*_Details_:*
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*We meet in the _UJ Doornfontein Library_. The next session will be as
follows:*
* *Date:* 27 May (Thursday)
* *Time:* 17h00 sharp to 18h30 sharp
* *Venue:* *_The Library_*, University of Johannesburg, 37 Nind
Street, Doornfontein, Johannesburg (former Technikon
Witwatersrand). Cars enter from the slip road to the left of the
bridge on Siemert Road.
* *Topic: Working-Class Perspecive on Housework
<http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/1981,+Davis,+Angela,+Women,+Race+and+Class,+Chapter+13>*
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On 2010/05/20 10:21 PM, DomzaNet wrote:
*/CU, No Woman, No Revolution, Part 8/*
<http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_D4UK2kWf5ik/S_WZiEk83OI/AAAAAAAACSA/MKnVXNRjvTE/s1600/AngelaLibertad.jpg>
*Women, Race and Class*
Angela Davis is well known but hard to summarise. She is certainly a
scholar. She is also a holder of the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet
Union, and she was twice a Vice-Presidential candidate on behalf of
the CPUSA. /[The image is a Cuban poster for Angela]/.
*This link
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/08/usa.gender>* takes you to
an interview that Angela Davis did with Gary Younge of the Guardian
(London) in 2007, during a trip which also took her to Johannesburg,
as recorded by the *CU here
<http://domza.blogspot.com/2007/11/populism-falls-apart.html>*.
*This link <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis>* takes you to
the Angela Davis page on Wikipedia, where as usual there are more
links, at the bottom of the page.
Chapter 13 from Angela Davis’s 1981 book, /Women, Race and Class/,
linked below, is to a large extent a polemic against the Wages for
Housework Movement of that time, led by Mariarosa Dalla Costa in Italy.
Davis tackles the matter of housework first, arguing for a communist
solution to the drudgery of child care, domestic cleaning, food
preparation, and laundry.
She shows that the current situation of women is historically recent
in origin, and that the repression of women coincides in historical
development of human society with the appearance of private property,
quoting Engels’ “*Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
<http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/1884,+Engels,+Origin+of+the+Family,+Private+Property+and+the+State>*”. Davis reports
on her 1973 interaction with the Masai people of Tanzania, where there
was still division of labour between the sexes that was “complementary
as opposed to hierarchical,” according to Davis.
Davis recounts, in her own way, the nature of the capitalist wages
system, where money is only paid for the survival or continued
availability of labour power, and nothing at all is paid for the
expropriated product of labour. Davis also records aspects of the
South African apartheid system of exploitation, which was still in
full force at that time.
In her concluding paragraph Davis says: “The only significant steps
toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken in the existing
socialist countries.” In other words, wages for housework is an
ineffective gimmick; the real solution to women’s problems in society
can only come from changing society.
The Communist University is suggesting that the democratic
organisation of women in the same kind of way as workers are
organised, so that their organisation is a component of democracy and
is not outside of democracy, is the only way that women can form a
collective purpose.
In the following session we will look at another past polemic between
a partisan of the working class, *Evelyn Reed
<http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/1970,+Reed,+Evelyn,+Women+-+Caste,+Class+or+Oppressed+Sex>*,
and the bourgeois anti-socialist feminists who stood opposed to her in
the late 1960s.
*Click here to download the text of Working-Class Perspective on
Housework, Davis, Women, Race and Class, 1981
<http://communist-university.googlegroups.com/web/1408%2C+Women%2C+Race+%26+Class%2C+C13%2C+Work+%26+Housework%2C+Davis%2C+1981.doc?gda=FoPwzYgAAAB4MbH-vDwpNagN2sDR9UlohmuUjtexlADe7DGFge8c6GvfIqVXRzlw7y1AVxhNsirmy70okYG97wQse1OiD9__wQoW0lXs0Dz6zWtOXFvNgB1Uq>
(7009 words, 11 pages)*
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