H. Cleaver
on
Self-valorization
in
Mariarosa Dalla
Costa’s
“Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1971)
One important limitation to
Mariarosa's essay, in my opinion, is its failure to directly address the issue
of self-valorization, either in general, or in the specific case of women's
housework. "Self-valorization" is my translation of the Italian word autovalorizzazione. A more literal
translation would be auto-valorization, but such a word is a bit weird in
English so I prefer self-valorization even though it is a bit misleading. It is
misleading for two reasons: first, because it is a term appropriated from Marx
but changed in its meaning. Second, because the English prefix
"self-" risks evoking the individual whereas the Italian prefix
"auto" is less likely to do so and is more conducive to a more
appropriate interpretation in terms not just of individuals but of groups and
classes. Let me explain further.
In Marx the term
self-valorization referred to the self-valorization of capital - everything
involved in its expanded reproduction - which is most basically the expanded
reproduction of the class relation but includes every element of that relation,
e.g., every element that appears in his analysis of Volume I of Capital and reappear as moments of his
analysis of the "circuits" or "reproduction schemes" of
capital discussed at length in volume II of Capital,
e.g., labor power, constant capital, money, exchange, work, commodities, and
all the class antagonisms those elements embody and structure: exploitation,
alienation and working class resistance and struggle. Capital successfully
"self-valorizes" when it is able to juggle/manage the class
relationships at all points sufficiently to achieve the expanded reproduction
of those relationships.
When Italian autonomist
Marxists, especially Toni Negri, appropriated the term
"self-valorization" they changed its meaning from the expanded
reproduction of capital to the autonomous, self-determination or
self-development of the working class. The new use of the term was designed to
denote working class self-activity that went beyond being merely reactive to
capital, e.g., fighting back against exploitation, to denote working class
self-activity that carried within it the basic positive, creative and imaginative
re-invention of the world that characterized the "living labor" that
capital-the-vampire has fed on but which is always an autonomous power that has
frequently ruptured capital's controls and limitations and that will
ultimately, hopefully, be powerful enough to break free completely and craft
new worlds beyond capitalism.
Whatever the limitations of
this particular term, or of its use by the Italians (Steve Wright has argued
that Negri's use was essentially so abstract and synthesizing as to be void of
concrete content.), I think this focus on the inventive, positive content of
our struggles was one of the autonomists' most important contributions to the
elaboration of Marxist theory because it helps us to see beyond the orthodox
Marxist vision that focuses almost uniquely on reactive struggles against
capitalist domination and relegates the building of a new world to the
post-revolution "transition" and beyond. It helps us look for, and
recognize when we see, our power to create the world autonomously of capital,
not just in theory, not just in some future after the seizure of state power,
but in the present, within those struggles, evoked by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, that are constituting
communism now, or as C.L.R. James put it: creating "the future in the
present."
Now, in Negri this notion of
self-valorization was more closely tied to Marx's concept of "living
labor" than I think it should be. Although Toni's formulation of concepts
to denote the phenomena associated with self-valorization evolved - under the
influence of Deleuze's and his own reading of Spinoza and the distinction
between potere and potenza - from self-valorization to constitution
(potere constituante or the
"power of constitution"), this self-determining, self-constituting power
is still largely conceived in terms of living labor. This conception involves
what I view as a reductionist understanding in which all "purposive"
human activity is collapsed into the category of "labor", instead of
the concept of labor being used, as I think it is in Marx, to denote only one
particular kind of human activity, i.e., the active human transformation of
passive non-human nature through the use of tools into commodities (the
analysis set forth in Chapter 7 of Volume I of Capital).
If "labor", or work
(I use the two terms interchangeably, unlike Engels and many Marxists), is understood
in this fashion, then self-valorization must be understood more broadly than
the constructive self-activity of "living labor"; it must be
understood to include all kinds of human self-activity that is autonomously
(from capital) constitutive of human being and human society. For example,
people have often invented new kinds of music, e.g., folk, or more recently
punk or hip-hop, that have been designed to escape and indeed have escaped, at
least temporarily, capitalist commodification and have contributed to the
elaboration of new kinds of social relationships that have escaped, at least
temporarily, the capitalist reduction of life to the work of commodity production
(including the production and reproduction of life as labor power). Or, in an
example germane to the discussion of Mariarosa's analysis, women have sometimes
invented new kinds of gender relationships, e.g., androgyny, that have escaped
the patriarchal forms of power then being imposed by capital and contributed to
the elaboration of human life as something other than, and thus effectively
antagonistic to, "labor power", i.e., the ability and willingness to
work for capital.
