Federici, Silvia The Reproduction of Labor Power in The Global Economy and The Unfinished Reminist Revolution
Federici, Silvia The Reproduction of Labor Power in The Global Economy and The Unfinished Reminist Revolution
Federici, Silvia The Reproduction of Labor Power in The Global Economy and The Unfinished Reminist Revolution
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are defending from bulldozers their urban gardens, the products ofmuch collective work that brought together entire communities and revitalized
daily life, as well as in international affairs. Feminists too must organize against police brutality, the military build up, and first ofall war. Our first and most important step must be to oppose the recruitment ofwomen
into the armies, which regrettably was introduced with the support of
some feminists and in the name of women's equality and emancipation.
Women's work and women's labor are buried deeply inthe heart
There is much we can learn from this misguided policy. For the image of the uniformed woman, gaining equality with men through the right to
kill, is the image ofwhat globalization can offer to us, which is the right
to survive at the expense ofother women and their children, whose coun
tries and resources corporate capital needs to exploit.
women. This would not offer much consolation if it had only meant heightened misery and oppression, but fortunately it has
also provoked resistance. And capitalism has become aware that
so much pounding, tomorrow I will go home. Hausa women's song from Nigeria
Introduction
What follows is a political reading of the restructuring of the (re)production oflabor power in the global economy, but it is also
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Campaign for Wages for Housework, especially Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, among others, and later by Ariel
Salleh in Australia and the feminists of the Bielefeld school, Maria Mies, Claudia Von Werlhof, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen. At the center of
this critique is the argument that Marx's analysis ofcapitalism has been hampered by his inability to conceive ofvalue-producing work other than
in the form ofcommodity production and his consequent blindness to the
capitalism must rely on both an immense amount ofunpaid domestic labor for the reproduction ofthe workforce, and the devaluation ofthese reproductive activities in order to- cut the cost oflabor power, he may
have been less inclined to consider capitalist development as inevitable
existence, reproducing them for their own sake,evenwhen the capitalists declare their uselessness as labor power. What are the prospects, then, that Marxist theory may serve as a guide to "revolution" in our time? I ask this question by analyzing the restructuring of reproduction in the global economy. My claim is that if Marxist theory is to speak to twenty-first-century anticapitalist move ments, it must rethink the question of "reproduction" from a planetary perspective. Reflecting on the activities that reproduce our life dispels the illusion that the automation of production may createthe materialcondi tions for a nonexploitative society, showing that the obstacle to revolution is not the lack of technological know-how, but the divisions that capital ist development produces in the working class. Indeed, the danger today is that besidesdevouring the earth, capitalism unleashes more wars ofthe
kind the United States has launched in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparked
by the corporate determination to appropriate all the planet's natural re sources and control the world economy.
and progressive. As for us, a century and a half after the publication of Capital, we must challenge the assumption ofthe necessity and progressivity of capitalism for at least three reasons. First, five centuries ofcapitalist development have depleted the re
sources ofthe planet rather than creating the "material conditions" for the
transition to "communism" (as Marx anticipated) through the expansion
of the "forces ofproduction" in the form oflarge scale industrialization. They have not made "scarcity"according to Marx a major obstacle to
human liberationobsolete. On the contrary, scarcity on a world scale is
Marx and the Reproduction ofthe Workforce Surprisingly, given his theoretical sophistication, Marx ignored the ex istence of women's reproductive work. He acknowledged that, no less than every other commodity, labor power must be produced and, insofar as it has a monetary value, it represents "a definite quantity of the aver age social labor objectified in it."1 But while he meticulously explored the dynamics of yarn production and capitalistvalorization, he was suc cinct when tackling the question of reproductive work, reducing it to the workers' consumption of the commodities their wages can buy and the work the production of these commodities requires. In other words,
as in the neoliberal scheme, in Marx's account too, all that is needed to
through an unequal division oflabor, through the use ofthe wage, giving the waged power over the wageless, and through the institutionalization
of sexism and racism, that naturalize and mystify through the presump
tion ofdifferent personalities the organization ofdifferentiated labor re gimes. Third, starting with the Mexican and the Chinese Revolution, the most antisystemic struggles ofthe last century have not been fought only or primarily by waged industrial workers, Marx's projected revolu tionary subjects, but have been fought by rural, indigenous, anticolonial, antiapartheid, feminist movements. Today as well, they are fought by sub
sistence farmers, urban squatters, as well as industrial workers in Africa, India, Latin America, and China. Most important, theses struggles are
fought by women who, against all odds, are reproducing their families regardless ofthe value the market places on their lives, valorizing their
