Silvia Federici on The Arcana of Reproduction
Silvia Federici's foreword to The Arcana of Reproduction by Leopoldina Fortunati.
The Arcana of Reproduction is a unique book in the world of Marxist feminism. Generally, Marxist feminists have elaborated on the methodological significance of Marx’s work for understanding the specific historical forms of oppression that women have experienced in capitalist society, or they have extended Marx’s analysis of the exploitation of women workers. Fortunati breaks with these trends, demonstrating how our understanding of the activities by which our everyday life is reproduced can be radically transformed if we apply to them the very same categories that Marx developed to analyse the process of commodity production. The result is a true tour de force exploring the similarities and differences of these two interlocking spheres of the capitalist organisation of work. Her painstaking analysis unsettles our common notions concerning reproduction as well as Marx’s own work.
As Fortunati explained in an interview with Viewpoint, the idea of the book originated from ‘the practical needs of the feminist struggle’: that is, the need to explain – both to feminists and the wider movement – why it has been necessary to rethink Marxism, and how feminism relates to class and the capitalist exploitation of labour. These were the issues at the centre of the campaign for Wages for Housework and the endeavours of the Padua-based Triveneto Committee, of which Fortunati was a founding member.
At a strategically important moment for the development of the feminist movement, Wages for Housework (WFH) provided an alternative to the dominant feminist tendency to view entrance into wage labour as the key step on the path to women’s emancipation. Partly inspired by the operaismo movement in Italy, as well as anticolonial struggles and the struggle against racism in the US, WFH embraced an anti-capitalist perspective. At the same time, however, it faulted Marxism for ignoring the exploitation that takes place in the sphere of reproduction – that is, the exploitation of women’s labour in the home, the family, the sphere of domestic activities – this being the ‘nerve centre’ (as Fortunati was to define it) of the production of labour power: that precious commodity on which all capitalist accumulation depends.
A key document, in this context, was Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s essay Women and the Subversion of the Community, originally published in Italian in 1972. It revolutionised Marx’s theory in arguing that, far from being a personal service or a vestigial remnant of a pre-capitalist world, ‘domestic work’ is a specific form of capitalist production that produces not commodities but the workers’ capacity to work. Dalla Costa’s now classic essay, together with Selma James’s Sex, Race and Class from 1975, was the theoretical foundation of both the WFH campaign in the 1970s, and of a feminist critique of Marx that was much needed both to respond to the attacks by the male left, and to articulate a new understanding, produced by the struggle, of the specific reality of women’s lives.
In this context, it is Fortunati’s work that, more than any other, has tested to what extent Marx’s analysis of the logic of capitalist production can be recuperated and extended to the sphere of domestic work, and thrown light on the principles by which the latter operates and is integrated in the process of capital accumulation.
Fortunati builds upon Dalla Costa’s thesis, but expands it. On the one hand, she dissects reproductive work to bring to light those elements that make it an aspect of the capitalist work-machine; on the other, she offers a historical overview of the context in which the capitalist restructuring of housework has taken place and the changes that it has undergone under the impact of women’s struggle.
Like Dalla Costa and James, Fortunati is critical of Marx’s exclusion of reproductive work from the process of value creation, but her unique contribution is to demonstrate that, if consistently applied, Marx’s categories lead to a different understanding of this work – indeed a different understanding of the entire sphere of family, life, parental and sexual relations – that denaturalises and fully reveals its capitalist function.
Housework, she shows, may appear to be a personal service and an individual activity, but in reality it is a form of social labour, as it is generalised and only modified by the kind of labour power to be produced. It is also a value-generating activity, in the Marxian sense of the term, as it makes it possible for capitalists to extract more labour power from workers, who are strengthened by their incorporation of the houseworkers’ labour. She further shows that the home is a factory, that familial and sexual relations are relations of production, that marriage is a labour contract, and that conjugal and parental love hide unequal, hierarchical power relations.
In particular, Fortunati dissects the function of the wage as the means by which the hegemonic role of the male worker in the family is constituted, as he becomes the representative of the state and supervisor of his wife’s work, as well as of his children’s formation as future workers. It is through the wage and the disciplining of the male worker (as Fortunati demonstrates) that capital also disciplines the houseworker, who does not confront capital directly but through the mediation of her husband or lover – an arrangement that inevitably hides the exploitation involved and undermines the woman’s struggle. This, Fortunati argues, is a necessary strategic condition imposed by capital and the state, since the illusion of a loving relation powerfully binds male and female workers to the marriage contract, enabling them to accept the servitude of the factory and the home, while providing the capitalist class two workers for the price of one.
As in Marx, the contrast between formal appearance and reality is a key principle in Fortunati’s analysis of the production/reproduction relation, powerfully confirming that what appears as capitalist economics is always, in fact, highly political, insofar as it is structured in such a way to guarantee not only maximum profit, but also maximum control over the workforce. She observes, for instance, that the way capital operates in the sphere of reproduction is diametrically opposed to its organisation of production. Whereas in production workers cooperate in the labour process, in reproduction they are isolated, disaggregated from each other, and work is highly individualised. This is because the illusion of uniqueness – the essential ingredient in the ideology of love— is a potent drug, necessary to keep the male worker bonded to his job. It hides the fact that neither husbands and wives, nor parents and children truly relate to each other directly, but always through the mediation of capital, which is the deus absconditus, the hidden agent, of familial relations.
