11 December, 2024\
Author: Martin Thomas
Pic from Flickr
Two postscripts to a letter on "Resurgent sexism and the 1968 precedent".
The idea that since housework is "toil and trouble", it therefore must count as value-producing in capitalist society, rests on a pre-Marxist theory of value.
"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the person who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it", wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
From that Smith drew a "labour theory of value" as a law of nature. "Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compare".
Marx disputed that, arguing that capitalist value-relations are set not by nature but by social relations - labour-power a commodity, ownership of the means of production divorced from the producers. Smith, wrote Marx, "has a presentiment, that labour, so far as it manifests itself in the value of commodities, counts only as expenditure of labour power, but he treats this expenditure as the mere sacrifice of rest, freedom, and happiness, not as at the same time the normal activity of living beings. But then, he has the modern wage-labourer in his eye".
Under capitalism "labour... counts only as expenditure of labour power", measured fundamentally by time. But that is the capitalist shaping of labour. It is what we see when "the modern wage-labourer" is "in our eye". It is not that work produces value because it is "toil and trouble". Rather the converse. Work is made into toil and trouble, even when the basic productive activity is not particularly unpleasant, because it is made wage-labour, or, more generally, servant-labour, exploited labour.
Marx wrote: "The abstract category 'labour', 'labour as such', labour sans phrase, the point of departure of modern economics, thus becomes a practical fact only... [in] the United States", because only there did labour-power flow easily between occupations, with relatively few traditional barriers. Labour is constantly reshaped by capitalism.
In general, labour is "the normal activity of living beings". Capitalism teaches us that life is the opposite of or the absence of work, and tends to identify it with passive consumption, but that is false. Marx urged workers to fight for a shorter working week and more free time. That free time will include, to be sure, more sleep and passive rest, but also "really free working, e.g. composing, [which] is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion".
Under a workers' government, and indeed within capitalism wherever workers have won short hours and good conditions, workers will do much activity in our free time (study, sports, exercise, friendly support for others...) which also enhances our creative capacities, i.e. our labour-power. When the labour movement has won relief for children from being swallowed by wage-slavery at an early age, it has been to replace the wage-slavery with "work" by those children in the form of school and pre-school learning (which improves their labour-power), not by passive consumption.
Housework in capitalist societies has been "toil and trouble", because a lot of it is physically demanding, and, less now than in the past but still to some degree, it is often controlled and supervising by a non-worker (a male "head of household"). That does not make it value-producing labour.
Capitalism has also created technological conditions for housework to be less "toil": piped water, electricity, washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, fridge-freezers, gas and electric cookers, microwaves, access to semi-processed food and to takeaway or delivered cooked food.
Housework was probably more toilsome in the early period of those household technologies than in the earliest periods of industrial capitalism, when workers had little "house" to work on (no cooking facilities at home, no carpets or soft furniture to keep clean, few clothes, etc.) But by now the impact of the technologies has outstripped the pressure of having bigger dwellings and feeling compelled to "keep them nice".
Housework is kept irksome by the atomisation of households and of childcare, and by gender inequality, e.g. men having "learned incompetence" at household and childcare tasks.
Socialisation of housework, via large public facilities (childcare and schools, public canteens, public repair shops, etc.) and households becoming larger and more diverse, as well as via socially-produced technology entering homes, can lift the burdens. It will have to go together with a continued ideological battle to insist that "house" and childcare tasks be shared equally between genders.
There will always be some element of "drudgery" which cannot be abolished and just has to be shared. The socialist households of the future will not call in external staff every time a spill has to be wiped up. It was a step forward when "typing pools" withered away, to be replaced by reports and memos in offices being typed by their authors. It will be a step forward in society when everyone (other than the very young and the frail) tidies up, wipes up, and cleans up after themselves.
That will include quite young children doing it. In a socialist society children will learn and practise housework skills, and skills at caring for other, younger (or impaired, or distressed) children more than they do now, not less. They will "work" to enhance their creative and productive capacities, i.e. their labour-power.
We want enhanced labour-power. We also want the human owners of that labour-power cooperating with each other under good conditions to produce goods and services for society, rather than having to sell that labour-power to capitalists so that they can produce whatever tat may sell and do so under the worst conditions they can get away with. We do not want "housework" preserved and parcelled away, and we do not want it consecrated in that role by being paid "wages for housework".
The other postscript is on the idea of waged women workers being siphoned into jobs (care, cleaning, sewing, etc.) which resemble housework.
There is something to it, but I think that thesis "naturalises" and over-simplifies.
