Social Reproduction

 “Patriarchy of the Wage,” by Silvia Federici, 2021

These are left-feminist or anarcho-Marxist essays over a period of 30 years analyzing, supporting and criticizing Marxist views, based on the importance of women and social reproduction in the overall schema of capital.  While praising Marx for raising the issue of the reproduction of labor power, Federici maintains in these essays that he ignored women’s issues, color issues, environmental issues and praised capitalism, industry and technology.  She takes a swipe at Lenin for praising aspects of capitalism too.

Federici seems to understand that Marxism is a method, not a dogma.  Historical materialism is her method too.  Marx was writing at a certain time in history and this impacted his view of aspects of capitalism.  “Theorists” have screamed at Marx for not anticipating global warming.  They have said he didn’t anticipate fascism.  Or write about the overwhelming level of financialization that capital has reached, though he did describe its beginnings.  As capital develops and changes, later Marxists have described, expanded and incorporated each of these into the analysis – just as Federici did on the issue of unpaid house work carried out mostly by women, which Marx did not theorize. 

FEDERICI’s CRITICISMs of MARX

Federici does know that in Britain, France and other European countries there was no ‘home’ life for the working class in the middle 1800s, which spent nearly all of its time - men, women and children - at work, thus endangering ANY kind of home reproduction.  The European labor movement made limiting this work one of its main goals.  This might explain Marx’s absence on this issue.  On mechanization, it is hard to believe that Federici does not understand the crushing toil of peasants and workers that machines can lessen, something no less true today.  I doubt she has forgotten that Lenin was one of those who overthrew capital in Russia.  He was not a stagist Bernstein waiting for the capitalist stage to eventually prepare us for socialism.    

Federici opposes the goal of communism, where technology is used to ease toil, not to create useless commodities or destroy nature.  She supports ‘the commons’ instead, praising subsistence farming, urban gardens, free software (while condemning computers), subsistence women farmers, the Incan and Aztec empires and the Zapatistas, in the process rejecting what seems like all mechanization.  She knows that care-work cannot be mechanized, which is certainly true. Her position in these essays is somewhat like a deep Green, against all industrialization.  She is evidently unfamiliar with the extensive work done by Johan Bellamy Foster on Marx’s understanding of the metabolic links between humans and nature.  Marx’s view of communism was to live in harmony with nature in the use of machines and technology, not to be Promethean.

FEDERICI’s POINTS

“Waged work” leads to surplus value, while unpaid social reproduction prepares for this exploitation, and becomes another type of oppression.  Federici wants to completely ‘center’ unpaid home-work – mostly carried out by women - as key to capitalism instead.  This ignores the key role of the commodity under capital. Social reproduction goes on under every economic system. She alleges that Marx thought ‘primitive accumulation’ ended long ago.  Yet modern Marxists continue to discuss present ‘primitive accumulation’ without quibbling with Marx.  Modern slavery is also well-known to leftists. Nor did Marx maintain that only large agriculture was the road to socialism.

Federici seems to oppose or under-estimate socialization of family tasks, which is already taking place under capital.  In fully capitalist societies, eating out or getting takeout food; hiring cleaners, plumbers, electricians, construction workers, lawn services and car mechanics; using day care centers, health clinics and nursing homes, even ordering groceries or items from the internet requiring truck drivers - all ‘outsource’ this work from the home, but on a capitalist basis.  Of course, the more money someone has, the more they outsource.  The middle-class and the rich are the biggest 'outsourcers.'  Renters already have some of these services – or should have - as part of a rental contract. At some point, socialism could almost completely socialize maintenance, cooking, cleaning, aged, child and sick care and make it available for everyone on a collective basis, not just those with more money, or just relying on unpaid women care-givers.  There are many ways to do this.

Working women then and now - the past is prologue.

The KEY SECTION

The book contains a concise section on Marx’s limitations regarding care-work and women’s role in social reproduction.  This is where the title “Patriarchy of the Wage” comes from, as Federici maintains that a male-dominated proletarian family was constructed by capital in the late 1800s and many women were relegated to wageless work in the home.  Federici seems to have missed the fact that that family has also been superseded by another ‘new’ model of the proletarian family in core capitalist countries, where women have returned to the workforce while working a second shift at home.  (Which explains why the term ‘second shift’ is not used in this book.)  Women have also become wage workers in China, Latin America and India in increasing numbers. The majority of women now work outside the home in the core countries, so Federici’s main point has been superseded in the areas where capital is most developed.  The 'wage' is now evenly spread. Marx predicted capital would turn women into wage workers too and he has been right twice.  55.4% of the workforce is female in the U.S. in 2019.  In a way, Federici is living in the past.

On a personal note, from my experience working-class men in advanced capitalist societies also play a role in the home, though perhaps not as great as women when it comes to ‘traditional’ tasks.  However, tasks like lawn care, snow removal, house, bicycle and auto maintenance, computer work, doing taxes and tracking finances are among the things that many times get delegated to men.  Younger men have taken up cooking, baby care and laundry. The definition of ‘housework’ needs to be expanded from its somewhat original feminist definition in the 1950s.

Humanity may go back to a small-holder agrarian life in the death holocaust that is to come if the working-classes do not take power.  Even a micro-level farming or hunting life will be a stretch.  But wishing for it is as anti-proletarian as you can get, including hostile to modern women.  Federici is an anarcho-communist who trumpets the second coming of utopian socialism – without a transitional state, through local counter-culturalism, absent all modern technology – but I expect she might moderate her stance when the reality hits.

In these essays she fails in trying to create a ‘new reconstructed’ leftism.  Her vague criticisms of a present abstract “Left” ignores the many variations of Marxist thought, though she is correct in looking at some of their failures.  She seems to think that Marxism starts and ends with factory workers, even in the present, while ignoring many Marxist analyses of service, farm, precariat, unemployed, lumpen, care-workers and white collar workers.

Federici and her cohort in the 1970s made great theoretical breakthroughs on the oppression of women, especially in home-life. These essays reference that.  Her proposal of a ‘wage for housework’ starts to deal with this issue, as she knows.  The cutting edge of class struggle for Federici began in the home, with the retrograde husband, and it still seems to reside there.  In her materialist and historical analysis of women’s free care-work, she recognizes her debt to Marx, but then discharges that debt and takes on her own.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate the 14 year archive:  “20^th Century Luxury Communism,”  “Feminists and Feminists,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Fortunes of Feminism,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “The Testaments,” “The Old is Dying,” "Women From the North Country" or the word “Marxism.”  

And I bought it in May Day’s excellent Feminist Section!

Red Frog

September 7, 2021