#dalla costa

[moda365]

Amleto Dalla Costa 'Woman of Kobe' 1979

[frank-o-meter]

By Dalla Costa (1978)

[anutoapp]

APARTAMENTO EN URB DOÑA BARBARA SAN FELIX

APARTAMENTO EN URB DOÑA BARBARA SAN FELIX es un anuncio publicado en Dalla Costa (Bolívar, venezuela) en la categoría de En venta (Inmuebles) de Anuto

[feelingpolitical]

In this essay the classical Marxist position that housework is ‘non-productive’ is challenged for the first time. Dalla Costa points out that what the housewife produces in the family are not simply use-values but the commodity ‘labour power’ which the husband then can sell as a ‘free’ wage labourer in the labour market. She clearly states that the productivity of the housewife is the precondition for the productivity of the (male) wage labourer. The nuclear family, organized and protected by the state, is the social factory where this commodity ‘labour power’ is produced. Hence, the housewife and her labour are not outside the process of surplus value production, but constitute the very foundation upon which this process can get started. The housewife and her labour are, in other words, the basis of the process of capital accumulation. With the help of the state and its legal machinery women have been shut up in the isolated nuclear family, whereby their work there was made socially invisible, and was hence defined - by Marxist and non-Marxist theoreticians - as ‘non-productive’. It appeared under the form of love, care, emotionality, motherhood and wifehood [...] one cannot understand the exploitation of wage-labour unless one understands the exploitation of non­wage-labour

Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, pp. 31-32

[bustakay]

The working class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class — but at the woman’s expense against the class itself. The woman is the slave of a wage-slave, and her slavery ensures the slavery of her man. Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial.

Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa - The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community.

[operaismomanchester]

Feedback from last session

On Tuesday we met to discuss the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign of the 1970s. Actually, the title of Silvia Federici’s pamphlet (the text which received much of our attention) was ‘Wages Against Housework’ and, whilst this was raised as a technical point, it sheds light on much of our conversation. We saw the campaign as more than a reform proposal. It was not a demand for a lump sum of money or (worse) an argument for women as just as capable of working in a ‘man’s world.’ Rather, our attention focused on the campaign as a political perspective that was able to show the wage as that which hides all of the unpaid work that goes into creating profit.

‘Wages for Housework’ created an autonomous political framework that did not rely on male dominated socialist movements.  This feminism, we generally agreed, was a particular strength of the struggle: able to show how uncompensated labour shapes what it is to be female, but without subordinating class to feminism or vice versa. Our discussion of ‘Women and the Subversion of Community’ helped to clarify an understanding of the family unit as the backbone of capitalism and, in turn, the way in which it continues to be women that are expected to take on austerity today. We also touched briefly on the pressures to ‘enjoy your job’ as well as debt and wagelessness as defining features of existence today. Amidst these topics there was a brief foray into the murky depths of ‘false consciousness’.

[luxurycommunism-blog]

A demand is:

[e-schatology]

For – to take a set of examples from Italian communist theory – if we take seriously the non-neutrality of productive assemblages (Panzieri), the structural and primary position of worker’s antagonism at the heart of the development of capital (Tronti), the impossibility of drawing a coherent line, in terms of the site of the production of value, between waged production and unwaged reproduction (Federici and Dalla Costa), the admixture of living and dead labor (late Bordiga), and if we take seriously that labor is a coercive process of the exploitation of the particular under the sign of the general, one that requires the violent paid and unpaid exploitation of humans and resources in the service of the construction and circulation of commodities, it follows that the entire built world of capital – buildings, furniture, highways, silverware, computers, wiring, painting, magazines, medicine, web pages, bullets, human bodies - is composed of actual, not metaphorical, crystallizations of congealed labor and, therefore, congealed hostility.

Dynamite at the police parade and other comic situations

By EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS