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CHAPTER 1
The Labour Lens
Why do feminists think about work at all? What makes work — or labour — a compelling lens through which to view the world? I can think of a few good answers to that question. The most obvious perhaps is that the vast majority of women today work, and they work a lot, often under difficult and degrading circumstances. To begin, women do the majority — 75 percent — of the world's unpaid care and domestic work. They spend up to three hours more per day cooking and cleaning than men do, and anywhere from two to ten hours more per day looking after children and the elderly. Whatever the hardship or rewards of such work, it remains the case that those who govern our countries and economies do not recompense or adequately recognize it as a contribution to overall social wealth. As for paid labour, women's global participation rates are lower than men's, but after 300-plus years of capitalism, women are still more likely to land in the informal and low-waged sectors. They are still more likely to earn their living doing jobs that are arduous, dangerous, and insecure.
That these patterns prevail makes it not just reasonable, but in fact urgent, to ask what women's work has to do with gender and gender oppression. Feminists began seriously engaging with that question at the dawn of industrial capitalism. That we return to it today is not so much a sign of their failure to find an answer as it is of society's failure to solve the problem of work, and of women's work in particular. This book is about the responses to that question. It stretches back to the earliest Western feminist tracts and leapfrogs the centuries to consider feminist ideas about labour today. It is not, however, a mere review of what wise women (and some men) have had to say. Rather, it reflects upon the ways in which those ideas developed in order, primarily, to understand why the socialist feminist tradition has struggled to articulate a coherent, inclusive anti-oppression politics, and how the renewal of social reproduction feminism can most effectively contribute to anti-capitalist projects today. I introduce the book's argument and structure below. But this chapter begins with a consideration of what work is, and why it matters so much for those who want to change the world.
CAPITALISM, WORK, AND WOMEN
There's a reason that Euro-Western feminists started thinking and writing about work when they did. It has to do with capitalism. The emergence of capitalist social relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and their imposition and consolidation throughout the United Kingdom, the continent, and the colonies over the next 150 years was founded on a dramatic and violent reorganization of people's working lives. The nature of the work people did, the times of day they performed it, who they worked with and for, and why they worked changed radically. Once a means of supporting life, work became a means even of dominating life as well.
Feudal peasants and serfs did indeed spend their lives working — often under harsh conditions. But work was something they did to survive. They did not also, as those who live in capitalist societies must, survive to work. Unlike waged workers, peasants and serfs had direct access to the wider ecosystem on which their subsistence depended. They produced the food they ate and chopped the wood they used for warmth and shelter. And they exercised significant control over the rhythms and pace of daily and seasonal tasks, and over the uses of communal lands and water. Their work satisfied specific, pre-determined needs (needs that exceeded bare subsistence to include spirituality, ritual, and play).
Marx refers to this relation of the peasantry to the land as "the natural unity of labour with its material [sachlich] presuppositions." This pre-capitalist mode of existence is premised upon a birth-given (and therefore seemingly natural) position within the wider social order. While that position is dependent upon and subordinate to the direct, personal authority of a lord, belonging to a lord in feudal Europe went hand-in-hand with belonging to the land. Whatever hardship lords inflicted, the peasantry was already, by custom and law, attached to the land from which its members could (however meagerly) feed, clothe, and shelter themselves. Given their direct access to the means of subsistence, the peasantry can sustain itself outside of the peasant-lord relation. The peasant has "an objective existence independent of labour," writes Marx, similar to a "proprietor," who can shape "the conditions of his reality." But unlike the nonproductive proprietor (a lord or capitalist for instance), the peasantry is a community of "co-proprietors ... who at the same time work."
This is not to say the peasantry exercised total control over its working conditions. Lords and estate managers decided what got produced on feudal estates, when and how. Moreover, those decisions, and to a certain extent those of peasant households as well, were set according to patriarchal conventions that enforced a traditional (if not absolute) gender division of labour, granting women only precarious and partial control over their bodies and labour. But access to the means of subsistence granted peasants and serfs considerable ability to set the rhythms and pace of their labours. They ceased work for festivals and holidays and, if pushed to intensify production or pay higher taxes, they regularly extended midday breaks or left crops in the fields to rot. Lords responded by exacting penalties and more closely supervising peasant labour. But they could not kick the peasantry off the land, effectively threatening recalcitrant producers with starvation. Though politically subordinate, peasants and serfs were under no economic compulsion to obey the lords.
All this changes — over time, and with tremendous struggle — with the rise of capitalism. Capitalist social relations emerge first in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and become the dominant mode of production in rural and urban areas across the continent over the next 150 years. The uneven, violent, and ongoing transition from feudalism to capitalism need not be recounted here in detail. At its heart is the expropriation of the peasantry — the razing of household plots and enclosures of common lands that, in time, sever the direct relationship of the peasant to her own means of subsistence. For Marx, this process generates the "primitive accumulation of capital": it transforms "individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated means of production" essential to kickstart (and sustain) capitalism.
No longer are decisions about what gets produced in the hands of lords and peasants. With the rise of capitalism, the market (that is, the competitive dynamic among capitalists and independent producers) determines production. Labour, then, becomes something more than a practical human activity to be set in motion to meet specific needs and desires. It becomes a means of producing commodities: things that the market determines hold economic value — things that will produce a profit. Whereas in feudal society, the needs and desires of the aristocracy were excessive, they were not endless. Capitalist production, however, has no such inherent limit. Unlike the peasant who exercised some control over how quickly and when she hoed fields for the lord, baked bread for her household, and broke from her labours to eat, drink, and sleep, the waged worker is forced to adopt new forms of work discipline. This ensures that one-time "co-proprietors ... who also work" learn precisely what it means to be (property-less) workers ... who also live.
The work of living, of sustaining oneself when not working for the capitalist, does not disappear of course. It just goes underground. It becomes separated from and subsumed to the work of making a living — earning a wage in order to buy what is necessary to create and maintain life. The marginalization of unwaged subsistence work does not occur because waged work is harder or more important. It occurs because the work of subsisting, of reproducing life, is no longer possible unless one, first, has access to a wage (or other forms of money income). Some people avoid waged work by selling or trading things they make. But most, unable to feed and shelter themselves by directly and productively appropriating the means of life from the forests, fields, and waters, end up working for a wage — a wage with which they buy food, shelter, and clothing. In this way, work for a capitalist comes to dominate all "life-activity" — not just the value-producing activity of the factory floor or other workplace.
As in feudalism, then, most people in capitalist societies certainly work to survive. But they also survive to work. More precisely, they survive to become waged labourers. But here's the crux: to become waged labourers is itself a feat of labour — of women's labour specifically. While women's work varied across region and time in feudal peasant societies, women performed the bulk of the tasks required to meet subsistence needs. They cooked, cleaned, and looked after young children. They also tilled the soil and harvested the produce of fields and garden plots, butchered animals, brewed beer, spun yarn, and ground grains. They developed and administered medicines to heal the sick. And they attended other women in labour, gave birth and nursed new life. In short, women — in a more direct and transparent way than men — reproduced human beings.
With the transition to capitalism, women's reproductive labour is radically reorganized. First, as peasants lose their access to land, women lose direct access to and control over the "material presuppositions" of their subsistence-based activities. Men of course lose this too, but women's reproductive work remains outside the immediate value circuits of capitalism (even as the product of that work, human beings, move in and out of those circuits as present and future waged workers, and even as women are themselves drawn into waged work on a massive scale). What's more, women's subsistence work is, in this early stage of capitalist development, increasingly distinguished from waged work spatially and temporally. It is generally performed in communities and private households (away from work performed for capitalists) and at times that accommodate the waged workers' workday, week, and year.
Responsible for reproducing workers, women in capitalist societies are at the heart of an intractable dilemma. Capitalist profit-making — and, thus, the existence of capitalism itself — depends upon the availability of the very human labour power whose means of subsistence it has already appropriated. It becomes imperative to regulate women's labour, especially if, as was often the case, there are not enough workers willing and able to submit to the new capitalist disciplines of work. Capitalist states and ruling classes partially resolve this dilemma by turning women's bodies "into an instrument for the reproduction of labor and the expansion of the work-force." Thus, as Maria Mies and Silvia Federici contend, the primitive accumulation of capital involves more than the expropriation of European workers' land (and the enslavement of African bodies). It also, crucially, requires the expropriation of women's reproductive labour.
