The Arcane of Reproductive Production

Introduction

One of the main contentions at the core of Autonomist Marxism is that all human activity in either the sphere of production or in circulation and reproduction is potentially productive, that is, can contribute to the valorization of capital.</strong> The work of reproduction, which is the work done on ourselves and on our families to reproduce ourselves, reproduces our labor power, i.e. our capacity to work for capital — in this sense, Autonomist Marxist theorists argue that the work of reproduction is production for capital. Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction, published in Italy in 1981 and in the US in 1995,[62] seems to be the most sophisticated contribution to this theme so far. While reproductive labor may cover anything from playing video games, attending courses, going to a gym, watching television, looking for a job, etc., in her pamphlet Fortunati deals with culturally specific female activities outside the sphere of production: housework and prostitution.[63]

Fortunati comes from a tradition of Marxist feminism connected to the Autonomist area. One can trace a study of the connection between female work and capital to 70s’ Italy for example in Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In her seminal work Women and the Subversion of the Community, written in 1971, Dalla Costa ‘affirms... [that] the family under capitalism is... a center essentially of social production’; and that housework is not just private work done for a husband and children.[64] Housework is then an important social activity on which capitalist production thrives. However, while Dalla Costa says that activities done within reproduction are ‘if not immediately, then ultimately profitable to the expansion... of the rule of capital’, Fortunati attempts the theoretical leap of demonstrating that housework does produce value within a ‘Marxian’ approach and tries to express this value-creation mathematically.[65] This is brave indeed, as Marx’s analysis of capital would appear to show that this is not the case — thus in order to achieve her aim Fortunati has to revise Marx’s categories — or, in her words, ‘combine them with feminist criticism’ (p. 10) so that they can becomes suitable tools for this aim.

Fortunati’s claim that reproduction produces value is a challenge to the Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ that agrees that the work of reproduction is a precondition of a future creation of value and serves to keep the cost of labor power low, but does not actually create value itself. In this ‘orthodox’ view the work of reproduction is just concrete labor, not abstract labor. Since it is only concrete and not abstract labor, this labor does not add any fresh value but preserves the values of the means of subsistence consumed by the family as the value of labor power. This value manifests itself as the exchange value of labor power.

Fortunati’s main arguments against this view are centered on her concept of labor power, which is the specific product of the woman’s work as a housewife or prostitute: in fact, Fortunati claims that labor power is, without other specifications, ‘a commodity like all others’, which is ‘contained within’ the person of the husband. It is true that when we hire ourselves to the capitalist, our submission takes the form of a sale, the sale of labor power. But, as we will argue in detail later, it is also true that producing and selling labor power is not like producing and selling other commodities, and this difference embodies the essence of our condition as proletariat and dispossessed. With her assumption of labor power as ‘a commodity like all others’ Fortunati eliminates this important difference on the one hand, and on the other hand she is able to conclude straight away that labor power must contain the value corresponding to the abstract labor time expended in its production like ‘all other commodities’ do.[66]

If according to this deduction housework produces value, how can Fortunati explain the fact that no value appears as a result of housework?[67] This is because, she says, in capitalism the individual has been ‘disvested of all value’, devalued, i.e. denied the property of being a carrier of value as a person. This is a devaluation in terms of monetary value: ‘while a slave or serf, i.e. as the property of the master or the feudal lord, the individual has a certain value... the individual has no value’ today (p. 10). If the individual cannot ‘carry’ the value produced by his wife, this value does not appear in the exchange between labor power and capital, and slips through the worker straight into the hands of the capitalist, without any recognition for the housework done.[68] And only when the husband’s labor power is in the hands of the capitalist, when the worker actually works, does this value manifests itself as value created during production. Housework according to this theory is then part of the aggregate labor in society that valorizes capital, but since the ‘individual’ is ‘devalued’, its contribution to capital is not recognized.

