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

by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici (Preface)

The attack on welfare was, and is, an attack on our class autonomy, structured to maintain a patriarchal and racist order, drive divisions, and disrupt our ability to collectively refuse capital’s exploitation and the state’s discipline. Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Family, Welfare and the State powerfully reminds us that the welfare system can only be understood through the dynamics of resistance and struggle, and women have been at the center of it. In reflecting on the history of struggles around the New Deal in which workers’ initiatives forced a new relationship with the state on the terrain of social reproduction , Dalla Costa asks if the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state were saviors of the working class, or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacity? Family, Welfare and the State offers a comprehensive reading of the welfare system through the dynamics of women's resistance and class struggle, their willingness and reluctance to work inside and outside the home, and the relationship with the relief structures that women expressed in the United States during the Great Depression. Revisiting the origins of this system today on a sociopolitical level—its policies governing race, class, and family relations, especially in terms of the role that was delegated to women’s labor power—remains vital for a deeper understanding of the historical and ongoing relationship between women and the state, crisis and resistance, and possibilities for class autonomy.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics

128 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2015

Reviews

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, "Family, Welfare, and the State" that takes the autonomist feminist critique first outlined in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation and turns it towards Keynesian Economics, Social Democracy, and the Liberal State through an examination of the New Deal and the Great Depression. The book reads as kind of racist in some parts (the italian was written in 1983) but I think that some of the racism comes from the translation and not Dalla Costa herself.

This book presents a critique of social democracy centered around Women and The Family and it was a refreshing take compared to the go-to critique of social democracy being one of anti-imperialism.

It would help if the reader has read Caliban and the Witch, at least, and understand's the autonomist analysis found in Tronti's Workers and Capital.

I would recommed this book to any marxist feminist, but I do not think that the general left will internalize the arguments outlined in the book itself as it reads more like history than theory -- which is the beauty of it.

[Ren Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This small 106 page volume is packed with information about the relationship between labor and the state from the 1929 stock market crash to the 1980s (when it was originally published in Italy). Find out how the political consciousness shifted to people looking to government to guarantee a basic income. The social movements, the desperation of the unemployment crisis, and all the acts that established welfare as we know it today- unemployment insurance, social security, temporary assistance for needy families, bank bail-outs. It’s all here and it’s riveting!