The Unpaid Labour of Motherhood

We at the project would like to wish a happy Mother’s Day to all the mums out there raising the next generation of workers and, hopefully, revolutionaries.

Now, we understand that in today’s world it’s not always mothers who raise the children. Sometimes it’s the father. But more often than not, especially for those on lower incomes, both parents are forced to share the burden of wage earning and child rearing. For the sake of this article, though, we’re focusing on the role of women and of the mother.

Capitalism depends on labour to generate profit. It relies not only on the labour of the worker in production, but also on the unpaid, invisible labour of mothers to reproduce that workforce to continually replenish the labour pool. Her role is to create life, to ensure the child is fed, bathed, and educated. New labour, prepared through free labour. Yet under a capitalist state, the mother is given nothing in return for this vital function. No help. No compensation. No rest. No respect.

I was raised in a family of seven in a three-bedroom council house. Each room was packed with children—including my parents’ room, where my youngest sibling slept with them. My two oldest brothers shared a partially renovated attic space. The house was never big enough to comfortably accommodate us all. But under capitalism, that doesn’t matter. So long as the labour pool is continually replenished, the conditions of childrearing are irrelevant. Any home over three or four bedrooms is either a petty bourgeois status symbol or carved up into single-room lets (student housing, bedsits, HMOs) to extract maximum profit from the commodity that is housing.

“Houses are for living in, not for speculation.”
– Xi Jinping

Mother’s Day is a false, commercial celebration of motherhood. It hands mothers cards, flowers, and discount perfume, while continuing to exploit their unpaid labour. Socialism doesn’t offer pretty gifts. It offers strength, dignity, and rest.

The socialist systems of the 20th century were genuinely pro-family in the sense that they sought to enable women to have children and still get an education, pursue meaningful work and be safe in the knowledge that her children were being properly cared for. In The German Democratic Republic for instance there were vast collective nurseries run by the local communities where children could be safely left whilst both parents went to work. This enabled mothers to actually play a full role in society whilst knowing that their children were being properly looked after by people they trusted to do so. Care for children under socialism will thus not just fall upon the parents but be seen as a collective endeavour, raising the next generation who will continue the struggle to build socialism is genuinely collective responsibility. That was the philosophy that guided the East Germans and Soviets in creating such extensive childcare provision. It also taps into something that existed in the early pre-modern period known as primitive communism where caring for children was something that a whole village was seen as being responsible for as they were the future of the tribe. This is something that we will recreate in a new way as we build socialism in our time.

For today though we salute the role of so many working class women who keep families together and children well cared for often in very difficult circumstances. If the working class is the engine of history, then mothers are the fuel that keeps it running.

This article was a collaboration of work by Rick and Alex.