(re)produce labor power is commodity production and the market. No other work intervenes to prepare the goods the workers consume or to restore physically and emotionally their capacity to work. No difference is made between commodity production and the production of the work force.2 One assembly line produces both. Accordingly, the value of la bor power is measured by the value of the commodities (food, clothing, housing) that have to be supplied to the worker, to "the man, so that he can renew his life-process," that is, they are measured on the labor time socially necessary for their production.3 Even when he discusses the reproduction of the workers on a gen erational basis, Marx is extremely brief. He tells us that wages must be sufficiently high to ensure "the worker's replacements," his children, so that labor power may perpetuate its presence on the market.4 But, once
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again, the only relevant agents he recognizes in this process are the male, self-reproducing workers, their wages and their means ofsubsistence.The production ofworkers is by means ofcommodities. Nothing is said about
women, domestic labor, sexuality and procreation. In the few instances in which he refers to biological reproduction, he treats it as a natural phe
add: "But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker's drives for
self-preservation and propagation. All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker's individual consumption to the necessary minimum."7 We can also presume that the difficulties posed bythe classification of a form of labor not subject to monetary valuation further motivated
Marx to remain silent on this matter. But there is a further reason, more
Why did Marx so persistently ignore women's reproductive work? Why, for instance, he did not ask what transformations the raw materials
involved in the process ofreproduction oflabor power must undergo in
order for their value to be transferred into theirproducts (as he did in the
indicative of the limits of Marxism as a political theory, that we must take into account, if we are to explain why not just Marx, but generations of Marxists, raised in epochs in which housework and domesticity were triumphant, have continued to be blind to this work. I suggest that Marx ignoredwomen's reproductive laborbecause he remained wedded to a technologistic concept of revolution, where free
dom comes through the machine, where the increase in the productivity
of labor is assumed to be the material foundation for communism, and
trial proletariat ofhis time as he saw it, and women's domestic labor was hardly part ofit. Housework, as aspecific branch ofcapitalist production,
was under Marx's historic and political horizon at least in the industrial
where the capitalist organization of work is viewed as the highest model of historical rationality, held up for every other form of production, in
cluding the reproduction ofthe workforce. In other words,Marx failed to
working class. Although from the first phase ofcapitalist development, and especially in the mercantilist period, reproductive work was formally subsumed to capitalist accumulation, it was only in the late nineteenth century that domestic work emerged as the key engine for the reproduc
tion ofthe industrial workforce, organized by capital for capital, according
recognize the importance of reproductive work because he accepted the capitalist criteria for what constitutes work, and he believed that waged industrial work was the stageon which the battlefor humanity's emanci
pation would be played. With few exceptions, Marx's followers have reproduced the same assumptions, (witness the continuing love affair with the famous
to the requirements offactory production. Until the 1870s, consistently with apolicy tending to the "unlimited extension ofthe working day" and the utmost compression ofthe cost oflabor power production, reproduc
tive work was reduced toa minimum, resulting in thesituation powerfully
"Fragment on Machines" in the Grundrisse (1857-1858), demonstrating that the idealization of science and technology as liberating forces has continued to be an essential component of the Marxian view of history and revolution to our day. Even Socialist Feminists, while acknowledg
ing the existence of women's reproductive workin capitalism, have in the
described in volume 1of Capital, in the chapter on the Working Day, and in Engels's Conditions ofthe Working Class in England (1845): that is, the
situation ofa working class almost unable to reproduce itself, averaging
alife expectancy oftwenty years ofage, dying in its youth ofoverwork. Only at the end ofthe nineteenth century did the capitalist class began to invest in the reproduction oflabor, in conjunction with ashift in
the form of accumulation, from light to heavy industry, requiring a more
rationalization process, raising its productivity level to that achieved by the leadingsectors of capitalist production. One consequence of this blind spot in modern times has been that
intensive labor-discipline and aless emaciated type ofworker. InMarxian terms, we can say that the development ofreproductive work and the
expressed in the Women's Liberation Movement, and have ignored its practical redefinition of what constitutes work, who is the working class, andwhat is the nature of class struggle. Onlywhen women left the orga nizations of the Left did Marxists recognized the political importance of the Women's Liberation Movement.To this day, many Marxists do notx
acknowledge the gendered character of much reproductive work, as it is
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/ # the case ofeven an eco-Marxist Hke Paul Burkett, or pay Up service to it,
as inNegri's and Hardt's conception of"affective labor." Indeed, Marxist theorists are generally more indifferent to the question ofreproduction
than Marx himself, who devoted pages to the conditions of factory chil
revealing the umbilical connection between the devaluation ofreproduc tive work and the devaluation ofwomen's social position. This paradigm shift also had political consequences. The most im
mediate was the refusal of the slogans of the Marxist Left such as the
ideas of the "generalstrike"or "refusal ofwork,"both ofwhich were never
its inability to grasp the significance ofthe neoliberal turn and the glo balization process. For the moment suffice it to say that by the 1960s,
under the impact of the anticolonial struggle and the struggle against
adult, male workers, largely drawing their power from the fact that they worked inthe leading sectors ofcapital industrial production at the high
est levels of technological development.
