Domestic labour and capital

Abstract

The direct products of domestic labour are not commodities; such products as clean clothes and cooked meals are not produced for the market by domestic labour and are not exchanged. Rather, they are produced for the direct satisfaction, without further transformation, of the needs of the producer and her family. In this sense domestic labour is private production. But it is not only distinguished by its location in non commodity production; it is also private production in another sense. No division of labour exists within its realm. All housewives perform very similar tasks, and they perform them in isolation, unless aided by other members of their families. Neither of the types of division of labour that Marx described as operating within commodity production—the a priori division of labour between workers employed by an individual capital through the organising control and authority of the capitalist, and the a posteriori social division of labour between workers employed by different capitals which, through the market, operates via the coercive force of competition—neither of these divisions of labour touches domestic labour. The only division of labour to which domestic labour is subject is that it is divided from commodity production. Indeed, this division comprises the specific form that the sexual division of labour, in its broadest sense, takes in capitalist society.