소외를 넘어 얽힘으로: 페미니즘적 노동해방의 전망

Abstract

Unstable and uncertain living conditions that cannot be explained by the industrial capitalist perspective in which capitalists directly control and rationalize labor and raw materials for capital growth are spreading. Since the mid-1980s when neoliberal capitalism emerged, standard employment has become a thing of the past in capitalist countries such as the United States, unions have been severely suppressed, and welfare has been drastically reduced. In addition, public support programs have been abolished, public education systems have collapsed, and discrimination has been institutionalized at a rapid pace. The “jobs, welfare, and education” that companies have formally provided according to social agreements are “no longer necessary even as a facade.” The “stable wages and benefits” that 20th-century capitalism promised are now becoming “very rare,” and as industries no longer tend to make plans for the future, people are solving their livelihoods in a “roughly tailored” manner. At the same time, the number of people leaving their jobs in search of “freedom” and entrusting their livelihoods to unstable lifestyles is increasing. In this article, I would like to examine from a feminist perspective whether we can still seek the prospect of labor liberation in these changing conditions of life. To this end, I first refer in detail to Hannah Arendt’s discussion, which examines the meaning given to labor while defining ‘labor’ as one of the essential activities corresponding to the ‘human condition’. Then, in order to link this discussion to the direction of feminist labor liberation, I examine the discussions of Maria Mies and Go-Jeong Gap-hee, who argue that capitalism could not have begun or continued if capitalist labor and production were not based on patriarchy, that is, in a patriarchal system, and that capitalism should be approached from the perspective of a patriarchal system above all else. Next, I interpret the discussion of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who proposes the concept of ‘alienation’ in a different way from Marx and suggests that we explore how life can be possible in the ‘ruins’ created by capitalism through the concept of ‘entanglement’, as a methodology for feminist labor liberation.