THE REPRODUCTION OF LABOR-POWER IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY,
MARXIST THEORY AND THE UNFINISHED FEMINIST REVOLUTION
Women's work and women's labor are buried deeply
in the heart of the capitalist social and economic structure.
(David Staples, No Place Like Home, 2006)
It is clear that capitalism has led to the super-exploitation of 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 if it completely
ignores or suppresses this resistance it might become more and more radical, eventually
turning into a movement for self-reliance and perhaps even the nucleus of a new social
order. (Robert Biel, The New Imperialism, 2000)
The emerging liberative agent in the Third World is the unwaged force of women who are
not yet disconnected from the life economy by their work. They serve life not commodity
production. They are the hidden underpinning of the world economy and the wage
equivalent of their life-serving work is estimate at &16 trillion." (John McMurtry, The
Cancer State of Capitalism, 1999)
The pestle has snapped
because of so much pounding
tomorrow I will go home.
Until tomorrow
Until tomorrow…
Because of so much pounding
Tomorrow I will go home.
(Hausa Women's Song, from Nigeria)
INTRODUCTION
This essay is a political reading of the restructuring of the [re]production of labor-power
in the global economy, but it is also a feminist critique of Marx that, in different ways,
has been developing since the 1970s, first articulated by activists in the Campaign for
Wages For Housework, especially Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina
Fortunati, among others, and later by the feminists of the Bielefeld school, Maria Mies,
Claudia Von Werlhof, Veronica Benholdt-Thomsen. (1) At the center of this critique is the
argument that Marx's analysis of capitalism has been hampered by its almost exclusive
focus on commodity production and its blindness to the significance of women's unpaid
reproductive work and the sexual division of labor in capitalist accumulation. (2) For
ignoring this work has limited Marx’s understanding of the mechanisms perpetuating the
exploitation of labor, and led him to assume that capitalist development is both inevitable
and progressive, on the assumption that scarcity is an obstacle to human selfdetermination,
but capital’s expansion of the forces of production, through large scale
industrialization, would in time lead to its transcendence. Marx had apparently second
thoughts on this matter in the later years of his life. As for us, a century and a half after
the publication of Capital, we must challenge this view for at least three reasons.
Whether or not scarcity has ever been an obstacle to human liberation, scarcity today is
the product of capitalist production. Second, while capitalist production enhances
cooperation in the organization of work, it accumulates differences and divisions within
the proletariat through its organization of social reproduction. Third, from the Mexican to
the Chinese Revolution, the most anti-systemic struggles of the last century have not been
waged by industrial workers, Marx’ projected revolutionary subjects, but by campesino/
as. Today as well, they are fought by subsistence farmers, urban squatters, undocumented
migrants, as well as high-tech workers in Europe and North America. Most important,
they are fought by women who, against all odds, are reproducing their families regardless
of the value the market places on their lives, valorizing their existence, reproducing them
for their own sake, even when 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? In what follows, 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 the
21st century anti-capitalist movements it must rethink the question of “reproduction” in a
planetary perspective. Reflecting on the activities which reproduce our life dispels, in
fact, the illusion that the automation of production may create the material conditions for
a non-exploitative society, showing that the obstacle to “revolution” is not the lack of
technological know-how, but the divisions which capitalist development reproduces in
the working class. Indeed, the danger today, is that beside devouring the earth, capitalism
unleashes more wars of the kind the US has launched in Afghanistan and Iraq, sparked
off by the corporate need to gain access to mineral and hydrocarbon wealth, and by
proletarian competition for a wealth that cannot be generalized. (Federici 2008)
SECTION 1. MARX AND THE REPRODUCTION OF THE WORK-FORCE
Surprisingly, given his theoretical sophistication, Marx ignored the existence of women’s
reproductive work. He acknowledged that, no less than every other commodity, laborpower
must be produced and, insofar as it has value, it represents “a definite quantity of
the average social labor objectified in it.” (Marx 1990, Vol. 1: 274) But while
meticulously exploring the dynamics of yarn production and valorization, he was succinct
when tackling 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 neo-liberal scheme, in Marx's account too, all that is
needed to [re]produce labor-power are 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. (Marx 1990, Vol. 1, ibid.) (3) One
assembly-line produces both. Accordingly, the value of labor-power is measured on 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 (Marx 1990, Vol. 1: 276-7). (4)
Even when he discusses the reproduction of the workers on a generational basis, Marx is
extremely sparse. 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. (Marx, ibid.: 275) But, once again, the only relevant agents he recognizes in this
process are the male, self-reproducing workers, their wages and their means of
subsistence. The production of workers is by means of commodities. 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 phenomenon, arguing that is
through the changes in the organization of production that a surplus population is
periodically created to satisfy the changing needs of the labor market. (5)
Elsewhere, I presented several hypotheses to explain why Marx so persistently ignored
women's reproductive work, why (e.g.) he did not ask what transformations the raw
materials implicated in the reproduction of labor-power must undergo in order for their
value to be transferred into their products (as he did in the case of other commodities). I
suggested that the conditions of the working class in England --Marx's and Engel's point
of reference-- shaped his description. (Federici 2004) Marx described the condition of the
