ABSTRACT
The original accumulators of commodities were men, and within the family or kinship equivalents women became merely the vehicles for ensuring that the man's property was handed on to his known heirs — hence the wife's enforced sexual fidelity. The socially useful work of women in the family lessens the value of their labour-power in the exchange-value capitalist mode of production. Women are thus a constant source of cheap and sporadic labour. The kinship organisation that underlies a class system is only in part visible in some customs and some laws — laws of inheritance and customs of marriage, for instance. For the most part, the implications of the social relations set up by ties of sex or kinship are only 'known' unconsciously. In several diverse ways, this has a bearing on an analysis of the position of women and on socialist visions of a family.
