Social Reproduction in Dispute

Put simply, the value of labor power does not depend on the labor time that reproduces it. If a woman spends two hours or thirty minutes preparing the stew that will feed her child, this does not affect the salary that the child can obtain in return for the sale of her labor power. In fact, labor power is the only commodity whose value can be adjusted by price: in times of unemployment, the price of labor power falls, and the value adjusts to that drop. In this sense we can say that labor power as a commodity is triply unique: it’s the only one which produces more value than itself, it is the only one largely produced outside the sphere of production, and the only one whose value is adjusted by its price (recognizing of course that³¹ Noting that the majority of the labor force reproduction work is exogenous to the sphere of production is not the same as saying that this isn’t waged labor. One of Vogel’s sharpest observations in the original second wave debate was to point out that there is a whole set of reproductive tasks that the capitalist state had “socialized” through schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and so on. Four forms of social reproductive work can be identified: nonproductive nonwaged (home/neighborhood/community); nonproductive, waged state (public services); nonproductive waged personal services (workers in private homes); productive waged (private companies that provide social reproduction services). this adjustment has biological limits, as Marx pointed out). This triple uniqueness is determined by the fact that the commodity labor power is inseparable from its bearer: the human being. When Vogel defined social reproduction as the daily and generational maintenance of the labor force,³² As Vogel writes, “I…restricted the concept of reproduction of labour-power to the processes that maintain and replace labour-power capable of producing a surplus for an appropriating class” (Vogel, Marxism, 2013, 188)she was referring to the “reproduction of life” under these particular, historical, and concrete conditions.

One more clarification is still required. Emphasizing that the reproduction of the labor force requires work (invisible, devalued, and gendered) that is conducted outside the scope of commodity production is not the same as saying that the labor force is reproduced entirely outside the realm of value production. This would be a huge error. The reproduction of the labor force is neither completely endogenous nor completely exogenous to the realm of value production. It is both. With regard to wages (as the expression of the measurable cost of the reproduction of the labor force), it is endogenous to the sphere of the production of value and surplus value; with regard to the vast majority of the social reproductive labor, it is exogenous to the sphere of production. Put differently, labor power (and workers who bear it) are reproduced thanks to what happens inside and outside the realm of value production. Hence, to understand the reproduction of the labor force, it is necessary to look at both production and reproduction, and above all, to look at their relationship.

These characteristics of wage labor as a key social relation that requires a “free” worker (compelled to sell their labor power on the market in order to reproduce themselves because they are cut off from means of production), and the particularities of the commodity labor power (inseparable from its bearer), explain the fact that the realms of production and reproduction are separated and differentiated, yet at the same time in-dissociable. It is to this differentiated unity that Vogel refers with the concept of the two dimensions of necessary labor: the social and domestic dimensions, which unfold in two spheres of social production as a whole.

In the Beginning Was the Domestic (or Reproduction as Oikos)

One of Mezzadri’s criticisms of Bhattacharya’s book is that it does not refer to what the author calls “Early Social Reproduction Analyses,”³³Mezzadri, “A Value Theory.” the feminist works upon which the Wages for Housework Campaign was based in 1972. The critique is a bit misleading because Bhattacharya does refer to them in her Introduction to the book³⁴ As Bhattacharya writes, “This line of theorization about the nature of waged and unwaged labor also touches upon critical branches of feminist thought and activism, the most prominent of course being the wages-for-housework movement” (“Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” in Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction, 12–13). Carmen Teeple Hopkins’s essay in the same volume, “Mostly Work, Little Play: Social Reproduction, Migration, and Paid Domestic Work in Montreal” (131–47) discusses the important contributions of scholar-activists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici and addresses the theoretical challenge that Autonomist feminists posed to Marxist schema of social reproduction. and because the discussion about domestic labor and its value was already inscribed in the debates of the time and involves different authors.³⁵ To situate the origins in this Campaign, Mezzadri omits, for example, very important works for this discussion, like that of Margaret Benston, whose 1969 article specifically discusses domestic labor and its production of value. Margaret Benston, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” Monthly Review 21, no. 4, 1969. For a detailed historicization, see Ferguson, Women and Work. The Campaign was indeed a watershed and was, without a doubt, the origin of the Autonomist vision on social reproduction. We will review the core of these discussions by looking into Silvia Federici’s work (one of the activists of the campaign), because there we will find the basis for understanding Mezzadri’s position.

