Revolution at Point Zero: Housework

Praise for Revolution at Point Zero “Finally, we have a volume that collects the many essays that Silvia Federici has written on the question of social reproduction and women’s struggles on this terrain over a period of four decades. While provid- ing a powerful history of the changes in the organization reproductive labor, Revolution at Point Zero documents the development of Federici’s thought on some of the most important questions of our time: globalization, gender relations, the construction of new commons.” —Mariarosa Dalla Costa, coauthor of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and Our Mother Ocean “As the academy colonizes and tames women’s studies, Silvia Federici speaks the experience of a generation of women for whom politics was raw, passionately lived, often in the shadow of an uncriti- cal Marxism. She spells out the subtle violence of housework and sexual servicing, the futility of equating waged work with emancipation, and the ongoing invisibility of women’s reproductive labors. Under neoliberal globalization women’s exploitation intensifies—in land enclosures, in forced migration, in the crisis of elder care. With ecofeminist thinkers and activists, Federici argues that protecting the means of subsistence now becomes the key terrain of struggle, and she calls on women North and South to join hands in building new commons.” —Ariel Salleh, author of Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern “The zero point of revolution is where new social relations first burst forth, from which countless waves ripple outward into other do- mains. For over thirty years, Silvia Federici has fiercely argued that this zero point cannot have any other location but the sphere of reproduction. It is here that we encounter the most promising battlefield between an outside to capital and a capital that cannot abide by any outsides. This timely collection of her essays reminds us that the shape and form of any revolution are decided in the daily realities and social construction of sex, care, food, love, and health. Women inhabit this zero point neither by choice nor by nature, but simply because they carry the burden of reproduction in a disproportionate manner. Their struggle to take control of this labor is everybody’s struggle, just as capital’s commodification of their demands is everybody’s commodification.” —Massimo De Angelis, author of The Beginning of History: Values, Struggles, and Global Capital “In her unfailing generosity of mind, Silvia Federici has offered us yet another brilliant and groundbreaking reflection on how capitalism naturalizes the exploitation of every aspect of women’s productive and reproductive life. Federici theorizes convincingly that, whether in the domestic or public sphere, capital normalizes women’s labor as ‘housework’ worthy of no economic compensation or social recognition. Such economic and social normalization of capitalist exploitation of women underlies the gender-based violence produced by the neoliberal wars that are ravaging communities around the world, especially in Africa. The intent of such wars is to keep women off the communal lands they care for, while transforming them into refugees in nation-states weakened by the negative effects of neoliberalism. Silvia Federici’s call for ecofemi- nists’ return to the Commons against Capital is compelling. Revolution at Point Zero is a timely release and a must read for scholars and activists concerned with the condition of women around the world.” —Ousseina D. Alidou, Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), Director of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University and author of Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO HOUSEWORK, REPRODUCTION, AND FEMINIST STRUGGLE Silvia Federici Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle Silvia Federici ©2012 Silvia Federici This edition ©2012 PM Press cna This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ ISBN: 978-1-60486-333-8 LCCN: 2011939663 Cover and interior design: Antumbra Design/antumbradesign.org 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PM Press Common Notions PO Box 23912 Brooklyn, NY Oakland, CA 94623 www.commonnotions.org www.pmpress.org Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568 www.autonomedia.org Printed in the USA on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson- Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Political ideas come from movements but their journey to a book requires the work of many individuals. Among the people who have made this book possible I wish to thank two in particular, for their contribution to this project and the creativity and generosity of their political activism: Malav Kanuga, the editor of the Common Notions Series, who encour- aged me to publish this work and assisted me through this process with enthusiasm and excellent advise; and Josh MacPhee whose design for the book cover is one more example of the power of his art and his concep- tion of images as seeds of change. I also want to thank Nawal El Saadawi, feminist, writer, revolu- tionary, whose work Woman at Point Zero has inspired the title of this book and much more. Revolution at Point Zero is about the transformation of our everyday life and the creation of new forms of solidarity. In this spirit, I dedicate this book to Dara Greenwald who through her art, her political activism, and her fight against cancer brought into existence a community of care concretely embodying that “healing island” Dara constructed during her disease. “Wages against Housework” was first published asWages against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). Also published in The Politics of Housework, ed. Ellen Malos (Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 1980) and Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement, eds. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000). “Why Sexuality Is Work” (1975) was originally written as part of a presentation to the second international Wages for Housework conference held in Toronto in January 1975. “Counterplanning from the Kitchen” was first published as Counterplanning from the Kitchen (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). Also published in From Feminism to Liberation, ed. Edith Hoshino Altbach (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 2007). “The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s” was a paper delivered at a conference convened by the Centro Studi Americani in Rome on “The Economic Policies of Female Labor in Italy and the United States,” December 9–11, 1980, sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Also published in The Commoner 11 (Spring–Summer 2006). “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet” first appeared in The Sixties Without Apologies, ed. Sohnya Sayres, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). “Reproduction and Feminist Struggle in the New International Division of Labor” first appeared inWomen, Development and Labor Reproduction: Struggles and Movements, eds. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999). “War, Globalization, and Reproduction” first appeared in Peace and Change 25, no. 2, (April 2000). It was also published in There Is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization, eds. Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas, and Claudia von Werlhof (London: Zed Books, 2001); and in Seeds of Hope, eds. Matt Meyer and Elavie Ndura-Ouedraogo (Pan-African Peace Studies for the Twenty-First Century). “Women, Globalization, and the International Women’s Movement” first appeared in a special issue of Canadian Journal of Development Studies 22 (2001). “The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution” was a paper presented at the UC Santa Cruz seminar “The Crisis of Social Reproduction and Feminist Struggle,” on January 27, 2009. “On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism” was first published in German as “Anmerkungen über Altenpflegearbeit und die Grenzen des Marxismus” in Uber Marx Hinaus, eds. Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (Hamburg: Assoziation A, 2009). “Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization” first appeared in Journal of Asian and African Studies, special issue, Africa and Globalization: Critical Perspectives 39, no. 1–2 ( January– March 2004). “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons” first appeared in Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States, ed. Team Colors (Baltimore: AK Press, 2010) and in The Commoner 14 (2011). CONTENTS Preface 1 Introduction 5 Part I: Theorizing and Politicizing Housework Wages against Housework (1975) 15 Why Sexuality Is Work (1975) 23 Counterplanning from the Kitchen (1975) 28 The Restructuring of Housework and Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s (1980) 41 Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet (1984) 54 Part II: Globalization and Social Reproduction Reproduction and Feminist Struggle in the New International Division of Labor (1999) 65 War, Globalization, and Reproduction (2000) 76 Women, Globalization, and the International Women’s Movement (2001) 85 The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished eministF Revolution (2008) 91 Part III: Reproducing Commons On Elder

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