Economy, life, and caring

“This life activity they sell to other people in order to secure the necessary means of life. [Wage-workers] work that they may keep alive. They do not count the labour itself as a part of their life; it is rather a sacrifice of their life...

“What they produce for themselves is not the silk that they weave, not the gold that they draw up the mining shaft, not the palace that they build. What they produce for themselves is wages...

“Life for them begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed”.

So wrote Marx, in Wage Labour and Capital. Since about 2000 bosses have been offering warm words about “work-life balance”, but as soft-soap for hard facts: the average work week increasing (slightly) in several countries, after multiple decades of slow shortening; more people in more jobs required to work late, or to respond electronically after work hours, when the boss is bothered about a deadline.

Pre-capitalist economies generally did not have the same work-vs-life dichotomy. There was a spectrum of activities from ploughing the fields to festivals, but they bled into each other, and both happened in largely the same space.

The dichotomy allowed advances: workers now had “our own” time where we could socialise, educate ourselves, organise, etc., outside the ambit of the boss.

At the same time, it opened the way for the bosses in “their” time to impose speed-up and squeeze out the “gaps” (where workers chat, goof off, etc.). It also separated off “housework” as a category. Lenin would write: “Notwithstanding all the laws [by the early 20th century] emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her”, worse than wage-labour.

The socialists’ answer was cutting social work-hours and regulating them democratically, expanding time and facilities for creative “life” activities, and socialising housework. Engels wrote: “Real equality of women and men can come true only when the exploitation of either by capital has been abolished and private housework has been transformed into a public industry”.

Marx argued that drudgery could not be abolished, but it could be reduced and subordinated to life: “Labour cannot become play, as [the older socialist] Fourier would like... [but] free time — which is both idle time and time for higher activity — has naturally transformed its possessors into different subjects, and they then enter into the direct production process as this different subject”.

Left-wing economists have complained, rightly, about care work for children and elderly or frail adults being pauperised, and called for a relative expansion of “the caring economy”.

Beyond that, however, we can shift and change the divide between “economy” and “life”, and to more caring life.

There were attempts in the decades after World War Two at creating working-class housing with more shared facilities (laundries, children’s daycare, etc.) integrated into them. Often they were executed with only cut-price communal facilities, and became unpopular.

More recent decades have brought a sort of partial capitalist socialisation of housework through technology (washing machines, fridges, vacuum cleaners, etc.) but also a burdensome “nuclear-family” atomisation. For example, younger children casually going in and out of neighbour households has become less common. A recent survey found: “The number of teens who get together with their friends every day has halved over the past ten years”.

An increase in the “patch-up” economy — more paid counsellors, support workers, etc. for the miserable or lonely or victims of domestic ill-treatment — is needed immediately.

The broader socialist horizon is for a more caring collective life, more cooperative ways of living, more mutual aid. Work will not be abolished, but integrated into collective life as a manageable and not crushing duty.