federici, silvia the reproduction of labor power in the global economy and the unfinished reminist...

7/22/2019 Federici, Silvia the Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Reminist Revolution

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REVOLUTION AT POINT ZEROHOUSEWORK. REPRODUCTION. ANO FEMINIST STRUGGLE

Silvia Federici

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90 REVOLUTION AI POINT ZERO

protagonists ofland struggles to recover land occupied by big landowners but alsofor women in industrialized countries. In New York, womenare defending from bulldozers their urban gardens, the products ofmuchcollective work that brought together entire communities and revitalizedneighborhoods previously considered disaster zones.20But the repression that has met even such projects indicates that weneed a feminist mobilization against the intervention of the state in ourdaily life, as well as in international affairs. Feminists too must organizeagainst police brutality, the military build up, and first ofall war. Our firstand most important step must be to oppose the recruitment ofwomeninto the armies, which regrettably was introduced with the support ofsome feminists and in the name ofwomen's equality and emancipation.There is much we can learn from this misguided policy. For the image ofthe uniformed woman, gaining equality with men through the right tokill, is the image ofwhat globalization can offer to us, which is the rightto survive at the expense ofother women and their children, whose countries and resources corporate capital needs to exploit.

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THE REPRODUCTION OFIN THE GLOBAL ECONOUNFINISHED FEMINIST

Women's work and women's laboofthe capitalist social and economNo Place Like Home (2006) 'It is clear that capitalism has lewomen. This would not offer mmeant heightened misery and opalso provoked resistance. And capifit completely ignores or suppbecome more and more radical, ement for self-reliance and perhasocial order. Robert Biel, The NThe emerging liberative agent iwaged force ofwomen who arelife economy by their work. Thproduction. They are the hiddeeconomy and the wage equivalenestimate at $16 trillion. John MCapitalism (1999)The pesde has snapped because ofI willgo home.Until tomorrow, u


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92 REVOLUTION AJPOINTZEROCampaign for Wages for Housework, especially Mariarosa Dalla Costa,Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, among others, and later by ArielSalleh inAustralia andthe feminists oftheBielefeld school, Maria Mies,Claudia Von Werlhof, Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen. At the center ofthis critique is the argument that Marx's analysis ofcapitalism has beenhampered by his inability to conceive ofvalue-producing work other thanin the form ofcommodity production and his consequent blindness to thesignificance ofwomen's unpaid reproductive work in the process of capitalist accumulation. Ignoring this work has limited Marx's understandingof the true extent of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the functionofthe wage in the creation ofdivisions within the working class, startingwith the relation between women and men. Had Marx recognized thatcapitalism must rely on both an immense amount ofunpaid domesticlabor for the reproduction ofthe workforce, and the devaluation ofthesereproductive activities in order to- cut the cost of labor power, he mayhave been less inclined to consider capitalist development as inevitableand progressive. As for us, a century and a half after the publication ofCapital, we must challenge the assumption ofthe necessity and progres-sivity ofcapitalism for at least three reasons.First, five centuries ofcapitalist development have depleted the resources ofthe planet rather than creating the "material conditions" for thetransition to "communism" (as Marx anticipated) through the expansionof the "forces ofproduction" in the form of large scale industrialization.They have not made "scarcity"according to Marx amajor obstacle tohuman liberationobsolete.Onthe contrary, scarcity onaworld scale istoday directly a product ofcapitalist production. Second, while capitalism seems to enhance the cooperation among workers in the organization ofcommodity production, in reality it divides workers inmany ways:through an unequal division oflabor, through the use ofthe wage, givingthe waged power over the wageless, and through the institutionalizationof sexism and racism, that naturalize and mystify through the presumption ofdifferent personalities the organization ofdifferentiated labor regimes. Third, starting with the Mexican and the Chinese Revolution,the most antisystemic struggles ofthe last century have not been foughtonly or primarily by waged industrial workers, Marx's projected revolutionary subjects, but have been fought by rural, indigenous, anticolonial,antiapartheid, feminist movements.Today as well, they are fought by subsistence farmers, urban squatters, as well as industrial workers inAfrica,India, Latin America, and China. Most important, theses struggles arefought by women who, against all odds, are reproducing their familiesregardless of the value the market places on their lives, valorizing their

THE REPRODUCTION OF LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 93

existence, reproducingthem for their ownsake,evenwhen the capitalistsdeclare their uselessness as labor power.What are the prospects, then, that Marxist theorymay serve as aguide to "revolution" in our time? I ask this question by analyzing therestructuringof reproduction in the global economy. Myclaimis that ifMarxist theory is to speak to twenty-first-century anticapitalistmovements, it must rethink the question of "reproduction" from a planetaryperspective. Reflecting on the activities that reproduce ourlife dispels theillusionthat the automation of productionmaycreatethe materialconditionsfor a nonexploitative society, showing that theobstacle to revolutionis not the lackof technological know-how, but the divisions that capitalist development produces in theworkingclass. Indeed,the dangertodayis that besidesdevouringthe earth, capitalismunleashes morewarsof thekind the United States has launched in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparkedby the corporate determination to appropriate allthe planet's natural resources and control the world economy.Marx and the Reproduction ofthe WorkforceSurprisingly, given his theoretical sophistication,Marx ignored the existence of women's reproductive work. He acknowledged that, no lessthan everyother commodity, labor powermust beproduced and, insofaras it has a monetary value, it represents "a definite quantity of the average social labor objectified in it."1 But while he meticulously exploredthe dynamicsof yarn production and capitalistvalorization,he wassuccinct when tackling the question of reproductive work, reducing it tothe workers' consumption of the commodities their wages can buy andthe work the production of thesecommodities requires. In otherwords,as in the neoliberal scheme, in Marx's account too, all that is needed to(re)produce laborpower is commodityproduction and the market. Noother work intervenes to prepare the goods the workers consume or torestore physically and emotionally their capacity to work.No differenceismade between commodityproduction and theproductionof theworkforce.2 One assembly line produces both. Accordingly, the value of labor poweris measured bythe value of the commodities (food, clothing,housing) that have to be supplied to the worker, to"the man,sothat hecan renew his life-process," that is, they are measured on the labor timesocially necessary for their production.3Evenwhenhe discusses the reproduction of theworkers onagenerational basis,Marx is extremelybrief. He tells us that wages must besufficiently high to ensure "the worker's replacements," his children, sothat labor power may perpetuate its presence on the market.4 But, once


