African Revolutionary Writers, Part 8a
Angela
Davis
Angela Davis is well known,
but hard to summarise. She is 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.
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, at the bottom of the page.
Chapter 13 from Angela
Davis’s 1981 book, Women, Race and Class
(attached) is to a large extent a
polemic against the Wages for Housework Movement of that time, led by Mariarosa
Dalla Costa in Italy. Davis makes an orthodox Marxist defence against a
kind of anarchism or liberalism. Naturally, this does not mean that Davis has
always been orthodox, any more than C L R James was always orthodox.
In this text,
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 the 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 is an ineffective gimmick. The real solution to women’s
problems in society can only come from changing society through the democratic
organisation of women in the same kind of way as workers are organised, so that
their women’s organisation is a component of democracy, and is not outside of
democracy.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Angela
Davis, Women, Race and Class, C13, Work and Housework, 1981.