It does not cover the whole of the business of "gendering" jobs by a long way.
"Typing pools", including typing pools to prepare punched cards as computer inputs, were major areas of women's employment for a whole era. But in the early days of the typewriter, operating it was seen as more a "man's" job. Typing does not resemble housework.
Chefs are stereotypically men, despite cooking being central to housework.
Studies in computer science, and IT jobs, have become more male-dominated since 1980s, while many other well-paid areas, such as studies in law, and lawyer jobs, have had more women coming in. On the other hand, assembly-line work in microelectronics (little affinity to housework) is typically dominated by women.
The "modelling on housework" theory does not explain the "married women bar", common in many countries until the 1960s, where married women would be barred from jobs even when those jobs were and had long been female-dominated (such as teaching).
There is a "natural" linkage of waged work to housework in the fact that boys tend to grow up bigger, with greater upper-body strength, and with better gross motor skills, than girls. Girls tend to grow up with better fine motor skills and social skills.
Some of this may be "natural", but some of it is to do with how inherited expectations inform the way parents and carers deal with small boys and small girls, for example, doing more to teach girls housework skills, being more likely to ask girls to look after younger siblings. So the bias is "social", but for each generation it is a fact we grow up with even before we are really aware of it.
Whatever their general views about what jobs women and men should do, young women will, on average, personally be more confident about work drawing on fine motor skills and social skills; young men, more confident about work drawing on gross motor skills and upper-body strength.
If the biases were to do only with "natural" elements, then there would be huge overlap, and if we ended up with not-exactly-50-50 gender composition in different workforces, it would not be a drama. Since there is such a large "social" element, the biases get "frozen". Then they shape biases among employers. And young women end up, for example, avoiding computer-science studies, not because they think themselves "not good enough", but because they consider themselves "too good", i.e. good at more interesting studies; and anyway they are disinclined to enter courses where the student body will be dominated by geeky young men.
The development of technology has reduced the number of jobs where sheer upper-body strength and gross motor skills are the prime requirement. For example, many ports now employ many women dockers.
Generally, technology is creating conditions which can help us drastically to reduce bias in the job market. But many obstacles remain. It will be a long battle. Hiring and training is always done by older people, and they are well-placed to communicate their biases (not always consciously) to new generations or even to impose them.
Pic from Flickr
Two postscripts to a letter on "Resurgent sexism and the 1968 precedent".
The idea that since housework is "toil and trouble", it therefore must count as value-producing in capitalist society, rests on a pre-Marxist theory of value.
"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the person who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it", wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
From that Smith drew a "labour theory of value" as a law of nature. "Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compare".
Marx disputed that, arguing that capitalist value-relations are set not by nature but by social relations - labour-power a commodity, ownership of the means of production divorced from the producers. Smith, wrote Marx, "has a presentiment, that labour, so far as it manifests itself in the value of commodities, counts only as expenditure of labour power, but he treats this expenditure as the mere sacrifice of rest, freedom, and happiness, not as at the same time the normal activity of living beings. But then, he has the modern wage-labourer in his eye".
Under capitalism "labour... counts only as expenditure of labour power", measured fundamentally by time. But that is the capitalist shaping of labour. It is what we see when "the modern wage-labourer" is "in our eye". It is not that work produces value because it is "toil and trouble". Rather the converse. Work is made into toil and trouble, even when the basic productive activity is not particularly unpleasant, because it is made wage-labour, or, more generally, servant-labour, exploited labour.
Marx wrote: "The abstract category 'labour', 'labour as such', labour sans phrase, the point of departure of modern economics, thus becomes a practical fact only... [in] the United States", because only there did labour-power flow easily between occupations, with relatively few traditional barriers. Labour is constantly reshaped by capitalism.
In general, labour is "the normal activity of living beings". Capitalism teaches us that life is the opposite of or the absence of work, and tends to identify it with passive consumption, but that is false. Marx urged workers to fight for a shorter working week and more free time. That free time will include, to be sure, more sleep and passive rest, but also "really free working, e.g. composing, [which] is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion".
Under a workers' government, and indeed within capitalism wherever workers have won short hours and good conditions, workers will do much activity in our free time (study, sports, exercise, friendly support for others...) which also enhances our creative capacities, i.e. our labour-power. When the labour movement has won relief for children from being swallowed by wage-slavery at an early age, it has been to replace the wage-slavery with "work" by those children in the form of school and pre-school learning (which improves their labour-power), not by passive consumption.