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94 REVOLUTION AT POINTZEROagain, the only relevant agents he recognizes in this process are themale,self-reproducingworkers, their wages and their means ofsubsistence.Theproduction ofworkers is by means ofcommodities. Nothing is said aboutwomen, domestic labor, sexuality and procreation. In the few instances inwhich he refers to biological reproduction, he treats it as a natural phenomenon, arguing that it is through the changes in the organization ofproduction that asurplus population is periodically created to satisfy thechanging needs of the labor market.Why did Marx so persistently ignore women's reproductive work?Why, for instance, he did not ask what transformations the raw materialsinvolved in the process ofreproduction oflabor power must undergo inorder for their value tobe transferred intotheirproducts (as hedidin thecase ofother commodities)? I suggest that the conditions of the working class in EnglandMarx's and Engels's point of referencepartlyaccount for this omission.5 Marx described the condition of the industrial proletariat ofhis time as he saw it, and women's domestic laborwashardly part ofit.Housework, as aspecific branch ofcapitalist production,was under Marx's historic and political horizon at least in the industrialworking class. Although from the first phase ofcapitalist development,and especially in the mercantilist period, reproductive work was formallysubsumed to capitalist accumulation, itwas only in the late nineteenthcentury that domestic work emerged as the key engine for the reproduction ofthe industrialworkforce, organized by capital for capital, accordingto the requirements offactory production. Until the 1870s, consistentlywith apolicy tending to the "unlimited extensionoftheworking day" andthe utmost compression ofthe cost oflabor power production, reproductive work was reduced toaminimum, resulting inthesituation powerfullydescribed in volume1ofCapital, in the chapter on the Working Day, andin Engels's Conditions ofthe Working Class in England (1845): that is, thesituation ofaworking class almost unable to reproduce itself, averaginga life expectancyoftwenty years ofage, dying in its youth ofoverwork.Only at the end of the nineteenth century did the capitalist classbegan to invest in the reproduction of labor, in conjunctionwith ashift inthe form of accumulation, from light to heavy industry, requiring amoreintensive labor-discipline and aless emaciated type ofworker. InMarxianterms, we can say that the development of reproductive work and theconsequent emergence of the full-time housewife were the products ofthe transition from "absolute" to "relative surplus" value extraction as amode ofexploitation oflabor. Not surprisingly, while acknowledging that"the maintenance and reproduction oftheworking class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction ofcapital," Marx could immediately


add: "But the capitalist may safely leave this to the worker's drives forself-preservation and propagation. All the capitalist cares for isto reducetheworker's individual consumption to the necessary minimum."7Wecan also presume that the difficulties posed bythe classificationof a form of labor not subject to monetaryvaluation further motivatedMarx to remain silent on this matter. But there is a further reason, moreindicative of the limits of Marxism as a political theory, that we musttakeinto account, ifweareto explain whynot justMarx,but generationsofMarxists, raised in epochs in which housework and domesticity weretriumphant, havecontinued to be blind to thiswork.I suggest that Marx ignoredwomen's reproductive laborbecause heremained wedded to a technologistic conceptof revolution, where freedom comes through themachine, where the increase intheproductivityof labor is assumed to be the material foundation for communism, andwhere the capitalist organization ofworkisviewed as the highest modelof historical rationality, held up for every other form of production, including the reproductionof the workforce. In otherwords,Marx failed torecognize the importance of reproductive work because he accepted thecapitalist criteria forwhat constitutes work, and hebelieved that wagedindustrial workwasthe stageonwhichthe battleforhumanity's emancipation wouldbe played.With few exceptions, Marx's followers have reproduced thesame assumptions, (witness the continuing love affair with the famous"Fragment onMachines" in the Grundrisse (1857-1858), demonstratingthat the idealization of science and technology as liberating forces hascontinued to bean essential component of theMarxian view of historyand revolution to our day. Even Socialist Feminists, while acknowledgingthe existence ofwomen's reproductiveworkin capitalism, have in thepast tended to stress its presumably antiquated, backward, precapitalistcharacter and imagined the socialistreconstructionof it in the formof arationalization process, raising its productivity level to that achieved bythe leadingsectors of capitalist production.

One consequence of this blind spot in modern timeshas beenthatMarxist theorists have been unable to grasp the historic importance ofthe post-World War II women's revolt against reproductive work, asexpressed in theWomen's Liberation Movement, and have ignored itspractical redefinition ofwhatconstitutes work, who istheworking class,andwhatisthe nature of class struggle. Onlywhen women leftthe organizations oftheLeftdidMarxists recognized thepolitical importance oftheWomen's LiberationMovement.To this day, manyMarxists do notxacknowledge the gendered character ofmuch reproductivework, as it is


