I. Spirit of Industrial Capitalism, and Class > Gender
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We’ve inherited a lot of our ideas about how work should be performed and valued from the era of industrialization and the socio-economic trends that culminated in its realization. Over a few centuries leading up to the 19th c., the Parliament of England passed a series of Enclosure Acts that transformed open fields (the prevalent agricultural system) and common land (collectively regulated land) into privatized legal property. As a result, individuals were systemically stripped of their self-sustaining, and sometimes communal, capacity to produce and were left with nothing but their labour-power to sell in a nominally free market – a process that is characterized as the primitive accumulation of capital. In order to begin developing a capitalist economy, people had to be separated from the yields of their own labour and autonomous control over the tools of their own subsistence, otherwise there would be less incentive to work for someone who was trying to generate surplus or profit for themselves only. Consequently, this process of rural displacement led to growing and concentrated populations in urban areas.

With so many people being dispossessed of land and forced to sell their labour in cities, urban centers could not feasibly adapt to the demand for jobs that such early forms of capitalism had instigated. The prevailing Protestant ethic of this historical period drastically influenced how people thought about this crisis as well as the ways in which the government controlled such commonplace problems like unemployment, begging and homelessness. The theological perception du jour was that work was available for those who wanted it, beggars and vagrants were lazy, and honest excessive work, coupled with diminished trivialities like pleasure, was a necessary penance for original sin. This spurred legislation to curb those who turned to crime to provide for themselves, informing a social atmosphere that construed the poor as ‘voluntary criminals’ who found themselves at an economic disadvantage of their own will.

Protestant reformers preaching to (from left to right) new colonial settlers and amidst European marketplaces.

With a social system in place that fundamentally misunderstood the economic realities facing the poor, the advent of the Industrial Revolution introduced competitive markets and complex divisions of labour, as well as poor relief reforms that sought to deter those who required provisions but wouldn’t submit to the austere conditions of government workhouses. Thus, by underscoring the social duty and moral sanction of working hard to earn a wage, society came to believe in a religiously flavoured socio-economic ethos that became secularized over time and woven into the cultural norms of 19th c. industrial nations.

It was also during this time that the idea of separate, gendered spheres of labour became operative within industrial societies. In order to justify the normative economic arrangements of the time, cultural myths emerged to substantiate the idea that women belonged in the private sphere of domestic activity and that men would find their true calling in the public sphere of the paid labour force.

It’s worth noting that not all women could afford to merely occupy domestic activity alone. During the 19th c. many women in industrial countries took jobs in textile mills or were employed doing piecework (weaving, embroidery, winding wool or silk), though primarily as a way to provide insurance should the husband become incapable of working. The loss of a man’s wages during this period could mean an entire family working off their debt in the deplorable conditions of workhouses. That being said, it was increasingly difficult to know where the efforts of women’s labour began and ended, since it was overwhelmingly their responsibility to maintain housework whether or while they occupied positions of paid employment. Not only this but the majority of socialist labour politics that sought to confront exploitative injustices stemmed from the Marxist tradition, a decidedly male-privileged perspective in practice at the time, favouring class struggle at the expense of gender. These politics considered value production as the primary locus of class exploitation and alienation. Thus the point of capital production (a position typically occupied by male workers) became prioritized as the foreground of workers struggle since it was only this type of activity (industrial waged labour) that characterized the proletarian subject.

Representations of working class struggle, typified by male labourers and the machismo of proletarian subjectivity.

 

II. Work-centric Politics vs Critique of Reproductive Labor

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Even as labour struggles continued in their many differentiated forms, they were often concerned with one objective: the right to work for a wage. This approach was two fold in its misguided attempt to address the repression of capitalist labour conditions. Firstly, it continued to lend substance to the virtuous merits and dignifying sense of self-hood associated with waged labour that was handed down to society from the coercive mechanisms of 16th-18th century capitalism itself. Secondly, it only recognized the efforts of a mostly male-dominated sphere of the productive economy, forgoing the activity that women performed in the private domestic sphere as having any relationship with the exploitative practices of a capitalist economy in general.