As Federici highlights, the first formulation of domestic work as producer of value was in Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s 1971 text, “Potere Femminile e Sovversione Sociale” (“The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community”).³⁶ This text and that of Selma James, “Il Posto della donna,” also from 1971, gave rise to the book in English by Dalla Costa and James: Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (Bishopston: Falling Wall Press, 1972). Dalla Costa was an Italian Operaista militant in the Véneto zone, adjunct professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad de Padua (lead by Toni Negri) and driving force behind Lotta Femminista. It was the product of the theoretical developments that had been unfolding in Italy, in the heat of what became known as Operaísmo, particularly the notion of the “social factory” by Mario Tronti.³⁷ Tronti was an Italian communist intellectual who occupied a central role in the development of Operaísmo in the 1960s, first from the magazine Quaderni Rossi (under the direction of Raniero Panzieri from the PSI), and later from 1964, in Classe Operaía along with R Alquati, A. Negri, and A. Rosa. In 1966, he published Operai e Capitale, where he developed the concept of the “Social Factory.” Federici explains:

Of equal importance in the development of our perspective was the operaísta concept of the ‘social factory.’ This concept translated the theory of Mario Tronti, expressed in his 1966 work Operai e Capitale (Workers and Capital). According to which, at a certain point in capitalist development, capitalist relations became so hegemonic that each and every one of the social relations is subordinated to capital and, thus, the distinction between society and factory collapses, so that society transforms into the factory, and social relations directly become relations of production. This is how Tronti theorizes the increase in the reorganization of the “territory” as social space structured according to manufacturing needs and those of capitalist accumulation. But from our perspective, at first glance it was obvious that the circuit of capitalist production and of the “social factory” that is produced, began, and was established primarily in the kitchen, the bedroom, the home—while these are the production centers of the workforce—and from there they moved to the factory, first passing through the school, the office, or the laboratory.³⁸ Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012, 7.

This paragraph condenses the Operaísta matrix that forms the base of Mezzadri’s and Federici’s positions. When Dalla Costa wrote that domestic labor not only contributed to the reduction of the cost of the workforce (an undisputed fact),³⁹ In fact, there are many ways in which the capitalist class reduces the cost of the work force: subsidies, antistrike, or anti-union legislation, and so on. but that it also produced surplus value, she was the first Operaist to extend Tronti’s notion of the social factory, proposing the existence of the extraction of surplus value outside the factory environment.⁴⁰ In this sense, Dalla Costa’s statements are more radical (and less ambiguous) than those of Mezzadri who says that social reproduction work “contributes” to the production of value. As we shall see below, what is ambiguous in the original approach and is also ambiguous in the present one is the explanation of how the value produced in the sphere of social reproduction could be measured. From that point on, Tronti’s concept was subsumed under this notion by the feminists of the Campaign, not to think about extra-factory spaces in general, but to think specifically of the domestic space as a space directly related to production: “Measuring work by wages also hides the high degree to which our families and social relations have been subordinated to the relations of production—they have become relations of production.”⁴¹ Federici, Ground Zero, 35, my emphasis.

