class composition

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Wed Aug 21 07:45:39 PDT 2002


Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 07:25:01 -0400 From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Subject: Re: class composition

Yoshie: Likewise, it has become more economical to pay a male worker enough to buy foods, meals, clothes, sexual services, etc. from respective industries than paying him enough to maintain a wife. Commodification makes production efficient. Each individual housewife preparing food for her family, even with the help of modern household appliances, still lacks the benefit of economy of scale that makes mass production faster and cheaper. Capital, by commodifying many aspects of previously domestic work, has thus gained new industries for surplus value extraction, cheapened the value of labor power, and expanded a reserve army of labor. At the same time, women, no longer dependent on their men, gained the objective material ground for struggles for equal rights; and both men and women, now able to live as urban singles and divorced from the peasant procreative ethic of producing many offsprings for farm labor, gained the objective material ground for the creation of such novelties as "sexuality as such" (pleasure independent of duty of procreation) and "sexual identities" ("gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "heterosexual," "trans-gender," "trans-sexual," etc.).

Tahir: I must say I agree with the general thrust of all this, and I think the argument that the family is functional to capital is overstated. However, the continuing illegality of prostitution in most countries, as well as the ideological link between sex and reproduction is still a political threat in the face of rightwing extremism against anyone who challenges these. Thus there is still a progressive as opposed to reactionary set of positions here, but as you correctly imply this is all internal to capital.

The above analysis abstracts from actual vicissitudes of labor history. The first productive wage laborers in many nations -- for instance, Japan -- were predominantly women. Also, most working-class individuals -- especially most blacks -- probably never had the luxury of having or becoming a full-time housewife for her entire adult life, even during the heydays of the "family wage" in the post-WW2 economic upsurge. Moreover, in many colonial and neo-colonial settings, migrant workers are compelled to live independently of their families: migrant miners in South Africa, Filipina maids in Singapore and the Gulf states, etc. Migrant work is increasingly feminized: at least half of migrant workers in Asia are said to be women.

Tahir: But usually migrant labour has an extremely oppressive aspect to it, even to those who accept it out of economic necessity. It only becomes 'economical' through its oppressivenes. Your example of migrant workers in South Africa is a case in point; the condition of migrant workers who, especially under apartheid, were crammed into single men's hostels is almost synonymous with oppression in SA. It is also always compared unfavourably with the family, as something 'unnatural', etc. Thus there is no question of such arrangements replaing the family on an ideological level. And it is on this level, where certain relations are seen as 'natural', 'healthy', etc. that capital has not come up with an alternative to the family, despite the behaviours of certain 'liberated' individuals. And it is the internalisation of this ideology that is a major source of oppression of women. As you would know, formal freedom does not equate with substantial freedom.



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