Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati's classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual's life and the labor performed in the home.
Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction is a foundational text and essential contribution to today's discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati's work provides some of the earliest theorizations of 'immaterial,' 'affective,' and 'caring' labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women's lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.
Foreword | Silvia Federici
Translators' Note | Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono
Introduction
Part I
1. Production and Reproduction: The Apparent Antithesis of the Capitalist Mode of Production
2. 'The Kingdom of Nature', or the Reproduction of the Individual as Labour Power
3. The Capitalist Form of the Man/Woman Relationship
4. Housewives, Prostitutes and Workers: Their Exchanges
5. In the Sphere of Circulation . . .
6. The Hidden Abode: On the Domestic Working Process as a Process of Valorisation
7. Revising Marx's Chapter on Surplus Value: Correcting the Map of Exploitation
Part II
8. The Labour of Reproduction Is Productive
9. The Doppelcharakter of Reproductive Labour
10. This Strange Form of Absolute Surplus Value
11. The Family as a Form of Capitalist Development
12. Capitalist Accumulation and Population
13. For a Workers' History of Reproduction
Afterword: Reading L'Arcano Today: 1981 to 2025
Index