Eurocentrism and his privileging the wage industrial proletariat as the main contributor to capitalist accumulation and revolutionary subject.8 However, it was the revolt of women against housework, in Europe and
the United States, and later the spread of feminist movements across the
On the positive side, the discovery of reproductive work has made it possible to understand that capitalist production relies on the produc
tion of a particular type of worker-and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, procreationand thus to redefine the private sphere as a sphere ofrelations ofproduction and a terrain ofanticapitalist struggle.
In this context, policies forbidding abortion could be decoded as devices for the regulation of the labor supply, the collapse of the birth rate and
increase in the number ofdivorces could be read as instances ofresistance
planet, inthe 1980s and 1990s, that triggered the most radical rethinking
of Marxism.
Women's Revolt against Housework and the Feminist Redefinition of Work. Class Struggle, and Capitalist Crisis
It seems to be a social law that the value of labor is proven and perhaps
to the capitalist discipline of work. The personal became political and capital and the state were found to have subsumed our lives and repro
duction down to the bedroom.
created by its refusal. This was certainly the case ofhousework which re
mained invisible and unvalueduntil a movementofwomen emergedwho
refused to accept the work ofreproduction as their natural destiny. It was women's revolt against this work in the '60s and 70s that disclosed the centrality ofunpaid domestic labor in capitalist economy, reconfiguring our image ofsociety as an immense circuit ofdomestic plantations and assembly lines where the production ofworkers is articulated on a daily
and generational basis.
capitalist policy making, during which the first steps were taken toward a neoliberal restructuring of the world economymany feminists could
see that the unfolding capitalist crisis was a response not only to factory
struggles but to women's refusal of housework, as well as to the increas
Notonly did feminists establish thatthe reproduction oflabor pow er involves a far broader range of activities thanthe consumption of com
modities, since food must be prepared, clothes have to be washed, bodies have to be stroked and cared for. Their recognition of the importance of
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, SelmaJames, Leopoldina Fortunati, who showed thatwomen's invisible struggles against domestic discipline were subvert ing the model of reproduction that had been the pillar of the Fordist deal. Dalla Costa, for instance, in"Emigrazione e Riproduzione" (1974) pointed out that, since the end ofWorld War II,women in Europe had
tory and fundamentals ofcapitalist development and the class struggle. Starting in the early 1970s, a feminist theory took shape that radicalized
the theoretical shift which the Third Worldist critiques of Marx had in
been engaged in a silent strike against procreation, as evinced by the collapse of the birth rate and governments' promotion of immigration.
Fortunati in Brutto Ciao (1976) examined the motivations behind Italian
women's post-World War II exodus from the rural areas, their reorienta
tion of the family wage toward the reproduction of the new generations,
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ness of the new generations ofworkers. Selma James in "Sex, Race and
Class" (1975) showed that women's "cultural" behavior and social "roles" should be read as a "response and rebellion against" the totality of their
capitalist lives.
Bank's agricultural development projects, prompting a flood of articles on "women's contribution to development," and later, initiatives aimed at integrating them into the money economy such as NGO-sponsored "income generating projects" and microcredit lending schemes. Given i these events, it is not surprising that the restructuring produced by the globalization of the world economy has led to a major reorganization of reproduction, as well as a campaign against women in the name of "population control."
tions. First, however, I should explain why I continue to use the concept
oflabor power, even though some feminists havecriticizedit as reductive, pointing out that women produce living individualschildren, relatives,
\J
primarily by black women. It was the Welfare Mothers Movement that, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, led the first campaign for statefunded "wages for housework" (under the guise of Aid to Dependent
Children) that women have fought for in the country, asserting the eco nomic value of women's reproductive work and declaring "welfare" a
women's right.9
Women were on the move also across Africa, Asia, Latin America,
friendsnot labor power. The critique is well taken. Labor power is an abstraction. As Marx tells us, echoing Sismondi, labor power "is nothing unless it issold" and utilized.121 maintain thisconcept, however, forvari
ous reasons. First, in order to highlight the fact that in capitalist society reproductive work is not the free reproduction of ourselves or others ac cording to our and their desires. To the extentthat, directly or indirectly, it is exchanged for a wage, reproduction workis, at all points, subject to the conditions imposed on it by the capitalist organization of work and relations of production. In other words, housework is not a free activity.
