WORK & WORKING PEOPLE IN POPULAR CULTURE
Revaluing Our Work Inside and Outside the Home: Everyday Lives Ennobled in the Writings of Russell Harrison
for productive activity. He writes that: “Here Highsmith powerfully describes women's role in the social division of labor. And this understanding of what is involved in the life of a housewife makes Edith’s Diary Highsmith’s most feminist novel.”
By Silvia Federici
Russ only faulted Highsmith for painting Edith’s character as totally passive and completely accepting her enslavement to the service of men and subordination to them. But he quotes sympathetically Highsmith’s saying that: “Her profession as a housewife slowly, dreadfully kills Edith.” In other words, Russ understood that in capitalism, the subordination of all our activities to the process of capitalist accumulation affects every sphere, every aspect of our life, turning family relations, sexuality, love relations between men and women into work relations, into the relations of production. And this is what the feminist movement has made visible.
employers have benefitted from, because it has saved them billions of dollars which they would have had to spend to build the infrastructures, necessary to enable millions of people to show up every day at their respective workplaces. One of the tasks of our campaign was to make visible this work, to make it visible as work, to reject the idea that work takes place only in the factories or in the offices. We also objected to the idea that to have some economic autonomy, women have to go out and take a job, as some socialist feminists said we should do. It was important for us to recognize that we are already working at home, that this work at home is the pillar for every other work activity because it produces the workers, and it will not disappear if we take a waged job. I think that what has happened over the last four decades has demonstrated that our position was correct.
Silvia Federici
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met Russ Harrison in 1974 when George Caffentzis came to New York and we started our relationship. Russ was a strong presence in our lives. We shared many dinners and hours of conversation. As Neil Donahue told us, Russ was an incredible conversationalist. And recently, reading his diary, I saw how many insights from those conversations he was able to absorb into his work. One of these long conversations on the subject of work in capitalism and its refusal was videoed by David Friedkin in 1980, I think. Unfortunately that video has been lost.
Unless we deal with the question of housework and the devaluation of this work, it becomes very difficult for us when we go to work to outside the home to negotiate favorable work conditions. It's not accidental that when women work outside the home, most of the time they get precarious jobs, often an extension of housework and very poorly paid. This is why today, in the US, so many workingclass women are indebted: and go from month to month on the basis of payday loans. Unlike many leftists at the time, Russ responded immediately and very positively to the analysis of our feminist campaign for wages for housework. He agreed to my writing in Wages Against Housework that: “They call it love; we call it unpaid labor.” He saw that alienated labor in capitalism extends outside the factory into the home, into the family, the community; that it shapes all relationships between women and men.
Russ, George and I also traveled together. In 1982 we spent a month vacationing and traveling in Yugoslavia, before the country was destroyed. Later, in 1994, we met in Berlin, where we visited Brecht’s house, his grave and the museum there that holds the paintings by Kathe Kollwitz – a great record of the misery of working-class life as well as her tribute to the German peasant war. And we saw an exhibit on World War I, reconstructing what would have been life in the trenches, and the daily carnage produced by this war that, we agreed, was a major attack on the possibility of a working-class revolution.
Not accidentally in his two main works, Against the American Dream and, above all, Patricia Highsmith, he dedicated chapters to the feminist idea that the personal is political and that alienated labor colors the daily reproduction of life and all our social relations. In Patricia Highsmith, when he discusses one of Highsmith’s main novels, Edith’s Diary, he has a section that seems to be taken from a pamphlet of the Wages for Housework campaign. It is entitled: “Housework, the Reproduction of Life and the Body.” The book is a portrayal of the classic self-sacrificing woman. Here Russ details all the many jobs that Edith does. He speaks of the revulsion that they often inspire, especially when they involve interactions with the male body. He knows that these activities would be considered productive work if they were paid, because they liberate men's time
When I met Russ, in the 1970s, I was involved in an international feminist campaign that demanded that reproduction be considered a social responsibility and called for Wages for Housework from the state. Its purpose was to show that housework is work – not a personal service, not a natural activity, as it has often been misrepresented, being defined as “women's labor.” We stressed that what we call domestic work is actually the work of producing daily and generationally the workforce. We argued that housework (re) produces our capacity to work, and that it is work which all
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In his novel, The Shop, which he never published, Russ writes of his father, a shopkeeper in a hardware store. He would go out of the house every morning and on the way to work he would go first to the public library and take out three books. He was an amazing speed reader and in the shop he read all through the day, and every time he heard the door-bell ring he looked up in annoyance. Then, at the end of the day, he would bring back the books to the library and the next day he’d go back and get new ones. again. Russ was the same. He didn't own a shop, but he was continuously reading. As Neil Donahue pointed out, his conversation was continuously interspersed by references to the many books he was reading or interspersed with German words or with literary references. and this comes through in his diaries as well. His diaries are an incredible journey through the details of everyday life, but made noble, rescued from devaluation, from this feeling of entropy that capitalism injects into our daily life. This very heroic struggle that Russ made to make life have some meaning, despite everything, comes through, not only in his books but, very painfully, also in these diaries.
Much more can be said on this topic. In Against the American Dream, for instance, while acknowledging that the protagonist of Bukowski’s work, Henry Chinaski, is a male chauvinist, Russ also comments that: nevertheless, he didn't do all the work that is involved in being a male chauvinist. This is because Bukowski presents him as a kind of a passive guy, who doesn’t do the work of projecting the authoritarian patriarchal image that the macho posture requires.
I spent several hours in preparation for today's event, reading from them, and I've been deeply moved by this exercise as Russ’s voice, his life, come across so powerfully through them. It made me wish, again and again, that he were alive and we could, I could, express to him what we may not have been able to do fully before: tell him how much we have valued his life and his friendship and how much we miss him now.
We should also talk also about Russ’s fascination, like Gorz and many others, with the Grundrisse, this work of Marx often characterized as his most utopian work. In it Marx described a world in which science and technology have been fully applied to the organization of work and in which all necessary labor is done by machines and our time is liberated for higher activities. Russ’ fascination with the work of Italian autonomous Marxists like Antonio Negri came from that; because they projected a world in which much of our time would be liberated from necessary labor.
Silvia Federici is, in the words of a recent New York Times profile: “One of the most influential socialist feminist thinkers of the last century” (2/19/2021). Among her most influential books – reaching new audiences today – are Caliban and the Witch, Wages Against Housework and Revolution at Point Zero. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism & the Politics of the Commons, is a collection of her work spanning over 20 years. Her newest book is Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (PM Press, May 2021). In April 2021, she was announced as the winner of the prestigious Franz Fanon Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is an Emeritus Professor in Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University.
I will conclude with a theme that runs through much of George's presentation: the fact that Russ tried very strenuously to rescue his life from alienation and lack of meaning. This comes through most powerfully in his very extensive diaries, that he kept for many years of his life and that I've come to consider his true masterpiece. For many years, Russ Harrison wrote almost every day, about everything that happened to him, while also commenting on current political and social events, and on the books that he was reading, the people he was meeting, and his teaching, including his teaching in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s and his teaching in Minsk in the 1990s.
REGIONAL LABOR REVIEW, vol. 23, no.2 (Spring/Summer 2021). © 2021 Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University
What is most striking about his diaries and what makes them so interesting is that, even when he speaks of his decision to buy a pair of shoes or of some other seemingly irrelevant event, he is able to give meaning to what might otherwise seem a most insignificant aspect of life. What is remarkable and truly genial, in my view, is his determination to rescue the daily, the micro events of our life from total oblivion. And again, his ability to bring to the micro events of our daily life his immense literary knowledge and creativity, so that they are illuminated and made significant. 25
