wages for housework Concepts

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

by Kathi Weeks · 8 Sep 2011 · 350pp · 110,764 words

could help us to secure. As a simultaneous way to insist on work’s significance and to contest its valuation, the Marxist feminist literature on wages for housework—with roots in an Italian feminism that was, as one participant observed, “characterized, with more emphasis than in other countries, by the leitmotif of

…

subordinate to it—demands that would serve as vectors rather than terminal points.23 Chapter 3 begins with a rereading of the 1970s movement for wages for housework, the most promising dimensions of which, I argue, have been poorly understood. This instance of Marxist feminist theory and practice is particularly relevant to

…

rebellion, seeking meaning and pleasure in the times and spaces of nonwork (1994, 163); and those second-wave feminists, including feminists associated with the wages for housework movement, who insisted that work—whether waged work or unwaged domestic labor—was not something to which women should aspire but rather something they should

…

and ethics of both waged and unwaged work within the practical territory of political claims making—or, more specifically, demanding. CHAPTER 3 Working Demands From Wages for Housework to Basic Income Political visions are fragile. They appear—and are lost again. Ideas formulated in one generation are frequently forgotten, or repressed, by

…

return to this bit of feminist history? One would be hard-pressed to find a political vision within feminism that has less credibility today than wages for housework; indeed, it is frequently portrayed in histories of feminism as a misguided movement and, when discussed in feminist anthologies, is typically represented as a

…

as competing models of feminist theory that socialist feminism was seen to at once absorb and outshine. In particular, Marxist feminism, a category that includes wages for housework, was positioned as thesis and radical feminism posed as its antithesis, with the shortcomings of each remedied by socialist feminism imagined as their synthesis.

…

an account is, of course, its reductionism—a perhaps inevitable side effect of any such classificatory project. In the case that concerns me here, wages for housework is contained in the broader category of Marxist feminism, which is in turn inserted into a progressive historical narrative as one moment in a dialectical

…

subsumption of Marxist feminism, or to a thoroughly repudiated and now overcome essentialist feminism. In response to such logics, part of the analysis of wages for housework that follows will be concerned with setting the historical record straight. This will involve both revisiting some existing interpretations of the discourse and recovering certain

…

ideas and stifled aspirations. Despite its value, however, the work of historical recovery is not my primary concern; I am more interested in remaking wages for housework than in preserving its memory. This brings me to a second conception of the relationship among feminist theories through time, another progress narrative that would

…

project is not for that reason primarily historical; as a work of political theory rather than intellectual history, its primary focus is on how wages for housework might be employed to confront the present and reimagine its possible futures. The reading I seek is at once antidialectical, open to the lost

…

the autonomist Marxist tradition that it drew upon, and whose later developments it helped inspire.9 Highlighting some of the links between autonomist Marxism and wages for housework accomplishes two things. First, drawing on the broader Marxist framework to which the feminist project was linked can serve to clear up certain misreadings

…

of those elements of the wages for housework texts that I want to reappropriate. Second, setting the discourse in dialogue with more recent autonomist work will help me construct a revised perspective

…

and less work” (1976, 11). The wage can facilitate both the accumulation of capital and the expansion of workers’ potentially autonomous needs and desires. The wages for housework perspective sought to challenge dominant understandings about who is disciplined by the wage and who is involved in struggles over wages. Just as Marx argued

…

feminist version of the orthodox Marxist celebration of productive activity (1987, 4). To grasp the specific character of the critique of work that animated wages for housework both in theory and in practice, one must recognize its roots in and resonances with the autonomist tradition. This is one of those instances when

…

production have the potential to be, and at various moments in history have in fact become, its active and potentially subversive antagonists. The demand for wages for housework seems to have intrigued Dalla Costa and James, initially at least, as a mechanism for the development of feminist subjectivity. Far from being a

…

open up the wage relation to new kinds of scrutiny by politicizing estimations of skill and determinations of value (Blum 1991, 16–17). The wages for housework perspective has a similar potential to demystify the wage system insofar as it can draw attention to the arbitrariness by which contributions to social production

…

women can, Cox and Federici claim, at least determine who it is that “we are not “ (1976, 8; emphasis added). Finally, advocates saw the wages for housework perspective as a means by which to chart the relationship between production and reproduction within the social factory. The demand for wages was in this

…

policy proposal, with its aura of neutrality, nor the plea, with its solicitousness, manages to capture the style and tone of the demand for wages for housework; none of them conveys the belligerence with which this demand was routinely presented, or the antagonism it was intended thereby to provoke. Although the demand

…

only what they think they are likely to be conceded, as other practitioners of Left politics might advise, advocates of wages for housework aimed for what they wanted. Indeed, the demand for wages for housework was sometimes asserted with a kind of joyful excessiveness, as exemplified in one tract billed as a “notice to all

…

their lives from capital’s logics and purposes, to make housework—together with other forms of work—“uneconomic,” to render them unproductive. The demand for wages for housework thus possessed a dual character: it was a reformist project with revolutionary aspirations. It is important to remember that in her foundational essay, Dalla

…

if any conditions should be imposed on it, and the timing of its distribution. As I will explain, to be both a worthy alternative to wages for housework and a substantive contribution to a postwork political project, the income demanded should be sufficient, unconditional, and continuous. The level of income considered “basic”

…

mass production for mass consumption to a more heterogeneous model of the wage relation based on flexibility, the relation between production and reproduction that the wages for housework perspective attempted to map becomes even more complex and the borders between them more difficult to discern. In the context of what I will

…

the distinction on which both the analysis and political project rested becomes even less tenable. Consider the relation between waged production and domestic reproduction. First, wages for housework’s insights into the productivity of reproductive labor and their analysis of unwaged housework and caring labor as part of the process of value production