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96 REVOLUTION AT POINTZERO/ # 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, Marxisttheorists are generally more indifferent to the question of reproductionthanMarxhimself, who devoted pages to the conditions of factory children, whereas today itwould be achallenge to find any reference to chil

dren in most Marxist texts.I'll return later to the limits of contemporaryMarxism, to noticeits inability to grasp the significance of the neoliberal turn and the globalization process. For the moment suffice it to say that by the 1960s,under the impact of the anticolonial struggle and the struggle againstapartheid in the United States, Marx's account ofcapitalism and classrelations was subjected to a radical critique by Third Worldist politicalwriters Hke' Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank who criticized itsEurocentrism and his privileging the wage industrial proletariat as themain contributor to capitalist accumulation and revolutionary subject.8However, it was the revolt ofwomen against housework, in Europe andtheUnitedStates, andlaterthe spread of feminist movements across theplanet, in the 1980s and 1990s, that triggered the most radical rethinkingofMarxism.Women's Revolt against Housework andthe Feminist Redefinition of Work. Class Struggle, and Capitalist CrisisIt seems to be a social law that the value of labor is provenand perhapscreated by its refusal. This was certainly the case ofhousework which remainedinvisible and unvalueduntil a movementofwomenemergedwhorefused toaccept the work ofreproduction as their natural destiny. Itwaswomen's revolt against this work in the '60s and 70s thatdisclosed thecentrality ofunpaid domestic labor in capitalist economy, reconfiguringour image ofsociety as an immense circuit ofdomestic plantations andassembly lines where the production ofworkers is articulated on a dailyand generational basis.Notonly did feminists establish thatthe reproduction oflabor power involves a far broader range ofactivities thantheconsumption ofcommodities, since food must be prepared, clothes have tobewashed, bodieshave tobe stroked and cared for. Their recognition ofthe importance ofreproduction and women's domestic labor for capital accumulation ledto a rethinking ofMarx's categories and a new understanding of the history and fundamentals ofcapitalist development and the class struggle.Starting in the early 1970s, a feminist theory took shape that radicalizedthe theoreticalshift which the Third Worldist critiquesof Marx had inaugurated, confirming that capitalism isnot necessarily identifiable with

THE REPRODUCTION OF LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBALECONOMY 97waged,contractual work, arguing that, in essence, it is unfree labor, andrevealing the umbilical connection between the devaluation ofreproductive work and thedevaluation ofwomen's social position.Thisparadigm shift also hadpolitical consequences. Themost immediate was the refusal of the slogans of theMarxist Left such as theideasof the "generalstrike"or "refusal ofwork,"both ofwhichwereneverinclusive of house-workers. Over time, the realization has grown thatMarxism, filtered through Leninism and social-democracy,has expressedthe interests of a limited sector of the world proletariat, that ofwhite,adult, male workers, largely drawing their power from the fact that theyworked in the leading sectors ofcapital industrial production at the highest levels of technological development.On thepositive side, thediscovery of reproductive work has madeit possible to understand that capitalist production relies on theproduction of a particular type ofworker-and therefore a particular type offamily, sexuality, procreationand thus to redefine the private sphere asa sphere ofrelations ofproduction and a terrain ofanticapitalist struggle.In this context, policies forbidding abortion could be decoded asdevicesforthe regulation of the labor supply, the collapse ofthe birth rate andincrease in the number ofdivorces could be read asinstances of resistanceto the capitalist discipline of work. The personal became political andcapital and the state were found to have subsumed our lives and reproduction down to th e bedroom.

On the basis of this analysis, by the mid 1970sa crucial time incapitalist policy making, during which the first steps were taken towarda neoliberal restructuring of theworld economymany feminists couldsee that the unfolding capitalist crisis was a response not only to factorystruggles but to women's refusalof housework, aswell as to the increasing resistance of newgenerations ofAfricans, Asians, Latin Americans,Caribbeans to the legacy of colonialism. Key contributors to this perspective were activists in the Wages for Housework Movement, likeMariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, who showedthatwomen's invisible struggles against domestic disciplinewere subverting the model of reproduction that had been the pillar of the Fordistdeal. Dalla Costa, for instance, in"Emigrazione e Riproduzione" (1974)pointed out that, since the end ofWorld War II,women in Europe hadbeen engaged in a silent strike against procreation, as evinced by thecollapse of the birth rate and governments' promotion of immigration.Fortunati in Brutto Ciao(1976) examined the motivations behind Italianwomen's post-WorldWar II exodus from the rural areas, their reorientation of thefamily wage toward the reproduction ofthe new generations,


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and the connections between women's postwar quest for independence,theirincreased investment in their children, and the increased combative-ness of the new generations ofworkers. Selma James in "Sex, Race andClass" (1975) showed thatwomen's "cultural" behavior and social "roles"should be read as a "response and rebellion against" the totality of theircapitalist lives.By the mid 1970s women's struggle were no longer "invisible," buthad become an open repudiation ofthesexual division oflabor, with all itscorollaries: economic dependence onmen, social subordination, confinement toanunpaid, naturalized form oflabor, a state-controlled sexualityand procreation. Contrary to awidespread misconception, the crisis wasnot confined to white middle class women. Rather, the first women's liberation movement intheUnited States was arguably amovement formedprimarily by black women. Itwas the Welfare Mothers Movement that,inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, led the first campaign for state-funded "wages for housework" (under the guise ofAid to DependentChildren) that women have fought for in the country, asserting the economic value of women's reproductive work and declaring "welfare" awomen's right.9

Women were on the move also across Africa, Asia, Latin America,as the decision by the United Nations to intervene in the field of feminist politics as the sponsor ofwomen's rights, starting with the GlobalConference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975, demonstrated.Elsewhere I have suggested that the United Nations played the samerole, with respect to the spreading international women movements,that it had already played, in the 1960s, in relation to the anticolonialstruggle.10 As in the case of its (selective) sponsorship of "decolonization," its self-appointment as the agency incharge ofpromoting women'srights enabled it to channel the politics ofwomen's liberation within aframe compatible with the needs and plans of international capital andthe developing neoliberal agenda. Indeed, the Mexico City conferenceand those that followed stemmed inpart from a realization thatwomen'sstruggles over reproduction were redirecting postcolonial economies toward increased investment in the domestic workforce and were the mostimportant factor inthe failure oftheWorld Bank's development plans forthe commercialization of agriculture. In Africa, women had consistentlyrefused being recruited towork on their husbands' cash crops, and insteadhad defended subsistence oriented agriculture, turning their villages fromsites for the reproduction ofcheap laboras in the image ofit proposedbyj^leillassoux!1into sites of resistance to exploitation. By the 1980s,this resistance was recognized as themain factor inthecrisis oftheWorld


