[Van-Parecon] "Off Without Off" & Canada22

[vancouverparecon at resist.ca]

Hello,

We'd like to share this recent and excellent ZNet commentary with you,
"Off Without Off", by Cynthia Peters. In it she discusses kinship vision
complimentary to a participatory economy. If you find this commentary
insightful and engaging please share your thoughts, comments and ideas in
our new message board where we are currently discussing Cynthia's article:
http://sandbox.oracleatbelfry.com/forums/vanparForum/viewtopic.php?t=20

Cynthia's article originally appeared in the ZNet Commentaries, a premium
sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet. Learn more about ZNet Sustainer Donors
at http://www.zmag.org


One brief and final note before launching into "Off Without Off". The
Vancouver Parecon Collective will be participating in the "Canada22:
Envisioning Post-Neoliberalism" workshop Saturday, April 22,
9:00am-4:00pm. This event will be held at the SFU Harbour Centre Campus,
515 West Hastings Street at Richards, Vancouver - one block from the
Waterfront Sky train Station. To find out more visit the Canada22 website:
http://dgivista.org/Canada22

Thanks,
Vancouver Parecon Collective

And now, without further adieu....

"Off Without Off"
By Cynthia Peters

"How was your weekend?" I ask my adult education students at the Good
Samaritan Hospital in Brockton. "Did you have any time off?" "Off without
off," is the usual answer.

For these female service employees, there is no such thing as "off."
There's only the question of which kind of work they are doing -- low-paid
work in the hospital or no-paid work at home.

Their husbands work hard, too, in factories and warehouses. But there's a
difference. When they come home exhausted, they rest. They eat the food
their wives prepare for them, put in front of them, and then clean up.

This basic work imbalance that breaks down along gender lines across the
socio-economic spectrum is well documented and intimately familiar. Even
when families share the cooking and cleaning across gender lines, women
still notice that they do more than their fair share of the mostly
invisible mothering work. The costs of this imbalance are high. Women hone
the selflessness that seems to be an integral part of mothering. Their
radar is finely calibrated to pick up and respond to the needs of others.
Men, meanwhile, seem to screen out some of the incoming neediness
messages. They have more time for themselves. There's nothing wrong with
either of these qualities; in fact, they are both necessary. All parents,
whether men or women, need time when they are fully present for and tuned
into their children. They also need a break from that -- the opportunity
to be cared for themselves and/or to follow pursuits outside the parenting
role. The problem with these qualities is when they are monopolized (or
nearly monopolized) by one gender or another.

How, in a better society, might we ensure that everyone has more equal
access to care -- both the giving and the receiving of it? Parecon
(www.parecon.org) lays out in great detail the ways that work would have
to be structured in a better society in order for it not to unfairly
concentrate power and decision making ability in the hands of a few. A
similar effort needs to be made in the kinship sphere -- the place you go
when you are "off" or "off without off," as the case may be. How could
family life be organized to ensure that caregiving work is not
concentrated in the hands of women?

The principles that guide a parecon-ish society would do a lot of the
heavy lifting when it comes to addressing gender imbalances outside the
home. In a participatory economy, if there were any income inequality, it
would favor those doing the most tedious and difficult work. There would
be no question of women being financially dependent on men, so a major
cause of the systemic pressure on women to agree to stay in domestic
situations that were unfair or imbalanced would be eliminated. The
structure of institutions would ensure equal access to decision making, so
women and men would be equally experienced at taking on empowered roles.
Parecon would create outside systemic pressures that would help put men
and women on equal footing in the home, but I'm not sure it would fully
address the intimate and very gendered nature of caregiving in the home.

Part of the problem is finding structural solutions to private, familial
configurations. One thing I hope for in a good society is that there are
diverse family configurations -- with very little public input about what
is right or wrong about how to be a family. There would have to be
prohibitions on certain things, of course, such as child neglect, child
abuse, etc. But I hope we would avoid prescribing how people might choose
to love each other, make commitments to each other, raise children or not
together, grow old together, etc. I hope we would embrace diverse models,
trusting that there are probably nearly infinite ways that people can
positively interact over the short- and long-term.

