I argue that Marx’s vision of communism as a society beyond exchange value, private property, and money, based on associations of free producers, and governed by the principle “to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities” represents an ideal that no anticapitalist feminist can object to. Feminists can also embrace Marx’s inspiring image of a world beyond the social division of labor, although they may want to ensure that between hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing after dinner, there would remain some time for everyone to share cleaning and childcare. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.153-154

[…] Marx’s historical materialist method, which posits that in order to understand history and society we must understand the material conditions of social reproduction, is crucial from a feminist perspective. Recognizing that social subordination is a historical product rooted in a specific organization of work has had a liberating effect on women. It has denaturalized the sexual division of labor and the identities built upon it, projecting gender categories not only as social constructs but as concepts whose content is constantly redefined, infinitely mobile, open-ended, and always politically charged. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.154

The main characteristics of the work-processes described above is that they are all connected with the direct production of life or of use values. A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and of wealth (see the quotation from Marx above), of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society, p.217

[…] the development of a feminist concept of labour has to begin with a rejection of the distinction between socially necessary labour and leisure, and the Marxist view that self-realization, human happiness, freedom, autonomy - the realm of freedom - can be achieved only outside the sphere of necessity and of necessary labour, and by a reduction (or abolition) of the latter. If we take as our model of a worker not the white male industrial wage-worker (irrespective of whether he works under capitalist or socialist conditions), but a mother, we can immediately see that her work does not fit into the Marxian concept. For her, work is always both: a burden as well as a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment, and happiness. Children may give her a lot of work and trouble, but this work is never totally alienated or dead. Even when children turn out to be a disappointment for the mother, when they eventually leave her or feel contempt for her - as in fact many do in our society - the pain she suffers at all this is still more human than the cold indifference of the industrial worker or engineer vis-a-vis his products, the commodities he produces and consumes. The same unity of work as a burden and work as enjoyment can be found among peasants whose production is not yet totally subsumed under commodity production and the compulsions of the market. The peasants who have to work from dawn to dusk during the harvesting season, for instance, feel the burden of work more than anybody else in their bodies and in their muscles. But in spite of the hardship of this work, it is never only ‘a curse’. I remember the times of haymaking or harvesting on our small subsistence farm in my childhood as times of extreme labour intensity for everybody-mother, children, father-and as times of the greatest excitement, enjoyment, social interaction. I found the same phenomenon among poor peasant and agricultural labourer women in India during the season of rice transplantation. […] During the collective work-processes in the fields, they sang an endless number of ballads which helped them ftp bear the burden of work more easily. And in the evening, after the evening meal, they danced and sang together till late (Mies, 1984). Anyone who has had an opportunity to observe the work-process of people involved in non-market oriented subsistence production will have found this interplay of work as necessity and burden, and work as a basic source of enjoyment and self-expression. The same is true for the work of the artisan or in handicrafts production, as long as this work is not yet fully subsumed under the compulsions of the market. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society, p.216-217

A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest and enjoyment are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organization of time prevail, the length of the working-day is no longer very relevant. Thus, a long working-day and even a lifetime full of work, will not then be felt as a curse but as a source of human fulfilment and happiness. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society, p.217

[…] we can work with Marxist categories, but we must reconstruct them and change their architectural order, so that the center of gravity is not exclusively wage labor and commodity production but the production and reproduction of labor power, especially that part of it that is carried out by women at home. For in doing so, we make visible a new terrain of accumulation and struggle, as well as the full extent of capital’s dependence on unpaid labor and the full length of the working day. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.156

Placing the reproduction of labor power at the center of capitalist production unearths a world of social relations that remains invisible in Marx but is essential to exposing the mechanisms that regulate the exploitation of labor. It discloses that the unpaid labor that capital extracts from the working class is far greater than Marx ever imagined, extending to both the domestic work that women have been expected to perform and the exploitation of the colonies and peripheries of the capitalist world. […] in both cases, not only have the forms of work and coercion involved been naturalized, but both have become part of a global assembly line designed to cut the cost of reproducing the wage workers. On this line, the unpaid domestic labor ascribed to women as their natural destiny joins with and relays the work of millions of campesinas, subsistence farmers, and informal laborers, growing and producing for a pittance the commodities that waged workers consume or providing at the lowest cost the services their reproduction requires. Hence the hierarchies of labor that so much racist ideology has tried to justify, but which only demonstrate that the capitalist class has maintained its power through a system of indirect rule, effectively dividing the working class, with the wage used to delegate to the male workers’ power over the unwaged, starting with the control and supervision of women’s bodies and labor. This means that the wage is not only the terrain on which the working class negotiates the quantity and constitution of socially necessary work - but is also an instrument for the creation of unequal power relations and hierarchies between workers, and that worker’s cooperation in the labor process is by no means sufficient to unify the working class. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.156-157

