IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE OLD AND NEW

Ideology critique has historically been associated with Marxist thought, and in particular with the Ideologiekritik of critical theory. In this tradition, ideology is usually offered as an answer to a political puzzle: why do people accept, or even participate in, their oppression rather than revolting against it? Ideology is in this sense a “pejorative” term describing the false beliefs which distort the reality of oppression and thereby help to perpetuate it (Geuss Reference Geuss1981, 11; Rosen Reference Rosen1996; Shelby Reference Shelby2003).Footnote ¹ While ideology critique receded in the late twentieth century, in recent years many thinkers have sought to recover its insights, often applying them to issues of gender and racial oppression (Celikates Reference Celikates2006; Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012; Reference Haslanger2017a; Reference Haslanger2020; Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi, de Bruin and Zurn2017). In both old and new guises, the project of ideology critique is usually understood to be both analytic and political: its purpose is typically to reveal ideology as such, implicitly with the assumption that oppression might thereby be recognized and confronted. This blend of analytic and normative functions is what makes ideology critique potentially powerful—and also what makes it challenging to do well. While critique is often held to be “inherently emancipatory” (Geuss Reference Geuss1981, 2), disaggregating the analytic and political functions of ideology critique can be a boon to emancipatory projects.

Ideology critique, I argue, typically performs two analytic functions in service of a political one. The epistemic function of ideology critique simply identifies ideology at work: it is a knowledge-production project concerned with understanding whether something is ideology (Aytac and Rossi Reference Aytac and Rossi2023; Sankaran Reference Sankaran2020; Rossi Reference Rossi2019). The explanatory function of ideology critique offers an account of how ideology serves to stabilize oppressive or unjust beliefs or practices. The emancipatory function, the most explicitly political, is usually—though not always—thought to follow from the analytic dimensions of critique: the exposure of ideology will enable oppressed people to see their oppression more clearly and hence to challenge it.Footnote ²

Rather than recommending or rejecting any function in particular, this article looks more closely at how they relate to one another and identifies the problems that can occur when they are conflated or misaligned. In particular, it argues, a convincing explanation of how ideology works is vital for understanding what ideology critique might plausibly be expected to do. Posing Michael Rosen’s question for ideology critique—“does it lead to good explanations that other theories cannot match?” (Rosen Reference Rosen2000, 399)—I argue that while ideology critique can provide good explanations, it too often does not. Many ideology critiques draw overly tight connections between the epistemic and emancipatory functions, bypassing the vital connecting tissue of explanation that articulates the mechanisms by which ideology actually operates to sustain social relations. The expectation that ideology critique is inherently emancipatory, moreover, tends to suggest that ignorance is the primary force in sustaining oppression and that knowledge of oppression is the crucial barrier to ending it. Yet while disclosure is often necessary for altering the conditions it seeks to reveal (Forrester Reference Forrester2022), it is rarely sufficient. The emancipatory aims of ideology critique, moreover, too often inform its analytic functions rather than following from them, with the effect of distorting both epistemic and explanatory accounts of ideology. The point of this critique is not to displace emancipatory goals, but to put them on firmer footing. Ideology critique may be more accurate—and hence more useful—when it is not expected to immediately serve emancipatory ends.

Clarifying the explanatory capacity of ideology critique also requires more sustained attention to its object. Much of the contemporary revival of ideology critique has, more or less explicitly, sought to redress the “economic determinism” said to plague traditional Marxist theories of ideology. While I am sympathetic to this aim, my concern is that the new ideology critique has overcorrected, disregarding the economic dimensions of social life altogether—even where the topic in question is explicitly economic in nature. Although Sally Haslanger defines ideology as a “cultural technē” that “prevents us from valuing things aptly” (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2017b, 166), for example, she treats valuation as an almost exclusively cultural and social phenomenon, neglecting the significance of economic valuation. Similarly, even where Haslanger addresses questions of labor—including the status of care work—she disregards the role of economic factors, suggesting instead that ideology itself has explanatory priority. Haslanger elsewhere rejects as “reductive” accounts which foreground capitalism, proposing instead a view in which different “logics” (of gender, race, etc.) are simply “cooking together” and “different elements have explanatory priority in response to different questions” (Reference Haslanger2020, 223–6). This causal agnosticism has virtues, insofar as it allows for a valuable degree of pluralism in diagnosing and analyzing social inequality rather than identifying a single primary factor. Yet it can tilt into an overly amorphous account of the relationship between different aspects of social life, offering little specificity about how or when certain elements should have explanatory priority. When different “logics” are treated simply as ingredients in a simmering stew, ideology acquires whatever flavor the theorist chooses.