Now, when I bring this
concept to bear in the reading and evaluation of Marx's own writings, or of
Mariarosa's analysis in "Women and the Subversion of the Community",
I don't look for the word per se but
for recognition and hopefully analysis of phenomena that constitute moments of
self-valorization. In the case of Capital
I find them principally in the same place Toni does: in the concept of living
labor. In the case of Mariarosa's article I find only eleven passages that seem
to me to evoke elements of "self-valorization" but no sustained
discussion. The eleven passages are the following: (page numbers refer to the
pdf formatted version I put on the web)
p. 2 "the possibilities
of a relationship free of a sexual power struggle, free of the biological
social unit, and asserts at the same time our need to open ourselves to a wider
social and therefore sexual potential."
p. 6 "the infinite
possibilities of learning"
p. 7 "It is in our
interest to conquer the freedom to procreate for which we will pay neither the
price of the wage nor the price of social exclusion. . . . the new social
ambience that the movement constructs offers to children social space, with
both men and women, that has nothing to do with the day care centers organized
by the state"
p. 8 "possibility of
developing their creative capacity"
p. 9 "possibility of
affection and intimacy . . . men and women to be in touch with each other,
physically or emotionally"
p. 13 "If women demand
in workers' assemblies that the night shift be abolished because at night, besides
sleeping, one wants to make love and it's not the same as making love during
the day if the women work during the day that would be advancing their own
independent interests as women"
p. 15 "we also want
choices: to eat in privacy with few people when we want, to have time to be
with children, to be with old people, with the sick, when and where we choose.
. . . re appropriate the social wealth; to be re integrated with us and all of
us with men, not as dependents but autonomously"
p. 16 "Sexual creativity
and creativity in labour are both areas where human need demands we give free
scope to our "interplaying natural and acquired activities. . . . the
possibilities of uninhibited sexuality."
p. 17 "Now we can begin
to reintegrate sexuality with other aspects of creativity, . . the vagina . .
is part of our natural powers, our social equipment."
p. 21 "restore to the
woman the integrity of her basic physical functions, starting with the sexual
one"
p. 22 "Women must
completely discover their own possibilities"
In the face of these few
passages that repeatedly evoke various kinds of "possibilities" -
that are clearly being realized to some extent but are cruelly limited by
capital - I ask myself "why?" Why so little discussion of those "possibilities",
of such elements of "self-valorization."? And when I ask myself that
question, the main answer that comes to mind is the following:
Mariarosa, like Marx, was
primarily focused on analyzing capitalist domination, the way it organizes,
limits and distorts individual and social life. Her analysis, like his, is
first and foremost an attempt to clarify the character and power of the enemy
in the class war and the negative effects of that power on workers (alienation,
exploitation, poverty, disease, violence, etc.). In her case, attention is
particularly focused on something Marx paid little attention to: the specific
ways in which capitalist power organizes and negatively affects women.
Inevitably for a woman coming out of an Italian New Left that had recognized
and insisted on the determining power of workers' struggles for capitalist
development such clarification also includes some discussion of the power of
workers/women to resist, and in that resistance, shape the evolution of
capitalist Power. But within the space of autonomia,
and potere operaio, or the group
Potere Operaio (PO) more specifically, much less attention was initially paid
to the positive efforts by workers, including women, to craft alternatives that
go beyond resistance. The Italian New Left was born in the struggles of rank
and file workers against capitalist development and against the collaboration
of union and party bureaucrats in that development. Although a few, like
Ferruccio Gambino had identified the "inventive power" of workers within
the factories, it was only as the movement spread beyond the factories into the
communities that it experienced and recognized a flowering of "inventive
power" or creative self-valorization that took all kinds of new forms,
e.g., pirate radio, self-created youth centers put together in squatted
buildings, women's collectives to explore alternatives to the limitations of
patriarchal capitalism. As Mariarosa recently clarified, and I posted here,
this essay was written at the end of 1971 as an early element of her
"feminist break" with the male-dominated group PO; it was both an
exposition of an analysis that had been missing from PO and the movement more
generally - the recognition of housewives as part of the working class and
their struggles as part of working class struggle - and a sketch of an agenda
for an autonomous women's movement within the space of "workerist"
politics or autonomia. It was one
early step, and after all, she could hardly deal with everything at once.
When I recently discovered and
read her
Well, whatever the reasons,
the absence of an analysis of self-valorization has meant a difficulty in
juxtaposing her analysis of housewives' work as reproducing labor power to more
traditional interpretations, e.g., housework as simply the patriarchal
exploitation of women by men, housework as a labor of love. While in the former
case her analysis allowed her to re-situate the patriarchal exploitation of
women by men within the exploitation of the working class by capital, that
analysis resulted in either the simple dismissal of the understanding of the
idea of housework being a labor of love as an ideology that hid the violence of
patriarchal relationships or relegated it to the kind of evocations listed
above. Those brief passages make it clear that she recognized that people are
capable of things like cooking and eating together, or making love together,
sharing of affection and intimacy in ways that are do not serve the capitalist
goal of recreating life as labor power. But, within this essay they are mere
evocations and there is no effort to address the problem that while sometimes
real, everyday housework may be pure work for capital, more often it is
simultaneously work for capital (because it does produce and reproduce labor
power) and yet involves, at the same time, efforts to get beyond such work and
create or sustain relations that achieve, to some degree, precisely the kind of
affectionate and intimate relationships as are repeatedly undermined by the
subordination of life to capital.
With the concept of
"self-valorization" we have a general way of characterizing the kind
of self-determined activity Mariarosa was evoking and thus a conceptual tool
for helping us confront and analyze the daily mixture of the reproduction of
labor power and of self-determination that moves beyond it. We can look at
something like cooking and eating together, or making love together and instead
of concluding that such activities "just reproduce labor power", or
of deluding ourselves by saying they are just acts of "friendship or
love", we can try to understand "the degree to which" those
activities involve one dimension or the other.
Let's look at some situations
taking off from the reference in the passage above about eating together. In
the case of the business power-lunch, where competitive white collar workers
gather, talk shop and play out all the usual petty games of their work and
hierarchical relationships, Mariarosa's analysis draws our attention to how
everything that is said and done involves either a continuation of the work of
production (talking shop) or the reproduction of labor power (eating and
drinking to have the energy and dulled awareness necessary to carry on working
for the rest of the day, interchanges that maintain or challenge the existing
pecking order, and so on). But what about meals such as a romantic dinner
between lovers far from the madding crowd where two people are totally focused
on each other and forget all about things like their waged jobs or their
housework, or a family dinner where parents and children sit down to eat
together and seek to renew or strengthened personal connections of affection
and intimacy that have been weakened or broken by their experiences in working
for capital on the job or in school. In these cases when we look at such
gatherings from the perspective of Mariarosa's essay, we are inclined to see,
first of all, that regardless of the individuals' subjective intentions and
perceptions, their meals are likely, to some degree, to renew their ability and
willingness to return to work in the near future. The food they eat will
nourish their bodies and their interactions will sooth and heal the
psychological wounds of work at least enough to get them back to work for a
while. Yet, most of us know that in such settings the people involved, be they
lovers or family members, are often trying, with more or less energy and more
or less skill, to achieve more than this; they really are seeking those
possible moments of "affection and intimacy" that Mariarosa evokes.
They are trying to "self-valorize" - not just as individuals but in
relationships with others. And, hopefully, they often succeed - "to some
degree" and however momentarily.
To take a broader example: a
collective meal of a community such as a fiesta where a large number of people
gather and, among other things, share food that they have fixed for one another
as part of, say, a celebration of their shared history of struggle - a fiesta
that gives them the strength not just to work but to continue to struggle to
elaborate various kinds of relationships that are the very antithesis of the
ability and willingness to work for capital. Here again, there will be mixed
effects. Eating, relaxation and sharing will certainly give them strength that
will be partly be available for subsequent work, but it may also be available
for going beyond work as well.
Finally, we can extend our
analysis from such meals backward or forwards through the material circuits of
social reproduction of which they are only moments: backwards through domestic
labor such as cooking and shopping to agricultural labor such as processing,
storing, harvesting, tending and planting; forward through cleaning up, washing
dishes, and handling/recycling of waste. At each point, on each terrain, we can
query and analyze in what ways and to what degree capital has organized our
activity for its own reproduction and to what degree and in what ways have we
sought and/or been successful at free our activity from its grasp and
organizing ourselves differently, better, in a more healthy manner and more
joyfully.
Unfortunately, of course, in
all these examples the degree and the frequency of such moments of
self-valorization will be limited by the context of their efforts: the
constraints and strains and horrors of the capitalist society within which all
these people are striving to be something beyond mere workers; but strive they
do, and sometimes, fortunately they succeed and their (as well as our) futures,
quite frankly, depends upon building on those successes.
If this is true, then we need
to recognize the antagonistic two-sidedness of everyday activities: to some degree they contribute to the
reproduction of labor power and to some
degree they may break free of such subordination to capital and achieve
some degree of self-valorization. This also means we need to decide how to use
terms like "housework" or "schoolwork". In as much as both
contain the suffix "work" should we use them only to designate the
dimension of the activities normally associated with them that contribute to
the production and reproduction of labor power? Or, do we accept Marx's generic
concept of work (labor) in Chapter 7 of Volume I of Capital and simply differentiate between housework or schoolwork for
capital and housework or schoolwork that is self-valorizing - say, the way many
have differentiated between "capitalist" development and
"socialist" development during much of the 20th Century? I'm inclined
to adopt the former approach. For reasons I spelled out elsewhere (the essay
"Work is still the Central Issue!"), I think we are better off using
specific terms to characterize specific activities that we succeed in crafting
that escape subordination to the expanded reproduction of capital and create
new ways of being and of being-together. So, if, for example, in one of those
meals evoked above, two people actually succeed in establishing a moment of
intimacy and affection that goes beyond reproducing each other's labor power,
we could call it a moment of "self-valorization" but that is only a
beginning, a point of departure for trying to understand what specifically
about that moment takes us beyond capital.
["Work is Still the
Central Issue!" can be found at:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/workiscentralissue.htm
or at:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/workiscentralissue.pdf
]
In short, the concept of
"self-valorization" opens a whole field of research and political
work that is barely glimpsed in this essay. The field of research includes both
past forms of self-valorization that have been either destroyed or instrumentalized
by capital and present forms through which people are crafting new ways of
being and relating to each other and to rest of nature that are both
incompatible with capital's own reproduction and interesting in and of
themselves as creative alternatives to the insane and murderous way capital
attempts to organize the world. Mariarosa's own recent work, without abandoning
Marx, has drawn on both eco-feminist thinking and on some of the ways of
thinking and doing in indigenous communities. In doing so, she has argued for
the continuing centrality of the sphere of reproduction in the class war,
analyzed the character of capital's attack on that terrain, especially its
ongoing efforts at the enclosure of land/nature (which involves the separation
of people from the land/nature and the murderous exploitation of both people
and land/nature) and highlighted the importance of widespread grassroots
networks of resistance to such attacks and of innovation in creating
alternative forms of social reproduction. She has called for the appreciation
of the power of the thinking and doing in those struggles both North and South
and East and West and for multiplying and strengthening those networks through
understanding and mutual aid.
Starting from her evocations
in this 1971 essay we can arrive in the same area by extending our analysis
from any point, say the meals she evokes, backward or forwards through the
material circuits of social reproduction of which they are only moments:
backwards through domestic labor such as cooking and shopping to agricultural
labor such as processing, storing, harvesting, tending, planting, ground
preparation; or, forward through cleaning up, washing dishes, and
handling/recycling of waste. At each point, on each terrain, we can query and
analyze in what ways and to what degree capital has organized our activity for
its own reproduction and to what degree and in what ways have we sought and/or
been successful at freeing our activity from its grasp and organizing ourselves
differently, better, in a more healthy manner and more joyfully. Basically, we
can recognize every moment of everyday life as a terrain of struggle - not
merely as a terrain to fight against the various ways that capital now tries to
shape our activities for its own purposes, but as a terrain upon which we can
and must seek to develop alternative ways of being in the world and relating to
each other in which we thrive and capitalist Power is outflanked and therefore
negated.