Re: [Fwd: Re: AUT: Re: Selma James Name Change]

[Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:17 17.02.98 Katha responded to what Dave wrote below:
>>
>> The attraction of Wages for Housework for some male leftists is no
>> great mystery. For them it  is a way of "expressing" the "woman
>> question" which satisfactorily reduces it to styles of political
>> rhetoric, and to forms of  economism, which don't challenge the
>> leftist hierarchy of struggles, and which fit in with a general
>> political project of organising and/or educating the working class
>> via. manipulative transitional demands.
>>
>> dave
>>  of not for John Gray Website
>>
>>      --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>   Dave! You are my hero.You've said what I've been stumbling around
>trying to express for months. I would  add that wages for housework
>appears to assert that housework is valuable, important, socially
>productive,necessary -- which is what men always say when women are
>doing it. It attempts to defang the feminist critique of housework by
>claiming to acknowledge its social value and brushing its gendered
>character. The truth is, women do housework because they are subordinate
>to men, not because this is a wonderful way to serve humanity.
>Besides, if housework is so socially valuable, why don't men do more of
>it?


Why this obsession with personal characterisations of Selma James,
(who really cares?) and the turning to name calling of others? Surely
it is possible to argue for or against the ideas of Wages for Housework,
and the possible social consequences for women of such a strategy,
without assuming that everybody who disagees with you on this, does so
because their against the liberation of women?

As for truths: The reason for the gendered division of labor surely
has a lot to do with the subordination of women. But it is also the
truth, whether one like it or not, that a lot of women still take
pride in the housework they do, and even may look down on women who
do not want or manage to do it "in the proper way", while as far as
generalisations goes, men tend to see housework as just something
which have to be done. There is still quite a few women around, even
in Scandinavia, who see the incursions of men into housework as an
attack on their field of control, domination, power. Therefore you
still can hear, though less frequent than before, that I don't allow
my man do this or that.

The unsolved question of both the strategies discussed is how to
avoid them being used as an extension of the subordination to
capital relations of control and exploitation. Another one is
how they fit into the owerthrow of capital relations altogether,
which I think is somewhat more interesting than the defamation
of one woman with the name Selma James.

Harald

  in solidarity,
  Harald Beyer-Arnesen
  haraldba@xxxxxxxxx



     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---