Here is the core theoretical claim: domestic labor unambiguously produces value, with the concept of the “social factory” (or rather, this particular understanding of the concept) serving to obscure the specific way in which the activities involved in social reproduction take part in the production of value. Federici contends:

Under capitalism, the production of value never derives from a concrete place but is determined socially. In other words, it is an “extensive assembly line” (I use the term in a figurative sense), necessary for the generation of surplus value. Obviously, the surplus value is generated when the products of labor are sold in the market. If you have a factory that produces a dozen cars and don’t sell any, no surplus value is produced. What I mean by this is that the activities involved in the reproduction of a waged worker form part of this assembly line: they are part of a social process that determines surplus value. Although we cannot specify a direct relationship between what takes place in the kitchen and the value that it generates, for example, with the sale of a car, or of any other product, when we contemplate the social nature of the production of value, a “social factory” unfolds beyond the factory itself.⁴²

A paradox emerges here. For Marxists, social reproductive labor is not value production precisely because it is not commensurable—it cannot be abstract labor.⁴² Editors’ note: within commodity production, it is the social organization of production for exchange—where values and prices are realized only through market transactions—that renders goods commensurable, that is, as quantitatively comparable products of human labor in the abstract. For Federici and Mezzadri, we must speak of value production even though social reproduction labor cannot be commensurated. In the absence of an alternative method of commensurability elaborated by the authors, we are forced to accept the existence of value which cannot be measured, which makes the notion of value extremely elusive. On this ambiguous conceptual basis, Federici engages in a series of theoretical leaps which will allow her to conclude that women, as protagonists of social reproduction work, are the most exploited subjects in this society turned “social factory.”  Therefore, women are the privileged subjects of the fight against capitalism.

The first leap is from affirming that the domestic work produces value (Dalla Costa’s thesis) to identifying the domestic realm as the central pillar of the “social factory” because that is where the labor force is produced. This understanding of the domestic realm as an oikos (basic unit) transforms it, in Federici’s terms, into the “point zero” of the revolution, and therefore, into the privileged terrain of the class struggle and the construction of a society that moves beyond capitalism. This “displacement” implies a very important shift. The original discussion of the second wave feminists criticized the fetishization of the worker in overalls (male and white) as the only subject of the working class (making women’s unpaid work invisible). The Autonomist approach begins to reconfigure the domestic realm as not only another domain of productive work (which should be recognized through wages) but as the primary realm of production. This prioritization will end (paradoxically) in the devaluation of waged labor as a fundamental social relation for the comprehension of the concrete forms of exploitation of male and female workers today. Peter Linebaugh’s formulation, “reproduction precedes social production. If you touch women, you touch the base,”⁴³ As Tithi Bhattacharya points out (“Introduction”) this “historical” anteriority (in the sense that, indeed, without production and reproduction of human-beings there is no waged labor), does not say much about which are the bases of the accumulation of capital, which still resides (regrettably) in the extraction of surplus value at the point of production.operates as a sort of slogan for this theoretical shift.

In its wake comes the second shift: “from the kitchen to the garden and to the land.” In the debate of the 1970s, this oikos was thought of from the point of view of the household. Today, “globalization” and its dynamic of constant commodification of diverse spheres of social life forces Autonomists to think of social reproduction as every sphere in which the work of subsistence takes place, whether in the cities (communal farms or community cooking pots) or in the countryside (subsistence agriculture). This shift is also very important because it makes it possible to establish links between the original feminist debate and studies on subsistence economies, such as those of the German Bielefeld school,⁴⁴ For an analysis of the Bielefeld School and its research on subsistence economy see Van der Linden, 2019. including the work of the feminist Maria Mies, to which Mezzadri refers in the text.

These studies, focused on the global periphery, make it possible to take the concept of social reproduction to a broader level in a “communitarian” key. The focus is now placed in what Mies calls the space of construction of “the commons,” in the same way as it was previously placed in the household. But it also makes it possible to establish the link with interpretations of neoliberalism or globalization as a permanent or constant process of “original accumulation” in which capitalism tries to save its crisis of accumulation through new dispossession procedures, either in the form of displacement of communities that still live in some kind of subsistence economy (the so-called new enclosures); or in the form of the indebtedness of peripheral countries (foreign debt as a procedure of dispossession), as austerity plans expand the mechanism of debt (and its disciplining effect) over the popular sectors impoverished by structural adjustment policies.⁴⁵ Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago, A Feminist Reading of Debt (London: Pluto Press, 2020).