…

labor of reproduction are difficult to limit to an identifiable set of workers, let alone to identities as specific as proletarian and housewife. As the wages for housework movement’s analysis of the social factory indicates, the time of production continues well beyond the formal working day, the space of production reaches

…

it, the difference between work and nonwork comes to resemble the more arbitrary distinction between “remunerated life and non-remunerated life” (2004, 103). The wages for housework perspective on the social factory demystified both work and family by engaging some of the political-economic, ethical, and gendered discourses that undergird both spheres

…

Fordist to the post-Fordist social factory. Although its pedagogy is less clearly inscribed in the very language of the demand than the slogan “wages for housework,” the demand for basic income nonetheless presumes an analysis of the political economy of the contemporary wage system, and to engage with the demand

…

depends on a network of social labor and cooperation broader than the individual wage relation (see Robeyns 2001, 84–85). Whereas the demand for wages for housework intended to expose the dependence of waged work on household-based relations of reproduction, the demand for basic income entails, as Ailsa McKay and Jo

…

only on the relationship between income and work, but also on the relationship between income and family membership. To recall our earlier discussion of wages for housework, as a perspective that demand tried to make visible the interdependence between the wage system and the institution of the family. The family is

…

life. Once again, the advantage of basic income is that it can both generate critical perspectives and offer an effective policy change. Whereas the wages for housework perspective sought to expose the link between the wage system and the family, as many have observed, its achievement risked preserving the relationship. As

…

as an invocation of the possibility of freedom. By “freedom” I mean neither individual self-sovereignty nor libertarian license,25 but rather what the wages for housework tradition envisioned as a condition of collective autonomy: freedom as the time and space for invention. Basic income can be demanded as a way to

…

the political imagination of, and desire for, a different future. INCOME BEYOND WAGES: BASIC INCOME AS A SUCCESSOR Using our earlier reading of the wages for housework literature as a model for our consideration of the demand for basic income allows us to recognize the latter demand as not merely a policy

…

system and the institution of the family to serve as reliable mechanisms of income distribution. Reading the demand for basic income in conjunction with the wages for housework literature can also reveal one potential weakness of the demand: its gender neutrality. This raises questions about the capacities of basic income as both

…

invested in consigning to the dustbin of history. Whereas the demand for wages may have had a denaturalizing effect, the demand by housewives for wages for housework threatened to resolidify this labor as women’s work performed in the family. Precisely because it does not address its potential recipients as gendered members

…

time and domestic life, but a challenge to long hours must also include a challenge to the contemporary ideology of the family. To recall the wages for housework perspective explored in the previous chapter, if, as Selma James argues, work and family are each integral to capitalist valorization, then “the struggle against

…

of utopian speculation.21 Adapting for this discussion the dual focus on a demand as perspective and provocation that we acquired from the analysis of wages for housework, and drawing on the rich utopian studies literature, I single out two generally conceived functions: as a force of negation, utopian forms can promote

…

merit the label “utopian” are necessarily larger in scope than their formulation as policy proposals would initially indicate. None of its supporters presumed that wages for housework would signal the end of either capitalism or patriarchy. But they did hope the reform would bring about a gendered system characterized by a substantially

…

ontological effects confounds facile distinctions between reformist and revolutionary change. PUBLICIZING AND POLITICIZING SOCIAL REPRODUCTION As I noted earlier, one way to understand the wages for housework movement and analysis is as part of a larger effort both to map and to problematize the vexed relationship between social reproduction and capital accumulation

…

. In the case of wages for housework, social reproduction was identified with the unwaged household labor necessary to reproduce waged work. One problem with this formulation was that, because housework was

…

worlds necessary for, among other things, production. The virtue of the latter approach is that it invokes a broader notion of social reproduction than the wages for housework analysis typically offered. Taking a cue from this second rationale, I want to consider “life” as a possible counterpoint to work. More specifically, I

…

prefer the term “Marxist feminism” for two reasons: first, because my own work and many of its points of reference, including the domestic-labor and wages for housework literatures, are indebted to Marxist theoretical traditions; and second, because I am skeptical about the contemporary relevance of the term “socialist,” a point I

…

autonomist Marxism also developed within several other groups and movements, including the Midnight Notes Collective, Zerowork, the feminist group Lotta Feminista, and the movement for wages for housework. The authors I draw on most frequently in this account include some associated with both autonomist Marxism’s early articulation and its later developments including

…

more resistant to change (on this point see, for example, Brenner 2000, 135). 3. Working Demands 1. Although the intellectual and political project of wages for housework continues after this period, my focus is confined to this early period of its development for reasons I will explain below. 2. For an example

…

Thompson. 2002. “ ‘We Recruit Attitude’: The Selection and Shaping of Routine Call Centre Labour.” Journal of Management Studies 39 (2): 233–54. Campaign for Wages for Housework. 2000. “Wages for Housework.” In Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, 258. New York: Basic. Carver, Terrell. 1998.

…

Contemporary Organizing.” Human Relations 61 (5): 661–85. Cox, Nicole, and Silvia Federici. 1976. Counter-Planning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework, A Perspective on Capital and the Left. Brooklyn, N.Y.: New York Wages for Housework Committee. Cremin, Colin. 2010. “Never Employable Enough: The (Im)possibility of Satisfying the Boss’s Desire.” Organization 17 (

…

Rutgers University Press. López, Maria Milagros. 1994. “Post-Work Selves and Entitlement ‘Attitudes’ in Peripheral Postindustrial Puerto Rico.” Social Text 38:111–33. Los Angeles Wages for Housework Committee. 1975. “Sisters Why March?” In All Work and No Pay: Women, Housework, and the Wages Due, edited by Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, 123

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

by Silvia Federici · 4 Oct 2012 · 277pp · 80,703 words

and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000). “Why Sexuality Is Work” (1975) was originally written as part of a presentation to the second international Wages for Housework conference held in Toronto in January 1975. “Counterplanning from the Kitchen” was first published as Counterplanningfrom the Kitchen (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). Also published

