>Whatever produces direct profit (surplus value) for capital is productive
>-- say producing a medicine that kills patients. caring, nurturing work
>is not. It is more a critique of capitalism than of housework.
ah, i see, i needed to flesh it out more:
for some early feminist marxists, housework is unpaid labor performed by women for men, and should really be regarded as unpaid labor performed for capital--where individuals males and the institution of masculinity can be understood as we understand (!!!) the role of management and the ideologies of managerial control to capital.
housework--or more broadly understood, reproductive labor-- needed to be brought into the sphere of wage labor as a way of advancing capitalism, and thus its demise. for some, this meant paying "women" to do housework, reproductive labor.
others countered with the argument that this would keep reproductive labor isolated to the realm of the family. what was needed was something more akin to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's proposal that reproductive labor--cooking, clearning,e tc--should be _socialized_. it should become part of the realm of wage labor. women and men shouldn't cook and clean, etc., but we should encourage that work to become paid labor: daycare, caferterias, restaurants, etc. this approach was based on the feminist critique of the public/private split that intensified under capitalist class relations.
kelley