Progress perverted (2024)

Book Review from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Work. A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time. By Helen Hester & Nick Srnicek. Verso, 2023. 282pp.

A key concept in this book is ‘social reproduction’. What the authors mean by this is work in areas such as healthcare, education, catering and social services, as well as the essential, ‘unpaid’ work people do outside of the workplace and largely at home (cooking, caring, cleaning, etc.). They examine the contribution of this kind of work to keeping human society operating across the whole range of other work taking place in the production and distribution of goods and services. Their approach to this is to trace the evolving history of that social reproduction, in particular as it has operated in the domestic sphere over the last century and a half, the influence on it of advancing technology (eg electricity, gas, sewerage, running water, waste removal), and the changes in attitudes and expectations this has brought about. Referring to themselves as ‘socialist republicans’, they devote the final chapter of their book to examining what the future might hold for social reproduction and the home generally, especially in an imagined new social context referred to variously as ‘post-work’, ‘post-capitalism’ or ‘post-scarcity’.

This is a detailed many-faceted exposition which draws upon multiple sources and studies. They point to how capitalism forces many workers ‘to waste precious hours of their lives on work that is neither stimulating, creative nor productive’, how much of the ‘free time’ spent at home is taken up with unsatisfying chores, especially for women, and how wasteful (‘a colossal squandering of human time, effort and labour’) is the organisation of people into atomised individual housing units which makes each person or family continually repeat activities such as cooking, laundering, washing up and cleaning rather than save energy, time and trouble by making communal activities of them. In their analysis of how the organisation of work and home in capitalist society presents obstacles to activity that satisfies individuals’ needs and talents, they also point tellingly to how, in ways we will all recognise, technology, ‘rather than reducing the amount of time spent on work …more often than not … seems to lead to more work’, while, if the social conditions were different, that same technology could ‘serve as an ally in the quest for temporal autonomy and for the recognition, redistribution and reduction of reproductive labour’.

It is in their final chapter, entitled ‘After Work’, that they put the most detailed flesh on what they consider could, given the right social conditions, constitute truly fulfilling non-coercive progress for human society. After offering a thoroughly recognisable picture of work under capitalism (eg, ‘the majority of us must give up forty hours or more per week in exchange for survival, typically selecting from a narrow range of possible jobs where decisions over what we do on a daily basis ultimately lie outside of our hands’), they talk about how ‘real freedom requires the absence of domination’, which currently workers are subject to both from their bosses and from impersonal market forces, while what is needed is for work to become ‘the focus of more freely chosen commitments’. What do they envisage? While not claiming to offer a ‘sketch’ rather than a blueprint, they look, for example, to ‘a free time infrastructure’ where ‘people have opportunities to develop their capacities and pursue collective projects’ with ‘infinite possibilities for human interaction’. They look to provision of ‘non-nuclear living arrangements’ with ‘more experimental models of early years care’. They look to communities being ‘turned from passive recipients of technologies into networks of active creators’. And, commendably, all this is envisaged as being within a framework of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’.

There is, however, is a key criticism to be made of the way this ‘imaginary’ (a word frequently used by the authors) is presented, in that it all seems to be seen as doable within the framework of the current society of money and wages, buying and selling and government control – in other words within the market system which the book has previously and quite rightly condemned as drastically limiting personal and social freedoms. So, for example: it expresses support for ‘government policies’ aiming ‘to provide support for public and community-based systems of care; ’it talks of ‘a free time infrastructure’ that provides ‘free museums’ and ‘free school meals and breakfast clubs’ for children’ – implying of course the continuation of overall social transactions via money; and, even more explicitly, it advocates ‘decent wages and better conditions for domestic workers’. In other words everything it commends is envisaged as happening via government action within the money system and without – or at least prior to — the establishment of the society of voluntary work, democratic control and free access to all goods and services that is the very essence of socialism. This seems to indicate a failure on the part of the authors, despite their obviously positive intentions and explicit aspiration for the ‘construction of a better world’, to accept that, so long as we have a system of governments overseeing the money and wages system, that system itself will not allow well intentioned reforms to come to fruition willy-nilly and any reforms that do get enacted can just as easily be reversed if those ‘impersonal market forces’ they refer to dictate it.

