Mothers of the World Unite!

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Comrades. I have been asked to comment on the so-called ‘Mommy Wars.’  I will do so, but it is self-evident that to even discuss the issue in these terms is to yield the terrain of the ideological battle to the forces of oppression.  The only valid struggle is that between the oppressed and the oppressor — yet here, the tactic of dividing the oppressed among themselves has succeeded only too well.  The ‘Mommy Wars’ pits ‘working mothers’ against other mothers.  Yet there is no category of mothers that does not labor.  All mothers are engaged in the essential task of reproducing the most fundamental factor of production, that is, labor itself.  More than this, they are the primary agents of social reproduction, adding to the hard physical labor of producing and tending to the young of the species the intellectual labor of socialization and education.  It is pure false consciousness that has led these mothers to internalize the fictitious and destructive distinction between wage-labor and unwaged labor. They have been divided like a conquered people so that the exploiters may dominate them at lower cost; divided into warring tribes of ‘working’ and ‘non-working’ mothers, whereas there are no such classes of people. 

Furthermore, the ideological framing of the issue as ‘Mommy Wars’ has also divided reproductive workers by sex. Why are only mothers considered in this false conflict? Do not fathers labor, paid or no? This division further undermines the prospects for worker solidarity in the face of an oppressive system that relies for its perpetuation on the essential reproductive work, in all senses of the word, that parents perform on behalf of society.

Enough!  The end of these so-called wars is in reality the falling away of scales from the eyes of those who have labored under false consciousness.  Women and men, waged and unwaged, it is time to rise up in the face of these oppressive relations of production and reproduction, to reclaim the essential dignity of labor from which we have been alienated through the manipulation of malignant capital. Reproductive workers of the world, unite!  We have nothing to lose but our chains.

>> Stuntmother is in fact an anarchist and is trying to buy a new house, even though property is theft. She has fewer teeth than she did last year and blogs at stuntmother.blogspot.com. <<

Read my version of mommy anarchy today at Stuntmother’s blog.

Tags: The Blog Exchange, Mommy Wars