wages against housework
by silvia federici (1974).. reading from 14 pg pdf [https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/femlit/04-federici.pdf] for m of care – feb 24 24 – seminars of care [https://museum.care/events/seminars-of-care-part-2/]:
Elke Krasny and Nika Dubrovksy will continue Seminars of Care in February 2024.
Following the first session of Seminars of Care on November 19, The David Graeber Institute will continue the series with the second session on February 24 at 18:00 (London time).
The meeting will explore Marxist feminists’ analyses of caring labor and David Graeber’s proposal to integrate it all into a new form of labor theory of value together with Silvia Federici, renowned scholar, teacher, and feminist activist. Federici’s most famous book, Caliban and the Witch, has been translated in more than 20 foreign languages, and reconstructs the history of capitalism, highlighting the continuity between the capitalist subjugation of women, the slave trade, and the colonisation of the Americas.
Elke Krasny is a curator, cultural theorist, urban researcher, and writer.
Nika Dubrovsky is an artist and one of the founders of the David Graeber Institute.
notes/quotes:
1/74
Silvia Federici
1974
They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.
They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both
working conditions. . . but homosexuality is
workers’ control of production, not the end of
work.
More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so
powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a
smile.
Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.
Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the fact that they reduce wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women
have been confined in capitalist society.
still missing it if still talking wages/money.. any form of m\a\p
2/75
When we view wages for housework in this reductive way we start asking ourselves: what difference could some more money make to our lives? We might even agree that for a lot of women who do not have any choice except for housework and marriage, it would indeed make a lot of difference. But for those of us who seem to have other choices – professional work, enlightened husband, communal way of life, gay relations or a combination of these – it would not make much of a difference at all. For us
there are supposedly other ways of achieving economic independence, and the last thing we want is to get it by identifying ourselves as housewives, a fate which we all agree is, so to speak, worse than death.
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
The problem with this position is that in our imagination we usually add a bit of money to the shitty lives we have now and then ask, so what? *on the false premise that we could ever get that money without at the same time revolutionizing – in the process of struggling for it – all our family and social relations. But if we take wages for housework as a political perspective, we can see that struggling for it is going to produce a revolution in our lives and in our social power as women. It is also clear that if we think we do not ‘need’ that money, it is because we have accepted the particular forms of prostitution of body and mind by which we get the money to hide that need. As I will try to show, not only is wages for housework a revolutionary perspective, but it is the only revolutionary perspective from a feminist viewpoint and ultimately for the entire working class.
*ie: sabbatical ish transition
3/76
A Labour of Love
It is important to recognize that when we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job as other jobs, but we are speaking of one of the most pervasive manipulations, most subtle and mystified forms of violence that capitalism has perpetrated against any section of the working class. True, under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle around and against the terms and the quantity of that wage, the terms and the quantity of that work. To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt concerning its
meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live..t But exploited as you might be, you are not that work. Today you are a postman, tomorrow a cabdriver. All that matters is how much of that work you have to do and how much of that money you can get. But in the case of housework the situation is qualitatively different. The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character..t
earn a living.. caring labor.. et al
4/77
Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. *Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work..t In its turn,the unwaged condition of housework has been the most
powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen – bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.
*deeper.. on accepting any form of m\a\p
Yet just how natural it is to be a housewife is shown by the fact that it takes at least twenty years of socialization – day-to-day training, performed by an unwaged mother – to prepare a woman for this role, to convince her that children and husband are the best she can expect from life.
Even so, it hardly succeeds. No matter how well-trained we are, few are the women who do not feel cheated when the bride’s day is over and they find themselves in front of a dirty sink. *Many of us still have the illusion that we marry for love. A lot of us recognize that we marry for money and security; but it is time to make it clear that while the love or money involved is very little, the work which awaits us is enormous. .tThis is why older women always tell us ‘Enjoy your freedom while you can, buy whatever you want now. . . ’ But unfortunately it is almost impossible to enjoy any freedom if from the earliest days of life you are trained to be docile, subservient, dependent and most important to sacrifice yourself and even to get pleasure from it. If you don’t like it, it is your problem, your failure, your guilt, your abnormality.
*nika & silvia on divorce et al
5/78
We must admit that capital has been very successful in hiding our work. It has created a true masterpiece at the expense of women. By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone..t First of all, it has got a hell of a lot of work almost for free, and it has made sure that women, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the
best thing in life (the magic words: “Yes, darling, you are a real woman”). At the same time, it has disciplined the male worker also, by making ‘his’ woman dependent on his work and his wage, and trapped him in this discipline by giving him a servant after he himself has done so much serving at the factory or the office..t In fact, our role as women is to be the unwaged but happy, and most of all loving, servants of the ‘working class’, i.e. those strata of the proletariat to which capital was forced to grant more social power. In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally and sexually – to raise his children, mend his socks, patch up his ego when it is crushed by the work and the social relations (which are relations of loneliness) that capital has reserved for him. It is precisely this peculiar combination of physical, emotional and sexual services that are involved in the role women must perform for capital that creates the specific character of that servant which is the housewife, that makes her work so burdensome and at the same time invisible..t It is not an accident that most men start thinking of getting married as soon as they get their first job. This is not only because now they can afford it, but because having somebody at home who takes care of you is the only condition not to go crazy after a day spent on an assembly line or at a desk..t Every woman knows that this is what she should be doing to be a true woman and have a ‘successful’ marriage. And in this case too, the poorer the family the higher the enslavement of the woman, and not simply because of the monetary situation.
hari present in society law et al
6/79
In fact capital has a dual policy, one for the middle class and one for the proletarian family. It is no accident that *we find the most unsophisticated machismo in the working class family: the more blows the man gets at work the more his wife must be trained to absorb them, the more he is allowed to recover his ego at her expense..t You beat your wife and vent your rage against her when you are frustrated or overtired by your work or when you are defeated in a struggle (to go into a factory is itself a defeat). **The more the man serves and is bossed around, the more he bosses around. A man’s home is his castle . . . and his wife has to learn to wait in silence when he is moody, to put him back together when he is broken down and swears at the world, ..t to turn around in bed when he says ‘I’m too tired tonight,’ or when he goes so fast at lovemaking that, as one woman put it, he might as well make it with a mayonnaise jar. (Women however have always found ways of fighting back, or getting back at them, but always in an isolated and privatized way. The problem, then, becomes how to bring this struggle out of the kitchen and bedroom and into the streets.)
7/80
This fraud that goes under the name of love and marriage affects all of us, even if we are not married,..t because once housework was totally naturalized and sexualized, once it became a feminine attribute, all of us as females are characterized by it. If it is natural to do certain things, then all women are expected to do them and even like doing them – even those women who, due to their social position, could escape some of that work or most of it (their husbands can afford maids and shrinks and other forms of relaxation and amusement). We might not serve one man, but we are all in a servant relation with respect to the whole male world. This is why to be called a female is such a putdown, such a degrading thing. (“Smile, honey, what’s the matter with you?” is something every man feels entitled to ask you, whether he is your husband, or the man who takes your ticket on a train, or your boss at work.)
graeber violence in care law et al.. steiner care to oppression law et al
The Revolutionary Perspective
If we start from this analysis we can see the revolutionary implications of the demand for wages for housework..t It is the demand by which our nature ends and our struggle begins because just to want wages for housework means to refuse that work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us.
not deep enough to be revolutionary.. need to let go of any form of m\a\p
To ask for wages for housework will by itself undermine the expectations society has of us, since these expectations – the essence of our socialization – are all functional to our wageless condition in the home..t In this sense, it is absurd to compare the struggle of women for wages to the struggle of male workers in the factory for more wages.
rather.. will perpetuate all/any form of m\a\p
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
8/81
*The waged worker in struggling for more wages challenges his social role but remains within it. When we struggle for wages we struggle unambiguously and directly against our social role. In the same way there is a qualitative difference between the struggles of the waged worker and the struggles of the slave for a wage against that slavery. It **should be clear, however, that when we struggle for a wage we do not struggle to enter capitalist relations, because we have never been out of them. We struggle to break capital’s plan for women,..t which is an essential moment of the divisions within the working class, through which capital has been able to maintain its power. ***Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it forces capital to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class. In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the’ opposite. ****To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.
