Marxism cannot account for reproductive labor or the feminization of work

At no point in Capital does Marx recognise that the reproduction of labour-power entails women’s unpaid domestic work – to prepare food, wash clothes, raise children, make love. On the contrary, he insists on portraying the waged worker as self-reproducing. Even when considering the needs that the workers must satisfy, he portrays them as self-sufficient commodity-buyers, listing among their necessities for life food, housing, clothing, but awkwardly omitting sex, whether they are obtained in a familial setup or purchased, suggesting an immaculate male workers’ life, with only women being morally tainted by industrial labour (Marx 1867, 275). The prostitute is thus negated as a worker, and relegated to an example of women’s degradation, being pictured as belonging to the lowest sediment of the surplus population, the lumpenproletariat that in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte he had described as “the refuse of all classes” (Marx 1852, 149). Even when referring to the generational reproduction of the workforce, Marx makes no mention of women’s contribution to it, and rules out the possibility of any autonomous decision-making on their part with regard to procreation, referring to it as the “natural increase of population” (Marx 1867, 788), commenting that “the capitalist may safely leave this to the workers’ drives for self-preservation and propagation” (Marx 1867, 718), suggesting that procreation is a natural phenomenon, which contradicts the previously cited comment that female factory workers’ neglect of their maternal duties practically amounted to infanticide. Marx also implies that capitalism does not depend on women’s procreative capacity for its self-expansion, given its constant creation of a “surplus population” through its technological revolutions. In reality, capital and the state have been so concerned with population movements that the advent of capitalism marked an extension of the prohibitions against all forms of birth control, in many cases in place even today, and an intensification of the penalties for women tampering with procreation. Marx also ignored that the most important commodities for the reproduction of labour-power in Europe, those that fuelled the Industrial Revolution – sugar, tea, tobacco, rum, cotton – were produced by slave labour, and that since at least the late 17th century an international division of labour, an international assembly line, had been created that cut the cost of producing the industrial work-force, connecting waged and enslaved workers, in ways prefiguring the present use of immigrant labour, serving to cut the cost of producing the industrial work-force. The plantation system was a key step in the formation of an international division of labour that integrated the work of the slaves into the (re)production of the European industrial workforce, while keeping enslaved and waged workers geographically and socially divided. But there is no analysis of slave labour in Capital’s discussion of the working day and the accumulation process, only passing references, although the International supported the boycott of cotton during the Civil War. Why this blindness? Certainly in the case of housework we can see a masculine bias that naturalises reproductive activity and makes it appear, in comparison with industrial labour, as an archaic form soon to be superseded by the progress of industrialisation. In addition, the working class family was all engaged in factory labour and little housework was done in the home. Another possible reason is that Marx was always thinking organisationally and did not see the social forces capable of transforming housework in a revolutionary direction.