Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.

1163/156920611X592850
Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 brill.nl/hima
Revisiting the Domestic-Labour Debate:
An Indian Perspective
Rohini Hensman
Union Research Group, Bombay
rohinihensman@yahoo.co.uk
Abstract
Te class-struggle under capitalism is shaped by the fact that for capital, labour-power is merely
a factor of production and source of prot, whereas for workers it is an element of their own
lives. Given the centrality of labour-power to the accumulation of capital, it is surprising that
Marx nowhere describes or analyses its production. Te domestic-labour debate of the 1970s was
a useful attempt to ll this gap, but left many issues unresolved. Tis article attempts to carry
forward this theoretical task, using examples mainly from India, and to draw practical conclusions
for the working-class struggle.
Keywords
domestic labour, production of labour-power, Marx, gender, feminist theory, India
Introduction
At the heart of the class-struggle under capitalism is the fact that for capital,
labour-power is merely an element of production and source of surplus-value,
whereas, for workers, it is inseparable from themselves as living human beings.
Struggles over wages, the duration and conditions of waged work, and control
over it, have easily been recognised by Marxists as important aspects of class-
struggle. Yet the relations and conditions under which labour-power is
produced, though equally important, have received far less attention, except
from Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists. Given the centrality of labour-
power to capitalism since, as the only commodity that can produce surplus-
value, and therefore prot, it is the sine qua non of accumulation it is
somewhat surprising that Marx nowhere describes its production. Engels did
recognise the existence of domestic labour and the gendered relations within
it, but did not take the analysis further. Te domestic-labour debate of
the 1970s was an attempt to ll this gap, but it left many of the crucial issues
unresolved.
4 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
One consequence of the under-theorisation of this particular arena of class-
struggle by Marxists is that it has been largely ceded to reactionary ideologies
and politics. In Tird-World countries such as India, it also results in extremely
high rates of infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, and disability or
premature death resulting from preventable or curable diseases. Tis article
attempts to take up this theoretical task using examples from contemporary
India. Recognition that the production of labour-power constitutes a crucial
arena of class-struggle would enable Marxists both to combat male domination
within the working class more eectively, and to play a more eective rle in
revolutionising the social relations of production.
Marx and Engels on domestic labour
Under capitalism, according to Marx, labour is either productive in the
sense that it is exchanged with capital and produces surplus-value or
unproductive, in the sense that it is exchanged with capitalists revenue or
workers wages, and does not produce surplus-value.
1
However, this denition
of productive labour is relevant only from the standpoint of individual capital:
labour is or is not productive according to whether it does or does not produce
surplus-value for the individual capitalist. A problem arises, however, when
we look at production from the standpoint of total social capital, as Marx
himself realised when he considered the capitalist production of articles
of luxury-consumption: Tis sort of productive labour produces use-values
and objecties itself in products that are destined only for unproductive
consumption. In their reality, as articles, they have no use-value for the process
of reproduction, and hence, if there is disproportionate diversion of productive
labour into unreproductive articles, it follows that the means of subsistence or
production will not be reproduced in the necessary quantities.
2
Te result will
be a reduction in the rate of accumulation of capital as a whole.
In other words, what is productive labour from the standpoint of individual
capital can be unreproductive labour from the standpoint of total social
1. Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus
value, labour is only productive, and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker, if it
or he creates surplus-value directly, i.e. the only productive labour is that which is directly
consumed in the course of production for the valorization of capital. . . . Every productive worker
is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is
purchased to be consumed as a use-value, as a service . . . labour is not productive and the wage-
labourer is no productive worker. His work is consumed for its use-value, not as creating exchange-
value; it is consumed unproductively, not productively. (Marx 1976, pp. 1038, 1041.)
2. Marx 1976, pp. 10456.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 5
capital. In Volume II of Capital, Marx does refer to luxury-production in the
reproduction-schemas for simple reproduction, but the schemas for
reproduction on an expanded scale (i.e., capitalist accumulation) include only
department I producing means of production for capital, and department II
producing means of subsistence for wage-workers.
3
Implicitly, he makes a
distinction between reproductive labour, embodied in products including
workers that re-enter capitalist production, and unreproductive labour,
embodied in products that do not. (We are here referring to social, not
biological, reproduction, although biological reproduction, without which
there would be no new workers to replace those who die, is a necessary element
of social reproduction.)
Marx comes closest to describing the process of production of labour-power
in the chapter on Te Sale and Purchase of Labour-power:
Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in
his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires
a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Terefore the labour-time necessary
for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production
of those means of subsistence[.] . . . If the owner of labour-power works today,
tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions
as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be
sucient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual. . . . Te
owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be
continuous, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes
this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself in the way that every
living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation. . . . Hence the sum of means
of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the
means necessary for the workers replacements, i.e. his children[.] . . . Te costs of
education vary according to the degree of complexity of the labour-power
required. Tese expenses (exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power)
form a part of the total value spent in producing it. Te value of labour-power
can be resolved into the value of a denite quantity of the means of subsistence.
4

Marx goes on to give examples of means of subsistence such as food and fuel,
which need to be replaced daily, while others, such as clothes and furniture,
can be purchased at longer intervals. But that is all. Unlike his detailed
descriptions of the production of other commodities, here there is no
description of a labour-process, nor even a mention of instruments of
production (such as a stove, pots and pans, broom, bucket and mop). Just raw
materials means of subsistence and the nished product: labour-power.
3. Marx 1978, Chapters 20 and 21.
4. Marx 1976, pp. 2746.
6 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
Te implicit assumption is that all that is required to convert those means of
subsistence into labour-power is a process of individual consumption. Yet the
worker would not be maintained in his or her normal state as a working
individual, nor be replaced when he or she could no longer work, unless
somebody carried the raw materials and instruments of production home
from the market or shops, cooked the food and washed up after the meal,
dusted, swept, mopped oors and washed clothes, fed the baby, changed it,
gave it a bath, and so on and so forth.
Te home is therefore a site of individual consumption, but also of
production;
5
both are necessary for the production of labour-power, and Marxs
failure to identify and analyse the latter has been attributed to his patriarchal
position.
