Sublime

Through my involvement in the women’s movement I realized that the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system, and that the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving.

the anticolonial movement taught us to expand the Marxian analysis of unwaged labor beyond the confines of the factory and, therefore, to see the home and housework as the foundations of the factory system, rather than its “other.”

Their main concern was to demonstrate the fundamental differences between housework and other types of work; unmask the process of naturalization this work had undergone because of its unwaged condition; show the specific capitalist nature and functioning of the wage; and demonstrate that historically the question of “productivity” has always been

Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and even fulfilling activity to make us accept working without a wage.

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 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.

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.

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.