refuse to perform this work.
«What !? Haha! » He laughed a little scornfully. How totally 20th century one could be to say such a Marxist waffle. At least he did not die inside, at all, he thinks it was cool to go to work. Really fat.
Good for him, I really hope he thinks so. I do not.
I love working, understood as being active, both manually and intellectually. But I love fucking not working for others who can then profit from my activity. And even though my position was apparently reasonably marginalized that night, I'm not alone in that.
Critical equality feminism
Rethinking what counts as work, who can and should perform different types of work, and how work is organized has been a common thread through centuries of feminist thinking. This is shown by political scientist and journalist Susan Ferguson in the book Women and Work. Feminism, Labor and Social Reproduction.
Here she draws the contours of what she identifies as three currents within (Western, especially Anglo-American) feminist thinking from the 18th-21st. century: Equality feminism, as formulated by, among others, Mary Wollstonecraft; critical equality feminism, as formulated by, among others, Flora Tristan; and social reproductive feminism, as formulated by, among others, Sheila Rowbotham and Silvia Federici.
Within, between, and across these currents, there is a sea of nuances and distinctions that Ferguson shows is anything but theoretical fly-fucking. How work is fundamentally conceptualized – and not least how the relationship between productive and reproductive work is understood – is crucial for political strategy and tactics. For how demands for change are formulated and how those demands are mobilized.
As a fundamental game changer in Western feminist thinking, Ferguson highlights black feminist thinkers such as Claudia Jones (1915–64) and later Angela Davis and Combahee River Collective. Although white socialist feminists had been able to analyze and criticize both colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, they had failed to understand the link between these forms of oppression and the oppression of women. Not surprisingly, Ferguson writes, it's something black women have had a better eye for. And more importantly, Ferguson writes, they rethought "the very idea of housework": "They did not associate it strictly with motherhood and full-time unpaid work in the home (…) but drew the connection between housework and slavery."
Wages for Housework
While for (critical) equality feminism it is the gendered division of labor that is wrong, in social reproductive feminism it is the very way of capitalist form of production that organizes work that is the problem. The gendered division of labor is merely a consequence of this system.
Ferguson is revisiting it as well Wages for Houseworkcampaign, which among others Silvia Federici in the 1970s was one of the architects behind, and which younger generations of feminists in recent years have pulled out of the hiding places of.
As Ferguson writes, the point of Wages for Housework was not that the gendered division of labor in the reproductive field would be perfectly ok if only women were paid for their work in the home; the point was, conversely, that by demanding pay for housework, one could at the same time make visible the possibility of refusing to perform this work – the possibility of going on strike. As a mobilization strategy, however, this campaign was not a great success, according to Ferguson, because the wage demand overshadowed the underlying, and subversive, idea of layoffs.
From this, Ferguson outlines the attempts that have been made since then to rethink and expand the analysis within social reproductive feminism – including clarifying the mechanisms of an economic-political system where social reproductive work must at the same time sustain life and ensure sufficient amounts of labor for capital.
She argues that a truly solidary and subversive feminism must aim to decouple work for capital from working for life. It is not clear what this entails in terms of mobilizing demands and forms of organization. The most concrete is a reference to the project outlined in the much talked about Feminism for the 99 percent who (as I have argued elsewhere) despite many strengths are characterized by a anything but innovative mass movement romance.
Ferguson highlights black feminist thinkers such as Claudia Jones and
later Angela Davis and Combahee River Collective.
But Ferguson's book does not in any way pretend to be action-oriented. Women and Work is an exploration of more than three centuries of feminist thinking and as such an invitation to think further – not for the sake of theory, but because the way we think defines our potential for action. And, as Ferguson writes:
"Theory is not about finding the 'right' answers, but rather about constantly testing ideas against reality and expanding the understanding of how the world works."
The purpose of this is, moreover, nothing more or less than to "counteract the system which constantly neglects and degrades the very lives on which it depends," in order instead to "organize work for life, not for capital."
