Aspects of the Condition of Women's Labor
Larguia, Isabel & Dumoulin, John
Introduction A woman's role in the family, her integration into the labor force and the level of education available to her are some of the factors which help to determine the extent of her...
...18, 1963), points out that "in the countryside it was taken for granted that men and women worked together...
...In socialist countries a notable diversification and higher level of women's skills has been brought about...
...A woman's labor thusappeared to grow out of her sexual identity...
...In the dichotomy between mental and manual labor, there is no doubt that housework falls into the manual category...
...Firstly...
...Thus, the changing relations of production produce an important transformation in the economic structure of the family...
...The confusion of labor and love is a particularly effective form of ideological coercion with a precise economic function-the imposition of domestic slavery...
...It is the production and reproduction of that means of production so indispensable to the capitalist: the labourer himself...
...The capitalist class as a whole pays a woman lower wages for the same work...
...Capitalism forces women into the labor market, where they enter into competition with men, some of whom are unemployed...
...The women's social labor must not conflict with the feminine image historically conditioned by her function as the reproducer of labor power...
...The need not only to develop better tools and techniques, but also to manufacture more complex artisan goods, entered into contradiction with the need to reproduce the labor power of all the family members, an activity which, since the inception of class society, was considered to be a specificallyfeminine task and an extension of the biological capacity to...
...Domestic labor is useful concrete labor while the necessary labor of a worker is, in addition, productive social labor and can be measured as abstract human labor...
...But, the economic condition which determines discrimination remains, in general terms, constant...
...Especially here in the United States it would be important to explore the impact that advanced capitalism has had on women's consciousness and- their assigned role in our society...
...6 September 1975 Published monthly, except May-June and July-August when it is published bi-monthly, at 160 Claremont Ave., New York, NY 10027...
...The positive aspect of the family as an improvement in human relations is distorted by the economic activities which take place within it...
...Subscriptions: $10 per year for individuals ($18 for two years), $16 per year for non-profit institutions ($30 for two years), $25 per year for profit-making and government organizations ($48 for two years...
...Not only is social labor destined for consumption outside the family, but the most prominent portion of labor power reproduced inside the family is not expended within the home but rather in a center of capitalist production...
...The wife and children no longer help produce for external consumption...
...I (New York: International Publishers, New World Paperbacks, 1967), p. 572...
...Introduction A woman's role in the family, her integration into the labor force and the level of education available to her are some of the factors which help to determine the extent of her oppression or, conversely, liberation...
...While men's consciousness is raised by contact with other men in the factory, women are isolated within the household...
...The aptitude for physical labor and intellectual creation was tied strictly to this division of labor, and society as a whole proceeded to form its youth for work according to their sex, developing certain aptitudes in some and opposite or "complimentary" aptitudes in others...
...formed outside this unit would only have briefly taken on a relatively important size within the total labor time consumed...
...2 3 Consequently, the economic unit of class society went through a premature crisis...
...This Is valid in the sense that it reflects in one way or another the exhaustion of human labor power...
...What are the trends in the development of socialism...
...Larguia and Dumoulin see the oppression of women as a direct result of class oppression and present a theoretical analysis of the evolution of women's roles from pre-capitalist societies through the development of capitalism and the transition to socialism...
...Historically women are admitted to that kind of work that is a social extension of the tasks traditionally performed in the home...
...Thus women had to passively accept their destiny, confusing their economic function with their biological identity...
...This emphasis on the family, in a world where one-half of all labor time is still devoted to domestic work, provides a methodology for analyzing the historical basis of the conditions women face in any society...
...It is one of its most solid pillars of support...
...Capitalism created the preconditions for the full socialization of production in the public sphere, but did not do so in the domestic sphere, that is, in the reproduction of labor power...
...The economy will cease to function in two mutually antagonistic spheres, as under private property...
...Ibid., p. 264-5...
...But the development of aptitudes labeled "masculine" or "virile" allowed for greater or lesser freedom according to the class to which the individual belonged...
...In natural pre-capitalist economics therefore, the family is as much a unit of reproduction of labor power as a unit of social production...
...The nature of indispensable family labor is quantitatively distinct from the necessary labor ofa worker, although in a capitalist economy both are indispensable...
...Change in the family is slower...
...However, much work remains to be done to concretize the application of their theoretical construct for capitalist societies...
...In general, each exploitative structure has a characteristic form of extractioh that can be distinguished in its stabilization of dominant relations...
...The discrimination against women thus contributes to the general depreciation of workers' wages...
...It is no longer necessary for women to occupy jobs that are of relatively little intensity or interest in order to save their energy for the home-although the corresponding transformations are long, laborious and only partly conscious...
...In Cuba, the new Family Code establishes the obligation of both spouses to share domestic chores...
...The concept of labor power and its reproduction is of fundamental importance to an understanding of this process...
...They left the home before large-scale industry had sufficiently developed to create a significant reduction in domestic work...
...On the other hand, it contains very valuable human relations...
...In the domestic sphere, on the contrary, capitalism progressively eliminates the remnants of the natural economy present in the economic unit of the family...
...While capitalism sharpens the discrimination against women on the one hand, on the other it prepares the conditions for the rise of socialism...
...3. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol...
...In order to consider the status of an exploited sector, materialist concepts hold as fundamental the conditions which determine the extraction of surplus labor and, in general, that sector's position within the structure of labor...
...Secondly, when wage labor is substituted for small, family production, a physical separation emerges between social labor and the family, between the work place and the home...
...But it does not lead, at least under capitalism, to the elimination of the economic unit of the family...
...Capital, op...
...In Vietnam, for example, students of both sexes receive instruction in traditionally "feminine" tasks...
...It produces the following goods and services: prepared food, clothing, clean housing and children educated in accordance with the standards required for a new generation of workers...
...But in the current period, these forces have developed to such an extent that they have become incompatible with the entire social structure of class society, including the role of the family as its economic unit...
...WOMEN UNDER SOCIALISM The transition to a classless society must not be analyzed from a utopian point of view...
...This is due to the fact that what determines the value of labor power and, therefore, its wage level, is the value of the commodities which are necessary for the maintenance of the family as a whole...
