Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal, Second Edition

By Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici and Liz Mason-Deese

• This new edition is the first to be distributed and promoted widely in the US

• The new material contextualizes why Family, Welfare, and the State is more needed and relevant than ever.

• Through the fight for a host of pandemic relief packages, stimulus payments, and the campaign to raise the minimum wage people are organizing and winning against increasing abandonment and workforce vulnerability.

• Dalla Costa lays out how race, class, and especially the family were reconfigured and forced into the role of ensuring the reproduction of the capitalist workforce. 

• She makes clear how the New Deal inscribed the heterosexual nuclear family as the “valued” and “approved” form of social organization.

• Family Welfare and the State makes clear that a pandemic new deal has to be feminist and recognize the unpaid and exploited labor at the heart of social reproduction. 

• Dalla Costa’s research and analysis played an important part in the development of her seminal work: The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and her work with Silvia Federici in the Wages for Housework campaigns. 

• The work of Silvia and Mariarosa has been receiving broader attention than it ever has before—including features in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and inclusion in the Smithsonian Museum. 

• The authors—together and individually—will be available to media and panels on the direction of social movements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Common Notions
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781942173595

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an influential Italian Marxist feminist and activist. She is the coauthor of the classic feminist text The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, with Selma James. This text launched the “domestic labor debate” in the early 1970s by redefining housework as reproductive labor necessary to the functioning of capitalism and as work that has been rendered invisible by its removal from the wage-relation. Her research has been translated into multiple languages and published in journals, edited collections, and monographs.

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PRAISE FOR FAMILY, WELFARE, AND THE STATE

"For fifty years Mariarosa Dalla Costa has been the feminist conscience of autonomist, labor, radical, and workerist movements internationally. Ever since The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community appeared in 1972, no one could reasonably engage in a revolutionary struggle against capitalism, and against the imposition of waged work, without due consideration to the power of women and unwaged reproduction of workers’ capacity to work. By placing welfare at the center of her analysis, Dalla Costa expands upon these initial findings while opening a new front against the racial and patriarchal order, and against the discipline of the state apparatus. A new edition of Family, Welfare, and the State provides a necessary opportunity to revisit her project, and hence, our own." —Kevin Van Meter, author of Guerrillas of Desire: Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible and Reading Struggles: Autonomist Marxism from Detroit to Turin and Back Again

"The revival of Italian workerist and autonomist thought among the English-speaking left today makes Family, Welfare, and the State indispensable reading. In it, Mariarosa Dalla Costa offers an expansive notion of class autonomy and a compelling historical inquiry into the subjects of class struggle in the New Deal era—women, Black workers, the unhoused, the unemployed, students, and others—that is, the marginalized or too-often ignored reproductive elements that, complimentary to the productive sector, compose capitalist society and are just as indispensable to its subversion." —Magally A. Miranda Alcázar, cofounder of SALT: Xicana Marxist Thoughts and former editor at Viewpoint Magazine

"This is the perfect moment to revisit Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s groundbreaking study. In the aftermath of a calamitous pandemic that dealt women a particularly devastating blow, the concepts of social reproduction and care work have finally entered the political mainstream. Family, Welfare, and the State brilliantly analyzes the conditions and ideology that shaped New Deal reforms, acutely alert to both their possibilities and limitations. This is essential reading as we push to continue the work of our radical feminist forebears." —Astra Taylor, author of Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions

"Through the prism of working-class self-organization, Mariarosa Dalla Costa traces the historical development of the welfare state in the United States. She details the ways in which the family was instituted as the basic unit of social organization and the role bestowed upon women in the reproduction of labor power. Widening the lens, Dalla Costa maps the broader configurations of gender, race, and class that the welfare state was built upon to reveal its systematic exclusions. Family, Welfare, and the State is an important book for a time when we confront the fallout of neoliberal restructuring. Against nostalgia, the current challenge is not to return to the past, but to struggle for a better future." —Emma Dowling, author of The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?

Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s landmark study of working-class struggles and the US state in the early decades of the twentieth century vividly illustrates how capitalist development passes through both family and home. The Great Depression, Dalla Costa argues, involved a massive crisis in the social reproduction of labor-power. She shows how militant movements by unemployed and employed workers prompted the New Deal state to intervene directly in the domestic sphere, inventing new norms for women’s work along the way. This prehistory of the welfare rights and wages for housework movements will remain essential reading for activists and scholars in the twenty-first century and beyond. —Andrew Anastasi, editor and translator of The Weapon of Organization: Mario Tronti’s Political Revolution in Marxism

"Dalla Costa’s analysis of the New Deal is essential reading for contemporary theorists of racial patriarchal capitalism. Centered on the nexus of the state, the family, social reproduction, and popular struggles in a period of dramatic change, Family, Welfare, and the State’s historically situated argument feels prescient. Dalla Costa’s feminist analysis of the Keynesian prequel to neoliberalism, which attends to the crisis of waged work and social reproduction in the 1930s, is critically important to our present imagination of—and struggle against—neoliberalism’s sequel." —Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

FAMILY, WELFARE, AND THE STATE

Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal

© 2015 Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Preface © 2015 by Silvia Federici

Foreword © 2021 by Liz Mason-Deese

Originally published in Italy as Famiglia, welfare e stato tra Progressismo e New Deal in 1997 by FrancoAngeli, Rome.

Translated from Italian by Rafaella Capanna

On Welfare (1977–1978) was originally published in Primo Maggio: saggi e documenti per una storia di classe 9–10 (1977–1978): 76–80. It appears here in translation by Richard Braude and in Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Women and the Subversion of the Community (PM Press, 2019). Reprinted with permission from PM Press.

This edition © 2021 Common Notions

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

ISBN: 978-1-94217-353-3 | EBook ISBN: 978-1-94217-359-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942966

www.commonnotions.org

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Cover design by Josh MacPhee/Antumbra Design

Layout design and typesetting by Morgan Buck/Antumbra Design

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Special thanks to Bryan Welton for editorial assistance.

Printed in Canada

FAMILY, WELFARE, AND THE STATE

Between Progressivism and the New Deal

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Translated by Rafaella Capanna

Brooklyn, NY

TO MY FATHER FRANCESCO AND MY MOTHER MARIA GHIDELLI

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

BY LIZ MASON-DEESE

Originally published in Italian in 1983, at a time when the capitalist system was undergoing profound transformations, Family, Welfare, and the State continues to provide crucial insights for feminist and workers’ struggles today. The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic, social, and political crises rendered visible another long-standing crisis: the crisis of care. Capital and the state seek to push responsibility for managing this crisis into the household, that domestic space, and onto women’s shoulders. Suddenly, women were simultaneously responsible not only for our own paid employment (when we have it!) and our usual burden of domestic work, but also educating and caring for children who were home all day, other sick and elderly family members who lost access to care, and extra cleaning and enforcement of health protocols to keep the virus at bay. As if this were not enough, women were often on the front lines carrying out essential work, often without appropriate safety precautions, thereby putting themselves and the people they live with at risk.

Dalla Costa’s methodological insights foreground the construction of the family and the domestic sphere, through specific state policies, emphasizing that there is nothing natural about women’s role in the domestic space. It was in a specific historical context and to address specific needs of capital, that women, racialized differently, were pushed into the role of reproducing the workforce and managing the wage in its multiple dimensions. By not taking the domestic sphere and family for granted as the natural or necessary social unit, Dalla Costa renders visible a multiplicity of forms of resistance, of autonomous social reproduction and community care, that go beyond the family and enable the reproduction of something other than capitalist relations. Meanwhile, she shows how state intervention, through various welfare and social assistance programs, produced and solidified gendered familial roles, attempting to lock women into the role of reproducers of the workforce and managers of household consumption. This understanding of the role of welfare makes it impossible to have nostalgia for any type of Fordist or New Deal past and instead calls on us to invent and enact other futures. It is worth keeping these questions in mind as we confront the current restructuring of capital.

Today we are witnessing a global counteroffensive against the surging feminist tide of successive international feminist strikes and other mass mobilizations around the world. From restrictions on abortion rights in the United States and Poland, to campaigns against feminist sexual education (e.g., the Con mis hijos no se metas (Don’t mess with my children) campaign backed by the Church across Latin America), to the move for a return to traditional families, this counteroffensive seeks to re-establish hierarchical and scripted gender roles. In line with Dalla Costa’s analysis, this move is in direct response to women’s organization and demands for more autonomy—whether in terms of an income, other forms of social assistance, or autonomous forms of social reproduction.

