Re: AUT: Re: wages for housework

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Another point about wages for housework. Usually the person who pays
wages acquires quite a lot of power over the person to whom the wages
are paid.
  So if the state pays the wages --whether in the form of underwriting
parental care or in the form of fabulous "socialized " childcare
arrangements, or both  --  then the state inevitably is going to feel
entitled to more power to oversee family life. It's not an accident that
Sweden, where the state provides all sorts of wonderful benefits for
parents and very much sees child raising as "social" to use monty's
term,  has the highest rate in the world of child- welfare intervention
into the home, and the highest rate of children being removed from their
homes and taken into foster care. Now too, we know, Sweden had an active
program of involuntary sterilization that lasted  I believe into the
l980s. Sweden also tracks down nonmarital fathers with great zeal--
whether or not the mom wants him to be involved.
  That same logic of "wages" is at work when women on welfare are denied
increased benefits for additional children, or find their checks docked
if their kids miss school or are not taken for their checkups.
  It is hard to imagine an America where childraising is socialized but
in which parents have the degree of free choice they now enjoy. To have
as many kids as they want to, say; or to pass on to their kids their
ancestral beliefs and customs; or to decide for themselves what
childraising philosophy to follow.
  If children are treated as  a social resource, then childraising is
going to be socially directed. I don't think you can have a society in
which much is given to parents, but nothing is demanded. There's no free
lunch. In this society  that means MORE Government, more bureaucracy,
less personal choice and less privacy. That is also true of wages for
housework -- which was a demand made on this society, not some future
world without sexism, marriage, fulltime work or the state.
  I'm not against this tradeoff necessarily -- I'd gladly give up my
freedom to have ten kids and beat them all, in return for free decent
after school programs etc. Maybe people ought to be strongly encouraged
to abort damaged fetuses; maybe more children should be removed from
their parents. Maybe a sailor should be tracked down on his ship and be
forced to take some kind of responsibility for a baby born from a night
of drunken sex with a stranger whose last name they never knew  (an
actual story of Swedish life from Jan Myrdal). I don't know.  But these
interventions are the flip side, the price, of the happy picture Monte
paints -- and  they do seem odd things for ANARCHISTS and anti-statists
to favor.




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