Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

The wage and the lack of it have allowed capital to obscure the real length of our working day.

Third, and most important, Hardt and Negri maintain that with immaterial production all the dichotomies that characterized labor in the industrial era—productive/unproductive, production/reproduction, labor/leisure, waged/unwaged—vanish, so that labor ceases to be a source of differentiation and unequal power relations.8 In the place of the former

Compared with assembly-line work, “affective labor” may appear more creative, as workers must engage in a constant rearticulation or reinvention of their subjectivity, choose how much of their “selves” to give to the job, and mediate conflicting interests. But they must do so under the pressure of precarious labor conditions, an intense pace of wor

The rise of the service sector has, in her view, made emotional work more systematized, standardized, and mass-produced, but its existence still capitalizes on the fact that, from childhood women, have been trained to have an instrumental relation to their emotions.20

Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers’ effort to unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum.

In fact, as wives and mothers have “gone on strike,” many of their previously invisible services have become saleable commodities around which entire industries have been built.

For the distancing of production from reproduction and consumption leads us to ignore the conditions under which what we eat or wear, or work with, have been produced, their social and environmental cost, and the fate of the population on whom the waste we produce is unloaded.

Is bringing coffee to your boss and chatting with him about his marital problems secretarial work or is it a personal favor? Is the fact that we have to worry about our looks on the job a condition of work, or is it the result of female vanity?

In sum, rather than being an autonomous, self-organized form of work, spontaneously producing forms of “elementary communism,” affective labor is, for workers, a mechanical, alienating experience performed under command, spied upon, and certainly measured and quantified in its value-producing capacity as much as any other form of physical labor.34