Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital [1981] Verso, 2025. Pbk £19.99, ebook £10.
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This new translation of Leopoldina Fortunati’s L’arcano della riproduzione (Marsilio, Venice, 1981), by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono, is especially welcome: it includes the original introduction, which was omitted from The Arcane of Reproduction (Autonomia, Brooklyn, 1995), a brief foreword from Silvia Federici, and a substantial new essay from Fortunati herself. The translation reads well. On a few occasions I took issue with it, and in direct quotations I use underlining to show where this occurs. It is a significant text, and one that is full of surprises.
You may like to know, for further reference, that the key works that Fortunati says that she draws deeply upon (p. 9) are all freely available online - Quaderni di Lotta Femminista 1, L’Offensiva and 2, Il personale è politico (1972, 1973), Brutto Ciao (1976), and Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, Un lavoro d’amore (1978) from the Biblioteche Civiche Padova (as is Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, Il grande Calibano. Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale, Milano, Franco Angeli 1984); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community from libcom.org; and Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox, Counter-planning from the Kitchen (Falling Wall Press, Bristol, 1975) (and much more besides) from the caring labor archive.
In retrospect, the most striking feature of L’arcano della riproduzione is its early identification of the falling rate of fertility, and its extended exploration of its significance. Five years earlier, the preface to Brutto Ciao (Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati, Edizione delle donne, Rome, 1976), written in the main at least by Dalla Costa, had described the ‘precipitous fall’ (an exaggeration, but still) in the rate of fertility in the advanced capitalist countries as a ‘refusal to procreate’ that signified a drastic reduction in the production of labour power, and would lead to a restructuring of the international division of this form of labour: ‘The capital that in the “advanced” countries is no longer able to command from women an “optimal” rate of fertility, in other words a sufficient reproduction of labour power, will have to shift the direction of its command towards women with less power, that is towards the women of the so-called Third World’ (p. 8, my translation). Two essays followed. In Riproduzione e emigrazione Dalla Costa argued that to the extent that the refusal to procreate was a moment in ‘a trajectory of struggle that has redefined relationships within the [working] class, between men and women, between the place of non-wage labour and the place of wage labour, the use of emigration is the state’s counteroffensive against women’s refusal to procreate’ (p. 19). She had in mind mostly outmigration (south to north, country to town) in Italy itself. In La famiglia: verso la ricostruzione, to which I will return, Fortunati analysed the involvement of women in social struggles in Italy during and after the Second World War, their emergence as a ‘fundamental political subject’, and the changes this brought to gender relations within the family.
The ‘refusal to procreate’ and the broader rejection by women of domestic and social roles related to reproduction forms the central thread in L’arcano della riproduzione. Fortunati claims that the ‘explosion of a feminist movement, which emerged from the crises of the 1970s, inspired in thousands of women from the Western metropoles to the Global South a great awareness that, through the increasingly massive organisation of their struggles against reproductive work ranging from domestic work to prostitution, they were inflicting fatal blows to the production of surplus value and to the process of capitalist accumulation’ (2). The essence of her argument is that this represented a huge and potentially fatal challenge to capital, which requires women to be primarily dedicated to procreation and domestic work. The early identification of the falling rate of fertility that accompanies women’s greater involvement in wage labour is noteworthy, and the manner in which Fortunati explores it is original and ambitious. But her approach is fundamentally wrong, and it remains a prodigious source of error. She takes the relationship between women and capital as her point of departure, giving analytical priority over the commodity and the (male) wage to the production and reproduction of labour power through unpaid (female) domestic labour. In doing so she tests to destruction the ideas that the logic of reproduction drives the logic of production, and that the role of women in the reproduction of labour power can ground a theory of capitalist accumulation; and her new essay steps back from these and other related claims. So it is important to see what her original argument was, and where it went wrong.
At the outset, Fortunati sets out her purpose as follows:
‘This essay is an attempt to systematise, on the theoretical plane, the analysis of the process of reproduction (domestic work and prostitution specifically) with respect to Marxian categories and beyond them.1 In relation to the Marxian categories, this essay deals with the analysis of relations of production between women and capital, and the many institutional, economic and political aspects this relationship implies, situating it within the marxist corpus. It also extends beyond the Marxian categories - since we must assume that Marx’s methodology can extend beyond his own work in the analysis of reproduction, a problem that he touched upon only briefly at various points. The analysis goes against Marx, when his partial vision of the capitalist cycle of accumulation leads to errors’ (1).
And footnote 1 reads:
‘In this essay, by “reproduction” we mean that part of the capitalist accumulation process concerning the production and reproduction of individuals as the commodity labour power. That is, the process of production and reproduction of the workforce is primarily undertaken by the houseworker, in the family and in the process of sexual reproduction of male labour power that takes place in prostitution. These two processes coalesce as the nerve centre of the process of reproduction itself. Unless otherwise specified, “production” here indicates that part of the capitalist accumulation cycle that concerns the production of other commodities’ (1).
She then proceeds to the principal conjunctural thesis that underpins her analysis:
‘[The] explosion of a feminist movement, which emerged from the crises of the 1970s, inspired in thousands of women from the Western metropoles to the so-called Third World [Austin and Colantuono have ‘Global South’, which is an anachronistic rendering of nel cosiddetto terzo mondo] a great awareness that, through the increasingly massive organisation of their struggles against reproductive work ranging from domestic work to prostitution, they were inflicting fatal blows to the production of surplus value and to the process of capitalist accumulation. The 1970s were a decade of struggles that - like a powerful earthquake - reshaped even the landscape of reproduction, disrupting every state policy in this regard. In response to [di contro a, not well translated as ‘in contrast to’] this explosion, international capital, aware of the centrality of reproductive labour in the process of valorisation, but also of the formidable struggles that now arose against this work, has taken up the Leninist strategy of pushing for a second job for women’ (2-3; cf. 170-71).
This is problematic. The feminist movement did not inflict ‘fatal blows’ on either the production of surplus value or the process of capitalist accumulation - Fortunati produces no evidence to support the claim, and would have been hard pressed to do so. And the idea that ‘international capital’ recognised such a mortal threat but accepted defeat in advance and opted to make the best of it by offering women work is fantasy, and is underpinned by a blatantly contradictory argument. Fortunati first celebrates female agency: ‘It was now capital itself that increasingly acknowledged, in the US and Europe, women’s demand for extra-domestic work to such an extent that it forcefully pushed the supply of female labour power into the extra-domestic market’, with the aim of ‘the intensification of the exploitation of women, a social subject who, in the reproductive sphere, had learned to become more and more undisciplined and unmanageable’. But she then turns this logic on its head, re-presenting what seconds ago was an autonomous demand for wage labour as a forced choice born of necessity: ‘They could only be blackmailed by the need for income, lacking money of their own from the work of reproduction’: ‘Having struggled to free themselves from a large share of domestic work while demanding higher and higher quotas of the male wage, women were forced by the crisis to switch increasingly to extra-domestic work. From the second job as a demand - for liberation from domestic work - it has become an obligation, a lengthening of women’s working day and an intensification of its rhythms’ (3).
This is not to be seen as an early contribution to social reproduction theory, but a revolutionary radical feminist manifesto; and there is an unresolved tension throughout between maximalist and even utopian political demands on the one hand, and recognition on the other that the theoretical work needed to ground such demands remains to be done. ‘We are not interested,’ Fortunati says, ‘in becoming liberated from domestic work only in order to assimilate ourselves to the exploitation of the waged worker. Nor are we interested in emancipating ourselves by changing the type of exploitation to which we are subject. Such an approach minimises what women can achieve: wealth, liberation from both factory and housework, as well as social services’ (3-4). There is no intention to socialise sexuality or to call for ‘a totally socialised reproduction of labour power’, as this would entail ‘the seizure by the state of all aspects of life, including compulsory factory work for every woman, and preschool and edu-factory for every child from birth. This is the opposite of what we aim for’ (4). The objective, rather, is ‘the rupture of capital’s domination over us, and therefore over the class as a whole’ (emphasis mine): ‘the feminist struggle emerges as a fundamental struggle of the working class for its potential and proven ability to undermine the mechanisms of surplus value extraction’ (5). This leads in turn to a demand that connects with the ‘wages for housework’ movement: ‘Without money in the hands of women, it is not possible for women and the whole class to exercise command over the process of reproduction. … We want enough money, and therefore wealth, to stop working, to reproduce ourselves as free individuals, and to be free from the chain of capitalist exploitation’ (7, emphasis mine). Fortunati argues that the theoretical work necessary to ground these revolutionary goals remains to be done, and that is the task she will take on here. The analyses and reflections of the feminist movement on the production and reproduction of the commodity labour power, she suggests, have ‘used Marx only in an empirical and fragmentary fashion’, but have not yet built ‘an organic and systematic analysis of reproduction using Marxist categories’, and this has left ‘many unresolved contradictions with respect to the Marxian corpus and the political projects of the left, without offering a solution’ (7):
‘For example, we asserted that housework and prostitution were productive work without demonstrating it theoretically, even if, in practice, the struggles in these sectors shook the capitalist cycle with such a virulence that this fact alone should have sufficed to disprove those who argued otherwise. The theoretical demonstration of this discourse is nevertheless necessary because we applied the Marxian analysis of productive work to labour (housework and prostitution) that, according to Marxian categories, cannot strictly be considered as such. In fact, such work did not, apparently, conform to the necessary criteria, since it was not directly waged, it was performed outside a work structure organised according to capitalist canons, it was determined in a way that did not involve the development of either cooperation or the division of labour, and it was organised in such a way as to imply a very limited technology (to the point that there has been much confused talk of the “underdevelopment” of the house as compared to the factory). These unresolved contradictions not only carried weight in the debate that we had managed to open within the male left, but also continually removed the possibility of shifting from an empirical analysis to a political theory of our working relationships and therefore of our living conditions’ (7-8).
This made it essential ‘to collect, organise and attempt to systematise organically all the observations, considerations and indications that women through these years of organisation and struggle had expressed regarding the function of reproduction, and to revisit the Marxian theoretical corpus in the light of the feminist experience’ (8). Fortunati identifies two results, which can be taken as summarising the theoretical and empirical claims of the text that follows:
‘The first is that the characteristics of reproduction, which seemed to mark it as irremediably irrelevant with respect to an analysis based on the Marxian corpus, have instead found their place, explanation and raison d’être within this feminist examination of Marxism. Second, it has allowed us to tackle with newfound insights many issues related to the problem of reproduction, such as the family, the relationship between technology and domestic work, the female labour market, the functions of the state with respect to reproduction, the domestic work cycle, the history of struggle over the working day and the shift from the production of absolute surplus value to that of relative surplus value’ (8).
