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Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.

For issue 177 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Fortunati's Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital. Here she explains how under capitalism, “free” workers are not liberated uniformly: men are freed into waged labor while losing control over reproduction, whereas women are doubly coerced into selling both their productive labor (for low wages) and their reproductive labor (often tied to a male wage), making capital a dual system of waged and indirectly waged relations.

In order to reproduce himself, the free male worker must confront, on the one hand, ‘the objective conditions of production as his not-property, as alien property, as value for-itself, as capital’.[1] On the other hand, he must confront the objective conditions of his own reproduction, that is to say, labour power as the capacity for reproduction, as the property of others (not his own and not having value for itself – the natural force of social work has no value), rather as having value in itself.[2]

Like the free male worker, the free female worker, in her productive capacity, confronts ‘the objective conditions of production as [her] not-property, as alien property, as value for-itself, as capital’.[3] On the other hand, in her capacity for reproduction, she confronts the objective conditions of reproduction not as capital, but as variable capital – the value of waged labour power as a capacity for production. From this it follows that, while the free male worker must necessarily confront the capacity of reproduction as the property of others, the free female worker does not necessarily do so with respect to labour power as productive capacity, because she is not expropriated of this capacity. As non-value, she can counterpose herself to variable capital both as having value of her own and in reproducing the other’s capacity for production. In other words, the woman, in order to reproduce herself, can exchange her labour power as reproductive capacity either with the male salary or with her own salary if she also works in commodity production. But, in reality, this opposition of women to variable capital in its double guise is never positioned, at a general level, as an alternative, but rather as a dual obligation. The proletarian woman, in order to reproduce herself, is always forced, on a mass level, to exchange her ability to reproduce both with her own salary and with the male salary. His salary has rarely allowed her to go without the second job.

The woman, even when salaried, is obliged to exchange with the worker for two basic reasons: first, because the extremely low salary she receives at a mass level does not allow her to reproduce herself independently from men; second, because the possibility for the woman to reproduce herself is subordinate to the modalities of this exchange. For example, for a woman to have a romantic relationship with a man, she must be willing to do domestic work for him.

Therefore, the process of the so-called liberation of labour power does not historically affect men and women in a homogeneous fashion. The process is much more complex than Marx described in his historical treatment, in which he considered the liberation of labour power in terms of its vicissitudes in production, meaning the vicissitudes of a working class made up predominantly of men. This is a process that runs along the gender division of labour, with the so-called liberation of the worker taking different paths, depending on whether that worker is a man or a woman. The man who was a serf becomes a salaried worker: his liberation from feudalism also becomes the expropriation of any property other than labour power as the capacity of commodity production. The other side of his liberation is the compulsion to sell his labour power, to submit himself to the waged labour relationship. The woman has a more complex destiny: from servant of serfdom, she becomes primarily an indirectly salaried worker. She too is expropriated of the little property she possessed – obviously much less substantial than that of a man – except for her labour power. However the expropriation occurs in both her modes of existence: reproductive and productive. The other side of the woman’s liberation is the compulsion to sell these two commodities: to submit herself to the relationship of indirectly salaried work and to that of salaried work.

The fundamental step in her liberation process is not the transition from serf as an ‘accessory of the earth’ to paid worker, but from serf to being a natural force of social labour. Therefore, the liberation of the woman is much more limited than that of the man. Moreover, having suffered discrimination in her liberation, as a capacity for reproductive labour, she has also heavily mortgaged her liberation process in her capacity for productive labour. Without going into detail here, it is enough to think of the sorts of jobs women are primarily assigned and the highly discriminatory wages they receive.

The complexity of reproduction is obviously reflected in the whole capitalist mode of production. Not only the functioning of reproduction, but also that of the entire capitalist production process is much more complex than even Marx himself grasped. Many Marxian categories, therefore, must be revised, starting from the very concept of capital.

For example, it is clear from what has been argued above that:

1. The exchange of labour for labour does not, in the capitalist mode of production, become only the exchange of waged work and capital, but also the exchange of variable capital and reproductive work that is indirectly waged;

2. the first exchange cannot exist without the second and vice versa.

