The questions Yoshie raises are very difficult; my inability to answer them to my satisfaction is one reason I was unable to finish a publishable version of an analysis of domestic labor. I agree that men are not a class. The exploitative relation between men as a group and women as a group, which is statistically real, is not as definitionally tight as that between capitalists and workers. And yet it _is_ real. The Second Shift is an uncompensated transfer of labor from women to men. Not all men benefit, and not all women participate. But most doa nd have for most of history.
Yoshie's question about how "coercion" is determined in intimate circumstances, howeverm is not much harder than the answer to the question of whether it is coercive for workers who want to do wage labor to do it. The general point is that it is coercive if you have to do it whether or not you want to. Women's lesser opportunities, social conditionaing and expectations about what's man's work and woman's work, economic conditions (such as higher pay for men) that make it rational to have thsi sort of division of labot, create coercion. It is not absolute. But then wage workers are not slaves either.
I think the point underlying Yoshie's questions is that the contradiction between mena nd women is not, as we used to say, antagonistic; we need to get rid of patriarchy, not men (at least I hope so), wheres getting rid of capitalism means getting rid of capitalists, not as individuals, but as a group. Socialism will make them workers. Feminism will not make men women. Fair enough. That still does not cancel the analogy between wage and domestic labor, or the fact of exploitation of domestic labor.
I agree that exploitation does not exhuast the reklations of oppression and other relations between men and women. But it is an aspect of those relations, an important one.
--jks
>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Re: reparations & exploitation
>Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 20:54:52 -0500
>
>Justin wrote:
>
>>Men as a group don't benefit from having full-time unpaid housekeepers,
>>etc?
>
>Men _as a group_, however, don't have full-time unpaid housekeepers.
>A good number of straight men do. Single men (single in the sense of
>not having any partner, not in the sense of being unmarried) don't. (Etc.)
>. . .
>
>>The situation is exactly the same as wage labor: there is a transfer
>>of labor from women to men due to coercive circumstances. It's
>>exploitation.
>
>If a woman doesn't do any housework and is well supported
>economically by her husband or lover or admirer, whose "labor is
>transferred" from whom?
>
>How do you define "coercive circumstances" in intimate relationships?
>An intimate relationship becomes a coercive one (a) if a woman has no
>other economic choice but to enter into one to survive or (b) if
>there exists domestic violence. What of other relationships in which
>neither (a) nor (b) is the case? Is household labor, if done by
>women for men, by definition coercive?
>
>Yoshie
_________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com