The Arcana of Reproduction

The definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970s

Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labor performed in the home.

Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature.

Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.Foreword | Silvia Federici
Translators’ Note | Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono
Introduction

Part I
1. Production and Reproduction: The Apparent Antithesis of the Capitalist Mode of Production
2. ‘The Kingdom of Nature’, or the Reproduction of the Individual as Labour Power
3. The Capitalist Form of the Man/Woman Relationship
4. Housewives, Prostitutes and Workers: Their Exchanges
5. In the Sphere of Circulation . . .
6. The Hidden Abode: On the Domestic Working Process as a Process of Valorisation
7. Revising Marx’s Chapter on Surplus Value: Correcting the Map of Exploitation

Part II
8. The Labour of Reproduction Is Productive
9. The Doppelcharakter of Reproductive Labour
10. This Strange Form of Absolute Surplus Value
11. The Family as a Form of Capitalist Development
12. Capitalist Accumulation and Population
13. For a Workers’ History of Reproduction

Afterword: Reading L’Arcano Today: 1981 to 2025
Index"The Arcana of Reproduction is a true tour de force, unique both in the world of Marxism and Feminism. Whereas Marxist-Feminists have generally only elaborated on the significance of Marx’s work for understanding women’s oppression and exploitation, Fortunati ‘sweeps away’ our common sense notions of production and reproduction by testing Marxian categories through their unorthodox application to the realm of reproduction. The result is a painstaking analysis that explores these two interlocking spheres as both interdependent and different—radically unsettling our understanding of both."
—Silvia Federici

"A classic of the great “domestic labor debates” of the 1970s and 80s, The Arcana of Reproduction remains the most subversive feminist critique of productivist understandings of value. This new translation is a must read for all those seeking to understand how capitalism exploits women’s unpaid labor and conceals this form of exploitation by relegating it to the margins of the wage relation. By re-centering social reproduction as the key battlefield on which the extraction of surplus-value is contested, The Arcana’s arguments remain central to understanding contemporary capitalism and a world of work increasingly characterized by forms of wagelessness that have moved well beyond the sphere of housework alone."
—Alessandra Mezzadri, Reader in Global Development and Political Economy, SOAS, London

"Fortunati's work is a groundbreaking classic of workerist feminism, distilling and elaborating critical concepts from an era of revolutionary feminist thought and politics. The work expands and moves beyond traditional Marxist categories, offering a bold and innovative analysis of the unpaid labor of the reproductive labor sphere that forms the basis of the capitalist system. In providing an analysis of a historical moment, she gives today's feminists an indispensable guide to understanding the importance and complexities of struggles over reproduction."
—Mariarosa della Costa, co-author of The Power of Women & the Subversion of the Community

"This excellent edition, wonderfully edited and translated, with insightful supplementary texts by Federici and the author, demonstrates the contemporary importance of this classic feminist text."
—Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive Seventies

"The Arcana of Reproduction is a must-read because it is an at once singular and path-breaking contribution to Marxist feminist theorizations of the capitalist production/reproduction system and because of the powerful estrangement—from domestic labor, from the institution of the heteropatriarchal family, from the gendered ideologies of work—that it continues to provoke."
—Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work

"Provocative....a work of worthy rumination."
—Sonakshi Srivastava, AsymptoteLeopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.