As fundamental as the first may be, the need for the second exchange is established by capital at a general level for both the free male and free female worker. For the free male worker, this exchange is based on the expropriation of his labour power as a capacity for reproduction. For the free female worker, the exchange is based on the co-presence of the two working capacities in her person. In other words, it is based on the one hand, on the fact that the value of women’s labour power, as productive capacity, is generally insufficient for the woman to engage with exchange value as something that she owns exclusively. The female salary is, in fact, auxiliary to that of the male. On the other hand, this exchange is based on the fact that capital as a value in-itself, as property of the objective conditions of production, deals with women, in their capacity as labour power capable of producing commodities, to a considerably lesser degree than it does so with men.

The purchase of women’s labour power, as productive capacity, is regulated by capital to ensure the primacy of the purchase by the ‘free’ male worker of female labour power as reproductive capacity – that is, so as not to hinder capital’s own simultaneous appropriation of the labour of reproduction.

The subordination of the exchange between capital and women, when the latter is a female worker, to that between her and the male worker, is determined by capital precisely in order to oblige the woman, first and foremost, to exchange her labour power, as capacity of reproduction with variable capital corresponding to the value of male labour power, and not with her own variable capital when such even exists.

Consequently, the opposition of the free woman worker to the objective conditions of production is both twofold, and of a double character. She can simultaneously oppose herself to capital and variable capital corresponding to the value of male labour power, or she can oppose only one or the other. As we have seen, however, at the general level, she can only refuse to engage the former but must necessarily engage with the latter. This means that she may encounter capital simultaneously both in her role as a natural force of social labour and as exchange value, or only as the former, but never exclusively as exchange value. She can also confront variable capital corresponding to the value of male labour power simultaneously as use value and as exchange value, or exclusively as an exchange value, but in no instance as pure exchange value.

Even the exchange of labour with labour in the capitalist mode of production is more complex than Marxist tradition has argued, because it too has a dual character. This exchange takes place in relation to the process of production as exchange of labour objectified as capital with living labour as use value. In relation to the process of reproduction, this exchange takes place in terms of objectified work, as the exchange value of labour power as capacity of production and living labour as use value.

Correspondingly, the labour relationship in the capitalist mode of production is much more complex than it has appeared. The male worker, as we have seen, is liberated both in relation to the waged labour relationship and in terms of the indirectly salaried labour relationship in reproduction. The male worker’s freedom in the latter relationship in the reproduction process is a presupposition for his liberation in waged employment. The liberation of labour power, therefore, implies that male and female workers, positioned as owners of their productive capacity, are formally free to sell it, as a commodity, to the capitalist, just as they are formally free to pose themselves as subjects of the exchange of reproductive labour and variable capital. Therefore, under capitalism, men and women as workers have won not only the right to work freely but also to marry freely. Such freedom, however, applies only on a formal level; below the surface the obligation to work marches hand in hand with the obligation to marry.

Therefore capital is not simply a salaried labour relationship, but a dual labour relationship: a salaried employment relationship in the production process and an indirectly salaried employment relationship in the reproduction process.

In fact, two productive relationships take place, being both opposed to and mutually dependent on each other: the relationship of the worker with the objective conditions of productive work – a waged labour relationship; and the relationship of the worker with the objective conditions of reproductive work – an indirectly salaried relationship. In the first case, the individual’s productive capacity engages with capital; in the second case, the individual as reproductive capacity relates not to capital, but to their own self as exchange value – as waged worker.

[1] Marx, Grundrisse, 498.

[2] Here, Fortunati uses ‘non valore per se stante’ (not a value for itself) to describe the reproductive labour primarily undertaken by women in the sexual division of labour and ‘valore per se medesimo’ (having value in itself) to mean the inherent value of reproductive labour for the waged worker. The passage from Notebook V of Marx’s Grundrisse, referenced in this paragraph and the subsequent, describes the new conditions in which the worker confronts capital as labour power. It appears in the original as translated by Enzo Grillo as ‘alle condizioni oggettive della produzione dei valori discambio come alla sua non proprietà, come a proprietà altrui, a valore per se stante, a capitale’. Karl Marx, Lineamenti fondamentali della critica dell’economia politica, vol. 2, trans. Enzo Grillo (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968), 126.

[3] Marx, Grundrisse, 498.

Excerpted with permission from The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital by Leopoldina Fortunati. Translated by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono. Publsihed by Verso Books, 2025.

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