Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader - Softcover

Dalla Costa, Mariarosa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629635707 ISBN 13: 9781629635705

Verlag: PM Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

This collection brings together key texts and previously unavailable essays of the influential Italian feminist author and activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa. 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. The collection offers both historical and contemporary Marxist feminist analysis of how the reproduction of labour and life functions under capitalism.

Dalla Costa’s essays, speeches, and political interventions provide insight into the vibrant and combative women’s movement that emerged in Italy and across the world in the early 1970s. Since the publication of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), Dalla Costa has been a central figure in the development of autonomist thought in a wide range of anticapitalist and feminist social movements. Her detailed research and provocative thinking deepens our understanding of the role of women’s struggles for autonomy and control over their bodies and labour. These essays provide critical and relevant ideas for anticapitalists, antiracists, and feminists who are attempting to build counterpower in the age of austerity.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an influential Italian Marxist feminist and activist. She is the coauthor of the classic feminist text The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, with Selma James. This text launched the “domestic labor debate” in the early 1970s by redefining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capitalism and as work that has been rendered invisible by its removal from the wage-relation. Her research has been translated into multiple languages and published in journals, edited collections, and monographs.

Harry Cleaver is an American scholar, Marxist theoretician, and professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known as the author of Reading Capital Politically, an autonomist reading of Karl Marx’s Capital.

Camille Barbagallo is a feminist activist and researcher. Her research, situated within Marxist feminist theory, gender, and black studies, explores how the reproduction of labour-power is valued, what it costs, and who pays the bill. She is the coeditor of The Commoner no. 15, Care Work and the Commons, with Silvia Federici. Before migrating to London in 2005, she lived and worked in Australia and was active in labour struggles, the national student movements, and in radical social movements that focused on ending the mandatory detention of asylum seekers and campaigns to close the refugee camps.

Richard Braude is a translator in Palermo, Italy who has translated works by left-wing Italian authors including Lea Melandri, Rossana Rossanda, Nanni Balestrini and Furio Jesi.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PM Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1629635707
• ISBN 13: 9781629635705
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Herausgeber: Barbagallo Camille
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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