via my email via Jessica Johnson: The Baby and the Bathwater

Jessica Johnson sent me this, and I found it instructive and, actually, in a few moments, kind of mind-blowing in its clarity.

"Disbursement of the social wage to the industrial working class through private-sector employment institutionalised a structural antagonism between different layers of the class, an antagonism generally demarcated and activated by race and gender. The best known form is that which occurred within the household: the employed worker’s wage packet and benefits had to be turned into food, cleaning, laundry, leisure, sex, children, by the unwaged housewife . . . a portion of the wage essentially becomes a coupon to claim reproductive labour from an unwaged or otherwise marginal woman worker."

-Gabriel Winant

The Baby and the Bathwater: Class Analysis and Class Formation after Deindustrialisation in: Historical Materialism Volume 32 Issue 2 (2024)