CH: Yes, it’s impossible to see ‘the pure’, like what might exist outside of labour relations. Like with love and care and all these things that get co-opted into the production of value or getting to work and making us productive people.
I remembered that I met you at a reading group – it would’ve been probably 2018. You quickly cited the Silvia Federici line ‘they say it is love, we say it is unwaged work’. And I was like, that’s so sick. This is kind of the line of Marxist feminism, and the Wages Against Housework movement that began in Italy in the 1970s. I wonder what this line means to you at this moment. Like as a writer, a friend, a comrade, a daughter, a lover –all these things. But also, any one of these will do.
EG: That line meant a lot to me during some formative years of my life. I think about it now, and the context feels like it suits a particular nuclear-hetero construction of love. And I think in the years since then, my understanding of love has expanded. Here’s another oversimplification: it comes down to food and time. Which I think about a lot in different ways, but it’s feeding and being fed. Having and giving your time to someone can exist outside the concept of waged unwed or the dichotomy set up by that logic. Even though food and time are both, of course, extremely commodified but also the reality of this is the opposite. That’s my point. But we could also ask, ‘What could love mean if it was unwaged work? It would still be unwaged work, but the collective relation to labour and the value of love would be entirely transformed.
CH: It sounds like the way that you are thinking unwaged care is in relation to what love is if it’s not strictly in the form of the nuclear-hetero family or housework. Maybe as a more updated version is what is waged and unwaged labour? To me, there are very important forms of unwaged labour outside of the family or the couple form that are generative to life, but that work is at the same time still unwaged work that makes it possible for us all to do labour. So, it’s both of those things.
EG: I think so, but I always come back to this question, how do we reproduce ourselves when we are no longer compelled to by particular forces? And those things for me are kind of a through line and it’s the thing that capitalism, like … I keep wanting to say ‘distorts’ or ‘inverts’. Inversion is a word I got from Beverly Best. Her writing on Marx describes his analysis of capital in this idea of inversions and how capital appears versus how it actually functions. I also think about how capitalism is the most vampiric of those parts of life that would be sustained without it. And that’s what allows capital this never-ending supply or something like that. It can only function because humans will always love and care for each other in different ways.
CH: Yes, we continue to have the pure desire and need for love and care, and it gets transformed into different forms other than the nuclear family. Our lives and networks of care are very different from our parents’ lives in just one generation. Lots of people’s kinship is structured more and more around friendship, community, etc., often out of necessity and survival. Maybe I’m just really cynical, but I’m like, capital’s still sucking that work and those relationships up to become work.
EG: That’s always going to happen under capitalism. And I’m sitting in this place of tension because, at some point … I’m trying to say things in a smart way and it’s not going to happen, so please bear with me … Basically, it’s too depressing to think about capitalism as totally inescapable until some ambiguous future moment when it will be gone. I want to know how we exist against it while also acknowledging that nothing is outside of it (for now). What does it mean to love and look after someone knowing that the co-option can happen? Of course, it’s in movements of resistance and solidarity. So, for example, maybe you’re working in a shitty job, but your money can go to someone’s bail fund … or you work in a compromised institution (like a university), but that offers you a way to protect more precarious or vulnerable people in your workplace.
CH: For sure, where food and time are used in this particular way and where care work then works against the structure and order of things.
EG: Communities reproduce themselves by sharing work that is entirely within this ecosystem of helping each other out all the time. They are also discrete and locally specific and changing all the time, but seeing these eruptions of care, even from the periphery, gives me a little glimpse at what is possible.
CH: Absolutely. I feel like so much of being a Marxist is about being cynical, refusing to be optimistic (or being a bitch). So, it’s important to identify those moments of genuine resistance. Especially through things like love and care.
