Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 20 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Topic

Happy May Day! This week, let's discuss a kind of work that (presumably) we all do to some extent - housework.

Alexandra Kollontai predicted a century ago that the nature of domestic housework would shift drastically any moment now, pointing to materialist trends that have only increased over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. Jane Psmith, writing from a rat-adj pronatalist angle in 2023, believes homemaking be more important than ever. Could there be a dialectical synthesis in the works?

Readings

• Communism and the Family - Alexandra Kollontai, 1920
• Review: Home Comforts by Cheryl Menderson - Jane Psmith, 2023

Optional supplemental readings: rationalist experiments in ~homemaking

• Experiences Raising Children in Shared Housing - Julia Wise, 2021
• The Craft is Not the Community - Sarah Constantin, 2017
• Various X Threads (one, two, three) on a tiny ongoing homeschooling project - Kelsey Piper

Optional supplemental readings: other writers on housework and possible forms of abolition

• I Dream of Canteens - Rebecca May Johnson, 2019
• The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective - Angela Davis, 1981

Discussion Questions

• What do you like and dislike about the readings?
• How much housework do you do? How much do you think your parents did?
• Psmith describes housekeeping as "among the most thoroughly pleasant, significant, and least alienated forms of work." How true does this seem to you? Is there something fundamentally different about work done for one's own household versus work done for a wage?
• Kollontai believed that economic trends would naturally lead to the withering away of the family, while contemporary pronatalists like Psmith advocate for deliberate cultural support for family formation. Which force do you think is the better one? Which force do you think will inevitably win out?
• Technology has drastically transformed the nature of housework over the past century - from pickle factories to washing machines to meal delivery apps. How has this shifted the nature of domestic labor?