What kind of work is housework under capitalism? And what kind of collective labor, out from under capitalism, could it one day become? The world campaign for “wages for housework” launched in the summer of 1972 in Padua, Italy, when a group of communist theorists and militant labor organizers formed the International Feminist Collective—among them Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici. Their ultimate aim, despite the campaign slogan, was not wages per se; it was, rather, to leverage an abolitionist demand for a wage “against housework”—or, in other words, to explode a capitalist system that failed to recognize the real value of the unwaged, domestic, feminized labor that makes all other market-traded labor possible. Via women’s strikes, welfare struggles, family allowance disputes, waitress grievances, custody battles, and prostitute pickets, Wages for Housework transformed the orthodox conception of “production” and, with it, the meaning of Marxism—from within. The call for “women of all ages” to “collect their wages” became a tool of base-building and solidarity, taken up by feminist radicals, homemakers, welfare claimants, and sex workers—as well as working mothers and those in domestic service for whom the “second shift” was an inescapable reality. Today, the movement leaders’ writings continue to resonate in debates over Universal Basic Income, while also providing a tantalizing, if fraught, insight into the “antiwork” utopianism of the 1970s. What might “wages for housework” mean for us now, in the context of our own 21st century economic geographies?
In this course, we will examine some of the network’s key theoretic texts, including contributions by Dalla Costa, Federici, and James, as well as Margaret Prescod, Leopoldina Fortunati, Nicole Cox, and Judy Ramirez. We will also read historical accounts of the WfH militants’ activities in Toronto, New York, London, and Milan, by scholars such as Emily Callaci, Louise Toupin, and Arlen Austin, and select, from among the many, a few recent analyses of their arguments by contemporary theorists such as Beverley Best, Katrina Forrester, Elise Thorburn, Heather Berg, Kathi Weeks, Maya Gonzalez, and Wilson Sherwin. What exactly did Federici mean by “putting feminism back on its feet”? And how has the movement been challenged and reshaped from within, by the thought and activism of, above all, Black and Indigenous women in the imperial core?