So, while there is much to reflect on here in terms of the kind of life that might be possible if workers were set free from ‘the realm of necessity’ that capitalism imposes, a good deal of that will only be feasible once workers in a majority take the necessary political action – ideally via the ballot box – to do away with governments and with money, wages and profit and cooperatively organise society. The Socialist Party is sometimes – unfairly — called ‘utopian’ for advocating this, but the true utopianism lies in trying to somehow see as possible true freedom in work and association within the framework of a social and economic system that by definition cannot allow it.

Howard Moss

Material World: ‘I Feel I am a Slave’ (2016)

The Material World Column from the January 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are now 53 million domestic workers worldwide, 1.5 million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia alone, where recruitment agencies fly in 40,000 women a month to keep up with demand.

In the Gulf, the International Trade Union Confederation says that 2.4 million domestic workers are facing conditions of slavery. Rothna Begum of Human Rights Watch says that ‘in many houses these women have absolutely no status – they have been bought’. The International Domestic Workers Federation estimates that families save $8bn (£5.1bn) a year by withholding wages from their domestic workers. ‘With kafala and other legal systems around the world that give no labour rights to migrant women, you are giving almost total impunity to employers to treat these women however they like,’ Begum says. 'It’s startling what cruelty can emerge when one person has complete control over another.’

Marina Sarno explains ‘I had no time off, no time to rest ever. Even when I was trying to eat, she would be calling me: ‘You are not here to rest. I paid a lot of money for you.’ To her, I was a slave. I was not a human.” Marina told her agency that she was being mistreated, but they said she had to stay until the end of her contract. “They said, ‘Your madam has paid good money for you’” (Guardian, 24 October).

Yet we should not consider such conditions as only applicable to the Middle East. In the UK there is the 2012 Domestic Worker’s Visa, designed for cleaners, chauffeurs, cooks and nannies from outside the European Union, who are accompanying overseas employers to the UK. It too is a system that ties overseas domestic workers to just one employer refusing them the right to change their employer in the UK. 15-16,000 Overseas Domestic Worker visas are issued to private households each year (around 200 visas are issued annually to those working for diplomats). The charity Kalayaan, which helps migrant domestic workers believes it facilitates and institutionalises the domestic servitude of workers. The old system allowed them to change employers once they were brought here, giving them a straightforward escape route if they experienced bad treatment. They could find a new job and apply to get their visa renewed. This system was praised as a model of fair play. The UN described it as ‘instrumental in facilitating the escape of migrant domestic workers from exploitative and abusive situations’.

The UK’s government position is that only a tiny proportion of those here as domestic workers are abused and exploited. However, Human Rights Watch said it had found serious abuses of migrant workers by foreign employers in the UK. ‘We have documented the forced labour of domestic workers; they have been made to work extremely long hours without breaks or days off, paid very little or not at all, psychologically abused and not provided with food,’ said Izza Leghtas.

‘Alia’ came to the UK as a maid. She said her passport was taken from her, she was made to eat scraps of food and sleep in a cupboard. ‘They promised me they were going to pay me more, but they didn't pay me. I started in morning at 06.00 until midnight. I didn't have any break and they never let me go out,’ she said. ‘I feel I am a slave, they told me you have no right to be questioning us because you are just a housemaid,’ she recalled. Alia eventually managed to escape, but by leaving her abusive employer she breached immigration rules and is now an illegal migrant. Her only option is deportation.

The Joint Committee on the Draft Modern Slavery Bill reported that ‘In the case of the domestic worker’s visa, policy changes have unintentionally strengthened the hand of the slave master against the victim of slavery’. The now 2015 Modern Slavery Act only provides for a six month period of leave for those domestic workers conclusively identified as trafficked.  For someone who has been trafficked he or she is expected to find employment within 28 days (the time limit specified by the rules) and during this time the worker has no recourse to public funds so may be destitute. They have to apply for the six-month visa having secured employment so need to search for and find employment with no clear immigration status. The worker needs to find an employer who will agree to employ them in their private household in spite of the six months limit to their visa and who will support an application to the Home Office. Last September the campaign group the Migrant Rights Network argued:

‘We are left with a provision which hasn’t taken account of the promised review and which offers so little leave it is worthless in practice. Worse there is a likelihood that these workers,  still not fully recovered from the effects of the trafficking, left with no evidence of their right to work, destitute and with the same pressures to support their families which led them to migrate in place, will be pushed into exploitative employment or even re-trafficking.’

