Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

If Georgescu-Roegen’s final recommendation had echoes of Keynes’s famous essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the rest of his program went far beyond what most economists were willing to contemplate. He insisted that orthodox approaches to resource depletion, which relied on market prices and market forces, “cannot even dream of handling this problem,” because they ignored the interests of countless generations of people who will live in the distant future, “say, those of A.D. 3000, let alone those that might exist a hundred thousand years from now.”47 The rapid and accelerating depletion of natural resources amounted to a dictatorship of the present over the future, he remarked, as “future generations are not, simply because they cannot be, present on today’s market.”

In 1976 Georgescu-Roegen retired from Vanderbilt. As he aged, he had become increasingly estranged from his colleagues in the economics department. According to one account, none of them attended his leaving party. In retirement, he continued to write but largely kept to himself and his family. To those who knew him, his disappointment and rancor were evident. “Along with others of his friends I was saddened that his latter years were so marked by bitterness and withdrawal, brought on in part by the failure of the profession to give his work the recognition that it truly merited, and in part by his own irascible and generally demanding personality,” Herman Daly wrote in an essay about Georgescu-Roegen that was published a year after his death, which came in 1994, at the age of eighty-eight.48

But if many of his colleagues in the economics profession had failed to appreciate Georgescu-Roegen’s intellectual contribution, by the time he died his reputation was rising in other quarters as concerns about environmental degradation and climate change intensifed. In 1979, Jacques Grinevald, a French writer and environmentalist, translated The Entropy Law and the Economic Process into French. Grinevald used as his title La décroissance: Entropie-Écologie-Économie. The term décroissance, which in English means “reduction” or “decline,” struck a chord. In 2001, in the city of Lyon, a group of environmental and political activists started a Decroissance movement, demanding, among other things, car-free cities, the establishment of food cooperatives, and an end to corporate advertising. Four years later the anti-growth journal La Décroissance was founded.49 Outside of France, similar developments were afoot. In many countries, calls to curb the pace of economic development and make the economy less resource intensive were garnering support from environmentalists and young people. The “degrowth” movement was taking off.

Georgescu-Roegen would surely have welcomed these developments: in many ways, he was the intellectual godfather of degrowth. But he wouldn’t necessarily have been reassured. Perhaps because of his experience of Nazism as a young man, he didn’t hold high hopes for human redemption. “Will mankind listen to any program that implies a constriction of its addiction to exosomatic comfort?” he wrote in 1975. “Perhaps, the destiny of man is to have a short, but fiery, exciting and extravagant life rather than a long, uneventful and vegetative existence. Let other species— the amoebas, for example—which have no spiritual ambitions inherit an earth still bathed in plenty of sunshine.”50

“A true masterpiece at the expense of women”

Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework

In November 1975 a group of women opened a storefront at 288B Eighth Street, off Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, not far from the famous Park Slope Food Coop, which had been established a couple of years earlier. The members of the New York Wages for Housework Committee, a grassroots organization that was demanding payment from the government for domestic labor, were keen to establish a permanent base where they could hold meetings, distribute their posters and literature, and welcome members of the local community. To mark the opening, they strung up banners across Fifth Avenue and held a street party, with refreshments and music.1 One of the founding members of the Committee, Silvia Federici, a young feminist activist who was Italian by birth, delivered a speech in which she expressed distrust of politicians and journalists who celebrated motherhood and ignored the harsh economic realities that many mothers faced, relying on their spouses or welfare for money to raise their families. “It seems to us that if instead of praising our sacrifices they sent us a check at the end of the month, then we would have something to celebrate,” Federici declared. She also emphasized the essential role that housework and childrearing played in supporting and re-creating the workforce in the paid economy. “If we were not at home doing housework, none of their factories, mines, schools and hospitals, could run, none of their profits could flow,” she said. “With our work we make it possible for other people to go to work; we slave, so our husbands and children can slave. No wonder they say the family is the pillar of society.”2

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As well as running the storefront and leafleting women on the streets, Federici and her colleagues put a lot of effort into creating posters that couched their message in everyday terms. One featured a drawing of Lady Liberty clutching a household broom in one hand and a fistful of dollars in the other, with three needy children clutching at her dress. “THE WOMEN OF THE WORLD ARE SERVING NOTICE!” the poster declared. “WE WANT WAGES FOR EVERY DIRTY TOILET, EVERY INDECENT ASSAULT, EVERY PAINFUL CHILDBIRTH, EVERY CUP OF COFFEE, AND EVERY SMILE. AND IF WE DON’T GET WHAT WE WANT WE WILL SIMPLY REFUSE TO WORK ANY LONGER!”3 Another poster showed a steaming iron sitting on an ironing board atop a pair of trousers that was waiting to be ironed. The poster read: “STRIKE! WHILE THE IRON IS HOT! WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK.”4

Although the Wages for Housework movement was small, it was also international, with branches in Italy, where the movement originated, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the United States, there were groups in a number of cities outside New York, including Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. Most of the members of these groups were educated white women. From 1976 onward, there were also Black Women for Wages for Housework groups in a number of places. Wilmette Brown, an African American activist who was originally from New Jersey, and Margaret Prescod, a Barbadian-American teacher at Queens College in New York, founded the first group in New York, which eventually spawned offshoots in other cities.5 In 1975, a Wages Due Lesbians movement emerged from the international Wages for Housework campaign and eventually organized in various cities, including London, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.6

Wages for Housework wasn’t part of the mainstream women’s movement, which had made great strides in the United States and other countries since the emergence of Second Wave feminism in the 1960s. Indeed, the relationship between the two was an uneasy one. Groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW), which the writer Betty Friedan and other American feminists had founded in 1966, campaigned for reproductive rights and sexual equality in the workplace. Wages for Housework supported reproductive rights and higher wages for women, but the movement focused primarily on housework, and the economic plight of domestic workers of all ages and races. “Like other feminists, we were convinced that housework was the root of our oppression as women,”

Federici wrote in a 2018 book about the New York Committee. “Unlike them, we believed that, for this very reason, it should be our main ground of struggle, and that the most effective way to free ourselves from it should be to refuse to do it for free.”7

Another distinguishing characteristic of Wages for Housework was its historical lineage. Whereas Second Wave feminism emerged alongside the civil rights movement in the United States during the early 1960s, Wages for Housework grew out of the student and worker protests of the late 1960s, and it had an explicitly leftist perspective. As a student in Italy in the mid-1960s, Federici viewed unpaid domestic labor as a key cog of global capitalism, and her efforts to abolish it as part of a larger endeavor. “We must admit that capital has been very successful in hiding our work. It has created a true masterpiece at the expense of women,” she wrote in a 1974 pamphlet, Wages Against Housework. “First of all, it has got a hell of a lot of work almost for free, and it has made sure that women, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the best thing in life (the magic words: ‘Yes, darling, you are a real woman’). At the same time, it has disciplined the male worker also, by making his woman dependent on his work and his wage, and trapped him in this discipline by giving him a servant after he himself has done so much serving at the factory or the office.”8

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Intellectually, the tying of female exploitation in the home to capitalist exploitation in the workplace was arguably the most important feature of the Wages for Housework movement. In Second Wave feminism, capitalism was seen as a potentially liberating force: if sexual equality could be introduced into the workplace, women could escape their historical position of subjugation. The tension between these views dated back to the early days of industrial capitalism, when many young women left their homes to work in textile factories, and many male artisans, such as weavers, lost their livelihoods. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels had described how in 1840s Manchester it was common to see families in which the woman and children were the main breadwinners.9 But as heavy industries, such as steel, engineering, and chemicals, came to dominate industrial economies, their workforces became overwhelmingly male. A new gendered division of labor arose, with women tending to leave the labor force once they had children. By 1911, only 10 percent of married British women were in the workforce, although more than 70 percent of single women were.10 The trends in the United States were similar. A Census Bureau survey from 1900 classified just 20.6 percent of all American women over the age of sixteen as “breadwinners,” and just 16 percent of those were married.11 Most married women became full-time mothers and housewives, engaging in domestic labor and relying on their husbands for their livelihood.

In her 1892 book, Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the American feminist writer and social reformer, noted two basic facts about the subservient role assigned to women. First, economic progress and rising productivity were largely a masculine affair because “such economic processes as women have been allowed to exercise are of the earliest and most primitive kind.”12 Second, “whatever the economic value of the domestic industry of women is, they do not get it. The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work … It is held to be their duty as women to do this work; and their economic status bears no relation to their domestic labors, unless an inverse one.”13 Perkins didn’t call for government payment for domestic labor, but she argued that society should be rearranged to make it less burdensome. She suggested setting up common kitchens in apartment buildings, an idea she may have picked up from the early socialist communitarians. She also called for men and women to share housework, and she encouraged women to go out to work wherever possible.

During an era when American women couldn’t even vote, nothing came of these suggestions. In 1920, the year that saw the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which introduced female suffrage, the women’s rights campaigner Crystal Eastman proposed more direct help for female domestic laborers. In an essay titled “Now We Can Begin,” Eastman called for a “motherhood endowment”—a financial payment from the government that would make women and children less dependent on a male breadwinner. “What is the problem of women’s freedom?” Eastman asked.

It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity—housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising, to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.14

These early feminists fully recognized the economic value of domestic labor, and how heavily industrial capitalist societies depended on it. In her 1939 essay collection, In Woman’s Defense, the Kentucky-born author and activist Mary Inman explained that the home was critical to the economic system because “the most valuable of all commodities is still produced there: Labor Power.”15 To illustrate her point, Inman cited the domestic work carried out by the wives of male workers at a Firestone tire factory in California. This “labor is as inseparably knit into those tires,” she wrote, “as is the labor of their husbands.”16 In Britain, meanwhile, Eleanor Rathbone, a women’s rights campaigner and social worker, who in 1929 was elected an independent member of the British Parliament, was tirelessly campaigning for the government to send mothers a monthly payment that they would receive independently of their husbands. Only such a system could recompense women for their housework and guarantee the financial independence of women, Rathbone argued. She advocated for the idea for years, including in a 1924 book, The Disinherited Family. Some labor unions opposed it on the grounds that it would prompt employers to reduce the wages they paid to male breadwinners. But during the Second World War, the Liberal peer William Beveridge proposed a limited version of it in his famous report on social insurance, and in the Family Allowances Act of 1945 it was passed into law.

During the postwar decades, scientific and social developments gradually transformed the economic role of women. The contraceptive pill became widely available, fertility rates declined, and more and more women went out to work. Between December 1948 and December 1970, the share of adult American females who were active in the labor force rose from 33 percent to 43.4 percent.17 (By 1997, it would reach 60 percent.) Even as women flooded into the workplace, however, they earned much lower wages than their male counterparts, and corporate executive suites remained a male preserve. Slowly, the political system started to come to terms with these developments. In June 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law an Equal Pay Act, which outlawed pay discrimination on the basis of sex. The following year the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in many other areas on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court asserted a “right to marital privacy” that prohibited the government from restricting the use of contraceptives. One immediate question was whether these new civil rights laws would be effectively enforced. In creating NOW, Friedan and other feminists were motivated in large part by the desire to make sure that they were.

The Second Wave feminist movement had some major successes. In 1973 the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Roe v. Wade case, which greatly expanded access to abortion. A year later Congress passed the Women’s Educational Equity Act, which was designed to remove barriers facing women at all levels of education. Under pressure from NOW and other women’s groups, many states passed laws enacting no-fault divorce, which made it possible for women to leave marriages of their own accord. The issue of unpaid domestic labor received far less attention, however. Some feminists were suspicious of any policies that would keep women tied to the hearth. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan argued that women who went out to work and had a career were happier and more fulfilled than women who were full-time homemakers. But where did this leave the countless women, particularly working-class women, who were stuck in the unpaid role of raising children and doing housework?

★ ★ ★

Federici was born in 1942 in the northern Italian city of Parma. Her father was a professor of philosophy at the local university. After finishing high school, she attended the University of Bologna, where she studied literature and philosophy and became involved in leftist politics. In the mid-1960s the Italian Communist Party, which was committed to Marxist-Leninism, still dominated the left in Italy, but there were signs of change, including the emergence of Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), a competing far-left group that set out to organize workers directly in their factories. After getting her bachelor’s degree, Federici started graduate work, but she had to live at home because of a lack of money. In 1967 she obtained a Fulbright Fellowship to do graduate work in political philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which had some noted Marxist scholars on its faculty. “When in 1967 I came to the US I was already a natural rebel,” she recounted in a 2022 interview.18

One of Federici’s roommates in Buffalo organized feminist meetings on the campus. Federici was sympathetic to the cause. Growing up in Italy, she had witnessed firsthand how a traditional patriarchal society worked and, as she and many other female activists learned, how leftist men were far from immune to sexism. Initially, however, she struggled to reconcile American-style feminism with the leftist perspective she had embraced in Bologna, which emphasized that the fundamental economic divide in society was between labor and capital. Federici would later recount how her attitude to feminism changed during a train ride from Boston to New York in early 1972, when she read an essay by another young Italian leftist, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who taught political science at the University of Padua. The article was titled “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,” and it set out to analyze what Dalla Costa termed the “Woman Question” through the framework of the capitalist division of labor. “The oppression of women, after all, did not begin with capitalism,” Dalla Costa wrote. “What began with capitalism was the more intense exploitation of women as women and the possibility at last of their liberation.”19 Federici didn’t know Dalla Costa personally, but she found the essay captivating. “By the time I read the last page,” she subsequently wrote, “I knew that I had found my home, my tribe and my own self, as a woman and a feminist.”20

Dalla Costa, who was born in 1943 in the northern Italian city of Treviso, had been a member of the “workerist” movement in Padua. Before teaching her classes, she got up early to leaflet workers outside factory gates in the nearby industrial zone of Porto Margherita. Almost all these workers were male. In the essay that Federici read on the train journey to New York, she noted how the rise of modern capitalism had left many women isolated in their homes, where they were cut off from industrial production but still an integral part of the economic system because of their role in feeding and looking after existing workers and raising new ones. Following the lead of earlier leftists, including Mary Inman, Dalla Costa called this domestic labor “social production” and insisted that it created a great deal of economic value. She referred to the nuclear family as the “social factory,” where female domestic workers endured a parallel existence to industrial workers, being exploited and dehumanized. “In the same way as women are robbed of the possibility of developing their creative capacity, they are robbed of their sexual life which has been transformed into a function for reproducing labour power,” Dalla Costa wrote. “Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labor power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment.”21 By ignoring or downplaying these realities, leftist thinkers, including Marx, hadn’t merely made an analytical error, Dalla Costa argued. They had robbed their cause of a potent weapon: the prospect of women withdrawing their domestic labor and upending the traditional family unit, which served as “the very pillar of the capitalist organization of work.” “Let us sum up,” Dalla Costa concluded. “The role of housewife, behind whose isolation is hidden social labor, must be destroyed.”22

This was the critical theoretical framework that Federici had been searching for: one that combined an indictment of the patriarchy with a leftist economic analysis. At the time she read “The Power of Women and the Subversion of Society,” she was living in Brooklyn and trying to finish her doctoral dissertation. She wrote a note to Dalla Costa, and the two started to correspond. In July 1972, Federici went back to Italy to see her family. While she was there, she traveled to Padua. The previous year Dalla Costa and some fellow activists in the Italian city had created a new feminist group, Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle). While Federici was in Padua, she attended a two-day meeting with Dalla Costa and other members of the group, as well as some feminist activists who were visiting from different countries, including Selma James, a member of the Notting Hill Women’s Liberation Workshop in London, who had helped Dalla Costa to write and edit the published version of her essay. At the end of the Padua meeting, the participants, who numbered about twenty, constituted themselves as the International Feminist Collective and issued a declaration, which said: “We identify ourselves as Marxist feminists and take this to mean a new definition of class … based on the subordination of the wageless worker to the wage worker behind which is hidden the productivity, i.e. the exploitation, of the labour of women in the home.”23 The members of the collective vowed to launch wages for housework campaigns in their own countries. They knew they would face many challenges, including skepticism from the mainstream women’s movement and male leftists. “Despite the anticipated difficulties, by the time I left Italy I had embraced the project,” Federici recalled later in her life.24