nist politics as the sponsor of women's rights, starting with the Global
Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975, demonstrated. Elsewhere I have suggested that the United Nations played the same role, with respect to the spreading international women movements,
constraints that derive from the fact that its product must satisfy the re
quirements of the labor market.
struggle.10 As in the case of its (selective) sponsorship of "decoloniza tion," its self-appointment as the agency incharge ofpromoting women's rights enabled it to channel the politics of women's liberation within a frame compatible with the needs and plans of international capital and the developing neoliberal agenda. Indeed, the Mexico City conference
and those that followed stemmed in part from a realization thatwomen's struggles over reproduction were redirecting postcolonial economies to
ward increased investment in the domestic workforce and were the most
Second, highlighting the reproduction of "labor power" reveals the dual character and the contradiction inherent in reproductive la bor and, therefore, the unstable, potentially disruptive character of
this work. To the extent that labor power can only exist in the living individual, its reproduction must be simultaneously a production and
valorization of desired human qualities and capacities, and an accom modation to the externally imposed standards of the labor market. As impossible as it is, then, to draw a line between the living individual and its labor power, it is equally impossible to draw a line between the two corresponding aspects of reproductive work. Nevertheless, maintain ing the concept brings out the tension, the potential separation, and it
important factor inthe failure ofthe World Bank's development plans for
the commercialization of agriculture. In Africa, women had consistently refused being recruited towork ontheir husbands' cash crops, and instead had defended subsistence oriented agriculture, turning their villages from
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sites for the reproduction ofcheap laboras in the image ofit proposed byj^leillassoux!1into sites of resistance to exploitation. By the 1980s,
this resistance was recognized as the main factor in thecrisis oftheWorld
suggests a world of conflicts, resistances, contradictions that have po litical significance. Among other things (an understanding that was
crucial for the women's liberation movement) it tells us that we can
struggle against housework without having to fear that we will ruin our
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Primitive Accumulation and the Restructuring of Reproduction There are five major ways in which the restructuring of the world econ
omy has responded to the cycle of struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed the organization of reproduction and class relations. First,
ern trends, the separation between production and reproduction. There is certainly one important sense in which the difference between the two has become blurred. The struggles of the 1960s in Europe and United
States, especially the student and feminist movements, have taught the capitalist class that investing in the reproduction ofthe future genera
tion ofworkers "does not pay." It is not a guarantee ofan increase in the
there has been the expansion ofthe labor market. Globalization has pro duced a historic leap in the size of the world proletariat, both through a
global process of"enclosures" that hasseparated millions form theirlands,
their jobs, their "customary rights," and through the increased employ
ment of women. Not surprisingly, globalization has presented itselfas a process of primitive accumulation, which has taken many forms. In the
North, globalization has taken the form of industrial de-concentration
productivity, of labor. Thus, not only has state investment in the work
force drastically declined, but reproductive activities have been reorga nized as value-producing services that workers must purchase and pay for. In this way, the value that reproductive activities produce is imme
and relocation, as well as the flexibilization and precarization of work, and just-in-time production. In the former socialist countries, there has
ded, which still divides production and reproduction in terms ofthe sub
jects ofthese activities and the discriminating function 'of the wage and
lack of it.
By destroying subsistence economies, by separating producers from the means of subsistence and making millions dependent on monetary incomes, even when unable to access waged employment, the capitalist
class has relaunched the accumulation process and cut the cost of la bor-production. Two billion people have been added to the world labor
ited part of the work that the reproduction of human beings requires
and erases the subversive potential of the feminist concept of repro ductive work. By highlighting its function in the production of labor
market demonstrating the fallacy of theories arguing that capitalism no longer requires massive amounts of living labor, because it presumably
relies on the increasing automation of work.
Second, the de-territorialization of capital and financialization of economic activities, which the "computer revolution" has made possible, have created the conditions whereby primitive accumulation has become
a permanent process, through the almost instantaneous movement of
capital across the world, breaking over and over the constraints placed on
capital by workers'resistance to exploitation.
ing on workers and especially on women, traditionally the main subjects ofreproductive work? Finally, what do we learn from this restructuring concerning capitalist development and the place ofMarxist theory inthe anticapitalist struggles ofour time? My answer to these questions is in two parts. First, I will discuss briefly the main changes that globalization has produced in the general process ofsocial reproduction and the class
relation, and then I will discuss more extensively the restructuring of re
productive work.