industrial proletariat of his time as he saw it, and women’s domestic labor was hardly part
of it. Housework, as a specific branch of capitalist production, was below Marx's historic
and political horizon at least in the industrial working class. Although from the first phase
of capitalist development, and especially in the mercantilist period, reproductive work
was formally subsumed to capitalist accumulation, it was only in the late 19th century
that domestic work emerged as the key engine for the reproduction of the industrial
workforce, organized by capital for capital, according to the requirements of factory
production. Until the 1870s, consistently with a policy tending to the "unlimited
extension of the working day" (ibid. 346) and the utmost compression of the cost of
labor-power production, reproductive work was reduced to a minimum, resulting in the
situation powerfully described in Capital Vol.1, in the chapter on the Working Day, and in
Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), That is, the situation of a
working class almost unable to reproduce itself, averaging a life expectancy of 20 years
of age, dying in its youth of overwork (6)
Only at the end of the 19th century did the capitalist class began to invest in the
reproduction of labor, in conjunction with a shift in the form of accumulation, from light
to heavy industry, requiring a more intensive labor-discipline and a less emaciated type of
worker. In Marxian terms, we can say that the development of reproductive work and the
consequent emergence of the full-time housewife were the products of the transition from
absolute to relative surplus.(7) Not surprisingly, then, while acknowledging that "the
maintenance and reproduction of the working class remains a necessary condition for the
reproduction of capital," Marx could immediately add: "But capitalist may safely leaves
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…" (Capital Vol.1, chapter 23: 718).
We can also presume that the difficulties posed by the classification of a labor not subject
to monetary valuation further motivated Marx to remain silent on this matter, especially
as he faced the uneasy task of illustrating the specific character of capitalist relations. But
there is a further reason, more 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 ignored women’s reproductive labor because he remained wedded to
a technologistic concept of revolution, where freedom comes through the machine, where
the increase in the productivity of labor-- understood as increase of output in time-- is
assumed to be the material foundation for communism, and where the capitalist
organization of work is viewed as the highest model of historical rationality, held up for
every other form of production, including the reproduction of the work-force. In other
words, Marx failed to recognized the importance of reproductive work because he
accepted the capitalist criteria for what constitutes work and believed waged industrial
work was the scenario where the destiny of humanity would be shaped.
With few exceptions, Marx's followers have reproduced the same assumptions, (witness
the continuing love affair with the famous “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse),
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 acknowledging the existence of women’s
reproductive work in capitalism, have tended to stress its presumably antiquated,
backward, pre-capitalist character and imagined the socialist reconstruction of it in the
form of a rationalization process, raising its productivity level to that achieved by the
leading sectors of capitalist production.(8)
One consequence of this blind spot in modern times has been that Marxist theorists have
been unable to grasp the historic importance of the post-World War II women's revolt
against reproductive work, as expressed in the Women's Liberation Movement, and
ignored its practical redefinition of what constitutes work, who is the working class, and
the nature of the class struggle. Only when women left the organizations of the Left in
droves did Marxists recognized the WLM. To this day, many Marxists are pondering on
the relation between class and gender; view the popularity of the latter category as a
cultural indulgence, a concession to post-modernism, and either bypass the question of
reproductive work, as it is the case even with an Eco-Marxist like Peter Burkett (200…)
(9) or pay lip service to it, assimilating it --again-- to commodity production, as in
Negri's conception of "affective labor," which takes us to a pre-feminist conception of
reproduction. Indeed, Marxist theorists are generally even more indifferent to the
question of reproduction than Marx himself, who could devote pages to the conditions of
factory children, whereas it would be a challenge today to seek for references to children
in a Marxist text.
I return later to the limits of contemporary Marxism, to notice its inability to grasp the
significance of the neoliberal turn and globalization process. For the moment suffice to
say that already in the 1960s, under the impact of the anti-colonial struggle and the
struggle against apartheid in the United States, Marx's account of capitalism and class
relations was subjected to a radical critique by Third Worldist political writers (e.g.,
Samir Amin and Gunder Frank) who challenged its Euro-centrism, its condoning of
colonial expansion, and his privileging of the wage industrial proletariat as the primary
object of exploitation and revolutionary subject. However, it was the revolt of women
against housework in Europe and the US, and later the rise of feminist movements across
the planet, in the 1980s and 1990s that triggered the most radical rethinking of Marxism.
SECTION 2. WOMEN'S REVOLT AGAINST HOUSEWORK AND THE FEMINIST
REDEFINITION OF WORK, CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE CAPITALIST CRISIS.
It seems to be a social law that the value of labor is proven and perhaps created by its
refusal. This was certainly the case of housework which remained invisible and unvalued
until a movement of women emerged who refused to accept reproduction work as
their natural destiny. It was women's revolt against this work in the '60s and '70s that
disclosed the centrality of unpaid domestic labor in capitalist economy, reconfiguring our
image of society as an immense circuit of domestic plantations and assembly lines where
the production of workers is articulated on a daily and generational basis.
