A Militant Book: Interview with Leopoldina Fortunati

Demonstration of feminist collectives in Piazza Grande, Modena, 1977. Women’s Documentation Center.

After the movements and organizations which formed during Italy’s “long ’68” were crushed by a mixture of police repression, mass incarceration, and internal conflicts, militants (in and outside of jail cells) felt compelled to pass on discoveries gleaned from over a decade of struggle. Leopoldina Fortunati’s 1981 The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital is one such contribution: both an appraisal and a condensation of a decade of feminist militancy, as Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono, the translators of a new edition, describe. Today, the importance of a robust Marxist-feminist analytic is duly evident for confronting worsening crises of health and bodily autonomy, feminicide and domestic violence, and state-sanctioned attacks on trans and nonbinary people, all of which were exacerbated and entrenched by measures taken by repressive apparatuses in response to the Covid pandemic. We met with Fortunati over Zoom to discuss these issues, starting from a desire to reflect on how the urgency to reread The Arcana today might also express a wish for intragenerational reconnection between today’s anti-capitalist and feminist struggles and those of the 1970s, placing Marxist feminism and its critique of reality at the center. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

—Giulia Sbaffi and Andreas Petrossiants

Andreas Petrossiants (AP): Could you introduce the historical and political context in which you wrote and developed The Arcana of Reproduction?

Leopoldina Fortunati (LF): First of all, it is a militant book, by which I mean to note that it was a book which responded directly to the needs of feminist comrades at the time. More than anything, it offered a framework of analysis. It should be noted that in the 1970s, many women were coming to the feminist movement—joining groups like Rivolta Femminile, Lotta Femminista, the international Wages for Housework campaign, and so on—without prior political experience. At best, some had participated in the student movements in 1968. A few of us, like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and myself, had experience in Marxist groups like Potere Operaio.1

The feminist movement didn’t have (obvious) preexisting paths or frameworks of political formation to build from. The participants had a great deal of energy to dedicate to understanding the world and for organizing towards revolution, but few tools were available. From our view, however, we [Lotta Femminista] didn’t go along with the idea that we had to start from scratch [da zero], unlike other sections of the feminist movement. For them, women could only start from scratch because everything that came before us had been contaminated by masculinity and patriarchy. Think of books like Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s spit on Hegel).2 The idea was to create a rupture with all traditions, including those of the historical worker’s movement. We [Lotta Femminista] never believed in such a radical break—first and foremost because we saw that it didn’t bear great results. Rivolta Femminile—an incredibly important group who produced crucial theory—for example, refused to go out into the streets to join protests or demonstrations. They considered the form of the public protest to be fundamentally masculine, and thus not useful for the feminist movement. Either you can come up with, as a woman … I don’t know, climbing the greasy pole [albero della cuccagna]3 to create alternatives, or you have to use what is there. And so, we were always more aligned with a view of making do with what we had. And, furthermore, we began from the perspective that certain men also laid some valuable groundwork.

Certainly, we were building from the development of operaismo (workerism) which had elevated discussions [of Marxism] to a very high level. And so, why not work from that as a canvas on which to position ourselves and our struggle, on which to write, reflect, and develop our own autonomous political strategy? For example, I took a seminar on Capital with Ferruccio Gambino, where I finally understood Marx. Given that there were so few of us at that time, it was crucial to be present at demonstrations and assemblies in public. If we could assert a strong presence in these places, then we could multiply the forces of women. It was the only way to acquire militants. The problem was not only that of organizing or political training, which we lacked, but also the simple point that women were not used to public speaking. Meeting and speaking in public were huge wins in themselves.4 The street was a historically masculine space, a space for men to demonstrate. This was compounded by the fact that we were clashing with other militants and comrades—whether the Communist Party (PCI) or the unions, or even the extra-parliamentary left (Potere Operaio, Lotta Continua, etc.), who were in the process of forming and organizing themselves. Imagine that this scanty group of women who were autonomous from all existing groups, trying to set up a discourse in this complicated political context. The Arcana was written to offer theoretical tools for a discourse that for the most part was this: let’s talk about domestic work.

The first thing that needed to be addressed was the view that domestic labor was unproductive work and concomitantly that women couldn’t participate in the composition of class.5 Women had to settle for the ancillary role of supporting the “real” struggles of the workers who were part of that technical-political composition and who did the bulk of confronting the economic system. The conclusion was that if those workers dropped their tools, then they stopped capital, the system, the economy, and so on. On the other hand, if women stopped, then nothing would happen. And so, for us, talking about domestic work wasn’t just theoretical or semantic; after all, who cares what’s called “productive” work and what isn’t. Rather, our insistence on the productivity of domestic work was a crucial intervention so that non-factory workers could be included in class composition and thus attack capital directly. The problem was political because unless this [orthodox Marxist] view was addressed, it would continue to have adverse effects for women, and for class struggle. Firstly, as mentioned, such a view excludes women from class composition; secondly, it renders women a subordinate subject; and lastly, it disastrously confines women’s struggle to simply fighting to “go to work” outside the home, limiting liberation to self-inscription into wage exploitation. This thinking was really offensive. While men were offered an analysis and a strategy to destroy or radically change the mode of production or to imagine an alternative society in which there was no more exploitation, women were not. We were offered only equality in exploitation. We did not even have the right to dream or to imagine a different organization of the sphere of reproduction. So this was a very complex situation that had to be addressed on various levels. And so, The Arcana was created to respond to those needs, to put tools in the hands of the women activists that would make them able to respond in the proper tone and to articulate and defend and argue our point of view.