Even though this perspective on proletariat subjugation was a popular consensus during the 19th and much of the 20th century, there were some documented alternatives in circulation. For instance, in the late 1800’s feminist, sociologist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman had proposed that conditions for women would improve when the work they were forced to do in the domestic sphere became recognized and valued in the public sphere. However the most advanced and influential efforts would fall out of the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWHC), an organization of Marxist feminists who challenged capitalist, feminist and conventional Marxist frameworks. These activists emerged in the 1970’s, shedding new light on the status of women in capitalist societies, questioning fundamental feminist approaches to gender inequality, and advancing novel critiques of socio-economic hegemony. Amongst the co-founders of the IWHC was Italian scholar and activist Silvia Federici, who put forth the idea that a capitalist economy is preconditioned by and sustained through the expropriation of gendered and unpaid labour.

This troubled what traditional Marxist-socialists understood as the roots of women’s subordination to men in a capitalist society. Adherents of this conventional socialist perspective thought, since women had been confined to domestic activity and excluded from the labour that capitalism recognized as productive of wealth and accumulation, that women’s efforts were limited in their access to the socially useful power that was associated with the wage relation. Along with theorists and authors like Maria Della Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati, this branch of feminism acknowledged the kind of labour that operates outside of the mediated market of capital accumulation and wealth production, while claiming it as foundational to society in that it constantly reproduces and sustains the workforce and its constitutive labour power. As such, reproductive labour is largely framed by traditionally gendered obligations to care for home and family, including things like: care-giving for the sick and elderly, child rearing, domestic work such as cleaning and cooking, consumptive activity like shopping for family members and for household needs, and sex work to please the desires of the male counterpart in any given union.

A 2014 OECD chart presents the average hours per day spent on unpaid carework
by women and men by regions of the world: Middle East and North Africa (MENA),
South Asia (SA), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC),
East Asia and Pacific (EAP), Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and North America (NA).

 

International Labour Organization figures for domestic workers globally. It is crucial to note that
such work is closely linked to international migration patterns both in neighbouring,
wealthier countries in the global south, as well as the global north more generally.

 

III. Single Mother as the Complete Gendered Circuit of Capitalism

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Having grown up in a family supported by a single parent on a meagre salary, I find the Marxist feminist critique truly potent in capturing this dynamic; namely, my mother as the split subject of both proletariat and reproductive labour – an individual with only one wage, exploited as two workers in a formal relation of (re)production. I grew up in conditions of relative poverty, sharing a room with my sister in a 600 square foot apartment supported mostly by Government Social Assistance during our first few years as a family. Almost everything we owned (furniture, clothing, appliances, dishware) was handed down from relatives, neighbours and friends, or purchased from garage sales and/or damaged-product clearance sales. With financial support from the provincial government, my mother pursued an intensive college diploma program, and procured a number of jobs in early childhood education over the course of my young life, such as kindergarten assistant, preschool teacher, and integration aide. These jobs meant a number of constraints in themselves, like navigating an oscillating combination of hours and wages that place her below the poverty line, uncertainty over new contracts and their terms, Employment Insurance supplements during the summer months, and occasionally unpredictable and shifting locations of employment. Further to this, she could only afford to use public transit, a bicycle and sometimes just walking as a means of daily transportation to her job.

My mother’s wage relation was a recognizable form of capitalist exploitation and her raising two kids under these conditions demonstrated to me the ways in which capitalism bore on the social organization the poor. Despite the government assistance that provided her a platform for employment and the Family Allowance that topped up her salary with scant portions of income, she never stood a chance at lifting herself out of poverty. Instead, like countless others, she was brought into the fold of waged relations only to testify to its function of constraining her prosperity and engineering workers to feel deserving of mere subsistence.

