Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital

• Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation
• Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour
• Security, Territory, Population (Lectures at the College De France)
• The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century
• Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century

1. That the relations between men and women under capitalism have to be grasped as relations between women and capital, mediated by men, where women as reproductive labor are part of the creation of value (and therefore surplus value) in a Marxian sense.

2. That Marx and most post-Marx Marxists have gotten the realtionship of reproduction to production radically wrong, and that this requires a revaluation in practice of the labor of reproduction and production.

Some people will see this work as a 'theoretical proof' of the necessary subordination of women to men under capital. I don't think that that is what Fortunati really does however.

Rather, Fortunati attempts to adequately theorize the relationship between reproductive and productive labor, and between unwaged and waged labor. In the process, she discusses the historical gendering of such labor and the aspects of reproduction (of labor power, which cannot be reduced to giving birth) which make it difficult for reproduction to not express itself through gender oppression (especially pregnancy/birth, which is ironic). Her whole work is couched in the understanding of reproductive labor as 'unwaged value-producing labor'.

The working class becomes split, in effect, between unwaged and waged labor as a major intra-class hierarchy, which will result in some kinds of specific intra-class oppression, in this case, gender. In this case, since men mediate between women's labor and capital (since capital here cannot directly own the means of production, women's bodies), the development and perpetuation of the form of sexual relations specific to capital can be theorized and understood as a mode of existence of the capital-labor relation, without being reduced to a crude economic argument, as is so often found among 'Marxists' and without being posed as simply a 'man-woman' problem endemic to feminist thought. Not only does this signal a change in analysis, but calls for a different political orientation towards sexual oppression and/as unwaged labor.

I think that the book is weakest at the end where the absorption of too much of Negri's Planner State argument weakens some of her argument. Overall, this is an excellent book worth reading very carefully and a good example of an immanent critique of Marx's work, rather than a simplistic counterposing of one value-set against another.