In sum, this theoretical shift from a domestic to a “communitarian” perspective transforms the original reading that placed women and their work of social reproduction in the household at the core of the capitalist “social factory” into a new reading of global capitalism. Today, the epicenter of global capital lies in subsistence economies as spaces of resistance to the logic of capitalist commodification, and the women of these economies (mainly women of the “third world”) are the foundation of the entire system and its history. This idea can be seen clearly in the work of John McMurtry, taken up by Federici in her reflections:

The liberating factor emerging from the Third World is the force of the unpaid women who have not yet seen themselves as disconnected from the vital economy by means of employment. They serve life not the production of commodities. They are the hidden backbone of the global economy.⁴⁶ Cited in Federici, “La cuestión,” 153.

This perspective fetishizes, in a “spectral” fashion, the sphere of social reproduction in a mirror image of the fetishization of the sphere of production originally denounced by second wave feminists. Neoliberal globalization is reduced to an attack on subsistence economies and on the women who are their protagonists. This reading blocks an understanding of the evolution of capital in the neoliberal era as an attack, unequal in speed and combined in a peculiar way according to different geographies, on the working class as a whole through the articulation of policies aimed at both the circuits of production and social reproduction.

In the circuit of commodity production: multiple forms of precariousness of wage labor; combination of extension of the working day (absolute surplus value) and high unemployment and underemployment; increase of informality and hybrid forms between wage and nonwage labor; and brutal cuts in real wages and in the living conditions of male and female workers. In the circuit of social reproduction: cuts to health services, education, and all the forms in which the capitalist state had “socialized” social reproduction; privatization of former public services such as transportation, housing, access to water and other basic necessities; commodification of natural resources and expulsion of communities from their lands; extension of the mechanism of debt plundering, and so on.

The result of the theoretical displacements within Autonomist feminism is something that was inscribed in the Wages for Housework Campaign as a possibility. What was originally proposed as a political perspective “beginning with women but [is valid] for the entire working class,”⁴⁷ Federici, Ground Zero, 30. was transformed. Now the working class as subject, heterogeneous in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, geographical-cultural origin, and sexuality, is diluted. In its place, emerges a subject of “popular women” or “women of subsistence,” who, due to their proximity to “the reproduction of life,” embody the potential to transcend capital and so much “production of death.”

The Problem of the Unity of Production and Reproduction Struggles

I come now to the third dimension that Mezzadri introduces in her text: the form in which these different theoretical understandings of social reproduction shape political strategies. This is important because Mezzadri claims that the Autonomist approach opens the possibility of uniting diverse sectors of workers through considering their struggles as “ultimately” reproductive.⁴⁸ Mezzadri, “On the Value,” 39. However, it is precisely this reification of the sphere of reproduction that, in my opinion, undermines the possibility of unity.

When thinking about the political perspectives of an anticapitalist feminism today, Federici states:

Inevitably, such a historic attack on people’s lives eternalized by the politics of “permanent crisis” has led many of us to rethink our political strategies and perspectives. In my case, it has led me to reconsider the question of “wages for housework” and to investigate the meaning of the growing call in different international radical circles for production of “commons.”⁴⁹ Federici, Point Zero, 11.

