H. Cleaver on:
Domestic labor and value
in
Mariarosa Dalla
Costa's
"Women and the
Subversion of the Community" (1971)
A central point of
Mariarosa's analysis in "Women and the Subversion of the Community"
is to argue that housework, or domestic labor, or for that matter any and all
labor that produces and reproduces labor power is socially productive, i.e.,
produces value and surplus value. "We have to make clear," she
writes, "domestic work produces not merely use values, but is essential to
the production of surplus value." And a footnote adds: "What we meant
precisely is that housework as work is productive in the Marxian sense,
that is, is producing surplus value." This is a claim which is
asserted - in the section of the essay called "Surplus Value and the
Social Factory" - but not really explored in her article. She demonstrates
at length how housework produces a key element of capitalist society - labor
power - but doesn't do so, for the most part, in terms of value. It is also a
claim that was, and remains, highly controversial (and one which Polda
addressed in greater depth in her book - a treatment that I'm going to leave
for future discussion).
The primary objection to this
claim that housework produces value and surplus value derives, of course, from
contrasting her assertion with Marx who treated the production of value and
surplus value uniquely in the context of workers producing commodities for
capital that are sold and on which a profit is realized. This objection, and
the usual reading of Marx, however, usually doesn't critically examine a key
issue: what it means to "produce" value. Neither, of course, does
Mariarosa in this essay.
It seems to me, as I have
argued elsewhere, that while the verb "to produce" is fairly
unproblematic as a way to talk about the creation of commodities, it is much
more troublesome as a way to talk about value (and surplus value). The fact
that Marx inherited the term from the classical economists who also had a labor
theory of value and who also talked freely about workers producing value (if
not surplus value) doesn't make it any less troublesome, indeed any less
misleading. The verb "to produce" is a transitive verb and therefore
calls for a direct object. With respect to commodities (things or services or
labor power that can be sold) "producing" something makes perfectly
good sense and we can easily substitute other transitive synonyms such as
"creating", "making" or "fabricating" without
much worry. But what does it mean to "produce" or "create"
value? Finding a satisfactory answer is not helped by the way Marx also uses
other transitive verbs to talk about value. For example, he talks about labor
"preserving" the value incorporated into raw materials, intermediary
goods or machinery, or that same labor "transferring" value from
those things to some final product.
Unfortunately, partly as a
result of this use of language, interpretations of "value" have often
been derived more from these ways of referring to it as being
"produced", "preserved" or "transferred" rather
than the meaning of "producing" (or "preserving" or
transferring") being derived from what we mean by value. As a result the
meaning of "value" often remains mysterious, even metaphysical,
something like "phlogiston", the alchemical essence of fire -
something gains value from the magical touch of the worker. Or, value is a
category that denotes something intrinsic to humanness and transcends
historical specificity. Thus, a great many interpreters of Marx think that he
had a labor theory of value because he agreed with Engels that labor is central
to the definition of what is human, humans must be understood as essentially
tool-using beings who work, or homo faber - man who makes. We are all
descendents of Hephaistos and Daedalos, inventors and makers of tools that we
use to work.
Against such interpretations,
I have proposed that Marx's labor theory of value is not a theory of the
central value of labor in all human society, but a theory of the value of labor
to capital. Marx doesn't define value as labor because he believes labor is
fundamental to the definition of humanness but because labor is central to the
capitalist organization of society, its fundamental means of social control. It
organizes society by subordinating people's lives to commodity production. What
is fundamental to humanness for Marx is the fact that for him humans have a
conscious will; thus, as he says in chapter seven of Capital the worst
of architects is better than the best of bees (Apis faber) because,
unlike the bees who masterfully build honeycomb after honeycomb by instinct,
the human architect thinks through his project before he begins to build. But
... humans exercise their conscious will in all kinds of ways, not just in
"making" or "producing"; labor/work is only one particular
kind of human endeavor - except in capitalism where every kind of human
activity is progressively subordinated to work, indeed turned into work, either
commodity producing work or the work of producing labor power.
So, what Marx calls the
"substance" of "value" or "abstract labor" in
chapter one of volume one of Capital is nothing more than the labor/work
capital imposes as its means of social control, or, put differently value is
that quality of the labor/work it imposes that consists of its means of social
control - the fundamental role of labor in creating and maintaining the class
relation. All concrete labors have this abstract quality to the degree that
they can all be used by capital for the same purpose of social control. Of
course, "value" also has measure (socially necessary labor time) and
form (exchange value), thus only that work has the quality of "value"
that produces commodities (on which a surplus value is realized via
sale/exchange such that the work can be imposed again on a larger scale; NB:
hence forth all references to commodities include this proviso).