Third, we have witnessed the systematic disinvestment by the state in the reproduction of the workforce, implemented through structural
adjustment programs and the dismantling of the "welfare state." As al
ready mentioned, the struggles of the 1960s have taught the capitalist
class that investing in the reproduction of labor power does not necessar
ily translate into a higher productivity ofwork. As a result, a policy and an ideology have emerged that recast workers as microentrepreneurs, re
sponsible for their self-investment, being presumably the exclusive ben eficiaries of the reproductive activities expended on them. Accordingly
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transport have all been cut, as high fees have been placed upon them, and
workers have been forced to take on the cost of their reproduction, every
so high that USAID could recruit workers offering nothing more than "Food for Work." Wages have fallen so low thatwomen maquila workers
have been reported buying milk by the glass and eggs or tomatoes one at a time. Entire populations have been demonetized, while their lands has been taken away for government projects or given to foreign investors. Currently, halfthe African continent is on emergency food aid.15 In West Africa, from Niger, to Nigeria, to Ghana, the electricity has been turned off, national grids have been disabled, forcing those who canafford them to buy individual generators whose buzzing sound fills the nights, mak ing it difficult for people to sleep. Governmental health and education budgets, subsidies to farmers, support for basic necessities, all have been
Fourth, the corporate appropriation and destruction of forests, oceans, waters, fisheries, coral reefs, animal and vegetable species has reached an historic peak. In country after country, from Africa to the
Pacific Islands, immense tracts of crop lands, and coastal watershome and sources oflivelihood for large populationshave been privatized and
its "universal appropriation of nature" and "its production ofa stage of society [where] nature becomes simply an object for mankind, purely a
matter of utility, [where] it ceases to be recognized as a power in its own
gutted, slashed, and axed. As a consequence, life expectancy is falling and phenomena have reappeared that capitalism's civilizing influence was supposed to have erased from the face of the earth long ago: famines, starvation, recurrent epidemics, even witch-hunts.16 Where "austerity"
programs and land grabbingcould not reach, warhascompleted the task, opening new grounds for oil drilling and the harvesting of diamonds or coltan. As for the targets of these clearances, they have become the subjects of a new diaspora, siphoning millions of people from the land to the towns, which more and more resemble encampments. MikeDavis has used the phrase "Planet of Slums" in referring to this situation, but a more correct andvivid description would speak of a planetofghettos and a regime of global apartheid. If we further consider that, through the debt crisis and structural
adjustment, "Third World" countries have been forced to divert food
right; and the theoretical acknowledgement ofits independent laws ap pears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements,
either as anobject ofconsumption ora means ofproduction."14
In 2011, after theBPspill and Fukushimaamong othercorporate made disastersas the oceans are dying, imprisoned by islands of trash,
In different degrees, these development have affected all popula tions across the planet. Yet, the New World Order is best described as a
process ofrecolonization. Far from flattening the world into anetwork of interdependent circuits, it has reconstructed it as a pyramidal structure,
increasing inequalities and social/economic polarization, and deepening
the hierarchies that have historically characterized thesexual andinterna
tionaldivision of labor, which the anticolonial and the women's liberation
movements had undermined.
production from the domestic to the export market, to turn arable land
from cultivation of edible crops to mineral extraction and biofuel pro duction, to clear-cut theirforests, and become dumping grounds for all kinds ofwaste as well as grounds ofpredation for corporate gene hunters,
then,we mustconclude that, in international capital's plans there are now world regions destined to "near-zero-reproduction." Indeed, the destruc tion oflife in all itsforms is today as important as the productive force of biopower in the shaping of capitalist relations, as a means to acquire raw
materials, dis-accumulate unwanted workers, blunt resistances, and cut the cost of labor production.
