Italian Autonomist Feminism & Marxism on Nature and Technology

Ruminations on Federici and Technology Part 1

In Re-enchanting the World, Silvia Federici deems Karl Marx’s historical materialist method and political language necessary but not sufficient for abolishing the “present state of things” or the capitalist patriarchy.¹ As an alternative to capitalism, Federici envisions a commons, which she considers a “radical departure from what communism has signified in the Marxist tradition.”² Italian autonomist feminism departs from what Federici considers ‘orthodox Marxism’ in many ways; from its active denaturalization of femininity to its focus on unwaged labor. This piece will center on Federici’s embrace of ecofeminism as an alternative to her interpretation of a Marxist dialectic between humanity and nature. Federici and Marx’s positions on nature and technology are here considered irreconcilable. However, I argue that given missteps in Federici’s reading of Capital Volume I and her lack of engagement with Marx’s early and late writings, there is a revolutionary way forward through Marx’s embrace of technology that assuages some of Federici’s concerns. Through a counter-reading of Marx on the topics of teleology, cooperation, and the instruments of labor, I open space for a feminist communist approach that transforms the technology developed in service of capitalism towards a future where reproductive labor is communal and private property, abolished. 

Having been influenced by the autonomist Marxist tradition in her hometown of Parma, Italy, Federici took issue with Antonio Negri’s Grundrisse-centered Marxism which held information technology as the way to combat the neoliberal order. She is rightfully concerned by the exploited labor and resource extraction, which currently uphold computing power. Federici takes reproductive labor, often practiced by women, to be less technologically involved than productive labor. She joins Maria Mies and Ariel Salleh in asserting that “Marx’s devaluation of women’s labor and reproduction” is connected to his “view that humanity’s historic mission is the domination of nature.”³ Federici leans into the metaphor of madame la Terre, linking women to nature and men to industrialization. Marx is accused of an “idealization of capitalist industrial development” that corresponds to his failure to “appreciate the power of women.”⁴

We begin by analyzing the developmental thrust of history in Marx’s work, which Federici assumes to be teleological. Her feminism combats the notion that capitalism is a necessary stage in societal development, presumably taking ‘necessity’ to apply to all worlds. Necessity in this case, however, may serve as a practical measure, given that the world we live in is one where capitalism does confront us in the struggle towards economic revolution. There is an irony here, given Federici’s commitment to praxis over theory.⁵ Federici claims that acknowledging capitalism’s inevitability places us “on the other side of the people’s struggle to resist it.”⁶ What, however, is more dismissive of the people’s struggle than denying the materiality of the oppressive force against which they stand?⁷ To wager that Marx undermined the resistance he wrote for by charting capitalism’s development would be to overlook the advantage of having a systemic understanding of one’s enemy. Marx is concerned with the causal network governing our current situation. His progressive history indicates confidence in the eventual triumph over capitalism but does not seek to justify exploitation on the basis of advancement.

Federici praises Marx for his “historical materialist method” yet neglects the dialectical form of argument through which it proceeds. She takes progress to be a linear procedure rather than one which makes its way through a series of expanding contradictions. While Marx is often read as a historical thinker, his analysis centers around the logical tendencies latent in social forms. In Capital Volume One’s section on the Contradictions in the General Formula, “merchant’s capital and interest-bearing capital are derivative forms” of the modern form of capital, despite their earlier appearance in history.⁸ The unmediated M-M’ formula of usurer’s capital is incompatible with the nature of money and inexplicable from the standpoint of commodity exchange, thus, it is logically downstream of M-C-M’.  The accusation of teleology sometimes levied at Marx seems to miss a core idea of dialectical materialism; Πάντα ῥεῖ, all matter undergoes a continuous process of change. Marx’s project entails a study of the laws of motion which guide the shifts from one mode of social organization to another through polar opposition and negative unity, at both a macro and micro level.⁹ Notebooks VI and VII of Marx’s unpublished manuscripts may appear to be an affirmation that “once modern industry (has) reduced socially necessary labor to a minimum…we (could) finally become masters of our existence and of our natural environment.”¹⁰ But upon closer reading, nothing in Marx is final. Capitalism tends to give production a scientific character in its pursuit of relative surplus value, moving capitalism “towards its own dissolution.”¹¹ Capitalism’s pursuit of infinitely valorized exchange value (measured in socially average labor time) leads to the mechanization of production, which reduces human labor expenditure, unintentionally resulting in less labor time.  Machine development is one of many contradictions capitalism exhibits. In Marx’s published work, we find many instances of “the ruling class… coming under the fire of its own repressive machine,” such as capitalism’s deterioration of its own industrial reserve army via abysmal conditions and overwork, or capitalism’s simultaneous reliance upon and blindness to use value.¹² History for Marx takes the shape of an upward spiral, an image which perhaps Federici’s takes to be “metaphoric” rather than diagramming.¹³ 

