[The crisis that Federici identified in the 1970s has reached a
boiling point.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

SILVIA FEDERICI SEES YOUR UNPAID WORK  
[[link removed]]


 

Joanna Biggs
February 11, 2022
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The crisis that Federici identified in the 1970s has reached a
boiling point. _

,

 

Patriarchy of the Wage Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism
Silvia Federici
PM Press
ISBN-13: 9781629637990

It used to puzzle me that so many feminist books deal in literary
criticism. Mary Wollstonecraft takes on Rousseau, Simone de Beauvoir
attacks D.H. Lawrence, Shulamith Firestone spends several pages on a
story by Herbert Gold, and Kate Millett pulls apart, well, everybody.
Freud is a target, for blaming everything on women, as is Marx, for
forgetting them. Couldn’t arguments for women’s liberation be
mounted in themselves? Why perform the work of dissection when you
could be proposing some more irresistible vision of the world?

When Silvia Federici came to the United States from Italy on a
Fulbright scholarship in 1967, she was much more interested in what
she could do than in how she could argue. In her research, she came
across the work of Selma James, who had proposed a simple but
startling idea
[[link removed]]
at the third National Women’s Liberation Conference in Manchester,
England: that women be paid for housework. “I was really
inspired,” Federici remembers
[[link removed]], and on a trip home to
see family in 1972, she went to Padua to visit Mariarosa Dalla Costa,
who had recently written a paper with James. The International
Feminist Collective was formed at that meeting: They would mount a
campaign to ask governments for wages for housework.

Federici helped set up the New York branch of the campaign (their
first public action was to hand out flyers saying “No More Work for
Free” in Prospect Park on May Day 1974) and wrote a pamphlet titled
“Wages Against Housework.” Her version of the argument was subtle
but boldly expressed: “We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers
in struggle.” The work that goes on in the home—the cooking, the
cleaning, the childcare, the elder care, the gardening, the shopping,
the fixing, fetching, wiping, and carrying—wasn’t seen as work,
but as something women did for love. This made it hard to refuse, or
to share; it made what women did difficult to value, and even to see.
But if a price was put on that work, wouldn’t that be the first step
to changing it? And if we recognized that the work wasn’t in fact
love, well, then “we might rediscover what is love.”

 
Although Federici speaks of capital and labor, class and wages, she
doesn’t mention Marx by name in that first pamphlet, which has
become a touchstone for feminists since the crash of 2008 and the
Occupy movement. When she disentangled love from work, she laid the
groundwork for arguments, recently mounted
[[link removed]] by Melissa
Gira Grant and Juno Mac and Molly Smith, to recognize sex work as
work. When she suggested care work was worth payment, she staked a
claim for the type of collective care that abolition feminists such as
Mariame Kaba hope
[[link removed]]
will replace the carceral system. The coronavirus lockdowns also
brought about a small revival of Federici’s ideas, as the work done
by day-care centers, schools, and care homes as well as (in the homes
of the upper middle class) cleaners and nannies fell back onto the
family, and the simmering care crisis that Federici had identified in
the 1970s reached a boiling point
[[link removed]].
Over the last decade or so, PM Press has been reissuing 50 years of
Federici’s work—collecting her housework writings in _Revolution
at Point Zero
[[link removed]]_ in
2012 and updating the idea in a new volume, _Patriarchy of the Wage
[[link removed]]_.
Beyond the thrilling provocation of wages for housework, Federici has
been addressing one of the most irritating gaps in Marx for feminists:
the fact that he didn’t seem to notice women’s unpaid work,
limiting his comments on it to footnotes. She uses Marx’s analysis
of the relation between the worker and the boss in _Capital_ and
the _Grundrisse_ to supply the gap, and leaves us with ideas that
challenge the way things are, even in a world heating up and breaking
down.

Born in Parma, Italy, in 1942, Federici grew up in a household not
dissimilar to millions of others across the West. Her father went out
to work—he was a professor of philosophy—and her mother stayed
home. In a preface to _Revolution at Point Zero_, Federici remembers
her mother “making bread, pasta, tomato sauce, pies, and liqueurs,
and then knitting, sewing, mending, embroidering, and attending to her
plants,” and realizes belatedly how painful it was for her mother to
be “so often taken for granted,” dependent on Federici’s father
“for every penny she spent.”
During her graduate studies in the early 1970s, Federici encountered a
pamphlet by Mariarosa Dalla Costa that marked the start of her life as
an active feminist. In “Women and the Subversion of the Community
[[link removed]],” Dalla Costa
argued that “women must completely discover their own
possibilities—which are neither mending socks nor becoming captains
of ocean-going ships.” Dalla Costa wanted a route to women’s
liberation that didn’t look just like men’s. By the time Federici
had reached the last page, she writes, “I had found my home, my
tribe and my own self.” When Federici got in touch with Dalla Costa,
she was just in time to contribute to the Wages for Housework
campaign. She began organizing the New York committee with Nicole Cox
in 1973, and it was her pamphlet “Wages Against Housework” that
would become the most accessible and enduring formulation of the idea
behind getting paid for doing dishes.

The campaign sparked furious exchanges in the left-wing journals of
the time, and was misunderstood by everyone from liberal feminists to
Marxists themselves. Some thought that women were just greedy: They
were happy as they were, but wanted more money. Others thought that an
idea dreamed up in Italy couldn’t hold in the United States, where
more women worked outside the home. (In the 1980s, Angela Davis would
suggest
[[link removed]]
that more women joining the traditional workforce, and fighting for
robust social services from that position, was a better way of
tackling the problem.) Still more thought the love shown in the work
of making a home was one of the few activities capitalism hadn’t
tainted and should stand inviolate. And should the government pay for
these wages? Why not businesses? Why not husbands? The New York wing
of the Wages for Housework movement organized marches and teach-ins at
laundromats and supermarkets. They held table-top sales where you
could buy Wages for Housework pot holders. But Federici’s
“militant” phase, as she has called it, ended in 1977 when the
chapter crumbled.

Then came the arguing: Federici wanted to look back to the beginnings
of capitalism in order to trace the ways women were exploited,
excluded, and mystified out of economic power. In her efforts to
understand these processes, Federici turned to literature,
specifically the story from _The Tempest
[[link removed]]_ of
Caliban, the island native, and Sycorax, his mother, who had been
exiled from Algiers for her witch’s ability to control the moon.
Sycorax taught her son to appreciate and channel the power of the land
and its waters. As queen, she raised him as the rightful heir to the
isle that is, as Caliban tells two drunken courtiers who wash up on
its shores, “full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give
delight and hurt not.” When Prospero arrives on the island, he
seizes power, enslaving Caliban and abolishing his mother’s customs.
In the transition from their government to his, Federici saw an
analogy for how patriarchy established a stranglehold over society.

In her 2004 book, _Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and
Primitive Accumulation
[[link removed]]_,
she looks through the archives for real-life versions of Sycorax and
Caliban, beginning in the Middle Ages. Federici tells us of Gostanza,
a widow who was tried as a witch in San Miniato, Tuscany, in 1594. She
lived in an all-female household—with a niece and two other
widows—and worked as a healer, receiving people in her home but also
traveling “to ‘mark’ an animal, visit a sick person, help people
carry out a revenge.” She used oils, but also “devices apt to cure
and protect by ‘sympathy’ or ‘contact.’” As Federici notes,
she was “very popular, everyone would go to her to be cured, to have
his or her fortune told, to find missing objects or to buy love
potions.” Like Sycorax, she was punished for seeming to have too
much power. Federici also writes of a number of young English settlers
in seventeenth-century Virginia, who were executed for living among
Native tribes. They had formed an alliance against the colonists,
which Federici sees as similar to the alliance Caliban forms with the
drunken courtiers against Prospero.

Federici even suggests you can glimpse what a Sycorax-ruled island
might have looked like by examining the way women worked under
feudalism. Female serfs worked the fields as well as cooking,
spinning, and keeping an herb garden at home, drawing no great
division between work done inside and outside. And as women washed,
harvested, and tended animals collectively, their work became a source
of “intense female sociality and solidarity” that allowed them
“to stand up to men.”

