Women And The Subversion Of The Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader - Softcover

Harry Cleaver

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629635707 ISBN 13: 9781629635705

Publisher: PM Press, 2019

Synopsis

<DIV>In recent years there has been both a renewed interest in theories of social reproduction and an explosion of women's struggles and strikes across the world. This collection offers both historical and contemporary Marxist feminist analysis of how the reproduction of labour and life functions under capitalism, using Dalla Costa's insights into the vibrant and combative women's movement that emerged in Italy and across the world in the early 1970s. Since the first publication of Women and the Subversion of the Community in 1972, Dalla Costa has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought. Her detailed research and provocative thinking deepens our understanding of the role of women's struggles for autonomy and control over their bodies and labor.</DIV>

About this title

About the Author

<DIV>Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an influential Italian Marxist feminist and activist whose works launched the “domestic labor debate” by redefining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capitalism. Camille Barbagallo is a feminist activist and researcher. She is the coeditor of The Commoner, no. 15, Care Work and the Commons, with Silvia Federici. Harry Cleaver is an American scholar, Marxist theoretician, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Reading Capital Politically.</DIV>

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Women and the Subversion of the Community

A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader

By Camille Barbagallo

PM Press

Copyright © 2019 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-570-5

Contents

PREFACE by Harry Cleaver, 
INTRODUCTION by Camille Barbagallo, 
Preface to the Italian Edition of Women and the Subversion of the Community (March 1972), 
Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), 
On the General Strike (1975), 
Domestic Labor and the Feminist Movement in Italy since the 1970s (1988), 
Reproduction and Emigration (1974), 
Emigration, Immigration, and Class Composition in Italy in the 1970s (1980), 
Family and Welfare in the New Deal (1985), 
On Welfare (1977–1978), 
Excesses in the Relationship of Women to Medicine: Some History (2005), 
Women's Autonomy and Remuneration of Care Work in the New Emergencies of Eldercare (2007), 
To Whom Does the Body of This Woman Belong? (2007), 
Workerism, Feminism, and Some United Nations Efforts (2008), 
Capitalism and Reproduction (1994), 
The Door to the Garden (2002), 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 
ABOUT THE AUTHORS, 

CHAPTER 1

Women and the Subversion of the Community(1972)

These observations are an attempt to define and analyze the 'Woman Question' and to locate this question in the entire 'female role' as it has been created by the capitalist division of labor. We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this female role. We assume that all women are housewives, and that even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives. What is, on a world level, particular to domestic work, not only measured as number of hours and nature of work but as the quality of life and the quality of relationships that it generates, is that it determines a woman's place wherever she is and whatever class she belongs to. We concentrate here on the position of the working-class woman, but this is not to imply that only working-class women are exploited. Rather it is to confirm that the role of the working-class housewife, which we believe has been indispensable to capitalist production, is the determinant for the position of all other women. Every analysis of women as a caste must proceed from an analysis of the position of working-class housewives.

In order to see the housewife as central, it is first of all necessary to analyze briefly how capitalism has created the modern family and the housewife's role in it by destroying the types of family group or community that previously existed. This process is by no means complete. While we are speaking of the Western world, and Italy in particular, we wish to make clear that to the extent that the capitalist mode of production also brings the Third World under its command the same process of destruction must be and is taking place there. Nor should we take for granted that the family as we know it today in the most technically advanced Western countries is the final form the family can assume under capitalism. But the analysis of new tendencies can only be the product of an analysis of how capitalism created this family and what woman's role is today, each as a moment in a process.

We will complete our observations on the female role by also analyzing the position of the woman who works outside the home, but this is for a later date. We wish merely to indicate here the link between two apparently separate experiences: that of housewife and that of working woman.

The day-to-day struggles of women since World War II run counter to the organization of both the factory and the home. The 'unreliability' of women both in the home and outside of it has grown rapidly since then, and directly opposes the factory as regimentation organized in time and space and the social factory as organizational form of the reproduction of labor power. This trend toward more absenteeism, less respect for timetables, and higher job mobility is shared by young men and women workers alike. But where the man for crucial periods of his youth will be the sole support of a new family, women who on the whole are not restrained in this way, and who must always consider the job at home, are bound to be even more disengaged from work discipline, forcing disruption of the productive flow and therefore higher costs for capital. This is one excuse for the discriminatory wages that make up for capital's loss many times over. It is this same trend of disengagement that groups of housewives express when they leave their children with their husbands at work. This trend is and will increasingly be one of the decisive forms of the crisis in the systems of the factory and of the social factory.

* * *

In recent years, especially in the advanced capitalist countries, there have developed a number of women's movements of different orientations and ranges, from those that believe the fundamental conflict in society is between men and women to those focusing on the position of women as a specific manifestation of class exploitation.