Giulia Sbaffi (GS): Already from the title of the book, one gets a sense of the hierarchy of productive and nonproductive labor: houseworkers and sex workers, and then workers and capital. In the book, however, one can clearly also perceive the impact that homosexual, trans, and lesbian liberation movements had on the wider Marxist-feminist movement. As well as the tension between reformism and revolution that subsumed many of these subjectivities into the heteronormative system, while excluding others through criminalization—sex workers in particular. Could you talk about the historical contribution of forms of militancy that were coming “from below” (from prostitutes, e.g.) that allowed you to refine the arguments in the book? The awareness that being homosexual is not enough to get out of the dogma of social reproduction, for example. Even the exchange of free money between clients and sex workers is not enough, because one must also have preconditions of possibility, of freedom, of life. I would like to understand if there was something historical, some emergence of subjectivity that influenced that aspect.

LF: Regarding the struggles of homosexuals, certainly. There was the figure of Mario Mieli, for example, who represented in Italy a great reference point of a struggle that most other groups and movements avoided at all costs.6 Obviously the PCI was completely averse to solidarity with gay movements (homosexuality was considered a bourgeois vice), but the extra-parliamentary left was similarly reluctant. Instead, from the very beginning of our feminist struggle, we made it clear that lesbians and gays were our comrades in struggle and we staged demonstrations together. We saw these struggles [whether feminist or gay liberation] not as “simple” civil rights struggles, but as class struggles: real class struggles to which we gave the recognition that was due. They were struggles that could unhinge and break the logics of the division of labor and hetero regime upon which the social order is based. This solidarity puts the system into crisis because it makes clear that without the political the engagement of everyone outside of the factory as well, social struggles cannot win.

For us “wages for housework” didn’t just refer to women specifically, but to whoever did housework: male or female, young or old. Not just housewives. Indeed, we have to remember that the discussion of remunerating women houseworkers is also an old perspective from the right—tied to God, homeland, and family. In that capitalist and sexist view, the remuneration of housework works to define the home as a woman’s space. For us, it was the idea of breaking out of that space. And at the time that we were organizing there was also a big movement in our region of sex workers who were organized into workers’ committees that had organized a series of struggles to get rid of the “pimp” figure and take back their lives. They were also our comrades in struggle. Again, movements and organizations on the left shunned these struggles; they didn’t want to get their “hands dirty” with gay struggles, let alone sex worker struggles. There was always the talk of organized crime related to prostitutes, which is absolute nonsense because sex workers had shown that they had managed to free themselves [by organizing as workers] without the help of political forces. And of course, we can’t forget that a part of the mainstream feminist movement was not inclusive towards sex workers either. For us, the figure of the sex worker presented a struggle over subjectivity, because we were starting from working-class housewives, salesclerks, secretaries in professional firms, while prostitutes were even lower on the social ladder. The mainstream feminist movement was made up of women who were educated, middle class, teachers, employees, and appeared to belong to social classes that were very far away from the bottom—they had a limited sensitivity to this political subject. Their perspective on sex work was purely “abolitionist”—meaning to abolish sex work. But what does that mean? They didn’t understand that to destroy a form of work under capitalist relations [which in this case could only be criminalization] and to liberate oneself from work are two different things. Their “abolitionism” was rooted in Catholic thinking. We on the other hand built a different tradition of struggle from the bottom up. We started from working-class housewives, from the struggles of salesclerks; we supported the struggles of factory workers, we supported the struggles of prostitutes, we supported the struggles for legalized abortion—all of which were difficult to digest politically both by the feminist movement and by political forces, even revolutionary groups who understood nothing about women’s struggles. To me, operaismo itself died because it did not understand anything about women or the other struggles we participated in. It remained so hung up on an outdated idea of society [postwar Taylorism].

AP: As those writing on operaismo and autonomia are often compelled to reiterate, “operaio” referred to factory workers, and indeed a very specific type of subjectivity that was defined in the 1960s as the “mass worker,” which later dissolved into what numerous theorists called the “social worker” (which presents its own dilemmas). Marxist feminism, in work by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and indeed very explicitly in The Arcana, provided a crucial reconsideration of the valorization process, which pushed operaismo to account for subjectivities outside of the factory.