From this point of view we
can interpret Marx's references to labor "producing" value as
denoting that labor which is imposed and which materially contributes to the
production of commodities (and thus to the expanded reproduction of the class
relation). Similarly, when he refers to labor "preserving" or "transferring"
value, we can interpret that as labor having material effects such that
previously expended labor (which produced raw materials or other means of
production) indeed winds up having contributed to the final product. The
opposite situation would obtain if means of production are lost (wasted, left
to rust, buried and forgotten); in that case the labor that was previously
expended producing them would be lost and its quality as value negated. Such
negation of the value quality of expended labor occurs frequently, especially
in periods of crisis/depression when factories shut down and existing inputs
are left to rust/rot/decay. "Value" therefore is a quality of imposed
labor as it functions within circuits of capital that actually succeed in
reproducing themselves on an expanded scale. This means, of course, that
"value" only exists when "surplus value" is realized; the
failure to realize "surplus value" in any line of commodity
production means that line gets shut down and the labor that was part of it
ceases and loses its quality as value.
But what is surplus value? In
terms of substance, surplus value is surplus labor, or surplus "abstract
labor" or surplus labor-as-social control. Surplus vis-à-vis what? Vis-à-vis
the amount of labor capital must impose to produce the commodities necessary
for the reproduction of labor power - or what Marx calls "necessary
labor" vis-à-vis "surplus labor". In Marx's analysis of expanded
reproduction surplus labor is all that concrete labor that produces the means
of production (as opposed to the necessary labor that produces the means of
subsistence).
In all of this what we see is
how Marx's labor theory of value is a theory of capitalist accounting and
therefore only "accounts for" the labor that capital imposes and
oversees directly in commodity production, i.e., waged labor. As Mariarosa
points out this accounting ignores the labor that produces and reproduces labor
power directly. It includes the labor that produces food commodities; it does
not include the labor of buying, storing, cooking and serving that food in the
home and community. Capital doesn't have to keep track/account of domestic
labor because it doesn't pay for it, at least not directly. So, when she says,
as I quoted above, that domestic labor produces value and surplus value we have
to ask ourselves whether, as her critics have argued, her claim is inconsistent
with Marx's theory.
I argue that there is at
least one interpretation of her claim that is not inconsistent. That
interpretation looks at the relationship between unwaged domestic labor that
produces labor power and the waged labor that produces the means of subsistence
as commodities (the value of labor power) and sees how domestic labor keeps
down the labor capital must impose to produce the means of subsistence and
therefore keeps up the proportion of imposed labor that is a surplus. In other
words, the more cooking, the less need for prepared food (that requires more
processing labor for its production than raw foods). Another example: the more
the labor involved in domestic agriculture the less food of any kind needs to
be purchased as commodities, and thus the less of the labor that it imposes
capital need allocate to such production. [According to those who have studied
the reproduction of the South African labor force, it was only the vast amounts
of labor in the "homelands" that made it possible for capitalists to
pay such low wages in gold and diamond mining (and no doubt in many other
circuits of production) and to reap such great profits. When Soviet capital
collectivized agriculture it left peasants domestic plots to produce food for
themselves so that the largest possible proportion of the crop (and thus the
labor expended) on collective and state farms could take the form of surplus.]
Thus we can say that Mariarosa's claim that domestic labor produces surplus
value is quite consistent with Marx's theory as long as by that we mean that
the existence of domestic labor keeps down necessary labor and by doing so
allows capital to realize more of the labor that it imposes in the form of
surplus labor/value. Unwaged domestic labor may not have the quality of
"value" for capital in the same sense as does waged labor, but the
more of it that capital can impose, the greater the surplus value it will be
able to extract. The situation parallels the dynamic of relative surplus value
in which the rate of surplus value is raised not by imposing more labor, but by
reducing the proportion of imposed labor required to produce the commodities
necessary for the reproduction of labor power, i.e., necessary labor.
The implications of this
include: first, capital can achieve higher rates of surplus value if it can
shift the burden of meeting the reproduction needs of the working class from
commodity production to domestic work, second, any reduction of domestic work
will tend to undermine the reproduction of labor power unless it is compensated
by increased commodity production. An example of the first case might be what
occurred in the early 1970s when