6
In fact, Marxs confusion of production with individual consumption
leads to bizarre contradictions in his work. For example, he writes of domestic
labour that: Te largest part of society, that is to say the working class, must
incidentally perform this kind of labour for itself; but it is only able to perform
it when it has laboured productively. It can only cook meat for itself when it
has produced a wage with which to pay for the meat.
7
If we generalise this
proposition to all commodities, it would state that until a commodity has
been sold, it cannot be produced. But commodities are usually sold only after
they have been produced, and this is especially true of labour-power, which
cannot be sold for the rst time until many hundreds of hours of labour-time
have been spent on its production, as Marx recognises elsewhere: Its exchange
value, like that of every other commodity, is determined before it goes into
circulation, since it is sold as a capacity, a power, and a specic amount of
labour-time was required to produce this capacity, this power.
8

Engels not only recognised the existence of domestic work and the gender-
division of labour within it, but even went so far as to observe that the reversal
of gender-rles during the industrial revolution, and the distress caused by it,
was possible only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from
the beginning.
9
He did not carry the analysis further, however, nor was there
5. In case this is doubted by anyone, one way of demonstrating the point would be to ask: is
it possible for someone else to substitute for a person in this particular activity or not? If someone
else eats all my meals for me, I would die of starvation within a month or two. On the other
hand, if someone else cooks all my meals for me, I would not suer at all, and might even enjoy
them more than if I cooked them myself ! Tus, in general, if it is possible to substitute one
person for another in some activity, it is a process of production, while if that is not possible, it
is a process of individual consumption.
6. Weinbaum 1978, p. 43.
7. Marx 1963, p. 161.
8. Marx 1976, p. 1066.
9. Engels 1975, p. 439.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 7
much progress on this front until the debate around domestic labour (i.e.
housework and childcare) erupted in the 1970s.
10
Let us look at the issues
taken up which throw light on the production of labour-power.
Te debate of the 1970s
Most participants in the debate agreed that domestic labour was socially useful
and necessary: i.e. it was useful not just to other members of the household
but to society as a whole. It is clear that domestic labour transfers the value of
the commodities bought with the wage to the end-product, labour-power, but
does it also create value?
Here, those who say yes
11
are surely correct, while those who say no
12
are
wrong. Domestic labour is part of the production-process of labour-power, a
commodity that is sold on the (labour) market, and to say that it does not
produce value would contradict the whole starting-point of Marxs theory of
surplus-value, according to which the value of each commodity is determined
by . . . the labour-time socially necessary to produce it. . . . Hence in determining
the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all the
special processes carried on at various times and in dierent places which were
necessary, rst to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle,
and then with the cotton and spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked
on as dierent and successive phases of the same labour process.
13
Whether the materials that go into the production of a commodity are
produced as commodities or not makes no dierence to the value of the nal
product, so long as their quality is comparable. In the case of labour-power,
one male worker may eat his meals at restaurants, get his clothes and linen
washed at a laundry, and pay for a cleaner to clean his at, while another
worker doing the same job at the same workplace and earning the same wage
may have a wife who does the shopping, cooking, washing-up, washing and
cleaning, but the value of their labour-power would be the same. To deny that
the housewifes labour in the latter situation creates value would entail arguing
that the rst workers labour-power has a much higher value than that of the
second; an analogous contention would be that the piece of cloth woven by a
handloom-weaver whose wife spins the yarn at home has less value than an
10. Malos (ed.) 1982.
11. Dalla Costa and James 1972; Seccombe 1974 and 1975.
12. Benston 1969; Coulson, Magas and Wainwright 1975; Gardiner, Himmelweit and
Mackintosh 1982; Himmelweit and Mohun 1977.
13. Marx 1976, pp. 2934.
8 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
identical piece of cloth woven by one who buys the yarn on the market, which
clearly cannot be the case. To the extent that domestic labour performs a
function that is necessary for the production of labour power, it produces
value: Te value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other
commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently
also the reproduction, of this specic article.
14
And this is reproductive labour
in the sense that it makes an essential contribution to social reproduction.
Once we acknowledge that domestic labour contributes to the value of
labour-power, the neat division of the working day into necessary and surplus-
labour performed in the workplace collapses. Te equation becomes even
more complex when the generational reproduction of labour-power and the
contribution of state-education and healthcare are brought into the picture.
Te rate of surplus-value would then have to be calculated taking into account
all the necessary labour (in the workplace as well as the home) done by
members of the household that is the unit of production of labour-power, and
all the payments made by the capitalist, not only by way of wages, but also in
contributions to services such as state-education and healthcare.
Does domestic labour produce surplus-value? A housewife is not paid
wages, but her labour is paid for out of her husbands wage, so his employer
pays her indirectly. If the amount paid for her labour is the same as or more
than what her husband would have to pay to buy the services she performs on
the market, then she would not be producing surplus-value. (However, it is
possible that her husband keeps for himself part of the amount paid by the
employer for her labour, in which case, he would be exploiting her.) But, if the
amount paid for her labour by her husbands employer is less than the value of
the services she performs, that means the employer is keeping part of what he
would otherwise have had to pay out as wages, and her labour is therefore
contributing indirectly to his surplus-value. Te disparity is likely to be greatest
where there are small children in the family, since the cost of waged childcare
would tend to be considerably greater than the cost of the labour-power of
their mother.
Tus, although Dalla Costa and James
15
were wrong to think that domestic
labour is always productive (i.e. always produces surplus-value for the
individual capitalist), it is true that when its duration is extended unduly, this
labour allows extra surplus-value to be appropriated by subsidising the
production of labour-power. Te Bolivian womens leader and miners wife
Domitila Barrios de Chungara made a precise calculation of this, comparing
14. Marx 1976, p. 274.
15. Dalla Costa and James 1972.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 9
the work performed in the home with the cost of the same services bought on
the market:
One day I got the idea of making a chart. We put as an example the price of
washing clothes per dozen pieces and we gured out how many dozens of items
we washed per month. Ten the cooks wage, the babysitters, the servants. . . Adding
it all up, the wage needed to pay us for what we do in the home . . . was much
higher than what the men earned in the mine for a month.