Bank's agricultural development projects, promptinga flood of articleson "women's contribution to development," and later, initiatives aimedat integrating them into the money economy such as NGO-sponsored"income generating projects" and microcredit lending schemes. Given ithese events, it is not surprising that the restructuring produced bytheglobalization of the world economy has led to a major reorganizationof reproduction, as well as a campaign againstwomen in the name of"populationcontrol."Inwhatfollows, I outline themodalities ofthis restructuring, identifythe main trends,its social consequences, andits impacton class relations. First, however, I should explain why I continue to use the conceptof labor power, eventhough somefeministshavecriticizedit asreductive,pointing out that women produce living individualschildren, relatives,friendsnot labor power. The critique iswell taken. Labor power isanabstraction. As Marx tells us, echoing Sismondi, labor power "is nothingunless itissold" andutilized.121 maintain thisconcept, however, forvarious reasons. First, in order to highlightthe fact that in capitalist societyreproductive work isnot the free reproduction ofourselves or others according toour and their desires. Totheextentthat,directly or indirectly,it is exchanged fora wage, reproduction work is, at allpoints, subject tothe conditions imposedon it by the capitalist organization ofwork andrelations of production. In otherwords, housework isnot a free activity.It is "the production and reproduction of the capitalist most indispensablemeansof production: theworker."13 As such,it is subject to all theconstraints thatderive from the fact thatits product must satisfy therequirements of the labor market.Second, highlighting the reproduction of "labor power" revealsthe dual character and the contradiction inherent in reproductive labor and, therefore, the unstable, potentially disruptive character ofthis work. To the extent that labor power can only exist in the livingindividual, its reproduction must be simultaneously a production andvalorization of desired human qualities and capacities, and an accommodation to the externally imposed standards of the labormarket. Asimpossible asit is,then, to draw a linebetween the living individual andits labor power, it is equally impossible to drawa linebetween the twocorresponding aspects of reproductive work. Nevertheless, maintaining the concept brings out the tension, the potential separation, and itsuggests a world of conflicts, resistances, contradictions that have political significance. Among other things (an understanding that wascrucial for the women's l iberation movement) it tells us that we canstruggle against houseworkwithout having to fearthat wewill ruin our


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communities, for this work imprisons the producers as well as thosereproduced by it.I also want todefend my continuing tomaintain, against postmodern trends, the separation between production and reproduction. Thereis certainly one important sense in which the difference between the twohas become blurred. The struggles of the 1960s in Europe and UnitedStates, especially the student and feminist movements, have taught thecapitalist class that investing in the reproduction of the future generation ofworkers "does not pay." It is not aguarantee ofan increase in theproductivity,of labor. Thus, not only has state investment in the workforce drastically declined, but reproductive activities have been reorganized as value-producing services that workers must purchase and payfor. In this way, the value that reproductive activities produce is immediately realized, rather than being made conditional on the performanceof the workers they reproduce. But the expansion of the service sectorhas by no means eliminated home-based, unpaid reproductive work,nor has it abolished the sexual division of labor in which it is embedded, which still divides production and reproduction in terms ofthesubjects ofthese activities and the discriminating function 'of the wage andlack o f it .Lastly, I speak of"reproductive," rather than "affective" labor because in its dominant characterization, the latter describes only a limited part of the work that the reproduction of human beings requiresand erases the subversive potential of the feminist concept of reproductive work. By highlighting its function in the production of laborpower, and thus unveiling the contradictions inherent in this work,the concept of "reproductive labor" recognizes the possibility of crucial alliances and forms of cooperation between producers and thereproduced: mothers and children, teachers and students, nursesand patients.Keeping this particular character ofreproductive work in mind, letus ask then: how has economic globalization restructured the reproduction of the workforce?And what have been the effects of this restructuring on workers and especially on women, traditionally the main subjectsof reproductive work? Finally, what do we learn from this restructuringconcerning capitalist development and the place ofMarxist theory in theanticapitalist struggles ofour time? My answer to these questions is intwo parts. First, Iwill discuss briefly the main changes that globalizationhas produced in the general process ofsocial reproduction and the classrelation, and thenI will discuss more extensively the restructuring ofreproductive work.

THE REPRODUCTION OF LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 101Naming ofthe Intolerable:Primitive Accumulation and the Restructuring of ReproductionThere are five major ways inwhich the restructuring of the world economyhasresponded to the cycle of struggles of the 1960s and 1970s andtransformed the organization of reproduction and class relations. First,there has been the expansion of the labor market. Globalization has produced a historic leap in the size of the world proletariat, both through aglobal process of"enclosures" that hasseparated millions form theirlands,their jobs, their "customary rights," and through the increased employment ofwomen. Not surprisingly, globalization has presented itselfas aprocess of primitive accumulation, which has taken many forms. In theNorth, globalization has taken the form of industrial de-concentrationand relocation, as well as the flexibilization and precarization ofwork,andjust-in-time production. In the formersocialist countries, therehasbeen the de-statalization of industry, the de-collectivization of agriculture and privatizationsocialwealth. In the South,we havewitnessed themaquilization of production, import liberalization, and land privatization.The objective, however, has everywhere beenthe same.By destroying subsistence economies, by separating producers fromthe means of subsistence and making millions dependent onmonetaryincomes, even when unable to access waged employment, the capitalistclass has relaunched the accumulation process and cut the cost of labor-production. Twobillion people have beenadded to the worldlabormarket demonstrating the fallacy of theories arguing that capitalism nolonger requires massive amounts of living labor, because it presumablyrelies on the increasing automation ofwork.Second, the de-territorialization of capital and financialization ofeconomic activities, which the "computer revolution" has made possible,have created the conditions whereby primitive accumulation has becomea permanent process, through the almost instantaneous movement ofcapital across the world, breaking over and over the constraints placed oncapital byworkers'resistance to exploitation.Third, we have witnessed the systematic disinvestment by the statein the reproduction of the workforce, implemented through structuraladjustment programs and the dismantling of the "welfare state." Asalready mentioned, the struggles of the 1960s have taught the capitalistclass that investing inthe reproduction of labor power does not necessarily translate into a higher productivity ofwork. As a result, apolicy andan ideology have emerged that recast workers as microentrepreneurs, responsible for their self-investment, being presumably the exclusive beneficiaries of the reproductive activities expended on them. Accordingly


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102 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZEROa shift has occurred in the temporal fix between reproduction and accumulation. As subsidies to healthcare, education, pensions, and publictransport have all been cut, as high fees have been placed upon them, andworkers have been forced to takeon the cost of their reproduction, everyarticulation of the reproduction of labor power has been turned into animmediate point of accumulation.Fourth, the corporate appropriation and destruction of forests,oceans, waters, fisheries, coral reefs, animal and vegetable species hasreached an historic peak. In country after country, from Africa to thePacific Islands, immense tracts of crop lands, and coastal watershomeand sources oflivelihood for large populationshave been privatized andmade available for agribusiness, mineral extraction, or industrial fishing.Globalization has sounmistakably revealed the cost ofcapitalist production and technology that it has become unconceivable to speak, as Marxdid intheGrundrisse, ofthe"civilizing influence of capital," issuing fromits "universal appropriation of nature" and "its production ofa stage ofsociety [where] nature becomes simply an object for mankind, purely amatter ofutility, [where] it ceases to be recognized as a power in itsownright; and the theoretical acknowledgement of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements,either as anobject ofconsumption orameans ofproduction."14In 2011, after theBPspill and Fukushimaamong othercorporatemade disastersas the oceans are dying, imprisoned by islands of trash,as space is becoming ajunkyard as well as an army depot, suchwords canhave forusonlyominous reverberations.In different degrees, these development have affected all populations across the planet. Yet, the New World Order is best described as aprocess ofrecolonization. Far from flattening the world into anetworkofinterdependent circuits, it has reconstructed it as a pyramidal structure,increasing inequalities and social/economic polarization, and deepeningthehierarchies thathave historically characterized thesexual andinternationaldivision of labor, whichthe anticolonial and thewomen's liberationmovements had undermined.The strategic center ofprimitive accumulation has been the formercolonial world, historically the underbelly of the capitalist system, theplace ofslavery and plantations. I call it the "strategic center" because itsrestructuring has been the foundation and precondition for the globalreorganization of production and the world labor market. It is here, infact, that we have witnessed the first and most radical processes of expropriation and pauperization and the most radical disinvestment bythe state in the reproduction ofthe labor force. These processes are well


documented. Starting in the early 1980s, as a consequence of structuraladjustment, unemploymentin most "ThirdWorld"countrieshas soaredso high that USAID could recruit workers offering nothing more than"Food for Work." Wages have fallen so low thatwomen maquila workershavebeen reportedbuying milkby the glass and eggs or tomatoes oneata time. Entire populationshave been demonetized,while their lands hasbeen taken away for government projects or given to foreign investors.Currently, halftheAfrican continent ison emergency food aid.15 InWestAfrica, from Niger, to Nigeria, to Ghana, the electricity hasbeen turnedoff, national grids have been disabled, forcing thosewhocanafford themtobuy individual generators whose buzzing sound fills the nights, making it difficult for people to sleep. Governmental health and educationbudgets, subsidies to farmers, supportforbasic necessities, all have beengutted, slashed, and axed. As a consequence, life expectancy is fallingandphenomena have reappeared that capitalism's civilizing influence wassupposed to have erased from the face of the earth long ago: famines,starvation, recurrent epidemics, even witch-hunts.16 Where "austerity"programs andland grabbingcouldnot reach, warhascompleted the task,opening new grounds for oil drilling and the harvesting of diamondsor coltan. As for the targets of these clearances, they have become thesubjects of a new diaspora, siphoning millions of people from the landto the towns, which more andmore resemble encampments. MikeDavishas used the phrase "Planet of Slums" in referring to this situation, butamore correct andvivid descriptionwould speakofaplanetofghettos anda regimeofglobalapartheid.

If we further consider that, through the debt crisis and structuraladjustment, "Third World" countries have been forced to divert foodproduction from the domestic to the exportmarket, to turn arable landfrom cultivation of edible crops to mineral extraction and biofuel production, to clear-cut theirforests, and become dumping grounds for allkinds ofwaste as well as grounds ofpredation for corporate gene hunters,then,wemustconclude that, in international capital's plans there are nowworld regions destined to "near-zero-reproduction." Indeed, the destruction oflife in all itsforms is today as important as theproductive force ofbiopower inthe shaping ofcapitalist relations, as ameans to acquire rawmaterials, dis-accumulate unwanted workers, blunt resistances, and cutthe costof laborproduction.It is a measure of the degree to which the reproduction of theworkforce has been underdeveloped thatworldwide, millions are facinguntold hardshipsand the prospect of death and incarcerationin order tomigrate.Certainlymigration is not just a necessity, but an exodus toward