Not only did feminists establish that the reproduction of labor-power involves a far
broader range of activities than the consumption of commodities, as food must be
cooked, clothes have to be washed, bodies have to be stroked and made love to. Their
recognition of the importance of reproduction and women's domestic labor for capital
accumulation led to a rethinking of Marx's categories, and a new understanding of the
history and fundamentals of capitalist 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 inaugurated, confirming that capitalism is not
identifiable with waged, contractual work, that, in essence, it is un-free labor, and
revealing the umbilical connection between the devaluation of reproductive work and the
devaluation of women's social position.
This paradigm shift also had political consequences. The most immediate was the refusal
of the slogans of the Marxist left, such as the ideas of the "general strike" or "refusal of
work," both of which were never inclusive of house-workers. Over time, the realization
has grown that Marxism, filtered through Leninism and social-democracy, has expressed
the interests of a limited sector of the world proletariat, that of white, adult, make
workers, largely drawing their power from the fact that they work in the leading sectors
of capital industrial production, at the highest levels of technological development.
On the positive side, the discovery of reproductive work has made it possible to
understand that capitalist production relies on the production of a particular type of
worker, and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, procreation, and thus to
redefine the private sphere as a sphere of relations of production and a terrain of anticapitalist
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 of divorces could be read as instances of resistance to the capitalist discipline
of work. The personal became political and capital and the state were found to have
subsumed our lives and reproduction down to the bedroom.
On the basis of this analysis, by the mid 1970s, a crucial era in capitalist policy-making
--the one in which the first steps were taken towards a neo-liberal restructuring of the
world economy-- 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
increasing resistance of new generations of African, Asians, Latin Americans, Caribbeans
to the legacy of colonialism. Key contributions were the works of Dalla Costa, Fortunati,
Boch, who showed that women's invisible struggles against domestic discipline were
subverting the model of reproduction that had been the pillar of the Fordist deal. Dalla
Costa pointed out, for instance, that, since the end of WWII, women in Europe had been
engaged in a silent strike against procreation, as evinced by the collapse of the birth rate
and governments' promotion of immigration. (10) Fortunati in Brutto Ciao (1976)
examined the motivations behind Italian women's post-WWII exodus from the rural
areas, their re-orientation of the family wage towards the reproduction of the new
generations, and the connection between women’s post-war quest for independence, their
increased investment in their children, and the increased combativeness of the new
generations of workers.
By the mid 1970s these struggle were no longer "invisible", but had become an open
repudiation of the sexual division of labor, with all its corollaries: economic dependence
on men, social subordination, confinement to an unpaid, naturalized form of labor, a
state-controlled sexuality and procreation.
Contrary to a widespread misconception, the crisis was not confined to white middle class
women. On the contrary, the first women's liberation movement in the US was arguably a
movement of Black Women. It was the Welfare Mothers Movement that, inspired by the
Civil Rights Movement, led the first campaign for state-funded wages for housework
women have fought for in the country, (under the guise of Aid to Dependent Children)
asserting the economic value of women's reproductive work, and declaring "welfare" a
women's right.
Women were on the move also across Africa, Asia, Latin America, as the first United
Nations Global Conference on Women held in Mexico City in 1975 demonstrated. The
conference and those that followed proved that women's struggles over reproduction were
redirecting post-colonial economies towards increased investment in the domestic workforce
and were the single most important factor in the failure of the World Bank's
development plans for the commercialization of agriculture. In Africa, women had
consistently refused being recruited to work on their husbands' cash crops, defending,
instead, subsistence oriented agriculture, in this process transforming the village from a
site for the reproduction of cheap labor (Meillassoux) to a site of resistance to
exploitation. By the 1980s, this resistance was recognized as the main factor in the crisis
of the World Bank's agricultural development projects, prompting a flood of articles on
“women's contribution to development.”
Given the events I have described, it is not surprising that the restructuring that has taken
place with 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."
In what follows, I examine the main aspects of this restructuring trying to assess the
prevailing trends, its social consequences, and its impact on class relations. First,
however, I want to clarify why I continue to use the concept of labor-power which some
feminists have criticized, pointing out that women produce living individuals --children,
relatives, friends-- not labor-power. The critique is well taken. Labor-power is an
abstraction. As Marx tells us, echoing Sismondi, it “is nothing unless it is sold,” and
utilized. (1990: 277) I maintain this concept, however, for various reasons. First in order
to highlight the fact that in capitalist society reproductive work is not the free
reproduction of ourselves or others according to our and their desires. To the extent that
directly or indirectly it is exchanged for a wage, reproduction work is, at all points,
subjected to the conditions imposed on it by the capitalist organization and relations of
production. In other words, housework is not a free activity. It is "the production and
reproduction of the capitalist most indispensable means of production: the worker" (ibid.)
