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June 30 - July 20, 2023
women are a Third World where ever we are: low on capital, low on technology, labour intensive, and a source of raw materials, maintenance, and underpaid or unpaid production for the more powerful.
“I know that most men, including those at ease with the problems of greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into their lives.
Policy measures are based on a selective understanding of economic statistics. The national accounts just record a pattern of economic activity. But from the outset, the figures are rigged.
Early national income accounts were evolved, as we shall see, in order to justify paying for wars.
A major reason that only cash generating activities are taken into account is to ensure that countries can determine balance of payments and loan requirements — not as a comparative exercise, but as a controlling exercise.
They are only interested in seeing the cash generating capacity of the debtor countries, not their productive capacity.
Those who are making the decisions are men, and those values which are excluded from this determination are those of our environment, and of women and children.
The current state of the world is the result of a system that attributes little or no “value” to peace. It pays no heed to the preservation of natural resources or to the labour of the majority of its inhabitants or to the unpaid work of the reproduction of human life itself — as well as its main...
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An extraordinary alignment of the male delegation heads from India, the USSR, and the Holy See (yes, the Vatican has a permanent seat in the UN), told us: • An interest in women in any role other than mother is culturally imperialistic, imposing a Western feminist ideology on other quite different cultures. • Support for women’s nonmothering roles must necessarily lead toward destruction of the family. • Development problems must be solved first, and then we can deal with equal opportunities, rights, and benefits for women. • Attempts to employ women will necessarily exacerbate employment
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For example, what feminist wouldn’t enjoy responding to Frederic Engels’ discussion of Dühring’s “Force” theory, and his discussion of slavery.1 He suggests: “in the case of Robinson Crusoe and Friday, so in all cases of domination and subjection up to the present day . . subjugation has always been … a means through which food can be secured [my emphasis].”2
So who “secures food”? I ask myself. Then Engels quotes Karl Marx as writing, …In order to make use of a slave, a man must possess two kinds of things: First, the instruments and material for his slaves’ labour [a household?] and secondly, the minimum means of subsistence for him … Before slave labour could become the dominant mode of production in a whole social group an even far higher increase in production, trade and accumulation of wealth was essential.3 “Property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and, on
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Yet now I delight in exposing these tyrannous ideologies. For example, following a period of despotism, communities see, according to Engels,
their first economic advance consisting in the increase and development of production by means of slave labour.… This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least kept their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier period…
So long as the really working population was so much occupied in their necessary labour that they had no time left for looking after the common affairs of society — the direction of labour, affairs of the state, legal matters, art, science, etc. — so long was it always necessary that there should exist a special class, freed from actual labour, to manage these affairs; and this special class never failed to impose a greater and greater burden of labour, for its own advantage, on the working masses. Only the immense increase of the productive forces attained through large scale industry made it
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Since “workers” are defined as males, since male workers are now capitalists, and since the property imbued in them is womankind, then what Engels describes is a very apt portrayal of the current position of women.
6 I am not arguing that a woman should be paid an assessment lower than the average wage to reproduce herself as a beneficiary in the system. I am talking about attributing monetary valuation to unpaid work, productive and reproductive. This process, called imputation, would make this work visible, influencing policies and concepts, and questioning values.
Mary O’Brien draws attention to this in the introduction to her book The Politics of Reproduction: Feminist scholarship cannot engage in the disciplinary fragmentation which currently pervades social science, nor can it afford the ahistorical indulgences of here and now empiricism. A feminist social science, responding to the cultural pervasiveness of male supremacy, must be a unified social science, a unification which also transcends the partiality of political economy.9
is the economics discipline a functionary and tool of patriarchy — or is patriarchy a functionary and tool of economics? Does it matter?
Albert Einstein wrote: The discovery of general laws in economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilised period of human history has — as is well-known — been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature.10
For example, what changes might occur in global economic policy and practice, if the worth of the planet itself, as well as that of the majority of its human population, were valued?
I suggest a strategy, something each of us can do as we refuse to be cogs in the machinery of perpetuating this barren and murderous economic system.
Mathematical formulas assist the illusion that economics is a value-free science: propaganda is less easily discerned from figures than it is from words.
Xenophon coined the word “oikonomikos” to describe the management or rule of a house or household.
In recent years, economists have begun to infiltrate the field of demography. This is part of the imperialist movement in which we economists try to apply our methodologies to everything — to the law, to the sociology of the family, courtship, marriage, divorce, and cohabitation.
Following that pitiful conception of labour as a curse, comes the very old and androcentric (i.e. male-centred) habit of despising it as belonging to women and then to slaves … for long ages men performed no productive industry at all, being merely hunters and fighters. Our current teachings in the infant science of political economy are naively masculine. They assume as unquestionable that “the economic man” will never do anything unless he has to; will only do it to escape pain or attain pleasure; and will, inevitably, take all he can get and do all he can to outwit, overcome, and if
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Invisible, informal work includes bartering, the trading of goods in informal settings (for example, in flea markets), and “off the books” or “under the table” employment. Workers who do not report work or pay income taxes on earnings and workers who are paid in cash at below minimum wages fall into this category. In addition, volunteer work can be considered informal work.
volunteer work is generally done by women, while financial contributions to voluntary organisations — which take place in the market, are tax-deductible, and have special rules within the economic system — are generally made by men.)
“Home-based work activities” — including housekeeping, home repair and maintenance, do-it-yourself building, and child care — are informal work. So are “deviant work activities” — which include anything from organised crime to petty fraud.
labour force, then, is defined in economics as all members of the working age population who are either employed formally or are seeking or awaiting formal employment.
The skewed definitions of work and labour that are used by economists result in an equally skewed concept of production.
economists usually use labour to mean only those activities that produce surplus value (that is, profit in the marketplace). Consequently, labour (work) that does not produce profits is not considered production.
labour of childbirth may be work for a paid surrogate mother or for the paid midwife, nurse...
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the reproducer, sustainer, and nurturer of human life — does not “produce” anything.
Growing and processing food, nurturing, educating, and running a household — all part of the complex process of reproduction — are unacknowledged as part of the production system.
But what value is a unit of production which cannot guarantee its own continuous and regular production?
The American contributor to the International Encyclopedia of Social Science, A. J. Jaffe, further demonstrates the peculiar reasoning inherent in the international economic system. In the section “The Labour Force — Definitions and Measurement”, he writes that “housewives are excluded from what is measured as the working force because such work is outside the characteristic system of work organisation or production. Moreover their inclusion in the working force would not help policy makers to solve the significant economic problems of American society.”
Vladimir Illich Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution in the USSR, blamed women’s subordinate position in society on their work within the confines of the household. The solution he advocated was to involve women in social production outside the household and to socialise housework.
Chinese writer, novelist, and commentator Han Suyin has written:
Woman as creator of wealth has been totally ignored. Yet the development of civilisation from spinning and weaving by hand to the industrial manufacturers of today require women’s labour. Woman the consumer is also a factor in the economics of any country. Throughout the ages, the role of woman as wealth accumulator has been slighted. Her role as traditional teacher of arts and language and skills, in dance and music and singing and many other fields, is taken for granted and not properly valued.
Ester Boserup’s classic book, Women’s Role in Economic Development,41 demonstrated as long ago as 1970 that women’s invisibility as workers retarded any real process of growth.
French theorist Christine Delphy was concerned to avoid the tempting trap that the answer for women lay with socialism. Using the language of the Marxist school, she discusses their analysis of household labour.
A woman’s agricultural labour, for instance, is not paid if it is performed within the family; she cannot exchange her family production on the market. Therefore, she does not make use of her own labour power. Her husband makes use of it, since he alone can exchange his wife’s production on the market. In the same way a woman does not make use of her housework as long as it is performed within the family; she can only exchange it outside the family. Thus women’s production always has an exchange value — can be exchanged by them — except within the framework of the family. With
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lighter. But as former Norwegian parliamentarian Berit Ås reports: Women researchers are concerned about the fact that growth in many sectors of the economy takes place by adding more work to the existing unpaid work performed by women. For instance, all over the Western world, supermarkets replace small retailers. This requires housewives to increase the time needed for shopping. A Swedish study revealed that a majority of women customers had no car at their disposal. Either they had to shop every day and walk longer distances or they had to carry heavier burdens and use bus transportation
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