…

housework was crucial to feminist politics, it had a special significance for the organization I joined in 1972: the international Wages for Housework Campaign, in which I was active for the following five years. Wages for Housework (WfH) was rather unique, as it brought together political currents coming from different parts of the world and different

…

Civil Rights Movement, mobilized to demand a wage from the state for the work of raising their children, laying the groundwork on which organizations like Wages for Housework could grow. From the Operaist movement that stressed the centrality of workers’ struggles for autonomy in the capital-labor relation, we learned the political importance

…

unifying topic of the essays collected in Part One, all written between 1974 and 1980, the period of my organizational engagement in the campaign for Wages for Housework. Their main concern was to demonstrate the fundamental differences between housework and other types of work; unmask the process of naturalization this work had

…

essays attempted to establish that the attributes of femininity are in effect work functions and to rebut the economistic way in which the demand for wages for housework was conceived by many critics, due to their inability to understand the function of money beside its immediate character as a form of remuneration.

…

The campaign for wages for housework was launched in the summer of 1972 in Padua with the formation of the International Feminist Collective by a group of women from Italy, England

…

” has led many of us to rethink our political strategies and perspectives. In my case, it has led me to reconsider the question of “wages for housework” and to investigate the meaning of the growing call in different international radical circles for the production of “commons.” The WfH movement had identified the

…

a smile. Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife. Many times the difficulties and ambiguities that women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the fact that they reduce wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is

…

enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance

…

in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society. When we view wages for housework in this reductive way we start asking ourselves: what difference could more money make to our lives? We might even agree that for a

…

that money without at the same time revolutionizing—in the process of struggling for it—all our family and social relations. But if we take wages for housework as a political perspective, we can see that struggling for it is going to produce a revolution in our lives and in our social

…

of prostitution of body and mind by which we get the money to hide that need. As I will try to show, not only is wages for housework a revolutionary perspective, but it is the only revolutionary perspective from a feminist viewpoint. “A Labor of Love” It is important to recognize that

…

work as the expression of our nature, and therefore to refuse precisely the female role that capital has invented for us. To ask for wages for housework will by itself undermine the expectations that society has of us, since these expectations—the essence of our socialization—are all functional to our wageless

…

condition in the home. In this sense, it is absurd to compare the struggle of women for wages for housework to the struggle of male workers in the factory for more wages. In struggling for more wages, the waged worker challenges his social role

…

but remains within it. When we struggle for wages for housework we struggle unambiguously and directly against our social role. In the same way, there is a qualitative difference between the struggles of the waged worker

…

an essential moment of that division of labor and social power within the working class through which capital has been able to maintain its hegemony. Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it forces capital to restructure social relations in terms more

…

favorable to us and consequently more favorable to the unity of the class. In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do this work. It means precisely the opposite. To say

…

that we want wages for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable

…

work—our femininity as work—since the lack of a wage has been so powerful in shaping this role and hiding our work. To demand wages for housework is to make it visible that our minds, our bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function, in a specific function,

…

as a model to which we should all conform if we want to be accepted as women in this society. To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling,

…

Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized. Wages for housework is only the beginning, but its message is clear: from now on, they have to pay us because as women we do not guarantee anything

…

control over our lives, in the other we extend the State’s control over us. The Struggle against Housework Some women say: how is wages for housework going to change the attitudes of our husbands towards us? Won’t our husbands still expect the same duties as before and even more than

…

us through them—each other, against each other), we—their crutches, their slaves, their chains—open the process of their liberation. In this sense wages for housework will be much more educational than trying to prove that we can work as well as them, that we can do the same jobs. We

…

what capital is doing to us, and our power to struggle against it. Unfortunately, many women—particularly single women—are afraid of the perspective of wages for housework because they are afraid of identifying even for a second with the housewife. They know that this is the most powerless position in society and

…

personal service outside of capital.2 It is no accident that in the last few months several journals of the Left have published attacks on Wages for Housework. Whenever the women’s movement has taken an autonomous position, the Left has felt threatened. The Left realizes that this perspective has implications that

…

offer to every worker), but the right to work more, the right to be further exploited. A New Ground of Struggle The political foundation of Wages for Housework is the refusal of this capitalist ideology that equates wagelessness and low technological development with political backwardness, lack of power and, ultimately, with a

…

rejection is a redefinition of what capitalism is and who the working class is—that is, a new evaluation of class forces and class needs. Wages for Housework, then, is not one demand among others, but a political perspective that opens a new ground of struggle, beginning with women but for the

…

entire working class.3 This must be emphasized, since the reduction of Wages for Housework to a demand is a common element in the attacks of the Left upon it, as a way of discrediting it that enables its critics

…

a bit of money, but is the expression of the power relation between capital and the working class. A more subtle way of discrediting Wages for Housework is to claim that this perspective is imported from Italy and bears little relevance to the situation in the United States where women “do work

…

and the Subversion of the Community—the only source Lopate refers to—acknowledges the international dimension of the context in which Wages for Housework originated. In any case, tracing the geographical origin of Wages for Housework is beside the point at the present stage of capital’s international integration. What matters is its political genesis, which

…

it embodies. In the case of the wageless, in our case, the struggle for the wage is even more clearly an attack on capital. Wages for Housework means that capital will have to pay for the enormous amount of social services employers now save on our backs. Most important, to demand

…

each other. In opposition to the divisions typical of the capitalist organization of work, we must organize according to our needs. In this sense, Wages for Housework is as much a refusal of the socialization of the factory as it is a refusal of a possible capitalist “rationalization” of the home, as

…

the power relations within the working class in terms more favorable to us and the unity of the class. As for the financial aspects of Wages for Housework, they are “highly problematical” only if we take the viewpoint of capital, the viewpoint of the Treasury Department, which always claims poverty when addressing