( ) As such, it is subject to all the constraints that derive from the fact that its product
must satisfy the requirements of the labor market.
Second, highlighting the reproduction of "labor-power" reveals the duality, the
contradiction inherent in reproductive labor 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 simultaneously be a process of creation and
valorization of desired attributes and capacities and an accommodation 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, so it is impossible to draw a line
between the two corresponding aspects of reproductive work, but maintaining the concept
brings out the tension, the potential separation, it suggests a world of conflicts,
resistances, contradictions that have political 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 communities,
for this work imprisons the producers as well as those reproduced.
I also want to defend my continuing to maintain, against postmodern 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 US, especially from the student and feminist movements, have taught the
capitalist class that investing in the reproduction of the future generation of workers
"does not pay," it is no a guarantee of an increase in the productivity of labor. Thus, not
only has state investment in the work-force been drastically reduced, but reproductive
activities have been reorganized as value-producing services that workers must purchase
and pay for. In this way, the value which reproductive activities produce is immediately
realized, rather than being made conditional on the performance of the workers they
reproduce. But, as I show later, the expansion of the service sector has not eliminated
home-based, unpaid reproductive work nor the sexual division of labor in which it is
embedded, which still divides production and reproduction, in terms of the subjects of
these activities and the discriminating function of the wage and lack of it.
Last, I speak of "reproductive," rather than "affective" labor because even in its
Spinozistic connotations, this term describes a limited part of the work that the
reproduction of human beings requires, and it erases the subversive potential of the
feminist concept of reproductive work which, by unveiling the contradictions inherent in
this work, recognizes the possibility of alliances, forms of cooperation between producers
and reproduced --mothers and children, teachers and students, nurses and patients.
.
Keeping this particular character of reproductive work in mind, let us 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 women, traditionally the
main subjects of reproductive work? Last, what do we learn from this restructuring
concerning capitalist development and the place of Marxist theory in the anti-capitalist
struggles of our time? My answer to these questions is in two parts. First, I will discuss
briefly the main changes globalization has produced in the general process of social
reproduction and the class relation, to then discuss more extensively the restructuring of
reproductive work.
SECTION 3. NAMING OF THE INTOLERABLE. PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION
AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF REPRODUCTION
There are five major ways in which the restructuring of the world economy we refer to as
“globalization” has responded to the cycle of struggles that culminated in the 1960 and
1970s and transformed the organization of reproduction and class relations.
First, has been the expansion of the labor market. Globalization has produced a historic
leap in the size of the world proletariat, through a global process of enclosures that has
separated millions form their lands, their jobs, their “customary rights” and through the
increased employment of women. Not surprisingly, globalization has presented itself as a
process of Primitive Accumulation. It has taken many forms: (i) in the north industrial
deconcentration and relocation, as well as flexibilization and precarization of work, just
in time production; (ii) in the former socialist countries the de-statalization of industry
and decollectivization of agriculture and privatization social wealth; (iii) in the South,
import liberalization, currency devaluation, the maquilization of production, “structural
adjustment.” However, everywhere, the objective has been the same. By destroying
subsistence economies, by separating producers from the means of subsistence, by
making millions dependent on monetary incomes, even when unable to access waged
employment, once again, the capitalist class has through the world labor market, regained
the initiative, re-launched the accumulation process, cut the cost of labor-production. Two
billion people have been added to the labor market. This demonstrates the fallacy of
theories [see Negri and Hardt in Mutltitude and Empire] arguing that capitalism no longer
requires massive amounts of living labor, since it is moving towards an increasing
automation of production.
Second, the de-territorialization of capital, and financialization of economic activities
have seemingly liberated capital from the constraints imposed on it by resistance to
expropriation and exploitation of labor.
Third, the disinvestment by the state in the reproduction of the work-force, [through
Structural Adjustment, the dismantling of the “welfare state” and state-socialism] have
massively cut pensions, healthcare services, public transport, placed high consumer fees
upon them, forced individual to take on the full cost of their reproduction. The struggles
of the 1960s have taught capital that investing in the reproduction of labor-power does
not pay, it does not necessarily translate into a higher productivity of work.
Fourth, there has been an immense expansion in capital’s free appropriation and
exploitation of “natural resources.” Mostly through the mechanism of ‘debt repayment”
and “structural adjustment,” from Africa to Asia countries have been led to sell their
forests, expropriate/privatize immense tracts of lands, home to large population and make
them available for mineral extraction
Combined, these trends have produced an immense leap in capital accumulation, but
caused a drastic worldwide devaluation of labor-power, and underdevelopment of social
reproduction. They have abrogated any social contract and have deregulated labor
relations. As a consequence, we have seen the return on a massive scale of un-free forms
of labor. Through the globalization of the world economy, especially the computerization
of work and de-territorialization of capital, an economic system has been created
allowing for a permanent process of Primitive Accumulation (Werlhof) such as not only
destroy those "pockets of communism" that more than a century of workers' struggle had
won, but undermine our “production of commons.” From this viewpoint, it is impossible
to share the optimism of Hardt and Negri [see Empire and Multitude], who argue that
with the computerization of work and the information revolution we are entering that
phase of total automation anticipated by Marx in Grundrisse, when capitalist production
no longer requires living labor, when labor-time is no longer the measure of value, and
the end of work is at hand, only depending on a change in property relations.
