A push-pull of capitalism

This article is the first of a series of three in which I will look at the apparent resurgence of sexism and misogyny among young men signalled in such developments as Trump’s victory in the USA.

Capitalism is a system of exploitation. Capitalism is defined by the production of commodities for profit. It is system where workers must go and earn wages to live. Regularly and routinely, workers are paid no more than the value of their labour power. All additional value-added is siphoned off for the capitalist.

But for wage-work you need workers, and we don’t make workers in factories or grow them in fields — we make them in families.

The nuclear family is a class institution, which gives us our initial class position. The gender division of labour assumed in working-class families is based upon the unpaid work of the woman. This is then reproduced in the bourgeois family with low-paid domestic workers replacing mothers as those who cook, clean and serve.

That is expanded to society at large. Women are more likely to do jobs that resemble domestic labour or are seen that way — cleaning, service work, care, tending to the sick, early education.

Skills

The skills required for such work are devalued in the labour market because they recall work women should be doing naturally in the family. Cleaning is hard, physically demanding work; care requires an overlap of high-level skills. Neither are seen as such. They are seen as carry-on from women’s “natural” domestic skills.

The unpaid labour of women in the family is not appropriated by men, though they benefit from it, but by capital, which saves on the costs of social reproduction which would otherwise have to be carried out by waged work.

The physical, economic and political separation of productive work in one sphere and social reproduction in another underpins women’s oppression under capitalism. Women’s relative freedom under capitalism can be judged basically by participation in production and relative freedom in and from reproduction.

At the extreme end women are pushed out of work, and as a result you are denied education, you have no choice about who you marry or sleep with, or if and when you have children. But, counter to that, capitalism wants women to come into wage-work, so it can exploit them as workers. There is push-pull around these relative freedoms.