Wages for Housework: The Marxist-Feminist Case for Basic Income

Abstract

This article explores the Marxist-feminist critique of capitalism of the International Feminist Collective (IFC) of the1970s and its Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign. WfH theorists, including Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Marie Mies and Claudia von Werlhof, combine Marxist and feminist perspectives to articulate a compelling critique of capitalism designed to unite the entire working class, including both waged and unwaged workers. I argue that, despite the movement’s seemingly narrower slogan, the WfH demand was an implicit argument for an unconditional, individual, and universal basic income. Like other historical precedents of contemporary basic income movements, the WfH campaign was unsuccessful in achieving its policy goal. Despite its failure, its identification of unwaged housewives as workers, its extension of the concept of the housewife to precarious workers in the globalized economy, and its identification of the strategic deficiencies of mainstream working class and feminist movements are critical to contextualizing contemporary debates on basic income and to the development of successful strategies for contemporary working class movements.