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

The second factor that has recentered reproductive labor in the home has been the expansion of “homework,” partly due to the deconcentration of industrial production, partly to the spread of informal work. As David Staples writes in No Place Like Home (2006), far from being an anachronistic form of work, home-based labor has demonstrated to be a lo

It is not an accident, then, if 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 also because having somebody at home who takes care of you is the only condition of not going crazy after a day spent on an assembly line or at a desk.

Given that in the labor market women are concentrated in service-sector jobs involving reproductive labor, it can be argued that women have traded unpaid housework for their families for paid housework in the marketplace.

Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.

The women’s movement must realize that work is not liberation. Work in a capitalist system is exploitation and there is no pleasure, pride or creativity in being exploited. Even the “career” is an illusion as far as self-fulfillment is concerned.

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.

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

the production of workers and of unequal power relations aiming to keep the labor force divided remains the main capitalist enterprise, as it was at the dawn of capitalism.

Why hasn’t the women’s movement posed the question of freeing the university, not simply in terms of what subjects should be studied, but also in terms of eliminating the financial cost of studying?