Disco Shifts as Care Work: When Marx Said The "Working Class" He Meant The Working Women, part 2
A Woman’s Place Is In The Home, With The Children
The sphere of social reproduction is still largely perceived as feminised on account of the misogynistic perception that ‘however necessary these activities are for the production and reproduction of labour-power, they are structurally made non-labour.’18 As Lucy Freedman writes, ‘for somebody gendered as a woman, then, to insufficiently care for members of your family or community is considered a great failure. In the general social imaginary, it is the job of women to love and discipline the children and men around her into law-abiding subjects, and her fault when this is not how they turn out.’19 The treatment of women as supposedly willing carers first, and labourers second, not only denies that social reproductive labour is, in fact, a form of labour, but also devalues her labour-power carried out in the DMM sphere, justified in defence of gender hierarchies ‘by the fact that [women’s] “passions” lay outside of the workplace.’20 Freedman goes on to recall former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s statement that ‘low income families with working mothers’ were more likely to ‘mug you on the street corner’. This claim is probably true, given that ‘the working-classes - both women and men - spearhead(ed) the struggle for public provision’.21 However, Johnson’s interpretation of this fact ‘lays bare the racist misogyny circulated widely by the government and its policy makers’.22 Thus the hypothetical working-class mother is ‘caught in a double-bind: because she is poor, if she doesn’t work she will have to rely on welfare, and will therefore be setting her children a bad example. If she does work however, then she is negligent and her children will become “feral”.23 As the ongoing gender pay gap demonstrates, regardless of whether or not she chooses to also be a mother, women - unlike men - are still disproportionately undermined in the workplace under the presumption that they can be paid less because they might leave. Patriarchal-Capitalist society has deemed her position as a worker precarious and her labour - even if it does produce surplus-value - of lesser value as a result. Similarly to the way in which Lucy Freedman describes her employer presenting the skills of an ‘unqualified workforce as a USP’, those gendered as men’s inability to bear a child serves as a reason for their continued and higher-valued inclusion in the directly market-mediated, social sphere.24 Consequently, capitalism posits a false dichotomy between labour-power and its bearer, since ‘labour-power is the living, labouring capacity of this person, and as such, it cannot be detached from the bearer.’25 The relegation of women to the parameters, carrying out necessary although undervalued labour, poses a contradiction, since it is this very labour which keeps the sphere of the ‘production and circulation of values’ afloat.
Furthermore, Johnson’s outrageous claim omits the failure of the state - at one point under his care - to manage reproductive labour and commodified care itself since a ‘protracted crisis’ had, by the 1980s, prompted a globalizing and neoliberal regime following the stagflation of the 1970s and the New Left’s challenging, a decade earlier, of the state’s imperial, gender, and racial exclusions. The accumulation of these crises thus ‘promoted state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare, while recruiting (working class) women into the paid workforce.’26 Previously, there had been a drive for ‘public investment in health care, schooling, childcare and old-age pensions,’ in order to reproduce the conditions in which capitalist labour-power can be reproduced, following the dent made in social reproduction by the Second World War and the Great Depression.27 In the 1970s, during which Federici produced her famous essay ‘Wages Against Housework’, (1974), commodified services became more affordable. There was also a growing focus on public health and a large shift to community-based care under the Labour government established in 1974, leading in turn to the rapid expansion of the service and care sectors thanks to advances in productivity which made these commodities affordable with the wage.28 Once the introduction of social welfare had done its job (pardon the pun) to get the system back up and running, the owners of this system of production once again sought to produce surplus-value, thus leading to the dereliction of resources.29 Except, unlike products produced by DMM labour-power, even waged IMM labour is not easy to commodify. Whilst IMM activities such as laundry can be sped up by the use of a washing machine, ‘the time for childcare is never reduced.30 You cannot look after children more quickly: they have to be attended to 24 hours a day.’31 Paradoxically, as more people are needed for this kind of labour, the potential surplus-value of service-industry roles like this depreciates. In order to reduce expenditures then, this type of labour can be rationalised through state organisation which reduces the adult-to-child ratio, or by offering lower wages for the same amount of work; the labour itself is considered too abject for subsumption into the public, better remunerated, sphere.
