what i'd like to know is why no one picked up on jordan's use of "productivity" without pointing out that such notions are exactly what we're talking about when we talk about oppression! feh
i think this discussion could use a huge infusion of feminist theory too. i hope that when i get my package of justin's work (thank you!) that i'll find copious references to feminists who've written extensively on the topic of the relationship of exploitation and oppression. a handy dandy reference guide is Alison Jaggar's Feminist Theory and Human Nature written in 1983 already!! nicholson's discussion, below, seems so obvious an answer wrt an advancing division of labor... you can see how it relates to my brief foray into Eric Olin Wright's work and the arguments about the position of the professional managerial classes (and Marx has already written about this extensively anyway!). where such attempts to flesh out oppression and exploitation and their relation to one another trips up, however, is on the issue of race.
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While we might agree that the addition of the category of "reproduction" to the category of "production" might be necessary for understanding gender relations within industrial society, neither category is necessarily useful for analyzing earlier societies. Indeed, since there is no reason to believe that the kinds of social divisions expressed by these categories played a significant role in structuring gender relations within such societies, there would be no reason for employing them. This is not to say, of course, that gender did not play a significant role in earlier societies. it is rather that the categories through which we need to grasp it have to be understood as historically changing, reflecting the changing emergence, dominance and decline of different institutions. thus in early societies it appears that the key institution in structuring gender, as well as those activities we would label political or economic, is kinship. Social theory must focus on the differential power relations expressed within this institution to explain relations between men and women as well as amongst men as a group and women as a group. For later periods, we need to focus on the transformation of kinship into family, and the emergence of the economy and the state as separated spheres. Thus for the modern period we need to focus on that very historical separation of spheres which led liberals to differentiate the family and the state and marxists to differentiate production and reproduction."
In so far as marxists interpret "production" as necessarily distinct from "reproduction," then aspects of capitalist society are falsely universalized and gender relations in both pre-capitalist and capitalist societies are obscured. In pre-capitalist societies, child rearing practices, sexual relations and what we call "productive" activities are organized conjointly through the medium of kinship. Thus in these societies, issues of gender and issues of class are inseparable. Moreover, within capitalist society, this integration of gender and class continues both in so far as the progressively separating sphere of the economic bears traces of its origins in its continued functioning, and also in so far as the separation of the economic from the family and household remains incomplete. Thus understanding gender, both in its pre capitalist and capitalist manifestations, requires an awareness of the historical nature of the separation of the economic rather than its presupposition in the categories employed."
Linda Nicholson "Feminism and Marx: Integrating Kinship with the Economic," _Praxis International_ 367-380, January 1985