Re: [Marxism] meaning of labor time in Capital

[J.M.P.Cloke@xxxxxxxxxxx]

It's not so much just a re-working of the exploitation of 
women in the household, but the massive change in gendered 
labour relationships under globalizing capitalism (for 
instance the massive demand for young female labour in 
Export Processing Zones throughout S.E. Asia and the 
resultant change in the role of women in the family and of 
the household itself). When (for instance) I was living 
and working in Nicaragua, not only were female-headed 
households greatly on the increase but also the number of 
multiply female-headed, extended households. This was 
because although Nicaragua had a population of about 5 
million at that time, estimates were that anything between 
1/2-1 million Nicas lived and worked in Costa as a result 
of the economic situation in Nicaragua, and possibly as 
many again to the North throughout mexico and into the US.

These migrant labour flows, sending home up to double the 
value of Nicaraguan exports as remittances (mas o menos 
$800 million) were sustained and sustained the aggregation 
of housholds through economic pressure, and were 
themselves gendered; female domestic labour and sex 
workers south to Costa Rica, male agricultural workers 
south to Costa Rica and North to Mexico and the US, female 
labour of a variety of kinds to the North and sex workers 
in particular to Guatemala. The household in Nicaragua had 
in effect become increasingly transnational and extended 
because of the push-pull factors involved in global 
pressures/opportunities for labour abroad.

In the rich countries of the north, the same pressures 
result in the classical (see Malinowski (1913)) nuclear 
model of the household becoming a luxury that only the 
rich can afford. In a world of part-time, temporary and 
short-term contract labour that is ushered in through the 
rich north, the stereotypical heterosexual household-type 
can only be maintained through both partners having at 
least part-time work, something else which, in tandem with 
the rapid social changes in the perception of the roles of 
women and men produces rapid increases in divorce rates 
and the numbers and types of different kinds of household 
- the nuclear household is now a relative rarity.

What's needed is a re-definition of kinds and types of 
what is considered to be productive labour, as well as 
what constitutes a household, and whether that is a valid 
unit of economic measurement any longer, not because it 
doesn't exist but because it has fragmented in type and 
meaning - which household type(s) and why, and can they 
really be aggregated meaningfully any longer?


 



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