Rogueish

There are sev­eral ways to con­ceive the de­mand for wages. One could de­scribe it as a pro­posal for re­form-specif­i­cally, a pol­icy or pro­gram de­signed to ra­tio­nal­ize the wage sys­tem by mak­ing up for some of its de­fi­cien­cies. Al­though this de­scrip­tion is ac­cu­rate to a de­gree, to get a sense of what is miss­ing from it, con­sider the dif­fer­ence be­tween a de­mand on the one hand and a re­quest or plea-a first step in an ef­fort to seek com­pro­mise or ac­com­mo­da­tion-on the other hand. Nei­ther the pol­icy pro­posal, with its aura of neu­tral­ity, nor the plea, with its so­lic­i­tous­ness, man­ages to cap­ture the style and tone of the de­mand for wages for house­work; none of them con­veys the bel­liger­ence with which this de­mand was rou­tinely pre­sented, or the an­tag­o­nism it was in­tended thereby to pro­voke. Al­though the de­mand for wages may have been, at least in part, a se­ri­ous bid for re­form, there seems to have been lit­tle ef­fort on the part of its pro­po­nents to be seen as rea­son­able or to meet oth­ers halfway, and lit­tle in­ter­est in work­ing within the logic of the ex­ist­ing sys­tem and play­ing by its rules.

― Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries