And not to sound too autonomist or second wave, but alienated emotional labor by women is an absolutely vital part of maintaining waged capitalist systems.
But the solution isn’t to make human relationships into a gig economy where yr husband is explicitly yr employer
Seriously. The solution to having a problem with capitalism relying on unpaid women’s (and children’s and and and) labour is not to try capitaling harder and more personally.
This is so obvious and yet when people talk about unpaid labor there’s this weird assumption that it’s the ‘unpaid’ part, not the ‘labor’ part that’s coercive.
because we’ve been taught that labor is something we have to do to survive instead of something we choose do for each other and our communities
Another thing is that almost all the negative things we associate with labor disappear the moment labor stops being a forced repetitive task we do because we must.
Cooking a meal? Is a thing most of us enjoy doing for fun every once in a while. Cooking a meal every day because it is expected of the homemaker or cooking 50 meals in a night because you need to work at a restaurant to survive? In those conditions does cooking lose all it’s joy.
The same is true of most other labor. Building something? Making art? Farming? Coding? Gathering and restructuring information? All these things are already perceived as leisure in a non-coercive context. Heck, even cleaning doesn’t feel like much of a chore when it’s not obligatory.
Labor becomes leisure and leisure becomes labor when the coercive aspect is taken out. The anti-capitalist future isn’t just one where we work for our communities but one where we ‘work’ for fun and creativity and our enjoyment is as central to the activity as the outcome.
QueerAnarchism 