My mother certainly worked hard for my sister and I, but not solely within the parameters of waged labour alone. In fact her job required plenty of unpaid labour, typical of those employed in the field of education. This spanned a number of activities such as buying and preparing materials for courses, developing curriculums and lesson plans for each new group of children she would work with, communicating with parents, setting up and cleaning classrooms, attending school board meetings, reading and integrating knowledge from books related to her profession, and the list goes on. Especially at home, my mother was tasked with endless unremunerated forms of reproductive labour, such as ensuring her children did their homework and assisting us should we need it, doing laundry, preparing meals, shopping for food and other necessities, taking us to medical appointments, attending school meetings, and events that she volunteered at (such as teaching after Sunday mass) at a local church. Due to the lack of an adult-male presence in our domestic space, my mother figured as both a worker recognized and consumed productively by capital but unacknowledged by fortune or security, and the socially imperative reproductive subject whose labour is obscured by capital yet necessary to foster and maintain its constitutive markets, her own waged use-value, and prospective labourers (i.e. my sister, the children she taught, and myself). Currently, during the majority of time outside of her job, she and my aunt are the primary medical, emotional and psychological care-givers for their 91 year-old mother whose health has recently begun to suffer.

 

 

IV. Wages, Stigma, and Resistance

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One aspect of the IWHC’s campaign was to problematize the assumption that women’s emancipation meant the acquisition of a wage whether for domestic work or as a socialized wage relation in the public sphere. In other words, the wage is not in itself an object that can be reformed but rather a qualification that administrates and naturalizes the social order of a capitalist labour force. The conviction that the exploited toil of a proletarian wage relation is the primary locus of unjust, concentrated profit is simply a fetish and addresses only one facet of the systemic engineering that serves capitalist ends.

UK short film exploring the stereotypes and stigma that media coverage can
reinforce, from the perspective of those with experience of poverty.

As such their struggle is part and parcel of a greater movement towards locating the hegemony of the work ethic and all of its increasingly pronounced and oppressive drawbacks. In terms of planning a future alternative infrastructure that combats the inequality engendered by wage relations, reproductive labor and the work ethic, some have proposed a universal basic income as a means of combatting the need for people to sell their labour-power to survive, reevaluating the social value of work-centric reverence, providing a platform for non-market sociality, and acknowledging and promoting reproductive and care labour. Yet resistance does not always have to be posited on such grand scales. It can unfold in piecemeal yet persistent ways, like how my mother brazenly fought to trouble the social stigma that her and her children faced from educators, co-workers, friends, associates and administrators alike. Some of these incidents occurred at the level of financial means, like my sister and I being berated, patronized, shamed and punished because our mother could not pay for certain services in school or because we didn’t have the popular commodities that our friends had. Some stemmed from cultural discrimination and/or stereotypes about how low-income and single parent families are predisposed to innate behaviour problems and bad habits, drug addictions and early pregnancies, petty criminal behaviour and underachievement. Perhaps some assumptions meant no harm at all, articulated by those who couldn’t understand that I had pursued my first job at 15 years old due to the soft coercion of my household’s income bracket and not as a means to dabble in a novelty of personal responsibility or character building for its own sake. Yet throughout all these complications my mother would maintain her own unwavering self-respect and relentlessly tenacious disposition, confronting those who she could and doing her utmost to explain to us how peoples lives are also governed by broader structural inequalities (of which we didn’t even see the worst of).

What has become increasingly explicit to me is the way in which the conditions of both exploitative and revolutionary subjectivity are profoundly gendered, not only in terms of women in the sphere of value-productivity, disproportionate salaries, and workplace discrimination but in the augmentation of unpaid reproductive work that inevitably falls upon women and single mothers especially. Such labour barely maintains the price of labour-power alone, and in my experience being raised at home, is more akin to the work of mere survival. This is a reality wherein making ends barely meet, for the sake of sustaining a system of exploitation, is premised on beliefs so old that we barely recognize the rituals we continue to endure just to animate the corpse of capital.