Re: value and gender

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 11/19/03 9:54:13 AM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Joanna wrote: I don't know why we'd call [the comfort of a clean house] "bourgeois" -- people have been > cleaning themselves and their houses for ever. "We" don't. You just have to decide whose side you're on here. Jurriaan   The issue is taken out of its historical context. One must examine cleaning or washing clothes before the advent of electricity and the washing machine to understand the essence of "cleaning" and a clean home. What was called women's work was extremely labor intensive.   The role of women in society has changed with every single change in the means of production in society and their final liberation is going to rest upon - not the thinking of men, but the absolute elimination of the social division of labor that assigns them to "kitchen, church and children - and a job."   The introduction of electronic in the workplace has reconfigured the labor process and draw more and more women into the workplace as the value of labor falls due to the introduction of this technology. What was it that placed women in a position of inferiority in the first place? The only way any group becomes inferior is to be dependent. If you are not dependent, nobody on earth can place you in a position of inferiority. This means that someone or somehow the instruments that allow you to be economically independent - no matter what the means of production are, have to be taken away.   In history women became depndent on the labor expenditure of men and with the evolution of the value system and the man becoming dependent on the ability to sell his labor power, the women as an excluded class from production, became depndent on the wage earning of the men. Here is the bottom line question.   What is still called "women work" in the household is not historical "women work." In the past and to a large degree today a "women's work was never done." And she was at the mercy of the person who feed her - whether she loved this person or not is not relevant, because she could not feed herself by independent means. Washing clothes and cleaning house was an arduous task before the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner and floor cleaner.   The man could not have possibility have survived as a modern laborer without the underpinning of the eighteen hour days of the women. The liberation - to a degree, of the women in the household has been the product of the revolution in cooking, cleaning, child rearing and not some spontaneous impulse of man's thinking.   Once the absolute dependence of women on man was broken and her emergence as not an agent dependent on the male proletariat, but a proletariat dependent on the ability to freely sell her labor power in the market combined with the revolution in the household, the shit hit the fan in a different way.   "Value and gender" means the gender relationship as it evolves on the basis of the value producing system.   Yes, there is a lot of biology involved and I love this part of the equation of gender.   The world looks a lot different when you are retired and the wife goes to work and you get tired of the house being "Not exactly right."   I swear, if the girls do not clean up my stove I am going to kick their asses. Just because I am not working does not mean you can mess over me.   Nonetheless, the historical dimension of the Women Question cannot be ignored because we are not equal in present day society.     Melvin P.