Someone has to feed you every day. Someone has to take care of you when you’re sick. Someone has to raise your children so the next generation of workers can exist. Someone has to make the home a place where you can recover enough from one day’s work to show up for the next.
In 1909, Alexandra Kollontai asked: what if we called that work what it is?
Not natural. Not love. Not a woman’s duty. Labor. Stolen labor.
The argument Kollontai made
Kollontai was a Russian Marxist writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her contribution was to insist that Marxist analysis had a blind spot: it analyzed the exploitation of labor in the factory but couldn’t see the exploitation of labor in the home.
The standard Marxist account focused on the surplus extracted from workers in production: workers received wages representing part of the value they created, and capitalists kept the rest. This was the mechanism of exploitation. The solution was for workers to capture the surplus — either through collective ownership of the means of production or through political control of the state.
Kollontai pointed out that this account assumed the worker arrived at the factory already fed, clothed, rested, healthy, educated, and capable of working. It assumed that between shifts, the worker was somehow reproduced as a worker — returned to the state of being a productive human being. It did not ask who produced that reproduction, under what conditions, and at what cost.
The answer was: women. The cooking, cleaning, childcare, elder care, emotional labor, household management — all of the work that made it possible for workers to keep working — was performed primarily by women, in the home, without wages, without legal recognition as work, without any accounting in the economic theory that described the system they were sustaining.
Wages for Housework
Kollontai’s analysis was a beginning. The full elaboration came in the 1970s through the Wages for Housework campaign, developed by Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and others.
Their argument extended Kollontai’s: domestic labor is not just unrecognized work. It is the site of a specific form of accumulation. Capital did not just fail to pay for reproductive labor. It structured the economy specifically to ensure that reproductive labor would not be paid — by assigning it to women as a natural obligation, by defining the domestic sphere as outside the economy, by building a wage structure for men that assumed a domestic support system at home.
The Wages for Housework demand was deliberately provocative. The point was not literally to campaign for the state to pay housewives (though that was part of it). The point was to make the invisible visible: to say that the work is work, that it has value, that the current arrangement is one in which that value is extracted without compensation, and that this is a political choice, not a natural condition.
The demand also revealed something about the system’s dependence on unpaid reproductive labor. When women in the 1970s began the analysis that reproductive labor was work, and began refusing to do it without acknowledgment — when they went on strike from housework, from emotional labor, from the invisible management of domestic life — the response revealed how essential that labor was. It couldn’t simply be replaced by the market at any affordable price. The system ran on its availability at no cost.
Reproductive labor and the double shift
Paid employment for women didn’t solve the problem. It added a second shift. Women who entered the workforce in large numbers from the 1960s onward found that the domestic obligations attached to their gender didn’t transfer to their male partners in proportion to their paid labor. They worked full days in the formal economy and then came home to the unpaid economy of housework and childcare.
Arlie Hochschild’s research in the 1980s, published as The Second Shift (1989), documented this in detail: mothers in dual-income households worked roughly an extra month of twenty-four-hour days per year compared to fathers, accounting for the unpaid labor they performed at home. The “second shift” was not incidental. It was the ongoing extraction of reproductive labor that the formal economy depended on but refused to count.
The care economy has not been solved. Childcare in the United States costs more than college tuition in most states. Elder care is unaffordable for most families without significant sacrifice. The people who perform care work — childcare workers, home health aides, nursing home workers — are among the most poorly compensated workers in the economy, despite performing some of its most essential functions. This is not a market failure. It is the market functioning exactly as it was designed to: keeping care work cheap by ensuring that women (disproportionately women of color) will perform it because no other options are available.
What this means for the commons
The commons approach to reproductive labor is not a new idea. Before capitalist enclosure reorganized the domestic sphere, care was organized collectively — in village commons, in extended family networks, in religious communities, in the mutual obligations of neighborly life. Collective childrearing, shared cooking, communal care of the elderly and ill: these were not utopian experiments. They were the default organization of care before the privatization of the household turned them into individual family responsibilities.
The cooperative care models that exist today — childcare cooperatives, elder care networks, community kitchens — are not radical departures. They are recoveries of the logic that existed before enclosure. The work of restoring care to the commons is not building something new. It is undoing a specific historical process that removed it.
Kollontai saw this clearly: the liberation of women was inseparable from the liberation of care from the private household. Not just paying women for the work they already did, but reorganizing the work itself — making it social, collective, shared, acknowledged. That argument is still waiting to be realized.