Marxism 3 Flashcards
Labour Theory of Value
Value is produced through labour (specifically labour which produces more than it is paid). Value does not come from ingenuity, it comes from the exploitation of this labour. This has a particular geography: specific sites of action and struggle.
Socially necessary labour time involves…
a) time of production
b) conditions of production
c) reproduction of the labourer
Davis (1981)
Housework chores consume 3,000-4,000 hours of the average housewife’s year; this does not even take into consideration time spent with children. Much of this work goes unnoticed- it is invisible until it is not done.
One of the closest guarded secrets of capitalism involves the possibility of radically transforming the nature of housework. Since little profit would occur, industrialised housework is anathema to the capitalist economy.
However, with the increasing expansion of the female work force, women are finding it harder to balance their domestic and work lives As a consequence, housework as an individual woman’s private responsibility may be approaching historical obsolescence.
Engels identifies that sexual inequality as we know it did not exist before the advent of private property. Within pre-capitalist societies like those of the Masai in Tanzania, women’s domestic labour is as essential to the economy as the activities of men. BUT, in advanced capitalist societies, the service-orientated domestic labour of housewives who seldom produce tangible evidence of their work diminished the social status of women
The important of women’s domestic work suffers a systematic erosion- the entire economy is moved away from the home. Since housework does not generate profit, domestic labour is naturally defined as an inferior form of work compared to waged labour
The Wages for Housework Movement was set up in 1974 to demand a wage for domestic labour. Based on Dalla Costa’s (1973) argument that domestic labour was re-producing the labourer to be ready for work the next day. This was argued to be the backbone of the capitalist economy. BUT, the capitalist production process pre-supposed the existence of a body of exploitable workers (negating this argument)
However, the ‘housewife’ only reflects a partial reality- she was a symbol of economic prosperity that was enjoyed by the emerging middle classes. The housewife became a universal figure of womanhood- BUT this is mainly a white, middle class position in society. The majority of black women have had to work and do their domestic chores throughout history.
Alongside this, many working class women have been paid for domestic work throughout history- cleaning, childcare assistants and maids (this is also racialized)
Finally, does a wage justify the misery of domestic work? Should this not be the problem to be addressed?
Dallacosta (1972)
The role of the working-class housewife has been indispensable to capitalist production. This is in the re-production of the labourer for the working day.
The true nature of the role of the housewife was never considered by Marx. Domestic work does not only produce use value, but it is essential in creating the production of surplus value
Capitalism has produced the nuclear family structure. Those who work receive a wage, and those who do not are thus dependent upon this person (women and children). Capitalism has turned the man into a waged labourer by nature. This has created a separation and exclusion between those who do not earn a wage- they are considered to not be participating directly in social production. The women is subordinate to the man- cutting her off from her sexual or psychological autonomy (affecting everything from the brain to the uterus).
Where women are concerned, their labour is considered to be a personal service, outside of capital. Women have become isolated in the home, forced to carry out work that is considered to be unskilled. Her role in the cycle of social production therefore remains invisible- only the product of her labour (the labourer) is visible. The woman is simply a supplier of use values in the home.
Federici (1998)
Federici (1998) writes an alternative narrative to capitalism…
The disciplining of women was necessary for the institutionalisation of private property. The emergence of capitalism was not made on the back of an attempt to discipline and respond to anti-feudalism struggles. Instead, capitalism arose as a response to egalitarian, anti-feudal liberation struggles. These attacks peaked in the witch trials across Europe. This was to do with overturning the power that women had in society.
The Wages for Housework Campaign (1974)
As a response to social inequality, the Wages for Housework Campaign was formed during the 1970s. This was a platform which advocated for women’s rights to waged labour outside of the home, full unemployment benefits and parental leave.
Critiques of the Wages for Housework campaign…
1) More women had already begun to be paid for domestic labour. This was through the outsourcing of domestic labour- which was racialized. White feminists failed to see this in their critiques.
2) From the above, many women now face low wages and heightened isolation through the uneven geography of domestic work
3) The problems for some women were decreased, whilst for others they were heightened
4) This has created a ‘care drain’ in some countries
5) Domestic labour is still not seen as a form of production in many areas of the world
Ritzer (1993)
Argues that Fordism was about the mass production of commodities in the west (involving standardization). This was referred to by the author as the ‘McDonaldization of industry’
However, ‘post-Fordism’ refers to the period after this; the rise of small batch production and information service economies. With this has come the heightened flexibility of production requiring fewer labourers in factories. Instead, the whole of society has become a factory for production.
Bittman et al. (2004)
Technology was understood as being ‘labour saving’. The introduction of technology was meant to increase leisure time. BUT, this has not been the case.
Identifies that the rise of technology has led to more time being spent on domestic labour. There has been the collapse of the distinction between work and leisure. Technology has created heightened productivity and more intensive work for labourers.
Marx (1839)
Argues that technology presses to “reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time as a sole measure of source of its worth”. Put simply, technology cannot lead to the end of labour since labour is the core source of value
MetaFilter (2010)
Argue that “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”.
Sites of production and accumulation need to be reframed in context of modern technology; they have moved into people’s homes and social lives.
Marx (1864)
Marx (1864) refers to as “real subsumption”
This is the full transformation of social relations (including cultural, social and knowledge relations). This is done by capital for capital and necessarily involves the incorporation of reproduction time into the production process.
Terranova (2000)
There is a glamorization of digital labour; however, there are many blurred lines between the provision of free labour online.
The digital economy is characterized by the emergence of new technologies and new types of workers. The internet for many people is a place of leisure, but there is a key act of giving/receiving information without a thought of payment- this is a fundamental moment in the creation of value in digital economies. This is simultaneously embraced and often shamelessly exploited.
The internet effectively functions are a channel through which human intelligence renews its capacity to produce- this is an important area of experimentation with value and free labour. The internet is a collection of knowledge- the labour of creating this knowledge is not equivalent to waged labour
The internet then is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work which is labour intensive. The online commodity is only as good as the labour that goes into it (e.g. creating an up-to-date website). The sustainability of the internet depends on massive amounts of labour- most of which is free labour (but not necessarily exploited).
Labban (2014)
Two technical developments have transformed the mining industry: the recycling of metal-containing waste and the application of biotechnology in mining metals from mineral ore
Current and developing technologies of extraction have extended the terrain of extraction beyond the limits of what we consider extractive industry. As a result, this has transformed this industry in ways which require re-thinking the materiality, spatiality and temporality of extraction (in its dual sense)
There is a rising interest in the active contributions of non-human organisms to the production of nature and the accumulation of capital. The author is wary of supplanting human labour with the labour of microbes nor does he wish to extend the category of labour to cover microbe metabolism and reproduction as non-social forms of labour.
The work microbes do cannot be considered a form of labour- it is not value-creating in itself (even though surplus value is congealed in it). Microbes exist external to the value relation.
Important to understand that all capitalist industry is extractive in a dual sense- the extraction of raw materials is the absolute objective condition of all productive activity AND this presupposes the extraction of surplus value in the labour process.
