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A review by johnaggreyodera
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici
5.0
I met Federici at a reading she gave at an anarchist bookshop in Philadelphia in the Fall of 2018. Then, I’d only had a chance to loosely skim through the pages of her first major work “Wages against Housework” (1975), and while speaking to her, it was clear that I hadn’t understood her argument, or, at best, that I had only partially done so - and thereby misconstrued it.
When I thought about wages for housework, the only ideological lense I looked at it through was a feminist one - and a limited one at that. So my mind immediately went to Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963) which I had also just recently read. The main argument of The Feminist Mystique was not one that I had a hard time buying. It was this: that patriarchal male society had relegated women’s role to nothing more than “housewife-mother”, and that as a consequence, women were not leading fulfilling lives. Many facets of personal fulfilment that were available to men - “professional” careers, serious intellectual work, true political engagement etc. were not available to women.
The Feminie Mystique was a liberatory text, but it was liberatory for a very particular kind of woman: middle class and mostly white, with some formal education - usually up to college level. What Friedan argued for was basically that avenues open to men be open to women too - therefore, that women exchange the apron for the business suit, the kitchen and bedroom for the office and the boardroom. But this was indeed a classed notion, for, in pursuit of equality, it is doubtful whether working-class women were willing to (or should have had to) exchange their aprons for the overalls of the factory, their work scrubbing pots and pants for the grimy work of working with industrial effluents - i.e. exchange their own oppression for that that their men were subjected to. My mistake, by looking at Federici’s work only through this narrow feminist perspective, had been to mistake Federici’s radical liberationary argument for a version of Friedan’s more narrow one.
Revolution at Point Zero is a series of essays and speeches that Federici gave in the 70s and 80s, mostly concerned with the Wages for Housework movement, which Federici, along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and some other women, had founded in Padua, Italy, in the early 70s. The argument that runs throughout the book (and the movement) is a powerful one: Not that wages for housework is a feminist issue, but rather that, for any serous feminist concerned with ending the subjugation of women, it is THE feminist issue.
By “housework”- Federici means cooking, cleaning, childcare, fucking etc. - that labour that is seen as the natural province of women in the household and that, since it is not waged, and is supposedly seen as outside the purview of capital, is viewed as not work. As such, Federici is mainly concerned with the idea of reproductive labour: that the work that women engage in at home, while viewed by capital as “unproductive” - for it does not generate profit, the only measure of value under capitalism, is actually REproductive, for it serves primarily to create - by birthing and tending to, nourish - by feeding and fucking, and sustain - by providing emotional labour, workers at the silent behest of capital. This is precisely why capital, so efficient at exploiting workers and sucking every last bit of value out of them, is comfortable with supposedly allowing a large mass of potential workers (women) to stay at home doing “nothing” - it’s because they’ve always been working, dummy!
The demand for wages for housework is therefore a demand for the recognition of this relation that capital has to housework (which is why the demand is that the state pays these wages, not individual men to their wives). And indeed capital does recognize housework per se as work; it is only housework that is done by people who enter relations with each other as family (I.e. wives, mothers and daughters, other relatives etc.) that is not viewed as actual work. This is demonstrated by the fact that daycare and foster centers, contracted cleaning services etc. are legitimately thought of as actual labor deserving of a wage - which leads Federici to surmise that if the state is willing to pay women to care for other women’s children but not for their own (I.e. foster parenting arrangements conducted by the state), then women might have to resort to swapping their children with each other.
But Federici insists that the recognition of this relation is only the first step, for providing women with a wage does not release them from this relation of subordination (any more than paying a factory worker a wage releases him from his exploitative relation with capital). To understand why she thinks this is so, we have to understand that there is a reductivism inherent in Federici’s argument, a tendency to view all subjugation - on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. through the primary prism of class exploitation (for example, she says that the reason why intimate homosexual relations are frowned upon under bourgeois capitalism circa 1975 is because they are not viewed as productive - whereas sexual relations between men and women have as their core purpose the production of additional humans, thus additional workers).
Therefore, for Federici (and this is why she sees wages for housework as the primary feminist issue), women cannot be liberated (as Friedman desires) without men too being liberated - and in her conception, unlike Friedan’s, men are not free. The subjugation of women in the household is a consequent of the subjugation of men under capital (which is why, even waged women working in offices still bear the brunt of household labour when they get back home from work), and until we are all freed from the yoke of capital, women will not be free. Point zero is the household, and when we recognize capital’s activity in this domain and challenge it, when we start the revolution in the household, then we can challenge capital’s supremacy in other areas of our life. This is why wages for housework is but the first step. Only when this, the expansion of the revolution that begins in our households to every sphere of our lives controlled by capitalism, happens, thinks Federici, will women truly be free - because all of them (not just white middle class ones, as implicit in the arguments of Friedan and many liberal feminists) will be free.
When I thought about wages for housework, the only ideological lense I looked at it through was a feminist one - and a limited one at that. So my mind immediately went to Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963) which I had also just recently read. The main argument of The Feminist Mystique was not one that I had a hard time buying. It was this: that patriarchal male society had relegated women’s role to nothing more than “housewife-mother”, and that as a consequence, women were not leading fulfilling lives. Many facets of personal fulfilment that were available to men - “professional” careers, serious intellectual work, true political engagement etc. were not available to women.
The Feminie Mystique was a liberatory text, but it was liberatory for a very particular kind of woman: middle class and mostly white, with some formal education - usually up to college level. What Friedan argued for was basically that avenues open to men be open to women too - therefore, that women exchange the apron for the business suit, the kitchen and bedroom for the office and the boardroom. But this was indeed a classed notion, for, in pursuit of equality, it is doubtful whether working-class women were willing to (or should have had to) exchange their aprons for the overalls of the factory, their work scrubbing pots and pants for the grimy work of working with industrial effluents - i.e. exchange their own oppression for that that their men were subjected to. My mistake, by looking at Federici’s work only through this narrow feminist perspective, had been to mistake Federici’s radical liberationary argument for a version of Friedan’s more narrow one.
Revolution at Point Zero is a series of essays and speeches that Federici gave in the 70s and 80s, mostly concerned with the Wages for Housework movement, which Federici, along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and some other women, had founded in Padua, Italy, in the early 70s. The argument that runs throughout the book (and the movement) is a powerful one: Not that wages for housework is a feminist issue, but rather that, for any serous feminist concerned with ending the subjugation of women, it is THE feminist issue.
By “housework”- Federici means cooking, cleaning, childcare, fucking etc. - that labour that is seen as the natural province of women in the household and that, since it is not waged, and is supposedly seen as outside the purview of capital, is viewed as not work. As such, Federici is mainly concerned with the idea of reproductive labour: that the work that women engage in at home, while viewed by capital as “unproductive” - for it does not generate profit, the only measure of value under capitalism, is actually REproductive, for it serves primarily to create - by birthing and tending to, nourish - by feeding and fucking, and sustain - by providing emotional labour, workers at the silent behest of capital. This is precisely why capital, so efficient at exploiting workers and sucking every last bit of value out of them, is comfortable with supposedly allowing a large mass of potential workers (women) to stay at home doing “nothing” - it’s because they’ve always been working, dummy!
The demand for wages for housework is therefore a demand for the recognition of this relation that capital has to housework (which is why the demand is that the state pays these wages, not individual men to their wives). And indeed capital does recognize housework per se as work; it is only housework that is done by people who enter relations with each other as family (I.e. wives, mothers and daughters, other relatives etc.) that is not viewed as actual work. This is demonstrated by the fact that daycare and foster centers, contracted cleaning services etc. are legitimately thought of as actual labor deserving of a wage - which leads Federici to surmise that if the state is willing to pay women to care for other women’s children but not for their own (I.e. foster parenting arrangements conducted by the state), then women might have to resort to swapping their children with each other.
But Federici insists that the recognition of this relation is only the first step, for providing women with a wage does not release them from this relation of subordination (any more than paying a factory worker a wage releases him from his exploitative relation with capital). To understand why she thinks this is so, we have to understand that there is a reductivism inherent in Federici’s argument, a tendency to view all subjugation - on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. through the primary prism of class exploitation (for example, she says that the reason why intimate homosexual relations are frowned upon under bourgeois capitalism circa 1975 is because they are not viewed as productive - whereas sexual relations between men and women have as their core purpose the production of additional humans, thus additional workers).
Therefore, for Federici (and this is why she sees wages for housework as the primary feminist issue), women cannot be liberated (as Friedman desires) without men too being liberated - and in her conception, unlike Friedan’s, men are not free. The subjugation of women in the household is a consequent of the subjugation of men under capital (which is why, even waged women working in offices still bear the brunt of household labour when they get back home from work), and until we are all freed from the yoke of capital, women will not be free. Point zero is the household, and when we recognize capital’s activity in this domain and challenge it, when we start the revolution in the household, then we can challenge capital’s supremacy in other areas of our life. This is why wages for housework is but the first step. Only when this, the expansion of the revolution that begins in our households to every sphere of our lives controlled by capitalism, happens, thinks Federici, will women truly be free - because all of them (not just white middle class ones, as implicit in the arguments of Friedan and many liberal feminists) will be free.