[Marxism] Remembering Moms on International Women Day 2009

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

According to some family members it seems I always loved my mother beyond  
comprehension. Mother was extremely defiant and outspoken, cursed like three  
sailors and was stunningly beautiful. The kind of beauty that stopped traffic.  
During my late teens years when we were together all the fellows would ask me  
"who is your girl friend" and in frustration my answer would be "that my 
mother  stupid." Mother reeked with a raw sexuality, loved high culture , dance 
and  music, later becoming a nurse as her marriage to dad began unraveling. 
 
As a child I would eagerly help mother wash clothes in the basement of the  
projects where we lived. The Jefferies Project, the first of its kind in 
America  built under the Roosevelt administration. Everyone had a household job 
in 
our  family life. As an individual you had the democratic right to contribute 
to the  laboring process sustaining the family as a unit and no one had the 
right to not  contribute their creativity to the process. Mom and dad would set 
and adjust the  "party line" and division of labor as one child after another 
grew in age. Years  later I would come to understand that our family social 
life was organized on  the principle of democratic centralism as necessity 
rather 
than political  ideology. 
 
The machining machine back then was this heavy tubular machine with a  
mechanical/powered wringer whose two rolling cylinder would squeeze - pressed,  
the 
water out of clothes. The work was hard but enjoyable. I learned how to wash  
clothes and cook at an early age, only superficially understanding mothers 
toil.  Our family life was organized as an industrial machine with industrial 
time  frames making it efficient to manage six children in the household. 
 
Moms had lyrical sayings with rhythmic beats, which did not always make  
sense  . . . at first. For some reason these saying would come out when she  
was 
ironing clothes. "Iâm a lady, not Sadie, get your own maid/made." 
 
The mind conceives beyond the possible, peering into the future world of  
possibilities. Mother knew she was not made to be a maid. We wanted mother to 
be  
happy and not made. As children barely out of diapers we took our place in 
the  society labor front manifested in our family. 
 
We learned how to iron all our clothes because mother had a tendency to  burn 
- scorch them, and then curse everyone, including dad. Dad would send all  
his nice shirts and pants to the Chinese cleaners. All the boys - five of us,  
would whisper amongst ourselves, "when I get older and have money Iâm going 
to  
the Chinese cleaners and the Chinese restaurant." 
 
I would have to read Marx many years later to understand that the washing  
machine, iron and ironing board were productive forces, that shattered and then 
 
destroyed a historically evolved form of labor and social position attached 
to  it. The washing machine produces clean clothes. 
 
The role of women has changed with every single change in the means of  
production and their final liberation is going to rest upon the absolute  
elimination of the social division of labor that assigns them "the kitchen,  
church and 
children." Such tools as the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the  
dishwasher and the micro wave cooker, did away with much of the form of unpaid  
and 
unaccounted for labor that tied women to household drudgery and a social  
position in our system of production. Coincidentally, the introduction of 
modern  
electronics in the work force has pulled her more and more into social  
production. This tendency is the result of declining wages that demands a two  
worker household in correspondence to instruments that freed her from housework 
 as 
the primary expression of her life as she is "productively active." 
 
Another shift is taking place in the workforce as the financial/economic  
crisis widens unemployment in the manufacturing sector and pushes the majority  
of the workforce into the feminine. 
 
Reductionism has its place in analysis because it allows the mind to  grapple 
with individual events. As a world view reductionism prevents one from  
making sense of a complex of events. Even if the family as a unit, through a  
freak 
accident of history, had a computer but didnât have a washing machine and  
microwave cooker, a women social position would be confined to the household,  
making it possible for the man to go to work. The man could not go to work if 
he  had to do the household work and care for the children, and do all the 
cooking.  This is the historical patriarchal division of labor within the 
family, 
between  husband and wife. She is his helpmate from the standpoint of society 
production.  She makes it possible for "me" to work - sell my labor power to 
the capitalist,  and "my wages" were once enough for all of us to get by on. 
This relationship  was not a one sided thing. However, her wages were never 
given to her but were  once embodied as my wages. Far to often the men spent 
"her 
wages" in the tavern.  

And then wondered why she was made mad. 
 
Women liberation is dependent upon them entering fully and equally into the  
larger production process and not simply reproduction of the family as a unit  
that reproduces the next generation of proletarians. They cannot enter into 
the  larger production process unless they are freed from the drudgery of 
household  work and this drudgery is in turn dependent upon the development of 
the 
means of  household (re)production. The point is that the position of mother, 
women, in  the family is a result of the development of the means of 
production, the  relentless demands of capital, rather than her ovaries. We 
have all 
seen that  the recent changes in the means of production have not only changed 
her place  and role in the family but have changed the form of the family 
itself. This in  turn has allowed women to redefine, on their own basis, the 
meaning of love. 
 
The washing machine is a big thing. This was an amazing advance over having  
to take two and three tubs of water. Chopping wood for fire to heat the water  
and boil the clothes. The labor time involved in this process consumed the 
life  time and energy of generations of women. The society saying was once, " 
you wash  on Monday, and iron on Tuesday, and clean on Wednesday and cook on 
Thursday . .  . A womenâs work is never done." 
 
A womenâs work was never done; it was NEVER DONE and so long as her work  was 
never done she was at the mercy of the person who fed her or made her  
feeding possible, because she could not sell her labor power in the market and  
still be mom! It was the same as the slave in America. 
 
The liberation of women is advancing along a line - a trajectory, and not  
because someone said "this is a good idea." Women liberation comes about the  
same way as the liberation of any and every other class and oppressed group in  
society. They get kicked out of a social position. When the sharecropper got  
kicked off the plantation that was his liberation. As the proletariat gets  
kicked out of his social position and its labor is replaced by more efficient  
forms of energy that will be the proletariats emancipation. Society will then 
be  forced to reorganize the division of labor and meaning of work for society 
to  reproduce itself on another basis, without capitalist private property. 
 
March 8, 2009, International Womenâs Day, arrives at a moment in time where  
the American proletariat is female in its majority configuration. The  
feminization of poverty, starkly written about in the 1980âs and early 
1990âs  has 
revealed itself in its final historic form as the poverty of the  proletariat. 
To say the word proletariat no longer conjures a figure from the  1930's of 
thick armed beefy industrial workers. The proletariat wears a dress or  a 21 
century version of the skilled laborers apron. 
 
All the legislative mandates can not and could not free women, truly  
liberate her, until a revolution in the mode of production occurred that  
systematically destroyed the basis of her social position in the family unit  
founded and 
reproduced on the basis of bourgeois private property. Progressive  
legislation is worth fighting for even when one cannot be liberated beyond the  
existing division of labor. Here is another context to unravel the Women Factor 
 as 
it played itself out in the old Soviet Union of the late 1920's and early  
1930's. Sexual liberation under conditions where women is tied to the household 
 
division of labor, meant that many Soviet men jumped from bed to bed leaving  
children in their departing wake and these children had to be cared for by the  
women, while the revolutionary man went to the next front of the "ass 
struggle."  It was in fact women who demanded new laws governing man-women 
relations. 
Why?  Because there was no washing machine and the women manned the clothes 
cleaning  front with babies attached to the apron. 
 
That is why mother was anger. 
 
WL.
 
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