Even critical assessments of the “new ideology critique,” meanwhile, have largely followed its lead in focusing primarily on instances of gender oppression as exemplary ideological phenomena (cf. Aytac and Rossi Reference Aytac and Rossi2023; Sankaran Reference Sankaran2020). The point isn’t that these aren’t rightly thought of as ideological; to the contrary, analyses of ideology have been vital to feminist thought (Finlayson Reference Finlayson2016). But we should be wary of the suggestion, implicit in both the new ideology critique and some responses to it, that gender is distinctively ideological, in a way that other aspects of social life are not. My analysis here echoes aspects of these criticisms—notably, Sankaran’s (Reference Sankaran2020) skepticism about the causal force of ideology and the necessarily emancipatory function of ideology critique—and joins work by “radical realists” and others (Prinz and Rossi Reference Prinz and Rossi2017; Reference Prinz and Rossi2022; Rossi Reference Rossi2019) in affirming the importance of empirical analysis for critical social and political theory. But rather than abandoning ideology critique altogether, as Sankaran proposes, I seek to reintegrate it with the critique of political economy.Footnote ³ As I argue, WfH’s creative reappropriation of Marxist ideology critique has lasting significance for theorists of labor and political economy writ large, which have been neglected in part because of the assumption that it offers a theory of gender rather than a theory of work. The subsequent debate, however, has often eschewed the Marxist critique of the wage itself and, as such, has tended to neglect the underlying causes of labor’s (mis)valuation.

IDEOLOGY AT WORK: THE MARXIST-FEMINIST SYNTHESIS

Most contemporary theories of household labor qua labor stem in one way or another from Western feminists’ attempt to provide novel answers to Marxism’s so-called woman question in the 1960s and 1970s (Vogel Reference Vogel2014). Amidst the postwar rise of the women’s liberation movement, many Marxist and socialist feminists hoped to root the analysis of gender oppression in material conditions without suggesting, following the traditional “base-superstructure” model, that gender was “secondary” to the more foundational problem of class oppression. To square this circle, many argued that women had a distinctive class position rooted in the unusual status of housework (Benston Reference Benston1969; Fox Reference Fox1980; Glazer-Malbin Reference Glazer-Malbin1976; Malos Reference Malos1980). Under capitalism, they argued, domestic labor produces a unique commodity: labor power, the ability of human beings to do work. By cooking meals, cleaning house, and tending to sexual and emotional needs, the (female) unwaged housewife readied the (male) waged worker to return to work each day; by gestating and raising children, they produced the next generation of workers; by doing this work for free, they helped keep wages down. While various theories of housework proliferated, I focus here on a particularly influential intervention: the WfH campaign of the International Feminist Collective (Dalla Costa and James Reference Dalla Costa and James1975; Federici Reference Federici2012; Federici and Austin Reference Federici and Austin2017; James Reference James2012).

While the WfH movement has received considerable attention from scholars in recent years, addressing various aspects of this multifaceted project (Forrester Reference Forrester2022; Reference Forrester2024a; Toupin Reference Toupin2018; Weeks Reference Weeks2011), its engagements with feminist analyses of ideology and consciousness have largely been overlooked. Ideology was central to many feminist efforts to explain the persistence of gender oppression after the realization of formal equality, reflected in analyses of “sex roles” and cultural portrayals of femininity, and deployed politically via the practice of consciousness-raising (Atkinson Reference Atkinson1970; Firestone Reference Firestone1970; Finlayson Reference Finlayson2016; Rowbotham Reference Rowbotham2015; Sarachild Reference Sarachild1970). The housewife came under particular scrutiny as the idealized figure of (white) womanhood in the postwar era, one famously diagnosed by Friedan’s (Reference Friedan1963) “feminine mystique.” Thinkers associated with the WfH movement echoed this critique, but rooted the housewife’s emergence in capitalism as opposed to “society” in general. The ideology of housework, they argued, not only consigned women to the home: it also concealed their true status as workers. The movement’s founding document, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s “Women and the Subversion of the Community” (Reference Dalla Costa and James1975) explicitly posed the housewife as an answer to the woman question: by identifying women as an unrecognized proletariat, the housewife offered a way to reconcile feminism’s “subject question” with Marxism’s. The analysis of housework brought the traditional project of Marxist ideology critique—identifying capitalism’s distortion of reality and demystifying false appearances in order to awaken class consciousness—to bear on the household, a sphere that Marxists had typically ignored. This, however, would require subtle but significant revisions to the Marxist account of ideology itself.

The “locus classicus” of the Marxist theory of ideology is, Stuart Hall argues, the sphere of exchange, where the proletarian and capitalist appear to meet as formal equals and agree to a mutually satisfactory exchange of labor power for a wage (Hall Reference Hall1986, 35–6). Marx’s famous descent into the hidden abode of production is itself an act of ideology critique, intended to reveal the domination and exploitation that lurk beneath surface ideals of freedom and equality. Here, the wage itself is the vehicle of mystification: it appears to be fair payment for a given amount of work and a deal to which both parties voluntarily agree. If the apparent freedom and fairness of this exchange purports to justify it, however, ideology does not explain why people work in the first place. The “doubly free” status of the worker does that: proletarians work “in order to live” (Marx Reference Marx1976, 270; Reference Marx and Tucker1978, 204; Roberts Reference Roberts2017). This account is more challenging to apply to the household than it might initially seem. After all, the unwaged housewife doesn’t enter into the ideological sphere of exchange at all. So what mystifies work if the wage does not? And how does the capitalist compel work in the absence of the wage? The theoretical moves of the WfH analysis are best understood as responses to these problems, as elaborated below. Where the Marxist analysis identified exchange itself as a realm of “appearances,” WfH identified ideology in the exclusion from exchange, and wagelessness rather than the wage as a tool of mystification. WfH also drew on ideology to explain why women worked at all. Ultimately, WfH demanded the wage as an emancipatory strategy aimed at reconstituting housewives as a revolutionary class of workers. Importantly, this emancipatory aim motivated the WfH analysis, most significantly informing its explanatory account of gender.