The Arcana of Reproduction should be recognised, then, as an ambitious work of feminist Marxist theory, arising out of but not restricted to the specific context in which it emerged.
The first chapter begins with a focus on two outcomes of the transition from the pre-capitalist to the capitalist mode of production: the shift in economic purpose from the reproduction of the individual through the production of use values to ‘the production of exchange values, the creation of value’, and the consequence that ‘reproduction is separated from production’ (13-14). From there, it goes on to argue that the cycles of production and reproduction are presented as realms of value and non-value respectively, with the result that the fact that the commodity labour power is produced in the reproductive cycle is obscured. Crucially, the two cycle operate in terms of their own laws, and therein lies the secret at the heart of reproduction:
‘In production, work is paid and performed in the factory, the quintessential capitalist structure. Its organisation specifically involves developing cooperation and the division of labour, as well as high levels of technological advancement. In reproduction, work is not paid; it is carried out in the house, a structure organised in a fashion opposed to that of the factory. Its organisation requires neither the development of cooperation nor the division of labour, and it demands only limited technological development. In other words, reproduction is governed by laws that are very different, if not opposed to, those that govern production’ (15; cf. 156).
Or again:
‘The capitalist mode of production operates formally on two different tracks with determinate laws governing the cycle of production, and different laws governing the cycle of reproduction, while on the level of the real, these two cycles share a single character. The fact that capital formally assumes a twofold nature is the very condition that allows it to work in a unified fashion, with a single logic, with a unified direction and purpose. Its twofold nature is the condition that allows capital to make use of both production and reproduction as two sides of the valorisation process: to exploit both the waged worker and the unwaged woman for the creation of value’ (18).
Not only that, but
‘To be precise, this double character [Austin and Colantuono translate duplicità here as duplicity] not only allows the capitalist mode of production to exist and function but allows it to function far more productively than previous modes of production. The capitalist mode of production is made more productive not only by lengthening the working day to the limit of human resistance in the production process, but also by framing reproduction as a natural form of production. With this operation, capital not only exploits two workers with only one salary, but also unloads onto labour power all the costs of reproduction’ (18; cf. 159).
Fortunati then goes on to substantiate the argument in a series of related propositions.
First, the separation between labour power as productive capacity and its reproductive capacity has a ‘sexual connotation’:
‘Productive capacity is developed primarily in male workers, and reproductive capacity primarily in female workers’ [lavoratrice, which Austin and Colantuono translate as ‘women working as houseworkers’]. On the one hand, in fact, the liberation of labour power implies that, for the male worker, the possession of productive capacity is accompanied by the expropriation of his labour power as a capacity of reproduction. In other words, masculine labour power is fundamentally alienated from the effective conditions of its own reproduction, its own labour power as a capacity of reproduction. On the other hand, the capitalist liberation of labour power implies that for the female worker [Austin and Colantuono omit per la lavoratrice, so the meaning is lost] their capacity for reproduction is accompanied by that of production, but with the compulsion to primarily sell the former, and the latter only subordinately. There is a precise difference between the destiny of the male worker and that of the woman. For the former, the possession of labour power involves his liberation understood here as liberation from the labour of self-reproduction. … For women, by contrast, possession of labour power as reproductive capacity does not imply their liberation from production work’ (23).
Second:
‘The woman, even when salaried, is obliged to exchange with the worker for two basic reasons: first, because the extremely low salary she receives at a mass level does not allow her to reproduce herself independently from men; second, because the possibility for the woman to reproduce herself is subordinate to the modalities of this exchange. For example, for a woman to have an romantic relationship with a man, she must be willing to do domestic work for him. … Not only the functioning of reproduction, but also that of the entire capitalist production process is much more complex than even Marx himself grasped’ (25).
Specifically, the primary commitment of half the potential workforce to the task of reproduction is the key, as it secures the day-to-day and generational renewal of labour power, while women retain a residual capacity for wage labour.
So, third:
‘The purchase of women's labour power, as productive capacity, is regulated by capital to ensure the primacy of the purchase by the ‘free’ male worker of female labour power as reproductive capacity - that is, so as not to hinder capital’s own simultaneous appropriation of the labour of reproduction. The subordination of the exchange between capital and women, when the latter is a female worker, to that between her and the male worker, is determined by capital precisely in order to oblige the woman, first and foremost, to exchange her labour power, as capacity of reproduction with variable capital corresponding to the value of male labor power, and not with her own variable capital even when such exists’ (26).
Fourth, then, ‘the obligation to work marches hand in hand with the obligation to marry’ (and to have children):
‘The liberation of labor power, therefore, implies that male and female workers, positioned as owners of their productive capacity, are formally free to sell it, as a commodity, to the capitalist, just as they are formally free to pose (sic) themselves as subjects of the exchange of reproductive labour and variable capital. Therefore, under capitalism, men and women as workers have won not only won the right to work freely but also to marry freely. Such freedom, however, applies only on a formal level; below the surface the obligation to work marches hand in hand with the obligation to marry (27; cf. marriage ‘cannot be a private contract, because the production of surplus value depends on it’, 89; and ‘the capitalist mode of production demands that every woman always and everywhere has a man and some children for whom to work. This is the motto of capital’, 91).
And fifth:
‘Among all these relations of production and their relative exchanges, that between the woman as houseworker and capital, mediated through the waged male worker - and its relative form of exchange - is fundamental. The production of future workers is, in fact, not only a moment internal to the reproduction of the male worker and the woman as houseworker, but also a subsequent process on which their reproduction depends. In other words, it is fundamental, because the births and raising of children constitute not only an integral part of the reproduction of the waged worker and the houseworker, but also an internal moment in their relationship and subsequently to its regulation. The dependence of procreation on reproduction does not mean that capital has not simultaneously tried to subordinate the reproduction of the male worker and the female houseworker to the production of the future generation of workers, so as to ensure the greatest possible increase in population’ (31-2, emphasis mine).
Alongside this, a subsidiary argument is developed through an analysis of prostitution as an important intrinsic feature of capitalist development:
‘In the family and prostitution, the fundamental production processes that generally occur are: the process of production and reproduction of labour power and the specifically sexual reproduction of male labour power’ (29). Prostitution, then, is
‘a corollary and particular process of reproduction. It is corollary, because it must function as a support and complement to domestic labour - filling in where domestic sexuality is lacking. … it is particular because it is a selective process both with respect to the sphere of operations of the reproductive work it provides, which is that related to sexual reproduction, and with respect to the specific form of labour power that it reproduces - primarily that of the male work force’ (30).
So there you have it. On the foundation of the initial proposition that the production of labour power takes place in the reproductive sector, Fortunati has erected a theoretical edifice which posits capital as called upon, on pain of its own extinction, to recognise and secure the primary commitment of women to reproductive work, to present it as ‘natural’, and to guarantee thereby that women will be obliged to offer themselves to men in marriage, and to breed in order to produce future workers. Put this together with the observation that women are moving into paid work in increasing numbers, marrying later, and looking to have fewer children or none at all, as Fortunati is among the first to recognise, throw her argument regarding the changed power dynamics in the family into the mix, and it follows that women’s social and political agency is creating a crisis that capital cannot overcome.
But ‘capital’ does not exist in the form that Fortunati’s argument requires - it exists only in the form of many individual capitals, in competition with each other and each seeking to expand. This state of affairs has some important tendencies - for example, for the total sum of capital to grow, for productivity to increase, and, importantly, as a result of those two features, for capital to invade other ‘more primitive’ areas of production. But it rules out the possibility that capital can be a unified and purposive actor, let alone one with the capacity, for example, to present women’s role in domestic labour as ‘natural’. Fortunati insists that capital must do this in its own interest without providing any notion of how it is or might be done. If individual capitals, in their own competitive interest, wish to recruit women into wage labour they do so if they can, without any concern for its impact on reproduction. A moment’s reflection will tell you that every individual capitalist would prefer women to be available for waged labour, and none has a preference for women to be confined or primarily committed to unpaid domestic work. It is true that as this practice becomes more widespread, in the context of other changes pushing in the same direction, fewer women will marry, women will give birth to a first child later if at all, and the overall rate of fertility will fall. But whether this will constitute a crisis for capital is open to doubt. Fortunati simply asserts it on the dubious grounds that the best of all possible worlds for capital is one in which half the available adult working class is committed in advance to solitary domestic work largely untouched by the division of labour or productivity-enhancing investment in the production process, or in other words that capital is most productive when it has the capacity to condemn half of the adult population to low-productivity activity.
So, to summarise the theoretical errors on which the text is founded:
First, reproduction does not operate in accordance with ‘its own laws’. Nor in fact does Fortunati actually think it does. She depicts it generally as varying in accordance with the dominant mode of production, and repeatedly in the case of capitalism as the ‘mirror image’ of production (though ‘obverse’ might have been better). Specifically, at the end of the first chapter:
‘In fact, two productive relationships take place, being both opposed to and mutually dependent on each other: the relationship of the worker with the objective conditions of productive work - a waged labour relationship; and the relationship of the worker with the objective conditions of reproductive work - an indirectly salaried relationship’ (27-8).
Second, as touched on above, ‘capital’ does not, cannot and needs not posit reproductive work (or anything else) as ‘natural’ or as ‘non-value’ (19), nor could it have ‘established the capacity of reproduction as a natural force of social labour’ (53). Least of all does it have ‘every interest in ensuring that all women, in their totality, are houseworkers’ (87). As Fortunati notes, it has no direct relationship to reproductive work. Individual capitals operating in the sphere of exchange are indifferent to the manner in which labour power is produced and renewed, so long as they get it as cheaply as possible, and if they think about it at all it is because they see reproductive work as a sphere of ‘primitive’ production that might advantageously be taken over for new sources of profit.
Third, the work of reproduction is not exclusively carried out by women, nor is it carried out exclusively in the family, as Fortunati of course recognises: ‘Besides the family and prostitution, reproduction in a capitalist society comprises other branches. These branches include domestic work that is salaried and performed for a wage for a family other than the worker’s own, the social reproduction of labour power established and organised by the state, and social services provided by private companies (or the state itself acting as entrepreneur)’. But she deliberately puts this aside, choosing to limit her analysis to ‘that part of the reproduction process that takes place in the family and in so-called prostitution, because they represent the backbone, the nerve centre of the overall reproduction process’ (29). As a result she deprives herself of the possibility of theorising reproduction as a whole, or grasping the changing relationship between its various elements.
Fourth, it is not a necessary or permanent feature of the capitalist mode of production that: ‘The man is subjected to the waged working relationship, which is the capitalist relationship par excellence, and he is formally positioned as the woman’s master. The woman has no formal relationship with capital, and she is positioned in a relationship of service to the man’ (44). Women and children were factory workers in early industrial capitalism; the male worker/female housewife dyad was always as much a staple of bourgeois ideology as a social reality; and it has rarely been a reality for working class families.
Fifth, it is not true that capital attempts ‘to subordinate the reproduction of the male worker and the female houseworker to the production of the future generation of workers, so as to ensure the greatest possible increase in population’ (32); nor is ‘having children posed as a necessity by capital’ (41), and how it could be is another mystery. Fortunati’s claim that ‘more and more women and couples are not having children because of the cost in terms of domestic work and money and because of the social isolation that having children entails’ (41; cf. 89) is an important early identification of a significant development, but it did not then and does not now pose the mortal threat to the capitalist mode of production that she suggests.
Sixth, whatever Fortunati means by the ‘sexual reproduction of male labour power’ and capital’s need for it, she knows perfectly well that it is not secured exclusively by sexual relations in heterosexual marriage or by prostitution, as her passing reference to the history of marriage as ‘strewn with adulterers of all genders’ (33) is enough to demonstrate; nor does the brief account (68-71) of how capital secures its alleged goals regarding prostitution carry any conviction. She drops this argument in her new essay, and you can see why, but it pays a significant structural role in her original account, and its logic is shattered without it.
So, seventh, despite the significance Fortunati attaches to the waged male worker-female housewife dyad and the complementary role of prostitution (see especially 43-71), she cannot establish that they are central and essential to the capitalist mode of production.
Eighth, individual sexual identity, to which she frequently returns, has no bearing on the capitalist mode of production. There is widespread ‘coercive pressure towards heterosexuality’ in many societies, and arguably in all, but there is no such coercive pressure in the capitalist mode of production per se, either as ‘an expression of its ideology or a form of social control and discipline’. Heterosexuality is not ‘the foundation of the capitalist organisation of individual relationships’ (39), nor is there any plausible logic to suggest that it could be. The ‘emergence of mass homosexuality and lesbianism in the last decade’ [the 1970s] was not ‘the expression of mass rebellion and rejection of the capitalist organisation of social relations’, nor had it or has it since ‘completely undermined the landscape of reproduction’ (39-40).
Rather than work through every chapter in the detail that would be required to illustrate the consequences of these propositions, I focus on just two: Chapter Four, ‘Housewives, Prostitutes and Workers: Their Exchanges’, and Chapter Eleven, ‘The Family as a Form of Capitalist Development’.
Chapter Four takes the male wage worker/female housewife dyad as its point of departure, and sees it as giving the ‘man/woman relationship’ a twofold nature: ‘on the one hand, it is an exchange between variable capital [the wage] and domestic labour; on the other it is an exchange between variable capital and prostitution’ (52). So, ‘capital appropriates the female houseworker’s or the sex worker’s labour time not through the mediation of the wage but indirectly through the exchange with the male worker’. But Fortunati immediately contradicts herself: ‘the fundamental exchange of reproduction is no longer merely that between woman and capital through the male worker, which is the one we are considering here, but it is articulated in many other forms (54, emphasis mine); women are more likely to be earning a wage while men perform some domestic labour, while ‘it is an established fact that the increase in male workers’ domestic labour does not compensate for the decline in female domestic labour due to the great momentum towards socialisation of such labour (we eat out more and more, we send our clothes to laundry services, etc.) and due to the increasingly persistent demand by women for either more money or more commodities from men for the labour they supply’ (57). Furthermore, when she returns to the ‘cycle of intense struggles’ since the Second World War, she notes the increasing prevalence of ‘the direct management of the male wage’ by the housewife, which ‘does not aim at guaranteeing the steady reproduction of the working class, but, on the contrary, at determining a reproduction of the class constantly opposed to capital’ (59). In the 1970s, she suggests, ’women’s mass achievement of their own wage … contributed to the development of their new agency, with full rights over their own consumption and even more control over the management of family wages’; and at the same time: ‘The 1970s began with a new phase of management of the proletarian wage, based on mass indebtedness. Credit cards and loans became instruments for exceeding the wage on the level of circulation’, with women ‘the battering ram that creates these breakthroughs’ (60).
In retrospect, it is clear that Fortunati had considerable insight into an emerging conjuncture that was quite different to anything that had gone before, its key features being changed gender relationships within the family and the household, the trend towards later marriage and fewer and later births, the greater frequency of separation or divorce, increased female participation in the waged labour market, increased consumption in the home of commercial products, and the development of credit and consumer debt. But having identified it, she doubled down on her rigid model of the male wage worker/female housewife dyad, stipulating again that it was central to capitalism and its prospects:
‘the exchange between woman and capital is mediated by the worker. Women’s labour power, under the guise of domestic labour, is sold by the housewife to the waged worker as a commodity. When the free woman worker meets the owner of money (in the form of the wage) on the market, they enter into relations with each other, but not on a footing of equality as owners of commodities, and not as equals in the eyes of the law. It follows that the inequality in the relation between man and woman is neither a dysfunction in the capitalist mode of production nor a legacy of some pre-capitalist barbarity. It is, instead, inherent and ingrained in the functioning of the capitalist mode of production. Equality of exploitation between man and woman cannot exist in a capitalist society precisely because such exploitation is based on power differences that are present within the class itself’ (61, emphasis mine).
So the ensuing discussion is based on the premise that capital ‘must compel the woman to present herself primarily as a houseworker because it is only in these terms that the exchange between domestic labour and variable capital and the exchange between capital and the labour of production become reciprocally essential’ (65). As we have seen, there is no reason to believe this - in fact, what Fortunati has produced looks more like a theory of patriarchy, masquerading as a theory of capital. In subsequent chapters she continues to explore the properties of a social world in which there is a rigid division of labour between men and women, secured by men on behalf of capital, in which men earn wages and women do ‘reproductive’ work (for representative statements, see for example 77, 87, 91, 103, 129-30). And because she has everything the wrong way round, she cannot see that the sources of the breakdown of this rigid patriarchal relationship might lie precisely in the dynamics of capitalist development itself.
Chapter Eleven turns from the wage worker/houseworker to ‘the productive nucleus in which the houseworker operates’, the family (173), and unfolds in the same way. ‘The purpose of the family, … cannot be, in capitalist society,’ Fortunati asserts, ‘the mere reproduction of the labour power of the paid worker and housewife. It must also entail the production of new labour power. That is, it cannot consist only in the reintegration … of existing labour power, but also the maximal production of additional labour power’ (193, emphasis mine). Next: ‘because the nuclear form of the household functions as a form of capitalist development it has become the general form of the capitalist family’ (emphasis original); and as ‘a unit, the centre of production and reproduction of labour power, the family is based on the worker’s possession of wages, the houseworker’s ownership of domestic labour power and the apparently free exchange between them’. In sum; ‘The relationship between man and woman and between parents and children is transformed from a relationship of exchange of labour with living labour by capital into a formal relationship of production established between parents: the man/husband/father and woman/wife/mother on the one hand, and their children on the other’ (194). But a particular condition is required for this to succeed:
‘The possession of wages by the worker is a decisive element for the establishment of the capitalist family. For capital, which requires a surrogate authority and command for the orderly functioning of the overall process of production and reproduction, the worker appears as the ideal solution. … Therefore, the command of capital over the domestic labour of the members of the same family is given only insofar as it passes through the mediation of the worker and is represented as the command of the worker over his wife and children. This command presides over the orderly carrying out of the labour process within the family. It constitutes the authority and power of planning which regulates the task allocation and cooperation involved in domestic work as it is distributed among the various members of the family’ (195-6).
But:
‘While in the factory, the worker is subject to the command and discipline of capital, in the family the wife and children are subject to the command and discipline of the wage earner. Or rather, they have traditionally been subjected to this discipline. In the current phase of capital, the subjection to the command of the husband/father is shaky at best … The worker-authority figure, in its command over wife and children, has been profoundly undermined, both by the struggles of women and young people within the family against this marital and paternal authority, as well as by the possession of wages by a growing segment of women’ (196-7).
And worse still:
‘It must be said … that the struggles of women and young people against domestic work and family discipline have also completely changed the structure of consumption within the family, especially since the end of the Second World War. If the adult male worker was previously not only the greatest consumer who worked the least (sic) but also the figure holding the power of decision over both the common and individual consumption of the members of his family, with the 1950s a new wind began to make demands on the wallet of the husband/father. As we have said, women have exerted enormous pressure within the family to broaden the sphere of consumption, especially on their children’s behalf rather than their own. Moreover, an obvious pressure is exerted by young people themselves, who are fighting furiously to become the decision makers of their own consumption process, as well as to broaden its sphere. These pressures have forced capital to discover them as important new agents of production. It is in this period that young people (even children) demand and achieve the agency to choose which clothes to buy, so that they often squander a salary of their own in frivolous spending, plundering a substantial pert of their fathers’ wages. They impose their wishes on the family: the scooter, the record player or, more recently, the cassette player and television set. In addition to the consistently high levels of domestic labour performed by mothers, it is evident how much of the paternal salary is used by them. This is a new generation, inexhaustible in its material and immaterial needs: such needs may be satisfied for many, but remain unmet for even more’ (199).
‘The restructuring of consumption,’ Fortunati then suggests, ‘sees the dethroning of the male waged worker as the privileged figure’ (199). The weapons in this struggle for a more equitable distribution of the family wage are ‘crying, tantrums, emotional blackmail, muzzling and enforced silences’, and in this context ‘it is easy to understand how the family can be a pit of vipers, a chasm of hatred and a factory of madness’ (200).
This startling argument is neither Marxist nor feminist, but it plays a central role in Fortunati’s analysis of the relationship between capital and the reproductive sector: the destruction of the capacity of the male waged worker as husband and father to command and control the family makes it dysfunctional for capital and undermines the processes of reproduction and production alike, with far-reaching consequences:
‘It is not necessarily true that the struggle against the family assumes the form only of a transformation from within. On the contrary, the tendency towards the concrete extinction of the family itself is becoming stronger and stronger. A large part of the proletariat no longer seeks their reproduction within families, preferring solitude or different reproductive arrangements to the “factory of chains” that is the family.There is a strange parallel here with the traditional factory, which is gradually becoming extinct. It is not too bold to say that we are moving towards a phase of the capitalist mode of production with neither factories nor families. The trends show a deep restructuring of the social productive body, which already has in nuce, separated much of production from these two structures, or anyway from the various standard forms each has taken, from the industrial revolution to the present day. if, on the one hand, the family is dying out as a reproductive centre, on the other hand, in the new forms in which the reproductive terrain is reconstructed, it also tends to incorporate within it processes of commodity production. The form is that of the cooperative, and the principle is that of self-management. At least, this is what capital is trying to organise as a response to proletarian struggles against both structures’ (201).
This reveals Fortunati’s core argument for what it is: that capitalism requires a reproductive sector based on heterosexual marriage, a male wage worker/female housewife-child bearer dyad and absolute patriarchal authority within the family, with this core structure supplemented by female prostitution. And in the middle of this discussion, the secret behind Fortunati’s theoretical failure becomes apparent, precisely in connection with her claim to have gone beyond Marx:
‘In the factory, “the co-operation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them,” such that “their unification into one single productive body, and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions, lies outside their competence”. As a consequence, “the interconnection between their various labours confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose” [quoting from Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Penguin/New Left Review, 1990, pp. 449-50]. The same happens in the family with respect to the cooperation of labour power as a capacity for reproduction that is indirectly waged. In the family, the worker is also a function of the plan, of the authority of capital that subjects the activity of all the workers of reproduction to its ends’ (197, emphasis mine).
This, then, is how Fortunati goes ‘beyond Marx’. She was wrong to do so. Marx was careful not to extend the logic of capital, or the driving forces internal to the capitalist mode of production, beyond the realm of capitalist competition and production itself in which they operated. Behind the idea of factory production as responding to a plan drawn up by the capitalist lay a material reality: the division of society into two classes and the pressure on workers to sell their labour power to the capitalist, the potential for the division of labour and the application of science and technology to make the labour process more productive, and the tendency for competition between individual capitalists to press them to seek to achieve greater productivity through these mechanisms in order to survive and accumulate. In the reproductive sector, or the family, these material factors do not operate, as Fortunati noted right at the beginning of the book (‘we applied the Marxian analysis of productive work to labour (housework and prostitution) that, according to Marxian categories, cannot strictly be considered as such. In fact, such work did not, apparently, conform to the necessary criteria, since it was not directly waged, it was performed outside a work structure organised according to capitalist canons, it was determined in a way that did not involve the development of either cooperation or the division of labour, and it was organised in such a way as to imply a very limited technology (to the point that there has been much confused talk of the “underdevelopment” of the house as compared to the factory)’, pp. 7-8, cited above). She was ill-advised to set these considerations aside, and more ill-advised still to adopt the expedient, in the absence of direct control by a capitalist, of making the wage earner represent capital in the family. Capital has neither the means nor the need to impose any specific mode of organisation on the family, so it makes no sense to talk of the worker as ‘the function of the plan, of the authority of capital’. In short, it was a fundamental error on Fortunati’s part to suppose that the reproductive sector must operate according to laws of its own, analogous to those of the capitalist mode of production, and just as fundamental an error to give them such rigid and specific form as she did. Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-social Family (Verso, 1982, reissued in paperback earlier this year) is incomparably better.
Curiously, her earlier essay, La famiglia: verso la riproduzione offered a quite different and far more convincing picture of the relationship between women’s struggles and capitalist development, concluding that while war-time and post-war confrontations placed women at the head of a broad alliance of the ‘non-waged’, challenged capital and the state on a number of fronts, and changed irreversibly the character of the family and the balance of power within it, they still reflected significant structural weaknesses, and contributed in the end to prompting a counter-offensive from capital that represented a crushing defeat for revolutionary aspirations:
‘The emergence … of women as a fundamental political subject, manifested in a direct confrontation with capital, created the objective conditions for other sections of the non-waged class to take up a political initiative of attack on the state. But the women’s strategy was heavily prejudiced by the “novelty’ of the experiment: the autonomy of the various non-waged strands was still too low, the front they had constructed was like a castle of sand, bound to fall apart if pounded, and the waged class, for its part, was circumspect in the construction of a common front, given the inevitable political weakness of the non-waged sectors of the class. So the recomposition of the class was founded on too weak a basis in so far as it rested still on the immediate solidarity in the struggle. It was a fundamental effort in the story of class struggle in Italy, and it was brutally defeated. The response of capital was to the point, and to be expected. It first acted to keep substantially separate the front of the waged from that of the non-waged, and then went on the offensive against the non-waged strata. The repression that followed cleared the non-waged from the field, leaving as its only interlocutor the male waged working class, which in the end was defeated. For sure, capital drove everyone back to their posts and in some way guaranteed itself the general willingness to work (laboriosità) of the class, succeeding to a certain extent in transforming the centrifugal force that had stemmed from the family into a centripetal retreat within the family itself. But a great endeavour had been undertaken and its defeat at this point did not signify the end of the road. On the contrary, that cycle of struggle had definitively exhausted the limits of those struggles and their strategy, imposing on the non-waged the need in the end to go down the road of autonomy, and showing women the strategic terrain of their struggle: the family. If in the 1950s the initiative was with capital, the class as a whole had already been given, albeit still in a rough and informal manner, the basic tools of revolutionary strategy: for the first time, the capital/non-waged relation underwent a definitive shift. Not only that, but the proletarian initiative with this cycle of struggle succeeded in conditioning in a very substantial way the initiative of capital, in the sense of accelerating it, increasing the speed of class reorganisation for capitalists in Italy and making US capital “stir itself”. The capitalist process underwent in those years an expansion forced by the political power of the class on the offensive, which imposed industrial reconstruction and the first crude rationalisations at highly accelerated rhythms, the deepening of the penetration of capital into the household and into agriculture, and [citing Romano Alquati and Piero Gasparotti, Lotte operaie in Italia negli ultimi vent’anni] the placing of the state at the centre of capitalist accumulation, which achieved its greatest leap since the 1930s’ (Brutto Ciao, 146-7, my own somewhat free translation).
This ‘dialectical’ analysis is much more consistent with a standard Marxist perspective that sees successful class struggles as provoking a response that raises productivity, the capital intensity of production, and the rate of extraction of relative surplus value in the capitalist sector, alongside accelerated penetration of capital into rural or household non-capitalist production. And while the essay that Fortunati has written to accompany the new translation by no means retracts the arguments of L’arcano (claiming for example that: ‘The most important thing for capital is that the highest number of wombs are put to work, capitalising on the ever-increasing impoverishment of women in general’, p. 261, and that : ‘Given that heterosexuality is precisely the sedimentation of the capitalist organisation of individual relationships, all forms of different sexual identities must be read, in some sense, as behaviours of rebellion and refusal against the capitalist organisation of individual relationships and the social order’, p. 273), it does step back in one particularly significant respect. First (in a passage that seems rather out of context):
‘The fact that the wage-housework exchange takes place between a man and a woman or between a woman and a woman or a man and a man, or persons of any gender, does not necessarily make any difference to capital. It is sufficient that the work of reproduction be carried out by someone, and that, in the morning at the factory, as in the office, as in public institutions, workers arrive, well washed, dressed and fed, able to work hard throughout the day’ (275).
Neither it does it matter if the workers in question live alone, and secure the reproduction of their labour power through their own efforts and through the market, as is increasingly the case (p. 283). And later, ‘the capitalist system structural cares only minimally whether men or women do the housework’ (286).
Along with the fact that whole argument regarding the significance of prostitution is dropped, this signals that Fortunati has largely called time on her attempt to theorise capital from the starting point of its relationship with women. Her continued insistence that the most important thing for capital is that ‘the highest number of wombs are put to work’ (261) is the exception, but first no mechanism is identified through which this could be achieved, and second, it seems not to be true. And in fact Fortunati herself questions it, noting later that women have opted for fewer babies, and for investing more in those they have: ‘providing them with more intensive care, and better nutrition, education and access to health care’ (266). This perfectly suits the needs of capital (See Paul Cammack, The Politics of Global Competitiveness, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 145-6, 162-3).
We are left, then, with the much stronger argument that ‘reproductive work’ is productive insofar as it produces the essential commodity labour power. With an important proviso, this is true. In the case of capitalist production, it reproduces the worker in that it restores the material capacity to work, but it does not deliver the worker to the capitalist so that surplus value can be extracted during the process of production. To see how this happens we must return to a fundamental aspect of capitalist discipline - the denial to the great majority of the means of survival outside wage labour. Without that discipline, the ‘worker’ whose vital energies are restored might fritter them away on the golf course, or lolling about watching TV.
With that proviso, we can say that where the capitalist mode of production is dominant, reproductive work produces the commodity labour power - and in fact this is common ground, and a tautology. Following the logic of capitalist production, we can add that competition between capitalists who aim to find sources of profit and to produce at the least cost tends to drive capital into reproductive work, draw women into wage labour, and as a consequence bring about changes in the ‘family’, the household, and the division of labour within it - all of which Fortunati describes in her contemporary essay.
In conclusion, I might add that it does not follow that because reproductive work is productive, it produces value. It is productive in that it renews a capacity for labour that might in turn be seized by capital as labour power, but it does not directly produce value.
Fortunati is aware of this argument, but begs to differ:
‘some feminist scholars continue to insist that the realm of reproduction does not generate value - that, if anything, it produces only a commodity (labour power) that is subsequently positioned as potentially generative of value in the moment of encounter between humans in their capacity as living labour and capital. Such a distinction, however, neglects the broader cycle of accumulation in which labour power must be continuously produced and reproduced, made available both in the waged labour relationship and held in reserve, in a devalued or unvalued form’ (270).
As the argument she counterposes addresses only the production of labour power, it says nothing about value, so the claim remains unsubstantiated.
In short, Fortunati tests to destruction the potential of a perspective grounded in a specific model of patriarchy to demonstrate that under capitalism reproduction shapes production. It doesn’t.
You may like to know, for further reference, that the key works that Fortunati says that she draws deeply upon (p. 9) are all freely available online - Quaderni di Lotta Femminista 1, L’Offensiva and 2, Il personale è politico (1972, 1973), Brutto Ciao (1976), and Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, Un lavoro d’amore (1978) from the Biblioteche Civiche Padova (as is Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, Il grande Calibano. Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale, Milano, Franco Angeli 1984); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community from libcom.org; and Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox, Counter-planning from the Kitchen (Falling Wall Press, Bristol, 1975) (and much more besides) from the caring labor archive.
In retrospect, the most striking feature of L’arcano della riproduzione is its early identification of the falling rate of fertility, and its extended exploration of its significance. Five years earlier, the preface to Brutto Ciao (Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati, Edizione delle donne, Rome, 1976), written in the main at least by Dalla Costa, had described the ‘precipitous fall’ (an exaggeration, but still) in the rate of fertility in the advanced capitalist countries as a ‘refusal to procreate’ that signified a drastic reduction in the production of labour power, and would lead to a restructuring of the international division of this form of labour: ‘The capital that in the “advanced” countries is no longer able to command from women an “optimal” rate of fertility, in other words a sufficient reproduction of labour power, will have to shift the direction of its command towards women with less power, that is towards the women of the so-called Third World’ (p. 8, my translation). Two essays followed. In Riproduzione e emigrazione Dalla Costa argued that to the extent that the refusal to procreate was a moment in ‘a trajectory of struggle that has redefined relationships within the [working] class, between men and women, between the place of non-wage labour and the place of wage labour, the use of emigration is the state’s counteroffensive against women’s refusal to procreate’ (p. 19). She had in mind mostly outmigration (south to north, country to town) in Italy itself. In La famiglia: verso la ricostruzione, to which I will return, Fortunati analysed the involvement of women in social struggles in Italy during and after the Second World War, their emergence as a ‘fundamental political subject’, and the changes this brought to gender relations within the family.
The ‘refusal to procreate’ and the broader rejection by women of domestic and social roles related to reproduction forms the central thread in L’arcano della riproduzione. Fortunati claims that the ‘explosion of a feminist movement, which emerged from the crises of the 1970s, inspired in thousands of women from the Western metropoles to the Global South a great awareness that, through the increasingly massive organisation of their struggles against reproductive work ranging from domestic work to prostitution, they were inflicting fatal blows to the production of surplus value and to the process of capitalist accumulation’ (2). The essence of her argument is that this represented a huge and potentially fatal challenge to capital, which requires women to be primarily dedicated to procreation and domestic work. The early identification of the falling rate of fertility that accompanies women’s greater involvement in wage labour is noteworthy, and the manner in which Fortunati explores it is original and ambitious. But her approach is fundamentally wrong, and it remains a prodigious source of error. She takes the relationship between women and capital as her point of departure, giving analytical priority over the commodity and the (male) wage to the production and reproduction of labour power through unpaid (female) domestic labour. In doing so she tests to destruction the ideas that the logic of reproduction drives the logic of production, and that the role of women in the reproduction of labour power can ground a theory of capitalist accumulation; and her new essay steps back from these and other related claims. So it is important to see what her original argument was, and where it went wrong.
At the outset, Fortunati sets out her purpose as follows:
‘This essay is an attempt to systematise, on the theoretical plane, the analysis of the process of reproduction (domestic work and prostitution specifically) with respect to Marxian categories and beyond them.1 In relation to the Marxian categories, this essay deals with the analysis of relations of production between women and capital, and the many institutional, economic and political aspects this relationship implies, situating it within the marxist corpus. It also extends beyond the Marxian categories - since we must assume that Marx’s methodology can extend beyond his own work in the analysis of reproduction, a problem that he touched upon only briefly at various points. The analysis goes against Marx, when his partial vision of the capitalist cycle of accumulation leads to errors’ (1).
And footnote 1 reads:
‘In this essay, by “reproduction” we mean that part of the capitalist accumulation process concerning the production and reproduction of individuals as the commodity labour power. That is, the process of production and reproduction of the workforce is primarily undertaken by the houseworker, in the family and in the process of sexual reproduction of male labour power that takes place in prostitution. These two processes coalesce as the nerve centre of the process of reproduction itself. Unless otherwise specified, “production” here indicates that part of the capitalist accumulation cycle that concerns the production of other commodities’ (1).
She then proceeds to the principal conjunctural thesis that underpins her analysis:
‘[The] explosion of a feminist movement, which emerged from the crises of the 1970s, inspired in thousands of women from the Western metropoles to the so-called Third World [Austin and Colantuono have ‘Global South’, which is an anachronistic rendering of nel cosiddetto terzo mondo] a great awareness that, through the increasingly massive organisation of their struggles against reproductive work ranging from domestic work to prostitution, they were inflicting fatal blows to the production of surplus value and to the process of capitalist accumulation. The 1970s were a decade of struggles that - like a powerful earthquake - reshaped even the landscape of reproduction, disrupting every state policy in this regard. In response to [di contro a, not well translated as ‘in contrast to’] this explosion, international capital, aware of the centrality of reproductive labour in the process of valorisation, but also of the formidable struggles that now arose against this work, has taken up the Leninist strategy of pushing for a second job for women’ (2-3; cf. 170-71).
This is problematic. The feminist movement did not inflict ‘fatal blows’ on either the production of surplus value or the process of capitalist accumulation - Fortunati produces no evidence to support the claim, and would have been hard pressed to do so. And the idea that ‘international capital’ recognised such a mortal threat but accepted defeat in advance and opted to make the best of it by offering women work is fantasy, and is underpinned by a blatantly contradictory argument. Fortunati first celebrates female agency: ‘It was now capital itself that increasingly acknowledged, in the US and Europe, women’s demand for extra-domestic work to such an extent that it forcefully pushed the supply of female labour power into the extra-domestic market’, with the aim of ‘the intensification of the exploitation of women, a social subject who, in the reproductive sphere, had learned to become more and more undisciplined and unmanageable’. But she then turns this logic on its head, re-presenting what seconds ago was an autonomous demand for wage labour as a forced choice born of necessity: ‘They could only be blackmailed by the need for income, lacking money of their own from the work of reproduction’: ‘Having struggled to free themselves from a large share of domestic work while demanding higher and higher quotas of the male wage, women were forced by the crisis to switch increasingly to extra-domestic work. From the second job as a demand - for liberation from domestic work - it has become an obligation, a lengthening of women’s working day and an intensification of its rhythms’ (3).
This is not to be seen as an early contribution to social reproduction theory, but a revolutionary radical feminist manifesto; and there is an unresolved tension throughout between maximalist and even utopian political demands on the one hand, and recognition on the other that the theoretical work needed to ground such demands remains to be done. ‘We are not interested,’ Fortunati says, ‘in becoming liberated from domestic work only in order to assimilate ourselves to the exploitation of the waged worker. Nor are we interested in emancipating ourselves by changing the type of exploitation to which we are subject. Such an approach minimises what women can achieve: wealth, liberation from both factory and housework, as well as social services’ (3-4). There is no intention to socialise sexuality or to call for ‘a totally socialised reproduction of labour power’, as this would entail ‘the seizure by the state of all aspects of life, including compulsory factory work for every woman, and preschool and edu-factory for every child from birth. This is the opposite of what we aim for’ (4). The objective, rather, is ‘the rupture of capital’s domination over us, and therefore over the class as a whole’ (emphasis mine): ‘the feminist struggle emerges as a fundamental struggle of the working class for its potential and proven ability to undermine the mechanisms of surplus value extraction’ (5). This leads in turn to a demand that connects with the ‘wages for housework’ movement: ‘Without money in the hands of women, it is not possible for women and the whole class to exercise command over the process of reproduction. … We want enough money, and therefore wealth, to stop working, to reproduce ourselves as free individuals, and to be free from the chain of capitalist exploitation’ (7, emphasis mine). Fortunati argues that the theoretical work necessary to ground these revolutionary goals remains to be done, and that is the task she will take on here. The analyses and reflections of the feminist movement on the production and reproduction of the commodity labour power, she suggests, have ‘used Marx only in an empirical and fragmentary fashion’, but have not yet built ‘an organic and systematic analysis of reproduction using Marxist categories’, and this has left ‘many unresolved contradictions with respect to the Marxian corpus and the political projects of the left, without offering a solution’ (7):
‘For example, we asserted that housework and prostitution were productive work without demonstrating it theoretically, even if, in practice, the struggles in these sectors shook the capitalist cycle with such a virulence that this fact alone should have sufficed to disprove those who argued otherwise. The theoretical demonstration of this discourse is nevertheless necessary because we applied the Marxian analysis of productive work to labour (housework and prostitution) that, according to Marxian categories, cannot strictly be considered as such. In fact, such work did not, apparently, conform to the necessary criteria, since it was not directly waged, it was performed outside a work structure organised according to capitalist canons, it was determined in a way that did not involve the development of either cooperation or the division of labour, and it was organised in such a way as to imply a very limited technology (to the point that there has been much confused talk of the “underdevelopment” of the house as compared to the factory). These unresolved contradictions not only carried weight in the debate that we had managed to open within the male left, but also continually removed the possibility of shifting from an empirical analysis to a political theory of our working relationships and therefore of our living conditions’ (7-8).
This made it essential ‘to collect, organise and attempt to systematise organically all the observations, considerations and indications that women through these years of organisation and struggle had expressed regarding the function of reproduction, and to revisit the Marxian theoretical corpus in the light of the feminist experience’ (8). Fortunati identifies two results, which can be taken as summarising the theoretical and empirical claims of the text that follows:
‘The first is that the characteristics of reproduction, which seemed to mark it as irremediably irrelevant with respect to an analysis based on the Marxian corpus, have instead found their place, explanation and raison d’être within this feminist examination of Marxism. Second, it has allowed us to tackle with newfound insights many issues related to the problem of reproduction, such as the family, the relationship between technology and domestic work, the female labour market, the functions of the state with respect to reproduction, the domestic work cycle, the history of struggle over the working day and the shift from the production of absolute surplus value to that of relative surplus value’ (8).
The Arcana of Reproduction should be recognised, then, as an ambitious work of feminist Marxist theory, arising out of but not restricted to the specific context in which it emerged.
The first chapter begins with a focus on two outcomes of the transition from the pre-capitalist to the capitalist mode of production: the shift in economic purpose from the reproduction of the individual through the production of use values to ‘the production of exchange values, the creation of value’, and the consequence that ‘reproduction is separated from production’ (13-14). From there, it goes on to argue that the cycles of production and reproduction are presented as realms of value and non-value respectively, with the result that the fact that the commodity labour power is produced in the reproductive cycle is obscured. Crucially, the two cycle operate in terms of their own laws, and therein lies the secret at the heart of reproduction:
‘In production, work is paid and performed in the factory, the quintessential capitalist structure. Its organisation specifically involves developing cooperation and the division of labour, as well as high levels of technological advancement. In reproduction, work is not paid; it is carried out in the house, a structure organised in a fashion opposed to that of the factory. Its organisation requires neither the development of cooperation nor the division of labour, and it demands only limited technological development. In other words, reproduction is governed by laws that are very different, if not opposed to, those that govern production’ (15; cf. 156).
Or again:
‘The capitalist mode of production operates formally on two different tracks with determinate laws governing the cycle of production, and different laws governing the cycle of reproduction, while on the level of the real, these two cycles share a single character. The fact that capital formally assumes a twofold nature is the very condition that allows it to work in a unified fashion, with a single logic, with a unified direction and purpose. Its twofold nature is the condition that allows capital to make use of both production and reproduction as two sides of the valorisation process: to exploit both the waged worker and the unwaged woman for the creation of value’ (18).
Not only that, but
‘To be precise, this double character [Austin and Colantuono translate duplicità here as duplicity] not only allows the capitalist mode of production to exist and function but allows it to function far more productively than previous modes of production. The capitalist mode of production is made more productive not only by lengthening the working day to the limit of human resistance in the production process, but also by framing reproduction as a natural form of production. With this operation, capital not only exploits two workers with only one salary, but also unloads onto labour power all the costs of reproduction’ (18; cf. 159).
Fortunati then goes on to substantiate the argument in a series of related propositions.
First, the separation between labour power as productive capacity and its reproductive capacity has a ‘sexual connotation’:
‘Productive capacity is developed primarily in male workers, and reproductive capacity primarily in female workers’ [lavoratrice, which Austin and Colantuono translate as ‘women working as houseworkers’]. On the one hand, in fact, the liberation of labour power implies that, for the male worker, the possession of productive capacity is accompanied by the expropriation of his labour power as a capacity of reproduction. In other words, masculine labour power is fundamentally alienated from the effective conditions of its own reproduction, its own labour power as a capacity of reproduction. On the other hand, the capitalist liberation of labour power implies that for the female worker [Austin and Colantuono omit per la lavoratrice, so the meaning is lost] their capacity for reproduction is accompanied by that of production, but with the compulsion to primarily sell the former, and the latter only subordinately. There is a precise difference between the destiny of the male worker and that of the woman. For the former, the possession of labour power involves his liberation understood here as liberation from the labour of self-reproduction. … For women, by contrast, possession of labour power as reproductive capacity does not imply their liberation from production work’ (23).
Second:
‘The woman, even when salaried, is obliged to exchange with the worker for two basic reasons: first, because the extremely low salary she receives at a mass level does not allow her to reproduce herself independently from men; second, because the possibility for the woman to reproduce herself is subordinate to the modalities of this exchange. For example, for a woman to have an romantic relationship with a man, she must be willing to do domestic work for him. … Not only the functioning of reproduction, but also that of the entire capitalist production process is much more complex than even Marx himself grasped’ (25).
Specifically, the primary commitment of half the potential workforce to the task of reproduction is the key, as it secures the day-to-day and generational renewal of labour power, while women retain a residual capacity for wage labour.
So, third:
‘The purchase of women's labour power, as productive capacity, is regulated by capital to ensure the primacy of the purchase by the ‘free’ male worker of female labour power as reproductive capacity - that is, so as not to hinder capital’s own simultaneous appropriation of the labour of reproduction. The subordination of the exchange between capital and women, when the latter is a female worker, to that between her and the male worker, is determined by capital precisely in order to oblige the woman, first and foremost, to exchange her labour power, as capacity of reproduction with variable capital corresponding to the value of male labor power, and not with her own variable capital even when such exists’ (26).
Fourth, then, ‘the obligation to work marches hand in hand with the obligation to marry’ (and to have children):
‘The liberation of labor power, therefore, implies that male and female workers, positioned as owners of their productive capacity, are formally free to sell it, as a commodity, to the capitalist, just as they are formally free to pose (sic) themselves as subjects of the exchange of reproductive labour and variable capital. Therefore, under capitalism, men and women as workers have won not only won the right to work freely but also to marry freely. Such freedom, however, applies only on a formal level; below the surface the obligation to work marches hand in hand with the obligation to marry (27; cf. marriage ‘cannot be a private contract, because the production of surplus value depends on it’, 89; and ‘the capitalist mode of production demands that every woman always and everywhere has a man and some children for whom to work. This is the motto of capital’, 91).
And fifth:
‘Among all these relations of production and their relative exchanges, that between the woman as houseworker and capital, mediated through the waged male worker - and its relative form of exchange - is fundamental. The production of future workers is, in fact, not only a moment internal to the reproduction of the male worker and the woman as houseworker, but also a subsequent process on which their reproduction depends. In other words, it is fundamental, because the births and raising of children constitute not only an integral part of the reproduction of the waged worker and the houseworker, but also an internal moment in their relationship and subsequently to its regulation. The dependence of procreation on reproduction does not mean that capital has not simultaneously tried to subordinate the reproduction of the male worker and the female houseworker to the production of the future generation of workers, so as to ensure the greatest possible increase in population’ (31-2, emphasis mine).
Alongside this, a subsidiary argument is developed through an analysis of prostitution as an important intrinsic feature of capitalist development:
‘In the family and prostitution, the fundamental production processes that generally occur are: the process of production and reproduction of labour power and the specifically sexual reproduction of male labour power’ (29). Prostitution, then, is
‘a corollary and particular process of reproduction. It is corollary, because it must function as a support and complement to domestic labour - filling in where domestic sexuality is lacking. … it is particular because it is a selective process both with respect to the sphere of operations of the reproductive work it provides, which is that related to sexual reproduction, and with respect to the specific form of labour power that it reproduces - primarily that of the male work force’ (30).
So there you have it. On the foundation of the initial proposition that the production of labour power takes place in the reproductive sector, Fortunati has erected a theoretical edifice which posits capital as called upon, on pain of its own extinction, to recognise and secure the primary commitment of women to reproductive work, to present it as ‘natural’, and to guarantee thereby that women will be obliged to offer themselves to men in marriage, and to breed in order to produce future workers. Put this together with the observation that women are moving into paid work in increasing numbers, marrying later, and looking to have fewer children or none at all, as Fortunati is among the first to recognise, throw her argument regarding the changed power dynamics in the family into the mix, and it follows that women’s social and political agency is creating a crisis that capital cannot overcome.
But ‘capital’ does not exist in the form that Fortunati’s argument requires - it exists only in the form of many individual capitals, in competition with each other and each seeking to expand. This state of affairs has some important tendencies - for example, for the total sum of capital to grow, for productivity to increase, and, importantly, as a result of those two features, for capital to invade other ‘more primitive’ areas of production. But it rules out the possibility that capital can be a unified and purposive actor, let alone one with the capacity, for example, to present women’s role in domestic labour as ‘natural’. Fortunati insists that capital must do this in its own interest without providing any notion of how it is or might be done. If individual capitals, in their own competitive interest, wish to recruit women into wage labour they do so if they can, without any concern for its impact on reproduction. A moment’s reflection will tell you that every individual capitalist would prefer women to be available for waged labour, and none has a preference for women to be confined or primarily committed to unpaid domestic work. It is true that as this practice becomes more widespread, in the context of other changes pushing in the same direction, fewer women will marry, women will give birth to a first child later if at all, and the overall rate of fertility will fall. But whether this will constitute a crisis for capital is open to doubt. Fortunati simply asserts it on the dubious grounds that the best of all possible worlds for capital is one in which half the available adult working class is committed in advance to solitary domestic work largely untouched by the division of labour or productivity-enhancing investment in the production process, or in other words that capital is most productive when it has the capacity to condemn half of the adult population to low-productivity activity.
So, to summarise the theoretical errors on which the text is founded:
First, reproduction does not operate in accordance with ‘its own laws’. Nor in fact does Fortunati actually think it does. She depicts it generally as varying in accordance with the dominant mode of production, and repeatedly in the case of capitalism as the ‘mirror image’ of production (though ‘obverse’ might have been better). Specifically, at the end of the first chapter:
‘In fact, two productive relationships take place, being both opposed to and mutually dependent on each other: the relationship of the worker with the objective conditions of productive work - a waged labour relationship; and the relationship of the worker with the objective conditions of reproductive work - an indirectly salaried relationship’ (27-8).
Second, as touched on above, ‘capital’ does not, cannot and needs not posit reproductive work (or anything else) as ‘natural’ or as ‘non-value’ (19), nor could it have ‘established the capacity of reproduction as a natural force of social labour’ (53). Least of all does it have ‘every interest in ensuring that all women, in their totality, are houseworkers’ (87). As Fortunati notes, it has no direct relationship to reproductive work. Individual capitals operating in the sphere of exchange are indifferent to the manner in which labour power is produced and renewed, so long as they get it as cheaply as possible, and if they think about it at all it is because they see reproductive work as a sphere of ‘primitive’ production that might advantageously be taken over for new sources of profit.
Third, the work of reproduction is not exclusively carried out by women, nor is it carried out exclusively in the family, as Fortunati of course recognises: ‘Besides the family and prostitution, reproduction in a capitalist society comprises other branches. These branches include domestic work that is salaried and performed for a wage for a family other than the worker’s own, the social reproduction of labour power established and organised by the state, and social services provided by private companies (or the state itself acting as entrepreneur)’. But she deliberately puts this aside, choosing to limit her analysis to ‘that part of the reproduction process that takes place in the family and in so-called prostitution, because they represent the backbone, the nerve centre of the overall reproduction process’ (29). As a result she deprives herself of the possibility of theorising reproduction as a whole, or grasping the changing relationship between its various elements.
