Disco Shifts As Care Work: When Marx Said the "Working-Class", he Meant the Working Women. Part 1.
The Precarity of Devalued, Feminised Labour
Women have always played a significant role in agricultural and textile labour, as well as various forms of vending, before the industrial revolution sought to directly marketise these skills for mass capitalist production. As a writer for Socialism Today notes, the roots of women’s oppression go ‘back thousands of years to when societies first divided along class lines’ as women became the main and most subjugated class exploited by those with ownership over the means of producing - and reproducing - wealth. ‘As an integral part of that (re)production process, during the time of serfdom, women’s role in society became - and is largely still viewed as - primarily a private one within the family, bearing and raising the future generation, and looking after the household.’1 This was due to the misogynistic perception that these nurturing activities, which form part of the social reproduction of labour, ‘come naturally to those with biological traits coded as “female”.2 The working women’s potential biological capabilities, as well as the hypothetical disproportionate responsibility she would bear in the reproduction of this unwaged, “non-labour” - are thus valued above, and regardless of, her abilities, skills, or contributions as a worker. Similarly, her economic circumstances, or even her personal preferences, even when she has the right to own her labour-power as capital, are also overlooked.
It wasn’t until the late 18th/early 19th century Industrial revolution that women began working in factories. This ushered in a clearer distinction between their participation in socially-valued, waged, labour-power, what Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton call ‘Directly Marked-Mediated’, (DMM) labour, and unrecognised, unwaged, ‘Indirectly Market-Mediated’ (IMM) activities.3 Here, Marx’s distinction between the proletariat (‘blue collar, industrial, productive workers’) and the working-class (‘a much broader concept’) is also important. Marx knew that women had always “worked”.4 However, as Marxist writer Terry Eagleton has noted, ‘he [Marx] knew, very well, that most working people in Victorian England weren’t industrial, productive workers, they were domestic servants, and of those, a huge majority were women.’5 Thus, under this definition, the working class becomes largely synonymous with ‘those who sold their labour in domestic situations.’6 This distinction would have offered a new kind of liberation for working-class women, were it not for what Frierdich Engels conceptualised as the ‘Economic Family Plan’.7 The patriarchal nuclear family thus emerged as a necessary means of transferring, through patrimony, private property, including women and any children they may have had. Women who began to enter the labour-force were also often wives and daughters subcontracted by husbands and fathers into selling their labour-power for a price bargained, and often collected, by the head of the family. Indeed, at this time, the ‘women working outside of the home was a blatant indicator of poverty,’ the assumption being that they would have remained at home had the family been able to afford it.8 Women were not, until recently, able to sell their labour as their own. As late as 1965 in France, and 1977 in Germany, ‘women could not engage in wage-labour without the authorisation of their husband,’. 9While this sphere of socially valued production offered women a sense of sociability and community through labour - ‘social in the sense that it denotes cooperation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end,’ as German socialist Clara Zetkin writes, it oppressed and facilitated the victimisation of women by enabling her to gain ‘economic independence’ but ‘neither as a human being nor as a woman or wife to develop her individuality.’10
Nevertheless, women’s tentative entrance into the DMM sphere did lead to an interrogation of women’s dependence on the ‘old family economic system which provided both livelihood (financial dependence on their working husband) and life’s meaning’ (to produce more life); participation in productive, recognised labour-power offered women an opportunity for their labour to be used by capital beyond the unrecognised sphere of social reproduction.11 However, as ‘capital gradually transforms the social relations and modes of labour until they become thoroughly imbued with the nature and requirements of capital,’ the labour process is able to accumulate capital at the expense of the worker’s wellbeing or freedom from capital.12 This was exacerbated by the modification of the Victorian model of separate spheres in the 20th, which promoted domestic consumerism paid for by the ‘family wage’, despite the reality that ‘few families were permitted to achieve it.’13 The 20th century, in particular during the post-bellum period, saw a dramatic rise in consumer consumption for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most preliminary of these was Henry Ford’s introduction of the assembly line into places of production. While this system allegedly increased disposable income - in reality it was lowering the price of consumer goods through economies of scale. As the price of these products dropped, so did their quality since they were mass produced in poor conditions. This meant that while individuals could technically buy more for less, this theory of value only worked on a short-term scale. Ford’s system catastrophically undermined the fundamental sociability of labour; the assembly line stagnated workers at one stage of the production process, alienating them not only from the completed product of their labour, but also from each other as they were trained to carry out one specific aspect of the manufacturing process with little to no need to share skills or work stations. This led to what Karl Marx called the real subsumption of the labour process. Unlike the middle-classes, who in the early 19th century more overtly demonstrated their wealth and leisure time through what Thorstein Veblen coined ‘conspicuous consumption’, the abject working-classes had no option to shift their labour (both waged and unwaged) onto the shoulders of those who occupied a lower social strata.
The advent of consumerism, then, sought to exacerbate this exploitation for working-class women predominantly, and subsequently bolster class hostilities. As the exchange-value of commodities was reduced to accommodate for mass consumption, so too was the labour-value of the proletariat workers, who had to work longer hours in order for capitalists to gain surplus-value from mass manufactured commodities. For the working-class woman, this reduced the time she could spend at home carrying out unwaged non-labour, such as childcare or domestic duties, since she was working. Thanks to her alienation from the unaffordable commodities her labour was producing, she would also have more to do at home than middle-class women who could afford convenience commodities - from devices of domestic convenience like a hoover, to services such as private nannies. Moreover, as Zetkin explains, ‘wherever a woman is no longer forced to fulfil her duties, she devolves her duties as spouse, mother and housewife upon paid servants,’ due to the economic basis of such a familial and economic model.14 Not only is the working-class woman more likely than the middle-class one to need to carry out this additional labour to support her family/husband, but as the ‘modern mode of production slowly undermined domestic production,’ it was predominantly working-class women who sought a livelihood through productive labour because their social class made it impossible for them to rely solely on the economic family plan.15 It was working class women most of all, then, who found themselves trapped within the systems of production which reproduce the conditions of capitalism. She was thus subject to both a social-evaluation in terms of her labour power, whilst expected to continue carrying out unwaged, non-labour activities in the sphere of social reproduction. This attempt, as Karl Polyani wrote, ‘to defend society against economy’, however, led to the separation of these spheres, leaving ‘poor, racialised, and working-class women…to satisfy Victorian ideals of domesticity’ with none of the economic resources they would require in order to do so.16 Nor, as Nancy Fraser goes on to write, ‘were those middle-class women who would conform to Victorian ideals always content with their situation, which combined material comfort and moral prestige with legal minority and institutionalised dependency.’17 Therefore, whilst women’s struggle for emancipation spanned across the social classes, the reliance on the exploitation of the working-class woman in order to produce the circumstances of the middle-class plotted these classes of women against one another. Rather than forging a necessary female solidarity against patriarchal capitalism, rapid-pace capitalism and mass-consumption worked to alienate individuals from each other and from the products of their labour, obfuscating the possibility of women’s emancipation through the deliberate separation of the two spheres.
Anon, ‘Covid, Capitalism and Women’s Double Burden’ in Socialism Today, <https://socialismtoday.org/covid-capitalism-and-womens-double-burden> [accessed 01/07/25]
Lisa Yashodhara Haller, “Capital - State - Gender. A Theoretical Analysis of the Mediation Context,” in Materializing Feminism. Positions on Economy, State and Identity, ed. Lea Haneberg (Münster: Unrast, 2018). (Unpublished translation from German by Callum Sunderland).
Maya Gonzalez, Jeanne Neton, The Logic of Gender: On the separation of sphere and the process of abjection, libcom.org, June 30, 2017, <https://libcom.org/library/logic-gender-separation-spheres-process-abjection#note_3>, [accessed 29/06/25]
Terry Eagleton, ‘Radical Sacrifice, Terry Eagleton and Daniel Soar’, London Review Bookshop Podcast, 24 April 2018, <
Ibid
Ibid
Friedrich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999, 2000. ed: Mark Harris 2010 [accessed 01/07/25]
Gonzalez and Neton
Gonzalez and Neton
Collected Works v 43; Clara Zetkin, ‘Proletarian Woman and Socialism’, Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious, (Speech at the Party Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Goth, October 16th, 1896, Berlin. (p.5)
Zetkin
Karl Marx, ‘The Direct Production Process, in Economic Works of Karl Marx, 1861-1864, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm>, [accessed 01/07/25]
Nancy Fraser, Contradictions of Capital and Care, in New Left Review, 100. (July-August 2016), pp.99-117, (p.104)
Zetkin
Zetkin
Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation, Boston 2001 138-9, 213 (p.87)
Fraser, p.106
To be continued.
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