In 2012, we all pay at least lip service to the
entanglements of class, gender, and race when not also struggling to
incorporate other threads into our explanatory frameworks and actions. So when
you come across clarity of vision that precisely explains those relations, one
can only marvel that it was written 37 years ago and try not to be too dismayed
that it isn’t more widely known. Hopefully this new collection of work by
Silvia Federici will change that.
They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.
They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.
Every miscarriage is a work accident.
Heterosexuality and homosexuality are both working
conditions... but homosexuality is worker's control of production, not the end
of work.1
So opens the first essay in this necessary collection of
Federici’s writings. It includes essays from two periods and is organised into
three sections: the first as part of her work with the Wages for House Work
campaign and in dialogue with the feminist movements of the time; the second
covering social reproduction since 2000 and the rise of the Movement of
Movements; and the final part on the reproduction of the commons and communing.
The constant optic running through her work is the centrality of social
reproduction to production, and women’s labour at the heart of that
reproduction globally. The first set of essays, written at the height and in
the afterglow of the social struggles of the time, posit the demand of wages
for housework and explains the logic behind it, drawing attention to the
impossibility of production without reproduction, particularly its affective
dimensions, or as she writes in the preface, 'nothing so effectively stifles
our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that
satisfy our desires.'2 In the later sets of essays, her optic is expanded to
reflect the changes in the international division of labour and unalienated
forms and communities of care.
As part of the Wages for Housework campaign, and as part of
the generalised struggle against work, her writings lay bare the connection
between waged labour, the unwaged labour necessary to reproduce it, and its
international dimension. Taking an Autonomist Marxist line against the dominant
liberal and socialist feminisms of the time, these essays argue two points.3
First, that women are already part of the working class and the tasks labeled
'housework' produce and reproduce both the current and the next generation of
labor power that is required by the ever expanding circuits of capital, making
money from their 'cooking, smiling, fucking'.4 Second, bringing women into the
factories was no more of a victory than bringing factories to the 3rd world.
And that going to work in a factory was a defeat in itself, or as the Marxist
groupuscule propagandises at the beginning of Elio Petri's 1971 La classe
operaia va in paradise [The Working Class Goes to Heaven], to the workers as
they go into the factory on a bright winter's day, 'today the sun will not
shine for you'.
As the book’s introduction notes, her life's work had its
genesis in the matrix of 1960s Italy, in the social struggles of the time and
the insights and problematics of operaists and autonomists, particularly Mario
Tronti's seminal Operai e capitale. Wages for Housework engaged with Tronti’s
notion of the social factory, that at a 'certain stage of capitalist
development capitalist relations become so hegemonic that every social relation
is subsumed under capital and the distinction between society and factory
collapses', that an increasing reorganisation of social space is and has taken
place for the needs of capitalist production.5 For Federici and the other
members of the Wages for Housework campaign, the heart of this reorganisation
is in 'the kitchen, the bedroom, the home', where the labour of social
reproduction is performed and given a much more concrete reading, and more
importantly, a much more concrete demand.6
Federici's success as a writer and theorist is in the
grounded nature of her proposals and her irrefutable axiom that if we weren't
fed, able to sleep and make ourselves presentable, we wouldn't be able to sell
our labour power. The demands of Wages for Housework are an argument against
housework, its invisibility, its gendering and its devaluation and ultimately,
for wages. Wages that could be used to refuse other work, that receiving a wage
for the work would no more guarantee its performance than the union contracts
of the 1970s prevented widespread absenteeism, and that is the first step
against struggling against it. It is a revolutionary demand, 'not because by
itself it destroys capital, but because it forces capital to restructure social
relations in a way more favorable to us and consequently more favorable to the
class.'7
The rest of the book collects a subsection of her
interventions in the debates on globalisation and the commons, or commoning
from the point of view articulated during her time with the Wages for Housework
campaign but expanded to reflect the changed dynamic of the international
division of labour.8 The articles are strong but lack the urgency that informs
the first section of the book. Overall the shortcomings of the book are minor
but threefold. There is a dark age, a lack of biographical information and a
lack of in-depth theorisation about the relation between housework and the
possibility of unalienated communities of care work, which she deals with in
her essay 'On Eldercare and the Limits of Marxism', but not to the extent one
would like. The dark age consists of a fifteen-year gap from which no writings
are included. Given the strength of the rest of the material, the fact she was
publishing during this time as part of the Midnight Notes Collective, and the
marked difference in tone between the two periods, albeit not the analytic
lens, at least a small sample of the period would have been appreciated.
Finally, a lacuna of biographic information hurts the collection. She draws
attention to the fact that second wave European feminists grew up in the rubble
of the Second World War and the effects it would have on the idea of choosing
or not to raise children after having spent a childhood in such marked scarcity
and destruction. Beyond that, there is still a great history to be written on
the social nexus of a small but vital section of the Marxist U.S. Left starting
in the 1970s and continuing to the present. The lines running through the Wages
for Housework campaign, the short lived journal Zerowork, the Midnight Notes
Collective9, the publishing house Autonomedia, Federici, Peter Linebaugh, Harry
Cleaver, and George Caffentzis, among others, deserves to be examined.
Autonomists posited the theory of the circulation of struggle, that forms and
discourses of struggle travel. The inverse, the circulation of strugglers, needs
to be investigated as well. (The circulation of defeats is also worth
investigating, and perhaps more critical in understanding working class defeats
globally in the era of neoliberalism, but a much less happy point to reflect
upon).
Finally, since at least 1968, social movements have been
struggling with their relation to the state. Federici offers a useful insight
into the nexus between social movements, the state, and how values are
encapsulated in every demand and in the organisation to achieve it:
It is one thing to set up a day care center the way we want
it, and then demand the state pay for it. It is quite another thing to deliver
our children to the State and then ask the State to control them not for five
but fifteen hours a day. It is one thing to organize communally the way we want
to eat (by ourselves, in groups) and then ask the state to pay for it. It is
the opposite thing to ask the State to organize our meals. In one case we
regain some control over our lives, in the other we extend the State's control
over us.10
Info:
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero; Housework,
Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland: PM Press, 2012
Bibliography
“The Commoner.” Web. 17 Oct 2012.
<http://www.commoner.org.uk/>.
Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework,
Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press, 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2012.
“Midnight Notes Collective.” Web. 17 Oct. 2012.
<http://www.midnightnotes.org/mnpublic.html>.
Petri, Elio. La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso. 1971. Film.
Wright, Steve. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and
Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism,
Pluto Press, 2002. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.
“Zerowork.” Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://zerowork.org/>.
Notes
1Federici 17.
2 Federici 3.
3 Steve Wright's Storming Heaven: Class Composition and
Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism remains invaluable for understanding the
history and theoretical debates of the period.
4 Federici 19.
5 Federici 7.
6 Federici 8.
7 Federici 19.
8 The Commoner web journal is a good place to familiarize
oneself with the commons and communing.
9 Most content of both journals are available online.
10 Federici 21.
