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Informationen zum Autor Mariarosa Dalla Costa is an influential author and militant of international feminism who has devoted her theoretical and practical efforts to the study of the female condition in capitalist development. From Potere Operaio, Lotta Femminista, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign, Dalla Costa has for decades been a central figure in the development of autonomy in a wide range of anti-capitalist movements. Her seminal book The Power of Women and the Subversion Of The Community, co-authored with Selma James, has been translated into six languages. Her writings, reflecting on the role of social reproduction in the organization of autonomy as well as the historic development of capital, have consistently been staged within and through social struggles and movements organizing around the questions of land, agriculture, food, and the commons. Klappentext Was the New Deal and the welfare state savior of the working class, or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacity? Leseprobe As the end of the welfare state is calling for a reassessment of the politics of the New Deal—its main point of origin in the United States—the publication of a U.S. edition of Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Family, Welfare, and the State: Between Progressivism and the New Deal could not be more timely. Originally published in Italy in 1983, as the welfare state was already undergoing an historic crisis, the book centers on the new relation that the New Deal instituted between women and the state, and the development of a new reproductive regime in which the working-class housewife plays a strategic role as the producer of the workforce and manager of the worker’s wage. This is an aspect of New Deal politics that to this day remains understudied. It is crucial to an understanding of not only the limits of the welfare state, but also the paths to be taken in the construction of alternatives to it. Even the theorists of Italian Operaismo , who described the New Deal as a turning point in the management of class relations and as capital’s first conscious integration of the class struggle in its development plans, have ignored the central relationship of women and the state underpinning this historical change in class relations. The New Deal, for Operaist political theorists like Mario Tronti, marked the institutionalization of collective bargaining and the transformation of the state into an agent of economic planning. It was part of a Keynesian deal in which wage increases would be exchanged for and matched by labor productivity, with the state and the unions acting as guarantors of the equilibrium to be achieved. What Dalla Costa shows, however, is that the complex social architecture upon which the New Deal relied was at all points dependent on a reorganization of the reproduction of the workforce and the integration of women’s domestic labor and the family in the schemes of American capitalism. According to the New Dealers’ plans, it was the woman’s task to ensure that the higher family wage, which workers would gain through their newly acquired collective-bargaining power, would be productively expended and actually contribute to the production of a more disciplined, more pacified, and more productive workforce. As such, the “house-worker” was the strategic subject on which the success or failure of the New Deal depended, while essential to the exploitation of her work was the invisibilization of her labor. […] With the New Deal, for the first time, the state assumed the responsibility for the social reproduction of the worker, not only through the introduction of collective bargaining, but also through the institutionalization of housework—smuggled in, however, as “the work of love.” As Dalla Costa shows, it was only with the New Deal that the state began to plan the “social factory”—that is, the home, the family, t...