If at first sight the position and attitudes of the former are perplexing, especially to women who have previously participated in militant political struggles, it is, we think, worth pointing out that women for whom sexual exploitation is the basic social contradiction provide an extremely important index of the degree of frustration experienced by millions of women both inside and outside the movement. There are those who define their own lesbianism in these terms. Here we refer to views expressed by a section of the movement in the U.S. in particular: "Our associations with women began when, because we were together, we could acknowledge that we could no longer tolerate relationships with men, that we could not prevent these from becoming power relationships in which we were inevitably subjected. Our attentions and energies were diverted, our power was diffused and its objectives delimited." This rejection constitutes the basis for a movement of gay women that asserts the possibility of relationships free of a sexual power struggle and of the biological social unit, while at the same time asserting our need to open ourselves to a wider social and therefore sexual potential.

Now, in order to understand the frustrations women are expressing in ever increasing forms, we must make clear what in the nature of the family under capitalism precipitated a crisis on this scale. The oppression of women, after all, did not begin with capitalism. What began with capitalism was both the more intense exploitation of women as women and the possibility at last of their liberation.

The Origins of the Family under Capitalism

In precapitalist patriarchal society, the home and the family were central to agricultural and artisanal production. With the advent of capitalism, the socialization of production was organized with the factory at its center. Those who worked in the new productive center, the factory, received a wage. Those who were excluded did not. Women, children, and the aged lost the relative power that derived from the family's dependence on their labor, which was seen to be social and necessary. Capital, destroying the family, the community, and production as a whole, on the one hand, has concentrated basic social production in the factory and the office and, on the other, has in essence detached the man from the family and turned him into a wage laborer. It has put on the man's shoulders the burden of financial responsibility for women, children, the old, and the ill: in a word, all those who do not receive wages. That marked the beginning of the expulsion from the home of all those who did not procreate and service those who worked for wages. After men, the first to be excluded from the home were children; they were sent to school. The family not only ceased to be the productive but also the educational center.

To the extent that men had been the despotic heads of the patriarchal family, based on a strict division of labor, the experiences of women, children, and men are the contradictory experiences that we inherit. But in precapitalist society the work of each member of the community of serfs was seen to be directed to a purpose: either to the prosperity of the feudal lord or to our survival. To this extent the whole community of serfs was compelled to be cooperative in a unity of unfreedom that involved to the same degree women, children, and men, cooperation that capitalism had to break. In this sense the unfree individual and the democracy of unfreedom entered into a crisis. The passage from serfdom to free labor power separated the male from the female proletarian and both of them from their children. The unfree patriarch was transformed into the 'free' wage earner, and upon the contradictory experience of the sexes and the generations was built a more profound estrangement and, therefore, a more subversive relation.

We must stress that this separation of children from adults is essential to an understanding of the full significance of the separation of women from men, to grasp fully how the organization of the struggle on the part of the women's movement, even when it takes the form of a violent rejection of any possibility of relations with men, can only aim to overcome the separation that is based on the 'freedom' of wage labor.

The Class Struggle in Education

The analysis of the school that has emerged during recent years, particularly with the advent of the students' movement, has clearly identified the school as a center of ideological discipline and of the shaping of the labor force and its masters. What has perhaps never emerged, or at least not in its profundity, is precisely what precedes all this; the usual desperation of children on their first day of nursery school, when they see themselves dumped into a class and their parents suddenly desert them. But it is precisely at this point that the whole story of school begins.

Seen in this way, elementary school children are not those appendages who, merely by the demands for 'free lunches, free fares, free books' learned from the older ones, can in some way be united with the students in the higher schools. In elementary school children, in those who are the sons and daughters of workers, there is always an awareness that school is in some way setting them against their parents and their peers, and consequently there is an instinctive resistance to studying and to being 'educated.' This is the resistance for which black children are confined to educationally subnormal schools in Britain. The European working-class child, like the black working-class child, sees in the teacher somebody who is teaching her something against her mother and father, not as a defense of the child but as an attack on the class. Capitalism is the first productive system where the children of the exploited are disciplined and educated in institutions organized and controlled by the ruling class.

The final proof that this alien indoctrination that begins in nursery school is based on the splitting of the family is that those (few) working-class children who arrive at university are so brainwashed that they are no longer able to talk to their community.

Working-class children are the first who instinctively rebel against schools and the education provided in schools. But their parents carry them to schools and confine them to schools because they are concerned that their children should 'have an education,' that is, be equipped to escape the assembly line or the kitchen to which they, the parents, are confined. If a working-class child shows particular aptitudes, the whole family immediately concentrates on this child, gives him the best conditions, often sacrificing the others, hoping and gambling that he will carry them all out of the working class. This in effect is the way capital moves through the aspirations of the parents to enlist their help in disciplining fresh labor power.

