>You are right that it should count somehow. But Justin was trying to
>balance against his paid work while not considering that other people do
>the same chores while not sharing in the paid work. Counting it is fine.
>Using it as an excuse for not counting paid work is not.
which is why I didn't have the slightest interest in answering any appeal to speak for feminists. if one is a feminist, then one might have just quoted relevant feminists, instead of asking me and joanna to do so. the request to bail out your interlocutor was insulting: it's not my job to make feminist arguments for men who want to use feminist arguments when it suits them. it's their job.
As for what you're saying Gar, I think it's pretty simple. If everyone takes home 50k in a _socialist_ (profit's out the window, right?), then you are being paid, not only for the work you do on the job complex, but for the work you do at home. The reproduction of labor thing-a-roo is calculated _into_ the wage, no? Compensation to single parents is a recognition that the single parent does double duty when it comes to reproducing labor.
I don't know if I'm the feminist you're referring to but, yes, it's not clear to me that the late 70s Marxist Feminist call for paid housework is the answer. They had a specific Marxist reason for the particular position: labor must be socialized and women are, in part, oppressed because their labor has not been brought into the market. Well, as a working class chick, when I read that I snapped my bubble gum, sprayed some more aquanet on my bleach blonde curls and thought, "FUCKMEDEAD!"
I haven't been following this thread entirely because ...well never mind, I'm not interested in dispensing super sized tubes of desitin to people who get chapped asses so easily. I also know little about Parecon and, what I do know, I have some objections. But there is a feminist position that certainly would back what I take to be a fundamental assumption held by pareconists:
the social fucking conditions of your labor shape your fucking consciousness in significant fucking ways. (this is the heart of what cat and I are saying on the thread that started this all. but, alas, actual interactions between people are, apparently, not real or somesuch shit)
socializing the economy isn't just about socializing ownership of the means of production, but about _recognizing_ our interdependence. you know, all that hoohah in Marx about the benefits and costs of a highly specialized division of labor an' all that?
That is, all of us--you, me, Gar, Bill, Steve, Jenny, and people whom we don't know and never shall know--depend on one another. When you have an economy with a highly specialized division of labor, it's hard to see that. And it doesn't matter whether it's marxist, martian, socialist, feminist or whatever.
I have no faith that some abstract, macro-level relation to "ownership" --where we're all owners now--is going to change my or anyone's way of thinking about the world unless that macro-level relation manifests itself where I fucking live: in my everyday relations with the people i love, fuck, work with/for/on (damn prepositions!).
And that means that, somehow, the micro-level social conditions of our labor need to change in ways that are complementary to this shared social ownership of the means of production.
Now, mind you, I'm not in favor of forcing anything on anyone, so shove the Maoist baiting bullshit, but for the life of me I fail to understand how some really intelligent people don't get this.
This isn't about sending people to the fields to pick green peppers. This is about the fact that we work, mainly, in organizations with other people and our work--every single fucking job--depends on someone else's work.
One of the most fascinating things I've ever observed in this regard was at a restaurant where we all worked different jobs: food production manager, general manager, dishwasher, line cook, sous chef, wait staff, accountant, hostess, busboy, catering managers, sales, etc.
DUH! not everyone was capable of being a chef or being a waitress or an accountant or a manager. so DUH, they didn't try more than a few times. Instead, they are good at other things and do those jobs. And, often, they brought with them experiences that meant that they could make changes to the procedures involved in, say, food production management or being a waiter or sales rep in order to make life easier for others, to cut back on costs, to improve sales, etc.
Whereas traditional restaurants are fraught with all manner of antagonisms between wait staff, cooks, and dishwashers (don't even get me started on wait staff-management), this particular restaurant wasn't because everyone had a better sense of how their work was bound up with everyone else's, how their performance impacted the work and well0being of others.
That's a feminist insight in so far as some strands of feminism are very interested in how socialization is on-going, not confined to childhood, how the social conditions of our labor shape consciousness and how the gendered division of labor shapes consciousness in ways that certainly delimit women's freedom.
Kelley