published in 2012 by PM Press
grad school notes in preparation for a comprehensive paper on autonomy
The key concepts Federici elaborates are wages (and their ordering function), reproduction, dispossession, neoliberal globalization, and the commons. Her analysis of globalization and accumulation by dispossession are particularly pertinent, as she shows we can’t understand these without seeing that the gendered aspect is fundamental to how capitalism overcame the strategy of refusal. Basically, capitalism overcame workers’, women’s, Blacks’, and student’s refusal in the First World, socialism in the Second World, and national and peasant autonomy in the Third World by creating a New International Division of Labor fundamentally based on the dispossession and exploitation of Third World women.
Wages for housework
Older articles in the book concern the wages for housework campaign. The precursors to this were people like Fanon and Gunder Frank showing that unwaged labor outside the factory is what makes the waged work inside possible. This shows us that wageless actors are engaging in class struggle and the crucial point is that wages perform an ordering function in society. This ordering causes all social relations to be subsumed under capital, meaning the distinction between society and factory ends and all social relations become relations of production. Gendered relations also become relations of production: performing feminine sexuality becomes work (women always asking ‘how much?’ sex to give, when to give it so the ‘price’ doesn’t go down, how many babies to have, how much to fake their pleasure in order to pleasure the waged worker).
All this shows us that the socialist prerogative of simply industrializing isn’t the answer. The waged and unwaged must come together in refusing to negotiate the terms of their exploitation. Instead of merely raising their consciousness, women need a strategy for material gains, for the power that truly expands consciousness. Instead of the liberal feminist struggle to ‘get a job’ (which easily slips into demanding the poor work for their money), poor women must demand wages for the house work they already do, and a fundamental aspect of this (which is frequently overlooked) is wages in the form of free social services.
Federici’s self-critique of all this is that 1) wages aren’t liberating and 2) neoliberalism reacted to the strategy of refusal by using ‘permanent crisis’ to turn the world into a giant assembly line, steal land, and integrate women into the workforce under the worst conditions. This means the commons are even more important than wages, as it involves the reclamation of the means of production and creation of new forms of social cooperation for subsistence.
Reproduction
So on one side you have the globalization of dispossession, and on the other side you have reproduction and the commons. Instead of following traditional Marxists in accepting the capitalist definition of work-as-wages, feminists see value production outside commodity production, especially in the unwaged domestic reproductive work that lowers the cost of labor-power. This reproductive work requires a complete engagement with the person being reproduced, and the physical and emotional aspects of this engagement are never separate (against Hardt and Negri focusing on the immaterial).
Having recognized just how important reproduction is, there are many other tenets of traditional Marxism that are upset: indigenous peoples have been greater revolutionary subjects than the working class; instead of simply generating increased worker cooperation, capitalism divides people using wages, race, and gender; instead of leading to an end to scarcity by rationalizing the factory and home, the awaited technology boom hasn’t happened in the realm of reproduction and is instead being done by immigrant women – so capitalism makes resources scarce and impoverishes workers. All of this culminates to show that capitalism is not a progressive force that creates the conditions for socialism and then communist utopia. Whereas dialectics focuses on the ‘first and second’ contradictions of production, this emphasis on reproduction shows a central contradiction is reproduction being concerned with living humans while it’s pressured to simply reproduce labor-power. This contradiction is heightened as destruction becomes as much of a force of production as creating labor-power. This leads Federici to conclude that capitalism is a permanent reproduction crisis. It is constantly de-concentrating and de-organizing workers.
Key points
Neoliberal globalization and dispossession are the ways this reproduction crisis happens. 1) Instead of society-as-factory, dispossession is the destruction of any activity not subordinated to accumulation. One historical example of this process is the witch hunt, which was a war on women that allowed primitive accumulation by destroying reproduction based on a relationship with the garden and the land.