…

wages for their work in the home”—in short, she assumes that we can never win.31 Finally, Lopate warns us that if we obtained wages for housework, capital would send supervisors to control our work. Since she sees housewives only as victims, incapable of a struggle, she cannot imagine that we

…

write it had not.”5 Moynihan was soon proven wrong. At the very time when he was recalling the legislative adventures of FAP, a Wages for Housework Movement was emerging in the United States, strong enough to cause the National Women’s Conference held in Houston in 1977 to recommend in its

…

where welfare is blamed as one of the main problems of American society, the government has failed to eliminate what can be considered the first “wages for housework.” Most important, while the “female welfare wage” has fallen and women and poverty are still synonyms, the total wage in the hands of women

…

this context, we agree with Nancy Barrett that women: May find it necessary to center their interest on financial support for non-market activities (and) Wages for Housework, Social Security … and other fringe benefits for housework will be matters of increased concern.28 PUTTING FEMINISM BACK ON ITS FEET (1984) Almost fourteen years

…

women who would tell us about their lives or at times would simply write: “Dear Sir, tell me what I have to do to get wages for housework.” Their stories were always the same. They worked long hours, with no time left and no money of their own. And then there were

…

be liberated for more work, but to be able to take a walk, talk to our friends, or go to a women’s meeting. Wages for housework meant opening a struggle directly on the question of reproduction, and establishing that raising children and taking care of people is a social responsibility. In

…

by the fact that, despite a strong women’s movement, subsidized day care has been steadily reduced through the ‘70s. I should add that wages for housework never meant simply a paycheck. It also meant more social services and free social services. Was this a utopian dream? Many women seemed to think

…

transportation, since everybody knows that at three dollars a trip, no matter how high your consciousness is raised, you are inevitably confined to the home? Wages for housework was a reappropriation strategy, expanding the famous “pie” to which workers in this country are considered entitled. It would have meant a major redistribution

…

paycheck for it. But there was a time when money was a dirty word for many feminists. One of the consequences of the rejection of wages for housework is that little effort was made to mobilize against the attack on welfare benefits that have unfolded since the beginning of the ‘70s, and

…

because it is the only possibility they have to earn some money and take care of their children at the same time. Feminists charged that wages for housework would isolate women in the home. But are you less isolated when you are forced to moonlight and have no money to go any place

…

feminist critique of Marx that, in different ways, has been developing since the 1970s. This critique was first articulated by activists in the Campaign for Wages for Housework, especially Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, among others, and later by Ariel Salleh in Australia and the feminists of the Bielefeld school,

…

increasing resistance of new generations of Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Caribbeans to the legacy of colonialism. Key contributors to this perspective were activists in the Wages for Housework Movement, like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, who showed that women’s invisible struggles against domestic discipline were subverting the model of reproduction

…

formed primarily by black women. It was the Welfare Mothers Movement that, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, led the first campaign for state-funded “wages for housework” (under the guise of Aid to Dependent Children) that women have fought for in the country, asserting the economic value of women’s reproductive

…

state on the level of reproduction. With this struggle women on Aid to Families with Dependent Children were able to turn welfare into the first “wages for housework.” See Milwaukee County Welfare Rights Organization, Welfare Mothers Speak Out. 4. On women’s struggles against deforestation and the commercialization of nature, see (among

…

Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant. In 1972, she was cofounder of the International Feminist Collective, which launched the Wages for Housework campaign internationally. With other members of Wages for Housework, like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and with feminist authors like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Federici has been instrumental in

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

by Sarah Jaffe · 26 Jan 2021 · 490pp · 153,455 words

Marxist operaismo (workerism) movement of the 1970s, put forward a different analysis, one that challenged popular ideologies of both work and the family. While the Wages for Housework Campaign, as a demand and a political perspective, didn’t spread as far as its founders would have liked, its organizers continue to struggle and

…

to inspire others to this day. 50 Wages for Housework picked up the idea from operaismo that capitalist production has subsumed every social relation, collapsing the distinction between “society” and “workplace” and turning all of

…

those relations into relations of production. To the organizers of Wages for Housework, the “social factory” began in the home, and the work done in the home was necessary for the functioning of capitalism because it reproduced workers

…

experiences of all women, even those who were wealthy enough to hire others (usually also women) to do their housework. 53 The women of the Wages for Housework Campaign took from the women of the welfare rights movement the understanding that neither the workplace nor the family was a site of freedom. They

…

devaluing of their work outside of it. Violence against women, they argued, was a form of work discipline, a boss keeping his subordinates in line. Wages for Housework was a perspective that could be applied to all political struggles—it added an angle that was missing in most analyses of capitalism and gender

…

. 54 Though many people laughed (and continue to laugh) at the idea of wages for housework, it is inarguably true that housework, in many instances, is in fact paid. As economist Nancy Folbre wrote, echoing those welfare rights organizers, “if two

…

Credit], receiving a total of more than $10,000 for providing essentially the same services they would provide for their own children.” The women of Wages for Housework noted that the state pays foster parents, and that courts had granted damages to men whose wives had been injured to pay for “lack of

…

new discourse of the labor of love was being knitted together as wages were dropping and factories were closing, moving, and automating. Those in the Wages for Housework movement were some of the first to see what was happening in the 1970s. The shifts in the economy became visible in New York and

…

other cities, where a fiscal crisis laid the groundwork for later austerity politics. Wages for Housework proponents warned, Cassandra-like, that feminists were going into the workplace just as the bottom was falling out of it. Women were expected to pick

…

’s another way to look at things. As Briggs wrote, these seemingly individual battles “are where neoliberalism lives in our daily lives.” The point of Wages for Housework is not for individual men to pay individual women, like the “wife bonuses” paid by wealthy husbands to their wives, described in Wednesday Martin’s