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104 REVOLUTION AT POINTZEROhigher levels ofstruggle, ameans to reappropriate the stolen wealth, asargued by Yann Moulier Boutang and Dimitris Papadopoulos, amongothers.17 This is why migration has acquired an autonomous characterthatmakes it difficult to use as a regulatory mechanism forthe structuringofthe labormarket.But there is nodoubt that, ifmillions ofpeople leavetheir countries for an uncertain destiny, thousands of miles away fromtheirhomes, it is because they cannot reproduce themselves, notat leastunder adequate living conditions. This is especially evident whenwe consider that halfof the migrants are women, many married with childrenthey must leave behind. From ahistoricalviewpoint this practice is highlyunusual.Women are usually those who stay, notdue to lack of initiative ortraditional restraints, but because theyare those who have been made tofeel most responsible for the reproduction oftheir families. They are theoneswho haveto make sure that the childrenhave food,often themselvesgoing without it, and who make sure that the elderly or the sick are caredfor. Thus,when hundreds of thousands leave their homes to face yearsof humiliation and isolation, living with the anguish ofnot being able togive to the people they love the same care they give to strangers acrossthe world, we know that something quite dramatic is happening in theorganization ofworld reproduction.We must reject, however, the conclusion thattheindifference oftheinternational capitalist class to the loss oflife which globalization is producing is a proof that capital no longer needs living labor. In reality, thedestruction of human life on a large scale has been a structural component ofcapitalism from its inception, as the necessary counterpart of theaccumulation of labor power, which is inevitably a violent process. Therecurrent "reproduction crises" that we have witnessed in Africa over thelast decadesare rooted in this dialectic of labor accumulation and destruction. Also the expansion ofnoncontractual labor and ofother phenomenathat may seem like abominations in a "modern world"such as massincarceration, the traffic inblood, organs andotherhuman partsshouldbe under st ood in thi s context.Capitalism fosters a permanent reproduction crisis. If this hasnot been more apparent in our lifetimes, at least inmany parts of theGlobalNorth, it is because the human catastrophes it has caused havebeen most often externalized, confined to the colonies, and rationalized as an effect of cultural backwardness or attachment to misguidedtraditions and "tribalism." For most of the '80s and '90s, moreover, theeffects of the global restructuring in the North were hardly felt except in communities of color, or could appear in some cases (e.g., theflexibihzation and precarization of work) as liberating alternatives

THEREPRODUCTION OF LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 105to the regimentation of the 9-to-5 routine, if not anticipations of aworkerless society.But seen from the viewpoint of the totality ofworker-capital relations, these developments demonstrate capital's continuing power tode-concentrateworkers and undermine workers' organizational efforts inthewaged workplace. Combined, these trends have abrogated social contracts, deregulatedlabor relations, reintroduced noncontractual formsoflabornot onlydestroying the pockets of communism a century ofworkers' struggle hadwon but threatening theproduction ofnew "commons."In the North as well, real incomes and employment have fallen,access to landand urban spaces has been reduced, and impoverishmentand even hunger have become widespread. Thirty-seven million are goinghungry in the United States, according to a recent report, while 50percentof the population, byestimates conducted in 2011,is considered"low income." Add that the introduction of labor saving technologies farfrom reducing the length of theworking day has greatly extended it, tothe point that (in Japan) we have seen people dying from work, while"leisure time" and retirement have become a luxury.Moonlighting is nowa necessity formany workers intheUnited States while, stripped of theirpensions,many sixty-to-seventy years oldare returning to the labormarket. Most significantly, we are witnessing the development of a homeless, itinerant workforce, compelled to nomadism, always on the move,on trucks, trailers, buses, looking forwork wherever an opportunity appears, adestiny once reserved intheUnited States toseasonal agriculturalworkers chasing crops, like birds of passage, across the country.Along with impoverishment, unemployment, overwork, home-lessness, and debt has gone the increasing criminalization of the working class, through a mass incarceration policy recalling the seventeenthcentury Grand Confinement, and the formation ofan ex-lege proletariatmade ofundocumented immigrant workers, students defaulting on theirloans, producers or sellers of illicitgoods, sex workers. It isa multitude ofproletarians, existing and laboring in the shadow, reminding usthattheproduction of populations without rightsslaves, indentured servants,peons, convicts, sans papiersremains a structural necessity of capitalaccumulation.Especially harsh has been the attack on youth, particularly working class black youth, the potential heir of the politics of Black Power,to whom nothing has been conceded, neither the possibility of secureemployment nor access to education. But formany middle class youthas well the future isin question. Studying comes at a high cost, causing indebtedness and the likely default on student loans repayment.


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106 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZEROCompetition for employment is stiff, and social relations are increasingly sterile as instability prevents community building. Not surprisingly,among the social consequences ofthe restructuringofreproduction, therehas been an increase in youth suicide, aswellas an increase in violenceagainst women and children including infanticide. It is impossible, then,to share the optimism of those like Negri and Hardt, who in recent yearshave argued that the new forms of production the global restructuringof the economy has created already provide for the possibility of moreautonomous, more cooperative forms ofwork.The assault onour reproduction has not gone unchallenged, however. Resistance has taken many forms, some remaining invisible untilthey are recognized as mass phenomena.Thefinancialization ofeverydayreproduction through the use of credit cards, loans, indebtedness, especially in the United States, should be also seen in this perspective, as a response to the decline inwages and a refusal ofthe austerity imposed by it,rather than simply a product offinancial manipulation. Across the world,a movementof movements has also grown that, since the '90s,has challenged every aspect ofglobalizationthrough mass demonstrations, landoccupations, the construction ofsolidarity economies and other forms ofcommons building. Mostimportant, the recent spread of prolonged massuprisings and "Occupy"movements that over the last year has swept muchof the world, fromTunisia, to Egypt, through most of the Middle East,to Spain, and the United States have opened a space where the vision ofamajor social transformation again becomes possible. After years ofapparent closure, where nothing seemed capable ofstopping the destructivepowers ofa declining capitalist order, the "Arab Spring" and the sprawling of tents across the American landscape, joining the many already setinplace by the growing population ofhomeless, show thebottom is onceagain rising, and a new generation is walking the squares determined toreclaim their future, and choosing forms of struggle that potentially canbegin to build a bridge across some of the main social divides.Reproductive Labor, Women's Work, and Gender Relations in the Global EconomyAgainst this background, we must now ask how reproductive work hasfared intheglobal economy, and how the changes it has undergone haveshaped the sexual division oflabor and the relations between women andmen. Here aswell,the substantive difference betweenproduction and reproduction stands out.The first difference to be noticed is that while production hasbeen restructured through a technological leap in keyareas oftheworld economy, no technological leap has occurred in the sphere ofdomestic work, significantly reducing the laborsocially necessary for the

