Review | The Arcana of Reproduction

Kika Hendry reviews the new translation of Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcana of Reproduction, a key text that, fifty years on, still exposes how domestic life sustains capitalism and speaks urgently to our experiences of labour, care and survival.

Leopoldina Fortunati’s 1981 text The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital is a leading work in the Marxist tradition, defining social reproduction and evaluating precisely its purpose in relation to political economy (with equations included). Quoting almost exclusively from Marx and Engels, Fortunati plays the philosophical games of the ‘male left’ on its own terms. The core of her argument is that reproduction is not a respite from capitalist relations, or a space of love rather than competition, but rather part of the sphere of circulation that creates absolute surplus value.

The book opens up the realm of experience of women, children, and the home articulating affective and embodied truths of domestic labour, marriage, and prostitution that have not been examined by previous Marxist writers. Fortunati coalesces her revised analysis of capitalism into demands, showing how the text can be wielded in new sites of struggle and liberation: in demanding wages for housework, in abortion on demand, in fighting the criminalisation of prostitution, and in youth liberation. 

Capital seeks to maximise production. In the opening passage, Fortunati quotes Marx’s statement that maximising production is equal to maximising ‘the unhappiness of society’. This is central to her book. She will unpick exactly what this unhappiness is and how and why it operates, arguing that Marx did not think through women’s unhappiness fully in his analysis.

According to capitalist ideology, reproduction is the work of staying alive (and incidentally, creating labour power) which is taken for granted and naturalised. It is the cooking, cleaning, raising of children, and care of the elderly that operates at the level of the family, rather than having a mass, communal character. As production creates value, reproduction is its opposite: the creation of non-value, and unwaged personal service. This conception of reproduction is ideological, produced and supported by the state and capital. Reproduction, Fortunati suggests, is the creation of the ‘necessities of life so that the workforce can live during production’. In the 20th century, a single working day in the factory and an entire unwaged working day in the home was necessary for the survival of a working-class family. Domestic labour is therefore ‘indirectly waged labour’ that enables labour power to work: indispensable to capital, and like natural resources of Mother Earth, free.

Housework is complicated – it is practical, technological and emotional – and a houseworker’s day is almost unlimited. In this sense, the housewife as domestic labourer is ‘the greatest technological invention made by capital in the process of reproduction’. Fortunati’s thesis is that the family is not just the backdrop to the wage and site of its consumption, but a site of production: the production of the commodity of labour power.

Understanding domestic labour as a site of production, it is then necessary to look at what this production-site is like. What is a home, and a family? For Fortunati, the family is ‘the sufficient core: the time, with its relations and exchanges, that must suffice for labour power to reproduce itself.’ This means that the obligation to work joins with the obligation to marry, as the male worker must be able to acquire the use of his labour through a woman’s living labour in the home. Simultaneously, a woman must attach to a male worker to access his wage. In this way the family is the ‘capitalist form’ of the ‘reproductive relations of individuals’. It divides men and women from each other, forcing them to use one another as conduits for capital for their mutually assured survival, rather than engaging freely as creative individuals.

For this system to work, domestic labour must not appear as labour, but a personal mission of love. Marriage is then imagined not as a socially isolated condition of dependency, but a love relation. Fortunati tries to break her readers out of this ideological deceit, arguing that women are ‘forced to work, through those we “love”, for capital’. She takes care to note that men suffer from this too, as women reproduce men not to live freely, but to give their time away to their bosses: ‘our “love” confirms their – and our – negation as individuals: their and our status as commodities.’ Marriage is then a work contract which pays the housewife indirectly, and exists as a mass system of wage-distribution posing as a unique and free union between two individuals.

The marital home is therefore necessary for production. Fortunati writes that the home is the ‘secret laboratory’, which hides the ‘l’arcano’ (secret) of profit making in its mystical emulsion of practical and emotional work. In the factory the male worker is dehumanised and commodified. To accept this without total collapse or rebellion he must leave the factory at the end of the day and feel returned to himself. The home appears as ‘non-factory; a release valve for the worker’. Now, the housewife’s affective task is clear: to make the man feel like a creative, complex individual with inherent value. The home must appear as ‘the place where the capitalist relationship ceases’. This is the mirror-world, where domestic tasks are not accounted as labour. 

Opening up the division between the real and formal nature of the family in the text is the first stage in mobilising a struggle for liberation in the world. Fortunati’s deeply serious claim that ‘the family is capital, and against it there can only be class hatred, revolt, and sabotage’ does not appear too extreme, even today fifty years later, when one understands the epidemic extent of domestic violence that plays out in homes across Britain, as the ‘microphysics of male power over women’ continues to meet the ‘macrophysics of capitalist command’.

The pressures of survival narrow the possibilities of relations between each other, dividing husbands from wives and parents from children, all demanding conformity of one another. However, everyone has a vast capacity for reproducing one another in a non-exploitative love. As Fortunati writes: ‘The only alternative today is to reproduce and be reproduced by others as individuals, not as commodities: to break, to interrupt this flow of love with its macabre face of exploitation’. That is, to understand the ‘unhappiness of society’, and build toward a new happiness.

While capitalism coerces populations towards heteronormative marriage and 2.1 children, many people struggle against these expectations and resist reproducing the nuclear family. Fortunati identifies the LGBTQ+ movements as an alternative to heterosexuality. Mass homosexuality and lesbianism reflect ‘the expression of mass rebellion’, a refusal to become husbands and wives and form units that produce new labour power. She also identifies the fall in the birth rate as a ‘direct expression of the houseworker’s refusal of the housework that having a child entails’ and the ‘consequences of a political will among women’. The fall in birth rate had huge consequences for the organisation of labour, necessitating the mass migration of labour from the Global South to the Global North.

Fortunati’s analysis also allows struggles in the home to become legible, not ignored as incidental, personal matters. The struggle of children against their parents’ discipline and to provide labour power (through school, and rigid daily routines) are, for example, ‘struggles made by crying, tantrums, emotional blackmail, muzzling and enforced silences […] not organised, but they are homogenous, and occur on a mass level’. It is only when we can imagine women who have been dispersed into a million isolated homes as being side by side in a common struggle that we can identify the trials of parenting as having a class character.

Fortunati’s analysis comes into being at the time of her writing through her political work in Lotta Feminista with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and in the Wages for Housework campaign with Selma James and Silvia Federici, a name which distills their digestible, utopian and public-facing demand. The Wages for Housework campaign didn’t simply seek for women to become formalised as wage labourers. Rather, the striking demand of the campaign illuminates housework as labour, as every paragraph of this book does in a more intricate way. Fortunati writes that these organisations ‘demanded money from the state as a means of opening up a direct struggle against capital’. Understanding how mystified and fragmented women’s work is, the Wages for Housework campaign and Fortunati’s interventions brought women together in a ‘direct struggle’ not hidden by the male wage-earner. 

In the expansive welfare states of the 20th century, now greatly reduced in scale, demands for wages for domestic labour were reflected in the creation of substantial social security payments and family support services. Fortunati’s analysis of the family also lays bare how the state regulates and defines what a family is. In the criminalisation of prostitution and taking away of sex workers’ children, it ‘imposes price controls’ and emotional terrorism to make sex work unprofitable for women, urging them toward becoming wives. The state also regulates women’s bodies through contraception and abortion. Without abortion on demand, women are without ownership of their own uterus, which the state ‘expropriates’ from them. A legal and biomedical control of people’s wombs also extends to constructing transphobic harm and panic toward people who do not conform to reproducing the nuclear family. 

Unlike Italy in 1981, today in Britain women make up roughly half of the workforce, and it is rare that a single income can support a family. Many of a housewife’s tasks are now carried out by low-paid workers outside the home. Rather than darning clothes, many people buy clothes imported from the Global South and consume them at a more rapid rate. More people can afford to pay cleaners with their wage, rather than spending time cleaning themselves. Care for young children and the elderly has also moved outside the home and into nurseries and care homes, where low-paid, often migrant workers carry out care work. 

The Arcana of Reproduction is helpful for applying Fortunati’s clear and steely gaze to get beneath the surface of our own lives. Working in a bar, I see people closing at night and then opening the next morning, who arrive barely socially reproduced and propped up by screen dopamine, caffeine, or cocaine. I see young people working fifty hours a week, living with their parents, without the time or space to have a fulfilling social or sexual life. I see customers who want to be reproduced as individuals because they don’t have a family-home-site for this, who want the same waitress delivering them a meal, rather than a rotating number of workers on the floor. I see loners and frequent business fliers for whom it is emotionally destabilising to receive bad service. 

At university, I see how parents’ emotions (smiles at graduation) and physical labour (loading and unloading the car) keep universities afloat. I’m thinking that what is so pleasurable about a yoga studio is that it is spotless and I don’t have to clean it, and how I outsource being fed and kept warm to a coffee shop, where I don’t have to take out the bins.

Thinking about housework is theoretically important. Even while in command of our own wage and our own survival (that is, not wives), it is important, just as it was for the Wages for Housework campaign, to understand that cooking and cleaning have a societal and not familial or “natural” character, and it happens side-by-side by waged and unwaged labourers in harsh as well as homely environments.

Understanding this diagnosis, with the help of Fortunati and the efforts of the Women’s Liberation Movement, we can summon infinitely different ways of loving, raising children, caring for the elderly, and supporting each other. We can resist how the breadth of potential ways of living together are put down to support the supremacy of the family, a conceptual system which necessarily overworks and extracts profit from the always-working mother and wife.

The Arcana of Reproduction is published by Verso.