Federici writes that capitalism, for Marx, is “the whip that schools human beings in the requirements of self-government, like…the capacity for social cooperation on a large scale.”¹⁴ Teleology aside, let us follow her footnote to a passage invoked in both Marx, Feminism, and the Construction of the Commons and Re-Enchanting the World. Here, Marx summarizes Part IV of Capital Volume One, in which “the development of the social productivity of labor (under capitalism) presupposes co-operation on a large scale.”¹⁵ The notion of cooperation as a “requirement for self-government” is nowhere to be found. Instead, the quote’s larger context demonstrates how the capitalist form of cooperation undermines the autonomy of the worker in service of capitalist accumulation and consolidation. Without explanation, Federici takes the word “cooperation” with a positive moral import.¹⁶ She confusingly defends non-capitalist forms of society for pioneering what Marx calls “simple cooperation,” even though he recognizes its “colossal effect… in the structures erected by the ancient Asiatics, Egyptonians,” and other pre-capitalist societies.¹⁷ Capitalist cooperation is special in that it “mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself...”¹⁸ It is developed with the explicit aim of producing relative surplus value, which works by reducing the cost of a worker’s reproduction. The conceptual task of dividing up the individual and transforming them “into the automatic motor of a detail operation” later gives way to machines, to which workers are then turned appendages.¹⁹ 

Federici is concerned that “modern industry and technology cannot simply be appropriated and reprogrammed for different purposes.”²⁰ Marx, too, in a different way, believes today's technology could not represent a different economic system. Capitalist machinery and large-scale industry necessarily concentrate “the historical motive power of society” and “disturb the metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” depleting the soil and the worker.²¹ This is because the instruments of labor indicate the social forms that produce them.²² The technological fossils of capitalism will one day lay bare “the process of the production of the social relations” of our lives, just as the tools of prior epochs do today.²³ This is not to say that the wheel, invented around 4500-3300 BCE, does not inform the design of today’s Teslas or M1 Abrams. Federici cites the danger of nuclear reactors in today’s geopolitical context as evidence for a return to pre-capitalist technology, yet in a communist world; nuclear science could be a climate-saving energy source. Unlike fast food, many technological artifacts of capitalism can not simply be ‘thrown out.’ Federici says, “the most important scientific discoveries have originated in precapitalist societies” as if it were a jab.²⁴ When, among other things, a Marxist history of technology would reveal the cumulative effect of human ingenuity across time, showing that no invention is the work of an individual. Furthermore, a Marxist history of technology would educate us about the economic motivations behind and the social forms sustained by particular machines, allowing for a more conscious scientific future.  

The asymmetry between nature and humanity is metabolized through simple labor; a process supported by the earth, which has enabled our species to survive from its earliest moments. It is true that Marxism is incompatible with a regressive politics of technology and thus perhaps incompatible with ecofeminism. This, however, can be attributed to a larger process of cumulative change across history as understood by the dialectical materialist as a method. I have addressed a series of missteps in Federici’s interpretation of Marx in order to demonstrate that a Marxist dialectic between humanity and nature can avoid some of Federici’s fears including; capitalism as a ‘necessary evil’ on the road to a cooperative society, technological determinism, an underappreciation of indigenous tools, and a clutching to the instruments of production in their current form. There are many concerns that this short remark on Federici does not have the scope to address, such as nurse bots and artificial wombs. I will conclude with the traditionally Marxist notion that production and reproduction are opposite poles that constitute a unity.  The sharing of care work across genders and the reproduction of our humanity as a communal effort at its current size would require both the productive capacity to feed 7.888 billion people and the eradication of exploitative labor globally. This dream demands incredible levels of organization, the mobilization of all scientific resources, a disintegration of the nuclear family, and of course, the abolition of private property. In Federici’s words, “Marx’s vision of communism as a society beyond exchange value… represents an ideal that no anticapitalist feminist can object to.”²⁵ 

1. Marx, Engels: German Ideology Part 1, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 56–57.

2.  Federici: Re Enchanting the World: Part II: Marxism, Feminism, and the Commons: From Communism to the Commons: A Feminist Perspective (EPUB)

3. Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 44

4.  Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 45, 46

5.  Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 66

6.  Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 66

7.  Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 91

8.  Marx: Capital Vol 1 pg. 267

9.  Marx: Capital Vol 1 pg. 199

10.  Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 60

11.  Marx: Grundrisse pg. 699

12.  Federici: Caliban and the Witch pg. 205

13.  Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 60

14. Federici: Re-Enchanting the World: Marxism, Feminism and the Commons: Machinery, Modern Industry, and Reproduction (EPUB)

15.  Marx: Capital Volume 1 pg. 775

16. Federici: Patriarchy and the Wage pg. 66-67 “To posit capitalism as necessary and progressive is also to underestimate (that)... capitalist development is not, or is not the primary development of human capacities and above all the capacity for social cooperation, as Marx argued.”

17.  Marx: Capital Volume 1 Pg. 451, 452

18.  Marx: Capital Volume 1 pg. 482

19.  Marx: Capital Volume 1 pg. 481

20.  Federici: Re-Enchanting the World: Marxism, Feminism, and the Commons (EPUB)

21.  Marx: Capital Volume 1 pg. 637, 638

22.  Marx: Capital Volume 1 pg. 286

23.  Marx: Capital Volume 1 pg. 493

24.  Federici: Re-enchanting the World: Technology, the Body and the Construction of the Commons (EPUB)

25.  Federici: Re-Enchanting the World: Marxism, Feminism and the Commons: Feminism and the Viewpoint of Social Reproduction (EPUB)