THE REPRODUCTIONOF LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 107

reproductionof theworkforce, despite themassive increase inthe numberofwomenemployed outsidethe home. In the North,the personal computer has entered the reproduction of a large part of the population, sothat shopping, socializing, acquiring information, and even some formsofsex-work can now bedone online. Japanese companies are promotingthe robotization of companionship andmating. Among their inventionsare "nursebots" that give baths to the elderly and the interactive loverto be assembled bythe customer, crafted according to his fantasies anddesires. But even in the mosttechnologically developed countries, houseworkhas not beensignificantly reduced. Instead, it hasbeenmarketized,redistributed mostly on the shoulders of immigrant women from theSouth and the former socialist countries. And women continue to perform the bulkofit.Unlike other forms of production, the production ofhuman beings is to agreat extent irreducible tomechanization, requiringahigh degree ofhuman interaction and the satisfaction ofcomplex needsinwhichphysical and affective elements are inextricablycombined. Thatreproductive workisa labor-intensive process ismostevident in the careof children and the elderly that, even in its most physical components,involves providing a sense of security, consoling, anticipating fears anddesires.18 None of theseactivities is purely"material" or "immaterial," norcan be broken down in ways making it possible for it to be mechanizedor replaced by the virtual flowof online communication.This is why, rather than being technologized, housework andcare work have been redistributed on the shoulders of different subjectsthrough its commercialization andglobalization. As theparticipation ofwomeninwaged workhas immensely increased, especially in the North,large quotas of housework have been taken outof thehome and reorganized on amarket basis through the virtual boom ofthe service industry,which now constitutes thedominant economic sector from theviewpointofwage employment. This meansthat moremeals are noweatenout ofthe home, more clothes are washed in laundromats orbydry-cleaners,andmorefood isboughtalready prepared for consumption.Therehas also been a reduction of reproductive activities asa resultofwomen's refusal ofthe discipline involved inmarriage and child-raising.In theUnited States, the number of births has fallen from 118 per 1,000women in 1960s to 66.7 in 2006, resultingin an increase in the medianage of first time mothers from 30 in 1980 to 36.4 in 2006. The drop inthe demographic growthhas beenespecially high inWesternand EasternEurope,wherein somecountries(e.g., Italyand Greece),women's "strike"against procreation continues, resulting in a zero growth demographic regime that is raising much concern among policymakers, and is the main


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factor behind the growing call foran expansion of immigration. Therehasalsobeena decline in the numberofmarriages andmarriedcouples, in theUnited States from 56 percent of all households in 1990 to51 percent in2006,and a simultaneous increase in thenumberofpeople living aloneintheUnited States by seven and a halfmillion, from twenty-three to thirtyand a halfmillionamounting to a 30 percent increase.Most important, in the aftermath of structural adjustment andeconomic reconversion, a restructuring of reproductive work has takenplace internationally, whereby much ofthe reproduction ofthe metropolitanworkforce is now performed by immigrantwomen coming from theGlobal Soujh, especially providing care to children and the elderly andfor thesexual reproduction ofmale workers.19 Thishas been an extremelyimportant development from many viewpoints. Nevertheless itspoliticalimplications are not yet sufficiently understood among feminists fromtheviewpoint ofthe power relations it has produced among women, andthe limitsof the commercialization of reproduction it hasexposed.Whilegovernments celebrate the "globalization of care," which enables themto reduce investmentin reproduction, it is clearthat this "solution" has atremendous social cost, not only for the individualimmigrantwomen butfor the communities from which they originate.Neither the reorganization of reproductive work on a market basis, nor the "globalization of care," much less the technologization ofreproductive work, have "liberated women" or eliminated the exploitationinherent to reproductive work in its present form. If we take a globalperspective we see that notonly do women still do most of the unpaiddomestic workin every country, but due to cutsin social services and thedecentralization of industrial production, the amount of domesticwork,paid and unpaid, thatwomen perform may have actually increased, evenwhen theyhavehad a extradomestic job.Three factors havelengthenedwomen's workdayand returnedworkto the home. First, women have been the shock absorbers of economicglobalization, having had to compensate with their work for the deteriorating economic conditions produced by the liberalization of theworldeconomy and the states' increasing disinvestment in the reproduction oftheworkforce. This has beenespecially true in the countries subjected tostructural adjustmentprograms wherethestatehascompletely cut spending for healthcare, education, infrastructure and basic necessities. As aconsequences of these cuts, inmost ofAfrica and South America, women must nowspendmore time fetching water, obtainingand preparingfood,and dealingwith illnesses that are far morefrequentat a timewhenthe privatization of healthcare hasmade visits to clinics unaffordable for

THE REPRODUCTION OF LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 109most, while malnutrition an d environmental destruction have increasedpeople's vulnerability to disease.In the United States, too, due to budget cuts, muchof the workthat hospitals and other public agencies have traditionally done hasbeen privatized and transferred to the home, tapping women's unpaidlabor. Currently, for instance, patients are dismissed almost immediately after surgery and the homemust absorb a variety of postoperative andother therapeutic medical tasks (e.g., for the chronically ill) thatin the past would have been done by doctors and professional nurses.20Public assistance to the elderly (with housekeeping, personal care) hasalso been cut, house visits have been much shortened, and the servicesprovidedreduced.The second factor that has recentered reproductive labor in thehomehas been the expansion of "homework," partlydue to the decon-centration of industrial production,partlyto the spreadof informalwork.AsDavid Staples writesinNoPlace Like Home (2006), far from being ananachronistic form of work, home-based labor has demonstrated to bea long-term capitalist strategy, which todayoccupies millions ofwomenand children worldwide, in towns, villages, and suburbs. Staples correctlypointsout that workis inexorably drawn to the homebythe pullof unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing workon a homebasis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers' effort tounionize, and drive wages down to a minimum. Manywomen choosethisworkin the attempt to reconcile earningan incomewith caring fortheir families; but the result is enslavement to a work that earns wages"farbelow themedianwage it wouldpayifperformed in a formal setting,and reproduces a sexual division of labor that fixes womenmoredeeplyto housework."21