First, WfH argued that the wage structures social life far beyond the direct exchange between the worker and the capitalist. In a society in which wages mediate access to goods necessary for survival, those who don’t earn wages directly become dependent on those who do. So too, Dalla Costa and James argued, does the wage “comman[d] a larger amount of labor than appeared in factory bargaining,” exploiting not only the waged worker but his unwaged wife: the capitalist paid one worker, but benefited from the work done by two (Dalla Costa and James Reference Dalla Costa and James1975, 23, 28; Ngai Reference Ngai2020; Weeks Reference Weeks2011). Whereas the traditional Marxist critique located ideology in the wage itself, then, WfH argued that the lack of the wage also indexed ideology at work: wagelessness “hid” housework; rendered it “invisible”; “obscure[ed]” the length of the working day; “mystified” the function of the family (Federici Reference Federici2012, 17, 35; Federici and Austin Reference Federici and Austin2017, 33). It made housework “appea[r] to be a personal service outside of capital,” a favor done by a wife for her husband, instead of labor exploited by capital (Dalla Costa and James Reference Dalla Costa and James1975, 28).

Second, WfH explained the seemingly “voluntary servitude” (Rosen Reference Rosen1996) of the housewife as motivated by the naturalized ideology of gender. If housework was work, gender was its disciplinary mechanism—backstopped by the authority of nature itself. This is a familiar charge made of ideology: it is said to misattribute social relations to nature, a phenomenon sometimes discussed in terms of “objectification,” “deproblematization,” “reification,” or simply as “naturalization” (Geuss Reference Geuss1981; Jaeggi Reference Jaeggi, de Bruin and Zurn2017; Rosen Reference Rosen1996). Here, WfH’s contribution was to link the Marxist analysis of naturalized social relations to distinctively feminist critiques of naturalized accounts of women’s oppression following de Beauvoir (Reference de Beauvoir2009). What made housework different from other forms of work, Silvia Federici argued, was the fact that it had been treated as “a natural attribute of our female physique and personality… an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character” (Federici Reference Federici2012, 17–8). This ideological trick served an economic function: capitalism had “gotten a hell of a lot of work almost for free,” without which it could not survive (16-17).

Finally, the emancipatory function of the WfH ideology critique was expressed in the demand for the wage. Against charges of economism, WfH were clear that the demand for the wage was a strategy for revealing housework’s ideological status: it was above all “a political perspective” which could “demystif[y] and subver[t] the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society” (Federici Reference Federici2012, 15; cf. Weeks Reference Weeks2011, 128). The demand also contained a theory of emancipation: it was not only an act of disclosure, revealing an underlying truth (Forrester Reference Forrester2022), but a more active project of redefinition. By redefining housework, WfH also sought to redefine housewives—metonymically standing in for women but often dismissed as merely “nagging bitches”—as “workers in struggle” against capital (Federici Reference Federici2012, 16). Consider, for example, the litany which begins Federici’s “Wages Against Housework” (Federici Reference Federici2012, 15):

Each statement—each a slogan in itself—names an activity, affect, or identity widely understood as intimate, private, or natural and redescribes it as perceived from the standpoint of the housewife, in terms of labor relations. The demand therefore sought not only to build a constituency of housewives (Forrester Reference Forrester2022), but to interpellate housewives differently: to constitute them as a different kind of subject altogether, as a class of workers conscious of themselves as such. The demand for the wage can therefore be read as an instance of what Amia Srinivasan calls “worldmaking”: a form of representation that aims to remake the world by describing it differently (Reference Srinivasan2019, 145).

While the political function of this demand has been widely acknowledged and, indeed, often embraced, its complexity remains underappreciated. The demand for the wage targeted three dimensions of ideology simultaneously. First, it sought to denaturalize both housework and the housewife: the wage, WfH theorists argued, would simultaneously make housework “visible” and “demystify” femininity, such that both housework and the “the female role that capital has invented” could be refused and work redistributed (Federici Reference Federici2012, 18–9; cf. Malos Reference Malos1978; Forrester Reference Forrester2022; Weeks Reference Weeks2011). Wages were therefore explicitly deployed “against housework”—and implicitly, against the housewife as a figure of gendered ideology. Less often noted, however, is the difficulty of using the wage as a tool for demystification, since the wage itself also mystifies. Deployed uncritically, then, the call “wages for housework” threatens to reinforce the idea that the wage is a fair price for labor—precisely the idea that the Marxist ideology critique challenged and that WfH also called into question. In a crucial but largely neglected move, they framed the demand for the wage as also a struggle “against the wage” itself and “the capitalist relation it embodies” (Federici and Cox Reference Federici and Cox1975, 11). If the demand called for wages against housework, in other words, it could also potentially mobilize housework against wages: housework reveals that wages do not actually pay for a great deal of useful labor, and can call into question the idea that the wage is an accurate measure of work’s “true value”—its social or moral worth (Roberts Reference Roberts2017, 172–4; Ngai Reference Ngai2020). The emancipatory function of the demand for the wage therefore entailed a tricky double move, in which the wage must be simultaneously demanded and disavowed.

