The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) by Kathi Weeks

Author:Kathi Weeks [Weeks, Kathi]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

FROM WAGES TO INCOME: THE DEMAND AS PERSPECTIVE

To explore the possibilities and limits of the demand for basic income, I want to apply the conceptual scheme gleaned from our earlier examination of the demand for wages for housework and consider it in this section as a perspective, and in the next as a provocation. To recall the previous discussion, the demand for wages for housework was predicated upon a critical perspective on the nature of both work and family and a mapping of their relationship across the times and spaces of the social factory. In order to appreciate how the demand for basic income as a perspective might build on and improve upon the perspective of wages for housework, we need to return the latter’s analysis of the social factory and update some of its terms.

The wages for housework analyses were grounded in an essentially Fordist model of the social factory, with production and reproduction parceled out into separate spheres represented by the iconic figures of the male proletarian and the housewife. The advocates’ insistence on the productivity of reproductive labor was a bid to subvert this model of separate systems. Indeed, the focus on housewives and the claim about the productivity of their work, together with the assertion of the political character of relations in the supposedly private sphere of the family, were at once the product of this Fordist order’s own imaginary and perhaps one of the more trenchant expressions of its refusal: a refusal of the privatization and depoliticization of the personal, a refusal of the naturalization of allegedly nonproductive domestic practices, and a refusal of the gendering of the division between production and reproduction. But in the move from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, from Keynesian to neoliberal regimes of governance, from Taylorist to post-Taylorist labor processes and management strategies, and from a Fordist wage relation predicated on 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 summarize as post-Fordism, 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 must now be developed further. The interpenetration of production and reproduction has deepened as domestically produced goods and services continue to be replaced with commodified forms, and as many modes of service and caring labor are transformed into waged forms of employment. Production and reproduction thus come to resemble one another more closely, in terms of both their respective labor processes and their outcomes. Second, not only is reproductive labor more clearly productive today, as evidenced by its many waged forms,

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