Lastly, the growth of female employment and restructuring of reproductionhas not eliminated gender laborhierarchies. Despitegrowingmaleunemployment, womenstill earna fraction ofmale wages.We havealso witnessed an increase in male violence against women, triggered inpart byfearof economiccompetition, in part bythe frustration menexperience in not being able to fulfill their role as family providers, andmost important, triggered by the fact that men now have less controlover women's bodies and work, as more women have some money oftheir own and spend more time outside the home. In a contextof fallingwagesand widespreadunemployment that makes it difficultfor them tohave a family, manymen also usewomen's bodies as ameans of exchangeand access to theworldmarket, through the organizationofpornographyor prostitution.


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110 REVOLUTION AT POINT ZEROThis rise ofviolence against women is hard to quantify and its significance is better appreciated when considered in qualitative terms, fromthe viewpoint ofthe new forms ithas taken. In several countries, under theimpact ofstructural adjustment, the family has all but disintegrated. Oftenthis occurs out ofmutual consentas one or both partners migrate(s) orboth separate in search ofsome form ofincome. But many times, it is amore traumatic event, when husbands desert their wives and children, for

instance, in the face ofpauperization. In parts ofAfrica and India, therehave also beenattacks onolderwomen, whohave been expelled from theirhomes and even murdered after being charged with witchcraft or possession by the devil. This phenomenon likely reflects a larger crisis in familysupport for members who are seen as no longer productive in the face ofrapidly diminishing resources. Significandy, ithas also been associatedwiththe ongoing dismantlingofcommunal land systems.22 But it is also amanifestation of the devaluation thatreproductive work and the subjects of thiswork have undergone in the face ofthe expansionofmonetary relations.23Other examples of violence traceable to the globalization processhave been the rise of dowry murder in India, the increase in trafficking and other forms ofcoerced sex work, and the sheer increase in thenumberofwomenmurdered or disappeared. Hundredsof youngwomen,mostly maquila workers, have been murdered inCiudadJuarez and otherMexican towns in the borderlands with the United States, apparentlyvictims ofrape or criminal networks producing pornography and "snuff."Aghastly increase in the number ofwomen murder victims has also beenregistered in Mexico and Guatemala. But it is above all institutional violence that hasescalated. This istheviolence of absolute pauperization, ofinhuman work conditions, ofmigration in clandestine conditions. Thatmigration can also be viewed as a struggle for increased autonomy andself-determination through flight, as a search for more favorable powerrelations, cannot obliterate this fact.Several conclusions are to be drawn from this analysis. First, fighting for waged work or fighting to "join the working class in the workplace," as some Marxist feminist liked to put it, cannot be a path to liberation.Wage employment may be a necessity but it cannot be acoherentpolitical strategy. As long as reproductive work is devalued, as long itis considered a private matter and women's responsibility, women willalways confront capital and the state with less power than men, and inconditions of extreme social and economic vulnerability. It is also important to recognize that there are serious limits to the extent to whichreproductive work can be reduced or reorganized on amarket basis. Howfar, for example, can we reduce orcommercialize the care for children, the

THE REPRODUCTION OF LABOR POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 111elderly, the sick, without imposing a great coston those in need of care?The degree to which the marketization of food production has contributed to the deterioration ofour health(leading, forexample, totheriseofobesityevenamong children) is instructive.As for the commercializationof reproductive workthrough its redistribution on the shoulders of otherwomen, as currentlyorganized this "solution" only extends the housework crisis, nowdisplaced to the families ofthe paidcareproviders, andcreates newinequalities among women.Whatis needed isthe reopening ofa collective struggle over reproduction,reclaiming controlover the materialconditions ofour reproduction andcreating newforms of cooperation around thisworkoutside ofthe logicof capital and the market.This is not a Utopia, but a processalready underway in manyparts oftheworld and likely to expand in theface of a collapse of theworldfinancial system. Governments are now attempting to usethe crisis to impose stiff austerity regimes onusforyearsto come. But through land takeovers, urban farming, community-supportedagriculture, through squats, the creationofvarious forms ofbarter,mutual aid, alternative forms ofhealthcareto name some of the terrainson which this reorganizationof reproduction ismore developeda neweconomy is beginning to emerge that may turn reproductive work froma stifling, discriminating activity into the most liberating and creativeground of experimentationin human relations.As I stated,this isnot a Utopia. The consequences of the globalizedworld economy would certainly have been farmore nefarious except forth e efforts that millions ofwomen have made to ensure that their familieswould be supported, regardless oftheirvalue on the capitalist labor market.Throughtheirsubsistence activities, as well as various forms ofdirect action (from squattingon public land to urbanfarming) women have helpedtheir communities to avoidtotal dispossession, to extendbudgetsand addfood to the kitchenpots.Amidwars, economic crises, and devaluations, astheworldaroundthemwasfalling apart,theyhave planted corn on abandoned town plots, cooked food to sellon the side of the streets, createdcommunalkitchensola communes, as in Chile and Peruthus standingin the way of a total commodification of life and beginning a process ofreappropriation and recollectivization of reproduction that is indispensableifwe are to regain control over our lives. The festive squares and"occupy"movements of2011are in awayacontinuationofthisprocess asthe "multitudes" have understood that no movemen t is sustainable that does no tplace at its center the reproduction of those participating in it, thus alsotransforming the protestdemonstrations intomomentsof collective reproduction and cooperation.

federici, silvia the reproduction of labor power in the global economy and the unfinished reminist...

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