As the complexity of the demand reflects, the WfH ideology critique wavered between a focus on the housewife (and more broadly gender), housework (and, more broadly, gendered labor), and the wage (and its inverse, wagelessness). This fluidity could be overlooked when these categories coincided in the figure of the unwaged female housewife. But it has proved more problematic as the WfH ideology critique has circulated beyond its initial purview. So too have the problems with an ideology critique rooted in the “woman question” become more glaring. In particular, the movement’s explanatory account of gender has become increasingly unstable as the theory has traveled.

EXTENDING THE CRITIQUE: THE NATURALIZATION THESIS

Theories of housework exploded precisely as the age of the housewife drew to a close. The housewife had always been a historically and racially specific figure, as Angela Davis noted: Black and working-class women had always worked outside the home, often as domestic servants, and labor power could be reproduced in barracks as well as in the family (Davis Reference Davis1981; Vogel Reference Vogel2014). Even early theories of housework noted that middle-class white women, too, were increasingly working outside the home, especially in the emerging “service sector” (Benston Reference Benston1969). By the 1980s, the analysis of housework alone seemed increasingly ill-equipped to address the complexity of both labor and gender (Hartmann Reference Hartmann1979). While many feminist theorists in this period abandoned the framework of housework altogether, a smaller current of feminist theorists sought instead to extend its insights beyond the household per se. Two traditions—“housewifization” theory and social reproduction theory—have been particularly influential in developing theories of reproductive labor since.

Theorists of “housewifization” drew directly on the WfH ideology critique to explain the persistent “wagelessness” of a wider array of work, focusing in particular on peasant women in the “Third World.” “Housewifization,” the sociologist Maria Mies argued, described the process of “universalizing the housewife ideology” in which women were “defined” as “housewives and sex objects” (Reference Mies1986, 142). Claudia von Werlhof similarly characterized it as a “strategy” for reducing costs: when women were defined as housewives, they could be paid less, while work that was “housewifized” was made subject to a set of poor working conditions (Reference von Werlhof, Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and Von Werlhof1988, 119). Housewifization theorists also developed the analogies, already incipient in WfH, between women, colonies, and nature: women were the “last colony”; women had been “defined into nature” so their work could be appropriated, while nature itself had been defined as costless (Mies Reference Mies1986, 119, 142; Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen Reference Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen1999; von Werlhof Reference von Werlhof, Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and Von Werlhof1988). Federici herself would increasingly take up similar arguments, arguing that capitalism had identified women and colonized peoples with nature in order to “justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations” (Federici Reference Federici2004, 17).

As these metaphors and analogies circulated, however, distinctive arguments blurred into a looser set of associations. An initially fertile exchange among theorists of colonization, the household, and nonhuman nature gradually solidified into a series of mimetic arguments built on circular reasoning. The unwaged status of work was said to result from the oppressive portrayal of women, while women’s subordination was conversely explained as stemming from housework’s lack of a wage. Theorists of housework had drawn on accounts of colonial and peasant economies in theorizing housework; in turn, theorists of colonialism and peasant labor drew on arguments about housework (Hall et al. Reference Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts1978; Mies Reference Mies1986). These analogies grew still more tangled with the emergence of a parallel strain of ecofeminist work diagnosing the association between women and nature in Western thought (Merchant Reference Merchant1980; Plumwood Reference Plumwood1993). With respect to nature, too, arguments often looped back on themselves: housewives were “naturalized” because capitalism needed their work to be unwaged; on the other, housework was unpaid because it was associated with women and thus with nature. Had women been naturalized or nature gendered? Had the household been colonized, or had wage workers in the internal colony been housewifized? As different arguments flattened into a catch-all explanation, “naturalization” became the force lurking behind free, cheap, or devalued work.

This expanded ideology critique would, in time, converge with an expanded analysis of the labor of “social reproduction,” developed via a largely separate strain of socialist feminist thought. These theorists also looked beyond the household to identify a more comprehensive array of activities required for the reproduction of labor power, and gradually expanding still further to describe the reproduction of “people” or “life” in general (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser Reference Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser2019; Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2017; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2019; cf. Munro Reference Munro, Hunter, Khachaturian and Nanopoulos2023). Social reproduction, in Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett’s oft-cited definition, is an expansive category, describing “the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (Brenner and Laslett Reference Brenner and Laslett1991, 314). This work may be organized in various ways, as Evelyn Nakano Glenn observes: both “in and out of the household, as paid or unpaid work” (Glenn Reference Glenn1992, 4). Notably, this definition centers on the product of labor: social reproduction produces labor power and/or life rather than “things,” a distinction echoed in many feminist critiques of both capitalism and Marxism (Benhabib and Cornell Reference Benhabib and Cornell1987; Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2019; Brenner Reference Brenner2000; Mies Reference Mies1986; Young Reference Young and Sargent1981).

As “naturalization” became a catch-all category, so too, as Lise Vogel notes, have categories like “reproductive labor” become more “metaphorical than analytical” (Reference Vogel2014, 196). Invoked to describe low-wage food service jobs alongside unwaged gestational labor, public sector education, and waged cleaning work, the category of social reproduction increasingly strains the limits of conceptual coherence. If waged food preparation can be classified as part of social reproduction, why not industrial agricultural work? Conversely, why does the highly capitalized field of biotechnology not constitute a form of “life-making”? These ambiguities reflect an imprecision about the definition of housework within WfH itself: as one document declares, “We are teachers and nurses and secretaries and prostitutes and actresses and childcare workers and hostesses and waitresses” (Federici and Austin Reference Federici and Austin2017, 44).