ALJO

Cleaning Houses (2000)

A Short Story from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is something about the interiors of other people's houses that makes me feel uncomfortable. In about eight out of ten visits I might make to a friend's or a neighbour's home, I return to my own abode, survey my sticks of furniture, my cluttered kitchen, my shabby living quarters and make a resolution to smarten the old place up a bit, then I become absorbed in something else and that's that. Until the next time.

Other people's houses are too clean. I have never lived in a very clean house and the reason for this is that I am a woman, and therefore there is an assumption that I am solely responsible for keeping it clean. I long ago ditched the idea that I should spend every minute of my available time making sure my house is dust-free. Yet it seems to me that almost every other woman I know takes her housework seriously. Spotless, fitted kitchens as well-tended as any Intensive Care Unit in a hospital, wall-to-wall carpets likely to suffer premature balding from so much vacuuming, immaculate chairs and sofasno crumbs, no stains, no tears, and bowls of fruit as perfect as wax imitations. Perfect houseplants too. And never a book out of place. Often never a book. No piles of papers abandoned on rickety shelves (as in my house) and no vases harbouring very dead flowersbeen there for weeks, months even. In these same houses no grimy jars on dusty shelves containing this and that; all essential to the sort of alchemy that takes place in my kitchen. Here things are prepared, cooked and eaten all from scratch, and jars of what will one day be wine stand in rows to ferment for months. I could take a bet on it that the inside of my house is never going to arouse feelings of envy in any other woman or man in the world. But it hasn't always been that way.

When first married I did dust and polish and remove cobwebs from corners, but you wouldn't catch me doing that these days. Within a very short space of time I grew depressed by it all. Outside the sun shone, books were waiting to be read, life was waiting to be lived. And what was I doing?polishing a table. I became resentful. I not only went out to work, I shopped and cooked and cleaned house too. We are only willing slaves to something all the time that we are unaware. Just as soon as there is awareness then the slave-mentality is challenged.

Few of us would choose to live in a slum, but it seems to me that a fetish is made of housework. How often have I called on someone unexpectedly and been asked to "Excuse the mess." What mess? Could she mean the magazine lying on the arm of the chair? Some women immediately rush to the bathroom to pull the chain if I casually express a wish to visit the loo. And in the kitchen a well-known brand of disinfectant is at the ready in case the plague strikes suddenly.

Most women are assigned this role from birth and that is not to deny that men are assigned roles too. When living at home I did not help my mother much in the house but there was, I think, a tacit agreement on both our parts that I would one day do exactly as she did. When later I didn't I knew that she was horrified. She would run the tips of her fingers over my furniture when she thought I wasn't looking and become tight-lipped when she found dust, as she invariably did. I had challenged her role in the world as a woman. I cleaned the house, yes, but not very thoroughly and not very often. It was scandalous. What kind of a daughter was I? I tried to tell her what kind of a daughter I was. I said that when I was born nobody had announced "It's a girl. She'll clean houses." And even if they had it still didn't mean I wanted The Housewife of the Year Award. What I wanted was to live and learn and become a real person, not someone who cleaned houses because they thought it would bring respect from other people, envy even. What sort of a life was that anyway and what was enviable about it?

Mine was a mini-rebellion and you may not think of it as significant, but it seems to me that unless we question what appears to be our lot in life then we stand in darkness or at least half-shadow. In other words we accept. And when you think that there is an acceptance of war, poverty and that biggest confidence-trick of all (the cause of much misery, ignorance and injustice) money, then perhaps you will see that my objection to becoming a slave to cleaning houses is just another example of how we can escape the conditioning we each of us experience before we can throw off our chains. As the proverb says, from little acorns oak trees grow.

Heather Ball