...He characterizes the out lay of salaries by the capitalist as variable capital in the following manner: The capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced, and new labourers are begotten...
...To perform their tasks, workers are grouped into large collective units which allow for a refined division of labor, that is to say, a higher socialization, as well as the application of increasingly advanced technology...
...PRECAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT To explain the development of the family as a productive unit, the specific labor needed to reproduce labor power and the corresponding situation of women, it is necessary to define some fundamental concepts...
...It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body...
...Nevertheless, this exclusion is only partial because women also leave the home to work...
...Ibid., p. 807...
...It undermined the foundations of the nation, injured the faculties of the workers, impoverished their culture, destroyed their average height, and prematurely consumed their strength to the point of death or early disability...
...The other 3 days he does forced work on the lord's domain...
...Thus, for the wife and the mother, labor was confused with sexuality...
...The English edition cited thus far gives a different Im...
...Engels summed up the situation in this way: "if she carries out her duties in the private sector of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn...
...cit., p. 221...
...House wives don't work," is a common saying...
...The ideal of women's seclusion in the home was first generalized among the dominant classes, for whom it was fundamentally associated with property inheritance...
...Larguia and Dumoulin's analysis demonstrates the idealism inherent in this argument...
...It is carried out within the framework of the family as the economic unit of society through which its useful labor is appropriated...
...It also guarantees the atomization of the working class at the end of the working day...
...Her labor saves him the extra hours required for the replacement of his labor power...
...The refinement of domestic techniques absorbed greater quantities of women's labor power...
...IX, No...
...But the replacement of labor power continues to have the same form of craft-like domestic organization as before...
...Address all correspondence to Box 57, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025 or Box 226, Berkeley, CA 94701...
...The cost of keeping the family increases, and balances the greater Income...
...And an even broader code, known as the "Thesis on Women," is currently being discussed throughout the island and will be finalized at the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party later this year...
...In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels outlines the fundamental conditions of the historic defeat of the female sex in the long transition that corresponds to the evolution of the patriarchal family, highlighting the social division of labor and the availability of surplus for appropriation...
...Copyright c 1975 by the North American Congress on Latin America, Inc...
...The various tasks are performed within the same group without the mediation of commercial exchange, and the technology employed is of a very low level...
...This need can only be met by selling the remaining supply of feminine labor time...
...This concept, despite the fact that it appears frequently in ethnographic and other social science literature, has not, as far as we know, been defined in a rigorous manner...
...1 1 The former only creates use values, while the latter fundamentally generates exchange values...
...At the economic level, the first task of socialism with respect to women is to incorporate them into social production which corresponds to their cultural level or to a level they can attain rapidly...
...The invisible labor of women is no longer even9 thought of as labor, but rather as mere domestic chores, necessary but without economic substance...
...Ismail Abdel-Hamlid Slrageldin: Nen-market Components of National Income, Institute for Social Research, Ann Arbor, 1969...
...Capitalism eliminates the self sufficiency of the family, making it totally dependent upon social production and the market...
...cit., Vol...
...It is crucial for the survival of class society that women not exhaust all their labor power in social production, but rather save some energy for the private economic unit...
...Therefore, only when this task has been socialized, or equally distributed among the entire population, can the dichotomy between mental and manual labor be overcome...
...2 9 Thus instead of reducing the importance of the home in the balance of labor, the absorption of its economic activity by the social sector leads first of all to the loss of productivity in the domestic sector and then to the aggravation of the imbalance between the two sectors...
...A solution to this problem is found in the historic development of socialism...
...17...
...For the female sex, a permanent cultural lobotomy was attempted...
...8 The capitalist appropriates the rest of the working day as surplus value...
...2 The forms of discrimination vary considerably in different societies and epochs under the influence of specific conditions of development: natural, ethnic, and historical...
...The private domestic work place does not reinforce private property or atomize the working class...
...The emancipation of women will only be possible when women can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of their time...
...The new lords no longer seek to satisfy their own needs, which have limits, but to accumulate wealth by creating value from capital, which has no limits...
...In the initial development of class society, the family appeared as a legal and productive unit by which, through men, the dominant classes appropriated women's surplus labor...
...Marcelo Moll, "La igualdad social real doe a muler y el hombre, requlsilto pare Ia Ilberacion total de Ia mujer," unpublished manuscript in possession of the authors...
...It is not a question of abolishing the family, as some utopians would like (even though a diminution of the dependence of young people on their parents can be expected) but rather of eliminating its character as a place of work and exploitation...
...Larguia and Dumoulin's article provides the theoretical context for the discussion of a wide range of issues including the concrete development of a strategy for women's liberation under socialism...
...The final purpose of the total mass of feminine labor changes fundamentally...
...The full socialization of the reproduction of labor power requires the construction of large service complexes analogous to the existing factory complexes that provide all services necessary to the development of much more efficient, and higher quality, domestic labor, employing the technology of continuous production...
...Labor power must constantly be replaced in two cycles: daily and generational...
...At the same time, the methods for the direct reproduction of labor power slowly became specialized...
...For all that is invested in domestic appliances-and it can be a considerable sum-the necessary hours are not reduced beyond a certain limit, and what is produced does not exceed the family's consumption...
...Consequently the burden on the population tended to rise along with the maintenance cost of the average family and, therefore, the necessary minimum wage...
...Under the liberal laissez-faire politics of the first half of the 19th century, capitalism almost succeeded...
...Only one aspect was not confirmed by history: the impression that is left by the phrase "as soon as," as if socialization constitutes a single explosion that erases the private form in the reproduction of labor power, at the same time that it erases the private form in the ownership of the means of production...
...The aspect of subsistence labor is not highlighted and its definition remains obscure...
...Men's labor is crystallized into products that are socially and economically visible in the form of taxes, rent or commodities...
...ASPECTS OF THE CONDITION OF WOMEN'S LABOR 1. Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, that after the private community "the organization of the home in the patriarchal family and even moreso in the individual monogomous family (. .. ) lost its social character and became private service...
...In a socialist economy, this incorporation takes place' under much more favorable conditions as both private capitalist ownership of the means of production and the resulting unemployment no longer exist...
