The Patriarchy of Wages. Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism

The revival of interest in the works of Karl Marx against the backdrop of social and economic upheavals at the beginning of the 21st century has prompted a rethinking and development of several classical Marxist concepts from the perspective of feminist criticism. Drawing on Marxist theory and methodology as a research basis, Silvia Federici proposes to pay attention to gender issues that were insufficiently addressed by the German philosopher. At the center of Federici's attention is the problem of unpaid women's labor, which, in her view, became one of the pillars of capitalism at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The emergence of the family, based on women's domestic labor, laid the foundations for a new informal contract between the sexes and a new order, which the author calls the patriarchy of wages. The researcher shows that class struggle can also take place within the proletariat itself when men agree to occupy positions within the family (and the wider community) as representatives of the state in relation to women. Silvia Federici is an American scholar, educator, and activist, and an honorary professor at Hofstra University.