#unwaged

[mostlyghostie]

I’ve set up a new honesty system based discount on my Etsy shop for anyone and everyone who is currently not employed or is low paid; just enter HONESTY25 at checkout to get a quarter off anything.

(The honesty system means don’t use the code if it doesn’t apply to you, I am a part time illustrator, not a global corporation)

Please also feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss commissioning something that isn’t currently listed on the shop, happy to consider anything!

[thegreenleavesofspring]

Actually you know what I'm gonna write this story but I'm gonna crowdsource it this time.

The stage: Earth at some unspecified point in the future when there is space travel, a one world order, a population decimation, and martial law. A war is ongoing with a planet full of human-passing aliens, who wish to commit a total genocide on Earth to acquire the planet for the use of their own overpopulation.

The scene: five(ish, maybe three, something like that,) years previously, one of said aliens, a spy, came to Earth, and married a human woman for cover. He has recently been discovered and incarcerated and is to be executed today.

The dilemma: I need him to escape as the very first scene. His wife is the guard during his execution, presumably as a test of her loyalty to the military order. Now:

*This is a double cross on the part of the military and she escapes with him when they start trying to kill her too

**This was my initial teenage explanation, and it's kind of a neat one, but it has implications that I never explored further and ultimately have decided to scrap that angle entirely.

[transmutationisms]

hi could you elaborate on why you don't think emotional labour is useful for analyzing interpersonal relationships? do you think there are contexts in which it is a useful tool? thank you for your time!

every human interaction involves managing and regulating one's persona and emotions. the reason to single out the way that this happens in a workplace (this is what the "labour" part of the term initially referred to) is because wage labour is the basis of a specific type of relation formed between capitalist (purchaser of labour-power) and worker (estranged from the products of their labour; selling their labour as a commodity). the value imo of the term "emotional labour" is to draw attention to the way that the material circumstance of estranged labour demands an affective performance from many workers. the resultant estrangement that a worker may experience from their own emotional state is part of the larger historical process of alienation that culminates (thus far) in the social form of wage labour.

it is of course true that the emotional and affective regulation people engage in outside of the workplace can also be alienating and exhausting, and it's definitely true that it is demanded more of some people than of others (particularly along lines of race and gender). i just don't think it's particularly useful to analyse ALL instances of emotional regulation or persona management in a way that ignores what makes the position of the waged labourer distinct.

similarly, when we talk about instances of domestic and reproductive labour that occur within the 'private sphere' of the family and are therefore unwaged and occurring without an employer-employee relationship, we specify that. it's still labour and is in fact crucial to capitalist production. but the distinction between an employer-employee relationship (characterised, again, by the purchasing of labour-power as a commodity) and other relationships (which may still be exploitative, alienating, or otherwise shitty or miserable) matters, and analysis that ignores that distinction is likely to become imprecise and trite very quickly.

[maaarine]

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Yanis Varoufakis, 2023)

"What we need, then, is a new story that explains not what we wish would happen but what is actually happening, and that is the story of how rent – the defining economic trait of feudalism – staged its remarkable comeback.

Under feudalism, rent was easy enough to grasp.

Courtesy of some accident of birth, or royal decree, the feudal lord obtained the deeds to a plot of land which empowered him to extract part of the harvest produced by the peasants who had been born and raised on that land.

Under capitalism, grasping the meaning of rent, and distinguishing it from profit, is much harder – a difficulty I witnessed first-hand when as a university teacher I would struggle to help my students spot the difference between the two.

Arithmetically, there is no difference: both rent and profit amount to money left over once costs are paid for.

The difference is subtler, qualitative, almost abstract: profit is vulnerable to market competition, rent is not.

The reason is their different origins.

Rent flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply, like fertile soil or land containing fossil fuels; you cannot produce more of these resources, however much money you might invest in them.

Profit, in contrast, flows into the pockets of entrepreneurial people who have invested in things that would not have otherwise existed – things like Edison’s light bulb or Jobs’s iPhone.

It is this fact – that these commodities were invented and created and so can be invented and created again but better by someone else – that renders profit vulnerable to competition. (…)

Capitalism prevailed when profit overwhelmed rent, a historic triumph coinciding with the transformation of productive work and property rights into commodities to be sold via labour and share markets respectively.