place ofslavery and plantations. I call it the "strategic center" because its restructuring has been the foundation and precondition for the global reorganization of production and the world labor market. It is here, in
fact, that we have witnessed the first and most radical processes of ex
It is a measure of the degree to which the reproduction of the workforce has been underdeveloped that worldwide, millions are facing
untold hardships and the prospect of death and incarceration in order to migrate. Certainly migration is not just a necessity, but an exodus toward
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higher levels ofstruggle, a means to reappropriate the stolen wealth, as argued by Yann Moulier Boutang and Dimitris Papadopoulos, among
others.17 This is why migration has acquired an autonomous character
that makes it difficult to use as a regulatory mechanism forthe structuring
of the labor market. But there is no doubt that, if millions of people leave their countries for an uncertain destiny, thousands of miles away from
But seen from the viewpoint of the totality of worker-capital re lations, these developments demonstrate capital's continuing power to
de-concentrate workers and undermine workers' organizational efforts in thewaged workplace. Combined, these trends have abrogated social con
tracts, deregulated labor relations, reintroduced noncontractual forms of
they must leave behind. From ahistorical viewpoint this practice is highly
unusual. Women are usually those who stay, not due tolack ofinitiative or traditional restraints, but because they are those who have been made to
labornot onlydestroying the pockets of communism a century ofwork ers' struggle hadwon but threatening the production of new "commons." In the North as well, real incomes and employment have fallen, access to land and urban spaces has been reduced, and impoverishment
feel most responsible for the reproduction oftheir families. They are the
ones who have to make sure that the children have food, often themselves
and even hunger have become widespread. Thirty-seven million are go ing hungry in the United States, according to a recent report, while 50
percent of the population, by estimates conducted in 2011,is considered
going without it, and who make sure that the elderly or the sick are cared
for. Thus, when hundreds of thousands leave their homes to face years of humiliation and isolation, living with the anguish of not being able to
"low income." Add that the introduction oflabor saving technologies far from reducing the length of the working day has greatly extended it, to
the point that (in Japan) we have seen people dying from work, while "leisure time" and retirement have become a luxury. Moonlighting is now a necessity for many workers in the United States while, stripped oftheir pensions, many sixty-to-seventy years old are returning to the labor mar ket. Most significantly, we are witnessing the development of a home less, itinerant workforce, compelled to nomadism, always on the move, on trucks, trailers, buses, looking for work wherever an opportunity ap pears, a destiny once reserved in the United States toseasonal agricultural workers chasing crops, like birds of passage, across the country. Along with impoverishment, unemployment, overwork, homelessness, and debt has gone the increasing criminalization of the work ing class, through a mass incarceration policy recalling the seventeenth
give to the people they love the same care they give to strangers across
the world, we know that something quite dramatic is happening in the organization ofworld reproduction.
We must reject, however, the conclusion thattheindifference ofthe international capitalist class to the loss oflife which globalization is pro
ducing is a proof that capital no longer needs living labor. In reality, the
destruction of human life on a large scale has been a structural compo
tion. Also the expansion ofnoncontractual labor and ofother phenomena that may seem like abominations in a "modern world"such as mass incarceration, the traffic in blood, organs andotherhuman partsshould
be understood in this context.
century Grand Confinement, and the formation of an ex-lege proletariat made of undocumented immigrant workers, students defaulting on their
loans, producers or sellers of illicitgoods, sex workers. It is a multitude of
Capitalism fosters a permanent reproduction crisis. If this has not been more apparent in our lifetimes, at least in many parts of the
Global North, it is because the human catastrophes it has caused have been most often externalized, confined to the colonies, and rational ized as an effect of cultural backwardness or attachment to misguided traditions and "tribalism." For most of the '80s and '90s, moreover, the
Especially harsh has been the attack on youth, particularly work ing class black youth, the potential heir of the politics of Black Power, to whom nothing has been conceded, neither the possibility of secure employment nor access to education. But for many middle class youth as well the future is in question. Studying comes at a high cost, caus ing indebtedness and the likely default on student loans repayment.
