Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are making, we cannot robotize “care” except at a terrible cost for the people involved.

For the distancing of production from reproduction and consumption leads us to ignore the conditions under which what we eat or wear, or work with, have been produced, their social and environmental cost, and the fate of the population on whom the waste we produce is unloaded.

What is needed is the reopening of a collective struggle over reproduction, reclaiming control over the material conditions of our reproduction and creating new forms of cooperation around this work outside of the logic of capital and the market.

On the positive side, the discovery of reproductive work has made it possible to understand that capitalist production relies on the production of a particular type of worker—and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, procreation—and thus to redefine the private sphere as a sphere of relations of production and a terrain of anticapitalis

The second factor that has recentered reproductive labor in the home has been the expansion of “homework,” partly due to the deconcentration of industrial production, partly to the spread of informal work. As David Staples writes in No Place Like Home (2006), far from being an anachronistic form of work, home-based labor has demonstrated to be a lo

Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers’ effort to unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum.

For what differentiates the reproduction of human beings from the production of commodities is the holistic character of many of the tasks involved.

in the present phase of capitalist development, the distinction between production and reproduction has become totally blurred, as work becomes the production of states of being, “affects,” and “immaterial” rather than physical objects.36

Not only do women across the world produce the workers that keep the global economy in motion. Starting in the early ’90s there has been a leap in female migration from the Global South to the North, where they provide an increasing percentage of the workforce employed in the service sector and domestic labor.