This horizon of pursuing “the commons,” in Caffentzis and Federici’s terms,⁵⁰ These terms are used by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici’s in their article, “Comunes contra y más allá del capitalismo,” in Caffentzis, ed., Los límites del capital: Deuda, moneda y lucha de clases (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón y Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo, 2018). implies a conscious construction of methods of production of subsistence that don’t respond to the logic of profit-making but to that of necessities. However, this does not deny, in Federici’s perspective, the demand for a salary paid by the state. On the contrary, it presupposes it. But instead of demanding, as in the 1970s, “Wages for Housework,” it is a “social wage” that guarantees reproduction understood as subsistence. Unlike other formulations of basic income,⁵¹ Federici herself recognizes that “reflection on wages for housework has been stimulated by the demand for a universal basic income, that in recent years has gained popularity in the European left” in Federici and Arlen Austin, Salario para el trabajo doméstico. Comité de Nueva York. Historia, teoría y documentos 1972-1977 (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Traficantes de Sueños, 2019), 44. The common point between the Autonomist feminist strategy and the strategy of organizations that are not anticapitalist but constitute fundamental pillars of contemporary capitalism (like wings of the Catholic church or many multilateral organizations and global NGOs, that Federici critiques acidly) is the idea that the state must guarantee the subsistence for the “losers” of neoliberal capitalism. here we are not to think of a subsidy to be paid “universally” but to those who make that subsistence possible: women. This subsidy, that authors like Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago label the “feminist salary,”⁵² In Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago’s appropriation of this idea, what is claimed of the state is a “feminist salary.” They write, “This is the key point that is being discussed today in various organizations: the management of public resources in the form of subsidy or social salary as a tool that the feminist movement is challenging from its own logic.” Cavallero and Gago, “Diez tesis sobre la economía feminista (o sobre el antagonismo entre huelga y finanzas,” Viento Sur, 2019, 164. would be the ground from which to deploy community forms of social reproduction toward the creation of “the commons.”

The exposition of this strategy for “social salary + construction of the commons” makes explicit elements that are present in the theoretical debate but are rarely expressed openly. First, the struggle against capitalism runs the risk of being equated with the fight for “a subsistence beyond wage labor.” Of course, no one can be against the political goal of “subsisting,” especially in a situation where there are millions of workers that die of hunger due to poverty, environmental contamination, ecological disasters, curable diseases, or systemic capitalist state violence against “lives that don’t matter.” However, there is a difference between considering subsistence as an objective of the first order and transforming it into the political horizon. One of the interesting elements of the Wages for Housework Campaign during the 1970s was that, far from being aimed at obtaining the wage itself, the objective of making domestic work visible opened the possibility for women to refuse to do domestic work. In this sense, it would open the possibility to a critique of unpaid social reproductive labor by women. Federici and Austin note that:

The document [Thesis on Wages for Housework from 1974] addresses the demand for wages as a strategy, not as an end in itself, but as a way of rejecting unpaid labor and as an instrument for the construction of more favorable power relations; the material vehicle for rejecting domestic labor as it is organized under capitalism.⁵³ Federici and Austin, Salario, 48.

This critique of the work of social reproduction is completely obliterated in the “political strategy of a return to subsistence,” and is replaced, de facto, by a sort of revaluation of social reproduction labor and an inevitable romanticization of the women who do it.⁵⁴ Federici warns about the danger of romanticizing women as “givers of life” or “caretakers of the commons” (that would mean a regression to reactionary views on women and their role in society).  But she doesn’t establish any relationship between this romanticization and the theoretical foundations of her own perspective. In its place she calls for keeping in mind that the forms of the reproduction of life that are opposed to commodification are a political construction and must be done consciously. The spirit of rejection of domestic work that emanated from the Campaign, is diluted here, and the claim of a social salary appears as the enabling condition for this work to be guaranteed by women in the neighborhoods or communities. Based on this public policy that guarantees social reproductive work done by women, the commitment to constructing “the commons” is what would make the difference between current (alienated) modes in which women carry out this work and the “alternative” modes in which it could be carried out.

This raises the second problem: what does the commitment to “the commons” mean? The question does not refer to the capacity of women (and also men and other gender options) to build social bonds better than the competitive individualism promoted by capitalism. This is without doubt: the history of class struggle is full of beautiful (and painful) examples of that capacity. Instead, I am questioning the overall hypothesis implied by the bet on “the commons.” Is it a bet that a sector of the population will subsist under “other rules,” while the rest of humanity reproduces itself under the rules of capitalism and according to the logic of value production—a sort of economy completely dualized between a market economy and a subsistence economy? Is it a bet that thousands of micro-subsistence economies (urban and rural) will spread in such a way that the working men and women will recover the means of life which were expropriated and will not, therefore, need to sell their labor power in order to live?