2 Gayle Rubin The Traffic in Women 163 1 whetherit be part of the process of production or not,forms by the capitalist.But to explain women's usefulness to capi- therefore afactor of the production and reproduction of capital; talism is one thing.To argue that this usefulness explains the just as cleaning machinery does....(Marx,1972:572) genesis of the oppression of women is quite.another.It is Given the individual,the production of labour-power consists in precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to his reproduction of himself or his maintenance.For his main. explainvery much about women and the oppression of tenance herequires a given quantity of the means of sub. women. sistence..Labour-power sets itself in action only by working. Women are oppressed in societies which can by no stretch But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle,brain,nerve, of the imagination be described as capitalistIn the Amazon etc.,is wasted;and these require to be restored.(Ibid.:171) valley and the New Guinea highlands,women are frequently of the ifferenb kept in their.place by gang rape when the ordinary mecha. bor powerandits products depends,thereforeon the de nisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient."We tame 4× our womenwiththe banana,said one Mundurucu man termination of what it takes to reproduce that labor power. Marx tends to make that determination on the basis of the (Murphy 1959195)Theethnographicrecord is littered quantity of commodities food,clothing,housing.fuel- with practices whose effect is to keep women"in their place" which would be necessary to maintain the health,life,and men's cults,secret initiations,arcane male knowledge,etc. 警 And pre-capitalist,feudal Europe was hardly asociety in which there was no sexismCapitalism has taken over,and diately in consumable form when they are purchased by the rewired,notions of male and female which predate it by wage.Additional labor must be performed upon these things centuries.No analysis of the reproduction of labor power before they cam be tumed into people.Food must be cooked, under capitalism can explain foot binding.chastity belts or clothes cleaned,beds made,wood chopped,etc..Housework any of the incredible array of Byzantine,fetishized indig nities,.let alone the more,ordinary ones,which have been is therefore a key element in the process of the reproduction of the laborer from whom surplus value is taken.Since it is inflicted upon women in various times and places.The anal- usually women who do housework,it has been observed that ysis of the reproduction of labor power does not even explain why it is usually women who do domestic work in the home, it is through the reproduction of labor power that women are rather than men. articulated into the surplus value nexus which is the sine qua In this light it is interesting to return to Marx's discussion non of capitalism.*It.can be further argued.that since no of the reproduction of labor:What is necessary to reproduce wage is paid for housework,the labor of women in the home the worker is determined in part by the biological needs of contributes to the.ultimate quantity of surplus value realized the human organism,in part by the physical conditions of *A lot of the'debate on women and housework has centered around the place in which it lives,and in part by cultural tradition. the question of whether or not housework is "productive"labor. Marx observed that beer is necessary for the reproduction of Strictly.speaking,housework is not ordinarily"productive"in the tech- the English working class,and wine necessary for the French. nical sense of:the term(I.Gough,1972;Marx,1969:387-413).But this distinction is irrelevant to the main line of the argument.Housework ..the number and extent of his the worker's/so-called neces may not be "productive,"in the sense of directly producing surplus sary wants,as also the modes of satisfying them,are themselves value and capital,and yet be a crucial element in the production of the product of historical development,and depend therefore to a surplus value and capital. great extent on the degree of civilization of.a country,more