…

struggles to revalue it. In recent years, even as witch-hunts have returned in some places around the world, political struggles have led to wins: Wages for Housework proposals were revived by Mexico’s ruling MORENA party, for example, and pensions for homemakers were instituted in Venezuela. 73 Claiming the work done in

…

a job that was deemed worthy of only £80 a month: raising a child. 76 When she met Barb Jacobson, who had come out of Wages for Housework to coordinate the UK basic income network, Jacobson asked her if she wanted to help run a London group. Malone agreed, and at the group

…

) and autonomia , which understood the fight against capitalism as extending outside of the workplace and into all facets of society, the “social factory.” While the Wages for Housework movement used this understanding to formulate its demands around women’s unpaid work in the home, artists aligned with the movements rejected art institutions and

…

the 2012 student strikes, and therefore applied an explicitly feminist lens to their organizing as well as to their analysis of internships. Inspired by the Wages for Housework movement, they began organizing in 2016 around the idea that school work, too, was a form of reproductive labor. Unpaid internships, then, were a natural

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy · 12 May 2025 · 774pp · 238,244 words

workers, who outnumbered male workers in many early textile factories. The chapter on Silvia Federici, an Italian expatriate who cofounded the New York branch of Wages for Housework, focuses on domestic work, which typically has been unpaid and carried out by women. As Federici and her colleagues emphasized, this unwaged labor is essential

…

no spiritual ambitions inherit an earth still bathed in plenty of sunshine.”50 24 “A true masterpiece at the expense of women” Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework In November 1975 a group of women opened a storefront at 288B Eighth Street, off Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, not far from the

…

famous Park Slope Food Coop, which had been established a couple of years earlier. The members of the New York Wages for Housework Committee, a grassroots organization that was demanding payment from the government for domestic labor, were keen to establish a permanent base where they could hold

…

on an ironing board atop a pair of trousers that was waiting to be ironed. The poster read: “STRIKE! WHILE THE IRON IS HOT! WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK.”4 Although the Wages for Housework movement was small, it was also international, with branches in Italy, where the movement originated, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the United

…

including Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Most of the members of these groups were educated white women. From 1976 onward, there were also Black Women for Wages for Housework groups in a number of places. Wilmette Brown, an African American activist who was originally from New Jersey, and Margaret Prescod, a Barbadian-American teacher

…

eventually spawned offshoots in other cities.5 In 1975, a Wages Due Lesbians movement emerged from the international Wages for Housework campaign and eventually organized in various cities, including London, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.6 Wages for Housework wasn’t part of the mainstream women’s movement, which had made great strides in the United States

…

Women (NOW), which the writer Betty Friedan and other American feminists had founded in 1966, campaigned for reproductive rights and sexual equality in the workplace. Wages for Housework supported reproductive rights and higher wages for women, but the movement focused primarily on housework, and the economic plight of domestic workers of all ages

…

office.”8 * * * Intellectually, the tying of female exploitation in the home to capitalist exploitation in the workplace was arguably the most important feature of the Wages for Housework movement. In Second Wave feminism, capitalism was seen as a potentially liberating force: if sexual equality could be introduced into the workplace, women could escape

…

is hidden the productivity, i.e. the exploitation, of the labour of women in the home.”23 The members of the collective vowed to launch wages for housework campaigns in their own countries. They knew they would face many challenges, including skepticism from the mainstream women’s movement and male leftists. “Despite the

…

the project,” Federici recalled later in her life.24 * * * Shortly after Federici returned to the United States, she and some colleagues founded the New York Wages for Housework Committee. On Mother’s Day, they went to Prospect Park and handed out a flyer that said: “Let us call mothers, wives, singles, grandmothers, daughters

…

still small, it sought to establish connections to other left-wing activists, such as union organizers and tenants’ rights campaigners. While Federici was dedicated to Wages for Housework and saw it as an organization with great potential, she always viewed it as part of a broader movement to empower working-class women and

…

was to demystify and undermine the economic system that had kept female domestic workers in a state of unpaid subjugation. “To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking

…

it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice.”29 In the fall of 1974, the Wages for Housework movement held its first international conference, in Brooklyn, with attendees coming from Canada, England, and Italy, as well as other US cities. They put

…

together a lengthy statement, “Theses on Wages for Housework,” which emphasized the role unpaid domestic labor played in propping up the capitalist system. “Our wageless condition is the material basis of our dependence on

…

discipline on their labor. It is the chain that ties them to their jobs.”30 One of the key figures in the international expansion of Wages for Housework was Selma James, who had a long history of campaigning against capitalism and colonialism. She was born Selma Deitch in 1930 in the Ocean Hill

…

our children in their father’s laps. Let’s see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK.”32 Initially, James’s agenda didn’t gain much traction in the British women’s movement. Some feminists feared that paying for domestic labor would

…

in the home. Others saw going out to work as the road to liberation. James wasn’t put off. A dedicated activist, she regarded the Wages for Housework movement as an essential extension of feminism and the anti-capitalist movement. * * * As the New York Committee geared up its activism, the media started

…

paying attention to it. In January 1976, The New York Times published a news story headlined “Brooklyn Women Seek Wages for Housework,” which quoted Federici saying: “No one works as hard as women do for nothing … If we stopped, the economy would be paralyzed.” Asked about

…

mass movement.”33 Other publications, including the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, and England’s Western Daily Press, also printed articles about Wages for Housework. In April 1976, Life magazine published a picture of Federici and a dozen of her colleagues standing in the kitchen of her Brooklyn apartment behind

…

about it in the community. That was a way of getting the information out.”35 Despite garnering media attention and establishing a physical base, however, Wages for Housework never attracted an enduring mass following. To some extent, this failure reflected its radicalism. Although its demand for housework to be paid had great popular

…

that necessarily spoke to hard-pressed working-class women, to whom revolutionary politics seemed like a distant concern. At the national and international level, meanwhile, Wages for Housework operated in the shadow of the broader women’s movement, whose demands for equal pay and conditions in the paid workplace were being embraced by

