It is Theoretical Weekends and we are going back almost twenty years to 1994 and a bit of analysis from Mariarosa Dalla Costa.
Rather than write my own introduction, I will just copy a bit about this from The Commoner introduction.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa explores the relation between capital and reproduction and regards the powers of the “actors” of the latter (women, indigenous people and earth) as decisive force “that can lift the increasingly deadly siege capitalist development imposes on human reproduction”. She argues that the woman’s question, the question of the indigenous populations, and the question of the Earth have close synergies, and thus it is no surprising that in the last two decades they have become of great importance. If the path towards a “different kind of development cannot ignore them” it is because of the many powers (powers to) these subjects have. The many powers of civilisations that have not died “but have managed to conceal themselves” reside in the secrets that “have been maintained thanks to their resistance to the will to annihilate them.” The gift of struggles. Also the Earth has “many powers, especially its power to reproduce itself and humanity as one of its parts.” And these powers have been “discovered, preserved and enhanced more by women’s knowledge than male science”. These triple knowledge/powers – of women, of indigenous people and of the earth – should “find a way of emerging and being heard” and act as the decisive force they are.
The following comes from The Commoner.
CAPITALISM AND REPRODUCTION[2]
(11-07-94)
Paper presented by Mariarosa Dalla Costa at the seminar, Women's Unpaid
Labour and the World System, organised
by the Japan Foundation, April 8 1994, Tokyo, as part of the
Foundation's “European Women's Study
Tour for Environmental Issues”.
The sphere of reproduction today reveals all the original sins of the
capitalist mode of production. Reproduction must be viewed, of course, from a
planetary perspective, with special attention being paid to the changes that
are taking place in wide sectors of the lower social strata in advanced
capitalism as well as in an increasing proportion of the Third World
population. We live in a planetary
economy, and capitalist accumulation still draws its life-blood for its
continuous valorization from waged as well as unwaged labour, the latter
consisting first of all of the labour involved in social reproduction (M. Dalla
Costa, 1972), in the advanced as well as the Third World countries.
We find that social "misery" or "unhappiness" which
Marx (Marx, 1975, p. 286) considered to be the "goal of the political economy" has largely been
realized everywhere. But, setting aside the question of happiness for the time
being--though certainly not to encourage the myth of its impossibility--let me
stress how incredible it now seems, marxist analysis apart, to claim that
capitalist development in some way brings a generalised well-being to the
planet.
Social reproduction today is more beset and overwhelmed than ever by the
laws of capitalist accumulation: the continual and progressive expropriation
(from the 'primitive' expropriation of the land as a means of production, which
dates from the16th-18th centuries in England, to the expropriation, then as
now, of all the individual and collective rights that ensure subsistance); the
continual division of society into conflictual hierarchies (of
class, sex, race, and nationality, which pit the free waged worker against the
unfree unwaged worker, against the unemployed worker, and the slave labourer);
the constant production of inequality and uncertainty (with the woman as
reproducer facing an even more uncertain fate in comparison to any waged worker
and, if she is also member of a discriminated race or nation, she suffers yet
deeper discrimination); the continual polarisation of the production of wealth
(which is more and more concentrated) and the production of poverty
(which is increasingly widespread).
As Marx writes in Capital (1976, Book I, p.799): "Finally, the law which
always holds the relative surplus production or industrial reserve army in
equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to
capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock.
It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the
accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of
wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the
torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at
the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product
as capital." This is true, not only for the population overwhelmed by the
Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. It is even more accurate
today, now that capital's accumulation passes, for example, through factory,
plantation, dam, mine, and even carpet weaving workshops where it is by no
means rare for children to be working in conditions of slavery.
Indeed, capitalist accumulation spreads through the world by extracting
labour for production and reproduction in conditions of stratification which
end in the reestablishment of slavery. According to a recent estimate, slavery
is the condition in which over 200 million persons are working in the world
today (The Economist, January 6 1990).