In Federici’s reading, witch hunts were a way of limiting female
freedom, and pushing women back into the home. Witches didn’t fly on
broomsticks; they earned their own living, slept with whom they wanted
to, and cared for the vulnerable. It took several hundred years of
terror, persecution, and torture to stop women living independently
and cooperatively, and even then the efforts didn’t fully succeed.
Ever harsher penalties for infanticide, contraception, abortion, and
midwifery, up to execution, were needed to make it clear that
women’s allotted (and safest) role in society was to bear and rear
children.

_Caliban and the Witch_ was published by Autonomedia, a tiny left
radical press run as a collective, but has grown in influence and was
republished as a Penguin Modern Classic last year. It’s an
attractive argument in much the same way that Wages for Housework is:
It takes an aspect of women’s lived history and re-situates it as a
source of power. A single woman living in a city apartment building
might feel less lonely if she saw herself as part of a tradition of
resistance to capitalism that began in the sixteenth century, just as
a frustrated housewife in Brooklyn 50 years ago could find a movement
in which her work was finally valued.

After a long period of neglect, Federici’s ideas were in circulation
again, and her next book, _Revolution at Point Zero_, reprinted and
repopularized her writings about housework, care, and social
reproduction. By the 2010s, a whole generation had come of age
expecting to build careers outside the home, largely thanks to the
advances of the 1970s. But they hadn’t been able to shed their work
inside it. As Arlie Russell Hochschild identified as early as 1989 in
her book _The Second Shift_, many women were working a second job
when their nine-to-five was over: doing the full-time work of taking
care of their homes and families in the evenings and early mornings,
on top of their paid work. Housework hadn’t gone away: In many ways,
it had become even more important.

The essays in this new volume, _Patriarchy of the Wage_, written from
1975 to 2020, return to the premise of Wages for Housework and see
what it can offer feminism today. Federici goes right back to her
first pamphlet, and tries to explain again why she uses wages to show
the value of housework. A wage is more than a sum of money every
month; it’s a way of appeasing the worker just enough so that the
boss can keep the profit. One of Marx’s biggest questions is, what
does waged labor hide? Wages hide things like the coal miners’
commute George Orwell describes in _The Road to Wigan Pier
[[link removed]]_:
To get to the coalface takes at least an hour a day, half-bent in the
dust-black air, and isn’t paid. The miner’s work starts, as far as
his employer is concerned, when he is stood in front of the glittering
black wall of coal with his pick. That hidden hellish commute, and all
the other things a worker does in order to be ready to claim his
wages, are part of what eventually become the boss’s profit.
What else do wages hide? Federici notices that a father’s wages hide
a mother’s work. The mid-century ideal was the “family wage”
with its expectation that a male breadwinner should earn enough to
keep a wife and children, who are concealed from capital. What would
happen, Federici asks, if you didn’t hide that work? In asking the
government for a paycheck, as well as for more social services and
free social services, Federici and her peers were asking society at
large to see them, to recognize their work, to negotiate. They were
questioning what wages are for, who they reward, and how they operate.
As you ask these questions, you find that all wages start to look
strange, the premise they’re based on arbitrary and confusing.

“_The struggle for the wage is at the same time a struggle against
the wage_, for the power it expresses and against the capitalist
relation it embodies,” Federici writes in the opening essay to this
volume, a 1975 piece titled “Counterplanning From the Kitchen.”
When people who are not paid for their work start asking for pay,
they’re often told there simply isn’t enough money to meet their
demands. What becomes clear is that neither private businesses nor
public entities can afford to pay for all the unpaid work done in
society. If the system operated logically, it could not stand. The
demand for a wage reveals, too, that no one’s wages are adequate for
the work they do, that no one’s life should be sacrificed to work.
“_We have always belonged to capital every moment of our lives_,”
Federici writes in italics, “_and it is time that we make capital
pay for every moment of it_.”

Whereas early essays such as “Wages Against Housework” and
“Counterplanning From the Kitchen” were combatively purposeful,
later ones collected in _Patriarchy of the Wage_ are measured,
almost dry, in tone. With their footnote-deep intimacy
with _Capital_ and the _Grundrisse_, they not only borrow from Marx
but constantly return to his silence on domestic work. There are
historical reasons Marx didn’t write about housework (not least
that, in the mid-nineteenth century, plenty of women and children
worked in factories, too), and there are political reasons (Marx had
to start somewhere), but it plays on Federici’s mind. Why wasn’t
Marx interested in the processes by which workers were born and
brought up? “Our work produces the most precious product on the
capitalist market: labor power,” Federici observes. Marx chose to
focus on industrial labor and thought that mankind should dominate the
earth. Federici tracks some of the ways Marx’s thought developed
later in life, and wonders if, in time, he “may have also understood
the importance of feminism, which he often dismissed as a struggle for
bourgeois rights.”

I sometimes wondered why Federici seemed so disappointed in Marx for
being, though a genius, a nineteenth-century man who was married but
slept with his housekeeper. Federici’s inquiries lead her to the
limits of Marx’s thought, and those limits in turn become a spur to
her own ideas. Marx, for instance, wanted mechanization and other
efficiencies to free the worker for afternoons fishing at the lake and
evenings debating at dinner, but Federici counters that the work
she’s interested in cannot always be done by machines. “How can we
mechanize washing, cuddling, consoling, dressing and feeding a child,
providing sexual services, or assisting those who are ill and the
elderly and not self-sufficient?”
It is not as if we haven’t tried mechanizing care. During the
pandemic, when care workers couldn’t run dining clubs for older
adults, New York State’s Office for the Aging gave robot cats and
dogs to their charges. Although the owners often forgot their pets
were electronic, their loneliness persisted
[[link removed]]:
Katie Engelhart wrote in _The New Yorker_ of the way an interviewee
would keep her on Zoom at the end of their conversation, asking her
questions about the weather where she was.

Instead of lovebots, nursebots, and electric cats, Federici points to
the potential of experiments in collective childcare; to efforts to
expand the nuclear family, such as alloparenting, in which friends and
neighbors share the work of running a household; and to the creation
of “reproductive commons,” which can be seen in fisheries in Maine
where lobster fishers have agreed on rules to protect breeding waters
at informal, local, state, and federal levels and thereby made their
fisheries some of the most sustainable in the world. One of
Federici’s examples of commoning is the establishment of
collectively run urban gardens across the United States, which have
become, over time, “places where people come together not just to
work the land, but to play cards, hold weddings, have baby showers or
birthday parties.” You can walk past the edge of Marx’s thought
and into a tomato patch, where the vines are for everybody. Commoning
doesn’t have to be utopian and out of reach: Federici most often
detects it in grassroots responses to injustice. From Cambodia to
Senegal, women set up “money commons,” where they gave small loans
on trust, in response to the shaming tactics of the World Bank; when
inflation was out of control during the 1980s in Chile, and households
couldn’t afford to shop and cook singly, they turned to communal
kitchens.

Wollstonecraft, De Beauvoir, Firestone, Millett, and Federici—all
used arguments with their intellectual fathers to work out what they
didn’t want their worlds to look like. But as much as feminism was
sharpened through these literary-critical encounters, it has always
drawn strength from the life experience of its mothers. Federici sees
her own work renewing and revitalizing Marx as the making good of her
mother’s invisible work. “What often saves me when I cannot
protect myself,” she wrote in June 2011, “is my commitment to
protect her work and myself as the child to whom it was dedicated.”
It is this that makes emotional labor, care work, social reproduction,
whatever you like to call it, different from other work. It is an
investment in a person for its own sake, a debt that can be considered
paid not at clocking-off but on returning the investment in the same
spirit. It is our first recognition that we must rely on one another
to get through life, and our first intimation of how the relying and
the getting through might be done.  

_This article appeared in the March 2022 print edition
[[link removed]] with the headline “All Work and
No Pay.”__ _
 

Joanna Biggs is a senior editor at _Harper’s_ magazine and the
author of _All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work._

* women and work
[[link removed]]
* Feminism
[[link removed]]
* wages
[[link removed]]
* housework
[[link removed]]
* CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]