16
Tus, if a miners wife died or stopped working, and the man was compelled
to buy on the market the services that she had formerly performed, his wage
would not have been sucient, showing that it was less than the value of
labour-power; indeed, the shortfall would have been even greater, because
Domitila, with help from her children, also made and sold small pies called
salteas to supplement the family-income. Tus, the womens surplus-labour
allowed the mine-owner to appropriate more surplus-value than he would
otherwise have been able to do. But it is impossible to see this eect so long as
the production of labour-power (and its value) is seen solely as the activity of
waged workers. Only if it is seen as the collective product of the unit of
production of labour-power the working-class household is it possible to
calculate the real rate of surplus-value.
What happens when there are two or more wage-earners in the family? We
can examine this by looking at three dierent situations that are found in
India. Situation A is one where a male worker in a formal-sector enterprise is
able to support his wife and, say, two school-going children. Tey might rent
a two-bedroom at with running water, use a gas-stove, and eat fairly well.
Te woman is there when the children come home from school, and can
spend time with them even while she does other chores. In eect, the mans
wage is sucient to pay for the upkeep of another person (his wife) to do all
this work.
17
If it is a woman who is the formal-sector employee, the continuity between
her waged and unwaged work is clearer: she must do both, perhaps with some
help from others at home, in order to support the family, since they cannot eat
raw rice, wheat, dal or other food o dirty plates. Te increase in time spent
on domestic labour in order to compensate for lower wages is also more
obvious. A study in Delhi showed that, in response to a cut in real wages
between 1994/5 and 1999/2000 resulting from ination and restrictions in
access to the Public Distribution System, the total time expended on waged
16. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer 1978, p. 35.
17. See Seccombe 1974.
10 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
work and domestic labour by women-workers increased from 1314 hours to
1617 hours a day, as they spent more time shopping around for the cheapest
goods, queuing-up at the ration-shop, and cleaning inferior rice.
18
If the male breadwinner loses his job and has to take an informal job in a
small enterprise which subcontracts work from his former company, earning
just half of what he was earning before (situation B), his wife has two options.
Tey could move to a basti (shanty-town) where she has to spend many more
hours collecting water from the shared tap, cooking on a kerosene-stove,
queuing-up at the ration-shop, cleaning, preparing food and washing up, and
so on. Teir standard of living would be lower, but by spending much more
time on housework perhaps 16 as opposed to 10 hours per day she could
feed everyone on the lower wage and keep the children in school. Alternatively,
she might nd a job that pays half or less of her husbands former wage. Tey
can then stay in their at and keep the gas-stove, but everyone has to chip in
and help with the housework even though she continues to do the bulk of it,
working perhaps 18 or more hours a day. In both cases the rate of surplus-
value has gone up. If the technology in the small enterprise where the man
now works is the same as in the large one (which is quite common), half of his
former wage is being taken as additional surplus-value. If his wife does not get
a job, this is partly compensated for by her increased domestic work; if she
does, then her wage may compensate for the loss in his earnings, but she works
even longer hours as well as creating surplus-value for her own employer. Te
family-wage is now split up between them.
Situation C is the most tragic: the man loses his job and cannot nd
another at most, he can nd only casual work for a few days a month. His
wife takes a job, but even their combined earnings cannot support the family,
so the children are taken out of school and sent to work too. Te family-wage
is now split up between four people, and the rate of surplus-value is even
higher. Teir collective working hours, including necessary labour spent
on household tasks, has also increased, since they are too poor to aord
ready-cooked food or laundry and cleaning services. Tis sequence of events
is not purely ctional, it is only too common: it occurred, for example, as
a consequence of the closure of textile-mills in Ahmedabad.
19
Millions of
agricultural and migrant-labour families have always been in situation C, as
indeed most working-class families were in Marxs time: everywhere, except in
the metallurgical industries, young persons (under 18), women and children
form by far the most preponderant element in the factory personnel;
20
even a
18. Chhachhi 2005, pp. 2479.
19. Breman 2004, pp. 2039.
20. Marx 1976, p. 577.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 11
steel- and ironworks employs 500 boys under 18, and of these about a third,
or 170, are under the age of 13.
21
If we include other permutations for
example, where there are small children in the family, and a slightly older girl
is kept at home to look after them while her parents go out to work the bulk
of the labour-force in India belongs to situations B and C. In all of these cases,
except the rare one where a mans wage is adequate to keep the family in
relative comfort without anyone being subjected to overwork, domestic labour
compensates for the fact that part of the value of labour-power is being kept
by capital as additional surplus-value.
Te genesis of the working-class family
Left to itself, capitals werewolf-like hunger for surplus value
22
pushes down
wages and extends the working day to such an extent that all members of the
family, excluding only the smallest children, work long hours in wage-labour
simply in order to survive. If at any time it needs to retrench workers, it
dismisses men rather than women and children. Te family as a space apart
from capital is destroyed. It is workers, through their struggles for higher
wages, abolition of child-labour and restriction of working hours, who win
back time and space for the family. In this, they are supported up to a point
by the state, acting in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. At an
earlier stage, in both England and India, the state used legislation to force
reluctant workers to labour long hours; but after capital extended these hours
to such an extent that it produces the premature exhaustion and death of this
labour-power itself
23
in other words, when the supply of labour-power for
capital was threatened the state stepped in again to limit working hours
and ensure that labour-power was not maintained and developed only in a
crippled state; in such a situation, the price of labour-power (embodied in
wages) falls below its value, since the value of every commodity is determined
by the labour-time required to provide it in its normal quality.
24
Tus, both wages and working hours enter into the calculation of whether
the price of labour-power is or is not below its minimum value. Te worker
sells her labour-power for a specied period of time, just as the rent for a at
is for a specied period of time. If a tenant can rent one at for two weeks with
21. Marx 1976, p. 371.
22. Marx 1976, p. 353.
23. Marx 1976, p. 376.
24. Marx 1976, p. 277; emphasis added.
12 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
a certain amount of money, but can rent another at for three weeks with the
same amount of money, the latter rent is only two-thirds of the former.
Similarly, if one capitalist pays a certain wage for an eight-hour working day
while another pays the same wage for a twelve-hour working day, the latter
wage is only two-thirds of the former. If working hours are extended beyond
a certain point, the price of labour-power falls below its value even if the wage
is kept constant. Tis calculation cannot be accurate unless all the hours
worked by all the members of the family in order to produce labour-power are
taken into account.
Labour-power is not a purely physiological entity. In contrast . . . with the
case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power
contains a historical and moral element.
25
Wages must enable the working
class to live at an acceptable standard of living. Ensuring that the price of
labour-power does not fall below its value, and setting this value at an
acceptable level, are both products of working-class struggle. Te moral and
historical element would dier from one society to another, but it seems
reasonable to set the minimum value at a level where income covers basic
requirements of food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education; where
the minimum age for employment complies with the International Labour
Organisations norm of 15 years; and where adults get at least 11 or 12 hours
per working day for sleep and recreation, plus paid weekly days o, annual
leave and holidays.
In the formal sector in India, workers have made progress in winning space
and time for the family. By contrast with the situation in 1890, when women-
millworkers in India were getting up at 4:30am and working till late at night
in order to complete their household duties as well as wage-labour,
26
and
children as young as seven years would be working in the factories, the Factories
Act of 1948 (still in force) prohibits the employment of children under
14 in registered factories, and the statutory work-week is 48 hours. When
combined with travel to and from work and with domestic labour, even a
48-hour week means that women never get enough time for rest and recreation:
women-workers in Chennai reported getting up at 4:305:00am, working for
1618 hours, and being forced to miss meals in order to meet their work-
schedules.
27
However, some unions have negotiated a shorter work-week. For
workers in formal employment, there has been considerable advance in raising
the standard of living and wresting family-time away from wage-labour.
25. Marx 1976, p. 275.
26. Savara 1986, p. 38.
27. Swaminathan 2002, pp. 910.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 13
Te same cannot be said for informal women-workers. At the beginning of
the twenty-rst century, malnutrition and ill-health resulted in a maternal-
mortality rate of 540 per 100,000 live births, with around 136,000 women
dying each year from pregnancy-related causes. Maternal malnutrition resulted
in 30% of infants with low birth-weight, creating health-risks that would last
for the rest of their lives. Te infant-mortality rate was 67 and under-ve
mortality rate 93; 47% of under-ve-year-olds were severely or moderately
malnourished. Tis resulted in a large number of children dying or becoming
disabled as a result of contracting preventable and curable diseases.
28
In other
words, the exceedingly low wages, long working hours and unhealthy working
conditions of the vast majority of women-workers resulted in the production
of labour-power in a crippled state.
Unions have demanded equal wages for women for the same work, yet
arguments for a family-wage also reveal an underlying assumption that many
women will not, in fact, be employed, but will be dependent on male wage-
earners who will therefore have to be paid enough to support them. Two
union-ocials in Bengal who were interviewed by the Royal Commission on
Factory Labour (1931) argued for a wage that would be sucient to support
female dependants as well as children. Although not formulated explicitly as
a demand for a family wage based on a male-breadwinner/dependent wife
conceptualization of the family, the complaints of the Bengali trade unionists
over wage levels certainly involved the assumption that the typical worker was
a married male with a range of non-employed dependants whom he had
increasing diculty maintaining.
29
Te Delhi Agreement of 1935 between
the Ahmedabad millowners and the Textile Labour Association made this
assumption explicit by specifying that married women-workers whose
husbands were employed in the mills would be dismissed.
30
Te fact that no
union has ever used the clause in the Equal Remuneration Act prohibiting the
rampant discrimination against women in recruitment, promotions and
training is eloquent testimony to the near-universal agreement that a woman
has less right to a job (especially a well-paid one) than a man.
What has happened here? Are these developments a victory or defeat for
women in particular? Te working class as a whole? Te answer to these
questions, unsatisfactory though it may seem, is both. Comparing the
employment and working conditions of nonunionised informal workers and
their families with those of unionised formal workers and their families,
28. UNICEF 2004, Tables 1, 2, 5 and 8; Krishnakumar 2004; Pelletier, Frongillo Jr.,
Schroeder and Habicht 1995.
29. Standing 1991, p. 149.
30. Chhachhi 1983, pp. 412.
14 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
no-one could possibly deny that men, women and children in the latter
category are vastly better o in terms of living standards, rest and leisure, and
access to healthcare and education. It would be hard to nd a housewife
married to a formal-sector worker who would want to trade places with an
informal woman-worker in her hut, chawl or pavement-shack; it is indisputable
that the retreat of certain family members from the labour force, in conjunction
with an organized attempt to secure a family wage
31
has resulted in a very
welcome rise in the standard of living. Like the woman-miner who was glad
that she had left her job because she did not have to do domestic work after
coming home exhausted from a days labour,
32
most women-workers in India
too are glad to escape from heavy labour and have more time to spend on
home-making. It is less obvious, but also true, that compared with young
women and men living on construction-sites or in dormitories supplied by
their employers, who are often nervous to be seen talking to outsiders for fear
of losing their jobs, workers who have homes that are outside the purview of
their employers have greater freedom to discuss, organise and struggle
collectively.
33
Tese are gains.
Yet the development of the male-breadwinner/family-wage norm was also a
defeat for working-class women, and thus for the working class as a whole.
Some women, especially if they have no young children, prefer to have formal
employment and to get help with housework rather than sit at home all day.
34

For large numbers of women-headed households, the acute shortage of formal
employment for women means there is no alternative to poverty, and often the
compulsion either to send children out to work or keep daughters at home to
look after smaller children while the women themselves go out to work. Te
assumption that only men have dependants is not sustainable, nor is it true
that all men have dependants: single young men living in their parental homes
might need a family-wage even less than a woman whose husband is employed.
Moreover, even when husband and wife are earning, there is no basis for the
assumption that his wage pays for basic subsistence while hers is supplementary:
indeed, most research shows that in such situations, womens wages are spent
entirely in ensuring family-survival, while a variable portion of mens wages is
spent on alcohol, tobacco, gambling and other activities.
35
So there is a negative element in the way that the demand for a family-
wage has been posed, fought for, and won in formal employment. It is directly
31. Humphries 1980, p. 157.
32. Pinchbeck 1930, p. 269.
33. See Humphries 1980, pp. 15963.
34. See Chhachhi and Pittin 1996, p. 110.
35. See Elson 1995, pp. 1834; Kottegoda 2004, pp. 13755.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 15
oppressive to women, and also disadvantageous to their dependants if they
have any.
36
Gandhis justication of the expulsion of women from the
Ahmedabad mills made the patriarchal assumptions behind this decision
explicit:
It is not for our women to go out and work as men do. If we send them to the
factories, who will look after our domestic and social aairs? If women go out to
work, our social life will be ruined and moral standards will decline.
37

Tis attitude undermines the working-class struggle as a whole, by constituting
women as secondary-wage earners and therefore cheap labour. In formal
employment, capitalists may have lost the battle to draw all members of the
working-class family (except the very youngest) into the wage-labour force
and compel them to produce surplus-value; but they have very astutely used
male dominance in the working class, which shaped the outcome of this
struggle, to their own advantage, by constituting women as a reserve-army of
cheap labour.
38
In Bombay and Ahmedabad, womens formal jobs in the
textile-mills were destroyed in the early-twentieth century,
39
but when mens
jobs were in turn destroyed, women had to enter informal employment to
ensure family-survival. Teir constitution as a cheap and exible labour-force
with the collusion of male workers and unionists meant that in this latter
situation, living standards for the whole family fell drastically.
Moreover, as discussions with women pharmaceutical workers in Bombay
showed,
40
even well-paid formal women-workers have great diculty
participating actively in the union, due to a combination of domestic-labour
commitments, objections from husbands, and prejudice in the workplace,
thus posing obstacles to united struggles. How can all of these problems be
overcome?
Mechanisation, commercialisation, and state-contributions
to domestic labour
Moving towards a resolution of these issues requires us to take a closer look at
the work that is performed in the home. It can further be divided into (i) work
which results in a product that is distinct from a person (such as cooking a
36. Hartmann 1981, pp. 201; Barrett and McIntosh 1980; Barrett 1980, pp. 267.
37. Patel 1988, p. 380, cit. Breman 2004, p. 112.
38. Beechey 1977 and 1978.
39. Kumar 1983, p. 110; Westwood 1991, pp. 2925.
40. Hensman 1996.
16 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
meal or washing clothes) and (ii) work whose product is inseparable from a
person (such as childcare). Te rst kind of production can quite easily be
mechanised or taken over by capitalism. Cleaning is a special case. Tere is not
much scope for mass-production techniques here; it is labour-intensive work,
made more onerous by the fact that its product is noticed only when the work
is not done. Te second kind is exemplied by caring work, where there can be
no mechanisation, no substitution of dead for living labour: caring and
nurturing work is, by its nature, labour-intensive. Although the majority of
people needing care are children (since everyone begins life as a child), there
are also adults who need it. Many people with disabilities and old people need
part-time or full-time attendance, and an accident or stroke can, at one blow,
convert even an able-bodied adult into one needing long-term care.
41
One way in which the workload of domestic labour can be reduced is by
mechanising tasks that were formerly performed manually, or by using labour-
saving devices. Tis process has probably gone as far as it can go in the First
World, but the same cannot be said for India. While refrigerators, which can
cut down the frequency of shopping and cooking, are common among
professionals and better-paid employees, and washing machines are somewhat-
less common, they are not an option for millions of working-class households
in rural areas and urban slums, for the simple reason that they have no power-
supply. Women in these households spend hours each day collecting water.
Tey sometimes also collect and prepare fuel for cooking on primitive stoves,
the smoke from which causes respiratory problems in the ill-ventilated shacks
they inhabit. Lack of sanitation further undermines the reproduction of
labour-power by causing widespread illness and death from water-borne
diseases. Tis is an area where the state urgently needs to contribute to the
social reproduction of labour-power. Providing such households with
subsidised housing, electricity, potable running water, sanitation, and stoves
(including solar-powered ones) that do not require the collection of fuel would
result in an enormous reduction in the time and eort spent on domestic
labour as well as a reduction in avoidable sickness and death.
Another way of reducing domestic labour is by buying on the market
products formerly made in the home. Again, the process has probably gone as
far as it can in the First World, and possibly even too far, substituting not only
ready-made for home-baked bread and frozen vegetables for fresh ones, but
also fast foods of doubtful nutritional value for more nutritious cooked meals.
In India, there has been some substitution of bread or ready-made chapatis for
41. Marxs analysis allows for means of subsistence for such people, but not for the care that
is equally important to their well-being.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 17
home-made ones, rice and pulses can be bought cleaned and packed, spices are
commonly bought already processed, and people often buy our rather than
buying wheat and getting it milled. Te use of packed and processed foods
(ranging from ice-cream and frozen peas to yoghurt and pasteurised milk) is
common among the families of professionals and better-paid employees, who
also often eat their mid-day meal at a restaurant or indigenous fast-food stall
if their workplace has no canteen of its own, and send their clothes and linen
to be laundered, ironed or dry-cleaned. But there are three obstacles to the
wider spread of such practices. One is the abject poverty of the largest section
of the working class, which simply cannot aord to buy processed foods, much
less get their clothes laundered. Another is the patriarchal assumption that it
is the duty of women in the household to do this work. And the third is the
availability of extremely cheap labour, which can be employed to do such tasks
in the home.
Te substitution of waged for unwaged domestic labour is universal among
the rich, many of whom employ whole retinues of live-in domestic workers.
Among professionals and better-paid white- and blue-collar workers, it is
more selective, in the sense that domestic workers are employed for some tasks
and not others, the most common tasks being cleaning, washing, and
washing-up. Te employment of child-minders to look after small children
when both parents are working is also common. Such practices were common
in the First World in Marxs time, then disappeared from all but the richest
households, but recently started spreading again with the inux of cheap
migrant-labour into these countries as well as parts of West Asia. One form is
the cleaning rm, which sends its employees to clean the houses of customers.
