Calculating the value of domestic labor

[butterfly]

What did Marx say about this? Is an individuals domestic labor taken into account with the provision of vouchers or the equivalent and how would this be calculated?

[mikelepore]

I think you're asking whether a socialist society should pay an income to each person for doing their own housework. I would be against it. Realize that the labor time credits or vouchers (http://www.deleonism.org/text/lv000016.htm) used to compensate individuals for work would be a method to distribute a physical inventory of goods that people get from the store. Therefore, every time society has to pay any kind of labor that doesn't put physical goods into inventory (say, doctors and teachers) it would be, in effect, a kind of sales tax added to the prices of all of the products in the store. This means that paying people to do something that everyone does, such as housework, would be "zero sum." It would be like telling every member of a club to pay an additional one dollar in dues so that the club can raise the money needed to give every member of the club one dollar. With a net effect of zero, there no point in doing it in the first place.

[Sawtooth]

There's a feminist economist named Madeleine Waring (she was at one time in New Zealand's parliament) who talks about issues related to this. She criticized pretty much all the ways the UN measures a country's wealth (primarily Gross Domestic Product but also Gross National Product and Power Purchasing Parity) because they didn't take into account work done by women in the home.

I agree with Mikelepore to a certain extent but if there are people who spend all their labor doing housework -- and I'm aware that there is little place for the traditional "housewife" under socialism -- then they should be paid, rather than relying on another person to be fed.