No Woman, No Revolution, Part 8a
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 US
Vice-Presidential candidate on behalf of the CPUSA. [The image is a
Cuban poster for Angela].
This link 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.
This link takes you to the Angela Davis page on Wikipedia,
where, as usual, there are more links, including those 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”. 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 under capitalism 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.
Wages for housework is not a major issue in South Africa at the present
time.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Working-Class
Perspective on Housework, Davis, Women, Race and Class, 1981.