…

intensified, the New York Committee continued its activities. In April 1976 it organized a conference on welfare, which was attended by dozens of women from Wages for Housework groups across the United States and allied organizations. At the time, conservative politicians were vilifying women on welfare, particularly Black women, as “welfare queens,” in

…

keep their student grants and their welfare payments, some white members of the New York Committee didn’t support them. “They didn’t consider that wages for housework, but we did,” Prescod recounted.38 Other schisms also emerged, and in 1977 the New York Committee dissolved itself. In later years, Federici was

…

Italian feminist theorist. In 1978, Dalla Costa’s Padua branch of Wages for Housework also shut down. Other parts of the movement carried on, including the International Wages for Housework Campaign and Black Women for Wages for Housework. But the shuttering of the New York Committee and the Wages for Housework branch in the Italian city where the movement had been founded

…

marked an ending of a sort. * * * Like many radical movements, Wages for Housework didn’t achieve its primary goals and

…

described in Das Kapital,” Dalla Costa recalled in an interview with Louise Toupin, a Canadian political scientist who wrote an illuminating history of the international Wages for Housework movement that was published in 2018.39 Over time, however, the importance of “social reproduction,” as domestic labor came to be known, became widely

…

only intellectuals on the left who came to recognize the economic importance of domestic labor. In the world of economics and policymaking, the rise of Wages for Housework helped spark a debate about how economic statistics should treat domestic labor. Since housework and childrearing weren’t paid and monetized, they weren’t counted

…

a 1988 book that is now widely acknowledged as an intellectual landmark: If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics. In her prologue, Waring brought up Wages for Housework, saying she shared Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s “original intention of providing a tool for raising consciousness and for mobilizing women everywhere.”43 She also hailed

…

In her final chapter, she called for a global campaign of consciousness raising around these issues, and she commended the activism of Dalla Costa and Wages for Housework for having “helped to have feminist issues understood by 12 million Italian housewives—which is no mean feat.”47 Replicating this success on a global

…

York Committee 1972–1977: History, Theory, Documents (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2018), 87–89. 2. Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 91. 3. Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 41. 4. Betsy Warrior, Strike! While the Iron Is Hot! Wages for Housework, poster, 48.2 × 35.5 cm, Yanker Poster Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2015649375

…

. 5. Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 121–22. 6. See, e.g., “The International Wages for Housework Campaign” (newsletter), https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC500_scans/500.020.Wages.for.Housework.pdf; and “International Lesbian Conference,” Power of Women: Magazine of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, no. 5 (1975), https://bcrw.barnard.edu/archive/lesbian

…

James, Power of Women, 43. 22. Dalla Costa and James, Power of Women, 49. 23. Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 30. 24. Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 18. 25. Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 46. 26. Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 20. 27. Federici, Wages Against Housework, 2–3. 28. Federici, Wages Against Housework, 6. 29. Federici, Wages

…

), 67, https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/selmajamesra.pdf. 33. Wendy Schuman, “Brooklyn Women Seek Wages for Housework,” The New York Times, January 11, 1976; reprinted in Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 172. 34. “Wages for Housework,” Life (April 1976), https://maydayrooms.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/WfHw_SF_LifeMagazine1976.jpg. 35. Andrews, “Interview

…

Gender Studies Institute Research Seminar, January 19, 2022, https://wgsi.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/feminist-generations-closed-captions-converted.pdf. 39. Toupin, Wages for Housework, 22. 40. Andrews, “Interview with Silvia Federici.” 41. Keith Love, “How Do You Put a Price Tag on a Housewife’s Work?,” The New

…

York Times, January 13, 1976; reprinted in Federici and Austin, Wages for Housework, 192–93. 42. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 4. 43. Waring, If Women Counted, 7. 44.

…

Bismarck, Otto von Black, John Black Dwarf Black Jacobins, The (James) Black Marxism (Robinson) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Du Bois) Black Women for Wages for Housework Blair, Tony Blanc, Louis Blanqui, Adolphe Blanqui, Louis-Auguste Blanquist rising Bloomsbury Group Blundell, Brian Boers Boer War Bogdanov, V. E. Bolivia Bolsheviks Bolts, William

…

Federal Reserve Federal Water Pollution Control Act Federici, Silvia; Dalla Costa and; early life of; The Great Caliban; Re-enchanting the World; Wages Against Housework; Wages for Housework and Feinstein, Charles Fels, Joseph Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan) feminism; Second Wave; see also women’s rights Ferri, Enrico Ferry, Jules feudalism Feuerbach, Ludwig Field

…

Bank interest rates International Feminist Collective International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance International Monetary Fund (IMF) International Revolutionary Party Proletariat International Trade Organization International Wages for Housework internet investment; savings and invisible hand In Woman’s Defense (Inman) Iran Iraq Ireland Irish National Land League Irish World, The ISI (import substituting industrialization

…

economics, Marxism; Bernstein and; in dependency theory; Du Bois and; feminism and; Kalecki and; Luxemburg and; Piketty and; Robinson and; Schumpeter and; Sweezy and; and Wages for Housework Marxism Today Marx’s General (Hunt) Marx 200 (Roberts) Mason, Paul Massey-Wheeler, Francis Matar Taluka, India materialism Maurice, Frederick Denison Maximilian of Baden (prince

…

for Ethical Culture New York Stock Exchange New York Sun New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The New-York Tribune New York Wages for Housework Committee Nicholas II (tsar) Nixon, Richard Norman, Montagu North, Lord North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Northern Rock Northern Securities Northern Star Norway Notting Hill

…

reserve army of jobless workers; Robinson on; stagnation of; subsistence; of weavers; of women workers; see also income Wages Against Housework (Federici) Wages Due Lesbians Wages for Housework Wales Wallerstein, Immanuel Walras, Leon war War Communism Ward, Aaron Montgomery Waring, Marilyn War in South Africa, The (Hobson) Warner, Charles Dudley Warren, Elizabeth Warsaw

