Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Operaismo, or workerism, was a Marxist current that arose in Italy in the 1960s. It looked for the starting point of revolution less in the leadership of the Communist Party and the unions than in the struggles and refusal of work that factory workers waged on their own, and after 1969 it fed extra-parliamentary left organisations such as Potere Operaio (Workers' Power). Dalla Costa was assistant to Antonio Negri at the University of Padua and belonged to the militants whose political experience had been formed with Potere Operaio in the industrial zone of Porto Marghera, across the lagoon from Venice.

But the class struggle of this current looked only at the male factory worker. In June 1971 Dalla Costa and others formed the Women's Struggle Movement in Padua, and at a women's assembly held at the Potere Operaio office she presented the draft of an essay arguing that unwaged housework is a structural element of capitalist accumulation. Selma James, whom she had met in London in 1970 and with whom she had been carrying on a theoretical correspondence, also came to the meeting. In July the group issued, in Italian and English, a Programmatic Manifesto for the Struggle of Housewives in the Neighbourhood, demanding the socialisation of care, more social services and payment for housework by the state or the municipalities.

In 1972 the group took the name Lotta Femminista. That July, at a women-only conference it held in Rome, militants of Roman Potere Operaio physically attacked the women present, and in September the last members still enrolled in Potere Operaio left it. From then on the group claimed separatism and the identity of "feminist Marxists", moving the centre of conflict from the factory to "the social": home and neighbourhood became the new sites of production and subversion. The English Wikipedia calls this an immanent critique of workerism, a critique that took workerism's own concepts and showed their limits from inside.

Lotta Femminista spread across northern and central Italy and parts of the south. In Padua it ran door-to-door inquiries into housewives' invisible work and founded one of the first self-managed feminist health centres in Italy. When groups calling themselves Wages for Housework formed in Italian cities in 1974, Dalla Costa gave a speech in Mestre entitled "A General Strike": no strike before had ever been general, only a strike of male workers. After the international campaign split in 1977 the Padua group left it and dissolved not long after; Dalla Costa has blamed the political repression in Italy in the late 1970s.

In Marxist economics "productive labour" is labour that produces surplus value for capital. Surplus value is the value workers create over and above what they are paid in wages, and it is the source of the capitalist's profit. Marxist economic thought of the time granted the status of productive labour only to waged work and placed household work outside the circuits of value, as something private and biological. The housewife, accordingly, was treated as if she were not a worker.

Dalla Costa and Lotta Femminista turned this distinction over. The functioning of the whole industrial machine and the production of surplus value, they held, rested on the unpaid work women had always done at home. For them the family was "the pillar of the capitalist organisation of work", the hidden core of the assembly line, an invisible factory producing the most precious commodity, labour power, and the women in it were "workers of the home". In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community Dalla Costa and Selma James made clear that feeding, cleaning, emotional support and raising children were not personal service or a natural "act of love" but a real process of production, and that the supposed gratuitousness of this work was a structural device by which capital cut the costs of society's reproduction by loading them onto women. The English Wikipedia sums this up as redefining housework as reproductive labour necessary to the functioning of capital, rendered invisible by its removal from the wage relation.

The position also clashed with the equality feminism of the Union of Italian Women (UDI) and the parties of the historic left, which saw women's entry into the formal labour market as the road out of patriarchy; the wages for housework theorists saw it as a "double exploitation" of paid work on top of housework. The demand met strong resistance and criticism within the 1970s women's movement and was long forgotten after the movement ended. Since the 2000s, gender history and oral history have re-evaluated it, and the Italian Wikipedia now presents Lotta Femminista's analysis of reproductive labour as one of the main antecedents of contemporary social reproduction theory.