What ultimately holds these categories together, I argue, is the residual mark of the “woman question” under which they were originally posed. Reproductive labor is usually defined according to some combination of three criteria, which typically remain implicit: first, the social identity or classification of those performing labor (“women”; “Black women”); second, labor’s status under capitalism (“unwaged”; “value-producing”); and third, the material activity or kind of product generated by labor (“labor power,” “life”). While social reproduction is a technically gender-neutral category defined by the product of labor (labor power; life), for example, it often remains implicitly defined in terms of the subject tasked with this kind of labor (women). Similarly, while “housewifization” ostensibly describes a way of reducing labor costs, it rests on the perception and treatment of people in keeping with certain social categories (women, housewives). The imperative to link the analysis of “reproductive labor” to the “woman question” has often encouraged the conflation of these distinct categories of analysis—even as empirical changes have rendered the relationship between these categories more tenuous than ever.

Although the intellectual traditions of social reproduction theory and housewifization theory largely developed on separate tracks, their insights are often combined in contemporary feminist analyses, which employ expansive definitions of reproductive labor and feature the ideology critique of naturalization as the central mechanism by which these kinds of work are rendered invisible and un(der)paid. This increasingly axiomatic argument explicitly contrasts reproductive labor to other kinds of labor, which are presumably recognized and valued rightly, and attributes its mistaken valuation to a distinctive kind of ideological mystification. It reifies a separate sphere of “reproduction” and its ostensible relationship to both capitalism and gender, casting a wide array of activities in terms of unvalued “women’s work,” regardless of who actually does them or under what conditions. Yet it is precisely in treating reproductive labor as an exception to the rule that this critique tends to obscure the reasons for its persistently low value.

THE LIMITS OF NATURALIZATION

The widening of the theoretical aperture described above rightly seeks to capture major changes to work and gender in the past several decades: the rise of the service sector; informal and wageless work; changing family structures; globalized care chains; and many other phenomena (Cooper Reference Cooper2017; Duffy Reference Cooper2011; Glenn Reference Glenn2010; Hochschild and Ehrenreich Reference Hochschild and Ehrenreich2004). The problem, however, is that an account of ideology developed expressly to extend the critique of waged labor to unwaged work becomes incoherent when applied to categories like “social reproduction” or “reproductive labor,” in which waged and unwaged work intermingle. None of the aspects of the ideology critique developed by WfH—the location of ideology in wagelessness; the explanation of wageless work via a naturalized gender ideology; or the proposal to demystify unwaged work through the demand for the wage—functions in quite the same way when (re)applied to waged work. As I argue, however, the explanatory account of ideology in particular has become an obstacle to understanding the conditions of this work today.

As the category of reproductive labor has expanded to include both paid and unpaid work, a subtle but significant shift in terminology has occurred, from the critique of “unwaged” or “wageless” work to the more subjective categories of “devalued,” “undervalued,” or “invisible” work. This change in language indexes a shift in the epistemic dimension of ideology critique: where “unwaged work” is an empirical category, the description of certain activities as undervalued or devalued registers an unarticulated normative claim about what the value of work ought to be. It becomes an ideology critique rooted in morality (cf. Aytac and Rossi Reference Aytac and Rossi2023).

The demand for the wage as an emancipatory strategy of denaturalization, meanwhile, has been applied in recent years to a wide range of activities, including sex work, dating, surrogacy, gestation, clinical medical trials, ecological stewardship, artwork, social media engagement, and the work of nature (Battistoni Reference Battistoni2017; Cooper and Waldby Reference Cooper and Waldby2014; Gotby Reference Gotby2023; Jaffe Reference Jaffe2021; La Berge Reference La Berge2019; Lewis Reference Lewis2019; Smith and Mac Reference Smith and Mac2018; Weigel Reference Weigel2016). This in itself has raised the specter of unlimited “labor creep,” since according to the criteria of wagelessness, any unwaged activity might plausibly be labor in disguise (Forrester Reference Forrester2024b; Horgan Reference Horgan2021). When the target is waged reproductive work, though, the demand for the wage doesn’t work in the same way. Many strategies for “revaluing” reproductive labor nevertheless echo the structure of the demand for the wage in the effort to make this labor more “visible,” whether through eye-popping estimations of its value or demonstrations which bring workers into the public eye (Gago Reference Gago2020; Wezerek and Ghodsee Reference Wezerek and Ghodsee2020). But are reproductive laborers really invisible—at least, any more so than workers in general? There’s a reason Marx describes the abode of production as hidden, after all. If anything, reproductive laborers are often more immediately visible than those engaged in the likes of manufacturing: people do tend to know the person who watches their child or cleans their apartment in a way that they will never know who makes their sneakers or television. Demands which seek to reveal the value of “hidden” work, moreover, tend to suggest that wages can and should reflect the “real value” of labor: that wages should valorize work rather than create the means for refusing it. They abandon the critique of the wage itself as a tool of mystification, and the double move against the wage.