...For the purpose of this article, we will define them as that production which ". . . must not be produced as the immediate means of subsistence of the producer himself,"1 2 but rather for consumption outside the basic economic unit, which according to the historical period could be the community or the family, regardless of whether the work is performed within or outside this unit...
...Women's labor becomes identified with domestic labor and with the sphere of the private family, while social labor, whose products circulate in the public sphere, is identified with masculine labor...
...For his maintenance he (the individual) requires a given quantity of the means of subsistence...
...The most important aspect of social production, in addition to the interchange between producers, became the production of an economic surplus which was expropriated by the dominant class, a function which linked the family with the class structure of the society...
...Throughout the development of such economies, women participated in social production as well as in subsistence production for direct consumption...
...An important sector within light industry is relegated to the production of machinery to sustain the smallest enterprise while cheaper and more efficient machinery could do the same work on a larger scale...
...The key concept in defining the role of women within the division of labor, and thus in analyzing the mode of appropriation that determines their status, is labor power and its reproduction...
...Carlos Marx y Federico Engels, Obras escogidas en dos tomos, Vol...
...NACLA's translation...
...The domestic economy will be converted into a social matter as well as the care and education of children...
...In precapitalist economies, in which exchange is limited, the difference between subsistence and social labor coincides with the difference between the reproduction of labor power and surplus labor...
...Larguia and Dumoulin stress the fact that "the conditions created by capitalism determine the immediate possibilities for change...
...As a superstructural phenomenon and as an ideological reinforcement, this both guarantees the continuation of extraction and is the result of that extraction...
...This atomization of the reproduction of labor power is one of the necessary conditions for strengthening the market, particularly the market for the durable consumer goods industry which is directed toward the individual domestic enterprise...
...I, p. 395...
...Frederick Engels, The Origin ofthe Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, New World Paperbacks, 1972), p. 221...
...These raw materials and means of subsistence have now become commodities...
...2 5 Thirdly, the man's wages-in the large majority of cases and theoretically in all--become the "support" of the family, that is, the family's only source of goods from the social sector...
...Jurgen Kuczynski, in "Die Geschichte del arbeitenden Frau" (Die Geschichte del Lage der Arbeiter unter dam Kapitalismusm Berlin, Vol...
...Thus we see, that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms the principal object of capital's exploiting power, at the same time raises the degree of exploitation.2 6 Although the monetary income increases slightly when women and/or other members of the family begin to work as a general social phenomenon, the family as a whole and each one of its members are more exploited than before...
...Socialism tends to create these conditions, removing economic activity from the home and freeing women for the full development of their human personalities The contemporary family is the result of a long and complex process...
...In the primitive community, the reproduction of labor power is not differentiated from the general flow of production...
...In contrast, investments in the social sector are highly productive...
...Capital, op...
...capacity to work...
...In this way, after the ebb of the first wave of women workers, an ebbing particularly characteristic of countries with an early industrial development, the slow incorporation of women again becomes the dominant historical trend...
...But the most characteristic unit Of production of the precapltallst stage, and in various circumstances the only unit, was the small family economy...
...Together they are sufficient for the reproduction of labor power...
...cit., p. 137...
...The industrial working day of twelve or more hours was incompatible with the second working day in the home...
...Within the limits of what is strictly necessary, the individual con- sumption of the working-class is, therefore, the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power at the disposal of capital for exploitation...
...In this way, the small-scale mercantile production which women undertook on their own is gradually eliminated...
...It Is sometimes confused with socially necessary labor...
...In capitalism, it becomes circumscribed and limited to in- visible labor, defined socially as "feminine...
...Two main interpretations, which partly overlaps emerge from materials on economy, economic geography, rural sociology, social welfare and cultural anthropology: a) an economic organization which provides only the indispensable means of existence...
...Added to the man's total wages this makes up the income necessary for the family, an income which is no longer paid entirely to the male worker...
...Engels, op...
...For this reason, there is a certain justification, if not justice, in considering today's housewives to be economically inactive, and as workers, abysmally unproductive...
...The value of labouring power is determined by the value of the necessaries required to produce, develop, maintain, and perpetuate the labouring power...
...The hours of domestic labor do not diminish appreciably and the product does not go beyond the satisfaction of the necessities of one family...
...Capital, op...
...The terms social production and social labor are defined in various ways...
...For the purpose of this article, it is necessary to emphasize that Marx points out clearly that with the concept of necessary labor time he refers to the laborer's working day, or by extension, to any kind of labor for exchange...
...The persistence of domestic labor is presently an impediment to the full liberation of the human potential of women and all members of the family...
...Its history and present structure cannot be understood simply as a series of biological relationships but rather through its relations of production which have undergone and will continue to undergo many changes...
...coarse woollen stuffs-thingswhose raw materials have been within the reach of every peasant family, had been spun and woven for its own use-were now transformed into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts at once served for markets...
...The authoritarian character of the family arises from the extraction of labor...
...As a means of transition, investment will be made in industries Without Women There is No Democmcy.13 and services that improve domestic implements to alleviate domestic work, thus removing the barrier to women's access to traditionally "masculine" jobs and to the power structure...
...Capital, op...
...With the beginning of the decomposition of the primitive community, both biological reproduction and the task of reproducing labor power occurred in the only place which women never left...
...While the importance of integrating women into both the economic and political process was recognized from the start, a veritable explosion in consciousness of and about women has occurred in the last few years...
...p. 216...
...the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra...
...In the labor market, as Kuczynski states, 2 7 women occupy the status of outcasts, similar to that of ethnic groups which are discriminated against...
...The thesis analyses women's oppression under imperialism and the problems they have encountered within the revolutionary process...
...The purpose of this article is not to question the positive psychological and social aspects of the family but rather the economic activity, socially invisible and hidden, which absorbs half of the labor of humanity...
...1 5 Of course, this reproduction is not realized at the level of the peasant as an individual, but rather at the level of the family unit of production in which men and women, the young and the old, work at their respective tasks...
...Educational levels differ vastly between the advanced industrial nations and most Third World countries, as do the roles which women play in the family...
...Women receive equal pay for equal work...
...Larguia and Dumoulin briefly mention the Cuban family code, a series of legal guidelines which clearly put forth the division of household tasks and child care responsibilities between men and women...
...The growing division of labor between the sexes tended to limit women to tasks that tied them closely to a communal center of production...
...Ibid., p. 395.As we know, this kind of labor wasperipheral to the subject of Marx's study, capitalist social production, which until then was poorly understood In essence as well as in the concrete aspects of Its functioning and development...
...2. Isabel Larguia and John Dumoutin, "Towards a Science of Women's Liberation," NACLA's Latin America & Empire Report, Vol...
...This physical separation had occurred earlier, under various forms, during the first period of centralization of class property, in the communal works of the early States, in the kidnapping of slaves from their native family (although in patriarchal societies these slaves were incorporated into other families), and through rent in kind on the land of the lord...
...As a result, the economic outcast disappears as a category for men as well as women...
...4 But since value embodies a quantity of social labor, "so far as it has value, it (labour power) represents no more than a definite quantity of the average labour of society incorporated in it...
...cit., Vol...
...give birth and to nurse...
...2 2 For example, women workers with small children, unable to care for them or to find another solution to this problem, were forced to drug them with a soporific, Godrey's Cordial, (with the imaginable side effects on the development of the child) in order to leave them quietly in the home while they remained in the factory...
...The family unit has been a principal economic structure of every class society...
...Only with the definitive elimination of the regressive aspects of the family can the last remnants of women's discrimination disappear...
...It is therefore believed that a woman worker does not need as high a salary as a man...
...Written by Isabel Largula, an Argentine, and John Dumoulin, a North American, both of whom presently live in Cuba, the article first appeared in the January-February 1975 issue of the Cuban journal, Casa de las Americas...
...Hence, the diminished expenditure of labor in the house is accompanied by an increased expenditure of money...
...While capitalism creates the social relations of production and the corresponding ideology that oppresses women, it would be utopian to assume that the taking of power by the working class immediately eradicates all vestiges of the previous system...
...The prejudices that bring about the organization of the reproduction of labor power in minute domestic work shops are aggravated within a highly developed economy...
...For example a sequence can be established leading from the subsistence production of grains, milling and cooking in the home to the general availability of commercial bread and pastas...
...7. Ibid., p. 171...
...Ibid., p. 139...
...The reproduction of labor power always implies human labor expended to provide the necessary goods...
...Thus, there is a contradiction between a woman's two working days, determined by the limit of the human capacity to work...
...Under capitalism, the housewife is the most common of all occupations...
...The process of the concentration of production and the proletarianization of workers makes the family doubly dependent on the market both to obtain the commodities which it consumes and, also, to sell the only commodity which it produces...
...This ideology is built upon the ancient relationship between the division of labor and biological differences: the division of labor ac- cording to sex...
...It sharpened the latent contradiction between women's role in social production and their work in the reproduction of labor power...
...The development of the urban industrial economy gradually frees part of women's labor time by absorbing the old domestic crafts which women used to perform in the home...
...It furthermore presupposes the combination of rural home industry with agricultural and industrial family labor...
...The regenerative side of family life both spiritual and sexual becomes primary...
...2. In this way, the proletarianization of women was not a solution to the problem of the family's survival, but rather shifted it to the question of family's gross wage income...
...the husband no longer possesses either the land or the instruments of labor formally located in the home...
...it also created the home-market...
...Marx called this type of labor "domestic labor" or "family labor that is indispensable for consumption...
...This is a long and complex process in which one cannot expect the immediate elimination of the problems of women and the family...
...In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage-labourers, and their means of subsistence and of labour into material elements of capital, created, at the same time, a home-market for the latter...
...Socialism tends to diminish and later to eliminate its character as a private enterprise, not to strengthen or "modernize" it...
...goods that are of use to the community or for the consumption of the lord and his retinue, while subsistence labor goes toward direct consumption...
...In its blind unrestrainable passion . . . capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day...
...More than ever, the concept of womanhood resembles that of servitude...
...pression...
...In this way the spontaneous forces of capital generated opposition not only among workers but also among people who clearly perceived the medium and long term interests of the capitalist class as a whole...
...These tasks were, under given conditions, those which permitted the group to achieve a simple, stable reproduction...
...A similar phenomenon takes place with the small independent peasant who emerges from the dissolution of the feudal system of landed property: "the cultivator, be he free owner or vassal, always must produce his own means of subsistence independently, as an isolated laborer with his family...
...The principal aspiration of the group is self-perpetuation...
...There was no structural division between these tasks and those of men...
...NACLA's translation...
...the woman became the main servant, no longer participating in social production...
...The collectivization of what is now "domestic labor" implies a technological revolution and profound changes in social consciousness...
...Beginning in the cradle, their physical and intellectual capacities were destroyed in the name of a "femininity" whose real meaning was domestic labor, the reproduction of labor power through the family structure...
...Marx pointed out how English government inspectors confirmed the effects of this suicidal tendency...
...The single productive flow which characterized the primitive community became diffused...
...He demonstrates that the continued division of labor according to sex within the family, came to mean the subjugation of the female sex in the development of social production which was fundamentally in the hands of men...
...Because there are so many variables affecting women's roles and women's consciousness, theoretical work that shows the interrelationship among these factors is necessary for understanding women's oppression and formulating a strategy for liberation...
...6 In the historical form of capitalism, this labor is fundamentally a social labor molded into commodities...
...Capital, op...
...They are economically inactive...
...1 4 Thus, in a natural economy the family becomes defined as a productive unit, where the following essentially distinct activities appear to be indistinguishable: a) strictly biological reproduction (which concerns us here), b) direct reproduction of labor power (which includes the private education of the new generation of workers), c) social production (which has two aspects: the surplus appropriated by the dominant classes and some production for direct exchange between producers...
...Labor power is both the physical and mental energies of the worker, his/her...
...It will be incorporated as a fully developed part of social production, thus completing a process that began thousands of years ago...
...This results in the division of lands for cultivation at the family level...
...This comes from the joint family economy in which both men and women participate...
...Edward Norbeck confirms this in A Dictionary of the Social Sciences (New York: UNESCO, 1964...
...they must of course eat, dress, and rest to be able to continue to produce the following day...
...The structuring of labor according to sex through the family unit is the means by which women are integrated into the system of exploitation of a class society...
