Autonomies

Hence we must refuse housework as women’s work, as work imposed upon us, which we never invented, which has never been paid for, in which they have forced us to cope with absurd hours, 12 and 13 a day, in order to force us to stay at home. We must get out of the house; we must reject the home, because we want to unite with other women, to struggle against all situations which presume that women will stay at home, to link ourselves to the struggles of all those who are in ghettos, whether the ghetto is a nursery, a school, a hospital, an old-age home, or asylum. To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those conditions, and so all those who work out of the home would then demand that the burden carried by us until now be thrown squarely where it belongs-onto the shoulders of capital. This alteration in the terms of struggle will be all the more violent the more the refusal of domestic labor on the part of women will be violent, determined and on a mass scale. The working class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman’s expense against the class itself. The woman is the slave of a wage-slave, and her slavery ensures the slavery of her man. Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial. To meet other women who work inside and outside their homes allows us to possess other chances of struggle. To the extent that our struggle is a struggle against work, it is inscribed in the struggle which the working class wages against capitalist work. But to the extent that the exploitation of women through domestic work has had its own specific history, tied to the survival of the nuclear family, the specific course of this struggle which must pass through the destruction of the nuclear family as established by the capitalist social order, adds a new dimension to the class struggle.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Women and the Subversion of the Community

We return to the feminism that emerged within and expressed itself against the grain of Italian operaismo and Autonomia, continuing our series of posts dedicated to Italy’s Autonomia movement(s) …

One of the most important contributions to contemporary feminism emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, in Italy, with Lotta Feminista and the Wages for Housework movements (the latter would also spread to North America), which, inspired by operaismo, placed the reproduction of capitalist social relations at the centre of theoretical criticism and political militancy.

If marxism traditionally focused on the centrality of wage labour, of labour as commodity, in the structuring of relations of social production under capitalism (with the practical consequence that the factory was seen as the principal site of political, class conflict), the italian feminist critique of the period attributed equal importance to the reproduction of labour outside the factory, a reproduction necessary for the very possibility of commodity production; a labour which as unwaged (consequently judged to be “unproductive”) was assigned to “marginal” populations, most notably women (along with the slaves, the colonised, racial and ethnic “minorities”, and the like). And it was in this subaltern place of reproduction that modern sex and gender identities would be constituted.

If patriarchy predates capitalism, the latter appropriates patriarchy its own ends, such that a revolutionary feminism can only be anti-capitalist.

We begin with an essay that serves as an introduction to the Italian feminism of the period, to be followed by texts by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati and Carla Lonzi.