Patriarchy, domestic mode of production, gender, and class - Christine Delphy
Christine Delphy proposes that there is a parallel mode of production - domestic production - alongside capitalism.
The analysis of patriarchy in our society that I have been developing for the last fifteen years has a history I would like to detail. I came to my use of the concept and to the model growing out of it by way of two projects whose theoretical concerns might seem unrelated.
Theorizing patriarchy - Silvia Walby
Silvia Walby's 1990 book sets out a dual-systems approach to theorizing capitalism and patriarchy, synthesising Marxist and radical feminist perspectives.
Sylvia Walby provides an overview of feminist theoretical debates – Marxism, radical and liberal feminism, post–structuralism and dual systems theory. She shows how each can be applied to six key social structures: wage labour, housework, culture, sexuality, violence and the state. Her arguments are backed by drawing on empirical findings.
The problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries - Kathi Weeks
In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique.
Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects.
A new start? Welfare changes and the labour-power shortage
Submitted by With Sober Senses on Jan 6 2013 02:16
An attempt to understand the changes to welfare in Australia by looking at the impact of the labour-shortage caused by the mining boom.
As some readers might be aware on 1st of January substantial changes to the single parent payment took place.
Wrong to work! Two perspectives on the abolition of work
Submitted by Joseph Kay on Jan 3 2013 20:45
ALL MUST WORK! declares the cabinet of millionaires. 'Workers not shirkers!', they implore. 'Strivers not skivers!' The divide-and-rule rhetoric trying to pit those in work against those without is as relentless as it is transparent. But what's so good about work anyway?
Junge Linke's short piece nicely skewers how attempts to mobilise resentment of claimants and the unemployed undermine even those in work who aren't claiming benefits. What I'd like to focus on is two perspectives on what an explicitly anti-work politics might look like.
Robocommunism
Are communities of care a possible site of struggle?
Submitted by Operaista on Jan 2 2013 02:00
Raising the question of whether intentional communities of care can be a site of struggle, rather than just a place of support.
I have personal experiences in creating and expanding communities of care, street medicing, radical mental health, as an herbalist initially trained through an informal apprenticeship, and in radical clinics.
Colonization and housewifization - Maria Mies
Chapter 3 from Patriarchy and capital accumulation on a world scale: women in the international division of labour, 1986.
The dialectics of ‘progress and retrogression’
On the basis of the foregoing analysis, it is possible to formulate a tentative thesis which will guide my further discussion.
What the hell is the family?
A text translated by Evan Calder Williams from Rosso, an Italian communist journal, from 1974. It’s written by the rather formally named “Study Group on the Family In Collaboration with the Workers’ Committee ALFA-FACE-IBM.” It is, in short, an attempt to figure out the economic and ideological function of the family form, particularly in its Italian incarnation.
That is to say, a very strong, deeply embedded, and quite particular incarnation.) Many of its analyses won’t be particularly surprising to some readers, as it draws on the better-known texts of Dalla Costa and James and on the theses of Lotta Femminista more generally.
Wages against housework - Silvia Federici
Italian autonomist Marxist Silvia Federici on wages and housework.
They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.
More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.
Women, the State, and the Family
An essay by E. Moraletat examining the feminist movement in the context of women's relationship with the State and the bourgeois family.
Today, as we begin the twenty-first century, how can we sum up contemporary feminist struggles? As a start, we can establish that these struggles have constantly asked for integration into the system. Even through the intense struggle of the ‘70s, patriarchal and capitalist institutions were left intact.
Women and the State
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