LF: Yes, like you say, operaismo didn’t capture the whole picture. Toni Negri, Guido Bianchini, Sandro Serafini, Lucio Ferrari Bravo, and other thinkers in the movement all came close to the “truth” with the concept of the “social factory.”7 They understood how the logics of the factory extended into the whole of society. And they were proven right in many ways by history: in the 1970s, the number of factory workers was at a high; today, however, [in the Global North] it’s less than a quarter of that. This type of factory [massive, industrial, expanding through the urban context] began to die in the industrialized countries in the 1970s, but returned with globalization in the Global South. In China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and so on. Those theorists understood early on, therefore, that the walls [between the factory and society] were dissolving and that a different proletariat characterized by precarity was forming. But, it was a discourse that failed to adequately describe the new conjuncture. At the end of the day, the concept of the “social factory” was kind of empty in terms of its descriptive power. We [feminists] developed it because the “social factory” is first and foremost a factory of reproductive labor. And our thesis was simple: either you come with us and support our struggles and then we can win together, or if you mind your own business and ignore us, remember that in the near future our weakness will become your weakness.

AP: That’s why I’ve always approached the concept of the social factory with caution. Of course it’s useful, but from the perspective of reproduction (that of labor power and of capital), we need a more powerful framework for understanding the contemporary capitalist mode of (re)production and division of labor.

LF: Right. And in the end, like I said, we have seen that “our” [reproductive workers’] weaknesses have become “their” [formerly proletarian, now precarious] weaknesses.

AP: Perhaps it’s less that there is a social factory in which the logics of the factory have extended into the social sphere than that the reproductive logics of the “home” have been extended out of the home and into working conditions generally speaking. In the afterword to the new translation you describe that over the last five decades “capital has used the relative weakness of organization in the sphere of reproduction to counter the power previously conquered by the working class through struggles in the sphere of commodity production.”8

LF: Exactly. This brings me to a concept that I’d like to underline. In a chapter by Ferruccio Gambino titled “Composizione di classe e investimenti diretti statunitensi all’estero” he describes globalization as a direct response in the 1980s to the worker struggles of the 1970s—a framework which is necessary for understanding the ostensible “disappearance” of the factory in the Global North and its emergence in the Global South.9 This is a crucial point: the power that the working class had achieved was so great that workers’ wages [variable capital] had essentially eroded profit. Thus, capital was forced to migrate to where wages were lower. But the story isn’t all that simple. The whole first phase of globalization was an extremely difficult phase for capital because it had to adapt to different systems of social organization and production in the places where capital fled to. If we don’t understand capitalist development in this way [following workers’ struggle], then we will not be able to see that globalization was a counterinsurgent response to worker struggle. You see here that I am a Trontian. It wasn’t just an explosion of the global working class in this period, but also an explosion of global communication—which for the first time convincingly posed the problem of the internationalization of the working class in concrete terms. With the internet, members of the global working class can talk to each other more directly. Of course, today we see how these tools were used also to counterattack workers and how they are kept under control by US corporations, but alternative possibilities for their use in struggle remain.

GS: I’m especially intrigued by the point about globalization being born from workers’ struggles, which brings me to a question I had planned to ask you. The Arcana is a book that has been translated into many languages and published in multiple editions internationally; however, it is a book that had been almost forgotten in Italy—consulted mostly during the last decades by university and independent female researchers. However, I believe that the perspective of a militant book like this, especially now, is crucial. So, how can this “militant book” be read in Italy today in the context of transnational struggles? How can it help us develop—with respect to these tensions we were talking about just now—a response to the racialization of capitalist production that is not only feminist, but transfeminist?

LF: Yes, The Arcana has been translated into Korean, French, Spanish, and English of course. It’ll be out soon in Chinese, Turkish, Korean again, Brazilian Portuguese, and perhaps also German. This is, I think, because there is a new generation of women who are looking for tools because of their dissatisfaction with struggle as it exists today. In Italy, The Arcana was published in 1981 during a period of mass repression. Think about the fact that I sent it to Toni Negri and other comrades when they were in jail. All of this is to say that it came out in a difficult moment, when the movement was focused on fighting for those behind bars; the horizon of struggle was limited to defense in this way. And it remained like this for years. Following the repression, traditional political forces like the PCI, trade unions, and so on distanced themselves even further from the movements. And so, through all of this, The Arcana was read, as you were saying Giulia, mostly in universities by female students.

And then there was the reemergence of a global feminist movement on a larger scale—with Non Una di Meno for example. Again, these struggles are so important, especially because, from my perspective, they are class struggles. If you don’t root them in labor, you won’t get anywhere. In fact, I have lots of relationships with women students, and many of them have told me that in between one demonstration and another, there is nothing binding them together, no organization. I remind them that organizing and reproducing the movement is a daily struggle; it’s militant work in the places where you are, in your neighborhoods, in your factories, in your offices, in your schools where you teach or you study. That’s where coordination must begin. There isn’t that much intergenerational inheritance from the feminist movements of the seventies. In one sense, it’s because they had to cut the “umbilical cord” between themselves and us, just as our generation did with our elders. If everything the mother did was wrong, then we need to do the opposite. But what if your mother was a militant feminist?