The Arcana of Reproduction

The Arcana of Reproduction is a true tour de force, unique both in the world of Marxism and Feminism. Whereas Marxist-Feminists have generally only elaborated on the significance of Marx's work for understanding women's oppression and exploitation, Fortunati 'sweeps away' our common sense notions of production and reproduction by testing Marxian categories through their unorthodox application to the realm of reproduction. The result is a painstaking analysis that explores these two interlocking spheres as both interdependent and different-radically unsettling our understanding of both. -- Silvia Federici
A classic of the great "domestic labor debates" of the 1970s and 80s, TheArcana of Reproduction remains the most subversive feminist critique of productivist understandings of value. This new translation is a must read for all those seeking to understand how capitalism exploits women's unpaid labor and conceals this form of exploitation by relegating it to the margins of the wage relation. By re-centering social reproduction as the key battlefield on which the extraction of surplus-value is contested, The Arcana's arguments remain central to understanding contemporary capitalism and a world of work increasingly characterized by forms of wagelessness that have moved well beyond the sphere of housework alone. -- Alessandra Mezzadri, Reader in Global Development and Political Economy, SOAS, London
Fortunati's work is a groundbreaking classic of workerist feminism, distilling and elaborating critical concepts from an era of revolutionary feminist thought and politics. The work expands and moves beyond traditional Marxist categories, offering a bold and innovative analysis of the unpaid labor of the reproductive labor sphere that forms the basis of the capitalist system. In providing an analysis of a historical moment, she gives today's feminists an indispensable guide to understanding the importance and complexities of struggles over reproduction. -- Mariarosa della Costa, co-author of The Power of Women & the Subversion of the Community
This excellent edition, wonderfully edited and translated, with insightful supplementary texts by Federici and the author, demonstrates the contemporary importance of this classic feminist text. -- Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies
The Arcana of Reproduction is a must-read because it is an at once singular and path-breaking contribution to Marxist feminist theorizations of the capitalist production/reproduction system and because of the powerful estrangement-from domestic labor, from the institution of the heteropatriarchal family, from the gendered ideologies of work-that it continues to provoke. -- Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work