...A woman requires a light job that does not exhaust her muscular and nervous energy because upon returning home she must consume a part of it in replacing her own labor power and that of her husband, as well as in attending to the new generation of workers...
...Women were thrown into the labor market...
...I, p. 395...
...3 3 These brief observations, made more than three decades before the first socialist revolution, show a clear comprehension of the.necessary links between changes in the family and changes in the status of women...
...The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital, the labourers, their means of subsistence, and material for labour...
...In the beginning, domestic crafts were primarily the responsibility of women...
...These factors, however, vary considerably in different historical periods and societies...
...In the order of succession the fidelity of the wife to her husband was especially important...
...I, p. 747...
...The reproduction of labor power will no longer be a subsistence economic sector that is both separated from and opposed to social production...
...Yarn...
...Engels, op...
...1 6 Discussing the possibilities for development within a small serf economy, Marx points out the fact that the "employment of his labor-power is by no means confined to agriculture but includes rural home industry...
...Social production began to be differentiated from the direct reproduction of labor power...
...3 2 As soon as the means of production pass into common ownership, the individual family will cease to be the economic unit of society...
...Within this context, they see the economic and social characteristics of the family as fundamental to an understanding of women's role within the society as a whole...
...7 Marx calls necessary labor time that part of the working day which the laborer needs to produce, "a value equal to the value of his means of subsistence or the money with which they can be bought...
...the labor power of the wage laborer...
...Its creation is intimately linked to the disappearance of the basic economic unit of class society and to the full development of the human personality...
...The modern individual family is based on the open or more or less obscured domestic servitude of women and modern society is a mass whose molecules are the individual families...
...It is clear, however, that as the revolution has become more secure, more time has been devoted to NACLA'S LATIN AMERICA & EMPIRE REPORT Vol...
...Therefore the labour-5 time requisite for the production of labour-power reduces itself to that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence...
...Beginning with the system of rent labor, he states: Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory service for his lord...
...On the other hand, the family constantly requires greater sources of income to purchase in the market those goods which were previously manufactured in the home...
...Largula and Dumoulin's analysis of capitalism's effect on the family is of particular help in understanding women's special oppression under imperialism both in the advanced industrial nations and in the Third World...
...Not only is a division between men and women's consciousness produced, but capitalist ideology creates and reinforces the myth that women's backwardness is due to her biological or sexual condition...
...The economy has become defined as the production and circulation of commodities, from which women have apparently been excluded...
...The conditions created under capitalism make it relatively easy to socialize the means of production and distribution in the social sector...
...Industrial capitalism makes it possible to spread this seclusion to the productive classes and carry it to its ultimate extreme resulting in the deterioration of the status of women...
...The division into classes is the motor force of the historical development of such societies, but this development could not take place without the existence of a second structure-the family-which in a certain way underlies the class division and absorbs greatquantities of labor indispensable for economic reproduction...
...5. Capital, op...
...The total mass of labor is progressively divided into two large sectors...
...As time goes on, this situation can only become exacerbated...
...However, we cannot infer that the intensity, or even less the productivity, of modern domestic labor is similar to that of a worker's labor...
...In order to understand how and why this is the case, it will be helpful to make use of Marx's analysis of the relation between extension and the intensity of the working day in 19th century English factories, the principles of which apply equally to any working day...
...These conditions are often not considered by North Americans who criticize the Cuban Revolution for a lack of attention to the problems L faced by women...
...As a consequence, the productivity of domestic labor cannot overcome its traditional level...
...The role of the nuclear family is not to promote great social changes but rather to mitigate them, even to stop them, giving stability to a class system based on private property...
...The home, therefore, ceases to serve its function of social production...
...Marx explained this clearly at a time when even children were compelled by necessity to work in the factory: Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labour-market, spreads the value of the man's labour- power over his whole family...
...It is expressed exclusively in the production of labor power as a commodity, and consists of multiple and invisible domestic services...
...Formerly, the peasant family produced the means of subsistence and the raw -materials, which they themselves, for the most part,I consumed...
...At the functional economic level, in terms of possible economic activity, the working woman, when finished with10 her day of social labor must face another-sometimes equally as long-at home...
...Historical circumstances have made it necessary to concentrate almost all forces on this front...
...It is also necessary to remove the limiting and deforming influence of millions of small domestic work places from those services and from the production of related devices...
...The worker participated In communal works or contributed his/her rent in labor not only as the embodiment of labor power but also as the social represent tatlve of the family...
...Marx first addresses the problem of the reproduction of labor power within the framework of the capitalist relations of production as a factor in the reproduction of capital...
...To purchase the labour-power of a family of four workers may, perhaps, cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labour-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four days' labour takes the place of one, and their price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus-labour of four over the surplus-labour of one...
...The two structures, although closely interrelated, are distinct and changes in the public structure, where the antagonism between classes emerges and develops, profoundly affect the second and less dynamic structure...
...cit., p. 171...
...The domestic labor of the woman no longer counted, beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man...
...The capitalist form is not eternal, it is nothing more than ". .. a particular historical form of appearance of the fund for providing the necessaries of life, or the labour-fund which the labourer requires for the maintenance of himself and family, and which, whatever be the system of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce...
...In this center of production, the husbands, as heads of the household, appropriated women's "products...
...On the contrary, it makes its burden more onerous for the whole economy...
...In every productive process it fulfills- a fundamental role...
...The restriction of women to certain jobs depends upon the existence of the family economic unit...
...Capital, op...
...cit., p. 568...
...women during and immediately after World War II...
...And only then will this work cease to be an alienated and alienating activity...
...he finds his market in manufactures...
...VI, No...
...The worker's necessary labor takes part directly in the dominant relations of production in a capitalist society...
...And when it could, it correspondingly increased the family's expenses: "Since certain family functions, such as nursing and suckling children, cannot be entirely suppressed, the mothers confiscated by capital must try substitutions of some sort...
...This ends salary discrimination...
...Both, however, are still typically labor of the same kind: they produce only use values...
...What interests him is its value, for which he will have to pay a salary...
...It will recuperate the fully social character that the primitive community had, but at a much higher level of productivity and more complex division of labor...
...Iii, p. 794...
...The current trend toward filling the house with devices that facilitate domestic chores does not eliminate the obstructive character of the family as a economic unit...
...9. ibid...
...Women's "invisible labor," cleaning, washing and generally caring for the next generation of workers, is unskilled manual labor that is both alienating and performed at an extremely low level of productivity...
...Men and women daily perform tasks, consuming their energies...
...This domestic work, a complement to the production of class society, is appropriated through the family, whose relations of production make it the minimum unit, the nucleus, of class society...
...But a methodologically adequate definition of the concept of subsistence labor must also include that labor which passes unnoticed because it creates nondurable objects that are immediately consumed, such as food, and goes toward the care and maintenance of that which already exists, such as cleaning and childcare...
...This circumstance obliges women in general to devote themselves to "light" jobs in social production...
...As distinct from the concentration produced in the public sphere, this function is performed in millions of individual enterprises that are anarchistic, unproductive and unconnected...
...This process implies the consumption of different kinds of goods whose specific characteristics vary with the historically determined physical and spiritual needs of the workers...
...Beginning by breaking up the natural economy, it destroys the self sufficiency of the peasant family which had met all of its needs with the requisite combination of agriculture and domestic crafts...
...1 0 This direct reproduction of labor power falls completely within the bounds of social labor...
...Social labor is materialized in...
...We have named the labor that goes into the immediate reproduction of labor power invisible labor because it occupies an immense portion of human labor time and yet is so easily overlooked...
...We propose here to deal only with the principal circumstances that influence the status of women in the working class, without completely separating it from its secondary aspects...
...This situation is exacerbated in underdeveloped countries such as Cuba where the level of women's integration into the work force was particularly low before the revolution and where the first task of the revolution was the strengthening of the social sector of production to ensure economic survival in the face of imperialist sabotage...
...Under these conditions, capitalism cannot develop either a higher level of technical skills within the work force or links between housewives...
...In time, feminine work habits came to be seen merely in sexual terms, constituting a second identity...
...Perhaps the most important debate in the woman's movement today focuses on the question of socialism...
...With the development of class society, social labor in general, and finally a laborer's work, is identified in- creasingly as masculine while domestic work is identified as "feminine...
...LNS)12 This is the economic situation which socialism inherits...
...It is the traditional means by which women are brought into the system of exploitation...
...The intensity and/or complexity of the job a woman is able to fulfill is limited by the addition of her domestic working day...
...This article deals with an aspect which is not always taken into account: the extraction of surplus is made possible thanks to an enormous quantity of domestic work, primarily female, which today still occupies more than half of all labor time...
...The family first enters into contradiction with the tribal organization of society without displacing it...
...The social sector, having begun as an off shoot of subsistence production, progressively absorbs the economic activity of the latter...
...For women to obtain a secure place in the labor market, the industrial economy would first have to absorb an important part of the function of reproducing the labor force, stripping the family of half of its economic function and reducing it to a unit of consumption...
...The seclusion is directly tied to property and to the division of society into classes...
...The future collectivization of the reproduction of labor power, through the development of a service production complex, 3 4 will be related to the development of automation, and such complexes will not be susceptible to subordination by the traditional small domestic work place...
...Outcasts, as a whole, form a second stratum within the working class and serve an important function for the system...
...Second-class postage paid at New York, NY.Condition of Women9s Labor resolving these problems...
...Under the heading "Subsistence Economy," he says among other things that "The term subsistence economy is rarely explicitly defined In Its "usage in the social sciences i...
...Once unemployment is eliminated, as the hours of domestic labor diminish, the division of labor according to sex loses its basis...
...Men and women work with their labor power and in the course of this activity it is consumed, exhausted, and must be replaced...
...The evolution of the relationship between the family as a productive unit and social labor under European feudalism can be traced through the writings of Marx...
...No longer is it expressed either in exchangeable goods or in an appropriatable surplus, nor even in goods that are visibly consumed by the family...
...4. Karl Marx, Wages, Price and Profit (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1969), p. 46...
...Capitalism develops large-scale industry in the social sector of the productive process where human labor acquires a productivity many times higher than in private craft work...
...The exploitation of women is supported by ideological reinforcements which are implemented in an extraordinarily stable and powerful way...
...The family becomes a unit of consumption that is obliged to sell its labor power...
...Domestic appliances are only caricatures of advanced technology precisely because they cannot raise the productivity of labor...
...8. Ibid., p. 216...
...And except for the case of mercantile slavery, this labor was not characterized by the alienation of the basic economic unit...
...It is through this change in the social organization of labor that the individual family completely displaces the tribal organization and becomes converted into the economic unit of society...
...We are using here the concept of labor time as the common denominator of a worker's labor andidomestic labor in order to point out the utillzation of labor resources...
...2 0 WOMEN UNDER CAPITALISM The development of the mercantile capitalist economy deepens the division between the direct reproduction of labor power and social production until the latter is finally separated from the family...
...Thus, the work dedicated to the production of use values for immediate consumption was linked to the strictly biological function of reproducing the human species...
...This private economic unit appears at the beginning of class society...
...It thus depreciates his labour- power...
...Class systems are defined fundamentally by the property relations which determine the extraction of surplus labor from the working class, that is, the additional productive labor beyond that which is necessary for subsistence...
...Seen in such a long perspective, the labor per...
...Ibid., p. 137 8. 32...
...In addition, the norm of the seclusion of women in the home is not applicable to women who are the sole supporters of a family, as is increasingly the case...
...An extraordinarily complex and costly system of transport, storage and retail marketing is required for a large quantity of articles that could instead be used collectively...
...l 7 The latter included the tasks assigned to women...
...I, p. 409.10...
...According to the norm a woman's work is domestic and the man is responsible for the family...
...It is not by chance that women are preferred in the textile and clothing industries, the food and drug industries and in the large branch of services as nurses, manicurists, primary school teachers, secretaries, waitresses, and archetypically as servants in all jobs...
...As the basic economic unit of class society it has been a tiny private enterprise, a center of exploitation...
...Capitalism concentrates the means of production and the workers in large units, according to the level of development of each country and makes them interdependent through a highly developed division of labor...
...II, p. 328-29...
