Rogueish

Still less does the de­mand for wages re­sem­ble an ef­fort to per­suade, let alone to coax, en­tice, or se­duce. For ex­am­ple, those who de­manded wages were not look­ing for recog­ni­tion for women’s sac­ri­fices or self­less­ness. “Our power,” ex­plain two of the de­mand’s ad­vo­cates, “does not come from any­one’s recog­ni­tion of our place in the cycle of pro­duc­tion, but from our ca­pac­ity to strug­gle against it” (Cox and Fed­erici 1976, 6). Rather than in­habit the sub­or­di­nate po­si­tion of house­wife and try to use it to their ad­van­tage as moral high ground and a way to evoke ei­ther sym­pa­thy or guilt, they were more in­ter­ested in an­nounc­ing their power…. The de­mand was thus not only a de­c­la­ra­tion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary an­tag­o­nism, but a de­mand for power in at least two senses. First, in mak­ing a “de­mand for au­ton­omy” (James 1976, 26), the pro­po­nents of wages for house­work sought the con­di­tions-in this case, the in­come-that could se­cure for women a mea­sure of in­de­pen­dence from men, from cap­i­tal, and from the state. This is why pro­po­nents of the de­mand were crit­i­cal of those fem­i­nists who fo­cused not on less work and more money for women, but only on achiev­ing the “so­cial­iza­tion of house­work” through the pro­vi­sion of state ser­vices like child-care cen­ters or col­lec­tive kitchens: “In one case we re­gain some con­trol over our lives, in the other we ex­tend the state’s con­trol over us” (Fed­erici 1995) 193). But the de­mand for wages was not only a de­mand for au­tonomous power, it was also an oc­ca­sion to ac­quire and nur­ture that power; it is about “the au­ton­omy that the wage and the strug­gle for the wage can bring” (James 1975,18).

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

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

As was the case with the de­mand for wages for house­work as a per­spec­tive, the de­mand as a provo­ca­tion had util­ity be­yond the merely prac­ti­cal. What is often over­looked in as­sess­ments of the de­mand is its per­for­ma­tive di­men­sion: as a per­spec­tive, it func­tioned to pro­duce the fem­i­nist knowl­edge and con­scious­ness that it ap­pears to pre­sup­pose; as a provo­ca­tion, it served also to elicit the sub­ver­sive com­mit­ments, col­lec­tive for­ma­tions, and po­lit­i­cal hopes that it ap­pears only to re­flect. The col­lec­tive prac­tice of de­mand­ing thus has its own epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and on­to­log­i­cal pro­duc­tiv­ity. As not only a per­spec­tive but a provo­ca­tion, the de­mand for wages should be un­der­stood as an at­tempted claim and in­cite­ment of an­tag­o­nism, col­lec­tive power, and de­sire.

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