Family, Welfare, and the State. Mariarosa Dalla Costa
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Wages for Housework Campaign of which Dalla Costa was one of the founders and main promoters.
An additional merit of Dalla Costa’s work is that it highlights the prominent creative role that women played in both the social and factory struggles of the 1930s and its transformation of family relations. Family, Welfare, and the State brings attention to another important, but still ignored, aspect of the New Deal regarding the social context in which it was hatched. This is the great variety of initiatives that workers across the U.S. put in place to create autonomous forms of self-reproduction. To this day, little has been written about this impressive surge of self-organization, which reached proportions exceeding the experiments with self-management that we have witnessed in Argentina, with workers taking over factories to produce the necessities of life.3 This is a history that today must be revisited as we ask whether our energies and our movements should concentrate on restoring or defending the welfare state, or constructing more autonomous forms of reproduction.
Were the New Deal and the institutions of the welfare state the saviors of the working class, or were they the destroyers of its self-reproducing capacities? As this question is presently coming to the center of radical political debate, at least in the U.S., an evaluation of the “reproductive” politics of the New Deal is more important than ever, and Dalla Costa’s work is a powerful contribution to it.
Silvia Federici
Brooklyn, NY
INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK IS INTENDED TO FILL A GAP in the literature on the New Deal concerning the relationship between women and the state, and therefore, the roles assumed by the family and women in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan. It is important to begin by precisely defining these themes to best bring into focus the relationship between the state and social reproduction in the U.S. in the 1930s.
Much has been written on the institution of collective bargaining as a new form of management for class relationships. Likewise, studies have been dedicated to the propulsive role of public spending for promoting development. It should also be shown how, through the policies of the New Deal, a vast and articulate operation directed at restructuring the reproduction of labor power came into being, and how the state’s planning efforts intended to integrate this force with the modalities of development. Consequently, the new role assumed by public spending responded to the need for investment in human capital as a means of increasing the productivity of labor.
The New Deal provided answers to problems of labor reproduction that were already being addressed in the second half of the nineteenth century by technological innovations and during the prewar period by Fordism. These instances highlight the centrality of investment in human capital for the purpose of increasing labor productivity. One can easily observe the correlation between Marshall’s recommendations (Principles of Economics, 1890) for investing in the working class and Ford’s “five dollars a day” policy, as well as the criteria that inspired the Social Security Act of 1935. It took the struggles of the 1930s to generalize awareness of the value of human resources even though the most progressive exponents of capital had previously expressed this need.
The state’s new role in relation to the economy—particularly its acceptance of the budget deficit and expansion of public spending to support demand—could function to propel development only if worker consumption passed through an arc of activities capable of guaranteeing the formation of a physically efficient and psychologically disciplined working class that, above all, was able to accept more intense work rhythms. All the initiatives in this direction revolved around strengthening the family—primarily through women’s domestic work—because the income paid by the state, or wages, resulted in the greater productivity of labor power. Caring for children and a husband required a woman to know how to carry out a complex range of tasks which, until then, had not been required. Knowing how to prepare a balanced meal was just one of the most important material tasks of domestic work. In addition to the reproductive labor of housewives, the state began taking direct responsibility for reproducing and improving labor power. To give one example, programs offering free lunches in schools responded to the concern of establishing a level of physical efficiency in the new generations to overcome the impasse of the Depression generation as quickly as possible. The attention that the social sciences increasingly devoted to issues such as the home, diet, sexuality, birthrates, health, education, and leisure always led to this central need for an adequate science of reproductive and social planning. Another aspect of state intervention concerned the function of social assistance. This did not just mean improving the level of physical reintegration of labor power, but rather insuring its subsistence independently of both perturbations induced by the production cycle on employment opportunities and the subjective capability (disability, seniority) of the person to be employed. This system of measures was intended to produce a new economic and social order. The unfolding of these new social features, however, presupposed the centrality of the family and the work of women within it.
We can therefore say that, if the New Deal represented the first comprehensive agreement between the state and the working class, in which the working class was guaranteed a certain level of reproductive security in exchange for an increase in labor productivity, the effectiveness of such a pact passed significantly through the restructuring of the family and the intensification of women’s domestic work. Even the work of women outside the home, in the areas and in the percentages allowed, would contribute to the subsistence and cohesion of the family during the Depression.
The New Deal remained the model social pact for the entire postwar period up to Kennedy’s New Frontier policy (which featured investment in mass university education with the aim of developing the scientific-technological potential of the nation after the event of the Soviets’ Sputnik launch in 1957) and especially until Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and “Great Society” policies were implemented after the 1960s race riots in the ghettos.
The 1970s witnessed the historic end of the New Deal in the U.S., and of similar development plans in the countries it had inspired. In the name of fighting inflation, stagnation of economic development, and the erosion of profits, the Reagan administration passed a series of measures that seemed to turn back the clock to the time of Hoover. The dismantling of public spending on social assistance brought about cuts to welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, school lunches, subsidies for low-income housing, and student loans. With the 1983 federal budget, this process has also begun to affect Social Security, the sacred cow of the New Deal. In the name of laissez faire and supply-side economics (meaning reduced public spending for social assistance but fewer taxes for industry in order to encourage investment), there is an attack on the main assumption of the New Deal that the state should take responsibility for social reproduction, thus denying that state intervention in reproduction results in an increase in labor productivity. Though never explicitly stated, this is the basic premise of Reagan’s policy of implementing widespread cuts in welfare.
The popular slogans of the 1980s are modeled on liberal-Hooverian themes: “we need to encourage private charity”; “the jobs are there, you just have to look for them”; “if people are unemployed it’s because they refuse to adapt to low wages.” Is it a return to Hoover? No, even if the current economic situation resembles that of the Great Depression, with thirteen million unemployed and a general condition of rampant poverty.
The Reagan administration’s strategy of reducing public expenditure on social assistance while increasing spending on weapons is not a contingency policy, but the expression of a historical turning point in the relationship between capital and the working class—that is, in the form of accumulation and the agreement which lies at its foundation. This policy is accompanied by a massive industrial restructuring aimed at dismantling the type of political recomposition that came about during the 1960s through welfare struggles. The struggles of mothers on welfare have played an important role in this regard, acting as an indicator of the overall struggles of the women’s movement against a mode of social reproduction undergirded by free domestic labor and subordination. Behind the wage claims, reflected in political pressure in the area of welfare and on the labor market, there was a withdrawal of women from free labor and the regimentation of the family, and with it the undermining of that entity as a means and guarantee of the productive