City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Revisting the Domestic Labor Debate: Toward a Critique of Workerist Feminism Alice Feng Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/919 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] REVISITING THE DOMESTIC LABOR DEBATE: TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF WORKERIST FEMINISM by ALICE FENG A master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts, The City University of New York 2015 © 2015 ALICE FENG All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies satisfying the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts. Dr. Linda Alcoff Date Dr. Linda Alcoff Thesis Advisor Dr. Matthew K. Gold Date Dr. Matthew K. Gold Executive Officer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT REVISITING THE DOMESTIC LABOR DEBATE: TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF WORKERIST FEMINISM by Alice Feng Advisor: Professor Linda Alcoff The extremely high presence of housewives in Italy during the “miracle years,” of 1950- 1963, seemingly suggested that an unprecedented number of women were unemployed after their expulsion from large-scale industry. This phenomenon inspired debate among feminists on questions such as the contribution of housewives to the reproduction of labor-power, the character of reproductive labor and the relation between the participation of women in waged labor and unwaged domestic labor. In revisiting this phenomenon, this thesis argues that, contrary to the appearance of women being unemployed, a significant number of women, along with children, were irregularly engaged in undeclared forms of labor in semi-illegal workshops and tenements while carrying out domestic chores for the maintenance of their families. Capital, therefore, set in place an invisible labor force that it super-exploited, while it infringed upon the ability of women to reproduce their labor-power. Production, therefore, ultimately determined the participation of women in reproductive labor and the way women reproduced their labor- power. Within the latter, the wage, which represents a portion of the value that the laborer produced, determined what use-values could be produced in order to maintain the laborer. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................................……..1 The workers’ side of Italy’s economic boom ........................................................................……..2 Grasping the laws of reality: the work of early operaismo intellectuals ...............................……..5 Operaismo and the woman question ......................................................................................……11 Lotta Femminista and Wages for Housework .......................................................................…....16 The intensification of labor in modern industry ....................................................................……22 Impact of modern industry on the family and gender ............................................................……31 The super-exploitation of women in modern domestic industry ...........................................……34 Domestic labor as productive labor? ......................................................................................……38 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................……45 Works Cited ...........................................................................................................................……48 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The working day .....................................................................................................……27 Figure 2. Exploitation of ten laborers ....................................................................................……28 Figure 3. Exploitation of five laborers ...................................................................................……29 Figure 4. Exploitation of three laborers .................................................................................……30 vi Introduction According to the workerist feminist trend, the oppression of women in the capitalist mode of production has its material basis in the institution of the family, through which the housewife produces an indispensible commodity: labor power. The two fundamental works that argued this position were Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Women and the Subversion of the Community and Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Both of these works contributed to the debate on domestic labor—which had as its object of analysis the housewife and her role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations—by identifying the housewife as the reproducer of labor power and by arguing that reproductive labor is capitalist in character. Despite these important contributions, the analyses offered by Dalla Costa and Fortunati remained problematic for two reasons. The first reason is that they reversed the decisive term in the relation between production and reproduction by attributing the locus of women’s oppression to the family. While it is undeniable that the predominant share of domestic duties falls on the shoulders of the woman at home, her specific role in production ultimately determines how her life is organized in order to meet her family’s needs. The second reason is that their overall argument that reproductive labor produces surplus value conflates production and reproduction, thus conflicting with their intention of identifying the specificity of woman’s oppression within the capitalist mode of production. This thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, I provide a historical account of the rapid industrialization of Italy in the 1950s and its relation to politics. This transformation changed the character and organization of production and gave rise to the possibility of new political trends, such as that of operaismo (workerism) and workerist feminism. In order to understand the context for Dalla Costa and Fortunati’s key arguments, I recount the formation of 1 workerism, a political attempt to address the new reality faced by workers. Beginning with the journals Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia and proceeding later to the materialization of the organizations Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power / PO) and Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle / LC), I map the political and theoretical lineage of Dalla Costa and Fortunati’s works. In the second section, I focus on Dalla Costa and Fortunati’s justifications for asserting that reproduction determines women’s engagement in waged labor and that housewives create surplus value. Using historical accounts of women involved in large-scale industry and modern domestic industry, I show how women are exploited in production as cheap labor power and how this phenomenon contradicts Fortunati’s argument that women are primarily exploited in their capacity to produce and reproduce labor power. Lastly, I demonstrate how the integration of women into production has impacted the family and the wage, exposing Fortunati’s false premise of unequal exchange. The workers’ side of Italy’s economic boom Workerism was a trend of Marxist thought that developed out of the intense expansion of large-scale industry in the 1950s in Italy. Affecting the northern triangle of Genoa, Turin and Milan in particular, this rapid development paved the way for new labor processes and new ideas, including feminism (Wright 6). Young and childless women, some migrating from rural areas, were integrated as industrial workers. The majority of women were concentrated in clothing manufacture, the textile industry and the food industry (Wilson 118; Betti 185). Work from home was also common during the boom years of 1958 to 1963 (Betti 190). The increased presence of women in the labor force in general provided the basis for posing the demand of equality and other gender-specific questions, such as workplace discrimination, childcare 2 services and the structural role of women in the family (Bracke 2013, 631). These changes necessitated a new politics. As a result of these changes at the economic level, which ultimately determined what political actions were possible, workers organized in new ways. For example, women new to the textile industry organized checkerboard strikes. Groups of workers walked out for short consecutive periods rather than all walking out simultaneously (Wright 34). Directly confronted with capital’s new regime, the self-activity of the workers indicated that they possessed superior knowledge in comparison with the Partito Comunista Italiano (the Italian Communist Party / PCI) nor the Partito Socialista Italiano (the Italian Socialist Party / PSI). The workers’ activity and their aversion to the structural division of labor revealed the centrality of organizing in the factories. To the dismay of the workers in Italy at this time, however, the interests of the dominant political parties went against their own. Neither the PCI nor the PSI was truly capable of organizing