Re: value and gender

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim wrote:

"I do a heck of a lot of housework and related family-maintenance
(baby-sitting) work. My wife does, too,
but she cares less about the neatness of the house than I do."

The peculiar thing which Marx doesn't really mention in his 1844 Manuscripts
is how human "species activities" such as caring for an infant can cease to
be fully human expressions which offer satisfaction or interest, but just
become "work which has to be done", which we sigh about at times, i.e.
simple human pleasures, or expressions of human bonding become transformed
into "work", but this work has the tendency to become abstract labour as
well, i.e. the work does not appear as an expression of human "species
activity" which humanises, despite all rhetoric and ideology to the
contrary, but just "work to be done". I consider this has everything to do
with the commodity form, with the value form, as suggested by "the oldest
profession" which Marx considers at the beginning of his manuscript.

Lenin remarks about the "coarseness" of human life, which causes us to say
that we ought not to whinge, disregard our emotion, and "just do the work",
"like a real man" or "like a real woman", or at least be stoic. He was
rather neat and meticulous in his household habits, considering that untidy
personal habits reflected an attitude that some slave or servant would clean
it up, which he considered not morally acceptable. Trotsky was the same way,
insisting on polishing his own footwear and keeping his rifle clean.

Nietzche for his part raised the challenge of transforming our lives into an
expressive "work of art", but this seems to rely in good part on the ability
to let other people do the more "artless" work for us, i.e. an individuation
at the expense of an external social cost, or else at the cost of the
exploitation of our art, or both at the same time. Nevertheless, upon
reflection, all the conditions for solving the problem already exist...  if
people could recognise it.

Jurriaan