What in the hell …

The Arcane of Reproduction is a book by Leopoldina Fortunati. I’m not at all sure what the arcane of reproduction is. Fortunati’s basic point is that unwaged or indirectly waged reproductive labors associated with housewives (and the waged and primarily sexual labors of prostitutes) are important to capitalism. Specifically, they produce value which is appropriated by capital during the purchase of labor power. The buyer of labor power gets the labor spent producing that labor power, and gets it without paying its full value. In a way, Fortunati’s book is an extended meditation on the transformation problem applied to labor power - the price of labor power does not reflect its actual value, according to Fortunati.

Fortunati might be interestingly read alongside Althusser’s essay on the ISAs, which was about ideology and reproduction. Fortunati writes that “greater complexity within reproduction has (…) meant that the sector has required a higher and greater level of ideological organization in order to make it function”. (9.) As with, for instance, the identification of traditional women’s work as the natural role of women and the result of faculties which inhere in women biologically, and with the labeling of women’s work as not a part of the economy.

There’s a lot I like in the book, which I’ll come back to in a later post or edit of this post. What I don’t like - the prose (dense, awkward, perhaps in part the fault of the translator), and assertions like that the husband’s “relation is not with his wife, but with capital through his wife” and vice versa. (130.) A better way to make the point would be that these relationships are also relationships with capital. Fortunati sometimes sounds like these relationships are reducible to their roles as mediations for capital production. That strikes me as simply and obviously false.

There’s also a tension in the conclusions one can draw from the book. On the one hand, one could conclude that the family and the home too are sites of (potential) anticapitalist struggle. Sure, and hurray for that. But on the other hand, the point that housework is productive isn’t sufficient. That doesn’t necessarily translate into potential power. This is true also of waged productive labors. Different sites of value production of different importance within different capitals and aggregate capitals and within capitalism as a whole. The power outside the shop resulting from the exercise of power on the shopfloor differs in, say, a crayon factory vs an oil refinery or a port. I do think there are important conflicts in homes and families (across homes and families, via collective organization and struggle) but it’s not clear to me how this relates to capitalism. I can see how there are struggles to be waged against the effects of various aspects of capitalism, which will often mean struggles against mostly male and adult wage earners vs female and child unwaged. I’m not as clear how these relate to the positive project of abolishing capital. One could also read Fortunati’s work as further underscoring the wage and point of waged production. Part of Fortunati’s argument is that in paying the wage the purchase of labor power gets much more than is often noticed - the level or scope of labor commanded by the wage is greater than many recognize. In that case, the wage and conflict over the purchase of labor power and use of labor power after purchase (these being sites or times in which unwaged labors are appropriated as part of setting purchased labor power to work in the shop) become even more important. Clearly conflicts over how wages paid are spent (basically, in feminist vs patriarchal ways within the home) are tremendously important, but I’m not clear how some issues about that relate to issues in waged production. Put differently, it’s not clear to me how unwaged labor like Fortunati is talking about could - qua unwaged labor - exert power against capital except via forms which are not specific to unwaged labor (like roadblocks in Argentina) or via the mediation of waged labor, which makes waged labor even more important.

Before I forget, Aufheben has a review of Fortunati that I want to respond to later, here.