Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat

Kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Sun Jan 27 17:49:17 PST 2002


At 05:22 PM 1/27/02 -0800, Michael Perelman wrote:
>I am familiar with the feminist take on the subject, but I don't think that
>they gave Marx a fair reading. He was describing how capitalism determines
>what is/is not productive.

could you elaborate?

i think you're sensitive to a critique that i never made perhaps. as far as i can tell, there wasn't anything in what i'd written that would suggest that it was a critique of marx/engel's claims about productive labor. rather, it was a description of policy proposals two strands of marxist feminist offered to deal with the way in which class relations obscured the role of reproductive labor within capitalism.

for marxist feminists, the goal was to move productive labor out of the home and make it "public". that is, they wanted to "socialize" it.i brought it up because it related to what i was saying to chuck0: some marxists (feminists in particular) have actually supported the rationalization (division of labor) of things like housework for they saw it as part of the process of socializing work.

kelley



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