However, it is no longer primarily a matter of ensuring the reproduction of the male manufacturing worker. Now the household becomes a laboratory for capital, as Lucía Cavallero and Verónica Gago have so succinctly put it, to ensure obedience through violence and debt.¹ Here, household debt operates as a mechanism to directly extract value from reproductive labor, whether through rent payments or debt incurred to pay utilities or food. This has reached unprecedented levels during COVID-19, with its mandatory stay at home measures ensuring access to household income decreased at the same time expenses went up.

This new counteroffensive seeks to push responsibility for managing the crisis back into the domestic sphere in ever more insidious ways, both in economic and moral terms. Dalla Costa’s analysis provides crucial insights for understanding the domestic space as both produced and productive. It is produced through state intervention in the form of welfare policies and their requirements and restrictions, through gendered labor market structures, through the lending policies of banks, etc. It is productive through (re)producing not only labor power in the form of male workers but also the wage relation itself in terms of hierarchies of obedience. Rather than a mere repetition of the past, however, today we are called upon to investigate precisely how the domestic sphere and gendered relations within it are being remade in response to the changing needs of capital. This inquiry will open new lines of struggle and enable the articulation of new alliances and demands.

Dalla Costa’s perspective, while it highlights the ability of the state and capital to shape our most intimate spheres of life, is far from fatalistic. It shows how these interventions were a response to social mobilization and organization, and in turn, gave rise to new forms of resistance. From the mass movements of the unemployed to the everyday refusal of women across the country, Dalla Costa underscores how the pressure applied by social organization was what ultimately forced the state to take responsibility for social reproduction. In other words, welfare was fundamentally a response to social movements and organized communities, an acknowledgment of their demands, and an attempt to contain them. This response initiated a fundamental transformation in the relationship between the state, women, and the family.

Furthermore, by not taking the enclosed nuclear family as the norm, she also enables us to identify and recognize forms of resistance that might otherwise remain invisible. For example, she examines the racialized construction of the family in the United States and allows us to see how Black communities’ reproduction beyond the nuclear family structure has often served as a form of survival and resistance to capitalist exploitation and racialized violence. This perspective also renders visible the multiple forms of autonomous social reproduction practiced in the United States during the New Deal era. While these autonomous practices have often been overlooked in favor of an emphasis on state policies, Dalla Costa shows how they were essential not only for survival but also for challenging established gender roles and positions, allowing women to exist beyond the patriarchy of the wage.

Mutual aid practices have long been central in marginalized communities—for example, drug users, AIDS patients, women seeking abortions—that are forcefully excluded from official forms of welfare and aid. With the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid practices have taken on an increasingly widespread and visible role. Faced with the lack of state support for those who needed all types of care during the pandemic, neighbors and community members came together to provide one another with food and medical supplies, and to arrange other care-giving services. In the rural New River Valley where I am writing from, a mutual aid network has provided thousands of food boxes, medical supplies, and other necessities for households across the valley. It has distributed food from a community garden, provided material support to a local anti-pipeline struggle, and managed to weave together relationships in a community suffering from multiple crises that extend well beyond the pandemic. This is only one example of the hundreds of similar mutual aid networks that have emerged or strengthened during the pandemic, and that far from being temporary measures, are proving to fundamentally transform community relations. One of the fundamental lessons we can draw from Family, Welfare, and the State is that when we turn social reproduction over to the state, we allow the state to determine what is reproduced, and we take for granted that what we are reproducing will be capitalist social relations. When we take social reproduction into our own hands, when we recognize it as a terrain of struggle, we enable the production of other social relations.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we attempt to articulate demands related to a feminist recovery, we must keep these lessons in mind. As the state and capital seek to push the management of the crisis into the household, we are called upon more than ever to challenge the naturalization of the domestic sphere and women’s role in it. We can also ask what types of demands might be able to articulate the diverse segments of the working class, recognizing how the current crisis has affected us differently. What would calling for a mass income look like today? What have been the impacts of temporary