Books by Alice Walker

Why War Is Never a Good Idea  / The Third Life of Grange Copeland / Meridian / The Temple of My Familiar / The Color Purple

By The Light of My Father's Smile / Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems  /  In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

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Lies, Truth and Unwaged Housework

A Response to   The Lie That Unraveled the World  

By Peter Taylor

For the past weeks your column "The Lie That Unraveled the World" has been resonating inside of me.

First, your words sent me back to a speech delivered by C. L. R. James in Brixton, London in August 1981. Titled "Three Black Women Writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange", this talk is recorded in At the Rendezvous of Victory. You may already be familiar with this book (if not I obviously recommend it), in which case please excuse me for quoting the first two paragraphs in full.

I have chosen three books to discuss: Sula by Toni Morrison; Meridian by Alice Walker; and Nappy Edges by Ntozake Shange. These books are by three Black women, though I haven't chosen them because they are Black Women, but because they are very fine Black writers. They are first-class writers. Meridian and Nappy Edges I would place in the very front rank of books being published in the United States today. There is another reason, also, that I was particularly interested in these: they represent a social movement in the United States.

Women all over the world seem to have realized that they have been exploited by men. Marx pointed out many years ago that women were more exploited than the proletariat. (This is a remarkable thing for him to have said.) Now women are beginning to say: "Who and what are we? We don't know. Hitherto we have always tried to fit ourselves into what men and what masculine society required. Now we are going to break through that." These three women have begun to write about Black women's daily lives.

Black women in America for hundreds of years have been scrubbing, sweeping, cleaning, picking up behind people; they have been held in the background; kept for sex. And now Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange have taken these Black women and put them right in the front of American literature. They can't be ignored any more. So it seems that in the women's movement, as usual in the United States, Black people took part; and they have taken a part in it which, as I hope to show you, is important not only to Blacks, but to society as a whole.

If you are indeed "taken as a madman for speaking of Walker's 'relevance'", then you are clearly in the finest of company.

And further on, you write: "For, in Walker's novels, race is indeed significant, but it is never the final determinant."

Again, C.L.R. James expresses a similar reading. While summing up his comments on Sula, James says: "She [Toni Morrison] is also saying that the real fundamental human difference is not between white and Black, it is between man and woman."

I agree with this truth. I leave aside the absurdly obscene 128 gradations, which official France attempted to impose on people in the colonies (pre-Haitian revolution), and the three or four categories into which apartheid South Africa attempted to divide the people, and also the one-drop regime of the United States. For all our complexions, there is only one race - the human race. Even modern science now agrees, and with nuff respect to Peter Tosh:

As they say in Jamaica, "When we are cut, we all bleed red".

Rather, the relation between a man and a woman is fundamental because this is the relationship through which the human race creates the human beings who live on into the future. And after the birth, these relationships of the mother with the father, and of both with the child, remain, for years, fundamental to the survival and growth of this member of the next generation.

This fundamental relationship does not exist between equals. And of course, it functions to maintain, to perpetuate, to reproduce this inequality of power between individuals. As you write in your essay:

America, Europe and also most of the nations and peoples of the earth have oppressive [patriarchal] hierarchies ritualized and institutionalized that lend themselves to the brutal oppression of women, children, and the weak.

And again:

Now, your words sent me back to Sex, Race and Class by Selma James of the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Published some thirty years ago, this pamphlet, along with their other writings, expresses the analytical triumph of the revolutions of the sixties.

A hierarchy of labour-powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages. Racism and sexism training us to acquire and develop certain capabilities at the expense of all others. So planting cane or tea is not a job for white people and changing nappies is not a job for men and beating children is not violence. Race, sex, age, nation, each an indispensable element of the international division of labour. Our feminism bases itself on a hitherto invisible stratum of the hierarchy of labour-powers - the housewife - to which there corresponds no wage at all.

Do you know of the work of the International Campaign for Wages for Housework? They can be reached at http://www.allwomencount.net/.

The revolutions of the sixties - Black, women, youth/student, anti-colonial - broke-up the set of capitalist social relations which had been formed during The Great Depression and formalized during World War II. Expressed in the formula "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work", the assembly line materialized the production of this relationship between variable and surplus value. Crucially, this assembly line ran out the factory gate, through the community and back again. Seen from the point of view of the circuit of commodity-capital, the very first step was the realization of the value embodied in the commodity.

Not merely the sale of goods for a profit, this process had to reproduce labour-power for the waiting factory gates, i.e., to produce labour-power willing to again perform a fair day's work for a fair days wage. During this "age of Keynes", the formal relationship of money to commodity-capital was fixed, pre-determined, and guaranteed by the U.S. government - US$35.00 = 1 oz of gold.