It was not just an economic victory.

Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets. (…)

Why didn’t Nokia, Sony or Blackberry build their own store?

Because it was too late: with so many people signed up to Apple, the thousands of third-party developers were not going to spend their time and effort developing apps for other platforms.

To be competitive, Apple’s unwaged third-party developers, mainly partnerships or small capitalist firms, had no choice but to operate via the Apple Store.

The price? A 30 per cent ground rent, paid to Apple on all their revenues.

Thus a vassal capitalist class grew from the fertile soil of the first cloud fief: the Apple Store."

[gothhabiba]

Loving the people in your family, mind you, is not at odds with a commitment to family abolition. Quite the reverse. I will hazard a definition of love: to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital. If this is true, then restricting the number of mothers (of whatever gender) to whom a child has access, on the basis that I am the “real” mother, is not necessarily a form of love worthy of the name. Perchance, when you were very young (assuming you grew up in a nuclear household), you quietly noticed the oppressiveness of the function assigned to whoever was the mother in your home. You sensed her loneliness. You felt a twinge of solidarity. In my experience, children often “get” this better than most: when you love someone, it simply makes no sense to endorse a social technology that isolates them, privatizes their lifeworld, arbitrarily assigns their dwelling-place, class, and very identity in law, and drastically circumscribes their sphere of intimate, interdependent ties. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Most family abolitionists love their families. It is true of course that it is usually the people who have had bad experiences within a social system, and who feel things besides love for that system, who initiate movements to overthrow it. But loving one’s family in spite of a “hard childhood” is pretty typical of the would-be family abolitionist. She may, for instance, sense in her gut that she and the members of her family simply aren’t good for each other, while also loving them, wishing them joy, and knowing full well that there are few or no available alternatives in this world when it comes to providing much-needed care for everybody in question. Frankly, loving one’s family can be a problem for anyone. It might put extra weights around the ankles of a domestic battery survivor seeking to escape (especially given the economic punishments imposed by capitalism on those who flee commodified housing). It might hinder a trans or disabled child from claiming medical care. It might dissuade someone from getting an abortion. Right now, few would deny that reproductive rights—let alone justice—are everywhere systematically denied to populations. Austerity policies purposively render proletarian baby-making crushingly unaffordable, even for two or three or four adults working together, let alone one. Housework is sexed, racialized, and (except in the houses of the rich) unwaged. It is unsurprising, in these global conditions, that large numbers of humans do not or cannot love their families. Reasons range from simple incompatibility to various phobias, ableism, sexual violence, and neglect.

— Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family. Verso, 2022.

[djuvlipen]

"Wages for housework as a perspective attempts to analyze women's situation and society as a whole. It attempts feminism in revaluing the contribution women have always made, in demonstrating the essentiality and value of women's most degraded and most universal functions. In breaking the ideological tie of that work to women's biology, it attempts to base a claim for a fair share of social product for an activity that almost all women perform, and perform largely for men. It attempts marxism in grounding its analysis of women's oppression in the exploitation-the nonvaluing in the political-economic sense--of women's work, in arguing for the contribution of this work to capital and its expansion. In this way, it grounds an analysis of women's power in her productive role, not incidentally changing the definition of production. In so doing, wages for housework makes women's liberation a critical moment in class struggle. At the same time, women's struggle is united with that of all unwaged workers, a new stratum of the exploited found beneath waged slavery. Discussions of wages for housework thus open critical issues of value; labor and its division by sex and sphere; conceptions of the meaning, structure, and inner dynamics of the social order of sex and class; and the sources and strategies for mobilizing political power toward a social transformation that is conceived as total."

Catharine Mackinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

[ghelgheli]

i love your thoughtful posts and your patience in answering questions, was wondering if you had read transgender marxism and if so what did you think of it? ty!

thank you 💖💖

i put off answering this ask specifically to read transgender marxism. i hadn't realized, going in, that it was an anthology of essays rather than a book with a single thesis and thread. having worked through them all i have to say... i was underwhelmed.

a few of the essays (e.g. queer workerism against work and seizing the means) read as restatements, using assorted theoretical widgets, of the rote fact that aspiration toward class consciousness and proletarian revolution demands that we organize with a consciousness of transness. true! moving on.

a few others (trans work employment trajectories, notes from brazil, dialogue on deleuze) felt like re-presentations of known knowns and (sorry!) kind of pedestrian to work thru.

several of the later essays (and especially the afterword, which as far as i could tell misrepresented at least JGP in histories of the transgender child and possibly even metabolic rift) bored me near to tears and were difficult to distinguish from the wordplay of theorizing purely in the realm of ideas. i'm pretty sure i think "‘Why Are We Like This?’: The Primacy of Transsexuality" by xandra metcalfe is just wrong and plays into racialist constructions of the plasticity of the subject while trying to construct an image of liberation.

that said, I had some favourites that i would recommend:

Encounters in Lancaster by JN Hoad. i posted an excerpt of this one recently. the analogies to atomism, the conception of the aleatrix, the image of heterosexuality as the swerving stream that sweeps us up in its currents—i thought it was beautiful and sharp.

The Bridge Between Gender and Organising by Farah Thompson. also posted an excerpt of this one. just a good autobiographical account with clear upshots of one subjectivity of organizing for a Black trans woman

A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction by Nat Raha. this is a critical recommendation (i think there is a classic overuse/misapplication of "femme" thru the text) but the concept of "gender labour" (not gendered labour!) and of the transfeminine subject as being relegated to the lowest, informal and unwaged rung of performing this labour in service of gender maintenance is something that will stay with me

i also enjoyed Transgender and Disabled Bodies: Between Pain and the Imaginary by Zoe Belinsky. don't have too much to say about this one. here's an excerpt tho: "The organism creates her own foundation: she continually creates the being of her own species – the condition for creating the ‘I can’. She continually creates her capacity to create that species-being and the ‘I can’. She does this through the collective labour of organisms labouring in common, in order to coordinate themselves as sensory parts in a higher organism. The labourers must move from particularity to generality in order to establish the general horizon of transformative possibilities: the inorganic body – institutions, tools of culture – that support the creative capacity of the human body."

[skullinahat]

"Wages for Housework came up with a remarkably precise dictum to convey their perspective on the activities performed by so many women in their own homes: "They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work." Pointedly, they did not deny that unwaged childcare, elder-care, housekeeping, sex, emotional labor, wifehood, might be a manifestation of love. Rather, the militants argued that "nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires". Put differently: the fact that caring for a private home under capitalism often is an expression of loving desire, while at the same time being life-choking work, is precisely the problem. That the "they" of the dictum-bosses, husbands, dads-are not wrong about this illustrates the insidiousness of the violence care-workers encounter (and mete out) in the family-form. It's the reason paid and unpaid domestics, and paid and unpaid mothers, still have to fight just to be seen as workers. And why being recognized as workers remains only a precursor to-one day-ending their exploitation and, by extension, beginning to know a new and different form of love, just as Kollontai envisioned it: a love beyond the family."

Abolish the Family, Sophie Lewis.

[thegreenleavesofspring]

Me: *rereading Draft Zeta of the first chapter of the scifi story I've been working on for almost fifteen years* No, nope, not remotely close to right either...

[probablyasocialecologist]

To pseudo-socialist antis, abortion access is a tool of capitalists to trick women into abandoning their true calling as mothers in order to make them more effective wage slaves—ignoring that actual Marxist feminists, including Engels himself, consistently argued that women’s liberation from the unwaged drudgery and violence of the home is an essential part of the communist horizon. They erase the work of Black reproductive rights organizations like SisterSong, who have long argued that abortion rights must exist alongside the right to have children in safe and sustainable communities. And they ignore the fact that liberals have never done much to make abortion accessible to the poor. In fact, Democrat Jimmy Carter supported the Hyde Amendment, which banned using federal Medicaid to cover almost all abortion services, claiming “there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t.” And it takes a jaw-dropping revision of history to ignore that the anti-abortion, trickle-down Reaganomics Right has been at the forefront of destroying anything approaching a social safety net, railing against handouts specifically on the basis that they allow women to rely on the state for survival rather than a husband, like God intended.

Emily Janakiram, The Right’s Fight for Women

[nyanbinary-perineum]

Do you support an annual living wag?