While taken in isolation, aspects of this re-conversion--e.g. the flexibilization and
precarization of work-- may appear as liberating alternatives (for example to the
regimentation of the 9-to-5 routine), if not anticipations of the workerless society. But
from the viewpoint of the totality workers-capital relations, they are an unequivocable
expressions of capital’s continuing power to deconcentrate workers, and preclude
effective organizational struggle in the waged work-place. Also the de-statalization of
industry and investment in the work-force, whether in former socialist or capitalist
countries, while seemingly responding to the revolt against the bureaucratization of life
imposed by the socialist and welfare states has been a set back. It is an expression of
capital’s power to refuse all social contract, to de facto abrogate all contractual relations,
and return to a state of affairs where the only guarantee workers are provided is the
absolute lack of any security as far as wages, benefits, employment. In sum, from the
viewpoint of social reproduction we can see that the technological leap achieved through
the computerization of production has been premised on an immense destruction of
social, economic, ecological wealth, an immense leap in the exploitation and devaluation
of labor, and the deepening of divisions within the world proletariat.
The economic and social consequences of these developments have been dramatic. Real
incomes and employment have fallen across the world, access to natural means of
subsistence has drastically declined, pauperization and even hunger have become
widespread phenomena, also in the developed countries. Thirty-seven million are going
hungry in the United States, according to a recent report. Far from being reduced by the
introduction of labor saving technology, the work-day and working-life have been
lengthened to a maximum, making “leisure time” and retirement seem utopias. In the US,
moonlighting--up to three jobs--is now a necessity among most workers; stripped of their
pensions, many 60-to-70 years old are returning to the job market. Meanwhile, the
corporate destruction of forests, oceans waters, coral reefs, animal and vegetable species
has reached a historic peak and so has the degree of conflict and warfare not just between
capitalists and workers but among workers themselves made to battle for the diminishing
resources. (McMurtry: 105-111).
As mentioned, we have also witnessed the return of unfree labor, and the increasing
criminalization of the working class, through mass incarceeration (recalling the 17th
century Grand Confinement), and the formation of an ex-lege proletariat made of
undocumented immigrants, under-the-counter workers, producers of illicit goods, sexworkers
--it is a multitude of proletarians working in the shadow, reminding us that the
existence of a population of rightless workers -- whether slaves, colonial subjects, peons,
convicts, or sans papiers-- remains a structural necessity of capital accumulation.
Especially harsh has been the attack on youth, in particular black youth, the heir of the
legacy of Black Power, but including, in a sort of pre-emptive strike and exorcism of
1968, a broader population of youngsters to whom nothing has been conceded, neither
the certainty of employment nor access to education, Not surprisingly, but very telling,
among the social consequences of the restructuring of reproduction there has been the
increase in youth suicide, as well as the increase in violence against women and children
including infanticide.
Certainly, this assault on workers reproduction has not gone unchallenged. The
widespread use of credit money in the US should be seen as a response to the decline in
wages and refusal to the austerity imposed by the wage decline. Across the world, a
movement of movements has grown that has challenged every aspect of globalization.
This in part explain the continuing necessity of WAR and CRISIS as pillar of
accumulation.
Looking at the global economy from the viewpoint of social reproduction we must also
conclude that, notwithstanding the Internet, communication and social cooperation have
not expanded. Not only has globalization undermined the main material conditions for
the "production of commons," which is the communal possession of land and natural
resources. Far from flattening the world-order into a network of equally interdependent
circuits --as liberal economists, journalists like Thomas Friedman, as well Marxist
Autonomists like Negri maintain-- it has reconstructed it as a pyramidal structure,
increasing inequality and polarization, and deepening the hierarchies that have
historically characterized the sexual and international division of labor, which the anticolonial
struggle and the women's liberation movements had undermined.
The strategic center of Primitive Accumulation has been the former colonial world,
historically the underbelly of the capitalist system, the place of slavery and plantations. It
is here we have witnessed the most radical processes of expropriation and pauperization,
the most radical disinvestment by the state and devaluation of labor. This process has
been well documented. Starting in the 1980s, as a consequence of SAP, unemployment in
most TW countries has soared so high that USAID could recruit workers offering nothing
better than Food for Work. Wages have fallen so low that women maquila workers have
been reported buying milk by the glass, eggs or tomatoes one at a time. Entire
populations have been demonetized, while simultaneously their lands has been taken
away for government projects and given to foreign investors. Presently half of Africa is
on emergency aid (Moyo and Yeros). In West Africa, from Niger to Nigeria, to Ghana, the
electricity has been turn off, the national grids have been disabled forcing those who can
afford them to buy individual generators, whose buzzing sound now fills the nights,
making it difficult for people even to sleep. Governmental health and education budgets,
subsidies to farmers, supports for basic necessities all have been slashed, axed, gutted. As
a consequence, life expectancy is falling and phenomena have reappeared that capitalism
was supposed to have erased from the face of the earth long ago: famines, starvation,
recurrent epidemics, wars, even witch-hunts. Mike Davis has used the phrase “Planet of
Slums” in referring to this situation, but it is more correct to speak of a “Planet of
ghettos,” a regime of global apartheid.
