In his essay collection Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher takes a moment to muse over the reality television show Supernanny, in which professional nanny Jo Frost would intervene in families where parental authority had broken down to introduce more effective techniques of childrearing and reestablish household order. Fisher wonders if the show is symptomatic of a larger breakdown in the family unit under post-Cold War capitalism, in which the paternal superego has become ineffectual, and the introduction of an outside force is necessary to restore stability. Observing the individualized nature of Frost’s endeavors, Fisher, with tongue in cheek, proposes that perhaps what is really needed is a Marxist Supernanny which would address this breakdown as a wider social problem rather than targeting one household at a time. Fisher’s concept is humorous on its face, but there’s something worth considering here, the concept that a transformation of familial relations is a necessary component of the transition out of capitalism. The recently passed Families Code in Cuba, instituted by popular referendum, gestures at this kind of transformation. In its new legal definition, a family is defined as any group of people who live and are bound together by a sense of love, with an emphasis on the equitable distribution of domestic labor regardless of gender. Familial bonds remain, and indeed are granted wider recognition, but the old structure of patriarchal family units, the root of labor exploitation, is challenged by the code’s emphasis on this shared burden.
The adage of prostitution being the world’s oldest profession is a distorted form of the truth that the oldest division of labor begins with the formation of the patriarchal family unit, in which the labor of reproduction, both the literal process and the broader category of caregiving, or reproductive labor, is imposed onto women by their fathers and husbands. Friedrich Engels directly touched upon this in his work The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, stating “[t]he first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.” Contrasted with primitive communism, where household management is a public matter, the institution of monogamous marriage transforms household management into a private labor separated from direct integration with social production.
Let us take a moment to be explicit as to what “reproductive labor” entails. In Marx’s writings, such as his 1865 address to the First International, “Value Price and Profit,” he discusses how a worker’s wages must be sufficient such that they can “reproduce” their labor power. That is to say, the wages must be able to allow the typical worker, on average, to afford the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, medicine, a dwelling, and the means to raise children who can eventually replace the worker as a source of labor power. However, the reproduction of labor is then not spontaneously achieved with the wages itself or the commodities that they can afford. Labor is now required for this reproduction to be carried out such as cooking meals, cleaning the living space, and caring for children and otherwise incapacitated members of the household.
By the time of the 19th century, the structure of the family in different societies had mutated and transformed many times over, but the fact remained that “[t]he modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.” We have made mention of “household management,” as a sort of synonym of reproductive labor, the task entailed by this “domestic slavery,” and it would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that this is the literal meaning of the very term “economy.” Every household is a microcosm of the planning and coordination inherent to economic activity, even under capitalism’s chaos of the marketplace, and the on-the ground planners for these households, traditionally responsible for measuring and determining the household’s needs and ensuring its maintenance and reproduction, have been women, as a result of their responsibility for the household’s basic needs in cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. The imposition of these duties varies according to the household’s wealth: proletarian women typically take on both the burden of the housewife’s labor in addition to bringing in wages, while the wives of labor aristocracy have, in times of prosperity, sometimes been able to take on the role of the housewife as their sole labor. But, when disposable income is sufficient, and almost universally among the haute bourgeoisie, reproductive labor is “outsourced” onto the domestic worker, a division of labor which is both gendered and racialized, being disproportionately women from the Global South. For the sake of brevity, we shall use the term “Maid” to encompass the variety of seemingly disparate forms which reproductive labor takes on.
For our purposes, the Maid is the archetypal representative of the domestic worker in the position’s manifold manifestations. The figure of the Maid stands for the “feminized” nature of the reproductive labor and service performed by growing numbers of workers in both the metropole and the neo-colonial periphery. The Maid is not inherently proletarian: the role has figured just as easily into slave and feudal relations and can exist as an independent artisan just as easily as a wage laborer. Even as the maid was transformed into a proletarian, a wage worker who has nothing to sell but her labor, she was for a time cut off from the sphere of “production.” The Proletarian Maid in her role as a personal domestic servant was an “unproductive” laborer not because she was personally idle, or her labor was not in of itself a commodity, but because this labor was not performed for the surplus value it would provide the maid’s employer, and instead for its utility - or rather, for its reproductive value. To clarify, if a Maid is paid wages by a capitalist to provide their services to different customers, and in doing so the maid returns with more in payment than their wages, then they have generated surplus value of the capitalist: this is what has made their labor “productive,” even if it is effectively the same labor they would perform if they were the personal domestic servant of a single master.