…

(Gilman) Women’s Educational Equity Act women’s rights; coverture and; marriage and; reproductive; Second Wave feminism; Thompson and; Tristan and; United Nations and; voting; wages for housework; Wheeler and women workers; in factories; wages of Wood, Adrian Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Virginia wool industry workers: children as; compensation systems for; competition among; division

…

of life in the future”: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Limits to Growth 24. “A true masterpiece at the expense of women”: Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework 25. “It is a form of regressive modernisation”: Theorists of Thatcherism: Stuart Hall vs. Friedrich Hayek 26. “Social disintegration is not a spectator sport”:

Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

by Premilla Nadasen · 10 Oct 2023 · 288pp · 82,972 words

until the 1980s that saw household labor as labor, rather than as primarily about caregiving or emotions. Activists and scholars in this period, including the wages for housework movement that I discuss in chapter 4, used terms such as housework, household labor, domestic work, and social reproduction. A vibrant feminist movement and robust

…

demands for state care, regulations, or state resources so people can care for themselves: lower food prices, welfare assistance, unemployment compensation, pensions, disability assistance, and wages for housework. These are not only about employment but are economic struggles designed to ensure that people have the resources to sustain life, what theorist Cindi Katz

…

source of support for social reproduction. People of all backgrounds have sought to leverage state resources for a more comfortable and secure home life. The Wages for Housework movement, for example, demanded that the state pay women for unpaid household labor, which, they argued, was essential to the functioning of the economy and

…

, and enslaved people, who contributed to capitalist wealth. The pamphlet, apparently, was “selling like hotcakes.”41 Shortly after the Manchester conference, activists formed the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Led by James and socialist feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and Margaret Prescod, who founded and led the Black Women for

…

Wages for Housework, the movement had bases in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. In contrast to other feminists of the period, Wages for Housework activists saw paid employment outside the home as simply another form of exploitation rather than

…

.”44 The demand to care, then, was emotional labor. Paralleling Hochschild’s analysis of emotional labor in the context of paid employer-employee relationships, the Wages for Housework movement explored how familial love served as a form of coercion to justify no pay and was not only imposed but also internalized—women themselves

…

the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence.”47 The Wages for Housework movement did not believe that the nuclear family should be the primary site for the labor of social reproduction.48 The long-term goal was

…

give workers a viable alternative to degrading and exploitative labor conditions. In that regard, the movement subverted dominant capitalist norms and attributions of worth. The Wages for Housework movement and the welfare rights movement helped shift the political terrain of class struggle to the domestic sphere. They believed that the labor performed by

…

mothers was economically and socially valuable and should be compensated by the state. Although the Wages for Housework movement rejected the language of love and care for their own families, welfare rights activists rooted their claim to assistance in that language

…

. Wages for Housework activists were speaking to women for whom the language of love was deployed to coerce them to provide unpaid care. Welfare recipients, however, embraced a

…

on Poverty to “wage their own war on poverty” in the 1970s and 1980s, as Annelise Orleck has written.56 Domestic workers, welfare recipients, the Wages for Housework movement, and other radicals in the 1960s and 1970s were all organizing at a time when it seemed that the state could be leveraged. This

…

make to ensure care for their loved ones. Such an agenda would align with the spirit of both welfare rights activists in the 1960s and Wages for Housework movement activists, who insisted that household labor and childcare should be economically supported. Alongside government policies, some corporations have instituted programs to create “caring workplaces

…

organizing. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to be in conversation for many years with Silvia Federici, one of the founders of the Wages for Housework movement. Rosa Navarro generously offered her insight about domestic worker organizing in Chicago. I am grateful that Sandra Killett shared her deeply moving story about

…

Press, 2022). 40. Annelise Orleck, We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 41. Louise Toupin, Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77 (London: Pluto Press, 2018). 42. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework; Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James

…

, Wages Against Housework, 6. 47. Costa and James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, 36. 48. For a critique of the Wages for Housework movement, see Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Penguin Random House, 1981). 49. Nadasen, Welfare Warriors, Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How

…

movement United Health Group, 167 United Nations Human Rights Office, 150–51 unpaid household labor, 28, 50–52 passim, 89–90, 92, 144. See also Wages for Housework movement US Bureau of Indian Affairs. See Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) US Department of Health and Human Services, 169 US Department of Homeland Security

…

wage labor and wages, 50, 51, 59, 78, 101, 103; women’s, 92. See also living wage; minimum wage Wages Against Housework (Federici), 121, 127 Wages for Housework movement, 120–22, 125 Walia, Harsha, 191 War on Poverty, 11, 126, 137 Washing Society (washerwomen), 105 wealth inequality, 151 Weeks, Kathi, 214 welfare, 129

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

by Harsha Walia · 9 Feb 2021

of capitalism, means the private domain of the home has long been a site of struggle to make this feminization of labor visible. The International Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, led by Marxist feminists, demanded that class struggle include women’s unpaid domestic labor as a pillar of patriarchal cisheteronuclear organization

…

’ sphere of paid employment and the ‘private’ sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for US Black women.”48 The International Black Women for Wages for Housework campaign specifically linked unwaged housework to reparations for slavery and imperialism, drawing links between the subsidization of capitalism by factory wages and unwaged labor in

…

Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 47. 49.“The International Wages for Housework Campaign,” Freedom Archives, https://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC500_scans/500.020.Wages.for.Housework.pdf. 50.Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis 42, no. 11 (November 1, 1930): 330

…

Police, 62 Industrial Workers of the World, xviii, 34–35, 85 Instacart, xv, 214 Institute of Race Relations, 119 Intercede, 165 International Black Women for Wages for Housework, 141 International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, 57 International Court of Justice, 97 International Democratic Union, 170 International Domestic Workers Federation, 144 International Finance Corporation, 70

