Conclusions

As we said in the Introduction, the present critique of The Arcane of Reproduction was principally aimed at commenting on a few questions that have been central in the Autonomist tradition:

• Does reproductive work (and in general any work outside the sphere of production) create value?

• Is the whole society a large factory where any work or activity not only produce value but are also organized as waged work?

• Can we see class relation in capitalism as the antagonism between capital, i.e. a subject that merely wants to impose (work) discipline, and the working class?

In Section 1 we explored the reasons behind the Autonomist argument that work outside the sphere of production creates value. We showed that this ‘quest’ for value is consistent with the Autonomist subjectivist reading of Marx’s categories, e.g. value and abstract labor: if value and abstract labor have immediate meanings in terms of subjective antagonism with capital, they may be extended to explain the struggles of the unwaged: the unemployed, students, etc.

Starting from Fortunati’s claim that the family is a hidden factory organized ‘capitalistically’, in Section 2 we explored the Autonomist thesis that all waged and unwaged work is organized by capital as in an extended factory. We acknowledged that this theorization has a moment of truth — it is true that capital tends to impose the discipline of waged work onto unwaged activity. It is true that this can explain the antagonism of the unwaged. It is also true that any disruption of reproduction or circulation is a disruption of the workings of capital as a whole — thus struggles outside the workplace can be effective against capital. However, this does not necessarily mean, nor requires as a precondition, that unwaged work must create value.

In Section 3 we discussed the way in which capital imposes ‘discipline’ on unwaged activity. We considered the dialectical interplay of capital’s despotism within the workplace and bourgeois exchange, which regulates the division of labor and defines the horizons for individual choice and possibility in society. We stressed that bourgeois freedom and equality and capital’s despotism are two sides of the same coin.

In Section 4 we argued that The Arcane of Reproduction lacks this dialectical understanding. We quoted a few sentences, among many, which suggest that freedom, equality (and Bentham) are illusory in capitalism only because they are constrained by despotism and distorted by unequal exchange — an old Proudhonian idea. There is no clear attempt to explore the role of bourgeois freedom of exchange and value in capital’s rule — instead, the centrality of exchange and value in human relations is uncritically assumed as natural and ahistorical. We found a similar one-sidedness in Negri and Hardt. In Empire the authors dream about ‘republicanism’, and claim that ‘a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’ is possible on the basis of the already existing wealth of individual freedom and productive creativity.[120] And they denounce capital’s imposition of discipline and control over this freedom and creativity. All this means is to theorize only one possible freedom or creativity: the only ones defined within the bourgeois relations as given.[121]

Section 5 went to the core of Fortunati’s own theory in The Arcane of Reproduction, i.e. that labor power is ‘a commodity like all others’ thus it must contain value as the crystallization of abstract labor of housework. We disagreed and argued that in wage-work relations labor power is sold as a commodity, but it is a special commodity, different from all others — this difference exposes the inequality inherent in the wage-work relation. We argued that conceptualizing labor power as ‘a commodity like all others’ and thinking that we all produce value means to conceptualize society as being made up of independent producers: producers of cakes, producers of labor power... and we felt that this betrayed a petty bourgeois delusion. In general, we noticed a common tendency in Autonomist Marxism to consider within the same theoretical framework labor power and other commodities (e.g. energy and food); or a tendency to conflate the despotism of the foreman on the waged worker with the pressure of the market on the independent producer.[122]

In Section 6 we discussed the nature of value and abstract labor and showed that Fortunati’s understanding of these concepts is fundamentally flawed. In general, one may be tempted to widen Marx’s original concept of value in order to embrace both waged and unwaged work (students, housewives...), or both productive and unproductive work (financial, advertising industry...), within the same ‘theoretical framework’. However, it is questionable that ‘labeling’ everything that happens under the sun of capital as ‘production of value’ is a useful way of explaining how capital works and dominates.[123]

In fact, the Autonomist attempt to ‘valorize’ all activity tends to mix up a moral conception of ‘valorization’ with an economic one. The claim of a social reward which society supposedly ‘owes’ the unwaged because of some alleged role in ‘producing value’ is part of a tradition of struggles of the unemployed and housewives of the ’70s which confronted their States and ended up demanding social support from them. This tradition has survived in some theorists who belonged or still belong to the Autonomist tradition.[124] As we discussed earlier, in Empire the claim that unwaged work creates value is explicitly aimed at justifying moralistically the demand for a ‘reward’, a ‘citizen’s wage’, for the unwaged.

The Arcane of Reproduction contributes to this tendency and theorizes that housewives are denied recognition of social and economic status within the present social relations as producers of ‘value’. She cannot imagine any reality beyond that offered by bourgeois relations and cannot think or claim anything beyond this restricted horizon. This is why she claims that demanding that the housewife be ‘allowed to consume’ or praising parents’ practice in giving pocket money to children is ‘very anti-capitalist’![125]

As it was discussed throughout this article, some authors within the Autonomist Marxist tradition still retain a criticism of the commodity form, e.g. De Angelis and Cleaver. While it was important to consider that Fortunati shares themes and jargon with these authors, it was also necessary to stress their differences.[126]

Only a few words about Fortunati’s style and methodology. Fortunati’s ‘dense’ style is one of the main reasons for our disappointment as readers. A text intended to present a new theory should have the quality of rigor, a quality that this pamphlet does not have. What can we make of her theory if we read one thing on one page and the opposite on the next? In fact we showed that Fortunati’s convoluted style actually hides contradictions and the lack of conceptual clarity in her content.

If readers are not intimidated enough by Fortunati’s style, they will surely be by her methodology. Fortunati’s analysis starts with an axiom, a ‘truth’, which the reader has to accept without arguments or justifications for it: ‘labor power is a commodity like all others, contained within the person of the worker’. This ‘truth’ and its ‘logical’ consequences contradict facts and previous theories, but this does not mean that there is something wrong — only that those facts are ‘apparent’ and those theories are ‘misconceived’ — she says with an authoritative tone which does not admit reply.[127] The result of this methodology is a ‘new theory’ which needs plenty of suspended disbelief because it is at odds with reality, theories, logic, common sense, or concrete experience. This methodology explains the... arcane of all the ‘complexities’ that Fortunati seems to find in her subject matter page by page.[128] Indeed, even very simple facts become ‘extremely complex’ if they are analyzed through a theory that is at odds with reality and which has rejected theories previously devised to explain reality straightforwardly.

So then, does housework create value, or not? We have seen in the previous sections that the answer is: no. Housework does not produce commodities, and the labor involved in it cannot be abstracted and measured as abstract labor, as a contribution to value. But we have also seen the value supposedly created by housework cannot be pinned down anywhere.

In the TV comedy The Fast Show which was popular in UK at the end of the ’90s one of the sketches was a studio interview, where a journalist invited an explorer to talk about a discovery he had made, of a monster in the wild. But, question by question, the explorer reveals that he did not see the monster because it was invisible; that the monster made a terrifying silence; and that it did not leave traces because it hovered about. At this point the journalist gets up in anger and chases the explorer out of the studio. Fortunati’s invisible value, which does not manifest itself on the market, which floats in the air, and that needs to be created again by the husband worker during the process of production while it had allegedly already been created by his wife in the process of reproduction, has exactly the same qualities of the Fast Show’s monster: i.e., if it is really there or not, if you swear about its existence or not, it does not make any difference in the world.