On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Justin Schwartz wrote:
> No, I think the thought experiment would be: keep wage labor, etc.,
> everything else the same, just eliminate the white workers from the picture;
> what if there were none.
>
> Btw, with respect to Kelly's idea that exploitation is never of women by
> men, etc. the figures on domestic labor, e.g., suggest otherwise. I am
> thinking, for eaxmple, of the Arlie Hochschild stuff on The Second Shift.
> --jks
>
To conceptualize the second shift as men exploiting women encourages us to overlook what is to me the important economic arrangement here: the more valuable labor done in the household, the lower the wages on which workers can survive. In the end, who really benefits from the second shift? It is not men as a group; rather, it is the capitalist class that can shunt the costs of reproducing the labor force back onto the workers' households.
Miles