If we further consider that through the debt crisis and SAP, Third World countries have
been forced to divert food production from the domestic to the export-market, turn arable
land from production of edible crops to mineral extraction and bio-fuel production, clearcut
their forests, become dumping grounds for all types of waste, as well as grounds of
predation for pharmaceutical gene hunters, then, we must conclude that, in international
capital's plans there are now world regions marked for "near-zero-reproduction." Indeed,
we can see that DEATH-POWER is as important as BIO-POWER in the shaping of
capitalist relations, as a means of dis-accumulate unwanted workers, blunt resistances, cut
the cost of labor production.
It is a measure of the degree to which the reproduction of the work force has been
underdeveloped in the Third World that millions are facing untold hardships and the
prospect of death and incarceration in order to migrate. Certainly migration is not just a
"necessity" but a choice, an exodus towards higher levels of struggle, a means to reappropriate
the stolen wealth (Yann Moulier Boutang, Papadopoulos, Mezzadra). It is
also true that migration has acquired an autonomous character that makes it difficult to
use it as a regulatory mechanism. But there is no doubt that millions leave their countries
because they cannot reproduce themselves in them. This is especially evident when we
consider that half of the migrants are women, many married, with children whom they
must leave behind. This practice is highly unusual historically. Women are those who
stay, not due to lack of initiative or traditional restraints, but because they take the
responsibility for the reproduction of their families. They are the ones who make sure
children have food, often going themselves without, and the elderly or the sick are cared
for. Thus, when hundreds of thousands leave, to face years of humiliation and alienation,
and live with the anguish of not being able give to the people they love the care they give
to others across the world, we know that something quite dramatic is happening in the
organization of world reproduction.
We must reject, however, the conclusion that the obvious indifference of the international
capitalist class to the loss of life globalization is producing is proof that capital no longer
needs living labor. In reality the destruction of human life on a large scale has been
structural component of capitalism from its inception, as the necessary counterpart of the
accumulation of workers, which is inevitably a violent process. The recurrent
“reproduction crises” we have witnessed in Africa over the last decades are rooted in this
dialectic. Also the return of non-contractual labor and of phenomena that may appear
abominations in a "modern world"--mass incarceration, the traffic in blood, organs,
human parts-- should be understood in this context. Capitalism fosters a permanent
reproduction crisis. If it has not been more apparent, it is because the “human
catastrophes” it has caused have been historically externalized, been confined to the
colonies, thus made invisible or rationalized as effects of cultural backwardness,
attachment to misguided traditions, tribalism. This “externalization” continues today, as
does the its ideological cover up. The economic and social disintegration many TW
countries are experiencing due to the effects of economic liberalization is rationalized
through the revamping of a colonial ideology that blames the victims, relying on the
increasing distancing of worlds, and the anxiety about others created by the apparent
diminishing of resources.
Last, globalization has so unmistakably revealed the cost of the technologization of
production that it has become unconceivable for us to speak, as Marx does in the
Grundrisse, of the “civilizing influence of capital” in reference to its “universal
appropriation of nature” and "its production of a 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 right; and the theoretical acknowledgement of its
independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human
requirements, either as an object of consumption or a means of production.” (Grundrisse,
quoted by McLellan : 363-4)
Just as with steel plants, computers too --their materials, their fabrication, and their
operation-- have a major polluting effect on the environment. The old as well the new
machines are already destroying the earth, so much so that as the recent conference in
Poland demonstrates “survivability” has become a political demand. [ ] In this case as
well, so much is daily heard on the topic, that we risk repeating the obvious. But the
unwillingness/inability of policy makers to change capital’s course, in the face of
accumulating evidence of global warming and other catastrophes in the make,
demonstrates not only that ‘capitalism is unsustainable” (Dalla Costa) but any dream of
technological exodus from it is preposterous.
SECTION 1V. REPRODUCTIVE LABOR, WOMEN WORK AND GENDER
RELATIONS IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
It is against this background that we must ask how has reproductive work has fared in the
global economy and how have the changes it has undergone shaped the sexual division of
labor and the relations between women and men. Here as well the substantive difference
between production and reproduction stands out. The first difference to be noticed is that
while production has been restructured through a technological leap in key areas of the
world economy [ ], no technological leap has occurred in the sphere of “housework”
significantly reducing the labor socially necessary labor for the reproduction of the
workforce. In the North, the personal computer has entered the reproduction of a small
part of the population, shopping, socializing, acquiring information, even some form of
sex-work can now be done online. Japanese companies are promoting the robotization of
companionship and mating. Among their inventions are “nursebots” that gives baths to
the elderly (Folbre) 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, housework has not been reduced, instead, it has been marketized, redistributed,
mostly on the shoulders of immigrant women from the South and former socialist
countries. However, women still perform the bulk of it. This is because, unlike
commodity production, the reproduction of human beings is to a great extent irreducible
to mechanization, being the satisfaction of complex needs, in which physical and
affective elements are inextricably combined, requiring a high degree of human
interaction and a most labor-intensive process. This is most evident in the reproduction of
children and the elderly that even in its most physical component involves providing a
sense of security, anticipating fears and desires. None of these activities is purely
“material” or “immaterial,” nor can they be broken down in ways making it possible for
them to be mechanized or replaced by the virtual world of online communication.
This is why, rather than being technologized, housework has been redistributed on the
shoulders of different subjects, through its commercialization and globalization. As it is
well documented, owing to women’s increased participation in the wage labor force,
especially in the North, large quotas of housework have been taken out of the home and
reorganized on a commercial basis, leading to the virtual boom of the service industry,
which now constitutes the dominant economic sector from the viewpoint of wage
employment. This means that more meals eaten out of the home, more clothes are washed
in laundromats or by dry-cleaners, more food is bought already prepared for
consumption...There has also been a reduction of reproductive activities as a result of
women’s refusal of the discipline involved in marriage and child-raising. In the US, the
number of births has fallen from 118 per 1000 women in 1960s to 66.7 in 2006, resulting
in an increase in the median age of the population 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) the women’s strike against procreation
continues, resulting in a zero growth demographic regime that is raising much concern
among policy makers and promoted immigration. There has also been a decline in the
number of marriages and married couples in the US from 56% of all households in 1990
to 51% in 2006, and a simultaneous increase in the number of people living alone [in the
US by seven and a half million--from twenty three to thirty and a half million--
amounting to a 30% increase].
Most important, in the age of Structural Adjustment and economic reconversion, a
restructuring of reproduction work has been taken place internationally, whereby much of
the reproduction of the metropolitan work-forces is now performed by immigrant women.
A New International Division of labor has been constructed on the pauperization of the
populations of the Global South whereby women from Eastern Europe or Africa, Latin
America, Asia perform a large quota of the metropolitan work-force, especially providing
for the care of children and the elderly and for the sexual reproduction of male workers.
(see Federici 1995). This has been an extremely important development from many
viewpoints, but not yet sufficiently understood by feminists in its political implications:
the new power relations it has produced among women, the new forms of struggle over
housework which have seen domestic workers and sex workers as the protagonists in
recent years, the limits of the marketization of reproduction it has exposed. While
governments celebrate the “globalization of care” which enables them to reduce the
investment in reproduction, it is clear that this ‘solution’ has a tremendous social cost, at
the expense of the communities from which immigrant women originate.
Neither the reorganization of reproductive work on a market basis, nor the “globalization
of care,” much less the technologization of reproductive work have in any way “liberated
women” and 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
housework in every country, but due to the state's cut of investment in social services and
the decentralization of industrial production the amount of domestic work paid and
unpaid they perform may have actually increased, even when they have had a extradomestic
job.
Three factors have lengthened women's workday and returned work to the home.
First, women have been the shock absorbers of economic globalization, having had to
compensate with their work for the deteriorating economic conditions produced by the
liberalization of the world economy and the states' increasing dis-investment in the
reproduction of the workforce. This has been especially true in the countries subjected to
Structural Adjustment where the state has completely cut spending for healthcare,
education, infrastructure and basic necessities. In most of Africa and South America,
women now must spend more time fetching water, obtaining and preparing food, and
dealing with illnesses that are far more frequent at a time when the marketization of
healthcare has made visits to clinics unaffordable, and malnutrition and environmental
destruction have increased people vulnerability to disease.
In the US 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. Presently, for instance, patients are dismissed almost immediately
after surgery and the home must absorb a variety of post-operative and other therapeutic
medical tasks (e.g. for the chronically ill) that in the past would have been done by
doctors and professional nurses. Also the public assistance to the elderly (with
housekeeping, personal care) has been cut. House visits have been much shortened, the
services provided reduced.
The second factor that has re-centered reproductive labor in the home, has been the
expansion of "homework," partly due to the de-concentration of industrial production,
partly to the spread of informal work. As David Staples, writes, in his No Place Like
Home (2006), far from being an anachronistic form of work, homework has demonstrated
to be a long-term capitalist strategy, which today occupies millions of women and
children worldwide, in towns, villages, suburbs. Staples correctly points out that work is
"inexorably" drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by
organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine
workers' effort to unionize, and drive down wages to a minimum. Many women choose
this work in the attempt to reconcile earning an income with caring for their families, but
the result is enslavement to a work that earns wages "far below the median the work
would pay if performed in a formal setting, and it reproduces a sexual division of labor
that fixes women more deeply to housework." (Staples 1-5)
Last, the growth of female employment and restructuring of reproduction has not
eliminated gender labor hierarchies and inequality. Despite growing male unemployment,
women still earn a fraction of male wages. We have also witnessed an increase of male
violence against women, triggered in part by fear their economic competition, in part by
the frustration men experience not being able to fulfill their role as their families'
providers. In a context of falling wages and widespread unemployment, making it
difficult for them to have a family, many men also use women's bodies through
prostitution as a means of exchange and a path of access to the world market.
This rise of violence against women is hard to quantify and its significance is better
appreciated when considered in qualitative terms, from the viewpoint of the new forms
violence has taken. In several countries, under the impact of Structural Adjustment, the
family has broken up. Often this occurs out of mutual consent--as one or both partners
migrate(s), or both separate in search of some form of income. But many times, it is a
more traumatic event, as in the face of pauperization, husbands desert their wives and
their children. In parts of Africa and India, there have also been attacks on older women,
who have been expelled from their homes and even murdered after being charged with
witchcraft or possession by the devil. This phenomenon most likely reflects a refusal to
support family members who are seen as no longer productive, in the face of diminishing
resources. Other examples of violence traceable to the globalization process have been
the rise of dowry murder in India, the increase in trafficking and other forms of coercion
to sex work, and the increase in the murders of women. Hundreds of young women,
mostly maquila workers, have been murdered in Ciudad Jaurez and other Mexican towns
in the borderlands with the USA, apparently victims of rape or criminal networks
producing pornography and "snuff." But it is above all the institutional violence that has
escalated. This is the violence of absolute pauperization, of inhuman work conditions, of
migration, in clandestine conditions. That migration can be seen as a struggle, a refusal of
pauperization, a search for higher levels of struggle, 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 a political strategy. For as long as reproductive work is devalued, as long it is
considered a private matter and a women's responsibility, women will always confront
capital and the state with less power than men, and in condition of extreme social and
economic vulnerability. It is also important to recognize that there are very serious limits
to the extent to which reproductive work can be reduced or reorganized on a market
basis. How, for example, can we reduce or commercialize the care for children, the
elderly, the sick, except at a great cost for those to be cared for? The degree to which the
marketization of food production has contributed to the deterioration of our health (e.g.
the rise of obesity even among children) is instructive in this context. As for the
commercialization of reproductive work through its redistribution on the shoulders of
other women, this "solution," only extends the housework crisis, now displaced to the
families of the paid care providers, and creates new power relations among women.
What is needed is the re-opening of a collective struggle over reproduction aiming to
regain control over the material conditions of the production of human beings and create
new forms of cooperation around this work that are outside of the logic of capital and the
market. This is not a utopia, but a process that is already under way in many parts of the
world, and that will certainly expand in the face of the collapse of the world financial
system. Governments will attempt to use the crisis to impose stiff austerity regimes on us
for many years to come. Through land takeovers, urban farming, community-supported
agriculture, through squats, the creation of various forms of barter, mutual aid, alternative
forms of healthcare--to name some of the terrains on which the reorganization of
reproduction is more advanced--a 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 struggle is not a utopia. The consequences of the globalization of the
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 their value on the capitalist market. Through their subsistence activities, as well as
various forms of direct action (from squatting on public land to urban farming) women
have helped their communities to avoid total dispossession, to extend budgets, and to add
food to the kitchen pots. Amidst wars, economic crises, devaluations, as the world around
them was falling apart, they have planted corn on abandoned town plots, cooked food to
sell on the side of the streets, created communal kitchens --ola communes, as in the case
of Chile and Peru, thus standing in the way of a total commodification of life and
beginning a process of re-appropriation and re-collectivization of reproduction that is
indispensable if we are to regain control over our lives.
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Women have also refused part of housework, by reducing the number of children, and the
services provided to their partners. In the US, the number of births has fallen from 118
per 1000 women in 1960s to 66.7 in 2006, resulting in an increase in the median age of
the population from 30 in 1980 to 36.4 in 2006. The procreation strike has been even
more dramatic in Europe, where in some countries (Italy e.g.), for years now, natality
rates have been below replacement, There has also been a decline in the number of
marriages and married couples in the US from 56% of all households in 1990 to 51% in
2006, and a simultaneous increase in the number of people living alone [in the US by
seven and a half million--from twenty three to thirty and a half million-- amounting to a
30% increase]. Not last, on the impoverishment of women in former socialist and Third
World countries, a new international division of reproductive work has been organized
that has re-distributed significant quotas of housework on the shoulders of immigrant
women, leading to what is often defined as the "globalization of care work." ….
But these developments have not significantly affected the amount of domestic work
which the majority of women are still expected to perform, nor have they eliminated the
gender-based inequalities built upon it. If we take a global perspective we see that not
only do women still do most of the housework in every country, but due to the state's cut
of investment in social services and the decentralization of industrial production the
amount of domestic work paid and unpaid they perform has actually increased, even
when they have had a extra-domestic job.