Women’s unpaid work, not slave refusal, is authentic zero-work

Evidence

Rather than the refusal to work of the freed Jamaican slaves in 1834, which is cited by Marx as the only example of zero-work, quickly recuperated by imperialist maneuvers, it is the long history of women’s work which is a sustained example of zero-work: work not only outside of wage-work, but, in one way or another, “outside” of the definitive modes of production. The displacement required here is a transvaluation, an uncatastrophic implosion of the search for validation via the circuit of productivity. Rather than a miniaturized and thus controlled metaphor for civil society and the state, the power of the oikos, domestic economy, can be used as the model of the foreign body unwittingly nurtured by the polis. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 496