...But as exchange developed, the two aspects of women's labor, that is, social production and the direct reproduction of labor power, entered into contradiction...
...The largest block of labor power, that of housewives, is wasted in the lowest level of productivity...
...Ibid., p. 795...
...All this implies a prolonged process that includes the technological and organizational redesigning of production and of housing and the extremely costly construction of the corresponding installations...
...While men's skills and/or intellectual capacities are developed relative to their class position, women's are chronically underdeveloped...
...While capitalism makes it relatively easy to socialize the means of production and distribution in the social sector," it does not leave behind favorable conditions for the socialization of domestic work...
...Correspondingly, women enjoyed a social status equal or superior to that of men...
...2 1 In this way capital tends spontaneously to devour its own indispensable means of production, the working class, thus frustrating the possibility of reproducing labor power...
...To socialize the reproduction of labor power it is necessary to rescue it from the antiquated, craft organizational model imposed by the family...
...3 1 Revolution is for Engels a suitable process to effect this change...
...Aspects of the Condition of Women's Labor provides the theoretical context for an analysis of these factors...
...cit., Vol...
...The productivity of these devices is definitely limited, as in all individual craft industries, especially when one worker tries to perform many different tasks during the same day-something that does not occur in large scale production...
...no matter whether rent in kind contains more or less of the industrial product, as is often the case in the Middle Ages, or whether it is paid only in the form of actual products of the land.18 In other words, even when rent consists only of agricultural products in whose production women do not work directly, as occurred in some cases, it cannot be said that only men produce the surplus product...
...While capitalism raises the level of productivity within the factory through the collectivization of labor and the development of technology, the home remains a "small domestic enterprise" organized along craft lines...
...Capitalism develops technology and new forms of organization and constructs factories, making possible the socialization of property and the basic means of production...
...The simple reproduction of labor power is appropriately the fundamental goal of an undeveloped economy...
...For Engels, this stage is characterized by the division of agricultural tasks and the emergence of specialized crafts at a time when both branches of social production are fundamentally in the hands of the men, women having been displaced into a secondary labor role...
...its biological, economic and cultural replacement, which must manifest itself in the succession of new generations which possess all the attributes of their ancestors...
...As such, it was necessary for the development of productive forces...
...It ends the uninterrupted flow of subsistence production from the raw materials to the final consumption...
...To ensure the survival of socialism in countries that suffer a low level of development and are surrounded by hostile powers, top priority must be given to intensifying social production, building factories and generalizing the most advanced forms of organization...
...He constantly reproduces his own labor-fund, advanced by another person...
...The guiding principle is no longer the production of goods but the production of surplus value, that is, of surplus labor in the form of value...
...Even if they do alleviate the intensity of domestic chores in an important way, they do not make them significantly shorter...
...10, December 1972, p. 3-20...
...26, Capital, op...
...In order that the family may live, four people must now, not only labour, but expend surplus-labour for the capitalist...
...linen...
...In his time, Engels foresaw a social revolution that would bring with it the emancipation of women, through their massive incorporation into the industrial economy--a step which he considered of essential importance: - . . to emancipate women and make them the equals of men is and remains an impossibility so long as women are shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor...
...With the dissolution of the primitive community, the communal residential unit was progressively fragmented and gave way to the private family which was to constitute the economic cell of the various class regimes...
...The patriarchial family is intimately linked with private property from its birth...
...3 0 From this passage and those that follow, it is clear that, domestic labor as well as private property formed an essential part of Engels conception of the role of the family as an economic unit of society that was destined to disappear: . . . the first condition for the emancipation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands that the characteristic of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished...
...The entire process of the Industrial Revolution had a particular impact on the situation of the family and women...
...It leaves the basic economic unit with only the last phase of the process, those aspects closest to final consumption-invisible labor...
...He refers here to the worker who ". . . since his work forms part of a system, based on the social division of labor, (he) does not directly produce the actual necessaries which he himself consumes . . ."9 The necessary labor of a worker is not sufficient to reproduce his/her labor power...
...2 8 For the millions of semi-craft home industries to continue to exist, they must be supplied with a huge work force of unskilled labor...
...Therefore, the woman could alternate her work between both functions...
...Recent estimates for the United States indicate that at the present time the unpaid labor of the family still absorbs approximately half the total labor time in that country...
...It was still vitally necessary for class society to continue reproducing the labor force in a private manner...
...To the extent that economic functions that were carried out within the family are shifted into the public sphere, female labor power will be progressively freed, permitting training for more complex and intensive jobs that require greater continuity and concentration...
...In other words, subsistence labor is this unit's production for subsistence...
...Receiving wages or even the necessary commodities is not enough to replace this power...
...Individual consumption of the means of subsistence replaces a part of the labor power...
...Once the stage of primitive accumulation was completed, and especially after largescale industry clearly had become dominant, many women workers were dismissed and returned to their homes...
...This explains the considerable ideological backwardness of housewives (a backwardness which is sometimes attributed to women's biological nature), who constitute the most backward sector of society especially in underdeveloped countries where their skill level is very low...
...The nuclear family is the economic and legal form through which the dominant classes employ and confiscate the labor of the female population...
...Thus, if the capitalist used to extract a portion of surplus value from the family head, with the increasing incorporation of women into the labor market he obtains multiple benefits...
...After describing this, Marx commented that, "From this we see how capital, for the purpose of its self-expansion, has usurped the labor necessary in the home of the family...
...From this springs the "insatiable greed for surplus labor" which characterizes capitalism...
...LNS) Turning to the system of rent in kind, Marx comments: This rent in kind . . . still presupposes for its existence a natural economy, i.e., that the conditions of the economy are either wholly or for the overwhelming part produced by the economy itself, directly replaced and reproduced out of its gross product...
...Marx demonstrates how the capitalist mode of production provokes a radical change in the system of production by stripping workers of all possibility of satisfying their needs except through the sale of their labor power...
...Therefore, women are forced to accept tasks of limited labor intensity that permit them to keep a reserve of energy to perform domestic chores...
...Otherwise, however, so soon as the compulsory shortening of the hours of labour takes place, the immense impetus it gives to the development of productive power, and to economy in the means of production, imposes on the workman increased expenditure of labour in a given time, heightened tension of labour-power, and closer filling up of the pores of the working-day, or condensation of labour to a degree that is attainable only within the limits of the shortened working-day...