Fuelled by the historic growth in the productivity of labour-power, the revolutions of the sixties attacked and overturned the power relations of capital all up and down the international hierarchy of labour-powers. By the early seventies, rulers of the "big power nations" were openly discussing the "crisis of governability", i.e., the refusal by people to accept their rules.

No longer could capital rely on its circuit as commodity-capital to command sufficient labour-power, to accumulate sufficiently. Formally, the relationship between money and commodity-capital (of dollars to gold) was severed - the U.S. government changed the rules by renouncing its guarantee.

When the working class imposes choices on capital, then capital always chooses against the working class.

Freed of its fixed link to commodity-capital, the U.S. dollar has been backed, since then, by U.S. power and wealth, its value determined by the amount of labour-power it can command. I think this is best seen in the circuit of interest-bearing capital, which both begins and ends outside any circuit of material production. Please don't get me wrong, we live and struggle in a very material (including spiritual) world. Indeed, "Big Oil" was first to really take advantage of the severed relation between money and commodity-capital by raising the dollar value of its commodity (with no reference to wages whatsoever) at a rate described as "the oil shock".

Immediately however, this accumulation created and exponentially expanded "petrodollars", i.e. money in the form of interest-bearing capital. And, despite its ever-expanding mass, the primacy of interest-bearing capital still required the imposition of a spike in interest rates, to levels greater than those existing "at any time since Jesus Christ walked this earth". The unprecedented expansion of debt during the Reagan years merely confirmed and expressed the ongoing domination of capital in its interest-bearing form.

As Marx notes:

These appearances are of course false - and their maintenance requires the telling and the living of lies by the whole of society. And at the top the lies have become total:

9/11 Commission states: There were no links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Bush replies: There were links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

The Black Commentator has portrayed this brilliantly in their picture of the Bush pirates floating in a bubble outside and above the world of human relations - a bubble of self-reproducing lies. In Issue 48 they write "The American "bubble" is a mostly white place, where fantasies of supremacy are passed around to justify [ongoing] privilege and aggression."

In reality, interest-bearing capital is "the result of the entire process of [capitalist] reproduction", i.e. it is money, which, is accepted by all in society as being able to return, after a certain period of time, along with a specified amount of surplus-value, a predetermined quantity of unpaid labour. In this way, capital accepts and assumes into the future its continued rule.

The success of this assumption that the ongoing functioning of the entire society will enable its continued accumulation of unpaid labour, this projected and desired future is actually created and produced by the unwaged labour of women. Daily, their unpaid work produces and re-creates the working-class with our set of internal hierarchical relations, i.e., the working-class in our social relationship to capital.

Since the mid-seventies, capital has stretched, and then stretched again, the international hierarchy of labour-powers and its corresponding scale of wages. Not only raising the top, the focus of capital's attacks have been on anchoring the bottom. Everywhere, these have focused explicitly on health care, education, social welfare, structural adjustments, privatization, migration controls, mass Black incarceration, etc. The result, first and foremost, is more work for women - work that is performed for little pay and for no pay.

When capital attacks, it is working class resistance that illuminates.

Even as capital was moving to consolidate its rule in its interest-bearing form, women in the International Wages for Housework Campaign were already "making visible the stratum at the bottom of the hierarchy of labour-powers - the housewife - to which there corresponds no wage at all". This unwaged labour of housewives is the fundamental source of the surplus-value accumulated by interest-bearing capital. Of course, patriarchy predates capitalism. And from its beginning, capital has exploited this power of men over women.

Now, however, this fundamental human relationship has been incorporated by capital into the very centre of its process of reproduction. No longer do the factory workers versus the assembly-line owners adequately express the class relation; rather, it is the unwaged housewife in confrontation with the moneylenders.

Even as the ever-expanding accumulation of interest payments continues, so also will our opposition to a barbaric, vampire-like, money-shitstem based on false appearances and lies. By laying bare the lie of man's dominion over woman, Alice Walker is speaking the truth. As such, she points the way for us all. As you wrote, we must stop the lies, and start telling the truth. In so doing, by telling the truth, we help create a future of equal rights and justice.

Power to the sisters and therefore to the class.

Peter Taylor is a long-time resident of Toronto, Canada. he was in the youth/student movement of the sixties, and later worked with Payday, an international network of men organizing with the International Wages for Housework Campaign. After marriage, he has actively tried to help his wife raise three children to young adulthood. Throughout, the message and heartbeat of conscious, roots reggae have nourished his spirit and body.

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updated 22 December 2007 / updated 28 2008