THEORIZING LABOR BEYOND THE WOMAN QUESTION: THE COST DISEASE

To answer Federici’s question—Why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?—my account brackets the identity of the laborer and focuses instead on the relationship between the social relations of capitalism and the concrete labor process, considering the physical activities that certain kinds of work require and how they are organized within a broader structure of production (Braverman Reference Braverman1974; Knights and Willmott Reference Knights and Willmott1990). As such, I pose an additional set of questions: What happens when the same activities (cooking, cleaning, caring, etc.) are performed in the commercial service sector as opposed to the personal household? Why do certain kinds of work remain poorly remunerated even where they are waged and even when they are no longer done only or even primarily by women? In addressing them, I build on Davis’s (Reference Davis1981) suggestive but brief comments about the unprofitability of housework with insights from recent social scientific analysis of the service sector.

My epistemic provocation is that understanding reproductive labor may require theorists to take not only the standpoint of the housewife (Hartsock Reference Hartsock1998), but that of capital—to consider how and why capital organizes labor as it does. I begin from the basic assumption, articulated by Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson, that “capitalist firms are compelled by competitive forces to select their labour force and constitute their division of labour on the basis of profitability, not ideology” (Reference Elson and Pearson1981, 92). The goal of capital is to reproduce itself by generating profit, not to reproduce a particular set of gender relations. The former may entail the latter—but it may equally entail the “supersession” of a gendered division of labor, as Davis elsewhere observes (Davis Reference Davis1998, 173). I also assume that capital is neither intentional nor omnipotent in its ability to coordinate social activity in service of accumulation. Indeed, as research on the service sector shows, certain kinds of labor have proven remarkably difficult to make valuable despite capital’s best attempts.

In contemporary economic thought, the defining characteristic of services, most prominently discussed by the economist William Baumol (Baumol Reference Baumol1967; Reference Baumol2012), is that they tend to resist the kinds of productivity gains which characterize manufacturing. Manufacturing, in Baumol’s account, is “technologically progressive”: improvements in machinery make it possible to make goods more efficiently, such that the same output can be achieved with fewer workers. What Baumol calls “personal services,” by contrast, require “direct, face-to-face interaction” between provider and consumer and, as such, are difficult to mechanize or industrialize—which means that it is difficult to reduce the amount of labor they require (Reference Baumol2012, 20). In Baumol’s terms, these sectors are “technologically stagnant.” Increasing labor productivity tends to correlate with decreases in quality: seeing more patients in an hour, for example, usually results in a lower standard of care. Whereas wage increases in technologically progressive sectors can be offset by growing productivity, in labor-intensive sectors, wage increases have an outsized effect on costs—and suppressing wages is the central way to keep costs down. Over time, the disparity between productivity in “technologically progressive” and “stagnant” sectors tends to rise, as efficiencies develop in the former while productivity in the latter remains low. The costs of technologically progressive goods continually decline, while those of labor-intensive services stay even or increase. Even when the costs of labor-intensive services are stable, they tend to rise relative to the persistently falling costs of goods in high-productivity sectors. The result, Baumol warns, is that even as manufactured goods become increasingly affordable, including once-luxury items like cars and computers, services like healthcare will become increasingly unaffordable—even as workers in the latter sectors are paid relatively low wages. Baumol names this phenomenon the “cost disease.”

While critical theories of service work have addressed the cost disease, its significance for the analysis of “reproductive labor” has gone largely unrecognized (cf. Benanav and Clegg Reference Benanav and Clegg2018; Smith Reference Smith2020). Baumol’s analysis suggests that the low value of reproductive work stems from the fact that its physical qualities tend to resist the productivity gains associated with industrialization and automation. Healthcare is an exemplary case of the cost disease for reasons long noted by feminist theorists: care fundamentally requires attention and responsiveness to the needs of others (Tronto Reference Tronto1993; Reference Tronto2013). While someone who is ill may not require constant attention, for example, their need for care is likely to emerge unpredictably, such that someone must always be available. Similarly, children need to be watched more or less continuously: there is no way to shorten the time of this task, and a given person can supervise only so many children at once. These and other activities which are difficult to make efficient and hence difficult to make profitable tend to attract less capital investment. Where they are privately provided, the effort to contain costs and eke out profit margins often translates into intense wage suppression (Winant Reference Winant2021). Other sectors are so labor-intensive as to attract no capital investment at all. The household, on this view, is a remnant of capitalism’s reorganization of labor writ large; housework, a catch-all for activities that can’t be profitably organized and aren’t provided by states (Battistoni Reference BattistoniForthcoming; Gardiner Reference Gardiner1975; Gonzalez and Neton Reference Gonzalez, Neton, Pendakis, Diamanti, Brown, Robinson and Szeman2014; Mann Reference Mann and Fox1980).