Fourth, it is not a necessary or permanent feature of the capitalist mode of production that: ‘The man is subjected to the waged working relationship, which is the capitalist relationship par excellence, and he is formally positioned as the woman’s master. The woman has no formal relationship with capital, and she is positioned in a relationship of service to the man’ (44). Women and children were factory workers in early industrial capitalism; the male worker/female housewife dyad was always as much a staple of bourgeois ideology as a social reality; and it has rarely been a reality for working class families.
Fifth, it is not true that capital attempts ‘to subordinate the reproduction of the male worker and the female houseworker to the production of the future generation of workers, so as to ensure the greatest possible increase in population’ (32); nor is ‘having children posed as a necessity by capital’ (41), and how it could be is another mystery. Fortunati’s claim that ‘more and more women and couples are not having children because of the cost in terms of domestic work and money and because of the social isolation that having children entails’ (41; cf. 89) is an important early identification of a significant development, but it did not then and does not now pose the mortal threat to the capitalist mode of production that she suggests.
Sixth, whatever Fortunati means by the ‘sexual reproduction of male labour power’ and capital’s need for it, she knows perfectly well that it is not secured exclusively by sexual relations in heterosexual marriage or by prostitution, as her passing reference to the history of marriage as ‘strewn with adulterers of all genders’ (33) is enough to demonstrate; nor does the brief account (68-71) of how capital secures its alleged goals regarding prostitution carry any conviction. She drops this argument in her new essay, and you can see why, but it pays a significant structural role in her original account, and its logic is shattered without it.
So, seventh, despite the significance Fortunati attaches to the waged male worker-female housewife dyad and the complementary role of prostitution (see especially 43-71), she cannot establish that they are central and essential to the capitalist mode of production.
Eighth, individual sexual identity, to which she frequently returns, has no bearing on the capitalist mode of production. There is widespread ‘coercive pressure towards heterosexuality’ in many societies, and arguably in all, but there is no such coercive pressure in the capitalist mode of production per se, either as ‘an expression of its ideology or a form of social control and discipline’. Heterosexuality is not ‘the foundation of the capitalist organisation of individual relationships’ (39), nor is there any plausible logic to suggest that it could be. The ‘emergence of mass homosexuality and lesbianism in the last decade’ [the 1970s] was not ‘the expression of mass rebellion and rejection of the capitalist organisation of social relations’, nor had it or has it since ‘completely undermined the landscape of reproduction’ (39-40).
Rather than work through every chapter in the detail that would be required to illustrate the consequences of these propositions, I focus on just two: Chapter Four, ‘Housewives, Prostitutes and Workers: Their Exchanges’, and Chapter Eleven, ‘The Family as a Form of Capitalist Development’.
Chapter Four takes the male wage worker/female housewife dyad as its point of departure, and sees it as giving the ‘man/woman relationship’ a twofold nature: ‘on the one hand, it is an exchange between variable capital [the wage] and domestic labour; on the other it is an exchange between variable capital and prostitution’ (52). So, ‘capital appropriates the female houseworker’s or the sex worker’s labour time not through the mediation of the wage but indirectly through the exchange with the male worker’. But Fortunati immediately contradicts herself: ‘the fundamental exchange of reproduction is no longer merely that between woman and capital through the male worker, which is the one we are considering here, but it is articulated in many other forms (54, emphasis mine); women are more likely to be earning a wage while men perform some domestic labour, while ‘it is an established fact that the increase in male workers’ domestic labour does not compensate for the decline in female domestic labour due to the great momentum towards socialisation of such labour (we eat out more and more, we send our clothes to laundry services, etc.) and due to the increasingly persistent demand by women for either more money or more commodities from men for the labour they supply’ (57). Furthermore, when she returns to the ‘cycle of intense struggles’ since the Second World War, she notes the increasing prevalence of ‘the direct management of the male wage’ by the housewife, which ‘does not aim at guaranteeing the steady reproduction of the working class, but, on the contrary, at determining a reproduction of the class constantly opposed to capital’ (59). In the 1970s, she suggests, ’women’s mass achievement of their own wage … contributed to the development of their new agency, with full rights over their own consumption and even more control over the management of family wages’; and at the same time: ‘The 1970s began with a new phase of management of the proletarian wage, based on mass indebtedness. Credit cards and loans became instruments for exceeding the wage on the level of circulation’, with women ‘the battering ram that creates these breakthroughs’ (60).
In retrospect, it is clear that Fortunati had considerable insight into an emerging conjuncture that was quite different to anything that had gone before, its key features being changed gender relationships within the family and the household, the trend towards later marriage and fewer and later births, the greater frequency of separation or divorce, increased female participation in the waged labour market, increased consumption in the home of commercial products, and the development of credit and consumer debt. But having identified it, she doubled down on her rigid model of the male wage worker/female housewife dyad, stipulating again that it was central to capitalism and its prospects:
‘the exchange between woman and capital is mediated by the worker. Women’s labour power, under the guise of domestic labour, is sold by the housewife to the waged worker as a commodity. When the free woman worker meets the owner of money (in the form of the wage) on the market, they enter into relations with each other, but not on a footing of equality as owners of commodities, and not as equals in the eyes of the law. It follows that the inequality in the relation between man and woman is neither a dysfunction in the capitalist mode of production nor a legacy of some pre-capitalist barbarity. It is, instead, inherent and ingrained in the functioning of the capitalist mode of production. Equality of exploitation between man and woman cannot exist in a capitalist society precisely because such exploitation is based on power differences that are present within the class itself’ (61, emphasis mine).
So the ensuing discussion is based on the premise that capital ‘must compel the woman to present herself primarily as a houseworker because it is only in these terms that the exchange between domestic labour and variable capital and the exchange between capital and the labour of production become reciprocally essential’ (65). As we have seen, there is no reason to believe this - in fact, what Fortunati has produced looks more like a theory of patriarchy, masquerading as a theory of capital. In subsequent chapters she continues to explore the properties of a social world in which there is a rigid division of labour between men and women, secured by men on behalf of capital, in which men earn wages and women do ‘reproductive’ work (for representative statements, see for example 77, 87, 91, 103, 129-30). And because she has everything the wrong way round, she cannot see that the sources of the breakdown of this rigid patriarchal relationship might lie precisely in the dynamics of capitalist development itself.
Chapter Eleven turns from the wage worker/houseworker to ‘the productive nucleus in which the houseworker operates’, the family (173), and unfolds in the same way. ‘The purpose of the family, … cannot be, in capitalist society,’ Fortunati asserts, ‘the mere reproduction of the labour power of the paid worker and housewife. It must also entail the production of new labour power. That is, it cannot consist only in the reintegration … of existing labour power, but also the maximal production of additional labour power’ (193, emphasis mine). Next: ‘because the nuclear form of the household functions as a form of capitalist development it has become the general form of the capitalist family’ (emphasis original); and as ‘a unit, the centre of production and reproduction of labour power, the family is based on the worker’s possession of wages, the houseworker’s ownership of domestic labour power and the apparently free exchange between them’. In sum; ‘The relationship between man and woman and between parents and children is transformed from a relationship of exchange of labour with living labour by capital into a formal relationship of production established between parents: the man/husband/father and woman/wife/mother on the one hand, and their children on the other’ (194). But a particular condition is required for this to succeed:
‘The possession of wages by the worker is a decisive element for the establishment of the capitalist family. For capital, which requires a surrogate authority and command for the orderly functioning of the overall process of production and reproduction, the worker appears as the ideal solution. … Therefore, the command of capital over the domestic labour of the members of the same family is given only insofar as it passes through the mediation of the worker and is represented as the command of the worker over his wife and children. This command presides over the orderly carrying out of the labour process within the family. It constitutes the authority and power of planning which regulates the task allocation and cooperation involved in domestic work as it is distributed among the various members of the family’ (195-6).
But:
‘While in the factory, the worker is subject to the command and discipline of capital, in the family the wife and children are subject to the command and discipline of the wage earner. Or rather, they have traditionally been subjected to this discipline. In the current phase of capital, the subjection to the command of the husband/father is shaky at best … The worker-authority figure, in its command over wife and children, has been profoundly undermined, both by the struggles of women and young people within the family against this marital and paternal authority, as well as by the possession of wages by a growing segment of women’ (196-7).
And worse still:
‘It must be said … that the struggles of women and young people against domestic work and family discipline have also completely changed the structure of consumption within the family, especially since the end of the Second World War. If the adult male worker was previously not only the greatest consumer who worked the least (sic) but also the figure holding the power of decision over both the common and individual consumption of the members of his family, with the 1950s a new wind began to make demands on the wallet of the husband/father. As we have said, women have exerted enormous pressure within the family to broaden the sphere of consumption, especially on their children’s behalf rather than their own. Moreover, an obvious pressure is exerted by young people themselves, who are fighting furiously to become the decision makers of their own consumption process, as well as to broaden its sphere. These pressures have forced capital to discover them as important new agents of production. It is in this period that young people (even children) demand and achieve the agency to choose which clothes to buy, so that they often squander a salary of their own in frivolous spending, plundering a substantial pert of their fathers’ wages. They impose their wishes on the family: the scooter, the record player or, more recently, the cassette player and television set. In addition to the consistently high levels of domestic labour performed by mothers, it is evident how much of the paternal salary is used by them. This is a new generation, inexhaustible in its material and immaterial needs: such needs may be satisfied for many, but remain unmet for even more’ (199).
‘The restructuring of consumption,’ Fortunati then suggests, ‘sees the dethroning of the male waged worker as the privileged figure’ (199). The weapons in this struggle for a more equitable distribution of the family wage are ‘crying, tantrums, emotional blackmail, muzzling and enforced silences’, and in this context ‘it is easy to understand how the family can be a pit of vipers, a chasm of hatred and a factory of madness’ (200).
This startling argument is neither Marxist nor feminist, but it plays a central role in Fortunati’s analysis of the relationship between capital and the reproductive sector: the destruction of the capacity of the male waged worker as husband and father to command and control the family makes it dysfunctional for capital and undermines the processes of reproduction and production alike, with far-reaching consequences:
‘It is not necessarily true that the struggle against the family assumes the form only of a transformation from within. On the contrary, the tendency towards the concrete extinction of the family itself is becoming stronger and stronger. A large part of the proletariat no longer seeks their reproduction within families, preferring solitude or different reproductive arrangements to the “factory of chains” that is the family.There is a strange parallel here with the traditional factory, which is gradually becoming extinct. It is not too bold to say that we are moving towards a phase of the capitalist mode of production with neither factories nor families. The trends show a deep restructuring of the social productive body, which already has in nuce, separated much of production from these two structures, or anyway from the various standard forms each has taken, from the industrial revolution to the present day. if, on the one hand, the family is dying out as a reproductive centre, on the other hand, in the new forms in which the reproductive terrain is reconstructed, it also tends to incorporate within it processes of commodity production. The form is that of the cooperative, and the principle is that of self-management. At least, this is what capital is trying to organise as a response to proletarian struggles against both structures’ (201).
This reveals Fortunati’s core argument for what it is: that capitalism requires a reproductive sector based on heterosexual marriage, a male wage worker/female housewife-child bearer dyad and absolute patriarchal authority within the family, with this core structure supplemented by female prostitution. And in the middle of this discussion, the secret behind Fortunati’s theoretical failure becomes apparent, precisely in connection with her claim to have gone beyond Marx:
‘In the factory, “the co-operation of wage-labourers is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them,” such that “their unification into one single productive body, and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions, lies outside their competence”. As a consequence, “the interconnection between their various labours confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose” [quoting from Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Penguin/New Left Review, 1990, pp. 449-50]. The same happens in the family with respect to the cooperation of labour power as a capacity for reproduction that is indirectly waged. In the family, the worker is also a function of the plan, of the authority of capital that subjects the activity of all the workers of reproduction to its ends’ (197, emphasis mine).
This, then, is how Fortunati goes ‘beyond Marx’. She was wrong to do so. Marx was careful not to extend the logic of capital, or the driving forces internal to the capitalist mode of production, beyond the realm of capitalist competition and production itself in which they operated. Behind the idea of factory production as responding to a plan drawn up by the capitalist lay a material reality: the division of society into two classes and the pressure on workers to sell their labour power to the capitalist, the potential for the division of labour and the application of science and technology to make the labour process more productive, and the tendency for competition between individual capitalists to press them to seek to achieve greater productivity through these mechanisms in order to survive and accumulate. In the reproductive sector, or the family, these material factors do not operate, as Fortunati noted right at the beginning of the book (‘we applied the Marxian analysis of productive work to labour (housework and prostitution) that, according to Marxian categories, cannot strictly be considered as such. In fact, such work did not, apparently, conform to the necessary criteria, since it was not directly waged, it was performed outside a work structure organised according to capitalist canons, it was determined in a way that did not involve the development of either cooperation or the division of labour, and it was organised in such a way as to imply a very limited technology (to the point that there has been much confused talk of the “underdevelopment” of the house as compared to the factory)’, pp. 7-8, cited above). She was ill-advised to set these considerations aside, and more ill-advised still to adopt the expedient, in the absence of direct control by a capitalist, of making the wage earner represent capital in the family. Capital has neither the means nor the need to impose any specific mode of organisation on the family, so it makes no sense to talk of the worker as ‘the function of the plan, of the authority of capital’. In short, it was a fundamental error on Fortunati’s part to suppose that the reproductive sector must operate according to laws of its own, analogous to those of the capitalist mode of production, and just as fundamental an error to give them such rigid and specific form as she did. Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-social Family (Verso, 1982, reissued in paperback earlier this year) is incomparably better.
Curiously, her earlier essay, La famiglia: verso la riproduzione offered a quite different and far more convincing picture of the relationship between women’s struggles and capitalist development, concluding that while war-time and post-war confrontations placed women at the head of a broad alliance of the ‘non-waged’, challenged capital and the state on a number of fronts, and changed irreversibly the character of the family and the balance of power within it, they still reflected significant structural weaknesses, and contributed in the end to prompting a counter-offensive from capital that represented a crushing defeat for revolutionary aspirations:
‘The emergence … of women as a fundamental political subject, manifested in a direct confrontation with capital, created the objective conditions for other sections of the non-waged class to take up a political initiative of attack on the state. But the women’s strategy was heavily prejudiced by the “novelty’ of the experiment: the autonomy of the various non-waged strands was still too low, the front they had constructed was like a castle of sand, bound to fall apart if pounded, and the waged class, for its part, was circumspect in the construction of a common front, given the inevitable political weakness of the non-waged sectors of the class. So the recomposition of the class was founded on too weak a basis in so far as it rested still on the immediate solidarity in the struggle. It was a fundamental effort in the story of class struggle in Italy, and it was brutally defeated. The response of capital was to the point, and to be expected. It first acted to keep substantially separate the front of the waged from that of the non-waged, and then went on the offensive against the non-waged strata. The repression that followed cleared the non-waged from the field, leaving as its only interlocutor the male waged working class, which in the end was defeated. For sure, capital drove everyone back to their posts and in some way guaranteed itself the general willingness to work (laboriosità) of the class, succeeding to a certain extent in transforming the centrifugal force that had stemmed from the family into a centripetal retreat within the family itself. But a great endeavour had been undertaken and its defeat at this point did not signify the end of the road. On the contrary, that cycle of struggle had definitively exhausted the limits of those struggles and their strategy, imposing on the non-waged the need in the end to go down the road of autonomy, and showing women the strategic terrain of their struggle: the family. If in the 1950s the initiative was with capital, the class as a whole had already been given, albeit still in a rough and informal manner, the basic tools of revolutionary strategy: for the first time, the capital/non-waged relation underwent a definitive shift. Not only that, but the proletarian initiative with this cycle of struggle succeeded in conditioning in a very substantial way the initiative of capital, in the sense of accelerating it, increasing the speed of class reorganisation for capitalists in Italy and making US capital “stir itself”. The capitalist process underwent in those years an expansion forced by the political power of the class on the offensive, which imposed industrial reconstruction and the first crude rationalisations at highly accelerated rhythms, the deepening of the penetration of capital into the household and into agriculture, and [citing Romano Alquati and Piero Gasparotti, Lotte operaie in Italia negli ultimi vent’anni] the placing of the state at the centre of capitalist accumulation, which achieved its greatest leap since the 1930s’ (Brutto Ciao, 146-7, my own somewhat free translation).
This ‘dialectical’ analysis is much more consistent with a standard Marxist perspective that sees successful class struggles as provoking a response that raises productivity, the capital intensity of production, and the rate of extraction of relative surplus value in the capitalist sector, alongside accelerated penetration of capital into rural or household non-capitalist production. And while the essay that Fortunati has written to accompany the new translation by no means retracts the arguments of L’arcano (claiming for example that: ‘The most important thing for capital is that the highest number of wombs are put to work, capitalising on the ever-increasing impoverishment of women in general’, p. 261, and that : ‘Given that heterosexuality is precisely the sedimentation of the capitalist organisation of individual relationships, all forms of different sexual identities must be read, in some sense, as behaviours of rebellion and refusal against the capitalist organisation of individual relationships and the social order’, p. 273), it does step back in one particularly significant respect. First (in a passage that seems rather out of context):
‘The fact that the wage-housework exchange takes place between a man and a woman or between a woman and a woman or a man and a man, or persons of any gender, does not necessarily make any difference to capital. It is sufficient that the work of reproduction be carried out by someone, and that, in the morning at the factory, as in the office, as in public institutions, workers arrive, well washed, dressed and fed, able to work hard throughout the day’ (275).
Neither it does it matter if the workers in question live alone, and secure the reproduction of their labour power through their own efforts and through the market, as is increasingly the case (p. 283). And later, ‘the capitalist system structural cares only minimally whether men or women do the housework’ (286).
Along with the fact that whole argument regarding the significance of prostitution is dropped, this signals that Fortunati has largely called time on her attempt to theorise capital from the starting point of its relationship with women. Her continued insistence that the most important thing for capital is that ‘the highest number of wombs are put to work’ (261) is the exception, but first no mechanism is identified through which this could be achieved, and second, it seems not to be true. And in fact Fortunati herself questions it, noting later that women have opted for fewer babies, and for investing more in those they have: ‘providing them with more intensive care, and better nutrition, education and access to health care’ (266). This perfectly suits the needs of capital (See Paul Cammack, The Politics of Global Competitiveness, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 145-6, 162-3).
We are left, then, with the much stronger argument that ‘reproductive work’ is productive insofar as it produces the essential commodity labour power. With an important proviso, this is true. In the case of capitalist production, it reproduces the worker in that it restores the material capacity to work, but it does not deliver the worker to the capitalist so that surplus value can be extracted during the process of production. To see how this happens we must return to a fundamental aspect of capitalist discipline - the denial to the great majority of the means of survival outside wage labour. Without that discipline, the ‘worker’ whose vital energies are restored might fritter them away on the golf course, or lolling about watching TV.
With that proviso, we can say that where the capitalist mode of production is dominant, reproductive work produces the commodity labour power - and in fact this is common ground, and a tautology. Following the logic of capitalist production, we can add that competition between capitalists who aim to find sources of profit and to produce at the least cost tends to drive capital into reproductive work, draw women into wage labour, and as a consequence bring about changes in the ‘family’, the household, and the division of labour within it - all of which Fortunati describes in her contemporary essay.
In conclusion, I might add that it does not follow that because reproductive work is productive, it produces value. It is productive in that it renews a capacity for labour that might in turn be seized by capital as labour power, but it does not directly produce value.
Fortunati is aware of this argument, but begs to differ:
‘some feminist scholars continue to insist that the realm of reproduction does not generate value - that, if anything, it produces only a commodity (labour power) that is subsequently positioned as potentially generative of value in the moment of encounter between humans in their capacity as living labour and capital. Such a distinction, however, neglects the broader cycle of accumulation in which labour power must be continuously produced and reproduced, made available both in the waged labour relationship and held in reserve, in a devalued or unvalued form’ (270).
As the argument she counterposes addresses only the production of labour power, it says nothing about value, so the claim remains unsubstantiated.
In short, Fortunati tests to destruction the potential of a perspective grounded in a specific model of patriarchy to demonstrate that under capitalism reproduction shapes production. It doesn’t.