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

by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Rafaella Capanna (Translator), Silvia Federici (Preface)

Written in the ten years following the publication of The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community (1972) and the international organizing efforts of the Wages for Housework Campaign, Mariarosa Dalla Costa's Family, Welfare, and the State reflects 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. Were the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state the saviors of the working class or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacity?
By analyzing the relationship of women and the state, Dalla Costa offers a comprehensive reading of the welfare system through the dynamics of resistance and struggle, the 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.
Three decades later, revisiting the origins of this system 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 relationship between women and the state, crisis and resistance, and possibilities for class autonomy.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics

160 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.

[ELK · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was incredibly helpful to me as a chronically ill/disabled person partnered with another chronically ill/disabled person, to access (and indeed, further develop in myself) framework around the ways our labor is stolen, exploited and of course, relied upon to prop up an increasingly violent capitalist order. The book focuses on heterosexual working class households, and does not spend a lot of time examining the ways these dynamics function elsewhere (eg in queer disabled households with mixed employment, such as mine), but the similarities were clear and palpable enough to parse out anyway, even if they left plenty of room for deeper analysis more tailored to other specific experiences. For example, though I "do not work," this state of supposed unemployment bears many parallels to that of so-called housewives, who are also culturally understood to "not work" (or who, in the case of formal employment, are certainly not recognized as holding two jobs), despite actually providing the labor (both physical and emotional) that makes their (traditionally-male) partners' "formal" (read: employed) labor possible; a systematically concealed but absolutely vital reproduction of labor power. (There is so much more to be explored here, like how my formally-employed, chronically ill/disabled partner functions in a similar dynamic to reproduce the labor power I am not even credited for exerting - but nevertheless line capitalist's pockets with, as a chronically ill person very much entrenched in the surplus class - but that's a separate essay for another day and is less relevant to this book).

Additionally, there were plenty of parallels to how chronic illness is itself an invisibilized full time job that is rendered invisible for the explicit purpose of concealing the extractive ways this social role has been structured to function under capitalism (though I'm not sure housewives would be considered surplus the way disabled people are, and my intial attempts to dig deeper have proven moot now that the internet is fully a corporate product rather than even the guise of a resource). And all of this analysis helped me put into further context the escalating violence of today's hypercapitalism, as accountability, care, and even the facade of social responsibility, recede, leaving us as individuals holding the bag - eg, bearing an ever-increasing burden of 'responsibility' - in order for capitalism to cheapen the value of labor (as well as eschew as much risk as possible, despite risk being an inherent dimension of business; it has instead become an overwhelming and inescapable dimension of everyday life, especially for chronically ill and disabled people in a "post-covid," post-public-health world) to such a degree that that labor is no longer even formalized via the labor force but rather heaped onto the 'consumer' who of course is not only not paid for this labor but actually expected to *pay* the very entity that has offset their responsibility onto the consumer for the 'privilege' of access to their shoddy, quality-control-lacking services/consumer goods/etc. This is supremely relevant to the experience of chronic illness, as I am structurally kept in a perennial state of burnout *and* sickness (for the explicit purpose of disempowering me politically) because just trying to access what we call healthcare (where of course care is, to be generous, scarce) is itself an immensely burdensome energetic cost, heaped on top of the additional burdensome financial cost that accompanies for-profit "healthcare": there is such a tremendous amount of labor involved in the administrative work of coordinating "care," trying (usually in vain) to hold care providers and their corporately-owned hospital systems accountable, following up to no end, being abandoned again and again and paying for it each time both spiritually and financially. And of course, there's the double-edged sword that is social security (which this book also speaks to, albeit from a labor perspective rather than the perspective of someone trying to utilize it from the other side of that dynamic), which is similarly gutted to an ever-increasing degree, maximizing labor extraction of those seeking to benefit from it in order to expend as little as possible on a formal labor force intended to keep this system functional, accessible and intact (not to mention make it easier to pillage for the purpose of laundering those resources into the pockets of private capital without recourse).

But I digress.

In the end, chronically ill people get little to nothing out of this so-called system of 'care' (unless you want to count medical trauma, hastened death and/or debt as "something"), while capital continues to expand via this extraction. This book speaks at length of how a similar dynamic exists for domestic laborers (whom it refers to as women, but whom we should know by now can be any marginalized gender, as domestic labor is explicitly a realm engendered by and for the purpose of legitmizing a patriarchal order, which this book also explores). Propaganda campaigns have inculcated these laborers (and their communities) to 1) not see or respect their labor as "real" labor and 2) justify this extraction via a framework of familial love - that is, wives/mothers/etc. give themselves away - sacrifice tremendously - in the name of 'loving their families.' This brainwashing campaign was explicitly started and executed by the US govt (detailed well in this book) and has clearly succeeded, as this sentiment overwhlmingly survives to this day as a major pillar of both white patriarchy and capitalism, and has ensured the ongoing institutionalization of wage theft among this class of [domestic] laborers.

Additionally, it was clarifying to see the New Deal deconstructed as an endeavor that aimed to save capitalism rather than serve the masses; a psyop, if you will (the author does not use this terminology). When engaged with this way, it is much easier to understand why the programs that arose from, for example, the public works administration, were deeply racist, or why social security remains, to this day, a deeply flawed, deeply classist and racist (not to mention ableist) safety net that is hardly equally available to all. It neatly emulates capitalism in its innately unequal distribution of resources and violent gatekeeping of access, because it is at its heart a fundamentally pro-capitalist - not a socialist - project, despite what the fascists of today might have you think as they dismantle even this pillar of society in our age of capitalism eating itself in a desperate attempt to stave off its self-imposed collapse.

I took so many notes reading this book, I couldn't possibly expound on them all here, or my review would be a book unto itself. But I haven't been able to "read a book with my eyes" (audiobooks ftw!) in full in years, until this book came along. It proved an extremely engaging and educational resource that I'd definitely recommend to anyone seeking to expand their political education and/or deepen their understanding of the US political project as it pertains to reanimating the corpse of capitalism at any cost. A helpful tool in the work of combatting epistemic injustice and placing the severe burnout imposed upon us by capitalism into stark focus, wherein it becomes possible to legitimize that burnout as a material condition with palpable structural forces at play that have explicitly aimed to conceal the very violence we feel weighing on our bodyminds, and which has served to obstruct this struggle as collective in nature and thus prevent its expression in conversation, discourse and media that might promote empowerment or otherwise advance the plight of justice.

[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!