NOTES
1 This happened as part of the massive demonstration of women celebrating International Women's Day in the US, August 1970.
2 This is to assume a whole new meaning for "education", and the work now being done on the history of compulsory education - forced learning- proves this. In England teachers were conceived of as "moral police" who could 1)condition children against "crime""”curb working class reappropriation in the community; 2) destroy "the mob", working class organization based on family which was still either a productive unit or at least a viable organizational unit; 3) make habitual regular attendance and good timekeeping so necessary to children's later employment; and 4) stratify the class by grading and selection. As with the family itself, the transition to this new form of muni control was not smooth and direct, and was the result of contradictory (rices both within the class and within capital, as with every phase of the his-laity of capitalism.
3 Wage labor is based on the subordination of all relationships to the wage relation. The worker must enter as an "individual" into a contract with capital stripped of the protection of kinships.
4 Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State", Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, N.Y., 1967, p.176.
5 We are not dealing here with the narrowness of the nuclear family that prevents children from having an easy transition to forming relations with other people; nor with what follows from this, the argument of psychologists that proper conditioning would have avoided such a crisis. We are dealing with the entire organization of the society, of which family, school and factory are each one ghettoized compartment. So every kind of passage from one to another of these compartments is a painful passage. The pain cannot be eliminated by tinkering with the relations between one ghetto and another but only by the destruction of every ghetto.
6 "Free fares, free lunches, free books" was one of the slogans of a section of the Italian students movement which aimed to connect the struggle of younger students with workers and university students.
7 In Britain and the US the psychologists Eysenck and Jensen, who are convinced "scientifically" that Blacks have a lower "intelligence" than whites, and the progressive educators like Ivan Illyich seem diametrically opposed. What they aim to achieve links them. They are divided by method. In any case the psychologists are not more racist than the rest, only more direct. "Intelligence" is the ability to assume your enemy's case as wisdom and to shape your own logic on the basis of this. Where the whole society operates institutionally on the assumption of white racial superiority, these psychologists propose more conscious and thorough "conditioning" so that children who do not learn to read do not learn instead to make molotov cocktails. A sensible view with which Illyich, who is concerned with the "underachievement" of children (that is, rejection by them of "intelligence"), can agree.
8 In spite of the fact that capital manages the schools, control is never given once and for all. The working class continually and increasingly challenges the contents and refuses the costs of capitalist schooling. The response of the capitalist system is to re-establish its own control, and this control tends to be more and more regimented on factory-like lines. The new policies on education which are being hammered out even as we write, however, are more complex than this. We can only indicate here the impetus for these new policies: (a) Working class youth reject that education prepares them for anything but a factory, even if they will wear white collars there and use typewriters and drawing boards instead of riveting machines. (b) Middle class youth reject the role of mediator between the classes and the repressed personality this mediating role demands. (c) A new labor power more wage and status differentiated is called for. The present egalitarian trend must be reversed. (d) A new type of labor process may be created which will attempt to interest the worker in "participating" instead of refusing the monotony and fragmentation of the present assembly line. If the traditional "road to success" and even "success" itself are rejected by the young, new goals will have to be found to which they can aspire, that is, for which they will go to school and go to work. New "experiments" in "free" education, where the children are encouraged to participate in planning their own education and there is greater democracy between teacher and taught are springing up daily. It is an illusion to believe that this is a defeat for capital any more than regimentation will be a victory. For in the creation of a labor power more creatively manipulated, capital will not in the process lose 0.1% of profit. "As a matter of fact," they are in effect saying, "you can be far more efficient for us if you take your own road, so long as it is through our territory." In some parts of the factory and in the social factory, capital's slogan will increasingly be "Liberty and fraternity to guarantee and even extend equality."
9 We are not at all ignoring the attempts at this moment to make test-tube hahics. But today such mechanisms belong completely to capitalist science rtfid control. The use would be completely against us and against the class. It is not in our interest to abdicate procreation, to consign it to the hands of the enemy. It is in our interest to conquer the freedom to procreate for which we will pay neither the price of the wage nor the price of social exclusion.
10 To the extent that not technological innovation but only "human care" can raise children, the effective liberation from domestic work time, the qualative change of domestic work, can derive only from a movement of women, from a struggle of women: the more the movement grows, the less men"”and first of all political militants-can count on female babyminding. And at the same time the new social ambiance that the movement constructs offers to children social space, with both men and women, that has nothing to do vith the day care centers organized by the State. These are already victories of struggle. Precisely because they are the results of a movement that is by its nature a struggle, they do not aim to substitute any kind of co-operation for the struggle itself.
11 It is impossible to say for how long these tendencies will continue to drive ill® movement forward and when they will turn into their opposite.
12 Some first readers in English have found that this definition of women's 'vork should be more precise. What we meant precisely is that housework as vork is productive in the Marxian sense, that is, is producing surplus value. We speak immediately after about the productivity of the entire female i)lc. To make clearer the productivity of the woman both as related to her vork and as related to her entire role must wait for a later text on which we are now at work. In this the woman's place is explained in a more articulated by from the point of view of the entire capitalist circuit.
13 See Introduction p.l1. Labor power "is a strange commodity for this is not a thing. The ability to labor resides only in a human being whose life is consumed in the process of producing...To describe its basic production and reproduction is to describe women's work."
14 This, however, is being countered by an opposite tendency, to bring women into industry in certain particular sectors. Differing needs of capital within the line geographical sector have produced differing and even opposing propaganda and policies. Where in the past family stability has been based on a relative-standardized mythology (policy and propaganda being uniform and official-uncontested), today various sectors of capital contradict each other and undermine the very definition of family as a stable, unchanging, "natural" unit. The classic example of this is the variety of views and financial policies on birth control. The British government has recently doubled its allocation of funds for this purpose. We must examine to what extent this policy is connected with a racist immigration policy, that is, manipulation of the sources of mature labor power; and with the increasing erosion of the work ethic which results in movements of the unemployed and unsupported mothers, that is, controlling births which pollute the purity of capital with revolutionary children.
15 Which is the policy, among others, of the Communist Party in Italy who for some years proposed a bill to the Italian parliament which would have give a pension to women at home, both housewives and single women, when they reached 55 years of age. The bill was never passed.
16 Today the demand of wages for housework is put forward increasingly and with less opposition in the women's movement in Italy and elsewhere. Since this document was first drafted (June '71), the debate has become more profound and many uncertainties that were due to the relative newness of the discussion have been dispelled. But above all, the weight of the needs of proletarian women has not only radicalized the demands of the movement. It has also given us greater strength and confidence to advance them. A year agn at the beginning of the movement in Italy, there were those who still thought that the State could easily suffocate the female rebellion against housework by "paying" it with a monthly allowance of£7-£8 as they had already done especially with those "wretched of the earth" who were dependent on pensions. Now these uncertainties are largely dissipated. And it is clear in any case that the demand for a wage for housework is only a basis, a perspective, from which to start, whose merit is essentially to link immediately female oppression, subordination and isolation to their material foundation: female exploitation. At this moment this is perhaps the major function of the demand of wages for housework. This gives at once an indication for struggle, a direction in organizational terms in which oppression and exploitation, situation of caste and class, find themselves insolubly linked. The practical, continuous translation of this perspective is the task the movement is facing in Italy and elsewhere.
17 There has been some confusion over what we have said about canteens. A similar confusion expressed itself in the discussions in other countries as well as Italy about wages for housework. As we explained earlier, housework is as institutionalized as factory work and our ultimate goal is to destroy both institutions. But aside from which demand we are speaking about, there is a misunderstanding of what a demand is. It is a goal which is not only a thing but, like capita) at any moment, essentially a stage of antagonism of a social relation. Whether the canteen or the wages we win will be a victory or a defeat depends on the force of our struggle. On that force depends whether the goal is an occasion for capital to more rationally command our labor or an occasion for us to weaken their hold on that command. What form the goal hikes when we achieve it, whether it is wages or canteens or free birth control, emerges and is in fact created in the struggle, and registers the degree of power that we reached in that struggle.
18 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Okonomie, Band 1, Berlin, Dietz, Verlag, 1962, p.5 12. "Large-scale industry makes it a question of life mid death to replace that monstrosity which is a miserable available working population, kept in reserve for the changing needs of exploitation by capital, In replace this with the absolute availability of the individual for changing requisites of work; to replace the partial individual, a mere bearer of a social detail function, with the fully developed individual for whom varied social functions are modes of interplaying natural and acquired activities."
19 "But the other, more fundamental, objection, which we shall develop in the ensuing chapters, flows from our disputing the assumption that the general level of real wages is directly determined by the character of the wage bargain . ..We shall endeavor to show that primarily it is certain other forces which determine the general level of real wages ... We shall argue that there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of bow in this respect the economy in which we live actually works." (Emphasis added.) The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes, N.Y., Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964, p. 13. "Certain other forces", in our view, are first of all. women.
20 It has been noticed that many of the Bolsheviks after 1917 found female partners among the dispossessed aristocracy. When power continues to it-side in men both at the level of the State and in individual relations, women continue to be "the spoil and handmaid of communal lust" (Karl Max, economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1959, p.94). The breed of "the new tsars" goes back a long way. Already in 1921 from "Decisions of the Third Congress of the Communist International", one can read in Part I of "Work Among Women": "The Third Congress of the Comintern confirms the basic proposition of revolutionary Marxism, that is, that there is no 'specific woman question' and no 'specific women's movement', and that every sort of alliance of working women with bourgeois feminism, as well as any support by the women workers of the treacherous tactics of the social compromisers and opportunists, leads to the undermining of the forces of the proletariat ... In order to put an end to women's slavery it is necessary to inaugurate the new Communist organization of society." The theory being male, the practice was to "neutralize". Let us quote from one of the founding fathers. At the first National Conference of Communist Women of the Communist Party of Italy on March 26, 1922, "Comrade Gramsci pointed out that special action must be organized among housewives, who constitute the large majority of the proletarian women. He aid that they should be related in some way to our movement by our setting up special organizations. Housewives, as far as the quality of their work IN concerned, can be considered similar to the artisans and therefore they will hardly be communists; however, because they are the workers' mates, and because they share in some way the workers' life, they are attracted toward communism. Our propaganda can therefore have an influence over [sic] these housewives; it can be instrumental, if not to officer them into our organization, to neutralize them; so that they do not stand in the way of the possible struggles by the workers." (From Compagna, the Italian Communist Party organ for work among women, Year I, No.3 [April 2. 1922],p.2.)