1. The quest for value

No Marxist would deny that housework and reproductive work are functional and necessary for the whole process of capital’s self-valorization. What makes Fortunati’s book new or challenging is that it aims to convince the reader that housework is a real expenditure of abstract labor time, and a real creator of value, and that this can be quantified.

In fact, the argument that work done outside production is productive is a recurrent focus in Autonomist theory. In Reading Capital Politically, Cleaver reminded the reader that abstract labor and abstract labor time ‘must be grasped in the totality of capital’ (p. 118) and that in the ‘total social mass’ of abstract labor and value produced in capitalism there is ‘a direct or indirect contribution’ from anybody who is coerced into any form of work, either waged or unwaged, including housework (pp. 122–123). Although any coerced activity can be functional to the valorization of capital, this does not mean that it is abstract labor and produces value. In saying that, this contribution can be ‘indirect’, Cleaver leaves the question ambiguously open.[79] However, this suggestion was later taken over and explicitly developed by his student Massimo De Angelis. In his article mentioned above, De Angelis attempted a logical ‘demonstration’ that any alienated, coerced and boundless work amounts to an expenditure of abstract labor and thus creates value for capital.

Why is it so important to argue for the creation of value outside the sphere of production? The reason expressly given by Fortunati and, for example, De Angelis is similar: this is somehow essential to explain the struggles that may develop outside the sphere of production as working class struggles. As De Angelis puts it, the recognition of a productive role of all proletarians is important for a theory that can explain and give ‘an appropriate interpretative framework’ to the struggles of the non-waged as well as the waged, as struggles against capital (p. 122). The categories of productive, unproductive, value, abstract labor, seem then to be essential in the political (or moral?) evaluation of the role and antagonism offered by sections of the proletariat.[80] Traditional Marxists would think that it is rather odd to use the categories that describe the dynamic of capital as analytical tools to interpret the class struggle or as indicators of class antagonism. Capital, value, use value, the falling rate of profit, the laws of the market, etc. are for them constitutive of an objective reality that conditions the class struggle, but are independent of our struggles and subjectivity. Yet Marx had explained in Capital that these ‘things’, real constraints on our lives, are an expression of a social relation, which appears to us in a mystified form, as independent of us. A merit of Autonomist theory was to try to overcome this objectivistic understanding by emphasizing the subjective dynamics of capitalism.

However, by criticizing the purely objectivistic and economicistic understanding of capitalism, they oppose to this reading one which is purely subjectivistic: class struggle as a confrontation between two opposing and Autonomous consciousnesses, capital and the proletariat.[81] In this reading capital and its objective categories become mere objectified phantoms of a purely subjective reality. Thus for example, De Angelis warns the reader that when he mentions ‘the law of value’ he actually means the ‘imposition of work and working class resistance in and against capital’ (p. 119). For Cleaver, ‘use value’, beyond being the physical body of the commodity (which is the ‘economicistic’ phantom), has to be understood primarily as a combination of qualities subjectively recognized in the commodity by the two subjects in struggle, the working class and capital. This way Marx’s Capital becomes a coded manuscript that has to be deciphered by looking at the subjective class-struggle ‘meanings’ of the categories employed in it; which is precisely what Cleaver attempted to do in Reading Capital Politically.

Perhaps this one-to-one-relation of subjective and objective categories can explain the Autonomist obsession for the most improbable quest after that of the philosopher’s stone. If abstract labor is the expression of a relation of antagonism between the dispossessed and the bourgeoisie, then pointing at the value produced by sectors of the proletariat becomes essential to understand their antagonism with capital and their struggles. Indeed, how can you explain the antagonism of sections of the proletariat who do not create value, if the expenditure of abstract value, thus the production of value, is your litmus paper for detecting class antagonism? In this perspective, recognizing all the proletariat as ‘productive’ becomes indispensable; conversely, a categorization of work as productive or unproductive becomes a ‘politically dangerous’ thing to do.[82] The liberating realization that the objective reality of value and its law is ultimately related to our subjectivity, antagonism and struggle, is then turned into a theoretical riddle. In The Arcane of Reproduction Fortunati simply applies this Autonomist approach to understanding and evaluating class struggle as an abstract rule to the case of female work and gives her own peculiar contribution to this theoretical riddle, as we will see later.

There is an important point that one has to stress here. The theoretical problem faced by Fortunati, Cleaver and De Angelis arises from their attempt to salvage Marx’s concept of value together with a subjectivistic concept of ‘value’ as expression of political power and class struggle. This is different from the position of Antonio Negri, who in the ‘70s started to theorize value as a purely subjective political force, ‘the command of capital’. Unlike Fortunati and the others, Negri explicitly distances himself from the Marxian conception of value. He justifies this move by claiming that there has been an historical change: in the ‘70s, he says, value and its law were effectively suppressed and replaced by a political, direct, command by capital.[83] In his recent work Empire, Negri reiterates his view that today we live in a ‘postmodern’ world in which capital is no longer ‘able to reduce value to measure’ or to make a ‘distinction between productive, reproductive and unproductive labor’ — a world where value is not anymore the result of an expenditure of abstract labor, but only the expression of ‘production and reproduction of social life’ and of the power of the system, of Empire (p. 402). This ‘value’ is obviously ‘produced’ by anybody who contributes to a general ‘reproduction of social life’. There is nothing to ‘demonstrate’ in this case, no ‘formulas’ to calculate, no complexities to disentangle. By distancing himself from Marx and adopting a non-Marxian, postmodernist discourse, Negri has indeed made his life easier than his Autonomist-still-Marxian colleagues.[84]

Despite the theoretical problems that we have just seen, is there something true in the Autonomist insight that all work, waged or not, is productive? And, above all, does Fortunati share this insight? This is what we will see in the next section.