During freedom struggle and within its garb, the principal aspect of women’s struggle was reformism of patriarchal social practices. The phase of fifties and sixties passed in social calm and stalemate with the satisfaction of social need generated during freedom struggle through post independence constitutional guarantee of equality between men and women and certain legal provisions for protections against women’s repressions. The women’s question fell into a brown study of reformist programme even during the upswing of social movements in seventies and its rejuvenation in the current phase. The confinement within a narrow boundary is largely due to lack of clarity on both theoretical and practical premise.

Theoretical impasse

On the question of women’s liberty, two positions are primarily held. According to mainstream left opinion, the question of women’s liberty need not be dealt with separately, because the working class movement by itself will resolve this issue, formation of women’s organization is needed only to ensure participation of women in the overarching workers’ movement. The contrary view held by a section of feminists emphasizes that women should get separately organized without being mingled with working class movement. The extravagant claim of the advocates of these two streams of thoughts can be interpreted as the theoretical impasse in the overall social and workers movements because these two thoughts do not take family as basic unit of social relation into consideration. However, feminist consciousness shows how women came together to articulate previously unspoken but increasingly powerful discontent, and in so doing created at one and the same time a movement and a theory which radically disrupted the gender relationship of previous generations. But if the family labour and social labour are not considered intertwined within the ambit of law of value and expropriation of surplus value, the importance of formulation of programme on women’s labour and women’s liberty within the essence of social and workers’ movement is undermined. In the backdrop of rising social and working class movement, the Gramsci’s ‘good sense’ rooted in our actual experience must articulate the question of women’s liberty within the ambit of mass movement as against the hegemonic ‘common sense’ which tells us how things are supposed to be and what we supposed to think, feel and do.  

Family labour and Social labour

It is often argued that family labour is valueless or unpaid because it is not productive labour. It is not productive labour because it does not pass through commodity value chain or exchanged in the market. In this logical-structure, the use value and exchange value and in this sense the family labour and social labour are segregated in two mutually unrelated space-time continuums. The value of goods produced through family labour even when not exchanged in the market, is determined by notional familial reckoning. The notional price of the family products for consumption is less than the price of the same product for exchange between buyer and seller in the market, because the prices in market transaction are influenced by transportation costs, commissions of many intermediaries in the supply chain, the balance between supply and demand etc. Let us consider an example. The family members produced a quantity of vegetables in their own field. They used these vegetables for their own consumptions. The family labour got expended in cultivation and cooking. Had they not cultivated the vegetables, they would have purchased these items from the market. They would have opted for market had the competitive prices of the products in the market are less than the expenditure incurred for production by the family for own consumption. It means that the value payment is ingrained in both use and exchange.  But the women’s labour like cooking, child rearing etc within the family are not paid directly. This family labour is also integrated with the overall social and production relation. Let’s consider a case of the woman family member who works in a social productive space. This woman may not have the time to spend for certain aspects of family labour e.g. cooking or child-rearing. In this situation, she will engage outside labour (especially of women) as maid-servant for cooking and avail service of child care centre in exchange of money for child rearing. But the women who are engaged as domestic maid servants or in child care centres for exchange value of their labour power will also perform the similar unpaid labour within their own family for creating use value. Thus depending on market demand of exchange, the character of family structure as well as the family labour will change. Under this changed situation, the male members who are engaged in social productive labour will get further relieved from family labour. This domestic family labour of cooking, rearing, providing family support system for mental health etc reproduces the social labour power which is sold to earn exchange value in the market by both men and women. Two broad divisions are visible in this changed production relation. In exchange of same value following the rule of economics, the men have to do only outside labour while women have to do both outside and domestic labour, on the other hand a small of section women are getting a part of domestic labour done by other women labour in exchange of money. Moreover, if the demand created by the need of family to earn means of livelihood is more than the market demand of women labour, then wages of women’s labour will be below the value of their labour power and less than the men’s wage. The regulator and controller of such need within the family is the male member, because women’s incomes are treated as supporting income, women are not considered as main bread earner. The participation of women in the labour market is high in the case of low income group. When men start treating women as their competitor in the social labour market and as the cause of shrinking job opportunities, the patriarchal values of considering women as family centrepieces that should remain within the confine of four boundaries of home, are strengthened. The undeclared rules of family management or the rules of contract of marriages determine the forms of women’s labour, and the changes in the family rules in turn are influenced by the dynamics of production relation. That’s why the division between women and men’s labour and division within women’s labour need to be considered while formulating the programme of social and working class movement.

Marxist Conception

If the basic law of unity of opposites of dialectical materialism is applied for developing struggling unity among the working class, the practical formulation of struggle should be ascertained basing on such internal non-antagonistic divisions. Here the production is also unity of opposites of social and family labour. In capitalist production, the value of the product is calculated by adding values of three factors. These factors are value of labour power, surplus value and value of past or dead labour. The value of dead labour is the value of that part of means of production which has been utilised to produce the new product. On the other hand, the value of these three factors is determined by the average social labour time expended. The immense women’s labour which is ingrained in the production and reproduction of labour power of living labour and the production of past or dead labour remain unaccounted. Women themselves perform the necessary labour required for reproduction of their own living social labour. Thus the domestic labour of women not only produces use value for consumption, but it also produces the exchange value for sale of labour power of both men and women. So the issues of special rights of women’s labour need to be incorporated in the revolutionary working class movement.