If the cost disease analysis draws attention to the qualities of certain labor processes, it also casts doubt on claims that the low wages of reproductive labor result from a lack of social recognition or a “cultural technē” that has “masked” what’s valuable (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2017b). To the contrary, it is in part because people do value care so highly, and hold it to high standards, that they are likely to resist productivity-enhancing measures which reduce cost at the expense of quality (e.g., “care bots”). Many people pay astronomically high costs for care; indeed, care is the most significant expense of many households (Child Care Aware 2022; DeParle Reference DeParle2021). The problem, then, is not that people are unable to recognize the value of this work or unwilling to pay for it. Moreover, while care work constitutes an exemplary case of the Baumol effect, it also occurs in sectors that are perceived very differently. Baumol originally considered the paradox of low wages and high costs via the example of a string quartet, observing that to play the same piece of music in both 1850 and 1950 would require the same number of people working for the same amount of time. Classical music hardly seems a candidate for devaluation through ideological naturalization: it is held in high social esteem, is seen as a pinnacle of high culture, requires years of specialized training, and has historically been dominated by men. Yet it suffers from precisely the same cost disease (Baumol and Bowen Reference Baumol and Bowen1966, 167–71).

Baumol insists that “there is no guilty party here”: although the cost disease is often attributed to corruption or greed, these are not its causes (Reference Baumol2012, 26). Nor is it, I argue, the result of ideological mystification. It is, rather, an unintended consequence of the way that particular labor processes develop and diverge within a broader structure of economic organization: the result of what Baumol describes as “economic forces so powerful that they constantly break through all barriers erected for their suppression” (Reference Baumol1967, 415). It is because capital allocates investment according to the prospects of profitability that labor-intensive services are costly and underprovided while manufactured goods are cheap and prevalent. Instead of requiring increasingly complex accounts of the ideological apparatus that capitalism constructs in order to appropriate women’s work, this account offers a parsimonious explanation: the low value of “reproductive labor” stems from the disinterested processes of capital investment rather than a plot to keep reproductive labor in particular cheap or persistently patriarchal attitudes toward “women’s work.”

The reminder that the social worth of many kinds of work is not reflected in the wage remains powerful. Restoring the double move embedded in WfH’s demand for and against the wage can help us recognize that capitalism will never pay what any labor is “really worth,” because that is simply not what the wage does. This recognition can point our inquiry in another direction: asking not why reproductive labor in particular is devalued, but why is any work valued as it is. What system of valuation places such a low value on the work of generating and sustaining human life—and why would we trust it to value any other kind of work correctly?

A Baumolian analysis of service work answers only some of the questions posed above: it explains why certain kinds of work remain poorly paid, but not why women, and women of color in particular, remain disproportionately responsible for them. The point is not that gender differences are not significant in the division of reproductive labor: they demonstrably are. Nor is it that ideological perceptions play no role in the distribution of labor: they surely do. But attending to labor processes rather than the identities of laborers offers a less functionalist and essentializing account of the relationship between labor and gender and makes space for more precise analysis. In some instances, gender may be the most significant factor in the distribution of labor—but in others, race, ethnicity, caste, or other social distinctions may play a larger role (Glenn Reference Glenn1992; Reference Glenn2010; Nadasen Reference Nadasen2023). This thin account of economic logics must also be supplemented with richer analyses of waged work in the areas designated “reproductive labor.”

REEXAMINING THE IDEOLOGY OF WAGED WORK

As I have argued, the ideology critique developed to analyze unwaged work is not well suited to waged work, even where tasks are similar. Instead of extending the analysis of unwaged housework, we might look to theories of waged reproductive work itself. Consider, for example, Claudia Jones’s ([1949] Reference Jones and Guy-Sheftall1995) analysis of the position of Black women employed as domestic workers. In Jones’s account, Black women’s overrepresentation in domestic work stems from a number of factors: the low earnings of Black men barred from union jobs, the realities of de facto and de jure segregation, the legal exclusion of domestic workers from labor protections, and the macroeconomic demand for labor. Ideology, too, plays a role: Jones notes that Black women were stereotyped as “mammies” who would put others’ children above their own; treated as “natural slaves”; and subjected to racist prejudice and “chauvinism” ([1949] Reference Jones and Guy-Sheftall1995, 111–2). Rather than presenting racial and gender ideology as universally causal, as the naturalization thesis does, in Jones’s account it is selectively justificatory. Black women’s overrepresentation in domestic service is overdetermined (Althusser Reference Althusser2006).

Jones also offers a view of ideology not as invincibly seamless and protean, capable of shape-shifting to fit any requirement, but rather, as contradictory and open to contestation. As she observes, ideologies which affirm women’s “place in the home” are belied by the fact that Black women work in other people’s kitchens ([1949] Reference Jones and Guy-Sheftall1995, 118). Similarly, while Davis agrees with other socialist feminists that the ideology of the housewife is a capitalist invention, she argues that it is glaringly contradicted by the status of immigrant white and Black working-class women, who not only worked for wages but often worked outside the home altogether, in factories and fields (Davis Reference Davis1981). Frances Beal, too, notes that although Black women were also “browbeaten” with the ideal image of the white housewife, “the reality of the degrading and dehumanizing jobs that were relegated to us quickly dissipated this mirage of ‘womanhood’” (Beal Reference Beal2008, 167). Instead of drawing on the ideology of the housewife to explain the conditions of all women workers, as the housewifization critique does, these Black feminists argue that simply observing the variety of work that women actually do can serve as the basis for denaturalizing gender ideology in its own right.

