New Left Review I/94, November-December 1975

Wally Seccombe

Domestic Labour: reply to critics

The real merit of the critique made by Margaret Coulson, Branka Magaš and Hilary Wainwright of my analysis of domestic labour [1] is that it focusses discussion about the strategic relation of women’s liberation to socialist revolution upon women’s double labour condition under capitalism. The fact that working-class women, in greater and greater numbers in the post-war years, are both domestic and wage labourers gives their position and consciousness its problematic and volatile character within the structures of late capitalism. The authors make a clear and convincing case in this regard. In my article in NLR 83, I set out to analyse domestic labour’s relation to wage labour in general. This was a proper level of abstraction on which to begin, but further concretization was necessary before political conclusions could very usefully be drawn. As Coulson, Magaš and Wainwright correctly point out, my political conclusions were somewhat over-extended, given the absence of a second level of analysis specifying domestic labour’s relation to women’s wage labour in particular. At this level of analysis, it is necessary to ask: If the law of value does not directly reign over domestic labour in the form of capital, how does it indirectly impinge upon it, in such a way as to distribute women’s total labour time between the household and outside employment? [2]

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