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Competition for employment is stiff, and social relations are increas ingly sterile as instability prevents community building. Not surprisingly,
reproduction of the workforce, despite the massive increase in the number of women employed outside the home. In the North, the personal com puter has entered the reproduction of a large part of the population, so that shopping, socializing, acquiring information, and even some forms
of sex-work can now be done online. Japanese companies are promoting the robotization of companionship and mating. Among their inventions are "nursebots" that give baths to the elderly and the interactive lover to be assembled by the customer, crafted according to his fantasies and desires. But even in the most technologically developed countries, house work has not been significantly reduced. Instead, it has been marketized, redistributed mostly on the shoulders of immigrant women from the
they are recognized as mass phenomena. Thefinancialization ofeveryday reproduction through the use of credit cards, loans, indebtedness, espe cially in the United States, should be also seen in this perspective, as a re sponse to the decline inwages and a refusal ofthe austerity imposed by it, rather than simply a product offinancial manipulation. Across the world,
a movement of movements has also grown that, since the '90s, has chal
South and the former socialist countries. And women continue to per
form the bulkof it. Unlike other forms of production, the production of
lenged every aspect ofglobalizationthrough mass demonstrations, land occupations, the construction of solidarity economies and other forms of
commons building. Most important, the recent spread of prolonged mass
uprisings and "Occupy" movements that over the last year has swept much
of the world, fromTunisia, to Egypt, through most of the Middle East,
to Spain, and the United States have opened a space where the vision of a major social transformation again becomes possible. After years of ap parent closure, where nothing seemed capable ofstopping the destructive powers ofa declining capitalist order, the "Arab Spring" and the sprawl ing of tents across the American landscape, joining the many already set in place by the growing population ofhomeless, show thebottom is once again rising, and a new generation is walking the squares determined to
reclaim their future, and choosing forms of struggle that potentially can
This is why, rather than being technologized, housework and care work have been redistributed on the shoulders of different subjects
large quotas of housework have been taken out of the home and reorga nized on a market basis through the virtual boom of the service industry, which now constitutes thedominant economic sector from theviewpoint
of wage employment. This means that more meals are now eaten out of
Reproductive Labor, Women's Work, and Gender Relations in the Global Economy Against this background, we must now ask how reproductive work has
fared in the global economy, and how the changes it has undergone have shaped the sexual division oflabor and the relations between women and
men. Here as well,the substantive difference between production and re
ofwomen's refusal ofthe discipline involved in marriage and child-raising. In the United States, the number of births has fallen from 118 per 1,000
women in 1960s to 66.7 in 2006, resulting in an increase in the median
age of first time mothers from 30 in 1980 to 36.4 in 2006. The drop in
the demographic growth has been especially high in Western and Eastern Europe, where in some countries (e.g., Italy and Greece), women's "strike"
production stands out. The first difference to be noticed is that while pro
duction has been restructured through a technological leap in keyareas of
the world economy, no technological leap has occurred in the sphere of domestic work, significantly reducing the labor socially necessary for the
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factor behind the growing call for an expansion of immigration. There has
alsobeen a decline in the number of marriages and married couples, in the
United States from 56 percent of all households in 1990 to 51 percent in 2006,and a simultaneous increase in the numberof people living alonein the United States by seven and a halfmillion, from twenty-three to thirty
and a half millionamounting to a 30 percent increase.
people's vulnerability to disease. In the United States, too, due to budget cuts, much of the work that hospitals and other public agencies have traditionally done has been privatized and transferred to the home, tapping women's unpaid labor. Currently, for instance, patients are dismissed almost immedi ately after surgery and the home must absorb a variety of postopera tive and other therapeutic medical tasks (e.g., for the chronically ill) that in the past would have been done by doctors and professional nurses.20 Public assistance to the elderly (with housekeeping, personal care) has
also been cut, house visits have been much shortened, and the services
important development from many viewpoints. Nevertheless its political implications are not yet sufficiently understood among feminists from the viewpoint of the power relations it has produced among women, and
the limits of the commercialization of reproduction it has exposed. While
provided reduced. The second factor that has recentered reproductive labor in the home has been the expansion of "homework," partly due to the deconcentration of industrial production, partly to the spread of informalwork. As David Staples writes in NoPlace Like Home (2006), far from being an
anachronistic form of work, home-based labor has demonstrated to be
a long-term capitalist strategy, which today occupies millions of women and children worldwide, in towns, villages, and suburbs. Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of un paid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home
basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers' effort to
sis, nor the "globalization of care," much less the technologization of re productive work, have "liberated women" or eliminated the exploitation inherent to reproductive work in its present form. If we take a global
perspective we see that not only do women still do most of the unpaid
domestic work in every country, but due to cuts in social services and the decentralization of industrial production, the amount of domestic work,
unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum. Many women choose this work in the attempt to reconcile earning an incomewith caring for their families; but the result is enslavement to a work that earns wages "farbelow the medianwage it would payif performed in a formal setting, and reproduces a sexual division of labor that fixes women more deeply
to housework."21
paid and unpaid, that women perform may have actually increased, even
when they have had a extradomestic job. Three factors havelengthened women's workdayand returned work
to the home. First, women have been the shock absorbers of economic
globalization, having had to compensate with their work for the deterio rating economic conditions produced by the liberalization of the world
economy and the states' increasing disinvestment in the reproduction of the workforce. This has been especially true in the countries subjected to structural adjustment programs wherethe state hascompletely cut spend ing for healthcare, education, infrastructure and basic necessities. As a consequences of these cuts, in most ofAfrica and South America, wom en must now spend more time fetching water, obtaining and preparing
food, and dealingwith illnesses that are far more frequent at a time when
Lastly, the growth of female employment and restructuring of re production has not eliminated gender labor hierarchies. Despitegrowing maleunemployment, womenstill earn a fraction of male wages. We have also witnessed an increase in male violence against women, triggered in part by fear of economic competition, in part by the frustration men ex perience in not being able to fulfill their role as family providers, and
most important, triggered by the fact that men now have less control over women's bodies and work, as more women have some money of their own and spend more time outside the home. In a context of falling wages and widespread unemployment that makes it difficultfor them to have a family, manymen also usewomen's bodies as a means of exchange and access to the world market, through the organization of pornography
or prostitution.
