This was one of Gramsci's real idiocies. He argued (pre-prison days) that working-class wives were petty-bourgeois because they were not employed.
Tahir: Well yes, this is pretty idiotic. The question is not employment of course but work as value creation. In fact the interesting stuff here is precisely (a) the relationship of the waged to the unwaged and (b) the relationship of both to capital.
The working class, how many times must it be repeated, is not a static category, a box into which one pops green marbles while popping purple marbles in another. Class is a social relationship. (Or as the Chinese would, or would have, put it, one divides into two.) There is NO class difference between a new infant, the infant's unemployed father, the mother who works at Walmart, the older half-sister who is serving time for shoplifting, and the uncle who is earning $90k a year (including overtime) as a Tool-&-Die maker at Ford. This attempt to get at a class by adding up the specific details of the lives of individuals is utterly bizarre. Carrol
Tahir: It's not so bizarre. At the very least one should be interested in the composition of the class. A lack of interest seems to me to betray too much of a fondess for the abstraction that you talk about. If you are saying that each member of the working class family, for example, relates to capital in exactly the same way then I think you are also showing a contempt for the struggles of women and the concerns they have put forward. (sorry, I'm deep into this stuff just at the moment and I'm not going to let go right now)
-----------------------