Production, Reproduction, and the Problem of Home for Work

Production, Reproduction, and the Problem of Home for Work

The ideological split between home and work in the industrialized West has obscured the ways that each realm shapes the other. It also shaped social policy toward “women in developing countries.” Contemporary political debate maintains an opposition between “mother” and “worker” as well as “work” and “care.” This division reflects a pervasive intellectual and political impasse pervading the organization of knowledge – our scholarship – as well as legal rules, government regulations, and union organizing. 

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The Role of the Housewife in Social Production (1940)

The Role of the Housewife in Social Production (1940)

The labor of a woman, who cooks for her husband, who is making tires in the Firestone plant in Southgate, California, is essentially as much a part of the production of automobile tires as the cooks and waitresses in the cafes where Firestone workers eat. And all the wives of all the Firestone workers, by the necessary social labor they perform in the home, have a part in the production of Firestone Tires, and their labor is as inseparably knit into those tires as is the labor of their husbands.

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The Bronx Slave Market (1950)

The Bronx Slave Market (1950)

I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day. That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. 

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Le operaie della casa (1977)

Le operaie della casa (1977)

That the state is the boss of women and the controller-guarantor of the reproduction of labor-power can be seen directly in the fact that: a) it is the state that controls the family, the birth rate, immigration, emigration etc. through the promulgation of pertinent laws; b) it is always the state that intervenes to stand in for women every time the refusal of housework deepens. Indeed, the struggle of women against housework is the fundamental factor behind certain transformations in the state.

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Insurgent Practice and the Black Panther Party: an Interview with Joshua Bloom

Insurgent Practice and the Black Panther Party: an Interview with Joshua Bloom

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The Black Panther Party was able to sustain disruption because the character of the practices that they had developed, that cultural technology of armed self-defense coupled with this anti-imperialism. It meant that the more authorities repressed them, the more they were able to gather broad allies, who otherwise wouldn’t have supported the party in the first place, but also had their own reasons to really feel threatened by the status quo.

Beyond Parliamentarism: Historical Bases and Prospects for Corbynism

Beyond Parliamentarism: Historical Bases and Prospects for Corbynism

Very few anticipated anything approaching Corbyn’s victory at the beginning of the race, not least Corbyn himself. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to identify the confluence of tendencies that led to this perfect storm in the summer of 2015 – and an analysis of the history of the Labour Party can illuminate situations and strategies for the British left in the coming years.

“There is a tendency to fetishize the fetish”: An Interview with Karl Reitter

“There is a tendency to fetishize the fetish”: An Interview with Karl Reitter

Reitter’s insistence that Capital is not principally a text about the “autonomous” subject of capital, but the specific social relations that underlie capitalism and their constitutive struggles, provides an important challenge. Class struggle, in this reading, is not simply additive to theories of value or crisis; it indicates the historical movement which opens up to the possibility of liberation, a movement which is irreducible to any determinism.

You Can't Evict a Movement: Strategies for Housing Justice in the United States

You Can’t Evict a Movement: Strategies for Housing Justice in the United States

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As neoliberal gentrification accelerates to outrageous levels, we focus on three epicenters of housing struggles to share emerging and long-term strategies of resistance. In doing so, we intend to amplify a national conversation about how to combat the displacement, inequality, and violence that constitute gentrification.