The Red Mole is starting the new year with a new regular column which will unashamedly discuss ideas. Its aim will be to combat wrong or confused The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, by Mariarosa Dalla Costa (with an introduction by Selma James). Falling Wall Press, 25p.
This pamphlet consists of a long central article an introduction by Selma James, and an early article by her dating from 1952. Since it is the article by Mariarosa that expresses the ideas shared by her and Selma most cogently, it is that on which the discussion is centred. MARXIST IN CONCEPTION Mariarosa's analysis is marxist in conception; it rejects feminism (the theoretical kind that poses the real class struggle as between men and women); factory has as its pivot the woman in the home it centres on the working class woman. Mariarosa argues that in a capitalist society a woman's job is the production of labour power in the home. There, unpaid, in a pre-capitalist economic situation, she produces new workers and reproduces existing ones. Such a situation produces the dependent psychological characteristics which make our struggle so difficult, and involve men as the agents of our oppression. In producing labour power, Mariarosa argues, housewives are themselves exploited, surplus value producers, and integral members of the working class. The struggle must be waged against organisations of the working class which divide between those producers employed in the factory and those in the home. Capitalist society is in fact one great social factory. The crucial task for the womens" liberation movement is to start the self organisation of women, whose potential social power can be utilised in community struggles. There is no solution in advocating that women should work, for this involves at best a change in the mode of exploitation, at worst the adoption of a double one. Therefore the women's movement should organise around demands that women should reject housework; meet their husbands on their own grounds outside the home at factory meetings; rent struggles can be fought on the basis that women's social production in the home has more than covered the rent; hold neighbourhood meetings, etc. On the question of wages for housewives, Mariarosa doesn't come down clearly on one side or the other. On the one hand it might give the impression that we wanted to *entrench the condition of institutionalised slavery.... such a demand could scarcely operate as a mobilizing goal" - on the other "it gives an indication for struggle, a direction in organisational terms in which oppression and exploitation, situation of caste and class, find themselves insolubly linked." (p.34 and 53) The resolution of this contradiction involves the understanding of the nature of demands. For a demand is "a goal which is not only a thing, but. • essentially a stage of antagonism of a social relation. Whether the canteen or wages we win will be a victory or a defeat depends on the force of our struggle.' CRUCIAL CONFUSIONS It is impossible in such a brief summary to capture the power and vitality of the writing that makes this pamphlet so stimulating to read. Yet those very qualities conceal what seem to me No. 3. Women's Liberation, Context and to be crucial confusions, leading to the division of a struggle where there should be unity. "We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this female role. We assume that all women are housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives" (p.19);" *..and this social producing labour power as a commodity.... (Selma's introduction p.7); *What we meant precisely is. that housework as work is productive in the Marxian sense, that is, producing surplus value. " (p. 52). The basis of all the problems lies in inese quotations.
Mariarosa confuses the reproduction of labour power with the reproduction of the labourer. The labourer himself (if he is male) reproduces the labour power. Women working in the home reproduce the labourer who sells his labour power with the organisation and demands relating to in order to live, who also can deny its sale, who forms trade unions, who also will have the central part in overthrowing the system. Capitalists would like us to believe that workers are just commodities, cost factors in the production process. They would also like us to believe that the essential nature of woman is to be bound to the family, the home and to produce children because this is advantageous to him. And Mariarosa falls into this trap, as Margaret Benston and many others have done before her.
Yet if we examine women's actual position within capitalist society, it is as clear that women have always worked as that they have always reproduced the labourer; and almost all women have worked at some period of their lives in the capitalist market. Also, images of woman as sexual objects with a sexuality, however distorted, divorced from reproduction, have consistently been used by capitalists in order to assist them to sell commodities. Thus women face a complex triple oppression, not analytically reducible to the single reference point of the home. Since the three types of oppression are partly contradictory, they can be utilised in ideology to weaken a woman's position in any one of them. For a woman working may feel she is negleding her home, or accept poor pay and conditions because she feels she is filling time until the real job of home making begins; a woman in the home suffers from fears that she is no longer attractive (a sex object) to her husband; while a woman who utilises her physical attractiveness in capitalist terms is stigmatised as immoral. And so on. We have to deal with and oppose a triple oppression, and while at one point in time or place, one aspect may seem predominant, our strategy in combatting that oppression must surely inter-relate the struggles, not to emphasise one, to the relative exclusion of the others. Perhaps the clearest case for this yet produced 5 Marare Conson eraticle in Internationoten tialities, which has so far been largely neglected by the movement, and does not even appear in the latest anthology of British writings from the Women's movement (The Body Politic). PROBLEMS OF ORGANISATION Within the home, Mariarosa is absolutely right to point out that a housewife and mother's position is only apparently isolated, and that in fact she hills a crucial role for capitalism in the production of new labourers and the "maintenance" of existing ones (though her work neither directly produces commodities nor surplus value). But although she is in fact firmly tied to the capitalist system as a whole, her isolation and economic dependence do create real problems of organisation not fully recognised by Mariarosa. It is no accident that the parts of the pamphlet dealing housewives is the vaguest.
It can be argued that developing an understanding of their situation, an demystifying it may be easier where women are outside the home, in collectivities, at school or especially in work -though the movement has hardly turned its attention to the possibilities of working in relation to young women in schools. If the politics of work with women in industry is not confined to narrow economic demands such as equal pay, but if such demands are integrated into an understanding of why economic struggles are different for female than for male workers, a basis for reaching or maintaining relationships with women in the home can be developed. It is unfortunately also the case that because of their economic dependency, and because of the chauvinist attitudes of male workers, who often do not regard women as capable of understanding the issues, only the most class-conscious women give full support in strike situations. It is in such situations that the women's movement can utilise the struggle to try and reach strikers wives, again integrating industrial and home based struggles. Such potentialities are not explored in the pamphiet. DIVIDING LINE Finally let this not be misconstrued into the suggestion that this means that I am suggesting that the solution for the subordination of women in the home is work in the capitalist market. It would be ludicrous to say to women that we can be liberated through work; but wethave no right to try to stop women from working until the women's movement can provide an answer to the cash nexus involved in the decision to work. That requires a total revolutionary perspective, linking together all the dimensions of oppression that we face, and relating our struggle against them to a strategy for overthrowing the system As Mariarosa says: "This ultimately is the dividing line between reformism and revolutionary politics within the women's movement" Rosalind Davis.
Letter from Selma James The title your reviewer gave for Women, the Unions and Work, or What is Not to be Done was as incorrect as the name of the publisher she gave. Not Women, Work and the Unions, and not Falling Wall Press. It was published by the Notting Hi ll Group, Women's Liberation Workshop, and is available from 20 Staverton Road, London, N.W.2, at 5p. plus postage. This first edition of 3,000 is almost exhausted and a new expanded edition is planned. Your reviewer perhaps confused this pamphlet with The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community which was published by Falling Wall Press and is available from them, 79 Richmond Road, Bristol (25p. + 4p. postage), from the Women's Liberation Workshop and bookshops. Dalla Costa and I, as members of the International Feminist Collective, are am used at the distinction reviewers and critics of the left here and in Italy have made between our political views. My Women, the Unions and Work and her Women and the Subversion of the Community (which is included in Power of Women) have been treated as contradictory. In reality the two publications are part of a growing body of literature in three languages of our Collective.
Yet in Italy the Dalla Costa article is attacked and the James pamphlet praised; in England the James pamphlet is attacked and the Dalla Costa article considered "important". Is this because for the male-dominated left the revolutionary vista is always more attractive at a distance?
For our Collective, Women, the Unions and Work is a practical articulation of the theoretical position of Power of Women which Dalla Costa and James wrote together. Who does not see the nature of the connection between these two publications understands neither.
Power to the sisters.
Selma James.
NOTE: The mistake over title and publisher was made in the editorial office and not by our reviewer-Eds.