*same song as long as any form of m\a\p
**perhaps until now.. now there’s a nother way
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
***perhaps more.. but not deep enough for legit change
Against any accusation of ‘economism’ we should remember that money is capital, i.e. it is the power to command labour. Therefore to re-appropriate that money which is the fruit of our labour – of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ labour – means at the same time to undermine capital’s power to command forced labour from us. And we should not distrust the power of the wage in demystifying our femaleness and making visible our work – our femaleness as work – since the lack of a. wage has been so powerful in shaping this role and hiding our work. To demand wages for housework is to make it visible that our minds, bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function, in a specific function, and then have been thrown back at us as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted as women in this society.9/82
To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it *shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling,..t our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our over-sexualization has left us completely desexualized.
*smiles ness et al.. kafka because law
Wages for housework is only the beginning, but its message is clear: from now on they have to pay us because as females we do not guarantee anything any longer. We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love and create what will be our sexuality which we have never known. And from the viewpoint of work we can ask not one wage but many wages, because we have been forced into many jobs at once. We are housemaids, prostitutes, nurses, shrinks; this is the essence of the ‘heroic’ spouse who is celebrated on ‘Mother’s Day’.
We say: stop celebrating our exploitation, our supposed heroism. From now on we want money for each moment of it, so that we can refuse some of it and eventually all of it.
In this respect nothing can be more effective than to show that our female virtues have a calculable money value, until today only for capital, increased in the measure that we were defeated; from now on against capital for us in the measure we organize our power..t
but graeber violence/quantification law
so not deep enough
10/83
The Struggle for Social Services
This is the most radical perspective we can adopt because although we can ask for everything, day care, equal pay, free laundromats, *we will never achieve any real change unless we attack our female role at its roots..t
*rather.. unless we facil a non role ness.. at its roots
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls (as only label(s) ness)1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
12/85
The Struggle Against Housework
But this is the best thing that can happen from their own point of view, because by exposing the way capital has kept us divided (capital has disciplined them through us and us through them – each other, against each other), we – their crutches, their slaves, their chains – open the process of their liberation. In this sense wages for housework will be much more educational than trying to prove that we can work as well as them, that we can do the same jobs.13/86
..we don’t have to prove that we can “break the blue collar barrier”..The things we have to prove are
our capacity to expose what we are already doing, what capital is doing to us and our power in the struggle against it.
..We are all housewives because no matter where we are they can always count on more work from us, more fear on our side to put forward our demands, and less pressure on them for money, since hopefully our minds are directed elsewhere, to that man in our present or our future who will “take care of us”.
need deeper than any form of us & them ness
14/87
And can we really so easily disregard the idea of living with a man? What if we lose our jobs? What about ageing and losing even the minimal amount of power that youth (productivity) and attractiveness (female productivity) afford us today? And what about children? Will we ever regret having chosen not to have them, not even having been able to realistically ask that question? And can we afford gay relations? Are we willing to pay the possible price of isolation and exclusion?
But can we really afford relations with men?
The question is: why are these our only alternatives and what kind of struggle will move us beyond them?..t
yeah that.
and today.. there’s a nother way for 8b people to live (and global detox leap to)
.. and we’re missing it.. for (blank)’s sake
______
after reposting tweets.. fabiana cecin quote tweeted [https://x.com/fabianacecin/status/1759608753622544431?s=20]:
First layer is: here’s unrecognized work, which following the current logic, would require wages.
Second layer is: the idea of wages (of creating a concept of people who work and people who don’t) is absurd, we should distribute all dividends equally.
Third layer: no money etc.
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting) as the planned obsolescence w/ubi as temp placebo.. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
______
______
______
______
______
_______
______
_______
be you. 