2) Contemporary dispossession continues to attack women’s subsistence agriculture, and the state has become a tool in waging this war of dispossession. Instead of the state mediating class struggle, it is a tool in the struggle to dispossess: Instead of accumulation-by-exploitation, dispossession is the use of the state to extract resources, extract nationally-backed finance, and to access international finance. War achieves the subversion of social activity to accumulation by destroying the social fabric (instead of subsistence agriculture, the military distributes ‘food aid’ and removes people from communal land; their philanthropic intervention feeds the army they support, allows popular support for the army with the food, and moves people off the land into feeding centers while ridding agrobusiness of surplus and allowing NGOs to govern over a permanent state of emergency).
3) Globalization is the historical process and the policies that perpetuate this dispossession. The process of ‘subversion of social relations to accumulation’ is otherwise known as structural adjustment. So the conclusion is an equation of war, dispossession, and structural adjustment: structural adjustment feeds a vicious cycle of war and dispossession, wherein structural adjustment generates war and war completes the work of structural adjustment.
4) Structural adjustment policies have succeeded in destroying national commitment to reproduction across the world: through anti-labor de-industrialization in the First World, through anti-socialist de-statization in the Second World, and through anti-communalist maquiladorization in the Third World. Financialization now allows dispossession in all three areas.
5) The culmination is a social devaluation that has contained the demands and refusal of the working class by creating a new gendered division of labor. The division has made the Third World into an immense ‘homeland’ of global apartheid with immigration status as its pass system. Women are the shock absorbers of this violence and austerity, as they’ve become the unregulated waged workers in the informal maquiladora economy and victims of males enraged by their exploitation.
6) Within this global apartheid system, women’s migration is a transfer of capital: women produce cheap labor-power in their home countries and then reproduce labor-power through their exploited waged work in the First World.
7) Finally, reformist feminist NGOs have nothing to say about any of this, as they focus on the feminization of poverty and human rights discourse while remaining pro-capitalist. They are the missionaries of the new international division of labor.
The conflict between the commons and the market has been a fundamental struggle for centuries, showing us that the commons are a counter-power to the forces of dispossession, a defence against enslavement of capitalist wage relations, and a de-linking of reproduction from commodity flows. Building the commons means refusing to base our lives on the suffering of others by forming a common subject responsible to each other and to ecology. Doing this involves re-combining what the social division of labor has separated. It has immaterial aspects, but is also very material: we must common the reproductive services devalued by capitalism (such as elder care), reclaim the home for collective life and reproduction, and common subsistence agriculture (she notes that 80% of food in sub-Saharan Africa is subsistence production, primarily by women, which is a major achievement against the primary aim of colonization which has allowed people to survive the Green Revolution and neoliberal ‘development’).
Autonomy
She uses the language of the commons and reproduction instead of autonomy, but you can consider autonomy and ‘common reproduction’ to be synonymous. Commoning means autonomy has to build collective social relations (and not in a nationalized sense) that protect us against social relations of accumulation, and autonomy has to include reproduction along with production. It’s autonomous from the forces of accumulation – dispossession, war, waged labor, and commodity exchange. Unfortunately, this critical analysis of dispossession and globalization is far more developed here than her elaboration of the commons and reproduction, but the negative understanding of ‘autonomy is what war undermines’ is helpful too. Dispossession is the violent process of breaking existing collective social relations and replacing them with relations of accumulation. Autonomy is the opposite of separating people from communal land tenure, separating them from the means of production, forcing them onto the market, and working through structural adjustment. If dispossession uses war and the state as tools for plunder, autonomy uses peace/reciprocity and consensual self-government for emancipation and good living.
From all this we can understand autonomy in a broad and powerful way as an exit from capitalism, which is best explained through the second contradiction (since it’s the one that focuses on reproduction). The second contradiction is between production and the conditions of production, wherein capitalist production needs labor, land, and money as its preconditions but existentially threatens them as it pursues endless accumulation. On the other hand labor, land (and money?) need to be valuable to capitalism to make the case for their protection, but the price of this protection is death-by-exploitation or forestalling extraction. Because of this price, society ends up being organized into a extension of the factory- all natural and human reproduction is put to the service of capital accumulation. Essentially, this is a contradiction between the reproduction of life and the reproduction of natural resources and labor-power. However, capitalism’s response to the strategy of refusal has heightened the contradiction. It’s no longer just life versus labor-power, but accumulation-by-destruction versus labor-power. Capitalism is increasingly actively attacking and dismantling the social factory. We get back to autonomy by emphasizing reproduction/conditions of production: society must escape from capitalism so that we can produce the use values we need without the externalities demanded by the profit motive, without production relentlessly destroying our labor-power, and without destruction being profitable. This can only be done by emphasizing social and ecological reproduction and demanding at every turn that production not compromise this. So autonomy is freedom from capitalism and the freedom to nurture life.
Schools of thought
As with Bookchin, Federici zooms out and situates her analysis in the broad sweep of class society, saying that there is a centuries-long struggle between the forces of the commons and those of accumulation. This helps relate autonomy to decolonization, since colonialism is the massive enterprise of forcing indigenous peoples all over the world into capitalist social relations.
Federici also provides an important intervention to the debate on globalization and neoliberalism (although I don’t think she uses the latter term). She says globalization is the social and political devaluation of labor, particularly feminine labor, thereby limiting the demands of the working class, and she shows this to be the next step in the history of class struggle forcing capitalism to modify its relations of production (that is, its division of labor). Fortunati wrote about the absolute to relative surplus value switch (forced by the eight hour day struggle), and then you have the ‘New International Division of Labor’ (resulting from the strategy of refusal): instead of getting wages for housework, First World women are offered wages for waged work, while reproductive/service sector work is done by immigrants and labor is left without the possibility of refusal as industry is moved offshore.
Relation to other concepts
Link to decolonial thinkers. Federici argues that wages perform an ordering function on society as a whole, separating the employed from the unemployed workforce and creating a much-needed hierarchy between them. This is important because it connects the unemployed to the working class- you don’t get a compliant working class unless you maintain a starving unemployed class. This is the same as how there’s no First World without the Third World or wealth without poverty. Since there isn’t the one without the other, which makes me think maybe ‘below’ is a better term than ‘working class.’
She also goes a step further to say that this global division is more pronounced and complex than ever, with the Third World serving as an immense ‘homeland’ of global apartheid, using status as its pass system to regulate the flow of humans-as-capital to the North. So we see how both wages and status work to form class in a way that’s amenable to capital accumulation.
Furthermore, reproduction has been undermined in the service of accumulation. In the First World this was achieved through de-unionization, de-socialization in the Second, and de-communalization in the Third. Workers are made into micro-entrepreneurs in each (from 1- Uber to 2- migration to 3- the informal economy), which allows their reproduction to become a source of accumulation. This helps explain the service economy: I’ve wondered what ‘material basis’ this economy exists on and how it can provide enough value to be the new basis of the entire economy, but this point shows how there’s a huge mine of social relationships to be capitalized upon by colonizing aspects of our everyday lives into capitalism. Most of this activity gets lumped into ‘services,’ but what’s really happening is that the way we communicate with each other, educate our kids, get food and exercise, and generally become ’employable adults’ are all getting commodified.
In the same way that Dunayevskaya and Lukacs critique Soviet bureaucracy for working against communism instead of being a transition towards it, Federici gives a feminist critique of traditional socialism as a whole, since its narrow focus on ‘workers as those who receive wages’ precludes an understanding for how thoroughly destructive capitalism is. If we look at capitalism’s effects on reproduction, we see it in no way lays the foundation for communism. It’s important to note that D and L critique the Soviet Union for accepting the capitalist definition of politics and F critiques those who accept the capitalist definition of work.
Concepts
reproduction, refusal, autonomy, class struggle, social relation, class, neoliberalism, dispossession, ngo, commons, spontaneity, love, feminism, globalization, Marxism, indigenous, revolution, subjectivity, immaterial labor, identity
People
Cleaver (on Operaismo), Amin, Gunder Frank, Fanon, Tronti (social factory), Fortunati (co-author, women and the transition to capitalism), Linebaugh (commons), Sassen (free trade and emigration), Selma James, Fortunati, Dalla Costa, Mies (value production outside of commodity production), Davis (Planet of Slums), Hardt and Negri (against, for lacking a feminist analysis, for their optimism that we can overcome capitalism’s divisions)
Stuart Schussler 