Disposable nannies? Some questions on the role of domestic servants in the political economy of South Africa

Abstract

This paper offers some tentative and exploratory comments on the problem of how to locate domestic labour within the totality of social relations in the South African social formation. The precise relation of domestic labour to capital has been the subject of much controversy within 'the domestic labour debate'. All the contributors have stressed the importance of housework - previously neglected because of its' social invisibility and privatized nature. However, the debate has been conducted at a very high level of theoretical abstraction, although many of the questions raisea within it - such as the relation between domestic labour and the value of labour power - arc questions which can only be posed at the level of concrete class practices within a specific social formation. Furthermore, many contributors have reduced a materialist analysis of women's subordinate position under capitalism to an analysis of domestic labour. To avoid this narrow economism Molyneux has effectively argued the case for moving "beyond the domestic labour debate" to include "a consideration of the broader significance of the household and the relations within it for the wider society, without losing sight of the specific position of women within these structures". (Molyneux, 1979:22). This is the insight this paper attempts to build upon. It attempts to show that the household is the site of important contradictions and that domestic servants are 'bearers' of some of the characteristic antagonisms of the social formation as a whole. It suggests that the reproduction of labour power which takes place within the household is a crucial subject of struggle: what constitutes adequate reproduction for the various categories of the working class, is a subject of class struggle; the fact that women perform most of the domestic labour involved in the reproduction of labour power is a subject of feminist struggle. The relation between class and feminist struggle is the main point of contention in current marxist-feminist analysis.