The transformation of the Proletarian Maid’s work into “productive” labor has become increasingly common in the past century as services which have traditionally been part of the internal labor divisions of the patriarchal household, such as cooking, cleaning, and childcare, have increasingly become major sources of capital accumulation. This transformation of the Maid with the rise of the “services” sector brings reproductive labor back into direct engagement with the sphere of social production in commodity exchange. The Maid is no longer confined to a single home and the direct service of a single master, but instead is an instrument of capital accumulation integrated into the rest of the proletariat. Line cooks, baristas, housekeepers, handymen, yard workers, and countless other occupations fall within the section of the proletariat, those workers whose labor has both a “productive” and “reproductive” nature. This dual character makes the revolutionary potential of the Proletarian Maid particularly interesting: when the Maid’s labor is withheld in these cases, the reproduction of numerous households is put under pressure while it brings the reproduction of capital to a halt. The proletarianization of reproductive labor makes it ripe for organization where it once would have been effectively impossible. Reproductive labor is the foundation upon which all value is ultimately premised - productive labor cannot create value without reproductive labor ensuring that the former is even possible, and the purpose of the wages has always been to ensure this reproduction is possible.
Unlike manufacturing, which is often localized to specific regions and concentrated overwhelmingly in the Global South, the Maid’s industries are pervasive in almost every part of the world, spread across every region. Reproductive labor necessarily entails at least some proximity to the households being reproduced: there is no way to outsource housecleaning to a third world immigrant without bringing them to the first world. This physical presence within the Global North and its necessity makes the reproductive laborer more difficult to uproot as a source of domestic labor disruption through offshoring - should they ever become organized to the same extent as the manufacturing sector once was. Logistics and reproductive services are two of the current major battlegrounds of the labor struggle in North America, each facing distinct challenges but united by the necessity of relative proximity which entails a resistance to displacement abroad, advantages which each can capitalize on. The Proletarian Maid has started to realize the power in her hands and is beginning to use it as leverage against her masters - the next step is for the maids of the world, already organizing and gaining militance, to become aware of their destiny and role as cornerstone of the polity and begin preparing to take this place.
So, if radical organized labor in industries of the Maid is a potential menace, then surely the natural response for capital is to prioritize the automation of such labor (rather than letting gradual advancements in production slowly approach this goal)? It’s certainly not inconceivable that such technologies which make labor inputs in proletarianized reproductive labor minimal could be rolled out within the next few decades if prompted by the threat of militancy among such workers. But the development of productive capabilities under capitalism is always a double-edged sword and creates the kind of disruptions which militant organizations can take advantage of. With so much labor concentrated in matters of reproduction, to try and automate it all at once would have disastrous economic consequences, both massive unemployment and a fall in wages for those who remain employed and already are among the least well-compensated parts of the labor force. If the Maids can organize themselves into a militant organization, binding themselves to the rest of the working masses and armed with a dedication to overturning the established order, then plunging the world into economic crisis will only spur on their rise to power.
Beyond the leverage which the Maid has in the world economy, there is another reason for their position as leaders in this struggle. Historically, the excellence obtained by the upper classes has relied upon the foundation of the work of these domestic workers: the freedom and vitality of the scions of wealth has depended upon the tutors, cooks, cleaners, and nannies whose labor nourishes and cultivates them. In this sense the Maid is the true aristocrat, the administrator of surplus who instills all that could ever potentially be virtuous into the empty shells of the gentry and bourgeoisie. A desirable social order, one that cultivates universal virtue and attends to individual and collective needs, requires a universal administration by the Maids. In that the nature of the role is both servant and administrator, the Maid is the ideal form of leader and the means by which leadership is reproduced. The ideal order is one in which everyone is both instilled with excellence by the Dictatorship of the Maids and elevated to maidhood so that they might impart that same excellence to others.
This socialization of the Maid’s reproductive labor is what constitutes the core of the abolition of the discreet family unit, long established as one of the objectives of the communist movement. Engels states this explicitly in The Principles of Communism:
What will be the influence of communist society on the family? It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.
As we discussed at the beginning, steps like the Families Code in Cuba move towards this vision of the family in communist society, emphasizing the relationship of adults to children as one of responsibility to the vulnerable and the equal sharing of domestic labor over its old division between the sexes. This is the rudimentary form of what becomes the Dictatorship of the Maid, where the labor of reproduction is brought back into the public sphere. Under such an order, everyone capable should be a Maid, working in tandem to provide those basic forms of housework for each other and all those who cannot care for themselves. In the long term, the aim is to eliminate the subject-object distinctions of care as extensively as possible, a social order in which self-sufficiency and interdependence are effectively indistinguishable. The Dictatorship of the Maids begets universal maidhood, and with universal maidhood the dichotomy of “maid” and “master” collapses.