Suggestions for a Marxist Feminist Political Platform

Why is Sarah Palin popular with white women? As you read the analysis below, it may seem apparent that no candidate is appealing the huge constituency to which Palin appeals: the unrecognized millions of women who do 70% of America’s childcare, 82% of US domestic labor. These are women who work outside of their homes as well as within them. Their work, what it entails, and what knowledges it develops is unnamed, unrecognized and unrewarded. These are women with a shift in labor outside the home, a second shift of housework and child care in the home, a third shift of unspoken emotional labor for their families, and a fourth job of being sexually attractive which also involves the time consuming disciplines of femininity. This huge group labors at home within what I define below as the fascist feudal class process.

At least in the US, any Left party that wants to succeed, needs to address women’s issues that have been excluded by the Left to our detriment. Three areas of personal life which are neglected are paving stones in the foundation of personal daily life. They are domestic labor, and emotional labor.One area is the production, allocation, and distribution of what has been traditionally women’s domestic labor in shopping, cooking, cleaning,etc., in other words maintaining the homes where we all live. The other, emotional labor is the production, allocation, and distribution of emotional efforts for the benefit of others. Emotional labor involves the expenditure of brain, muscle, and emotion to analyze others’ emotional needs and address them. It is a new category of analysis. Emotional labor is a second primary area of what has traditionally been women’s responsibility for maintaining emotional relationships. Women’s domestic and emotional labor are routinely exploited in a classic Marxian sense in that women in personal relationships and homes produce use value goods and services which men appropriate and distribute and for which women are unacknowledged and unpaid. The question of sexual exploitation of women’s labor is, I think, too controversial to be developed here.

The area of emotional labor is a new area for Marxian analysis. A Marxist analysis permits the Left to advocate programs for transformation in the household and emotional relationships which could and should be crucial feminist elements of a Left program.

How can these basic issues be incorporated into a political program?

The place to begin is with the acknowledgement, recognition and validation of the crucial importance of these vital arenas in life which have been so devalued that we do not yet have an adequate vocabulary to describe them, no less appreciate their contribution to human life. Part of their validation is to recognize that important surplus labor is produced in each of these arenas of women’s nearly invisible work sites. At each site we can explore basic questions of Marxian analysis:

* Is surplus labor performed in the home and in personal labors of love?

* Who produces that surplus labor?

* Who appropriates that surplus labor?

* Who distributes that surplus labor and for whose benefit are those distributions made?

Let us take those 4 basic questions into our first site, the traditional household.

In response to those questions: Yes, surplus value is produced in the traditional household. A wife produces use value surplus labor. She works to create order, cleanliness, cooked food, childcare and emotional services which the husband appropriates and distributes. The wife makes not only her side of the bed, but her husband’s as well. She cooks, not only for herself but also for her husband and his children as well. She creates order, not only for herself, etc. In Marxian terms the wife produces her own necessary labor i.e., her own food, order cleanliness, emotional comfort, and a surplus that her traditional husband appropriates and distributes. He may distribute her surplus to his friends who come over and watch sports on television and eat and drink. He may invite his ill parents to live with him and his wife to be cared for, by his wife and so on. All of this labor is usually discounted.

The class roles played in the household like those everywhere else that class processes happen, are the fundamental class role, the role of workers which is played by women producing domestic surplus use values in the household, the role of enablers who produce nothing, but enable the production of household surplus labor, which is played by the ideological forces defining traditional gender roles as women’s responsibility for domestic labor, as well as childrearing, and emotional labor. Those enablers may be Right wing ideologues, fundamentalist or Catholic religions, or psychological or socio-biological theorists defining traditional gender roles as natural, inevitable or even genetic mandates.

The third class role in the household is that of the appropriators and distributors. In traditional households that role is played by husbands who are domestically and emotionally served by their wives. These are categories that facilitate our understanding of the incredibly complex site of the household where class and non-class processes mutually shape one another and where women’s work is invisible and exploited. Useful as the analysis of class exploitation in the household is, one cannot capture the totality of what happens in households any more than any one aspect of the totality can ever capture the totality. Class processes are shaped by and also shape non class processes such as political, racial, ethnic orideological processes such as gender concepts promulgated by religion, media, family traditions, government programs, job opportunities, legal entitlements, etc.

Part of empowering women on the left is to help both men and women be aware that the class process which we just described in the household of the traditional wife conforms to what Marx called the “feudal class process.” It is called “feudal” because like the roles of serfs and lords in medieval Europe, the wife, like the serf produces surplus labor which the lord, the husband appropriates and distributes. The lord’s entitlement to serfs’ surplus labor was enabled by religious Catholic ideology citing the lord’s birth as a lord as proof of his God given entitlement to the labor of serfs. The same Catholic ideology, as well as other fundamentalist religious ideology, combines with socio-biological ideology that claims that women’s birth as a female gives her a God given or “natural”, genetically engineered mission to serve men. Some psychological gender ideology claims that women have an innate desire to serve chosen men. An ideology of love, which used to be more prevalent, defined female love as a woman’s wish to serve her husband as a domestic. Thus, gender ideology of different kinds mandates women’s domestic and emotional labor for men. This feudal ideology has no place in any society opposed to feudalism as an atavistic system of servitude and exploitation. In the US now, in spite ofthe fact that we are supposedly a nation whose very foundation was opposed to feudalism, women still work at home within a feudal class process often justified by feudal ideology. In the US now, three quarters of women are in the capitalist labor force outside of the household. However, fully 70% of household labor and 82% of child care is performed by women. [1]

We also need to bear in mind that women’s domestic exploitation in the household increases their exploitation in the market place. Part time jobs are the least secure and the worst paid. Women constitute a disproportional share of part time workers. They take time off from their jobs and careers to take care of domestic responsibilities and therefore lose seniority and lag in promotions. If they leave their jobs or careers to raise their young children, they reinter the job market without the latest training or up to date connections. Women who remain in the labor force need to attend to homes and children after work. They therefore cannot work overtime or spend time at workshops and conferences or socializing to informally arrange the business connections that lead to job promotions. Domestic feudalism is alive and well in US households and German ones as well. The most prevalent form of feudal household in the US today is what I call the fascist feudal household. I name this class process after the dominant form of household during the Third Reich. Within the fascist feudal household the wife works often full time outside of the home as many wives did in the Third Reich. However, since Nazi ideology defined women’s roles as “’kirche, kuche, and kinder,” women’s work outside of the home was considered temporary and unimportant to their domestic mission which justified women being grossly underpaid. A woman’s domestic labor to sustain men and children in the home was hers alone. Women in the Third Reich worked up to sixty hours a week outside of the home. [2] They were paid lower wages than men for comparable work. The ideological justification for their lower wages was that they were only temporarily giving time from their biologically mandated mission to produce surplus domestic, emotional and sexual labor for men. The norm in US married couple families and German ones as well is now the pattern cited above. The Left should first elaborate the jobs that domestic work involves then cite their crucial importance, and then create programs to ease women’s domestic labor burden.

A few ideas for platforms that stem from recognizing and ameliorating women’s exploitation in domestic labor are:

1. Low cost nutritious family restaurants

2. Options for healthy nutritious take out food

3. Subsidized house cleaning and laundry services

4. Child care provision on the model of the French Child Care System (read related article)

5. Quality after school programs in education, sports and the arts.

What are programs that could help ameliorate women’s burdens of emotional labor in addition to acknowledging all the skills and labor involved in emotion caring for others? Some ideas for programs follow.

1. Providing extra income for jobs that require emotional labor explicitly rewarding the emotional services provided. These are usually female jobs such as nursing, social work, and teaching infants, toddlers, and children from 5 to 8 years old. These are currently the least well paid positions in the US.

2. Creating an explicitly acknowledged financial incentive to compensate service workers for the part of their jobs that requires emotional effort towards the customer. These incentives might operate for such jobs as being a waitress, sales person, secretary, and receptionist. All health care personnel, lawyers, and other ostensible helpers would earn a supplement for providing emotional caring on the job.

3. Creating free counseling centers for couples and families in which the explicit labor of understanding and emotionally serving others is valued and taught.

4. Mandating that ubiquitous, popular 12 step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Anorexics Anonymous, Bulemics Anonymous, Child Abuse Anonymous, Sex Abuse Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and Relationships Anonymous all include a 13th step which looks at the conditions of existence of addictions in oppressive, authoritarian families and profit hungry corporations such as the liquor interests, the diet and fashion industries, the pharmaceutical industry., the pornography industry, and the industries producing junk food.

Other parts of a Left program built on the analysis above could be;

a. Organizing to end gender discrimination in all kinds of labor in both the home and the workplace.

b. Adequate and equal wages for men and women.

c. Work to end hiring discrimination against all women and particularly mothers.

d. A comprehensive birth control curriculum beginning in the early grades stressing respectful honest decisions about creating a life for which men and women will share equal responsibility. Scandinavians already have comprehensive birth control curricula that beginsin the early grades with studying plant reproduction which can be stopped if any step in the process is eliminated. As children get into higher grades the curriculum could stress personal relationships and sexual responsibility.

e. As children get older, sex education might include teaching responsibility for the needs of the other person who may be created as well as the crucial importance of planning if one wants a family.

f. A left movement might teach courses throughout the life span for both children and adults to teach skills in working out difficulties in relationships with respect and consideration for the other whether that other is a child or an adult. These courses could give ample opportunities for discussion of strategies for creating egalitarian and communist emotional relationships.

In summary, it is crucial for the Left to create a language for and an appreciation of women’s emotional labor and our labor in caring for other people. An explanation of what that labor entails is a crucial step in enhancing women’s positions at home and in the workplace. The class analysis above is a basis on which to create such a language and explanation and celebration ofwhat has traditionally been women’s unseen work.

Notes

[1] In spite of the massive increase in female paid employment over the past 20 years, women still account for the majority of household laborIn examining the US Department of Labor’s 2006 survey of households, we calculate from the data reported in Table 1 there that women’s labor accounts for 63 percent of the total labor time that men and women contributed to the household. Total labor time combines together all household activities, purchasing of goods and services, and caring for household members. However, women account for even a higher percentage when we look more closely at subcategories: they contribute 80 percent of the total time devoted to housework and 70 percent to the total time spent caring for household members. Even if a husband is unemployed, he does less housework than his wife who is working full time outside the home (Uchitelle and Leonhardt 2006).

[2] Koontz, C.1987. MOTHERS IN THE FATHERLAND. New York: Saint Martins Press. Fraad,H, 2003. “Class Transformation in the Household.” In CRITICAL SOCIOLOGY. V.29, N.1, P.59.

Works cited

Uchitelle, L. and Leonhardt, D. 2006. “Men Not Working and Not Wanting Just Any Job.” New York Times. July 31, 2006. DU1.

United States Department of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2006. American Time Use Survey. Washington: Government Printing Office.