The beneficiaries of housework are the workers themselves and their families, so they are often regarded as irrelevant to society.
Under the condition of market economy, housework can not reflect its value through the market because it does not directly enter the market to participate in the exchange, and it seems to be an uncertain quantity, and its price is difficult to find an equivalent to measure, so it has become a special labor that is indispensable to every family and ignored by everyone, and then forgotten by the process of social and economic activities.
It is of great practical significance to fully understand the economic value of housework and protect it by law for the harmony and stability of our family and society.
Economic value of housework under natural economic conditions.
Self-sufficient natural economy is compatible with low productivity and underdeveloped social division of labor. At that time, as Marx said, people "can't produce unless they combine their own activities and exchange their own activities in a certain way." {2} But why can people unite in some way to "share activities and exchange activities"? Housework is its origin. Because family is the most basic cell of society, there must be housework if there is a family, which is the maintenance and embodiment of family existence.
Then, can housework, which maintains and embodies the existence of social cells, be regarded as social labor? Moreover, the process of housework can be said to be the production process of "people", and everyone is a social person. In this way, the attribute of housework of people in the production society is of course social labor. Women do housework at home, and men have no worries about "sharing activities and exchanging activities" outside, realizing self-sufficient production of economic units.
From this point of view, housework can be transformed into social labor. As long as there is an external "mutual activity and exchange of their activities" between their families or family members, housework should create economic value. Posner, an American legal economist, said when studying the theory of family production: The fact that the family can exist as a social system shows that it must have important economic efficiency. {3} The economic efficiency of a family comes from the economic value of housework.