Another is the direct employment of domestic workers to work in the homes
of their employers.
Tese practices do free women in more auent households from the double
burden of domestic labour and paid work, but at a heavy cost to the
reproduction of labour-power in the households of the workers who take up
the burden. Tis is unregulated, informal labour, and suers from low pay,
long hours and lack of social security. In India, child-labour is rampant in this
sector. Women and girls who do such work, especially if they are live-in maids,
are extremely vulnerable to verbal, physical and sexual abuse; such cases are
reported from time to time, especially if they result in the death of the worker,
but most are unreported, and serious crimes go unpunished. Tere are similar
horror-stories about migrant workers in First-World countries, who are even
more vulnerable because they may not speak the language of the country
where they work or know anyone to whom they can turn for help, may be
illegal immigrants or on visas that allow them to work only for a specied
18 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
employer, and may have had their passports conscated by employers.
42
In the
case of live-in maids who are mothers, the money they send home often does
not compensate for the neglect their own children suer. If the worker is a
child, she loses the time she needs for education, play and rest.
Domestic workers in India, especially those engaged in cleaning work, are
unionising, and the ILO is working to strengthen the rights of migrant
domestic workers. It is possible that these eorts will succeed in improving
their employment-conditions. But employing domestic workers, even if they
come in only for an hour or two per day to do cleaning work, cannot be the
solution to the problem of domestic labour. It is not accessible to most
working-class families, makes use of cheap labour, and tends to reinforce a
social perception that cleaning work, which is socially necessary for hygiene
and health, marks out a person as inferior. In most societies it is ill-paid work
(if paid for at all), and in India has traditionally been consigned to Dalits, who
were at one time and still are in some places treated as untouchable.
43

Paradoxically, regulating this sector of employment so that child-labour is
abolished, a living wage and social-security contributions are paid, and paid
leave is available, would make it unaordable for the few working-class families
that use it. Tus, its rle in the reproduction of labour-power as opposed to
the provision of services to the auent is minimal.
Socialist and radical-feminist solutions
Yet childcare and help with the care of disabled and old people is essential if
women are to be released from full-time domestic labour; sick people need
specialised care and treatment, children need to be educated, and those who
have no means of support need to be supported. One solution that emerged
in countries with social-democratic and state-socialist rgimes was the provision
of these services by the state. Ideally, this would make it possible for workers
performing these services to have decent employment-conditions without
making the services inaccessible to those who need them most, some of whom
may be poorer than the workers. But the Indian state has been particularly
recalcitrant in providing these services, even by comparison with much poorer
Tird-World countries. Millions of children do not even get schooling, much
less pre-school care; providing adequate socialised care and education for all
children would require a substantial investment. Socialised care of adults is
42. Heyzer, Lycklama Nijeholt and Weerakoon (eds.) 1992; Young 2000; Ehrenreich and
Hochschild (eds.) 2003.
43. Menon 2005.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 19
hardly available at all except for the rich; the appalling cruelty with which
mentally ill patients are treated in many institutions, as well as the routine
appearance of people with disabilities and old people begging on the streets,
are testimony to the disastrous under-funding of this sector.
44

A radical solution to the specic problem of childcare proposed by Lilina
Zinoviev shortly after the Russian Revolution was state-run child-rearing:
Our task now is to oblige the mother to give her children to us to the Soviet
State. Te idea was taken up in Kollontais formulation: Children are the States
concern. She added: Te social obligation of motherhood consists primarily in
producing a healthy and t-for-life child. . . . Her second obligation is to feed the
baby at her own breast.
45

A similar suggestion was that it would . . . be desirable for the child to be left
to his parents innitely less than at present, and for his studies and his
diversions to be carried on . . . under the direction of adults whose bonds with
him would be impersonal and pure.
46
A logical conclusion following from
this approach is that womens liberation requires the application of modern
technology to the production of children in order to free women from the
social obligation to produce, breastfeed and care for them.
47
However, the practical results of institutionalised care were not particularly
positive. Small children left in full-time nurseries in Russia were found to be
more backward than those looked after at home,
48
and, as a woman lamented
in a samizdat-publication smuggled out of Russia in 1979,
Kindergartens and crches are a utopia, which in real life turn out to be anti-
utopias. If we send healthy children to such establishments, we get back sick
children. Women must constantly report sick in order to be at home with
the child. Not with the healthy child, as the case was earlier, but with the
sick child.
49

Another problem, where day-and-night nurseries were tried out in Russia
and China, was that women themselves wanted more contact with their
children.
50
44. For more details, see Hensman 2011, pp. 190203, 24650, 26275.
45. Broyelle 1977, p. 71.
46. de Beauvoir 1997, p. 539.
47. Firestone 1970.
48. Rowbotham 1974, p. 168.
49. Malachevskaya 1979; cf. McAuley 1981, pp. 1989.
50. Rowbotham 1974, p. 196; Dunayevskaya 1996, pp. 734.
20 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
It is hard to see how such proposals are an improvement on the more usual
feminist demands for women to be able to control their own bodies, sexuality
and fertility,
51
and for the development of technology which would enable
them to do so safely, thus ensuring that women have babies only if and when
they want them.
52
Tey also suggest that the cause of the oppression of women
is their biological dierence from men. Biological dierences such as sex and
skin-colour can certainly be made the pretext for oppression, but it is the
social relations under which this occurs that are to blame, not the dierences
themselves. Te biological dierence in this case the fact that womens bodies
are adapted to pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding
53
while mens bodies
are not need not in all circumstances lead to the oppression of women.
Whether it does or not depends on technological developments and social
relations, which in turn determine whether or not women can control their
own sexuality and fertility safely, whether or not childbearing is a physically
safe and socially respected activity, and whether or not there is provision of
facilities (such as extended maternity-leave and workplace-crches) which
provide social support for women who wish to combine breastfeeding with
paid work.