Yet that was not going to happen without a struggle. Without doubt, feudal society was deeply patriarchal. Women were, for the most part, legally subject to the authority wielded by fathers, husbands, curates, and lords. Still, within peasant households and communities, inequality was tempered, on the one hand, by the control women exercised over their (re)productive labours and, on the other, by the fact that both men and women were subject to a higher patriarchal authority, the lord. Capitalism's consolidation then required the gradual, uneven, and ongoing, frequently violent, process of undermining the control and relative equality women enjoyed in peasant households. A burgeoning capitalist state (supported by the Catholic Church and male-dominated craft guilds) variously terrorized, compelled, and induced women to accept new forms of sexist degradation and domesticity. Poor women faced persecution as witches and saw their work as midwives and healers sidelined, diminishing women's control over abortion, live births, and contraception. The state also intensified women's social vulnerability, introducing changes to inheritance laws, criminalizing prostitution, legalizing rape and battery, and ousting women from certain forms of paid labour. "Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries," observes Federici, "women lost ground in every area of social life."
In time, marriage and motherhood (when they were not outrightly forced on women) appeared a reasonable, perhaps the only sensible, option. Many women resisted their disempowerment and fought for control over their own fertility. Nonetheless, modern gender relations (characterized by the separation of a public sphere of industry and politics from the private domestic sphere, and women's relative isolation within and primary responsibility for the latter) eventually prevailed. "Housewification," as Mies calls it, takes hold first within bourgeois households, which could absorb the loss of the wife's income from paid labour or professions. Only later, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, after the introduction of protective legislation and a period of wages climbing relative to the cost of living, do increasing numbers of married working class women become full-time housewives.
WORK, LIFE, HISTORY
Capitalism thus radically disrupts people's relationship to work and life — a fact Marx spent his life explaining. And while he subjects capitalist forms of work to a brilliant and excoriating critique, his analysis rests on a broader, transhistorical, claim that labour is a precondition of all human life. Grasping what he means by this lends some insight into women's unique relationship to work, to life, and to capital.
Marx arrives at his insight about work and life by pondering how people are positioned in relation to nature. It is not an idle question. Like all social theorists, he aims to understand the dynamics of human society. Society would not be possible, he reasons, without human interaction with the natural world. Rather than conceiving of society and nature as two distinct or opposing realities, however, he begins his analysis by stressing their coherence or identity. That is, the events, processes, and institutions created to serve human ends are produced out of — and are therefore an integral part of — the nonhuman, physical world constituted by plants, animals, land, water, and climate.
Not only is the social world part of the wider natural world with which humans also interact, according to Marx, but humans themselves are of that world. Humans are nature. In his notebooks on economics and philosophy, he observes: "Man lives on nature — means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."
This leads Marx to propose that human existence and the reproduction of human life depend upon a person's ability to "appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs." Somewhat confusingly, the term "appropriate" in this passage does not signal the act of simply taking or owning something (as it does when Marx refers to capitalist appropriation). Instead, it means production — "practical human activity" or work in the broadest sense. Unless people productively appropriate from the oceans, lakes, fields, and forests to create food, shelter, clothes and more, there can be no human life. Yet in so doing, Marx observes, humans and their society are (must be) also distinct from nature. They are, therefore, both part of nature and external to it.
Unlike most nonhuman animals, people engage in productive appropriation consciously. They interact with nature not simply out of instinct, but with awareness of their needs and the ability and intent to design specific ways of meeting those needs. This is what separates, Marx famously writes, the weaver from the spider, the architect from the bee: the capacity to bring ideas and imagination to bear on the bio-physical interaction with nature required for human survival. This is the essence of human labour or work in general.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Women and Work"
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Copyright © 2020 Susan Ferguson.
Excerpted by permission of Between the Lines.
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