...19 What happens to the family economy when proletarianization takes place at the hands of large landowners and capitalists...
...The conditions created by capitalism determine the immediate possibilities for change...
...Something similar is now occurring with prepared foods.11 The absorption of the bulk of production by the social sector gives rise to the expansion of capital and the development of the forces of production...
...But far from concentrating the reproduction of labor power in large units, capitalism reinforces the characteristics of the small private enterprise within the household...
...Although women's participation in social production tended to decline, it remained possible because the means of production belonged to the man as head of the household and as such were located in the home...
...The ideology of sex becomes an instrument of coercion to the extent that this division acquires an exploitative character...
...The heavy duties of the direct reproduction of labor power forced women to withdraw from the most specialized crafts while men monopolized the work which produced socially visible and exchangeable goods...
...It transfers the entire process of visible production, from raw materials to durable goods, to the social sector...
...In addition it discusses the persistent attitudes resulting from these conditions and makes concrete proposals that range from ways to integrate women into the work force to the eradication of the double standard in questions of morality...
...He works on his own land, with his own means of production, for, say 3 days a week...
...b) an economic organization which gives a social unit its independence by producing a variety of goods or by limiting the consumption of the goods which It produces...
...Ibid., p. 395, footnote No...
...The family in its traditional form is destined to disappear...
...Another aspect of the discrimination which women confront in the labor market is the division of labor between the sexes within the working class...
...In this way, capitalism strips the home of all labor activity not directly related to the reproduction of labor power...
...We believe that this extraction of labor and the necessity to prolong it are the bases of discrimination against women...
...cit., p. 169...
...Generally, services are maintained on the craft level...
...Another phase of production, another kind of labor, is required, one that stands between social production and the general restoration of labor power, between the commodity and its final consumption...
...Capitalism does not leave behind favorable conditions for the socialization of the reproduction of labor power...
...the larger farmer sells them...
...The capitalist extracts a higher rate of surplus value from women workers...
...It is often argued that women's oppression does not stem from class oppression or that women constitute a separate class within society...
...For example, women may be integrated into the labor force at one point and then removed at another, as was the case of U.S...
...And only now has that become possible through modern large- scale industry, which does not merely permit the em- ployment of female labor over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends toward ending private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry...
...Subsistence labor, on the contrary, includes all labor performed within the basic economic unit for the consumption of its members, that is for the direct reproduction of labor power...
...There is also a very important tendency toward establishing a new morality according to which men and women share equally in domestic chores that social production still cannot absorb...
...The typical productive unit, the domestic community which groups together numerous kindred relations, is then destroyed by the uneven distribution of goods among the heads of different families which make up the community...
...dustrial development...
...A considerable portion of the global product is wasted in unproductive appliances...
...1 3 The term is commonly used to point to the visible products of "subsistence" such as the raw materials of consumption-harvests, domestic animals, etc., and durable articles such as tools, clothing and construction or maintenance materials for housing...
...Kuczynski, op...
...3 Labor power is a commodity for the capitalist...
...4 Discrimination against women, found in the most diverse historical periods, is a product of the economic structure inherent in a class society...
...This process has another important implication for the future of society...
...Thus in England, during half a century, lengthening of the working-day went hand in hand with increasing intensity of factory labour...
...Because they are poorly paid, they reduce the average wage, and their status constitutes a threat for the other workers who could be replaced or suffer a drop in wages...
...In the last chapter of The Origin of the Family . . . Engels links the economic rise of the family to the emergence of social production, to the social division of labor and to the development of property...
...The emergence of a market and the need to exchange the surplus of family production quickly spurred improvements in artisan production...
...These two aspects must be clearly distinguished: the authoritarian and repressive features of the family, the distorted psychological situation which so frequently occurs in its midst, are products of its economic content, not of the positive emotional and sexual relations it contains...
...They focus on the process by which capitalism creates a contradiction between economic activity within the family unit, or domestic work, and paid labor in the factory, or in the social area of production...
...The domestic economy closes women off from certain occupations in two ways: historically and economically...
...For this reason, the man's complex and/or intensive work is performed at the expense of the unskilled labor of the woman in the home and in production...
...In the future, large quantities of labor power will not be needed in household reproduction...
...The first reproduces labor power directly without an intermediate exchange while the second does it indirectly...
...But not the only possible occasion, since he considered the trend inherent to in...
...Domestic labor, on the contrary, is performed on the perifery of these relations and is subordinate to them...
...This justified, or at least made comprehensible the legal structure which transformed them into their husband's property and external "minors...
...Moreover, successive generations, upon reaching old age, and having completely consumed their capacity to work, must be replaced in production by young people who have the health, culture and necessary technical training...
...5 It is crucial to portray the reproduction of labor power as an economic factor in the biological process of reproduction...
...cit., Vol...
...Economic and social law were obscured under the domain of biology...
...Domestic work, such as sowing and mending, must be replaced by the purchase of ready-made articles...
...Through socialist development, the role of the family is simplified as domestic labor is diminished...
...This change will signify the defeat of the ideology of private property, and, at the same time, the defeat of the hidden economic relation through which female labor in the family has been exploited...
...cit., Vol...
...6. Ibid., p. 568...
...One married and had children to create the prerequisite for work on the farm...
...Nevertheless the reader will clearly see, that where we have labour, not carried on by fits and starts, but repeated day after day with unvarying uniformity, a point must inevitably be reached, where extension of the workingday and intensity of the labour mutually exclude one another, in such a way that lengthening of the working-day becomes compatible only with a lower degree of intensity, and a higher degree of intensity, only with a shortening of the working day...
...Men's high skill level and their monopoly of political power typical in class society is dependent upon the enormous mass of invisible labor appropriated through the family economic unit...
...Capitalism struggles to proletarianize all the sectors of small producers, to incorporate all their family members, including women and children, and to lengthen the working day indefinitely...
...and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties...
...This argument is often based on the fact that socialism in countries such as Cuba has not brought about an end to discrimination against women...
Vol. 9 • September 1975 • No. 6