As I will demonstrate, Fortunati’s insistence on the dominance of capitalist relations in the world of reproduction does not extinguish the possibility of autonomy and refusal. Schooled in the principle of operaismo as originally articulated in Mario Tronti’s Operai e Capitale, according to which ‘the struggle comes first’ – meaning that it is the workers’ struggle that explains capital’s movements – Fortunati alerts us to the power of even subterranean acts of refusal. She points out, for example, that women’s increasing refusal to carry the burden of bearing many children, although visible only in the fall of the birth rate, was yet powerful enough to force the capitalist class since the 1960s and 1970s to open the doors to migration from abroad and, in time, construct a global labour-market.
While not foreclosing the possibility of resistance, Fortunati’s account of the ways in which capital’s logic permeates our private life has great de-fetishising effect. Today, thanks to the feminist movement, the deconsecration of domestic work and the family that results from her analysis is more readily accepted. But, in the late 1970s, when Fortunati was working on The Arcana of Reproduction, her approach was iconoclastic – for, as the title of the book suggests, few social realities have been so manipulated as the sphere of reproduction, especially in Italy where years of Fascism had turned maternity into a religion.
Undoubtedly, what has driven Fortunati’s relentless demythologising of a world of activities that generations have considered the other of work – her insistent call to characterise such activities as labour – is a profound reflection on Marx’s political theory, at a time when, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the new left in Italy was rediscovering Marx’s radical critique of capitalist society. But what has most motivated and shaped the book has undoubtedly been the power of women’s revolt against the family form and domestic work. In a previous text, Brutto ciao (1976, co-authored with Dalla Costa), Fortunati had traced the beginning of this revolt in Italy to the period after the war, when women, especially in rural areas, broke with the patriarchal family, beginning a process of migration into cities that allowed them to gain more equality with men and started to democratise family relations.
The Arcana of Reproduction follows the evolution of this struggle, marked by gaining a new mobility in marriage, as well as women’s refusal to have many children or to have children at all, the refusal of heterosexuality, and women’s insistence on a new familial use of the male wage. These – she argues – should be considered not as changes of custom but as forms of class struggle, as each represents a subversion of capital’s plan for women.
The Arcana of Reproduction was published first in 1981. Since then, the process of social reproduction has undergone significant transformations. With the massive entry of women, both in Europe and the US, into the wage labour-market, domestic work has increasingly been performed by immigrant women coming from parts of the world which the expansion of capitalist relations has recolonised and impoverished. There have also been attempts to fill the vacuum produced by the exit of women from the home through the mechanisation of care work; though so far it has remained an extremely limited phenomenon, unaffordable by the majority and to a great extent not desirable. A good proportion of the work once done in the home has also been taken out of the home and commercialised. Yet the problems at the root of the feminist revolt of the 1970s have still not been resolved.
As the crisis of the COVID epidemic demonstrated, working outside the home has failed to liberate women from housework. Reinvesting in domestic work and the family, governments across the world brought women back to a home that was now also an office and a school, where they were expected to act as a buffer and compensate for the tensions generated by the pandemic. Meanwhile, as is clear from the uphill battle fought by migrant domestic workers to be recognised as workers, reproductive work continues to be devalued. As for a technological solution to the problem of reproduction, this has proven chimeric, for the very technologies that have been devised to enable women to take a paying job have most often expanded the task houseworkers expected to perform, or have created new problems. For instance, Telecommuni cando in Europa, a collection edited by Fortunati, shows that the invasion of the home by communicative technologies has added to the breakdown of communication among family members, whose relations are increasingly instrumental.
Constructed over five centuries of capitalist hegemony, the devaluation and naturalisation of reproductive work, in all its different (and constantly expanding) aspects, are clearly not amenable to any particular solution, nor can they be addressed by any reform of this work – though both reforms and changes giving women and all non-conforming subjects more power must be an object of struggle. The devaluation of reproduction, which, in essence, is the devaluation of our life, is a structural condition of capitalist accumulation. Fortunati’s analysis in The Arcana of Reproduction – of the capitalist structuring of the family and reproductive work thus continues to be both relevant and necessary.
As in the 1970s, revealing the extent to which capitalism dominates our lives – and revealing all the unpaid labour that it has extracted from women through the organisation of marriage and the family – is an essential step for forging a feminist political agenda: an agenda not limited to the quest for equality, equal rights or opportunities, but driven by the conviction that, as Fortunati argues throughout The Arcana of Reproduction, women’s liberation can be obtained only through the construction of a society beyond capitalism.
This is an edited version of Silvia Federici's foreword to The Arcana of Reproduction.