As for other aspects of the gender-division of labour, there is no evidence
that they have any biological basis, in the sense that all the tasks can be
performed either by men or by women, and competence depends, not on
gender, but on inclination and acquired skills. However, given particular social
relations, it may well make economic sense to relegate certain tasks to women
other than those for which they are biologically adapted. In precapitalist
agricultural societies where having a large number of children was an asset,
where child-mortality was high, and where women breast-fed each child for
one year or more, they might spend 20 or more years of their lives in
childbearing and breastfeeding, in which case it was more ecient for them to
do other household tasks as well. But these relations are revolutionised
51. Weinbaum 1978, pp. 2930.
52. A womans right to control her own fertility is also partially a protection of a childs right
to be wanted, loved and adequately cared for by at least one parent. Tis is absolutely essential,
given the huge amount of time and eort that is involved in this work indeed, preferably two
or more adults should make this commitment before the child is brought into the world.
Advocates of socialised childcare often forget that this presupposes a much larger number of
people who love children and wish to spend time on childcare than do so at present.
53. Breastfeeding can be substituted by bottle-feeding, either of expressed breast-milk or
infant-formula, but in India and other Tird-World countries this can lead to high rates of
infant-mortality where conditions are not hygienic or the milk-powder is diluted too much,
hence it is recommended that babies should be breast-fed for at least six months. But this does
not mean that the mother has to be solely responsible for childcare during this period, since there
is still a great deal that others can do for the baby.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 21
by capitalism.
54
In India, having a large number of children is no longer an
asset and may be a liability, with children constituting more mouths to feed,
and child-labour driving down wage-rates and causing unemployment by
competing with adult labour. Government family-planning programmes make
birth-control relatively easily accessible and have succeeded in reducing the
birth-rate; child-mortality, while still high, is rapidly being reduced; and a
combination of these two developments means that women need not spend
more than two or three years of their lives breastfeeding infants. On the other
side, the interest of capitalism in women as wage-labourers provides them
with an alternative that is often also necessary for the survival of the family.
In other words, the material basis for the gender-division of labour has changed
drastically.
Since caring work involves a relationship between the carer and the person
being cared for, it cannot completely be passed on to others without damaging
the relationship, but this does not mean that it cannot be socialised at all.
Indeed, at a slightly higher age ve or six years children now routinely go
to school, where they are looked after by people from outside the family for
several hours a day, and it can be argued that full-time care-giving constitutes
a workload that is too heavy for one or even two people to carry alone.
However, good-quality socialised care requires a high ratio of care-givers to
people being cared for, which makes it expensive.
55
Tis is probably why,
under capitalism, it is not provided without a struggle by both feminists and
the labour-movement,
56
except as an expensive service to the privileged few who
can aord it, or in circumstances where a shortage of labour-power makes it
necessary for large numbers of women to be inducted into the labour-force.
Although there is not much formal socialisation of caring work in India, a
great deal of informal sharing of care does take place. Te boundary between
the family and the outside world is not as sharp in South-Asian cultures as it
has become in Western ones. To begin with, the term family would usually
refer to the extended family, even where, as in Bombay, there are many nuclear-
family households due to migration; and it is quite normal for people who are
not kin to be called by family-designations (brother, sister, aunt, uncle, mother,
father, son, daughter, etc.). In traditional communities these honorary relatives
would tend to be from the same caste and religion, but in other settings they
might simply be neighbours or friends who could, for example, be relied upon
54. Ferguson and Folbre 1981, pp. 3213.
55. Tis applies to schoolchildren too, since teachers are responsible for pastoral care as well
as education. Terefore, even a ratio of one teacher for 25 to 30 children forget about the usual
Indian ratio of one teacher for 50 to 70 children! is not enough.
56. Zaretsky 1982, pp. 21517.
22 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
to look after children on an ad hoc basis. Te extended family has advantages
as well as disadvantages. In traditional families, it means that young women
and men, for that matter are more tightly controlled; young women have a
heavier workload because they are catering to a larger number of people; and
even if there are grandparents around to help with childcare, this comes at a
price, in the sense that the children may then be imbued with traditional
values such as rigid gender-rles. On the other hand, the uidity of boundaries
means that the isolation of mothers with young children is less common. Te
small minority of alternative families that are not based on biological
relationships and heterosexual marriage are more easily accepted in a metropolis
such as Bombay where traditional communities have partially broken down.
Solidarity instead of competition or domination and subordination
Socialising some caring work helps to reduce the huge burden now carried
mainly by women within the family, but it does not by itself eliminate the
gender-division of labour. It is quite possible that carers in the socialised
facilities are women, that the nurturing which continues to be done in the
home is also done by women, and that women continue to be treated as cheap
labour. Changing this would require challenging the gender-division of labour
both practically and ideologically, because it stunts both those involved in
round-the-clock caring work, who never get a chance to exercise other skills
and abilities, and those who do not engage in it at all, who never develop the
skills and intelligence required for this work. Practical measures to counter it
would include eliminating the gender-division of labour in employment,
working towards the equal sharing of domestic labour between men and
women, provision of crches and nurseries for all children whose parents need
childcare and sheltered accommodation or home-care for adults who need it,
shorter working hours, and regular part-time jobs if possible with exible
working hours to suit the needs of the employees for both men and women
who have caring responsibilities.
57
It would also mean demanding that a much
larger proportion of social-labour time be allocated to this work, which, in a
capitalist society, means state-funding. But the ideological struggle in a sense
has priority, because without winning that the practical struggle will not be
won, either in the home or outside. Te fact that, despite decades of feminism,
and well over one-and-a-half centuries of the labour-movement, caring and
nurturing continue to be undervalued and seen as womens work even within
the working class, needs to be explained.
57. See Molyneux 1979, p. 27.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 23
One strand of the explanation can be identied in what has been described
as a great intellectual and cultural ambivalence within feminism, in that it
represented both the highest development of liberal individualism and also
a critique of liberal individualism.
58
Te bourgeois ideology of competitive
individualism penetrated not just bourgeois feminism but also radical and
socialist feminism, leading to a devaluation of caring and nurturing because they
constitute, inevitably, a handicap in the competitive struggle for recognition.
But this has, at least partly, been a response to the attempt within working-
class movements to eliminate competition between women and men by
reinforcing relationships of domination over women by men, and this constitutes
the other strand of the explanation. Although Marx cannot be accused of
advocating such domination, he did help to create the basis for it by ignoring
and thereby devaluing the socially necessary caring work traditionally done
by women, and assuming that a patriarchal family with the man as sole
breadwinner was the model for the working class. Te result was that when the
working-class struggle wrested from capital time and space for a family, that
family was to a greater or lesser extent modelled on capitalist society, with its
social division of labour and hierarchical, authoritarian relations.
Condoning oppressive and sometimes-violent domestic relationships by
attributing them to the pervasive ideological inuence of capital or male
domination, as some Marxists and feminists do,
59
simply perpetuates a
situation where children grow up to believe that this is the only possible model
of human relationships. But if it is possible to live in a capitalist society and
struggle against it, it is equally possible and, in fact, easier to struggle against
authoritarian relationships between men, women and children within the
working class.
60
Indeed, without this struggle, the labour-movement will
continue to be subordinated to capital. Challenging the domination of capital
requires the full involvement of working-class women and children, including
those who are not directly exploited by capital, in the class-struggle. As
Domitila puts it, the rst battle to be won is to let the woman, the man, the
children participate in the struggle of the working class, so that the home can
become a stronghold that the enemy cant overcome. Because if you have the
enemy inside your own house, then its just one more weapon that our common
58. Gordon 1982, p. 45.
59. See Chodorow and Contratto 1982, pp. 689.
60. However grim the situation is, it is not inevitable that men or women turn the anger
generated by their own oppression against victims who are weaker and more vulnerable than
themselves (women and children in the case of men, children in the case of women, or minority
communities). Tis form of resistance to oppression i.e. the refusal to become an oppressor
oneself is available even to the most powerless.
24 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
enemy can use toward a dangerous end.
61
Women have an advantage in this
struggle, to the extent that they recognise both human needs for nurturance,
sharing and growth, and the potential for meeting those needs in a non-
hierarchical, nonpatriarchal society.
62
But it can only be won by the working
class as a whole.
What are the elements of such a struggle, and how far can it progress under
capitalism? Te rst requirement is an understanding and acceptance within
the labour-movement of the value of caring work and the skills and intelligence
required for it, followed by the recognition that these need to be fostered in all
human beings.
63
Caring for a person conforms to the Marxist ideal of work
that is directly for the satisfaction of human need and not for prot; hence
recognising its importance is crucial to the struggle against capitalist
exploitation and oppression. While the demand for wages for housework has
the drawback that, if met, it would eliminate even the limited autonomy
enjoyed by working-class women and bring their domestic labour directly
under the control of the state as employer,
64
the demand that the value produced
by domestic labour be recognised for example, in statistics such as GDP, in
settlements on divorce, and in allocating pensions to women is an important
one, helping to make this vast amount of labour visible. Counting the time
spent in domestic labour as part of the working day is also important, especially
in the case of women-workers, who often do not get enough time to reproduce
their own labour-power through rest and recreation.
Te backwardness of the situation in India, where traditional hierarchies
based on gender and age still predominate, could be an advantage if it allows
the womens liberation-movement to avoid the dead-end of liberal
individualism, which is often confused with the development of individuality
but is in fact as destructive of the full development of individuality as
authoritarianism and patriarchy, which crush individuality in a more obvious
way. Individuality can develop in a child only if she is surrounded by
the loving attention of other human beings; children completely deprived of
this wolf-children, for example fail to develop their human potentialities,
while the development of children who are deprived of adequate interaction
of this type is severely retarded. Yet providing this unstinted love and attention
inevitably puts the giver at a disadvantage in a competitive market, and would
therefore be ruled out in a purely market-driven economy.
61. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer 1978, p. 36.
62. Hartmann 1981, p. 33.
63. Ruddick 1982.
64. Freeman 1982.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 25
Tis contradiction at the heart of bourgeois ideology the fact that, taken
to its logical conclusion, it threatens bourgeois society with extinction, and
therefore the reproduction of competitive individualism depends on its
opposite (the reproduction of self-sacricing women) is what leads to the
right-wing insistence on the family as a separate realm from which the logic of
capital is excluded.
65
However, from the standpoint of the socialist principle of
solidarity, which posits an indissoluble link between the rights and well-being
of each individual with those of others, such a contradiction does not exist; an
ethic of care, in which the happiness and well-being of the person who is being
cared for is essential to the happiness and well-being of the carer, is entirely
compatible with it. Working for an ideal of nurturance and equal respect for
human beings both inside and outside of the family (whatever shape or form
it may take) is thus an essential component of a labour-movement built on the
principle of solidarity.
Te practical outcome of this understanding would be movement towards
an equal sharing of nurturing between men and women and a struggle for
conditions which would make that possible. Equally important is the struggle
for the allocation of vastly more social-labour time to this work than occurs
currently, reversing the neoliberal policy of cuts in spending on healthcare,
education and welfare. For most trade-unions in India, which have engaged in
collective bargaining exclusively for their own members and have never had a
solidaristic policy,
66
the idea of a social wage (including education and
healthcare for all) as a trade-union demand would be a new and important
departure. Shortening working hours and increasing the number of part-time
jobs with pro rata benets would improve productivity and expand employment
in addition to allowing more time for domestic labour. Te Maternity Benet
Act and Factories Act, which require individual employers to pay maternity-
benets and provide crches for the children of their women-workers, are
direct disincentives to their employing women, as well as being somewhat
unfair, since the generational reproduction of labour-power is a service to the
capitalist class as a whole rather than the individual capitalist. Funding parental
leave and childcare from contributions made by all employers, workers and
the government, as in the case of Employees State Insurance Scheme benets,
removes this anomaly.
Te nal goals of mutually armative relations within the household and
adequate resources for the production of labour-power cannot be reached
under capitalism, yet it is possible to make considerable progress in that
65. Torne 1982, p. 19.
66. Tere are a few exceptions, such as the Chhattisgarh Mines Mazdoor Sangh, which is also
unusual in the rle that women have played (see Hensman 2002).
26 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
direction even within capitalist society. Recognition that this constitutes a
crucial arena of class-struggle would enable Marxists to play a more positive
and eective rle in attaining that goal.
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