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

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Shortly after Federici returned to the United States, she and some colleagues founded the New York Wages for Housework Committee. On Mother’s Day, they went to Prospect Park and handed out a flyer that said: “Let us call mothers, wives, singles, grandmothers, daughters, sisters by their true name: HOUSEWORKERS.”25 Many of the women they approached talked about their own struggles raising children and doing housework and the lack of appreciation that they felt. “We were all, at the time, in our late twenties or thirties, white, with jobs, though often precarious, and none of us for a while fit the classic image of the housewife,” Federici wrote in her history of the New York Committee. “Few of us were married, and even fewer had children. Yet, we were not embarrassed to admit that we had not escaped domestic work, nor the social expectations deriving from its naturalization as ‘women’s’ work.”26 Although the New York Committee was still small, it sought to establish connections to other left-wing activists, such as union organizers and tenants’ rights campaigners. While Federici was dedicated to Wages for Housework and saw it as an organization with great potential, she always viewed it as part of a broader movement to empower working-class women and men.

As well as being a tireless organizer, Federici was a gifted writer, who could express in graphic terms the moral and economic arguments that underpinned the movement. In Wages Against Housework, her 1974 pamphlet, she explained that female houseworkers were, in some ways, even more subjugated than wage workers, who could at least switch jobs. “The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character,” she wrote. “In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not workers in struggle.”27 Turning to the movement’s practical demands, Federici emphasized that demanding payments for housework was “only the beginning.”28 Although the money would be extremely useful to many women, particularly working-class women, the larger goal was to demystify and undermine the economic system that had kept female domestic workers in a state of unpaid subjugation. “To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking,” Federici wrote. “At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice.”29

In the fall of 1974, the Wages for Housework movement held its first international conference, in Brooklyn, with attendees coming from Canada, England, and Italy, as well as other US cities. They put together a lengthy statement, “Theses on Wages for Housework,” which emphasized the role unpaid domestic labor played in propping up the capitalist system. “Our wageless condition is the material basis of our dependence on men within the family and in society,” the statement said. “The family is a colony where power is delegated to men to supervise our work. The power they have over us is the power of the wage. But their power over us is ultimately their weakness with respect to capital, for our dependence on them is a discipline on their labor. It is the chain that ties them to their jobs.”30

One of the key figures in the international expansion of Wages for Housework was Selma James, who had a long history of campaigning against capitalism and colonialism. She was born Selma Deitch in 1930 in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Her father was a Polish Jewish immigrant truck driver, who taught himself to read English and became an organizer with the Teamsters Union. After leaving school at fifteen, Selma moved to Los Angeles, where she worked in a factory, got married, had a son, and eventually became a writer. In 1952 she wrote an article, “A Woman’s Place,” that was based on her own experience and on interviews with female neighbors and coworkers about their domestic labor. Emphasizing the powerlessness and frustration that many of them felt, the piece said: “The way that the house is set up, neither the husband nor the children have any idea how much effort and real hard work and time have gone into cleaning the house  … You have no control over the hours of work, the kind of work you will have to do, and how much work you do. These are what women want to control.”31

Before leaving Brooklyn, Deitch met C. L. R. James, the Jamaican writer and historian: they were both members of a small Trotskyite group, the Johnson-Forest Tendency. After separating from her first husband and becoming a writer, she reconnected with James, who was by then a wellknown writer and anti-colonialist activist. In 1955, Deitch and James moved to London. The following year they got married, and Selma took James’s surname. On many issues, they were like-minded, but Selma James was very much her own thinker and writer. In early 1972, she wrote a paper titled “Women, the Unions and Work, or  … What Is Not to Be Done,” which she presented at the National Conference of Women, in Manchester. The paper argued that Britain’s powerful labor unions were ignoring the interests of women and outlined six demands to remedy this situation. The first two were: WE DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK LESS, and WE DEMAND A GUARANTEED INCOME FOR WOMEN AND FOR MEN WORKING OR NOT WORKING, MARRIED OR NOT. The ruling class had glorified motherhood only when it involved unpaid labor, James went on. “Let them pay us, or else we can go to the factories and offices and put our children in their father’s laps. Let’s see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK.”32 Initially, James’s agenda didn’t gain much traction in the British women’s movement. Some feminists feared that paying for domestic labor would institutionalize women remaining in the home. Others saw going out to work as the road to liberation. James wasn’t put off. A dedicated activist, she regarded the Wages for Housework movement as an essential extension of feminism and the anti-capitalist movement.

As the New York Committee geared up its activism, the media started paying attention to it. In January 1976, The New York Times published a news story headlined “Brooklyn Women Seek Wages for Housework,” which quoted Federici saying: “No one works as hard as women do for nothing … If we stopped, the economy would be paralyzed.” Asked about the specifics of the organization’s demands and how its wage program would operate, Federici replied: “It’s unwise to work out too many details until we have a mass movement.”33 Other publications, including the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, and England’s Western Daily Press, also printed articles about Wages for Housework. In April 1976, Life magazine published a picture of Federici and a dozen of her colleagues standing in the kitchen of her Brooklyn apartment behind a table stacked with pots and pans.34

The opening of the storefront on Eighth Street marked another significant development for the New York Committee. “We got a miserable little room, but it was great,” Federici recounted decades later. “A storefront with a big window onto the street. It’s a New York thing. So the room was small, but we filled it with all our posters. Whenever possible, the door was open so women could walk in, pick up a flyer and then periodically, we had meetings and we posted about it in the community. That was a way of getting the information out.”35 Despite garnering media attention and establishing a physical base, however, Wages for Housework never attracted an enduring mass following. To some extent, this failure reflected its radicalism. Although its demand for housework to be paid had great popular appeal, its broader goal of subverting the very nature of work in a capitalist system wasn’t one that necessarily spoke to hard-pressed working-class women, to whom revolutionary politics seemed like a distant concern.

At the national and international level, meanwhile, Wages for Housework operated in the shadow of the broader women’s movement, whose demands for equal pay and conditions in the paid workplace were being embraced by major political parties and international organizations. In 1975 the United Nations held a World Conference on Women in Mexico City, at which it called on member governments to guarantee sexual equality and ensure the full integration of women in the economy. Federici was skeptical of these developments. She viewed the UN and other international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as props for global capitalism. She believed that what she termed “liberal feminism” ultimately fulfilled a similar role, because it lacked a proper critical perspective and allowed itself to be co-opted. “With the intervention of the United Nations in feminist politics,” she later commented, “we have seen an attempt to institutionalize the movement in order to defuse and neutralize its struggles and its subversive potential.”36

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Another challenge that the New York Committee encountered was the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which placed enormous pressures on all workers’ and leftist movements. Following the OPEC oil price shock of 1973, when the price of crude tripled, the US economy fell into a recession, and New York City experienced a fiscal crisis that saw it move to the brink of defaulting on some of its municipal bonds. In September 1975, the New York State legislature created an Emergency Financial Control Board that took over the city’s finances. To balance the budget, the control board slashed spending on many programs, including welfare programs that benefited working-class women and children. The control board also laid off some city workers and imposed wage freezes and cuts in employee benefits on many others. Federici would compare this austerity package to the structural adjustment programs that the IMF and World Bank imposed on developing countries that had run into financial problems. As the city’s labor unions fought in vain to resist these measures, she and her colleagues, some of whom were also active in union organizing and other leftist causes, got swept up in this political struggle. Recalling a failed effort by the progressive Local 1199 to organize thousands of care workers, Federici wrote: “The defeat was palpable, as in everyone’s bones there was the sense that this was the beginning of an era in which only roll backs would be possible. Soon, moreover, it became clear that the disciplining of the New York workforce was part of a restructuring of the world economy that was to institute an austerity regime for years to come.”37

As the fiscal and political crisis intensified, the New York Committee continued its activities. In April 1976 it organized a conference on welfare, which was attended by dozens of women from Wages for Housework groups across the United States and allied organizations. At the time, conservative politicians were vilifying women on welfare, particularly Black women, as “welfare queens,” in an effort to win votes and undermine the Great Society programs that had provided financial support to poor families. Federici regarded the response of the broader women’s movement to these attacks as woefully inadequate. But despite the activism of the New York Committee and protests by other groups, Federici and her colleagues were powerless to prevent the cuts to spending and welfare benefits. Moreover, the economic crisis and its aftermath heightened differences on strategy and tactics that had emerged inside the Wages for Housework movement, including tensions between the New York Committee and some members of the recently formed Black Women for Wages for Housework. At a 2021 event in Toronto, one of the founders of that group, Margaret Prescod, said that when she and her colleagues were campaigning at Queens College for the right of students who were mothers on welfare to keep their student grants and their welfare payments, some white members of the New York Committee didn’t support them. “They didn’t consider that wages for housework, but we did,” Prescod recounted.38 Other schisms also emerged, and in 1977 the New York Committee dissolved itself.

In later years, Federici was reluctant to discuss the circumstances surrounding this dissolution. After it happened, she quickly went on to other projects, including the creation of a new political journal, Tap Dance. She also did historical research on the origins of the gendered division of labor, which turned into an influential 1984 book The Great Caliban: History of the Rebel Body in the First Phase of Capitalism, cowritten with Leopoldina Fortunati, an Italian feminist theorist. In 1978, Dalla Costa’s Padua branch of Wages for Housework also shut down. Other parts of the movement carried on, including the International Wages for Housework Campaign and Black Women for Wages for Housework. But the shuttering of the New York Committee and the Wages for Housework branch in the Italian city where the movement had been founded marked an ending of a sort.

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Like many radical movements, Wages for Housework didn’t achieve its primary goals and ended up splintering. That doesn’t mean it failed. Initially, the idea that domestic labor was productive in an economic sense because it helped to maintain and reproduce the capitalist workforce ran into resistance from some leftist intellectuals. “Workerist theoreticians insisted that what we called production—that is production, and reproduction of labor power—belonged rather to the sphere of circulation, as Marx described in Das Kapital,” Dalla Costa recalled in an interview with Louise Toupin, a Canadian political scientist who wrote an illuminating history of the international Wages for Housework movement that was published in 2018.39 Over time, however, the importance of “social reproduction,” as domestic labor came to be known, became widely accepted on the left. “I think there is now a sense that what we call domestic work is the production of the workforce,” Federici said in an interview in 2022 with The White Review, a London-based magazine. “And it gave a material basis to a radical feminist analysis of sexual and personal relations, the idea that the personal is political, because what happens in the home is connected to the broader organisation of work. The privatisation of the home actually hides the exploitation.”40

It wasn’t only intellectuals on the left who came to recognize the economic importance of domestic labor. In the world of economics and policymaking, the rise of Wages for Housework helped spark a debate about how economic statistics should treat domestic labor. Since housework and childrearing weren’t paid and monetized, they weren’t counted in the gross domestic product—an omission that led to some absurdities, one of which became notorious. If a man hired a female housekeeper to clean his house and do his washing, the money he paid her was included in GDP. If the man married the housekeeper, and she carried on doing the same work on an unpaid basis, GDP would fall even though the women’s economic contribution remained the same. Clearly, the official statistics were failing to count some crucial economic contributions. In 1975, researchers at the US Social Security Administration took a step toward addressing this omission by trying to place a dollar value on housework. They estimated how much it would cost in the marketplace to purchase the services that a typical housewife provided, such as cooking and cleaning. The researchers concluded that housewives between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine who had children did work that was worth, on average, \$6,417 a year, not far off the \$7,495 earned on average outside the home by female workers of the same age.41

Another significant step came in 1980, when delegates at a UN conference in Copenhagen put forward a motion demanding the recognition of unpaid domestic work—a proposal that ran into opposition from India, the USSR, and the Vatican.42 One of the conference attendees who supported the motion was a young politician from New Zealand named Marilyn Waring who, at twenty-three years old, had become the youngest member of the parliament in Wellington. Waring was a member of the center-right National Party, but she held liberal views on many issues, including women’s rights and the environment. After she got back from Copenhagen, she started working on a research paper about national income accounting, the data-collation process that generates GDP statistics. Her research formed the basis of a 1988 book that is now widely acknowledged as an intellectual landmark: If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics.

In her prologue, Waring brought up Wages for Housework, saying she shared Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s “original intention of providing a tool for raising consciousness and for mobilizing women everywhere.”43 She also hailed Ester Boserup, a Danish economist whose 1970 book, Woman’s Role in Economic Development, had emphasized the positive economic contributions that women in developing countries made through their paid and unpaid labor inside and outside the home. Noting that she was writing in the same tradition as these and other feminist pioneers, Waring said her goal was to demystify the UN System of National Accounts, the set of accounting conventions that most countries used to calculate GDP. She wrote: “It is my confirmed belief that this system acts to sustain, in the ideology of patriarchy, the universal enslavement of women and Mother Earth in their productive and reproductive activities.”44

Waring traced the origins of national income accounting back to Sir William Petty, a seventeenth-century English polymath who in 1665 produced some rough estimates of his country’s overall riches, distinguishing between stocks (wealth) and flows (income). Waring also described how, during the 1930s and ’40s, when American and British economists generated the first detailed estimates of national income for the United States and the United Kingdom, they excluded unpaid work, including women’s domestic labor. This decision was partly driven by practical considerations rather than conscious sexism, Waring explained.

Governments wanted to track their economies so they could estimate how much money they could raise in taxes, but unpaid labor couldn’t be taxed, and it was therefore left out. In 1953 the United Nations issued an international set of guidelines for national accounting that was based on the British and US model. It recommended the creation of a “production boundary” between the “producing and consuming entities” in the economy, which placed domestic workers in the nonproductive sector.45 During the decades since 1953, Waring noted, some minor changes had been made to the UN accounting guidelines, particularly those concerning household production in developing countries. But cleaning, cooking, and childcare—the basic forms of domestic labor—were still classed as nonproductive activities. The “reasons given by men for their failure to account for women’s work are 1) conceptual problems and 2) the practical difficulties of collecting data,” Waring wrote. “It does not seem to occur to them that if you have a conceptual problem about the activity of half the human species, you then have a conceptual problem about the whole.”46

Waring coupled her criticisms of GDP figures, and governments that compiled them, for ignoring domestic labor with a call for the statisticians to also recognize the enormous flows of value created by natural resources, such as fresh air, clean water, and sites of natural beauty. Like the economic benefits of housework, these flows had remained hidden for far too long, she argued. In her final chapter, she called for a global campaign of consciousness raising around these issues, and she commended the activism of Dalla Costa and Wages for Housework for having “helped to have feminist issues understood by 12 million Italian housewives—which is no mean feat.”47

Replicating this success on a global scale represented a mighty challenge, she conceded. But she pointed to some signs of progress, including a wave of strikes and walkouts that had taken place in more than twenty countries in October 1985 to demand that unwaged work be recognized in GDP. “We women are visible and valuable to each other, and we must, now in our billions, proclaim that visibility and that worth,” Waring wrote. “And if there is still confusion about who will achieve that, then we must each of us walk to a clear pool of water. Look at the water. It has value. Now look into the water. The woman we see there counts for something. She can help to change the world.”48

“It is a form of regressive modernisation”

Theorists of Thatcherism: Stuart Hall vs. Friedrich Hayek

On February 11, 1975, the British Conservative Party, having lost two elections in a row, selected the forty-nine-year-old Margaret Thatcher as its first female leader. Some time after Thatcher’s elevation, she visited the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), a conservative think tank based in a Georgian terrace house on Lord North Street, Westminster. The IEA’s director, Lord Ralph Harris, introduced her to Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian British economist, who in 1974 had been awarded a share of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences. Since publishing his wartime jeremiad against social democracy, The Road to Serfdom, the seventy-fiveyear-old Hayek had expounded his free market views from academic perches at the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and since 1962, the University of Freiburg in West Germany. He had also organized the Mont Pelerin Society, an international organization committed to “private property and the competitive market” that counted Milton Friedman and other conservative luminaries among its members. During the prosperous postwar decades, however, Hayek had fallen out of fashion. As the economic philosophy of his old intellectual foes Keynes and William Beveridge held sway on both sides of the Atlantic, he had retreated into obscurity.

The Nobel award, which came as a surprise to many economists, brought Hayek back into the public eye, and in Thatcher he found an eager pupil. “Although she is known as being a rather overpowering lady, she sat down like a meek schoolgirl and listened,” Harris later recalled of the meeting at the IEA.1 Hayek was smitten with the new Conservative leader. “She’s so beautiful,” he said after she left.2 During a stint as minister of education in Edward Heath’s 1970–74 government, Thatcher wasn’t regarded as a right-wing ideologue, but the industrial relations environment of the 1970s had radicalized her. In early 1972, miners in Britain’s publicly owned coal industry went on strike, demanding higher pay to catch up with rising inflation. As coal stocks ran down, there were extensive power outages. After seven weeks, the dispute ended in a victory for the miners: the National Coal Board awarded them a pay increase of more than 20 percent. In 1973, emboldened by this success, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) issued fresh wage demands, and its members refused to work overtime. Fearing a complete shutdown, Heath’s government ordered many businesses to work a three-day week to conserve energy. In February 1974 the miners voted to strike again. Heath called a snap general election, framing it as a choice between order and union-induced chaos: one of the Conservative Party’s campaign slogans was “Who Governs Britain?” The voters decided it would no longer be the Conservatives: on election day, the party lost its overall majority in the House of Commons. The Labour Party formed a minority government and quickly settled the dispute with the NUM, agreeing to give the miners another big pay raise.

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