Revolution at Point Zero Quotes

“Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking. At the same time, it shows that we have cooked, smiled, fucked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice. Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and even fulfilling activity to make us accept working without a wage. In turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not as workers in struggle.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“The women’s movement must realize that work is not liberation. Work in a capitalist system is exploitation and there is no pleasure, pride or creativity in being exploited. Even the “career” is an illusion as far as
self-fulfillment is concerned. What is rarely acknowledged is that most career-type jobs require that you exert power over other people, often
other women and this deepens the divisions between us. We try to escape blue collar or clerical ghettos in order to have more time and more satisfaction only to discover that the price we pay for advancing is the
distance that intervenes between us and other women. However there is no discipline we impose on others that we do not at the same time impose on ourselves, which means that in performing these jobs we actually undermine our own struggles.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“[A] woman, working fulltime in the home or outside of it as well, married or single, has to put hours of labor into reproducing her own labor power, and women well know the tyranny of this task, for a pretty dress and hairdo are conditions for their getting the job, whether on the marriage market or on the wage labor market.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“... by saying that the work we perform in the home is capitalist production, we are not expressing a wish to be legitimated as part of the 'productive forces,' in other words, it is not a resort to moralism. Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited. As Marx recognized, 'to be a productive laborer is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.' Thus we derive little 'self-esteem' from it. But when we say that housework is a moment of capitalist production we clarify our specific function in the capitalist division of labor and the specific forms that our revolt against it must take. Ultimately, when we say that we produce capital, we say that we can and want to destroy it, rather than engage in a losing battle to move from one form and degree of exploitation to another.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“In the name of "class struggle" and "the unified interest of the working class," the Left has always selected certain sectors of the working class as revolutionary subjects and condemned others to a merely supportive role in the struggles these sectors were waging.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Even holding a position in the academic world is not a road to becoming more fulfilled or creative. In the absence of a strong women’s movement working in academia can be stifling, because you have to meet standards you do not have the power to determine and soon you begin to speak a language that is not your own. From this point of view it does not make any difference whether you teach Euclidean geometry or women’s history, though women’s studies still provide an enclave that, relatively speaking, allows us to be “more free.” But little islands are not enough. It
is our relation to intellectual work and academic institutions that has to be changed. Women’s Studies are reserved to those who can pay or are willing to make a sacrifice, adding a school day to the workday in continuing education courses. But all women should have free access to school, for as
long as studying is a commodity we have to pay for, or a step in the “job hunt,” our relation to intellectual work cannot be a liberating experience.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“But the main reason why we cannot enjoy the pleasure that sexuality may provide is that for women sex is work. Giving pleasure to man is an essential part of what is expected of every woman.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“... by saying that the work we perform in the home is capitalist production, we are not expressing a wish to be legitimated as part of the 'productive forces,' in other words, it is not a resort to moralism. Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited. As Marx recognized, 'to be a productive laborer is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.' Thus we derive little 'self-esteem' from it. But when we say that housework is a moment of capitalist production we clarify our specific function in the capitalist division of labor and the specific forms that our revolt against it must take. Ultimately, when we say that we produce capital, we say that we can and want to destroy it, rather than engage in a losing battle to move from one form and degree of exploitation to another.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“In fact capital has a dual policy, one for the middle class and one for the working class family. It is no accident that we find the most unsophisticated machismo in the latter: the more blows the man gets at work the more his wife must be trained to absorb them, the more he is allowed to recover his ego at her expense. You beat your wife and vent your rage
against her when you are frustrated or overtired by your work or when you are defeated in a struggle (but to work in a factory is already a defeat). The
more the man serves and is bossed around, the more he bosses around. A man’s home is his castle and his wife has to learn: to wait in silence when
he is moody, to put him back together when he is broken down and swears at the world, to turn around in bed when he says, “I’m too tired tonight,”
or when he goes so fast at lovemaking that, as one woman put it, he might as well make it with a mayonnaise jar. Women have always found ways of
fighting back, or getting back at them, but always in an isolated and privatized way. The problem, then, becomes how to bring this struggle out of
the kitchen and the bedroom and into the streets.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“On the positive side, the discovery of reproductive work has made it possible to understand that capitalist production relies on the production of a particular type of worker - and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, procreation - and thus to redefine the private sphere as a sphere of relations of production and a terrain of anticapitalist struggle. In this context, policies forbidding abortion could be decoded as devices for the regulation of the labor supply, the collapse of the birth rate and increase in the number of divorces could be read as instances of resistance to the capitalist discipline of work. The personal became political and capital and the state were found to have subsumed our lives and reproduction down to the bedroom.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“It seems to be a social law that the value of labor is proven and perhaps created by its refusal.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

“Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions ... but homsexuality is workers' control of production, not the end of work.”
― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle