African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 8a
Angela Davis
Angela Davis is well known but hard to summarise. She is a
scholar. She is also a holder of the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet
Union, and she was twice a Vice-Presidential candidate on behalf of the
CPUSA.
This link takes you to an
interview that Angela Davis did with Gary Younge of the Guardian (London) in
2007, during a trip which also took her to Johannesburg, as recorded by
the CU here.
This link takes you to the
Angela Davis page on Wikipedia, where as usual there are more links, at the
bottom of the page.
Chapter 13 from Angela Davis’s 1981 book, Women, Race and Class (download linked
below) is to a large extent a polemic against the Wages for Housework Movement
of that time, led by Mariarosa Dalla Costa in Italy. Davis makes an
orthodox Marxist defence against a kind of anarchism or liberalism. Naturally
this does not mean that Davis has always been orthodox, any more than C L R
James was always orthodox.
In this text, Davis tackles the matter of housework
first, arguing for a communist solution to the drudgery of child care, domestic
cleaning, food preparation, and laundry.
She shows that the current situation of women is
historically recent in origin, and that the repression of women coincides, in the
historical development of human society, with the appearance of private
property, quoting Engels’ “Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State”. Davis reports on
her 1973 interaction with the Masai people of Tanzania, where there was
still division of labour between the sexes that was “complementary as opposed
to hierarchical,” according to Davis.
Davis recounts, in her own way, the nature of the
capitalist wages system, where money is only paid for the survival or continued
availability of labour power, and nothing at all is paid for the expropriated
product of labour. Davis also records aspects of the South African
apartheid system of exploitation, which was still in full force at that time.
In her
concluding paragraph Davis says: “The
only significant steps toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken
in the existing socialist countries.” In other words, wages-for-housework
is an ineffective gimmick. The real solution to women’s problems in society can
only come from changing society through the democratic organisation of women in
the same kind of way as workers are organised, so that their organisation is a
component of democracy and is not outside of democracy.
Please
download and read the text via this link:
Further reading:
C L R James, The Hegelian
Logic, 1948 (3692 words)
Huey P Newton, Speech
at Boston College, 1970 (6283
words)
Muammar Gaddafi, The
One-State Solution, 2009 (939
words)
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