> Of course, the labor dedicated to the domestic production of use
> values is hugely productive for capital as a whole. Capital as a
> whole presupposes the reproduction of labor power as a commodity,
> something that would be impossible without domestic labor under any
> historical capitalist society. If domestic labor contributes to keep
> the value of labor power low, then capital as a whole benefits from
> it. In other words, capital appropriates the fruits of domestic labor
> free of charge.
[from "Notes on the New Housing Question," by Maya Gonzalez; <http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/3>
[...]
Prior to the rise of specifically capitalist relations of production, there did not exist a “domestic sphere” in isolation from the sphere of production. Production of goods — even those produced for exchange — often occurred in or around the “home” (the place where workers lived). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to avoid the regulations of the guilds, merchants contracted out the production of a range of goods to rural households. This “putting-out system” eventually gave way to the modern factory and, in the course of capitalist accumulation, the modern separation between home and workplace. The home was henceforth the place where the worker rested and consumed a fraction of the product of his labour in the form of wage goods. It was also the place where women’s oppression became further ossified. Expected either to stay at home and do the work of reproduction or to submit themselves to worse pay and worse labour standards than those of male workers, pushed out of the common spaces where they had maintained a degree of autonomy and collective power, women’s access to the means of production was blocked or restricted through the patriarchy of the wage-form. In sum, the home became the exclusive site of the reproduction of labour-power, which for the first time appeared as distinctly “outside” the relations of production and thus also, for many, outside the purview of Marxism.
Yet, over the course of the post-war period in the US, the reproduction of the working class and the reproduction of capital came to fold in on one another, integrated increasingly tightly. More and more working class people became involved in the housing market, which meant that the home became not only the commodity which physically contained all the others, but was also a worker’s main asset — the commodity for which all others were sold, and eventually the one which also purchased all the others.
Thus we see in the post-war period the tendential overturning of separations that were central to the development of capitalism. In the originating moment of capitalist social relations a primary separation occurs in which workers are separated from the means of production. In spatial terms this separation takes the form not only of the strengthening opposition between town and country, and of a zoning of the former into residential and industrial areas, but also the fundamental categorical distinction between domestic, “reproductive” space and the “point of production”, each side implying the other. So, while capitalism initially subordinated the reproduction of labour-power through separating reproduction from production, beginning in the post-war period we find social relations and forms of everyday life increasingly subordinated to the prerogatives of capital’s own reproduction through an equally coercive unification of these spheres within the logic of capital.
[...]