Let me add at once that none of this is said in order to disparage the need for an understanding of the specific forms and issues of household labor, of the working-class family, and of sexual divisions and tensions both within and outside the family. But the unraveling of every complex of social reality requires a starting point, and it is my strong conviction that the best starting point in every case is the analysis of the dynamic elements rather than the traditional and static aspects of a given problem. Thus I have a feeling that the most light will be shed on the totality of problems and issues embraced in the feminist movement, including those of household work, by an analysis that begins not with the forms of household work that have been practiced for thousands of years, but by their weakening and by the dissociation of an increasing number of women from them in the last few decades.
To move to a different, although related, point, which has figured in a number of reviews as well as private comments that have reached me: Baxandall, Ewen, and Gordon raise in this connection my use of the distinction between the social and the technical or detailed division of labor. In common with some other reviewers, they treat this as my own invention, calling it "Braverman's distinction." Actually, as my references to this chapter and my use of quoted materials from Marx should make clear, the entire treatment comes from Chapter 14, especially Section 4 of the first volume of Capital, called by Marx “Division of Labor in Manufacture, and Division of Labor in Society." In connection with this topic, there is nothing more important to be studied by any modern reader. On the one hand, it is a brilliant example of Marx's historical method. On the other, it contains in fully developed form Marx's most mature conclusions on the subject of the division of labor, and it becomes ever more mystifying with every passing day how so many can discuss Marx's opinions on this subject as though all he ever wrote on it is contained in the few scrappy paragraphs of The German Ideology or other early manuscripts unpublished by him, which represent his first reactions to the problem.
Baxandall, Ewen, and Gordon comment that “Braverman's distinction between the social division of labor and the detail division of labor in capitalist industry is not adequate" for an understanding of the whole of the damage wrought by the divisions of labor in society, and they cite specifically the sexual division of labor. They could not be more right. The distinction in question is adequate only to the purposes for which it was fashioned.
Readers who study Marx's chapter carefully will see how he uses one of his most characteristic tools of analysis: He dissociates the elements of the problem historically specific to capitalism from those generally characteristic of human societies, and treats these not just as continuities, one of the other, but in their polar opposition. From this opposition between abstract social categories and specific social forms in which they are cast in a given epoch of history, Marx works up an analysis of extraordinary penetration.
This does not, however, mean that the analysis is directed toward the clarification of the sexual division oflabor which originates in the long hunting period of human pre-history, and which requires considerably different tools of analysis. On the other hand, an approach so broadened as to include this problem would require a level of abstraction and generality—in relation to the division of labor in the factory and similar institutions—so extreme as to make it relatively useless for the latter. It is this, I believe, which dictated the approach taken by Marx and followed by me. What I am trying to emphasize here is that an attempt to combine these two analyses of the division of labor in modern society and of the most general forms of the sexual division of laborinto a single step would only defeat the object of both analyses and create a muddle all around.
II
Labor and Monopoly Capital has been criticized also for its omission of any discussion of the future of working-class consciousness, although in this case too the critics have, like John and Barbara Ehrenreich in their article in this collection (“Work and Consciousness"), understood and explained the self-imposed limits of my analysis and thus relieved me of the need to repeat any explanations. Nevertheless, a few further words may be usefully said.
Marxism is not merely an exercise in satisfying intellectual curiosity, nor an academic pursuit, but a theory of revolution and thus a tool of combat. From that point of view the value of any analysis of the composition and social trends within the working population can only lie in precisely how well it helps us to answer questions about class consciousness. Thus I do not quarrel with critics who are anxious to see further progress made in that most important side of the analysis. It was my interest in that very question of class consciousness, in fact, which led to my taking up the entire study in the first place.
When I did so, however, I already had the firm conviction that little purpose would be served by a direct attack on the subject, since it did not appear to me to be in any condition to yield to such an attack. Two major preconditions seemed to me to be lacking. The first has to do with the lack of a concrete picture of the working class, what it is made up of, the trends of income, skill, exploitation, “alienation," and so forth among workers, the place of the working population as a segment of the entire population, etc. I thought that my efforts would best be directed toward helping to fill this gap. I might add that since this is still far from accomplished, I believe that many more essays (along the lines of some of those in this collection) will be appearing in the near future.
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Appendix 1
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