Those macro-processes and operations which economic forces, supported by
political power, unfolded during the period of primitive accumulation in Europe
with the aim of destroying the individual's value in relationship to his/her
community in order to turn him/her into an isolated and valueless individual, a
mere container for labour-power which s/he is obliged to sell to survive,
continue to mark human reproduction on a planetary scale. The indifference
shown by capital towards the possibility of labour-power's reproduction in the
first phase of its history was only very partially, and today increasingly
precariously, redeemed centuries later by the creation of the Welfare State.
Currently, the task being set by the directives of the major financial
agencies, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is to re- draw
the boundaries of welfare and economic policies as a whole (Dalla Costa M.,
Dalla Costa G.F., ed., 1993) in both the advanced and the developing countries.
(The economic, social welfare and social insurance measures recently introduced
in Italy correspond precisely to the various 'structural adjustment' plans
being applied in many Third World countries.) The result is that increasingly
large sectors of world population are destined to extinction because they are
believed to be redundant or inappropriate to the valorization requirements of
capital.
Just as at the end of the 1400s, when the bloody legislation against the
expropriated (Marx, 1976, Book I, Chapter 28) led to the mass hanging,
torturing, branding, and chaining of the poor, so today the surplus or
inadequately disciplined population of the planet is exterminated through death
by cold and hunger in eastern Europe and various countries of the advanced West
("more coffins less cradles in Russia" (La Repubblica,
February 16 1994)); death by hunger and epidemic in Africa, Latin America and
elsewhere; death caused by formally declared war, by genocide authorized
directly or indirectly, by military and police repression. The other variant of
extinction is an individual or collective decision for suicide because there is
no possiblity to survive. (It is significant that, according to the Italian
press reports in 1993-94, many cases of suicide in Italy are due to unemployment
or to the fact that the only work on offer is to join a criminal gang, while,
in India, the 'tribal people' in the Narmada valley have declared a readiness
to die by drowning if work continues on a dam which will destroy their habitat
and, hence, the basis of their survival and cultural identity). (1)
The most recent and monstrous twist to this campaign of extinction comes
from the extreme example of resistance offered by those who sell parts of their
body, useless container for a labour-power that is no longer saleable. (In
Italy, where the sale of organs is banned, press and TV reports in 1993-94
mentioned instances in which people said explicitly that they were willing to
break the ban in exchange for money or a job.) For those impoverished and
expropriated by capitalist expansion in the Third World, however, this is
already a common way for obtaining money. Press reports mention criminal
organisations which traffic in organs and supply perfectly legal terminals such
as clinics. This trade flourishes thanks to kidnapping, often of women and
children, and false adoption. An enquiry was recently opened at the European
Parliament on the issue (La Repubblica, September 16 1993), and various
women's networks are trying to throw light on and block these crimes. But this
is where capitalist development, founded on the negation of the individual's
value, celebrates its triumph; the individual owner of redundant or, in any
case, superfluous labour-power is literally cut to pieces in order to re-build
the bodies of those who can pay for the right to live to the criminal or
non-criminal sectors of capital which profit from it.
During the era of primitive accumulation, when the free waged worker was
being shaped in England, the law still authorized slavery (Marx, 1976, Book I,
Chapter 28), treating the vagabonds, created by the feudal lords' violent and
illegal expropriation of the land, as "voluntary" perpetrators of the
crime of vagabondage and ordaining that, if anyone should refuse to work, he
would be "condemned as a slave to the person who denounced him as an
idler." (Marx, 1976, p.897). But, if this reduction of the poor to slavery
remained on a relatively limited scale in England, not that much later, capital
launched slavery on a much vaster scale, emptying Africa of the equivalent of
Europe's population at that time through the slave trade to the Americas and
the Caribbean.
But slavery, far from disappearing, has remained as one of capitalism's
unmentioned, concealed constants. The poverty imposed on a large part of the
planet by the major financial agencies chains entire families to work in
conditions of slavery so that they can pay their creditors; workers are made to
work in conditions of slavery in livestock farms, plantations and mines;
children are made to work in conditions of slavery in carpet work-shops; women
are kidnapped or fooled into working in the sex industry. But these are only
some examples. It is significant that the problem of slavery was raised by the
Non-Government Organisations at their Forum in Vienna on June 10-12 that
preceded the UN's World Conference on Human Rights on June 14-25, 1993.
Again, in the period of primitive accumulation, with the birth of free
waged labour after the great expropriations, there was the greatest case of
sexual genocide in history, the great witch-hunts, which, with a series of
other measures directed expressly against women, contributed in a fundamental
way to forging the unfree, non-waged woman worker in the production and
reproduction of labour-power (Federici, 1988). Deprived of the trades and means
of production and subsistence typical of the previous economy, and largely
excluded from craftwork or access to the new jobs that manufacturing was
offering, the woman was essentially faced by two options for survival: marriage
or prostitution. Even for women who had found some form of work external to the
home, prostitution at that time was also a way of supplementing low family
income or the low wages paid to women.
Over and above the various regimes and meanings it has gone through in
different eras and social contexts, it is interesting that, in that
period, prostitution first became a
trade exercised by women at the mass level, whence one can say that during the
manufacturing period the individual proletarian woman was born fundamentally to
be a prostitute (Fortunati, 1981; 1984, p.209).
From this insoluble contradiction in the woman's condition as an unwaged
worker in a wage economy (Dalla Costa M., 1972) sprouted the conditions for
mass prostitution in that period - and also the conditions on which the same
phenomenon is based today, but on a vaster scale, in order to generate profits for one of the
most flourishing industries at the world level, the sex industry. This led the
World Coalition against Trafficking in Women to present the first World
Convention against Sexual Exploitation in Brussels (May 1993). The women in the
Coalition also agreed to work for the UN's adoption of the convention and its
ratification by the national governments.
Internationally, in fact, the sexual exploitation of women by organised
crime is increasingly alarming. In Italy, these organisations have already
brought many women from Africa and
eastern Europe to work as prostitutes. The tricks used to cover up exploitation
by prostitution - for example, wife sales by catalogue or 'sexual tourism' in
exotic destinations - are legion and well-known. According to the Coalition's
charges, various countries already accept forms of 'sexual tourism' as a
planned component in national income. Thanks to individual women and NGOs,
studies of the direct government responsibility in forcing women to serve as
prostitutes for soldiers during World War II have also begun.
Woman's condition in capitalism is born with violence (just as the free
waged worker is born with violence); it is forged on the witches' pyres, and it
is maintained with violence (Dalla Costa G.F., 1978). Within the current
context of the population's reproduction, the woman continues to suffer
violence as the subject of poverty at the world level (since her unpaid
responsibility for the home makes her the weak contracting party in the
external labour market), but because of her lack of economic resources, she
also suffers a further violence of being sucked increasingly into organised
prostitution. The warlike visage that development increasingly assumes simply
worsens woman's condition still further and magnifies the practice and
mentality of violence against women (2). A paradigmatic case is the war rape
exercised as ethnic rape in the war in ex-Yugoslavia.
I have mentioned only some of the social macro-operations which allowed
the capitalist system to "take off" during the period of primitive
accumulation. But just as important were a series of other operations (Marx,
1976, Book I, Chaps. 26-33) left unmentioned here for the sake of brevity, but
which could also be illustrated today as aspects of the continual re-foundation
on a world scale of the class relationship on which capitalist development
rests: the perpetuation of the stratification of workers in society based on
the separation and counterposition imposed through the sexual division of
labour.
All the considerations are
designed to lead to one fundamental thesis: capitalist development has
always been unsustainable because of its human impact. To
understand the point, all one needs to do is to take the viewpoint of those who
have been and continue to be killed by it. A presupposition of capitalism's
birth was the sacrifice of a large part of humanity, mass exterminations, the
production of hunger and misery, slavery, violence and terror. Its continuation
requires the same presuppositions. Particularly from the woman's
viewpoint, capitalist development has always been unsustainable because it
places her in an unsustainable contradiction, by being an unwaged worker
in a wage economy and, hence, for that reason, denied the right to an
autonomous existence. And if we look at the subsistence economies-- continually
besieged, undermined and overwhelmed by capitalist development--we see that
capitalist development continually deprives women of the land and water which
for them are fundamental means of production and subsistence in sustaining the
entire community.
The expropriation of land leaped to the world's attention in January
with the revolt of the indigenous people of Chiapas in Mexico. The media could
hardly avoid reporting it because of the
crucial role played by Mexico's alignment with the Western powers through the
agreement for the North American Free Trade Area. The perversity of producing wealth by
expropriation and the production of misery was there for all to see. But it is also significant that the dramatic
consequences of expropriation of the land led those involved in drawing up the Women's
Action Agenda 21 in Miami in November, 1991 to make a forceful appeal
for women to be guaranteed land and access to food. At the same time, the
process of capitalist expansion--in this case, with the Green Revolution--led
many people to practice the selective
abortion of female foetuses and girl-child infanticide in some areas of the
Third World (Shiva, 1990): from sexual genodice to preventive annihilation.
The question of unsustainable development has become topical fairly
recently with the emergence of evidence for various environmental disasters and
forms of harm inflicted on the ecosystem. The Earth, the water running in its
veins, and the air surrounding it have come to be seen as an ecosystem, a
living organism of which humans are a part-humans who depend for their life on
the life and equilibrium of the ecosystem-
as against an idea of Nature as the 'other' of Humanity - a Nature to be
dominated and whose elements are to be appropriated as though they were potential
commodities waiting in a warehouse. After five centuries of expropriation and
domination, the Earth is returning to the limelight. In the past it was sectioned, fenced in, and
denied to the free producers. Now, it is itself being expropriated of its
reproductive powers - turned topsy-turvy,
vivisectioned, and made a commodity.
But these extreme operations (like the 'banking' and patenting of the
genetic codes of living species) belong to a single process whose logic of
exploitation and domination has brought the planet to such devastation in human
and environmental terms as to provoke disquieting questions as to the future
possibilities and modalities of human reproduction.
But environmental destruction is united with the destruction wreaked on
an increasingly large proportion of humanity. The destruction wreaked on the
human groups is necessary for the perpetuation of capitalist development today,
just as it was at its origins. To stop subscribing to this general destruction,
and hence to approach the problem of 'sustainable development', means, above
all, to take into account the struggles that are moving against capitalist
development in the metropolises and the rural areas. It also means finding the ways, and defining
the practices to set capitalist development behind us by elaborating a
different approach to knowledge.
But in interpreting and taking into account the various anti-capitalist
struggles and movements, a global vision must be maintained of the many
sections of society rebelling in various forms and contexts throughout the
planet. To give priority to some and ignore others would mean adopting the same
logic of separation and counterposition which is the soul of capitalist
development. The cancellation and
annihilation of a part of humanity cannot be given as a foregone conclusion. In
the metropolises and the advanced capitalist countries in general, many no
longer have the waged job which, in their context, is the source of
subsistence. At the same time, the welfare measures representing the complex of
individual and collective rights that contribute to ensuring survival are being
cut back. Human reproduction has already reached its limits: the woman's
reproductive energy is increasingly dried out like a spring whose water has
been used for too much land and water, says Vandana Shiva (1990), does not
multiply.
Reproduction is crushed by the general intensification of labour, by the
over-extension of the working day, amidst cuts in resources whereby the lack of
waged work, too, becomes a stress-laden search for work and/or illegal
employment, added to the laborious work of reproduction. I have no space to
give a more extensive description of the complex phenomena that have led to the
drastic reduction in the birth-rate in the advanced countries, particularly in
Italy (where index of fertility rate, 1.26, and the population shows zero
growth). But it should also be remembered that women's refusal to function as
machines for reproducing labour-power, demanding instead to reproduce
themselves and others as social individuals, has represented a major moment of
women's resistance and struggle (Dalla Costa M., 1972). The contradiction in
women's condition--whereby women are at a disadvantage in searching for
financial autonomy through waged work outside the home, since they also remain
primarily responsible for labour-power's production and reproduction--has
exploded in all its unsustainability: women in the advanced countries have
fewer and fewer children. In general, humanity in the advanced countries is
less and less desirous of reproducing itself.
But women's great refusal in countries like Italy at the same time
demands an answer to the overall question we are discussing: it demands a new
type of development in which human reproduction is not built on an unsustainable
sacrifice by women, as part of a conception and structure of life which is
nothing but labour time within an intolerable sexual hierarchy. The
"wage" struggle, in both its direct and indirect aspects, does not
concern solely 'advanced' areas as something distinct from 'rural' ones, for
there are very few situations in which survival rests solely on the land. To
sustain the community, the wage economy is most often interwoven with resources
typical of a subsistence economy, whose overall conditions are continually under
pressure from the political and economic decisions of the major financial
agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank (Dalla Costa M., Dalla Costa G.F.,
eds. 1993). Today, it would thus be a
fatal error not to defend the wage level and guarantees for the income - in
money, goods and services - that it is working humanity's right to demand,
since the wealth and power of capitalist society has been accumulated on the
basis of five centuries of its labour. At the same time, land, water and
forests must remain available for those whose subsistence comes from them, and
to whom capitalist expropriation offer only extinction. As different sectors of
mankind seek and demand a different kind of development, the strength to demand
it grows to the extent that no one accepts their own extinction or the
extinction of others.
The question of human reproduction posed by women's rejection of
procreation is now turning into the demand for another type of development and
seeks completely new horizons. The concept of welfare is not enough. The demand
is now for happiness. The demand is for a formulation of development that opens
up the satisfaction of the basic needs on whose suppression capitalism was born
and has grown. One of those needs is for time as against a life consisting
solely of labour, another is the need for physical life/sexuality (above all,
with one's own and other people's bodies, with the body as a whole, not just
the functions that make it more productive) as against the body as a mere
container for labour-power or a machine for reproducing labour-power. Yet
another need is the need for sociality/ collectivity (not just with other men
and women, but with the various living beings with which can now only be
encountered after a laborious journey out of the city) as against the
separation/isolation of individuals in the body of society and living nature as
a whole. And still another need is for
public space (not just the public parks and squares or the few other areas permitted
to the collectivity) as against the enclosure, privatisation, and continual
restriction of available space. Then there is the desire to find a relationship with the
totality of the Earth as a public space as well as the need for play,
indeterminacy, discovery, amazement, contemplation, emotion...
Obviously, the above has no pretence to 'defining' fundamental needs,
but it registers some whose systematic frustration by this mode of production
has certainly not served human happiness.
But I think one must have the courage to pose happiness as a problem.
This requires the reanalysis of the notion of development, in order to think
again "in the grand manner," and to reject the fear that raising the
question of happiness may appear as too daring or as something too subjective.
Rigoberta Menchu (Burgos, 1991) tells how the mothers in her community teach
their girls from the start that the life facing them will be a life of immense
toil and suffering. But she also
wondered why, and the why reflects very precise, capitalist reasons: "We
started to reflect on the roots of the problem, and we came to the conclusion
that its roots lay in possession of the land. We did not have the best land,
the landowners did. And every time we clear new land, they try to take it from
us or to steal it in some way" (Burgos, 1991, p.144). Rigoberta has raised
the problem of how to change this state of affairs; she has not cultivated the
myth of human unhappiness. And the Christian teaching she has used alongside
the Mayan traditions, has offered various lessons, including that of the Old
Testament's Judith.
In my view, it is no coincidence that, in these last 20 years, the
woman's question, the question of the indigenous populations (3), and the
question of the Earth have assumed growing importance, for they are linked by
an especially close synergy. The path towards a different kind of development
cannot ignore them. There is much knowledge still in civilisations which have
not died but have managed to conceal themselves, and their secrets have been
maintained thanks to their resistance to the will to annihilate them. The Earth
encloses so many powers, especially its power to reproduce itself and humanity
as one of its parts. These powers have been discovered, preserved and enhanced
more by women's knowledge than male science.
It is crucial, then, that this other knowledge--of women, of indigenous
populations and of the Earth, whose 'passiveness' is capable of regenerating
life (Shiva, 1990)--should find a way of emerging and being heard. This
knowledge appears now as a decisive force that can lift the increasingly deadly
siege capitalist development imposes on human reproduction.
Bibliography
Burgos, E., (1990), Mi
chiamo Rigoberta Menchù, Florence, Giunti.
Dalla Costa, M., James S., (1972), The Power of Women and the
Subversion of the Community, London, Falling Wall Press.
Dalla Costa, G.F.,
(1978), Un lavoro d'amore. La violenza fisica componente essenziale del
"trattamento" maschile nei confronti delle donne, Rome, Edizioni
delle Donne.
Dalla Costa, M., Dalla
Costa, G.F., (eds.) (1993), Donne e politiche del debito. Condizione e lavoro femminile nella
crisi del debito internazionale, Milan, Franco Angeli (English edition in
preparation with Zed Books)
Federici, S.,
Fortunati, L., (1984), Il grande Calibano. Storia del corpo sociale ribelle
nella prima fase del capitale, Milan, Franco Angeli.
Federici, S., (1988), "The Great Witch-Hunt", in The Maine
Scholar, Vol.1, No.1.
Fortunati, L., (1981), L'arcano
della riproduzione. Casalinghe, prostitue, operai e capitale, Venice,
Marsilio.
Fortunati, L., (1984), Sesso
come valore d'uso per il valore, in Fortunati L., Federici S., Il grande
Calibano. Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale,
Milan, Franco Angeli.
La Repubblica, (1993), September 16.
La Repubblica, (1994), February 16.
Marx, K., (1975), Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) in
Early Writings, London, Penguin.
Marx, K., (1976), Capital.
A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, London, Penguin.
Michel, A., (1987),
"La donna a repentaglio nel sistema di guerra", in Bozze,
No.2, April-March.
Shiva, V., (1990), Staying alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in
India, London, Zed Books.
The Economist, (1990), January 6
Women's Action Agenda 21, (1991), in World
Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet, Official Report, 8-12 November 1991,
Miami, Florida, USA, United Nations, New York, N.Y.
Notes
(1) The protest over the Narmada dam has received extensive coverage in
international publications and the international media. For a critical
interpretation of the proliferation of dams in the world, see Shiva (1990).
(2) Currently, there is a wide-ranging debate on the issue. A. Michel's
essay (1987) remains a good reference-point.
(3) As was stressed by the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples at the
NGO Forum in Vienna (June 10-12, 1993), these peoples have worked especially
hard during the last two decades to get their voice heard, to make progress on
questions concerning them (the question of land, above all), to obtain greater
respect for and a formalisation of their rights in written form. Significant
stages in the process have been the Kari Oca Declaration, the Land Charter of
the Indigenous Peoples, and the Convention of the International Labour
Organisation on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ILO Conv. No. 169). This growing liaison and promotion of their
demands was a major factor in the speedy expressions of solidarity from the
North American indigenous populations during the rebellion of the indigenous
people of Chiapas.
Capitalism and Reproduction
a été publié
en japonais dans la revue "Jokyo"
(Situation), Tokyo, Juillet 1994
en anglais dans Open Marxism Vol. III: Emancipating Marx , W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, J. Holloway and K. Psycopeds (eds.), Pluto
Press, London, 1995.
en espagnol dans
"Viento del Sur" n. 3, 1994, Mexico.
en italien dans
"C.N.S., Capitalismo Natura Socialismo", n. 1, 1995.
Capitalismo e Riproduzione
è stato pubblicato
in giapponese sulla rivista "Jokyo"
(Situazione), Tokyo, luglio 1994.
in inglese su Open Marxism, Vol. III: Emancipating Marx, W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, J. Holloway and K. Psycopeds (eds.) Pluto Press,
London, 1995.
in spagnolo su "Viento del Sur", n. 3, 1994, Mexico.
in italiano su "C.N.S., Capitalismo
Natura Socialismo", n. 1, 1995.
Capitalism and Reproduction
has been published
in Japanese in the review
"Jokyo" (Situation), Tokyo, July, 1994.
in English in Open Marxism,
Vol. III: Emancipating Marx, W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, J. Holloway and K.
Psycopeds (eds.) Pluto Press, London, 1995.
in Spanish in "Viento del Sur", n. 3, 1994, Mexico.
in Italian in "C.N.S., Capitalismo Natura
Socialismo", n. 1, 1995.
