The Contradictions of Home Life

The Contradictions of Home Life in Capitalism Marnie Holborow describes how homes are left to provide everything that capitalist society won’t – care, day to day survival, all kinds of support – and, as a result, home life as we know it, is full of tensions and contradictions. This article is an adaptation from a chapter of Marnie’s new book Homes in Crisis Capitalism: Gender work and revolution, which is also reviewed in this issue. 90 Marx observed that the capitalist state proclaims individualism as its guiding force, which draws a veil over all existing social divisions and demands that members of civil society ‘face one another as individuals’.1 Home is a key construct in this capitalist ideology of the individual. Home is where personal fulfilment is meant to be found, the ultimate sanctuary for the personal self. In the Global North especially, where neoliberal individualism rules, it is where an impossibly vast array of needs and goals are meant to be realised, where personal and family relationships, intimacy, sexuality, lifestyles and emotional support expect to find fulfilment. The consumption of goods lies at the heart of this individual dream, now increasingly accessed online without even needing to set foot outside the home. But there are millions of people across the world who have no hope of ever owning their own home. People who live in an increasingly commodified world of high house prices and soaring rents; people who become rejected as ‘outcasts’ in this home-centred society. The home can also be a place of violence and control particularly for women and their children. Homes can be a sanctuary, but they can also be places of deep distress, coercion and control. They are also strangely hidden places, configured as somehow apart from society, from the economy and from public life. They are private spaces that play a deeply social role in capitalism and therein lies many of the tensions, mental health issues and unseen violence that happens behind the closed doors of homes in our society. IRISH MARXIST REVIEW Homes, work and women Traditionally, home has been counterposed to paid employment, despite the extensive amount of work - both paid and unpaid - that takes place within it. Achieving the right ‘work-life balance’ – a concept which turns on a dualism between home and work – has long been the mantra in business and industrial relations. The recent introduction of widespread working from home has helped to break down this distinction, but homes are still overwhelmingly viewed as places where we go to fulfil our needs once our paid employment has been done. This is a deeply individualistic understanding of the home which glosses over its essential care and social functions. Homes provide goods and services - cleaning, cooking, childcare etc- that are essential for the reproduction of its members, and they also provide, to varying degrees, for people’s psychological, emotional and sexual needs. This work is disproportionately done by women who are often expected to do what some economists term the ‘double day’. But these tasks are also highly inefficient as they take places in millions of individual units, repeated millions of times over, across any one society. This individual multiplication and mass repetition of domestic tasks has untold effects in planetary depletion, but it also results in hardship and poverty as most of the work needed to care for people falls back on individual households. Shelter and keeping warm may be basic human needs but in neoliberal society they are also offloaded almost entirely onto separate homes, meaning there are many going without heating on cold days or unable to make a meal. Many older people live on their own and eat, watch tv, and sleep in one room because they cannot afford to heat the others. Society works on the basis that everyone individually will pay for their access to electricity, gas, and everything else. Some sections of the population may be looked after in publicly provided institutional settings, others in schools and other places for some part of the day. But in general, capitalist society takes for granted that the responsibility for basic care falls on the individual household, financed by what those individuals earn in the market. This means that many inevitably fall through the cracks. The growth of charity provided food banks across many countries of the global north, and more generally, the huge growth in the NGO, not-for-profit sector, reflects the dire shortfall of this individual provision. Furthermore, the neoliberal retrenchment of the welfare sector, the marketisation of many social services, has extended further the relegation of care to the private domain. Individual homes are at the hub of what has been termed the ‘economisation of the social’, a development whose result is greater poverty levels and a greater gap between rich and poor.2 Homes are also places where children are raised. Children can help to fulfil our most intimate relationships, but childbearing is simultaneously of benefit to the ruling class for it must occur if the labour-force is to be replenished and reproduced. Women’s assigned role in this work means that they often participate in paid employment with one hand tied behind their backs. They are still expected to do the majority of work in ISSUE 37 91 92 the home even as more and more of them are also working for wages. Women are being drawn into labour without society assuming responsibility for the home care tasks that they do, and capital doubly benefits from this: it continues to get care on the cheap and women are forced to the bottom of the labour market and can be super-exploited. But equally, the more women enter paid labour, the more women’s vital role in social reproduction is pitted against their availability for exploitation. Therefore, at different times in history, capital has alternated between its dependence on women’s reproductive role and its need for more women in the labour force. For capital, this is a balancing act: for women, it represents the nub of their oppression. To understand this, it is useful to turn to the work of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. Homes in the totality of social relations Marx’s premise was that all social relations must be understood in terms of the mode of production, including gender relations. Marx and Engels, contrary to common belief, provided a rather detailed account of the impact of large-scale industry on gender relations within the household, and of the relations between the family and society. Their framework still provides a powerful analysis of social reproduction which links gender oppression to the role of the family in capitalism. Any limitations in their accounts spring from their not having lived to see later scientific, technical and medical advances, which have made significant changes to both domestic production and the production of life itself. Also, they did not foresee the degree to which capital would later come to reinforce ideologically the family to ensure the smooth and more reliable reproduction of the working class. These limitations notwithstanding, their basic understanding of the articulation of social reproduction with production, and the special capitalist features of this, provide a comprehensive historical and material explanation for the nature of gender relations. It is worth pointing out here that identifying the oppression which results from shouldering the bulk of labour carried out in family homes does not have to involve constructing the entire analysis from empirical observation. This would be to go against a fundamental principle of Marx’s critique of political economy, which, as Paul Cammack highlights, requires grasping the ‘particular’ as part of a rich totality of many determinations and relations.3 Marx attached great importance to the concept of ‘totality’ for understanding the nature and significance of different social phenomena. As he put it, ‘the capitalist process of production is seen as ‘a total connected process, i.e., a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalrelation itself: on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage labourer’.4Marx aimed to grasp the reality of forms of oppressionwhether that be of women, Irish workers in Britain, or black slaves in America - as part of the complex totality of capitalism. Oppression is not an epiphenomena of class relations but a specifically capitalist form with specific manifestations, from exclusion to enslavement, from misogyny to racism. It IRISH MARXIST REVIEW also follows that struggles against oppression also come up against capitalism itself. Understanding capitalist society in its totality also involves the recognition that those structures and systems within it, including systems of social reproduction, are also subject to the changes wrought by the system itself. While domestic labour is not subject to the degree of transformation of industrial production, because it remains relatively simple, small scale and repetitive, its activities do undergo changes due to capitalist developments and how this affects patterns of consumption in individual homes. These affect classes differently. Households can take advantage to a lesser or greater degree, depending on their income, of advances in industrial production to make some kinds of work in the home easier and less time-consuming. The extent and availability of state services can also affect the burden of household labour across different economies. Better off women can afford to employ others to perform care and domestic work. But there are also specific developments in capitalism which have altered the nature of home life: intensified competition for work, the increase of precarious contracts, the absolute and relative increase of female participation in the labour market, wider choices regarding childbearing, the development of reproductive technologies, the expanding labour market on a global scale, the impact of digital and internetbased technologies, the expansion of goods and services – particularly care services and ready-made food – which have all impacted on domestic labour and activities. More extensive working from home, itself only possible due to developments in information technology and almost universal access to the internet, has also altered the dynamics of home life. This too, despite appearing to be a choice for the individual, has been introduced on the system’s terms and we have yet to see what the social effects of it will be. Homes seem like a relatively stable social unit but, from many points of view, they are in a constant state of change. The fact that the work-home relationship in capitalism l e a v e s w o m e n m a i n l y, t h o u g h n o t exclusively, bearing the brunt of domestic labour and also, alongside migrant workers, often at the bottom of the labour market, does not require us to theoretically describe domestic work in its own terms but rather to grasp it in the specific and changing functions that it plays for the system as a whole. From this point of view, identifying women’s work as uniquely ‘caring’ or ‘affective’ is misleading and underestimates the changing contexts in which this work is performed. Administering care, for example in a situation where the person receives a wage, takes away its simple resemblance to ‘affective’ labour. Even paid healthcare work consists of many different tasks professional and administrative – which are sufficiently varied and part of an overall division of labour to make ‘care work’ only an approximative description. Social reproduction operates, therefore, not on its own terms, but within the broader context of capital relations, which vary in character and composition over time. It is how social ISSUE 37 93 reproduction processes articulate with the capitalist system overall, how efficiently and with what outcomes, that affects how capital and gender relations are constructed. 94 Homes and the needs of capital Marx places the wage at the centre of social reproduction for it is through the wage - the workers ‘means of subsistence’ – that workers can live, that they can refresh and replenish themselves, as well as raising a new generation of workers and caring for those who are no longer working. The relationship between production and social reproduction is that they share the same social foundation. As Marx puts it, ‘the conditions of production are at the same time the conditions of reproduction’.5 But this does not make reproduction and production equivalent, either in terms of the accumulation of surplus value or in terms of labour processes. ‘People making’ is not the same as commodity production as it does not extract surplus value as such, nor does it involve the same direct exploitation dimension. Social reproduction is not a given like capitalist social relations, nor is it the origin of ‘free labour’ in the way that class relations are. Rather social reproduction depends on already existing social relations and varies according to the changing needs of capital accumulation. Tithi Bhattacharya describes capital’s relationship to social reproduction as one of ‘reluctant reliance’ noting that capital resists greater investment in the social provision of care services.6 However it is important to note that capital refuses this, not in an absolute sense, but because of its own crisis-prone nature. In certain circumstances, and in particular regimes, capitalist production has delivered greater state involvement in the provision of care services: for example, during the Second World War in the UK, or in the former state capitalist regimes of Eastern Europe, or under Social Democratic governments in Scandinavian countries. Capital sometimes has an interest in socialising certain aspects of domestic labour and care or investing more public money in these services. This may be because it needs to free up more women for exploitation in the labour market or because higher poverty rates and lower human capital skills among its potential labour force may be undermining its competitive position vis-àvis other capitalist states. Capitalism is not per se against state support for care; rather it is a strategic question, influenced by conditions of capitalist production. Increased state spending under certain conditions, can occur. For example, Joe Biden’s 2022 $1.8 trillion Family Recovery Plan may have been motivated by US capitalism’s need to rehabilitate its public investment after decades of neoliberalism. However, what is generally true in capitalism’s current many faceted crisis, is that significant public investment in services in the foreseeable future seems unlikely, which means that individual homes continue to pick up the shortfall and this changes the character of homes at different times. Currently, changing household composition is a point in question. In the U.S, two-parent families now account for a just a third of all households. 7 Nearly a tenth of children world-wide live in single-parent households IRISH MARXIST REVIEW but this is much higher in countries of the Global North. The U.S. has a quarter of its children living in single-parent households. In Ireland, one in four families with children is a one parent family. Add to this that over a quarter of older adults in the U.S. live alone, and across the EU single-person households have increased. Rainbow families -same-sex couples, with or without children – and families with a child or children, who have at least one parent who identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex or queer have increased, although there is still little information available on their numbers. In other words, a significant shift in household composition across many countries has resulted, particularly in countries of the Global North, in a gradual displacement of the male-headed nuclear family. Many of these changes have coincided with the growth of women of all ages in paid work. In the OECD countries, the percentage of women in the labour force now hovers between 50 and 60 percent, up from 40 percent fifty years earlier, driven mainly by many more married women in paid work.8 In Ireland, we have seen the numbers of women in the workforce jump upwards by more than a fifth in the last thirty years; in 2023 figures from the World Bank showed Irish labour force participation rates among females at 60 percent, just 10 percent behind that of men.9 And, despite this, women still bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic work. In general, they carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men. Abolish the family? The pressures of individualised care and domestic work have led some to simply argue that the family should be abolished. This expresses a level of frustration with the deep systemic nature of oppressive gender relations in capitalism; it is part of a current revival of radical utopianism which has emerged in response to the many social crises of our times. US feminist, Sophie Lewis, calls for the abolition of the family through ‘a womb revolution’, part of which is to legalise and make socially acceptable surrogacy, so that women can avoid pregnancies altogether and still be mothers. The track record of the ‘natural family’ is such that, for Lewis, a ‘counter social reproduction’ is needed in which the techniques of dependency and renewal are ‘radically and relentlessly overturned’, the kinship surrounding the family broken, and a new social order created beyond capitalism and patriarchy.10 Radical feminist, Silvia Frederici, too, calls for us to ‘extricate ourselves from the family’, return to ‘more extended types of families, built not on blood ties but on friendship relations’, and refuse to be suffocated by the family by ‘denuclearising’ it’.11 Anti-work feminist, Kathi Weeks, also calls for abolition of the family so that sexual relations can be revolutionised through challenging the heterosexual monopoly on marriage and the traditional couple form through disrupted, non-monogamous, polysex relationships. She admits that these alternative relationships can often become distorted in the prevailing individualism of our neoliberal societies, but she argues that ISSUE 37 95 deconstructing the social norms of sexual relationships must remain part of the abolitionist political project. 12 96 But radical utopianism has its limits. Marx and Engels, it is true, referred to the abolition of the family both in The Communist Manifesto and in The German Ideology, where they wrote of the need to destroy the family ‘in theory and in practice’.13 But they also believed that this could not be an abstract ‘theoretical’ denunciation and that more progressive alternatives actually had to be built. The institution of the family had to be grasped in its social entirety, and changes in it required a change in social relations. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels situate the family, first, in relation to the bourgeois, property-based family. The ‘hallowed co-relation of parents and child’ they deem blatantly hypocritical as the bourgeoisie applies the sanctity of the family only to their own class. Tearing working class children away from their families and using them as the ‘simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour’ did not come into it.14 Neither did they have any objection to treating women in their own class as mere instruments to produce children. Marx and Engels’ analysis of the family started from its specific historical and social forms, particularly the role it performed for capitalist society and while they dwelt on its ideological and oppressive effects, they believed that both the bourgeois and working class family had specific material roots which determined its form and functions. The value of historical materialism over utopianism in discussions of the family is the understanding that envisioning different ways of living must be steeped in the concrete reality of the people in whose name the change is being offered. Criticism of existing society is not enough in itself; there is a material context which must be taken account of as well. The future can only be built on the present not on the realisation of an idea. Homes and families are not just ideological creations: changes to their composition and the relationships within them have come about through developments in capitalism - more women in paid work, new advances in technology and consumption patterns - but also as a result of political mobilisation against the old gender tropes. Without taking the rounded social basis of the family into account, abolition of the family remains an abstract call which fails to relate to the material reality on which families are built. The Irish family The material and social contexts of families are particularly important when it comes to the Irish family. British colonialism and occupation left the island at the mercy of a laissez-faire policy which resulted in mass starvation, death and widespread emigration. Families were torn apart by these upheavals and family links and networks became a vital means of emigrants making their way in foreign cities like New York, Chicago and London. Keeping families together, in this context, as has been noted for former slave families in the US, is almost a form of resistance.15 IRISH MARXIST REVIEW On the other hand, institutions like the Catholic Church put the family on a pedestal, made it a means of social control, and forced women to conform to the patriarchal authority the Church invested in it. Women were seen as primarily mothers and the Irish state backed up this view, particularly when, in periods of mass unemployment such as the 1930’s, it suited it to restrict women’s employment. Maintaining harsh restrictions on abortion was also a way of bolstering the family which served the Irish state and was part of a range of conservative measures intended to help keep the lid on social unrest in a country in which radicalism lay close to the surface. how it saw the family’s function, recognising it as ‘the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society’ and guaranteeing to protect it as the necessary basis of social order, including the denial of Irish women’s reproductive rights. Church teachings were drawn on to give this conservatism greater force, to bring stability to a state born of revolution and to write in stone that care provided by the family was socially necessary. As we have seen in recent referenda, liberals today may be prepared to drop the Catholic conservatism but not the individual provision of care that families provide, because they oppose more state spending. The particularly repressive and anti-woman aspects of the Irish family can be partly explained by the Catholic Church’s monopoly on social values and its rigid enforcement of gender roles. The extent of predatory abuse and physical violence administered by priests and the protection and cover up of this by the state has justifiably fed a deep resentment against the power of the Catholic Church and its hypocritical and authoritarian defence of the family. Some writers on the Irish family argue that the strength and hold of the family in Ireland stems from a specific post-colonial nationalism in the Irish southern state and a strong Catholic patriarchal culture.16 The reality is more complicated. The family cannot be separated from a total network of social relations and material lived pressures as well as those imposed from the social order. The pressures from above were certainly forceful and explicit. The Irish state in its 1937 Constitution was very frank about But the Irish family as a lived experience also constituted a uniquely strong social bond, forged in reaction to the cruel depredations of colonisation, famine and emigration. It became a vital social support network, in the emigrant communities across the world, and in Ireland it provided a ‘familist social order’ for a society which suffered economic deprivation and had a very patchy social welfare system.17The family, in other words, plays the role of protective agent in a poor and predatory society. The official version of the Irish family was undoubtedly misogynistic, subservient to the Catholic Church and allowed cruelty and violence to go unchecked. But sexual and moral repression was only one part of the picture – one which, as Antonio Gramsci described, in connection to the ruling ideas in society, was imposed as ‘common sense’ from the ruling orders. In people’s daily lives ISSUE 37 97 98 was forged a different kind of consciousness, a spontaneous ‘good sense’ shaped by their needs and their class. The same is true for the family. There is an imposed, top-down ‘common sense’ version and one made from below corresponding to ‘the good sense’ of living human beings. The Irish family, alongside the prescribed patriarchal authority and potential for abuse, also provided practical protection, a ready-made network of people to provide all sorts of material and emotional support. It was the means of passing on and sustaining a collective consciousness and solidarity. Traditions of trade unionism and militancy were often passed on through families and this continues to this day. Even values which go against traditional notions of the family, like those which support abortion, can filter upwards from children to parents within families and challenge the old ideas. Gramsci’s insights into the contradictory nature of consciousness are particularly apt for the family in capitalism. A kind of dual consciousness is present: those ideas which have been inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed; alongside a collection of ideas which are implicit in the everyday experience of working-class life, and which have the potential to challenge those same ruling ideas.18 Homes and Alienation There is another dimension which explains the mixed view that people have of families. Estrangement or alienation is the Marxist notion which captures the negative effects of capitalism on human beings, on their physical and mental states and on the social processes of which they are part. Alienation is centred on the acting individual and provides a lens through which to view the relationship between people and their conditions and to comprehend their interactions. Marx observes that workers are alienated from the object of their labour in so far as they have no control over the conditions of production, and from the fact that their own labour is also a marketable commodity. Capitalism converts everything into a product for sale and commodities thus acquire a significance over and above their specific use and purpose and appear to have a life of their own. Things that humans create appear to be autonomous, outside the control of humans themselves and enter into relations both with each other and with people.19 This is what Marx called commodity fetishism which in capitalism, like religious idolatry of old, demands human to surrender to it. In one of the few accounts in Marxist feminist writings to deal with alienation and social reproduction, Martha Gimenez draws on Marx’s theory of alienation to examine the changing nature of domestic labour today. She argues that while domestic labour is not strictly alienated labour in Marxist terms, it can have alienating effects. One of the physical and psychological effects of alienation is that workers live a divided existence ‘feeling really alive when not working and not really living while at work’ which, Gimenez notes, captures something of the profound division between work and IRISH MARXIST REVIEW life that is the lot of working people in capitalism.20 Domestic labour performed by household members is unpaid, produces use values and does not have the production-forexchange property identified with alienated labour in capitalist production. For domestic and care work performed by paid workers, however, their work contains the alienating features of any other place of work. The specific contextualisation of different kinds of domestic labour – whether it is paid or unpaid - counters the belief that all gender oppression lies in male control over women’s labour power or that the main function of domestic labour, as Silvia Frederici claims, is to ‘service the male worker, physically, emotionally and sexually’. 21 The fact that women continue to do more work in the house generally than men, creates frustration and irritation which feeds into the alienation which arises from the gendered division of labour. But even this is not a clearcut question of patriarchal dominance, particularly as many households are without male adults, and even those that contain them, the amount of care and work done by men varies according to the type of paid work that the man does, generational, and other factors. The experience of home life fits awkwardly into an overarching malecontrolling narrative mainly because people of different classes and in different living arrangements, experience the effects of domestic labour very differently. Domestic labour fits into an overarching need, not for men, but for capitalist society. These variations make it difficult to characterise domestic work in a uniform way. Amongst the homeless, the extremely poor, the marginalised, those in migrant centres, there is very little resembling domestic labour. Those who do work for a salary or wage differ in terms of income, education and occupation which affects the nature of the domestic work carried out in the home. For those dependent on welfare, it is state payments not a wage as such, which determine access to the means to provide for themselves. Dual-earning households on low wages are likely to have a different range of activities which make up domestic labour than duel-earning households on higher incomes. Domestic labour amongst the upper and middle classes, and for well-paid dual earner households, may be carried out by someone else. It may be eased or lessened by paid services and all sorts of elaborate household appliances. For most working people, despite greater availability of takeaway food, pre-prepared food, and cheaper household appliances, labour and care in the home can be a source of stress, even of conflict between household members. Domestic labour, Gimenez writes, can be described as a unity of opposites.22 It remains objectively oppressive, because women are still in the main expected to do it and because this leads to female discrimination in the labour market and in society. But it can also be sometimes subjectively fulfilling in that it may be experienced as a relief from paid work. Some household activities may contain a degree of agency and self-realisation. Unpaid domestic labour, that women mainly, although not exclusively do, can be oppressive and alienating as it may take ISSUE 37 99 place within unequal gender relations, but it can also be experienced as something apart from ‘work’, something over which you have more control. 100 Ideological pressures on home life can also be alienating. Dan Swain highlights that labour, under capitalism, undergoes a process of abstraction, a crucial component of which is time as value, which comes to dominate other aspects of social life besides work.23 Estrangement, commodification, the fixation on time as value and the encroachment on lived time by market time, all these have come to apply to home life under capitalism. Leisure time, sports and exercise, socialisation and family life are when people are meant to decide themselves what they do and pursue meaningful activities. But these do not come cheap, and the problem is that home life takes place after work when people are already exhausted. Homes seldom turn out to be the desired retreat from the world. More often they become places of isolation whose dynamics can be bad for people’s mental health. Home, as Johnathan Martineau notes, is thus a place of thwarted aspirations, at the very least, and at worst, a place where work continues. 24 Violence in the home Perhaps nowhere are the pressures and alienation of home life expressed more disturbingly than in the ever-wider prevalence of domestic violence. Most of the violence against women is intimate partner violence and takes place in the home. In Ireland, one in four women who have been in a relationship have been abused by a current or former partner. Incredibly, 41 percent of Irish women know someone in their circle of family or friends who have experienced intimate partner violence.25 Higher levels of violence against women, trans people and non-binary people are taking place amid ever more objectification, marketisation and commodification of people’s bodies. The rule of the market and possession of commodities, so beloved by neoliberalism, extends to people as well as things. In our increasingly atomised world, sex and relationships have spilled over to become a vast online industry which promises hope and fulfilment in return for a payment. Sexual ‘freedom’ in capitalism translates into a multi-billion-dollar sex and porn industry, a for-sale experience which feeds a sense of entitlement to sex which, in a sexist society, means that women are the losers. Society is saturated with pornographic images, now consumed routinely in people’s homes on phones and devices. The state’s reliance on homes to provide basic care means that the state is also complicit in the continuation of gender violence in the home. Society requires homes to deliver shelter, rest, respite from work, and a host of other human needs, and homes are left to deal with all of the pent-up problems and attitudes of society. The state’s refusal to adequately fund refuges often leaves women no choice but to stay in the house of their abuser. Over half the domestic violence refuges across Ireland are full, meaning that many women and children must return to an unsafe home or due to the lack of affordable housing, go homeless.26 IRISH MARXIST REVIEW Delivering real protection for women who are suffering domestic abuse requires a recognition that homes cannot be left to run as isolated individual units, based on what society considers a natural state of affairs. People should have real choices about how and with whom they live. The public provision of varied and different forms of living, including places where women with children can go to get away from abusive and violent situations, should be something that any truly people-centred society should provide. Fundamental social change The one-size-fits-all home is an ideological invention. It tends to be gender stereotyped, ignores who bears the burden of care work in the home, and is premised on having a high enough income to provide for its members. The still sexist and ultra-individualist haze through which homes are constructed in capitalism seldom corresponds to people’s conflicted experience of home life. It might have seemed, in the past, that progress could be made on easing the burden of oppression which emanates from society’s reliance on individual homes, that the goal of women’s equality might have secured some structural changes to ensure that care, replenishment and support for people, could be socially provided. But neoliberalism has entrenched an even deeper reliance on private households, with calamitous social effects – increased poverty, a fall in standards of living, greater provision of care at home due to the crisis in health and care services, and for many, the denial of access to a home at all. A fundamental social transformation is needed to address the contradictions and strains of home life in late capitalism. Greater flexibility in working hours and better pay could alleviate some of the pressures. But only publicly funded care and service provision, on a social and community-decided basis, can begin to undermine the current excessive reliance on homes and the gender stereotyping, oppression and social problems that this entails. Because funding and social support for this care provision runs deeply against the grain of for-profit crisis capitalism, even these simple demands require fundamental social change to become enacted. The many battles in the here and now– for childcare, for afterschool care, for elder care, for access to free health care – point the way to a socially much richer and freer alternative to the rigid and failed care model of individualised homes that we have at present. ISSUE 37 101 1Karl 102 Marx. 1843. Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right @ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1843/critique-hpr/ch06.htm. 2Francesco Laruffa. 2022. ‘Neoliberalization, Economization, and the Paradox of the New Welfare State’, European Journal of Sociology, 63:1, 2022, pp. 131-163. 3 Paul Cammack. 2020. ‘Marx on Social Reproduction’, Historical Materialism 25 pp.4-7. 4 Karl Marx 1976 Capital Vol 1. London. Penguin. p. 724. 5 Ibid, p. 711. 6 Tithi Bhattacharya. 2020. ‘Liberating Women from “Political Economy”: Margaret Benston's Marxism and a Social-Reproduction Approach to Gender Oppression’ Monthly Review 71 (8). 7Pew Research Centre, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/31/with-billions-confined-to-their-homesworldwide-which-living-arrangements-are-most-common/. 8Our world in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply#female-participation-in-labor-markets-grewremarkably-in-the-20th-century. 9See these World Bank Details @ https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/economies/ ireland#:~:text=In%20Ireland%2C%20the%20labor%20force,labor%20force%20participation%20has%20increas ed. 10 Sophie Lewis. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the family. London. Verso. 11 ‘Preoccupying Silvia Frederici’ 2014, The Occupied Times https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=13482. 12 Kathi Weeks, 2023 ‘Abolition of the family’. The most infamous feminist proposal. Feminist theory Vol 23 Issue 3 p.17. 13Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 122. 14Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. 1977. ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ in Selected Works, Vol 1, (Moscow: Progress Publishers p.124. 15 Angela Davis. 1981. Women Race and Class. London. Penguin Modern Classics. 16 Linda Connolly. 2014, The Irish Family, London, Routledge p.33. 17Michelle Norris. 2016. Property Family and the Irish Welfare State. London. Macmillan. 18 Antonio Gramsci. 1972. Selections from Prison notebooks. London. Lawrence and Wishart p.33. 19 Karl Marx. 1976. Capital Vol 1. London. Penguin p.165. 20Martha Gimenez. 2019. Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays. Chicago. Haymarket Books, see Chapter 11,’Loving Alienation: the Contradictions of Domestic Work’, pp. 257-273. 21 This is the formulation used by Silvia Frederici. 1975. Wages Against Housework, (New York Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press @ https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/silvia-federici-wages-againsthousework/. 22 Ibid p.258 23Dan Swain. 2019. ‘Alienation, or why capitalism is bad for us’ in Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta and Paul Pew, The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p.363. 24Jonathan Martineau. 2017. ‘Culture in the Age of Acceleration, Hypermodernity, and Globalized Temporalities’ Journal of Arts management Law and Society 47 (4) pp.218-229. 25See Women aid @ https://www.womensaid.ie/get-informed/facts/ #:~:text=14%25%20of%20women%20in%20Ireland,former%20partner%20since%20age%2015 26Over half of domestic Violence centres across the country are full @ https://www.thejournal.ie/domesticviolence-refuges-6298145-Feb2024/ for more details. IRISH MARXIST REVIEW