In the same way as Fortunati claims that reproduction really creates value, ‘but appears otherwise’, she asserts that the real status of the housewife is that of a waged worker, but ‘appears otherwise’. In fact, Fortunati says, the direct relation between the wife and the husband hides a real relation of wage-work exchange between the wife and capital, which is mediated by the husband as the woman’s work ‘supervisor’.[69]

Although, as we will see below, Fortunati’s arguments seem to diverge from other theoretical Autonomist approaches, it has encountered some appreciation within the Autonomist area. Dalla Costa mentions it for example; and Harry Cleaver has it in the reading list for his ‘Autonomist Marxism’ course.[70] Outside the area of Autonomia, her pamphlet has been praised by AK distribution as ‘an excellent book worth reading very carefully and a good example of immanent critique of Marx’s work’.[71] Surely no reader can miss Fortunati’s in being able to deal with ‘complexities’: in her pamphlet the words ‘complex’ and ‘complexity’ appear at least 26 times.[72] Her ‘dense’ style, noticed by AK distribution, which for example calls having sex a ‘work of sexual reproduction of the male worker’ is consistent with this fascination with ‘complexity’. No doubt this has inspired awe and respect in her readers.

One reason for the present critique is first of all because the disparity between the male and female condition in capitalist society is a real problem. If our realization as individuals having ‘value’ in bourgeois society is only through our roles as buyers and sellers of commodities (or specifically as sellers of labor power and earners of a wage), bearing and rearing children is an obstacle to this realization. Although part of the toll of being parents can be shared, bearing the child cannot — and, whatever her class, the woman is discriminated against with respect to the male in capitalism. A study of the problem connected to female work is then interesting for its potential criticism of bourgeois relations of exchange — specifically of the fragmentation of society into bourgeois individuals who recognize each other only as buyers and sellers of commodities.

Fortunati’s work is the product of her involvement with the ‘Wages for Housework’ movement in Italy in the 1970s. This movement produced plenty of radical theory close to Autonomia (such as Dalla Costa’s work) and received attention and respect from US Autonomist Marxism, especially Harry Cleaver.[73] However in the present critique we have chosen to deal only with the particular theoretical development by Leopoldina Fortunati and not with the wider issue of Wages for Housework — a treatment that would have to take on the rather cult-like behavior of the movement espousing this demand.

In fact, besides the interesting issues related to women’s condition in our society, the principal focus for this critique of Fortunati’s work is the specific issue of reproduction as ‘productive work’, which Fortunati shares with the broader area of Autonomist Marxism. In particular, we want to address the Autonomist elaboration of the concept of value in the present mode of production. In this discussion we will stress not only the similarities among various authors, but also their, sometimes important, differences in their theoretical positions. We will discuss in particular the following three points:

1. the importance, within Autonomist Marxism, of demonstrating, at every cost, even with the aid of ‘formulas’, that the work of reproduction is productive and a creator of value

2. the Autonomist concept of the work of reproduction as work which is, as Fortunati would put it, ‘capitalistically organized’; i.e., indirectly controlled by capital and having the character of waged work.

3. the concept of capital as imposition of work, discipline and repression, and the parallel conception of the working class as antagonism against capital.

In discussing these points, we will make parallels and reference to some of the main authors who write, or wrote, within Autonomia or Autonomist Marxism, and in particular Harry Cleaver (Reading Capital Politically[74]), Massimo De Angelis (Beyond the Technological and the Social Paradigms: A Political Reading of Abstract Labor as the Substance of Value[75]), and Antonio Negri (Pipeline, Lettere da Rebibbia[76]) and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (Empire[77]). We will make clear the difference between these authors, who on the one side share some basic tenets of the Autonomist tradition, but on the other side may diverge on fundamental points and in their understanding of capitalism.

In the following sections we will analyze the details of Fortunati’s own treatment of reproduction as productive work and her initial assumptions. For simplicity’s sake we only deal with Fortunati’s approach to housework, and avoid the issue of prostitution.[78]