In Italy parents are less and less successful in sending their children to school. Children's resistance to school is constantly increasing, even when this resistance is not yet organized. At the same time that the resistance of children to being educated in schools grows, so does their refusal to accept the definition that capital has given of their age. Children want everything they see; they do not yet understand that in order to have things one must pay for them, and in order to pay for them one must have a wage, and therefore one must also be an adult. No wonder it is not easy to explain to children why they cannot have what television has told them they cannot live without.

But something is happening among the new generation of children and youth that is making it steadily more difficult to explain to them the arbitrary point at which they reach adulthood. Rather the younger generation is demonstrating their age to us: in the 1960s, six-year-olds have already come up against police dogs in the South of the United States. Today we find the same phenomenon in southern Italy and Northern Ireland, where children have been as active in the revolt as adults. When children (and women) are recognized as integral to history, no doubt other examples will come to light of very young people's (and of women's) participation in revolutionary struggles. What is new is the autonomy of their participation, in spite of, and because of, their exclusion from direct production. In the factories youths refuse the leadership of older workers, and in the revolts in the cities they are the diamond point. In the metropolis generations of the nuclear family have produced youth and student movements that have initiated the process of shaking the framework of constituted power; in the Third World unemployed youth are often in the streets before the working class organized in trade unions.

It is worth recording what the Times of London (June 1, 1971) reported concerning a head teachers' meeting called because one of them was admonished for hitting a pupil: "Disruptive and irresponsible elements lurk around every corner with the seemingly planned intention of eroding all forces of authority." This "is a plot to destroy the values on which our civilization is built and of which our schools are some of the finest bastions."

The Exploitation of the Wageless

We wanted to make these few comments on the attitude of revolt that is steadily spreading among children and youth, especially from the working class, and particularly black people, because we believe this to be intimately connected with the explosion of the women's movement and that it is something that the women's movement must take into account. We are dealing here with the revolt of those who have been excluded, who have been separated by the system of production, and who express in action their need to destroy the forces that stand in the way of their social existence, but who this time are coming together as individuals.

Women and children have been excluded. The revolt of the one against exploitation through exclusion is an index of the revolt of the other. To the extent that capital has recruited the man and turned him into a wage laborer, it has created a fracture between him and all the other proletarians without a wage who, not participating directly in social production, were thus presumed incapable of being the subjects of social revolt.

Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the wage, that is, that the foundation of capitalist society was the wage laborer and his or her direct exploitation. What has been neither clear nor understood by the working-class organizations is that it is precisely through the wage that the exploitation of the non-wage laborer is organized. This exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hides it. That is, the wage pays for more labor than factory bargaining makes obvious. Where women are concerned, their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital. The woman seems only to be suffering from male chauvinism, being pushed around because capitalism meant general 'injustice' and 'bad and unreasonable behavior'; the few (men) who noticed convinced us that this was 'oppression' but not exploitation. But 'oppression' hid another and more pervasive aspect of capitalist society. Capital excluded children from the home and sent them to school not only because they are in the way of others' more 'productive' labor nor only to indoctrinate them. The rule of capital through the wage compels every able-bodied person to function under the law of division of labor, and to function in ways that are if not immediately then ultimately profitable to the expansion and extension of the rule of capital. That is the fundamental meaning of school. Where children are concerned, their labor appears to be learning for their own benefit.

Proletarian children have been forced to undergo the same education in the schools: this is capitalist levelling against the infinite possibilities of learning. Woman on the other hand has been isolated in the home, forced to carry out work that is considered unskilled, the work of giving birth to, raising, disciplining, and servicing the worker for production. Her role in the cycle of social production remained invisible because only the product of her labor, the laborer, is visible. She herself is thereby trapped within precapitalist working conditions and never paid a wage.

And when we say 'precapitalist working conditions' we do not refer only to women who have to use brooms to sweep. Even the best equipped American kitchens do not reflect the present level of technological development; at most they reflect the technology of the nineteenth century. If you are not paid by the hour, within certain limits, nobody cares how long it takes you to do your work.

This is not only a quantitative but also a qualitative difference from other work, and it stems precisely from the kind of commodity that this work is destined to produce. Within the capitalist system generally, the productivity of labor doesn't increase unless there is a confrontation between capital and class: technological innovations and cooperation are at the same time moments of attack for the working class and moments of capitalistic response. But if this is true for the production of commodities generally, this has not been true for the production of that special kind of commodity, labor power. If technological innovation can lower the limit of necessary work, and if the working-class struggle in industry can use that innovation for gaining free hours, the same cannot be said of housework; to the extent that she must procreate, raise, and be responsible for children in isolation, a high mechanization of domestic chores doesn't free any time for the woman. She is always on duty, for the machine doesn't exist that makes and minds children. A higher productivity of domestic work through mechanization, then, can be related only to specific services, for example, cooking, washing, cleaning. Her workday is unending not because she does not have machines but because she is isolated.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1629635707
• ISBN 13: 9781629635705
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Camille Barbagallo