Revolution at Point Zero
Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
Second edition
Written between 1974 and 2012, Revolution at Point Zero collects forty years of research and theorizing on the nature of housework, social reproduction, and women’s struggles on this terrain—to escape it, to better its conditions, to reconstruct it in ways that provide an alternative to capitalist relations.
Indeed, as Federici reveals, behind the capitalist organization of work and the contradictions inherent in “alienated labor” is an explosive ground zero for revolutionary practice upon which are decided the daily realities of our collective reproduction.
Beginning with Federici’s organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the essays collected here unravel the power and politics of wide but related issues including the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, the development of affective labor, and the politics of the commons.
More in this series
Praise
Federici’s attempt to draw together the work of feminists and activist from different parts of the world and place them in historical context is brave, thought-provoking and timely. Federici’s writing is lucid and her fury palpable.
– Red Pepper
Real transformations occur when the social relations that make up everyday life change, when there is a revolution within and across the stratifications of the social body… . Silvia Federici offers the kind of revolutionary perspective that is capable of revealing the obstacles that stand in the way of such change.
– Feminist Review
Reading Federici empowers us to reconnect with what is at the core of human development, women’s labor-intensive caregiving—a radical rethinking of how we live.
– Z Magazine
Federici has become a crucial figure for young Marxists, political theorists, and a new generation of feminists.
– Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
It is good to think with Silvia Federici, whose clarity of analysis and passionate vision come through in essays that chronicle enclosure and dispossession, witch-hunting and other assaults against women, in the present, no less than the past. It is even better to act armed with her insights.
– Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Contents
| Acknowledgments | |
| Preface to the New Edition | |
| Preface to the 2012 Edition | |
| Introduction | |
| I. Theorizing and Politicizing Housework | |
| Wages against Housework | (1975) |
| Why Sexuality Is Work | (1975) |
| Counterplanning from the Kitchen | (1975) |
| The Restructuring of Housework and Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s | (1980) |
| Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet | (1984) |
| On Affective Labor | (2011) |
| II. Globalization and Social Reproduction | |
| Reproduction and Feminist Struggle in the New International Division of Labor | (1999) |
| War, Globalization, and Reproduction | (2000) |
| Women, Globalization, and the International Women’s Movement | (2001) |
| The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution | (2008) |
| Going to Beijing: How the United Nations Colonized the Feminist Movement | (1997) |
| III. Reproducing Commons | |
| On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism | (2009) |
| Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization: An International Perspective | (2004) |
| Feminism and the Politics of the Common in an Era of Primitive Accumulation | (2010) |
| “We Have Seen Other Countries and Have Another Culture”: Migrant Domestic Workers and the International Production and Circulation of Feminist Knowledge and Organization | (2016) |
| Notes | |
| Bibliography | |
| Index | |
| About the Author |
