Abstract
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle is a raw and impassioned collection of essays that span the course of more than four decades. Silvia Federici encourages the reader to consider housework and the invisibility of women’s labor, both historically and in the present day. She elaborates on the many effects that unpaid labor, specifically unpaid housework, have on micro, mezzo, and macro systems. Federici explores physical and emotional labor in her definition of housework and exposes the exploitive and oppressive nature of this work through a critical analysis of the political and economic systems that produce such conditions. Federici well documents the many struggles of feminist social movements whose aim has been to liberate women, both economically and politically, from the tyranny of unpaid work: “when we struggle for a wage, we do not struggle to enter capitalist relations, because we have never been out of them … we struggle to break capital’s plan for women” (p. 19).
Federici helps us to understand the connection between housework and capitalism and globalization. She articulately describes reproductive work as necessary for the functioning of a capitalist state and begs us to call it into question. Throughout the book, Federici is cautious and critical of Marxism and clearly outlines its limitations while emphasizing the undeniable destructive force that is globalization. She chronicles the abuses of a capitalist labor market and implicates capitalist policies in the perpetuation of such marginalization “policies forbidding abortion could be decoded as devices for the regulation of the labor supply, the collapse of the birth rate and increase in the number of divorces could be read as instances of resistance to the capitalist discipline of work; the personal became political and the capital and the state were found to have subsumed our lives and reproduction down to the bedroom” (p. 97). Revolution at Point Zero highlights the many subversive ways that women have resisted exploitation of their reproductive work and have reclaimed the “personal as political.”
Federici offers a nuanced analysis of the state of caregiving as the current battleground of women’s reproductive work. She thoughtfully troubles our current understanding of the global caregiving system and suggests it as one possible location from which to establish our new commons. She raises the call for feminists to mobilize around reproduction and labor rights because “women are the largest group of elderly who are poor and the largest number of residents of low-income nursing homes, the concentration camps of our time, precisely because they spend so much of their lives outside of the waged workforce, in activities not recognized as work” (p. 123).
Federici suggests that the reconstruction of a new commons requires a total transformation of our everyday lives; it is a call for the complete reorganization of a capitalist system. Federici’s collection of essays are especially relevant to all social workers, feminists, and women; they remind us that none of our antioppressive, social justice focus efforts are insignificant; rather they are essential to the reorganization of reproductive labor within repressive capitalist systems.