ABSTRACT
A central theoretical concern of the Women's Movement in britain and elsewhere in the capitalist West has always been the analysis of the relation of the family to capitalism, or, more precisely, the relation of women's struggles within and concerning the family to her struggles in the sphere of wage work and other aspects of more public life. The debate over the theoretical analysis of domestic labour is just one of many attempts to address this concern. Domestic labour is private labour, not socialised labour. Since it is labour which is not brought into relation, through the buying and selling of commodities, to labour performed in the production of commodities, it does not enter into the formation of abstract labour, which is the basis of value. The relations which constitute the domestic labour unit also constitute the household, though the household has, in this society, many facets other than simply that of the production of the products of domestic labour.