I would not even want to prescribe equal amounts of mothering and
fathering work in heterosexual couples. Even if it could be proved that
equally sharing the mothering and fathering across gender lines would
produce a whole generation of non-gendered caregivers, I would still not
support it. Who am I (or anyone, for that matter) to know what is right
and sensible for any given family at any given time? When a baby is first
born, the nursing mother will be doing most of the mothering work. That's
obvious and is dictated by biology (assuming the baby is breastfed).
Fathers can do a lot of nurturing in this context, so the imbalance does
not have to be enormous, but the fact remains that a nursing mother is
going to tune into her child's basic needs in a direct biological way that
a man is not likely to experience. Perhaps a mother will choose not to
nurse, and perhaps a father will be the primary caregiver, and so develop
the intense bond that comes from being constantly tuned into a baby's
needs. Or maybe the parents will equally share this work, and maybe even
share it with others, too. It's not the job of the public to decide how
families carry out these roles.

But it is the job of the public to make sure that each new generation has
more than just private family to depend on. Why? Because it will help
de-gender caregiving work, which is a key way that sexism reproduces
itself. Socializing caregiving work but preserving individual liberty in
families will begin the process of unraveling sexist kinship structures at
the same time that it supports diversity in families (see New Family
Values by Karen Struening). It's a process that will take generations and
that will require (obviously) other efforts in other realms of society as
well, but it should be a key focus of attention for a society that is
committed to non-sexist practices in all levels of daily life. Here are
five reasons why we should socialize caregiving work:

1. Children represent the future.

The next generation -- whether your offspring are included in it or not --
will inherit our collective messes and triumphs. They will be the
engineers that sort out what to do with the garbage we leave behind.
They'll have to figure out how to preserve whatever treasures we create.
They are the ones who will take care of us when we are old. They are
tasked with nothing less than carrying on. Not only is it their right to
be born into a society that looks out for them, but we better hope they
have such a society, if only in our own self-interest.

2. We need women's contribution in the public sphere.

We also better hope we can find effective ways to de-gender the caregiving
work. If women are doing the lion's share, the simple fact of the matter
is that they will be more worn out and less able to participate in other
aspects of society, and so we will miss out on their contribution. Just as
there can be no true democracy if some groups of people are ill-equipped
to participate because they do unempowering work all day, so there can be
no true democracy if some groups of people are sleep-deprived or are
overwhelmed by private caregiving responsibilities. We care about
democracy not just because of the principle that says everyone *should*
have a say, but because we can do with nothing less than our collective
imagination and will in the ongoing work of making a better world.

3. No matter what the gender configuration of caregiving in each family,
every person needs access to caregiving work via public institutions (in
the same way they need access to empowering work).

Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel have argued that a balanced job complex
should include a fair mix of empowering and uempowering work so that
everyone is equally empowered to participate in decision making. But what
if this leaves out another whole kind of work -- care giving?

Care giving is neither tedious nor empowering. It is both and neither. It
requires both creative energy as well as endless patience. It is in a
league of its own because the care giver, although often performing rote
and repetitive tasks, is in a position of responsibility regarding the
emotional well-being of the person being taken care of. This
responsibility has unfairly fallen on women. Nancy Folbre in The Invisible
Heart defines "caring labor" as work that "is done on a person-to-person
basis, in relationships where people generally call each other by their
first names, for reasons that include affection and respect. ... Much of
this work is done on behalf of family members 
 Much, though not all of
it, has an explicitly compassionate dimension" (p. xi).

There have to be publicly structured ways to share care giving work or
else the biological/gendered pressure for women to monopolize it will win
out. We can't dictate what private families do, but we can make sure that
all individuals, no matter how they were "mothered" or "fathered" have
access to the work of care giving -- and so learn about it themselves and
hone those skills.

Would everyone perform direct one-on-one care giving? Probably not. Some
people may not have the disposition, and those people could engage in any
number of indirect ways of providing care. But my guess is that almost
everyone could find a way to participate in direct care giving. Given the
wide range types of care giving, it would be hard not to find a way to fit
in. Whether changing diapers, coaching a sports team, teaching chess,
setting up an apprenticeship at your workplace, or simply providing an
extra pair of arms to hold your neighbor's baby when needed, you would be
contributing to meeting human needs.

In the process, all the young ones would have access to caregiving from a
great variety of sources. Thus they would experience it as a non-gendered
activity, and as they grow up, they would be better able to pursue their
own inclinations and proclivities in that field in a way that was at least
not defined by gender.

4. The more care giving is socialized, the less invisible it will be.

Another benefit of including care giving in a balanced job complex is that
the work of care giving becomes structurally impossible to make invisible.
This is not to say that everyone has to help raise everyone's children,
but they do have to participate in creating a safe, nurturing, educational
space for the next generation to grow into. They have to be part of the
web that makes sure that other people's needs are getting met. Thus, they
have to be tuned into and aware of the mechanics of caring. This will lead
to better decisionmaking in the same way that if you experience rote and
empowering work, you make better decisions about how to organize work
because you are more invested in fairness, etc.

A society that sees caring for children as a collective responsibility and
that creates institutions that share caregiving work will make better
decisions about how to organize daily life, the economy, politics, etc.
(For now, my focus is on children, but clearly there are many other age
groups and types of people that would benefit from caring. Indeed, I can't
think of group or type of person who would not.)

5. Finally, if successive generations receive caring (in some form or
another) from all adults, care giving work will become less and less
woman-centered. Even in a society that embraces diverse families, women
are still the ones who give birth and have the capacity to nurse. These
biological pressures alone will probably mean more women being the primary
care givers in the early months or years of a child's life. Women's
potential to be the primary caregiver, however, does not have to mean that
caregiving is seen or experienced as "women's work." Nursing moms could
have food delivered and prepared by men. Men (or women) whose balanced job
complex included supporting and nurturing families with newborns would
mostly support and nurture the mother and/or other family members --
cleaning, cooking, caring for siblings, reading out loud, playing music,
preventing a new mother's isolation, etc.

If there are social supports for old people to stay in families, then
there could be another lap nearby, another set of arms, another source of
lullabies -- great assets for any family with a newborn.

Outside the home, there could be emotional support for people in the
newborn's family. People working as playground monitors would help solve
disputes, keep kids safe, apply Band-Aids when needed, and walk children
home when they are tired. Sufficient teachers, tutors, and mentors could
mean older siblings arrive home relaxed and confident rather than in
desperate need of maternal support.

The nursing mother would be providing one element of nurturing in what
should be an elaborate web of nurturing. Children growing up in this
context would perceive nurturing as gender neutral, even if it is
sometimes at least partly informed by biology (as in the case of
breastfeeding). Children would learn caregiving skills from men and women.
It would be seen as a valued and integral part of everyone's work. This
would be true whatever the family configuration might be -- single mother,
heterosexual parents, homosexual parents, multiple parents, extended
families, whatever.

In all families, there will be times when parents are "off without off,"
but, in a better society, upcoming generations will be equally
well-equipped to tune into the family's needs. In addition, the whole
effort will be less stressful because families will enjoy a lot more
support from outside institutions that value caregiving work, make it
visible, and include it in everyone's balanced job complex.

This commentary is an initial step in fleshing out some ideas about how we
might organize kinship structures in a better society. Thanks to Michael
Albert, Paul Kiefer, Justin Podur, Steve Shalom, and Karen Struening for
their helpful comments. They get credit for making this piece stronger,
but they are not responsible for its weaknesses. I hope to address the
latter in ongoing work. Comments (to cyn.peters at verizon.net) are welcome.