"Thus, women’s lives became primarily about having and raising children, which removed them from the status of being breadwinners (bread-growers, really) in the fields. On top of that, the tradition of inheritance increased the importance of being able to determine who was the father of each child. This led to women’s sexual monogamy being strictly enforced in a way it didn’t have to be for men, since it’s usually pretty obvious who the mother is at childbirth. And so began the development of the bullshit hypocritical morality around women’s bodies and sexuality that exists in most cultures to this day. These concepts of private property, inheritance, and women’s subordination originated in the earliest ruling classes but eventually became accepted norms for all members of agricultural class societies—although of course the specific forms they took varied widely as human civilization spread and developed throughout the world." (Katch 35)
"The fact that they haven’t is the reason why the gains made by feminism are in danger of being undermined by a system that continues to rely on women’s unpaid labor in the home and uses their bodies to sell products." (Katch 108)
Danny Katch often quotes Fredrik Engles who was one of the original Marxist explorers of woman's exploitation within capitalist's systems.
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"Then there are the millions of people who don’t get paid a dime for working countless hours caring for children, parents, and other family members. They often don’t even think of themselves as exploited workers, but their labor saves capitalism untold amounts of money in feeding, clothing, and educating its workforce. The United Nations estimates that across the world if unpaid domestic work—two-thirds of which is done by women—were paid at market rates, it would be worth $16 trillion, which is 70 percent of the world’s total economic output." (Katch 47)
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To destroy something you must first understand how it works. Socialism seeks to destroy and then replace capitalism, therefore socialists are often experts on capitalism. In these examples, Katch explores how capitalism has enslaved, exploited, and undermined the work of women.
Capitalism is a paradoxical system that embraces the highs and lows of a surplus economy in it's normal functioning. This paradox of extremes to create normalcy is a major critique of capitalism from socialists.
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Social Reproduction is the "private" work created at home, most often the work of women. This work centers around the important job of creating and caring for the next generation of our species. In a capitalist society social reproduction is exploited as unpaid and undervalued work.
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