…

, 144 International Monetary Fund, 49, 63–64, 113, 121, 143 International Organization for Migration, 66, 86, 106, 120 International Trade Union Confederation, 145, 152 International Wages for Housework, 141 Inuit people, 186 Ipili people, 94–95 Iran, 60, 88, 93, 122, 149 Iran-Contra scandal, 44 Iraq Blackwater in, 4 drone strikes in

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

by David Graeber · 14 May 2018 · 385pp · 123,168 words

she originally became interested in such issues when she first moved to London in the 1980s and became part of the International Wages for Housework Movement: Candi: I got involved in Wages for Housework because I felt that my mother needed it. She was trapped in a bad marriage, and she would have left my dad

…

live on, and immediately, she left my dad. That was kind of proof in the pudding for me. In London, Candi found herself drawn to Wages for Housework—then widely seen by most other feminists as an annoying if not dangerous fringe group—because she saw it as providing an alternative to sterile

…

the latter category, despite the fact that without it, the very machine that stamped it as “not really work” would grind to a halt immediately. Wages for Housework was essentially an attempt to call capitalism’s bluff, to say, “Most work, even factory work, is done for a variety of motives; but if

…

to be handed over to them; and wealth, of course, is power. What follows is from a conversation with both of them: David: So inside Wages for Housework, were there many debates about the policy implications—you know, the mechanisms through which the wages would actually be paid? Candi: Oh, no, it was

…

a really good job. Few were talking about the work women were already doing for free in the 1960s, but it became an issue when Wages for Housework was established in the 1970s—and now it’s standard to take it into account when working out divorce settlements, for example. David: So the

…

got into the mechanics. David: Wait, “wage caring not killing”—whose slogan is that? Leslie: Global Women’s Strike. That’s the contemporary successor to Wages for Housework. When we came out with the first European UBI [Universal Basic Income] petition back in 2013, that was Global Women’s Strike’s response: two

…

well just fund everybody, and let them decide for themselves who they want to care for at any given time. Candi had come around from Wages for Housework to UBI for similar reasons. She and some of her fellow activists started asking themselves: Say we did want to promote a real, practical program

…

, what would that be? Candi: The reaction we used to get on the street when we leafleted for Wages for Housework was, either women would say, “Great! Where can I sign up?” or they’d say, “How dare you demand money for something I do for

…

unquantifiable nature of caring, she told me Gorz had anticipated it forty years ago: Candi: Gorz’s critique of Wages for Housework was that if you kept emphasizing the importance of care to the global economy in strictly financial terms, then there was the danger that you

…

left to individual fantasy” (Gorz 1997:84, originally published in French in 1980, which makes it really quite prophetic). The more specific engagement with the Wages for Housework movement is in Critique of Economic Reason 2010:126, 161–64, 222). 18. The details can be found in Sarath Davala, etc. Basic Income: A

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work

by Joanna Biggs · 8 Apr 2015 · 255pp · 92,719 words

of workers in all kinds of jobs are now encouraged to create an experience out of an ordinary transaction – the smiling and fucking that the Wages for Housework campaign identified as worthy of payment – and we are only just beginning to understand what sort of experience of work the service economy allows. The

…

that housework turned women into something less than servants: ‘We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle,’ she wrote in the 1974 pamphlet Wages for Housework. ‘We are housemaids, prostitutes, nurses, shrinks; this is the essence of the “heroic” spouse who is celebrated on “Mother’s Day”. We say: stop celebrating

…

’d seen trailed by a black and a white dog at the ECP’s offices when I went to interview Ina, Federici set up the Wages for Housework Campaign, which continues to this day. Instead of agitating for more waged labour, to put another crack in the glass ceiling and occupy another board

…

seat, women would redefine what work is: Why is writing an email work and feeding a baby not work? Friedan and Wages for Housework came up with two different solutions to the problem, but they agreed on its nature. It wasn’t the cooking and cleaning; it was the

…

‘The Girl’ (1997, Vintage Classics); Ann Oakley’s words come from Housewife (Penguin, 1974) and the Silvia Federici quotes come from the 1974 pamphlet called ‘Wages for Housework’ available online. My account of Samuel Morton Peto’s life is from the ODNB, as are those of the previous Lords Somerleyton and the early

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart · 25 Jun 2018 · 320pp · 90,526 words

the devaluing of her labor and the labor of those around her into poetry and performance art. In the 1970s, Wages for Housework amplified Ukeles’s aesthetic impulse into an unsparing movement. Wages for Housework argued that caring for one’s own children and cleaning one’s own home should be compensated and politically and emotionally

…

mobility Urban Outfitters, 71 U.S. News & World Report, 55 Valencia College Peace and Justice Institute, 105 Vanity Fair, 211 Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carle), 7 Wages for Housework, 129–30 Wage stagnation, 9, 60–61, 243 Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 177 Wayne, Christina, 219 “Wealthies” vs. selfies, 216 “Wealthy Hand-to-Mouth

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore · 16 Oct 2017 · 335pp · 89,924 words

. One radical response to the fundamental devaluation of care work involves a jujitsu pricing move and the demand that housework be paid. As the 1970s Wages for Housework campaign argued, “Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink. To deny this is also to deny the

…

reach dignity. As Angela Davis put it, “Psychological liberation can hardly be achieved simply by paying the housewife a wage.”88 Yet the insight of Wages for Housework shouldn’t be forgotten. To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism. If introducing money into this

…

Shock, 69–70, 177 Voser, Peter, 166 Voss, Barbara, 114–15 wages: unequal by gender, 31; unions for higher wages, 41, 42; wage repression, 153 Wages for Housework campaign, 135 Walker, Alice, on activism, 42 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 25–26 war debt: captives and, 65–66; financing of, 66, 69; profitability decline and, 27