Enough wag to support you comfortably and have some left over wag to put back into the petconomy? Maybe invest in the bark market?

For each pet a bowl WITH their name on it and no tail left unwagged >:3

[westernillinois]

What was the task at hand? Organizing a planetary women’s strike, a seizure of the means of reproduction (seizure of cold hard cash, at least to begin with). It didn’t matter if society agreed that wages were, in fact, owed for women’s labor. As the slogan enjoined: Women of all ages, collect your wages! Wages for Housework was “serving notice” to “all governments.” They demanded the entirety of the money due to their sex “in full and retroactive.” Wages for Housework came up with a remarkably precise dictum to convey their perspective on the activities performed by so many women in their own homes: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.” Pointedly, they did not deny that unwaged childcare, eldercare, housekeeping, sex, emotional labor, wifehood, might be a manifestation of love. Rather, the militants argued that “nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.” Put differently: the fact that caring for a private home under capitalism often is an expression of loving desire, while at the same time being life-choking work, is precisely the problem. That the “they” of the dictum—bosses, husbands, dads—are not wrong about this illustrates the insidiousness of the violence care-workers encounter (and mete out) in the family-form. It’s the reason paid and unpaid domestics, and paid and unpaid mothers, still have to fight just to be seen as workers. And why being recognized as workers remains only a precursor to—one day—ending their exploitation and, by extension, beginning to know a new and different form of love, just as Kollontai envisioned it: a love beyond the family.

Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family

[crimsaph]

Some of you still seem to operate under the impression that the patriarchy can be solved if we are nicer to men. Do you think the patriarchy exists because women are too mean? Do you think we will liberate ourselves by being sweet???

The patriarchy exists because it is a coercive structure designed to extract unwaged reproductive labor from women. It does not exist because somehow women collectively are not nice enough to men after a lifetime of living as the second sex.

A power structure exists for a reason. The patriarchy is one such power structure. The reason it exists is because it benefits men to have a second class of people to extricate resources and labor from. It pisses me off so much when people spew nonsense about how dismantling the patriarchy benefits men too. If a system benefits no one then it wouldn't exist, and the patriarchy definitely fucking exists. If dismantling it would benefit men so much, it would have never existed in the first place.

We will not dismantle this structure by convincing men to willingly give it up by being nice and coddling them, because the structure provides a material benefit to the oppressor class. The only path to liberation is to rip it from their hands.

[female-malice]

Capitalism is destroying our planet, but like most social progress in the last two centuries, ecological justice can only be achieved through working-class struggle. In Workers of the Earth, Stefania Barca uncovers the environmental history and political ecology of labour to shed new light on the potentiality of workers as ecological subjects. Taking an ecofeminist approach, this ground-breaking book makes a unique contribution to the emerging field of environmental labour studies, expanding the category of labour to include waged and unwaged, industrial and meta-industrial workers. Going beyond conventional categories of ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ as separate spheres of human experience, Barca offers a fresh perspective on the place of labour in today’s global climate struggle, reminding us that the fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism.

---

NEW RADICAL FEMINIST ECOLOGICAL TEXT !!!

[azspot]

In a world increasingly dominated by cloud capital, which is produced largely by the free labor of unwaged cloud serfs, organizing the proletariat — and indeed the precariat — is not going to cut it. I am not suggesting that organizing factory workers, train drivers, teachers and nurses is no longer necessary. What I am saying is that it is far from sufficient. To stand any chance of overthrowing technofeudalism and putting the demos back into democracy, we need to gather not just the traditional proletariat and the cloud proles but also the cloud serfs and, indeed, at least some of the vassal capitalists. Nothing less than such a grand coalition that includes them all can undermine technofeudalism sufficiently.

Yanis Varoufakis

[gothhabiba]

do you think its ontologically impossible for mothers to use household duties to abuse their children? /gen

it is impossible for a mother to abuse her children? no. it is impossible for household “chores” (whether their performance or non-performance) to feature in this abuse in any way? no.

does the fact “it is something that sometimes happens in the world that mothers abuse their children” equate to justification for the claim “women have power over men”? also no.

is “women’s unwaged labour in the home is a source of power over their husbands and children” the best way (or even a half-reasonable way) to analyse the relationship between gender, domestic labour, and the status of children in our society? absolutely not.