wages for housework…
File this under “betcha didn’t see that coming” - Hugo Chavez, in a recent speech, essentially instituted a modest wages for housework program:
The role that housewives play in the economy and the nation also needs to be rewarded said Chavez. Beginning this summer, 200,000 poor homemakers will each receive roughly $200 (372,000 Bs) a month.
Chavez said, “These mothers work a lot, ironing, washing, preparing food, cleaning and bringing up kids.� More money has been set aside for the project and the number of beneficiaries could quickly rise above half a million.
Which women would receive the money would depend on several conditions. These include marital status, how many children they have, their living conditions and already existing levels of family support.
The measure is an outgrowth of Venezuela’s 1999 constitution, whose article 88 specifies that the constitution recognizes household work is economic activity that produces wealth and well being. Also, according to this article, since it is economic activity, homemakers have the right to a pension.
It should be noted that this amount is fairly significant, equivalent to about minimum wage. Perhaps autonomists might be convinced to abandon their dogmatic anti-Third-Worldism (read: Eurocentrism)?
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The Global Women’s Strike people in the UK are one of the most visible pro-Chavez groups over there; I’d rather thought this was just bandwagon-jumping, but obviously not. Also, here’s an interview with some Wages For Housework people about Venezuela.
Comment by tim @ 2/12/2006 2:54 pm
Are you guys going to get a Chavez Doll? It looks pretty sweet.
Comment by Marty @ 2/14/2006 5:52 am
ha! i just got back from caracas, so i’ve got one already!
Comment by geo @ 2/14/2006 9:27 am
hi Geo,
The characterization of autonomists as Eurocentric strikes me as requiring an overly limited set of who is ‘autonomist’. Any of the following fit in at least one sense of autonomist, depending on where one draws the lines -
Holloway lives in Mexico and does a lot of work on the EZLN and Latin America. Cleaver, who coined the term ‘autonomist marxism,’ has done extensive work on the EZLN. Ditto Midnight Notes, several members of which have done a lot of work on Africa (including Federici who has also got the Italian pedigree). The Dallacostas have done a lot on Africa too. And even if you consider figures like Negri and Virno… Negri wrote a book, or at least contributed several chapters of a book, on the situation in Argentina. He also was part of the Contrapoder book with Colectivo Situaciones. Virno’s written on Argentina as well. There’s also Nuevo Proyecto Historico, a more narrowly (post)operaismo group (compared to many of the others on this list) in Argentina. So, who do you have in mind here?
I also want to add that the “anti-thirdworldism is eurocentric” idea does a disservice (sp?) to your ideas. People might simply disagree and have radical and reasonable (even if - you’d say, I wouldn’t - ultimately wrong) arguments and analyses for doing so.
What do you mean by third worldism anyway? I didn’t find the Wikipedia entry very illuminating.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate @ 2/15/2006 9:28 pm
hi nate,
i think i was probably unclear of the context for my thought. i was thinking more of tronti/negri, the foundations of whose thought seems to be clearly eurocentric (in focus, epistemology, conceptual apparatus, as well as repeated metaphors about “discovering an unknown continent”). so my point was more that (many) autonomists are anti-third-worldist, and that this anti-third-worldism coincides in its origins with a pretty profound Eurocentrism. hence, some suspicion is due toward those same concepts.
but to those specific studies (some of which i haven’t seen), i should probably make clear that simply discussing the periphery says little about the shape of one’s thought (indeed, discussing the Orient was the profession of the Orientalist). and i think many contemporary “autonomists” do indeed carry eurocentric baggage in their exportation and application of a European framework (vis-a-vis the state, for example). this is most clearly in the attempts to seize upon something like the Zapatista struggle and to turn that into a general theory of radical practice. the same can be argued regarding the turn to immanence (a theory which is impossible from the point of view of the periphery).
yeah, too bad there’s no general Wikipedia entry (an anti-third-worldist conspiracy, to be sure). at its most strict, i use the term to refer to the potential to prompt crisis from the periphery. for obvious reasons, this has a good deal of overlap with something like guerrilla warfare and focoism. but European opposition to such forms of thought blends pretty consistently into Eurocentrism, with regards to which forms of thought are admissible, which political forces have the proper consciousness, etc. you shouldn’t necessarily take this as a massive denunciation: pretty much all of western Marxism and most of western philosophy fit into this category insofar as they don’t interrogate and contextualize their concepts. this doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.
so-called “third worldism,” which can be problematic as it is sometimes used, refers in its best usage to the ideal of south-south alliance against capitalism and imperialism, the capacity for autonomous action from the periphery to disrupt these systems, and the need for a decolonial perspective to effectively challenge these. this formal autonomy is, i think, the ground it shares with autonomist thought, but i don’t think it’s by mere chance that few autonomists make this transition.
cheers
geo
Comment by geo @ 2/15/2006 11:56 pm
hi Geo,
Much clearer, thanks. Looking back over my first comment it had a harsher tone than I intended, sorry. A product of being up late and tired. You and Mark Kelly should write a thirdworldism wikipedia entry, Mark’s a wikipedia fiend.
I have a different set of lenses than you (within what from another perspective is an almost identical theoretical and political perspective), so I’m not sure I follow or agree, and I can’t always tell the two apart. Generally I try to follow Holloway’s lead, which is to say, basically, there’s no universalizable formula. I’m often not sure how to respond to a lot of claims - like, say, criticisms or celebrations of figures like Lula, Chavez, Morales, etc. I’m for anything that makes people’s lives better, but I’m very suspicious of any kind of statist politics. At the same time, in some situations to some people those politics might be the best option. I’m not sure, and ultimately my personal (dis)approval doesn’t mean much because I don’t have much effect on those events (this is partly due to and partly the motivation behind my focusing of pretty much all of my own time and energy for politics on workplace activity, which feels much more within my sphere of influence). An interesting anthology and translation project would be to assemble documents for and against thirdworldism of some sort - some of the forms you identify, focos etc - as well as anti-americanism, and to do the selection in a way that there’s no silly strawperson representatives.
As for Tronti and Negri, I don’t know what to make of that (or the claim of Eurocentrism generally), but I do think you’re right that at least among some of the early operaisti there was anti-Maoist streak. Steve Wright’d know more about this, of course. I read somewhere that Maoism in Italy was the other big tendency outside the PCI at one point. Tronti makes disparaging remarks about national liberation/people’s movements someone in the Workers And Capital book, clearly a knock on Maoists but who he’s referencing and the specific political stakes at the time aren’t clear.
On this last, that’s what I’m most interested in learning about - the political stakes of one vs the other. At least some versions of thirdworldism I’ve encountered (people who use the term), generally a probably vulgar Maoist sort (I’m not a competent judge as I don’t know the material) strike me as wrongheaded. Not least because they seem to conflict with of have negative judgments about my own political interests and activities of workplace organizing in the US. The minimal sketch you provide - activity is possible and crises generable in the periphery - seems an incontrovertibly correct and important take. But I don’t know what the political stakes are for those of us not living in the periphery.
I can see one possibility, predicated on the idea of internal third worlds within first world countries, but that still leaves me wondering what the stakes and the projects are for those of us who are (arguably) not in those peripheries either. I think a lot if opened up if one abandons a search for privileged (sp?) sites for the appearance of agents for revolutionary transformation (ie, this or that objective position - industrial proletariat or peasantry) in favor of a perspective of assessing our (potential) power based on what we can build. (This building process does, of course, need to take objective factors as its point of departure and target for attack.)
Oh, one other thing - another stake I can see in this, and one I like quite a bit, is that one useful aspect of some kind of thirdworldism is that it renders a larger field of contiguous historical antecedents that people can draw upon for inspiration and the beginnings of analysis, rather than having there be a partition between struggles that count and ones that don’t.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate @ 2/16/2006 6:58 am
nate,
thanks for the comments. just one thing: my worry about holloway is precisely that he formulates something which operates as a “universalizable formula” (most clearly in his anti-institutionalism).
Comment by geo @ 2/16/2006 8:59 pm
hi Geo,
I think that’s a fair criticism. He’s pretty good in interview, though, I think, at not acting on that universalizing impulse. For instance, Tariq Ali’s harsh response to Holloway’s book basically said “not Chiapas, Venezuela!” and called Holloway misguided for not getting that. Rather than take the bait, Holloway said (as I remember anyway) basically instead that this either/or is not the dilemma facing movements in that part of the world, and that posing those kinds of either/or’s are potentially divisive and dangerous. I suspect his anti-institutional thing is more of a long-term outlook or desire than an immediate practical demand. I think it’s really interesting that folks from the Open Marxism circles put out that book on Lenin, basically moved toward a sort of council commie perspective. I’m deeply sympathetic to that, but I don’t really know what to do with it, I’m too hung up on organization. I wish some of those folk would apply their big brains more to those kinds of problems, or to just collecting and distributing more info on organizational experiments.
besos,
Nate
ps- I meant to ask but forgot, do you know of any material on the history and any debates or conflicts around/leading up to article 88? That’d be some great stuff to read.
Comment by Nate @ 2/16/2006 10:28 pm
two statements by global womens’ strike:
http://www.39ymas.com/temas/solidaridad/Articulo-88/
http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/Spanish2004/Article88Letter.htm
Comment by geo @ 2/17/2006 9:03 am