Value and the Unseen Producers: Wages for Housework in the Women's Movement in 1970s Italy and the Prosumers of Digital Capitalism

Abstract

This article examines the problem of value in unpaid labor from the perspective of the domestic labor struggles in the Wages for Housework campaign of the early 1970s in Italy. Some of the history of this movement is recounted in regard to the question of value in capital and, importantly, beyond capital. The issues of value that are raised in this perspective by posing questions of value in domestic labor against those in digital labor are not only the analogical and even the metonymical relations of domestic sphere production to digital labor and the critical discourse on it, but the historical and the foundational quality of the former to the latter, as well. In these models the larger social and cultural traditions within which labor is literally begotten remain, and so does capital's use of them.

Keywords:

• digital labor
• domestic labor
• exploitation
• value
• Wages for Housework

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For this perspective article, I am very grateful to Steve Wright, Monash University, an outstanding historian of the Italian social movements, who has very generously shared with me his research. I am also very grateful to Leopoldina Fortunati for her work, dedication, and inspiration through the years and for reading and commenting on this perspective. I have been very fortunate to benefit from their work and commitment, without which this perspective would not have been possible.