It took women’s revolt against the housework in the 1960s and 1970s to prove that domestic work is “socially necessary labor” in the capitalist sense, that even though it is not organized on an industrial basis, it is extremely productive, and that to a large extent it is work that cannot be mechanized; for reproducing the individuals in which labor power subsists requires a variety of emotional as well as physical services that are interactive in nature and therefore very labor intensive. This realization has further destabilized Marx’s theoretical and political framework, forcing us to rethink one of the main tenets of Marx’s theory of revolution, that is, the assumption that with the development of capitalism all forms of work will be industrialized and, most important, that capitalism and modern industry are preconditions for the liberation of humanity from exploitations. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.159

[…] Marx’s vision of a society in which necessary labor can be drastically reduced through automation clashes with the fact that the largest amount of work on earth is of a highly relational nature and hardly subject to mechanization. Ideally, in a post-capitalist society we would mechanize several household chores, and we would certainly rely on new forms of communication for company, learning and information, once we controlled what technology is produced, for what purposes, and under what conditions. But how can we mechanize washing, cuddling, consoling, dressing, and feeding a child, providing sexual services, or assisting those who are ill or the elderly and not self-sufficient? What machine could incorporate the skills and affects needed for these tasks? Attempts have been made with the creation of nursebots and interactive lovebots, and it is possible that in the future we may see the production of mechanical mothers. But even assuming that we could afford such devices, we must wonder at what emotional cost we could introduce them in our homes in replacement of living labor. But if reproductive work can only in part be mechanized, then the Marxian scheme that makes the expansion of material wealth dependent on automation and the reduction of necessary labor implodes; for domestic work, and especially the care of children, constitutes most of the work on this planet. The very concept of socially necessary labor loses much of its cogency. How is socially necessary labor to be defined if the largest and most indispensable sector of work on the planet is not recognized as an essential part of it? And by what criteria and principles will the organization of care work, sexual work, and procreation will be governed if these activities are not considered part of socially necessary labor? Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.162-163

[…] the collectivization of our everyday reproductive work […] is an essential part of our education to collective government and our recognition of history as a collective project, which is perhaps the main casualty of the neoliberal era of capitalism. On this account, we too must include in our political agenda the communalization of housework, reviving that rich feminist tradition that in the U.S. stretches from the utopian socialist experiments of the mid-nineteenth century to the attempts that “material feminists” made from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century to reorganize and socialize domestic work, and thereby the home and the neighborhood, through collective housekeeping […]. These practices and, most importantly, the ability of past feminists to look at reproductive labor as an important sphere of human activity not to be negated but to be revolutionized must be revisited and revalorized. One crucial reason for creating collective forms of living is that the reproduction of human beings is the most labor-intensive work on earth and, to a very large extent, is irreducible to mechanization. We cannot mechanize childcare, health care or the psychological work necessary to reintegrate our physical and emotional balance. Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are making, we cannot robotize care except at a terrible cost for the people involved. No one will accept nursebots as caregivers, especially for children and the ill. Shared responsibility and cooperative work not given at the cost of the health of the providers are the only guarantees of proper care. For centuries, the reproduction of human beings has been a collective process. It has been the work of extended families and the communities upon which people could rely, especially in proletarian neighborhoods, even when they lived alone, so that old age was not accompanied by the desolate loneliness and dependence with which so many of our elderly live. It is only with the advent of capitalism that reproduction has been completely privatized, a process that is now extended to a degree that destroys our lives. This trend must be reversed, and the present time is propitious for such a project. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.110-111

[The capitalist mode of production] has been rendered so much more productive not only by the extension of the working day to the humanly possible limits, but also through reproduction being posited as "natural production," which has enabled two workers to be exploited with one wage. and the entire cost of reproduction to be unloaded onto the labor force. Thus it becomes clear that Marxian analysis describes only one half of the process of production - the production of com­modities - and cannot be extended per se to cover reproduction; and further­more, that an analysis of the entire cycle of production cannot be made until reproduction has been analyzed too. This latter analysis can only be made if Marxian categories are not used dogmatically and if they are combined with feminist criticism. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, p.9-10

It is often asserted that, within the definition of wage labor, women in domestic labor are not productive. In fact precisely the opposite is true if one thinks of the enormous quantity of social services which capitalist organization transforms into privatized activity, putting them on the backs of housewives. Domestic labor is not essentially “feminine work”; a woman doesn’t fulfill herself more or get less exhausted than a man from washing and cleaning. These are social services inasmuch as they serve the reproduction of labor power. And capital, precisely by instituting its family structure, has “liberated” the man from these functions so that he is completely “free” for direct exploitation; so that he is free to “earn” enough for a woman to reproduce him as labor power. It has made men wage slaves, then, to the degree that it has succeeded in allocating these services to women in the family, and by the same process controlled the flow of women onto the labor market […]. And women are of service not only because they carry out domestic labor without a wage and without going on strike, but also because they always receive back into the home all those who are periodically expelled from their jobs by economic crisis. The family, this maternal cradle always ready to help and protect in time of need, has been in fact the best guarantee that the unemployed do not immediately become a horde of disruptive outsiders. Dalla Costa & James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, p.33-34

Now it is clear that not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be achieved through work. Work is still work, whether inside or outside the home. The independence of the Wage earner means only being a “free individual” for capital, no less for women than for men. Those who advocate that the (liberation of the-working class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink. To deny this is also to deny the slavery of the assembly line itself, proving again that if you don’t know how women are exploited, you can never really know how men are. But this question is so crucial that we deal with it separately. What we wish to make clear here is that by the non-payment of a wage when we are producing in a world capitalistically organized, the figure of the boss is concealed behind that of the husband. He appears to be the sole recipient of domestic services, and this gives an ambiguous and slavelike character to housework. The husband and children, through their loving involvement, their loving blackmail, become the first foremen, the immediate controllers of this labor. Dalla Costa & James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, p.35

The husband tends to read the paper and wait for his dinner to be cooked and served, even when his wife goes out to work as he does and comes home with him. Clearly, the specific form of exploitation represented by domestic work demands a correspondingly specific form of struggle, namely the women’s struggle, within the family. If we fail to grasp completely that precisely this family is the very pillar of the capitalist organization of work, if we make the mistake of regarding it only as a superstructure, dependent for change only on the stages of the struggle in the factories, then we will be moving in a limping revolution that will always perpetuate and aggravate a basic contradiction in the class struggle, and a contradiction which is functional to capitalist development. We would, in other words, be perpetuating the error of considering ourselves as producers of use values only, of considering housewives external to the working class. As long as housewives are considered external to the class, the class struggle at every moment and any point is impeded, frustrated, and unable to find full scope for its action. To elaborate this further is not our task here. To expose and condemn domestic work as a masked form of productive labor, however, raises a series of questions concerning both the aims and the forms of struggle of women. Dalla Costa & James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, p.35-36

In exemplary fashion, the famous feminist motto “the personal is political” intended to convey an idea that was scandalous in the 1960s: that there are “political dimensions to private life, that power relations shaped life in marriage, in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery, and at work” (Rosen in Lee 2007:163). […] “The personal is political” means, also, that pervasive cultural norms and social and economic structures are enacted and reproduced through individual action (Butler 1988:522). The feminist movement worked out schemes of political thought and action in line with this politicization of the everyday. It favoured modes of civic engagement that involved “average” women in their everyday lives. The emblematic practice of “consciousness-raising” that has been nurtured in feminist groups purported to empower women politically in their personal relations and life worlds. This process of critical group-thinking embodies a dynamic way of politicizing the personal and a singular modality of politics in the “everyday”. By way of sharing personal experiences and through collective discussion around shared feelings and concerns, it stimulated reflection on the political facets of personal life. Consciousness-raising thus enhanced awareness of everyday oppression. It boosted the self-esteem of women as persons who bring their distinct contribution to politics by cherishing, for example, values of sensitivity and care for the others. It also investigated ways of initiating change in patriarchal norms and subjectivities, in the present tense and from below. Hence, feminist politics intimated the idea that individual acts can be political in the mundane reality of gender relations inasmuch as they recycle cultural conventions of subordination or they undertake to displace and upset them (Hanisch 2006; Butler 1988: 523-4; Lee 2007: 165-6) Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.123

Ironically, the reproduction of dual spheres of gender and the anchoring of women to one and not the other is perpetuated and constantly re-established by the very mechanism of the “sex-blind” labour-market, which obtains not for the man/woman distinction directly but rather for the price distinction, or the exchange-value of their labour-power. Indeed, labour markets, if they are to remain markets, must be “sex-blind”. Markets, as the locus of exchanges of equivalents, are supposed to blur concrete differences in a pure comparison of abstract values. How then can this “sex-blind” market reproduce the gender difference? Once a group of individuals, women, are defined as “those who have children” and once this social activity, “having children”, is structurally formed as constituting a handicap, women are defined as those who come to the labour-market with a potential disadvantage. This systematic differentiation — through the market-determined risk identified as childbearing “potential” — keeps those who embody the signifier “woman” anchored to the IMM sphere. Therefore, because capital is a “sex-blind” abstraction, it concretely punishes women for having a sex, even though that “sexual difference” is produced by capitalist social relations, and absolutely necessary to the reproduction of capitalism itself. […]. As an apparent contradiction, once sexual difference becomes structurally defined and reproduced, woman as a bearer of labour-power with a higher social cost becomes its opposite: the commodity labour-power with a cheaper price. […] capitalists […] will […] privilege the labour-power that is likely to be the most reliable over a long period. If the worker is potentially going to leave, then she will not be as good an investment, and will get a lower price. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender