Collective Housekeeping and the Revenge of the Oikos: Against Hannah Arendt on Democracy, Work and the Welfare State

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's distinction between oikos and polis lay at the basis of much of her critique of modern politics and of the social. This article criticizes Arendt's perspective, laying a basis for a re-evaluation of forms of workers' control of work and of democracy itself, by showing that Arendt misunderstood three key historical experiences—ancient democracy, modern democracy and direct democracy. Sustaining the historical experiences by which agents of the oikos—slaves, women and workers—have used democracy to bring into the public sphere what had previously been seen as private, it develops a wider view of work, and redefines democracy as the conquest of the oikos by these agents and of the polis by a transformed oikos.

Keywords:

• Hannah Arendt
• political theory
• labor
• democracy
• welfare state

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Charles Christian, Cathy Christian, Filomena D'Addario and Marty Glaberman.

Notes on Contributor

Steven Colatrella is adjunct associate professor of sociology and government for the University of Maryland University College, and teaches immigration and human rights, and international business ethics for Spring Hill College's overseas study program in Bologna, Italy. He is the author of the book Workers of the World: African and Asian Migrants in Italy in the 1990s (Trenton and Asmara: Africa World Press, 2001). His major research areas are globalization and global governance, political economy, immigration and political theory. He lives in Padua, Italy.

Notes

¹ Polanyi (2001, 48): “… man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships.”

² See the classic work, Sahlins (1972, 63–65): “And what are we to construe of those Australian Aborigines—the Yir Yiront—who do not discriminate between ‘work’ and ‘play’?” And “But then, even to speak of ‘the economy’ in a primitive society is an exercise in unreality” (76).

³ See Shiva (2005) and Dalla Costa (2005). The excellent documentary film, “Beyond Elections,” on the new experiments in direct democracy in Latin America (see www.beyondelections.com) shows that many of the cooperatives set up by community councils and assemblies engage in recycling economies or organic agriculture; for the organic farming and ecological care in the discussion of the MST—the landless laborer's movement in Brazil, see Patel (2008, 202–9).

⁴ See also of course Wood (1988).

⁵ On the Demagogues, for a view that sees these as worthy of support and opposes the classic and elitist view of them as second-rate opportunists, see the magnum opus of Grote (1899, 454–92).

⁶ For a suggestive discussion on women, sustainable agriculture and the institution of the Sacred Cow, see Shiva (2000, 57–78).

⁷ See particularly the discussion on the implications of this failure in Mumford (1973, 17–36).

⁸ See especially Eley (2002) and Wilentz (2005); and see the important summary of the debate over the role of labor movements in the construction of democracy in Ost (2005). On the English and French Revolutions, the excellent recent discussions, see Kennedy (2007) and Gauthier (2007, 25–49; 71–92). Gauthier in particular, makes clear the relationship between defense of the common lands and the revolution for democracy, and just as relevant for our purposes here, points out that the revolutionary government abolished slavery, that executive power was in fact reduced under the Jacobins while legislative authority was maintained throughout, that the state of emergency and abrogation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man took place under the reaction of Thermidor and that the Vendee was a regional civil war that was transformed into a “genocide” for ideological reasons. Again, definitions matter here: Eley argues that if we use a strict definition of universal suffrage, with equal rights and secret ballots, only four states before 1914 qualify: New Zealand, Australia, Finland and Norway. If we ignore women's suffrage then France and Switzerland qualify. But using democracy in the sense of a democratic movement that has embodied itself in certain institutions, so as to discover whether these institutions improve the possibility of further extension of and defense of rights, which is what is relevant to our attempt to go beyond the limited vision of Arendt, it is more useful to begin with the more famous and influential examples of the United States and France.

⁹ About which, for starters, see Rawick (1972).

¹⁰ For a recent study of Garrison, see Mayer (1998).

¹¹ I had exactly the same feeling about the free lunch program that both my sister and I benefitted from when in middle and high school in New Jersey in the 1970s, the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) job that my mother worked at, that took some care of runaway teens in the area, and the financial aid, federal grants (not loans) that paid most of my way through an expensive college. All three were cut considerably (CETA abolished altogether) at the onset of the Reagan era.

¹² For an analysis of how a self-managed sector interacted with other parts of an otherwise non-self-managed society and polity in Algeria in the years 1960–67, see (Knabb 1981, 160–67), and of the factory councils movement in Italy in 1919–20, see Spriano (1975).

¹³ Including what in retrospect were an all-star team of people who might, had the usual splits among small radical groups not occurred, have been leading lights of the US left (in their case as well) such as Martin Glaberman, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, Filomena D'Addario, and George Rawick, among others.

¹⁴ I am extremely grateful to the analysis of Protagoras' ideas of self-government and the ancient Greek concept of techne in Wood (2008, 57–65).

¹⁵ James quotes this entire passage starting with the phrase, “For what happened here …” (1973, 157). Bewick/ed was the publishing house of my old friend, the late Martin Glaberman. Bewick Avenue was his house address in Detroit at the time of publication, and Marty always liked the pun “be wicked.” In practice, these were individually and occasionally collectively hand-published works, coming from someone who had spent many years in auto factories, getting up before dawn to run off copies of political flyers and pamphlets to hand out at work and in front of factory gates, further testimony to the intellectual and political capacities of workers learned at work.

¹⁶ Correspondence was led by C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs in the 1950s. Today Boggs remains politically active in Detroit (see her autobiography, 1998); Pierre Chaulieu was the pen name at the time of Cornelius Castoriadis.

¹⁷ See, among a vast literature, the account in Bernstein (1969).

¹⁸ See the discussion of this question in Glaberman and Faber (1998). Nor is this capacity limited to waged work, nor to “free” labor: see Rawick (1972), and the failed experiments in industrial work by slave labor on the plantations discussed in Starobin (1970, 75–115).

¹⁹ I am in debt to Prof. C. George Caffentzis for my understanding of the inability of Arendt's distinction between work and labor to even consider the importance of the vast matrix of work that takes place under the rubric of household labor or domestic labor.

²⁰ I am grateful to Russell who quotes this passage in her seminal article already cited, for reminding me of the relevance of this discussion by Marx.

²¹ See the excellent discussion of the difference between this experience and that of the citizen in ancient Athens in Wood (2002).

²² My critique here of Arendt's limitations in keeping to a strict dichotomy between oikos and polis is different from critiques by some feminist thinkers, who while rejecting this distinction by Arendt, do not stress the household as a sphere of work, and of democratic struggles to transform the conditions of that work and to meet needs, but emphasize gender relations per se in the relationship between private and public, and who find in Arendt's rejection of feminist as identity something to admire for postmodern gender analyses. See the collection in Honig (1995). Further, my critique of Arendt's opposition to the intervention of social agents and their concerns into the public sphere is different from that of Hanna Fenichel Pitkin. Pitkin's pioneering and at times incisive critique (Pitkin 2000), accuses Arendt of having an obsessive horror of the social, viewing the latter as a single, undifferentiated mass. This work is marred by the reliance on rather questionable psychoanalytical categories to explain Arendt's view of the social viewed as a single mass. Such works ignore the issue of the centrality of work and knowledge of work and of social reproduction—the meeting of human needs, as being at the center of the democratic experience and the movements associated with democracy ancient and modern.

²³ It is nearly impossible to cite merely one source for the amazing body of thought by Wendell Berry over the years. But one can start with Berry (1977), especially the essays “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture,” “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Culture” and “The Body and the Earth.” His recent reformulation of some arguments on these themes in the face of globalization and the post-9/11 conditions appears in Berry (2001).