Housework in capitalist societies has been "toil and trouble", because a lot of it is physically demanding, and, less now than in the past but still to some degree, it is often controlled and supervising by a non-worker (a male "head of household"). That does not make it value-producing labour.
Capitalism has also created technological conditions for housework to be less "toil": piped water, electricity, washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, fridge-freezers, gas and electric cookers, microwaves, access to semi-processed food and to takeaway or delivered cooked food.
Housework was probably more toilsome in the early period of those household technologies than in the earliest periods of industrial capitalism, when workers had little "house" to work on (no cooking facilities at home, no carpets or soft furniture to keep clean, few clothes, etc.) But by now the impact of the technologies has outstripped the pressure of having bigger dwellings and feeling compelled to "keep them nice".
Housework is kept irksome by the atomisation of households and of childcare, and by gender inequality, e.g. men having "learned incompetence" at household and childcare tasks.
Socialisation of housework, via large public facilities (childcare and schools, public canteens, public repair shops, etc.) and households becoming larger and more diverse, as well as via socially-produced technology entering homes, can lift the burdens. It will have to go together with a continued ideological battle to insist that "house" and childcare tasks be shared equally between genders.
There will always be some element of "drudgery" which cannot be abolished and just has to be shared. The socialist households of the future will not call in external staff every time a spill has to be wiped up. It was a step forward when "typing pools" withered away, to be replaced by reports and memos in offices being typed by their authors. It will be a step forward in society when everyone (other than the very young and the frail) tidies up, wipes up, and cleans up after themselves.
That will include quite young children doing it. In a socialist society children will learn and practise housework skills, and skills at caring for other, younger (or impaired, or distressed) children more than they do now, not less. They will "work" to enhance their creative and productive capacities, i.e. their labour-power.
We want enhanced labour-power. We also want the human owners of that labour-power cooperating with each other under good conditions to produce goods and services for society, rather than having to sell that labour-power to capitalists so that they can produce whatever tat may sell and do so under the worst conditions they can get away with. We do not want "housework" preserved and parcelled away, and we do not want it consecrated in that role by being paid "wages for housework".
The other postscript is on the idea of waged women workers being siphoned into jobs (care, cleaning, sewing, etc.) which resemble housework.
There is something to it, but I think that thesis "naturalises" and over-simplifies.
It does not cover the whole of the business of "gendering" jobs by a long way.
"Typing pools", including typing pools to prepare punched cards as computer inputs, were major areas of women's employment for a whole era. But in the early days of the typewriter, operating it was seen as more a "man's" job. Typing does not resemble housework.
Chefs are stereotypically men, despite cooking being central to housework.
Studies in computer science, and IT jobs, have become more male-dominated since 1980s, while many other well-paid areas, such as studies in law, and lawyer jobs, have had more women coming in. On the other hand, assembly-line work in microelectronics (little affinity to housework) is typically dominated by women.
The "modelling on housework" theory does not explain the "married women bar", common in many countries until the 1960s, where married women would be barred from jobs even when those jobs were and had long been female-dominated (such as teaching).
There is a "natural" linkage of waged work to housework in the fact that boys tend to grow up bigger, with greater upper-body strength, and with better gross motor skills, than girls. Girls tend to grow up with better fine motor skills and social skills.
Some of this may be "natural", but some of it is to do with how inherited expectations inform the way parents and carers deal with small boys and small girls, for example, doing more to teach girls housework skills, being more likely to ask girls to look after younger siblings. So the bias is "social", but for each generation it is a fact we grow up with even before we are really aware of it.
Whatever their general views about what jobs women and men should do, young women will, on average, personally be more confident about work drawing on fine motor skills and social skills; young men, more confident about work drawing on gross motor skills and upper-body strength.
If the biases were to do only with "natural" elements, then there would be huge overlap, and if we ended up with not-exactly-50-50 gender composition in different workforces, it would not be a drama. Since there is such a large "social" element, the biases get "frozen". Then they shape biases among employers. And young women end up, for example, avoiding computer-science studies, not because they think themselves "not good enough", but because they consider themselves "too good", i.e. good at more interesting studies; and anyway they are disinclined to enter courses where the student body will be dominated by geeky young men.
The development of technology has reduced the number of jobs where sheer upper-body strength and gross motor skills are the prime requirement. For example, many ports now employ many women dockers.
Generally, technology is creating conditions which can help us drastically to reduce bias in the job market. But many obstacles remain. It will be a long battle. Hiring and training is always done by older people, and they are well-placed to communicate their biases (not always consciously) to new generations or even to impose them.
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