Summary: | Feminist issue and Marxist issue mainly meet under the question of
reproduction of working class in capitalism. Among other things, the
existence of capitalist system is conditioned by possibility of, how Marx put
it, „worker to show up at factory’s gates every day“. Traditional Marxist
analysis of this question entails taking wage as a main point. According to
this position, reproduction of a worker is thought only through a wage as
money paid to him for buying his/her labor force. It is at this point where
feminist perspective help us see narrowness of traditional Marxist analysis
by insisting on category of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is unpaid
housework that is mostly done by women. Nonetheless, introduction of this
category is not just an addition to Marxist analysis since this labor is
necessary for reproduction of capitalist system itself. It is a system that
allocates labor in such a way that besides paid waged labor there also exists
unpaid reproductive labor that is also crucial for existence of the system.
This leads us to two complex problems: question of women’s emancipation in
capitalism and question of productivity of labor in capitalism.
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