Households and the World-Economy

by Joan K. Smith, Immanuel Wallerstein, Hans-Dieter Evers

In most large scale analyses of the world-economy, the basic building blocks of economies -- households -- are forgotten. This volume is a reminder to researchers of the crucial link between individual household behaviour, the state, and the world-economy. A group of distinguished American and European scholars have brought their work together in this book to present the first world-systems analysis of the household. Drawing together literature from fields as diverse as macro-economic processes and women′s and family studies, this book links the structure of the world labour force to the functioning of the world-economy.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1984

Reviews

[Gordon Goodwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic collection of essays exploring the household, covers the breadth of debate of the applicability of the household as a lens for studying the world economy, ranging from wholehearted support to full rejection of the topic. Rigorous use of global south sources, theoretical justification, and comparison to feudal alternates to the modern household make this a strong entry in the Explorations in the World Economy series. Some of the members of the Household Working Group ended up not fully agreeing with the theoretical stances that the majority came to, and the editors had the intellectual integrity to still include their rebuttals, critiques, and suggestions for alternative approaches. Still, their definition of the household is wonderfully operational, as is the emphasis on the necessity of the unpaid exploitation of women to capitalism. Essentially their argument (one articulated of course in earlier feminist theory) is that the modern household is actually a completely new capitalist development. The new forms with which the physical and reproductive labor of women is exploited (and alienated!) is far from being a relic of feudal patriarchy but an entirely new and heightened form of exploitation that is fully essential to the growth and survival of capitalism.

Even though this book was released in the 1980s it is refreshingly ahead of pseudo-theorists like Tsing, Han, McCarraher, etc. who try to push nonsense notions of the increasing prevalence of nonwage labor as a sign of non-capitalist/"pericapitalist" activity. The essays included here written decades earlier decisively answer no, there is no clever escape from Capitalism via a retreat to nonwaged labor and housework. It's all just Capitalism, root and stem.

I was struck most at how this book anticipates the fetishization of housework, obsession with birth rates, and a trend towards increasingly exploitive gig labor long before the shining examples of the trad wife movement and door dash/Uber/etc. became so prevalent.

There are limitations to the frame of the household (as a specifically defined long and short term resource pooling institution) that are well articulated, namely the need to better root some its basis in more empirical research. What more, there were a handful of areas where I did wonder if items included in their category of nonwage labor could actually still be considered wage labor to traditional definitions. Lastly, a few of the articles were actually quite weak in my opinion, the essay on the theory of gendered labor veers at times into just re-imagined gender essentialism, and on some occasions multiple authors made oblique references to debates/conversations that were clearly very familiar to the actual members of the Household Working Group but not at all to an external reader. Definitely plan on following some of these author's later works and trying to get a better grasp on how this approach's theory has developed since the 1980s.

TLDR: Read actual theory, even if it's boring, and avoid the new age of vulgar economists trying to push their "new take" on capitalism without meaningfully justifying their theories.