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This rise ofviolence against women is hard to quantify and its sig
elderly, the sick, without imposing a great cost on those in need of care?
the viewpoint ofthe new forms ithas taken. In several countries, under the impact ofstructural adjustment, the family has all but disintegrated. Often
this occurs out of mutual consentas one or both partners migrate(s) or
homes and even murdered after being charged with witchcraft or posses
sion by the devil. This phenomenon likely reflects a larger crisis in family support for members who are seen as no longer productive in the face of rapidly diminishing resources. Significandy, ithas also been associated with the ongoing dismantling ofcommunal land systems.22 But itis also amani
festation ofthe devaluation thatreproductive work and the subjects ofthis
The degree to which the marketization of food production has contrib uted to the deterioration of our health (leading, for example, to the riseof obesity even among children) is instructive. As for the commercialization of reproductive work through its redistribution on the shoulders of other women, as currently organized this "solution" only extends the house work crisis, now displaced to the families of the paid careproviders, and creates new inequalities among women. What is needed is the reopening of a collective struggle over repro duction,reclaiming controloverthe materialconditions of our reproduc tion and creating new forms of cooperation around this work outside of the logic of capital and the market. This is not a Utopia, but a process already under way in manyparts of the world and likely to expand in the face of a collapse of the world financial system. Governments are now at tempting to use the crisis to impose stiff austerity regimes on us foryears to come. But through land takeovers, urban farming, community-sup ported agriculture, through squats, the creation ofvarious forms of barter,
mutual aid, alternative forms of healthcareto name some ofthe terrains
ing and other forms ofcoerced sex work, and the sheer increase in the
numberof women murdered or disappeared. Hundreds of youngwomen,
mostly maquila workers, have been murdered inCiudad Juarez and other
Mexican towns in the borderlands with the United States, apparently
victims ofrape or criminal networks producing pornography and "snuff." Aghastly increase in the number ofwomen murder victims has also been registered in Mexico and Guatemala. But it is above all institutional vio
lence that has escalated. This is the violence of absolute pauperization, of inhuman work conditions, of migration in clandestine conditions. That
on which this reorganization of reproduction is more developeda new economy is beginning to emerge that may turn reproductive work from a stifling, discriminating activity into the most liberating and creative ground of experimentation in human relations. As I stated, this is not a Utopia. The consequences of the globalized world economy would certainly have been far more nefarious except for
the efforts that millions of women have made to ensure that their families
would be supported, regardless of theirvalue on the capitalist labor market. Through their subsistence activities, as well as various forms of direct ac tion (from squatting on public land to urbanfarming) women have helped
their communities to avoid total dispossession, to extend budgets and add food to the kitchen pots. Amid wars, economic crises, and devaluations, as the world around them was falling apart, they have planted corn on aban doned town plots, cooked food to sell on the side of the streets, created communal kitchensola communes, as in Chile and Peruthus standing
ing for waged work or fighting to "join the working class in the work place," as some Marxist feminist liked to put it, cannot be a path to lib
eration. Wage employment may be a necessity but it cannot be acoherent political strategy. As long as reproductive work is devalued, as long it is considered a private matter and women's responsibility, women will always confront capital and the state with less power than men, and in
conditions of extreme social and economic vulnerability. It is also im
in the way of a total commodification of life and beginning a process of reappropriation and recollectivization of reproduction that is indispensable if we are to regain control over our lives. The festive squares and"occupy"
movements of 2011 are in a waya continuation of this process as the "mul
titudes" have understood that no movement is sustainable that does not
portant to recognize that there are serious limits to the extent to which reproductive work can be reduced orreorganized on a market basis. How far, for example, can we reduce orcommercialize the care for children, the
place at its center the reproduction of those participating in it, thus also transforming the protest demonstrations into momentsof collective repro
duction and cooperation.