One way the state dealt with this ‘inverse ratio to surplus-value’ was to facilitate the hiring of unskilled or unqualified workers, or those who else would struggle to find work thanks to circumstances including, but not limited to, a precarious legal status, other family/domestic commitments (such as childcare), or gender, class, and racial bias within the capitalist economy.32 Financialised capitalism ‘reduced real wages, thus raising the number of hours of paid work per household needed to support a family and prompting a desperate scramble to transfer care work to others.’33 In doing so, the state’s negligence produced a ‘care gap,’ since the regime had created the conditions by which care could be funded by public provisions by ‘externalising care work onto families and communities’, only to ‘diminish their capacity to perform it’ by depleting the available commodifiable resources following the accumulation of crises in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.34 An excellent analogy for this reproduction of capitalism through resource minimisation on a smaller scale is to look at what Nestlé does to breastfeeding new mothers in developing countries. The International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), has accused Nestlé of distributing ‘free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula.’35 Mapping the Nestlé case on to that of the globally commodified care industry, here Nestlé serves as the State, while the milk formula mirrors public provisions, and the starving children are, well, the children that Capitalism allows to starve thanks to the supplementation of a lack of social welfare with a privatised, unaffordable care industry. Fraser explains how the need to fill this ‘care gap’ creates a ‘global care chain’, as migrant workers are imported from poorer regions to take on the reproductive and caring labour previously performed by more privileged women.’36 Their participation in this kind of labour means proletariat workers are forced to ‘transfer their own familial and community responsibilities to other, still poorer caregivers, who must in turn do the same - and on and on.’
Today, in 2025, we’re seeing the effects of this ‘global care chain’ once more, as the BBC recently announced the government’s decision to offer early years teachers in England ‘tax-free payments of £4,500 to work in nurseries in disadvantaged areas.’37 While this pay-out will certainly be appreciated, this offer doesn’t resolve the societal factors which contribute to economic disadvantage in these areas, for instance by increasing early years’ workers wages in the long term which would incentivise more people to take on this kind of labour. Rather, the government’s decision to bribe individuals to carry out this devalued labour with a one time payment once again sees the state leaning on individuals to fix inequalities which could and should be resolved through state policy - whilst continuing to offer over-remuneration to less important work. This echoes the short term fix tactics employed by the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher.
The overlooking of the disproportionate burden of labour predominantly carried out by women in the IMM sphere, in addition to the labour-power undertaken in the DMM sphere, is known as the double burden. In 2017, Tithi Bhattacharya wrote Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppressions. In this book, she describes SRT as the work carried out in order to reproduce the conditions in which the worker can perform labour owned by the capitalist. Bhattacharya explains how, at least with shift work, ‘members of the working classes are free in that they own their own bodies;’ they can ‘clock out’ and go home once their shift is done.38 However, for those carrying out unrecognised labour in addition to capitalist productive labour, the distinction between public and private labour, or rather, between spheres of exploitation and non-exploitation, collapses through the penetration of this systemic compulsion into their leisure time. Thus, the benefits of the additional time spent undertaking reproductive labour is subsumed into this capitalist system through the body of the worker, rather than the products of their labour-power being enjoyed by the domesticated individual who carries out this labour in their home. Thus, activities like eating a nice, home-cooked meal, or sleeping in one’s own freshly laundered sheets become inherently productive, as teleology surpasses tautology to the detriment of the individual’s wellbeing and leisure time. The desire for predominantly working-class women’s emancipation from SRT through adequate value attribution thus echoes the sentiment expressed by Federici in 1974, who wrote: ‘to say that we want money 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 condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.’39 The decades between these texts thus demonstrates the contradictory ongoing devaluation of feminised labour in the repeated iteration of a capitalist economy that cannot sustain itself without socially reproductive labour performed by the subjugated working-class.
As well as the stigma attached to working-class women with domestic responsibilities working, this demographic still shoulders a disproportionate degree of the double-burden. Working class women carry out an average of 60% of unpaid work in the home and were subjected to an average pay of £9,000 in the UK in the years leading up to 2020.40 In 2024 they were also less than half as likely to receive a promotion at their current company than women from upper-middle class backgrounds, or to even bother trying to negotiate any kind of pay rise, given that of those who did negotiate, last year more than a third did not receive any kind of raise at all. A further 26% received less than half of their desired raise.41 Thus, working-class women remain firmly stuck to the ‘sticky floor’, a term used to describe systemic barriers such as poorer socio-economic background, lower-quality or no schooling or greater caring responsibilities - thanks to a lack of affordable childcare - that disproportionately impact working-class women. Last year, a Robert Walters’ report found that women from working class backgrounds were 14% more likely than men from similar backgrounds to be either living paycheque-to-paycheque, or relying on additional streams of income.42 This statistic not only exemplifies the devastating circumstances of the working-class woman in our current capitalist society, but it also demonstrates how little progress has been made for the emancipation of the working-classes since Zetkin first posited the impossibility of working-class women relying solely on the economic family plan. Even if the working-class woman in question is situated within a stable nuclear family, most likely her partner/family is likely to be facing similar economic obstacles from within the same social strata. Perhaps she’s the sole provider for a minor. Or perhaps she’s alone. Whilst many middle-class women may find themselves discontent and dependent within the Victorian ideal, nevertheless it is the working-class woman who is vilified, overlooked, and/or exploited by patriarchal-capitalism in order for those who occupy higher social positions to conveniently benefit from her commodified labour and “non-labour”.
To be continued.
18 Gonzalez and Neton
Lucy Freedman, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place: An Education Worker’s Reflections on the Carceralisation of Care’, in Invert Journal, (31/05/2020), < https://invertjournal.org.uk/posts?view=articles&post=7106265#gender-as-accumulation-strategy> [accessed 2023] pp.4-12
Ibid, p.8
Fraser, p.109
Freedman, p.8
Ibid, p.8
Ibid, p.7
Gonzalez and Neton
Fraser, p.112
Fraser, p.102
Anon, ‘1968-1977: Rethinking the National Health Service’, in Nuffield Trust, <https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/chapter/1968-1977-rethinking-the-national-health-service-1#toc-header-2>, [accessed 03/07/25]
Fraser, p.112
Gonzalez and Neton
Ibid
Ibid
Fraser p.114
Fraser p.104
"How breastfeeding is undermined". IBFAN. Archived from the original on April 15, 2007. Retrieved June 6, 2007.
Fraser, p.114
Cachella Smith, ‘Nursery teachers to get £4,500 to work in disadvantaged areas’, in BBC News, 7 July 2025, <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5z1pp7q4do#:~:text=Early%20years%20teachers%20in%20England,government%20efforts%20to%20boost%20standards.> [accessed 08/07/2025]
Alan Sears, ‘Body politics: the social reproduction of sexualities’ in Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, (2017) pp.171-192 (p.176)
Sylvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, 1974
Christine Thomas, ‘Covid, Capitalism, and Women’s Double Burden’, Socialism Today, 1 September 2020, <https://socialismtoday.org/covid-capitalism-and-womens-double-burden>, [accessed 15/09/2025]
Anon, ‘Sticky floors: Only 26% of working-class female professionals have been offered a promotion’, in The Canary, 11 March 2024, <https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2024/03/07/working-class-women-pay/>, [accessed 03/07/2025]
Laura O’Flynn, ‘Cost of living crisis twice as bad for women’, in Robert Walters US, 22 March 2023, <https://www.robertwalters.us/insights/news/blog/cost-of-living-crisis-twice-as-bad-for-women.html>, [accessed 03/07/2025]
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