Chapter 07 - The Family Form of the Workers' Movement

Section Notes¶

The Family Form of the Workers’ Movement¶

• Late 19th century: new workers movement

  • Demanded family wage

    • Aspired to (and sometimes achieved) family form

  • Alexandra Kollontai: family abolitionist in the Soviet Union

The Thesis of the Workers’ Movement¶

• Instead of aiming to abolish wages, money, and class, workers developed working class pride

  • Sought to found socialist society on experience of industrial labor

  • Lots of internal oppositions, divisions

  • Split proletariat into respectable & lumpenproletariat

The Housewife-Based Family Form¶

• Bourgeois family form became available to some workers

  • Male-breadwinner family form

• Even if couldn’t remove wife from the market, WC families pursued:

  • Not living with other families

  • Single-family dwellings

  • Men assume finance control

  • Wives assume reproductive labor

• Victory for stability and survival of millions of WC people

  • Pros: neighborhood organizations, sustained struggle

  • Cons: putting down lumpenproletariat, Black, queer people

• Unions organized to exclude women from labor force

  • Working women = more labor availability, less pay

• Capitalist competition improved production techniques, drove down prices, improved real wages

• Production moved from the home into factories

• Shift away from team-based work

  • Far fewer children at work

  • Pushed into schools

  • Campaign to restrict child labor

• Municipal governments built public infrastructure for working class neighborhoods

Respectability and the Working Class Family¶

• Families with working moms faced condemnation and exclusion from neighbors

• Male workers took pride in supporting their families

• Working class family form: claiming moral dimension to wages, legitimizing pro-worker legislation

  • NOT enforced by capitalists!!

    • Most employers lacked direct control over domestic arrangements of workers

    • Expansion of bourgeois class values not inevitable: was a choice by (white) WC

  • Many WC families left behind

    • “Civilized” vs. “uncivilized”

Contradictions of the Family in the Second International¶

• Workers movement had 2-sided approach to family politics

  • Normative pursuit of male-breadwinner

  • Seeing socialist equality as dependent on shared experience of waged work

    • Internal basis for pursuing family abolition through women’s employment and collectivizing reproductive labor

  • Kautsky: no socialist dreams of legally and forcefully abolishing family

  • Housewives main organizers of WC neighborhoods and social orgs

  • Bestseller: August Bebel “Woman and Socialism”

  • Debating women’s participation in labor markets vs. their role at home

    • Different strategies for socialist movements

Racial Division of the American Workers’ Movement¶

• White workers pursued and won access to normative family form, but it was violently imposed on Black and Indigenous people

• End of 19th century: most US americans worked in agriculture

  • Northeast industrializing rapidly

  • Midwest small white family farms

  • Southwest seized from mexico in mid-century, then settled and farmed once railroads built

    • Railroads built by chinese and mexican immigrants

• World War 2: radical new gender order

  • Full proletarianization, breakup of family, more gay & women’s rights, massively increased state control

  • For Black people, first access to non-agricultural employment

Abolishing the Family in the Russian Revolution¶

• Rather than communist struggle to abolish bourgeois society, new family abolition called for full proletarianization through the collectivization of social reproductive labor

• Close of World War 1: early years of Russian Revolution

  • Russia’s small industrial working class had not achieved housewife-based family form

  • Bolsheviks wanted full mobilization of women

  • Implemented easy divorce, gender equality in the law, access to abortion

  • Implemented pro-gay policies

• Kollontai wanted state to take over social reproductive labor

  • Univeralization of wage labor under state authority

  • Stalin consolidated power; Kollontai gave up opposition to become the Soviet ambassador in Sweden

Quotes¶

“The workers’ movement had a two-sided approach to family politics. The normative pursuit of a male-breadwinner form was in tension with another, contradictory impulse that shaped the movement’s struggles over gender: seeing socialist equality as dependent on a shared experience of wage work. This impulse provided an internal basis for asserting the positive abolition of the family through women’s employment and collectivizing reproductive labor. The tension between the legitimacy and stability provided by the male-breadwinner family form to the socialist movement, and the equality of universal employment, shaped the debates and struggles over the family regarding the course of the workers’ movement.” (pp. 118)

“The demand to abolish the family took on a different and new meaning during the workers’ movement. While much of the workers’ movement abandoned the call to abolish the family, the other tendency toward full proletarianization offered a path to envisioning the overcoming of the working-class nuclear family. Rather than a communist struggle to abolish the bourgeois society, the new form of family abolition called for full proletarianization of women’s work through the collectivization of reproductive labor.” (pp. 123)