The experiences of paid reproductive workers also cast further doubt on the account of ideology as a causal force in motivating work. Paid domestic workers do not usually believe that they are naturally suited to housework or that they are actually “part of the family” that employs them—even if they are skilled at giving that impression, and even if they do genuinely care for their charges (cf. Fields Reference Fields1990; Nadasen Reference Nadasen2015; Reference Nadasen2021; Reference Nadasen2023). Geraldine Roberts, a domestic worker and organizer working in the late 1960s, explains her performance of emotional labor and subservience not in terms of internalized self-perception but recognition of the external power of her employer: “we were afraid we may not have the job—that we might get fired.” Similarly, Carolyn Reed, the head of the Household Technicians of America, formed in 1971, states bluntly: “I don’t want a family. I need a job.” (Nadasen Reference Nadasen2021, 170–2). These workers are motivated, in other words, not by an internalized sense of gendered duty but by the familiar power of employer over employee: the power of the sack, given force by the double freedom of the worker. Whether they think they are suited to the work or not, people have to work in order to live. In explaining why people do reproductive work for low wages, in other words, the ideology critique of the wage itself is more useful than the ideology critique of unwaged work. If anything, as Premilla Nadasen argues, the language of “care,” by evoking emotion and intimacy, threatens to “obscure[e] the inequality and exploitation” that underpin this work (Reference Nadasen2021, 166). When ideology is presented as a causal rather than justificatory force, it threatens to wrongly characterize involuntary aspects of labor as forms of voluntary servitude. In such cases, ideology critique itself might come to function ideologically in its own right, insofar as it mischaracterizes the forces which serve to compel work and potentially misdirects efforts to challenge them (Aytac and Rossi Reference Aytac and Rossi2023; Finlayson Reference Finlayson2015).

Finally, to see ideology as justificatory rather than causal suggests a different approach to political strategy, one that places less emphasis on the representation or recognition of labor as a means by which to “revalue” it. Describing childcare or nursing as work rather than nature does not make those activities less labor-intensive; it does not reduce the number of people required to care for a given number of children or patients. Nor is sheer appreciation for the social value of this work likely to compel private employers to raise wages, as the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated all too clearly. Widespread cultural recognition of “essential workers” as “heroes” did not generally translate into improved working conditions or better pay—as workers themselves, clearly undeceived by this ideology of heroism, pointed out (Leyva Del Río and Medappa Reference Leyva del Rió and Medappa2020). Rather, the downward pressure on wages must be challenged through political action which seeks to change working conditions and which ultimately tackles the structural conditions in which labor’s value is determined by its ability to generate profits. Again, Jones saw no need to disclose that waged domestic service was work: it clearly was. Instead declaring housewives to be workers of the world, she appealed to the Communist Party to organize them as such ([1949] Reference Jones and Guy-Sheftall1995, 121). Her multifaceted analysis of domestic work led to a similarly broad set of prescriptions, ranging from formal labor organization to legislative change.

My argument for reviving the ideology critique of the wage is not an argument for reviving classical Marxist ideology critique in its entirety. Theorists of the new ideology critique are right to be wary of arguments which too quickly explain cultural dynamics as a function of capitalist logics, as I have argued above. Those seeking to reassert the centrality of capitalism might articulate more carefully the mechanisms by which capitalism is said to remake social life, and the inevitably messy and even contradictory ways in which it does so. Yet conversely, the new ideology critics should take care not to dispense with the analysis of labor or economic factors altogether out of fear of economic determinism. More generally, rather than simply thinking about the relationship between feminism and Marxism as overarching and internally coherent “systems” which might be more or less happily “married” (Barrett Reference Barrett1980; Hartmann Reference Hartmann1979; Young Reference Young and Sargent1981), those returning to the questions of this unresolved debate might instead imagine more complex interrelations of capitalist social relations with both material practices and social identities.

In this respect, WfH has made lasting contributions. Despite their tendency to make sweeping claims about capital’s invention of the housewife, WfH theorists also theorized more specific mechanisms by which the material practices of labor habituate us to gender. As James observed, in a riff on Beauvoir, “women are not born housewives, but can only become housewives because we are trained to it almost from birth” (Reference James2012, 169; cf. Federici Reference Federici2012). These comments suggest a more complex account of ideology as not handed down by capital from on high but instantiated through the materiality of rituals and practices. This view resonates with Althusserian insights, anticipates elements of Judith Butler’s later theorization of gender, and suggests connections to feminist phenomenology (Althusser Reference Althusser1971; Butler Reference Butler1990; Young Reference Young2005). So too do some currents of contemporary social reproduction theory point toward different ways of considering the processes by which capitalism constitutes people as gendered and laboring subjects, even as subjectivity informs practices of both labor and politics (Arruzza Reference Arruzza2014; Reference Arruzza2016, 27; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2019; Weeks Reference Weeks2018). Rather than abandoning the analysis of ideology as it pertains to political economy, then, theorists might attend more closely and precisely to the ways that gender and racial formation inform the composition of different sectors, industries, and workplaces, and the way that gender itself is forged not only in the household or hospital but in the factory, the mill, and the office (Elson and Pearson Reference Elson and Pearson1981; Fernandes Reference Fernandes1997; Salzinger Reference Salzinger2003; Wills Reference Wills2018; Winant Reference Winant2021). While I cannot explore these ideas in detail, I want to suggest the importance for theorists of ideology critique who proclaim an interest in “material practices” (cf. Haslanger Reference Haslanger2015; Reference Haslanger2017a) of attending more closely to labor—one of the most pervasive, regular, and indeed compulsory practices of daily life.