Feminist academic and writer Silvia Federici puts feminist economics in its historical context and schematically examines its contribution to political and disciplinary changes, from its inception to the early 1990s.
**This article is abridged from Silvia Federici’s lecture at the 5th National Feminist Economics Congress held by Vic University in June 2015.
This conference on feminist economics is being held at these critical times, when there is no doubt that an alternative to current economic policies is needed more than ever. Precisely for this reason, the need to articulate alternative programs and a fairer society is more urgent than ever.
Can feminist economy meet these needs? Could it be a transitional tool between social movements and institutions, helping to establish the grounds for proposal or negotiation? What are the possibilities, what possibilities does this proposal offer, what are its limits and contradictions?
To answer these questions, perhaps, it is necessary to first put feminist economics in its historical context and schematically examine its contribution to political and disciplinary changes, from its inception to the early 1990s. Feminist economics is an example of the power of feminism. Feminism has given women such courage, such self-confidence in their experiences and struggles that women have created a huge storm: of all disciplines, the closest to the power structures that dominate our society, an economic storm. It was significant that the emergence of the feminist economy coincided with the crisis of the dominant political and economic paradigm, brought about by the rise of neoliberalism, the reconstruction of the world economy, and the demise of the “welfare state.”
In this context, feminist economics has played a complex and contradictory role. On the one hand, it challenged neoclassical and neoliberal economics by criticising its standard categories, methodologies, and structural values; on the other hand, it denounced the privileged focus of this economy on monetary relations and the assumptions that the driving force of individual behaviour is selfishness and competition. More importantly, it placed central issues of the feminist movement, such as gender inequality, the devaluation of care work, and the importance of cooperation in social relations, at the heart of economic theory.
What is important, among others, is that my colleague Antonella Picchio, who is also part of the international wage for housework campaign, shows in her study of the centrality of housework in the process of social reproduction that the work at stake is the “real economy” since all “productive” activities depend on it.
Marilyn Waring, the author of the book ‘If Women Counted’ (1988), which is now considered one of the founding works of feminist economics, criticised international standards of economic growth for excluding nature and reproduction within the field described as “productive.” As Waring underlines, the concept of economic value in this society is so perverse that producing weapons that kill children is considered a contribution to ‘productivity’ and social wealth, while helping children grow is not included.
This path opened by Picchio and Waring has allowed the proliferation of studies on “care work”, “ecological sustainability”, labor market and gender inequality in international economic relations in few years. We should also mention the work of Lourdes Benería, originally from Catalonia, on the different effects of globalization on men and women, and the work of Cristina Carrasco and Amaia Pérez Orozco on care work.
Feminist economists, with their contributions, have not only broadened our horizons and offered a theoretical reconstruction of the economy that will give us new tools to understand social reality; it also deciphered the technical and disconnected language that has perpetually infiltrated political discourse with an intimidating use of Latin. In addition, new concepts that they added to our language such as “glass ceiling” and “feminization of poverty” became widespread.
Along with all these advances, I should underline the difficulty that feminist economists face within the theoretical and analytical framework within which feminist economics develops, which is to openly confront the foundations of economic theory because of its commitment to the privatisation of wealth and capitalist development.
For example, feminist economists’ critiques of international economic policies mostly focused on the “differential effects” of globalisation on women, emphasising that these policies would be more acceptable if the “different effects” were more evenly distributed. Similarly, the search for “gender integration” has often overlooked that the structural origin of the typical “male privileges” of the traditional economy is a structural consequence of wage relations. This is in fact the result of the systematic devaluation of reproductive and care work that imposed on women by the capitalist system as their primary duty and as an unpaid activity within the workforce since they inherit because of their biological and psychological convenience.
The distinction between production and reproduction, which is shaped by wage discrimination, which is the main basis of the “patriarchy of the wage”[***] and one of the biggest problems in economic thought cannot be overcome by putting new “productive” burdens on their shoulders, such as the development programs that want to “integrate” women.
Unless faced with the problem of unpaid domestic labor, which, in addition to other works, the vast majority of women have to do while at home, talking about “integrating into the labor market” or “integrating into the development economy” is to pose over-exploitation which means women’s lives are entirely confined to work, especially low-wage work such as risky and free trade zones where there is no rule usually and exploitation is unrestricted.
Also, the definition of the “value” of unpaid housework is not entirely clear. With few exceptions, feminist economists have not explained whether the proposed “valuation” should be purely formal and moral to include productive labor in their national and international financial systems, or whether it should be for a fee, which are vital questions for many women.
As I have mentioned before, we, as women, can only negotiate on better living conditions both in our relationship with men and the state and with reproduction, and also in all areas in which we work. We can do this by putting an end to this enormous exploitation to which most women are subject, which increases capitalist accumulation and strengthens the exploitative power of capitalism. But although there are some changes today as networks of feminist economists are now confronting and denouncing the enormous exploitation women experience, few feminist economists have defined it to date.
Such hesitation is understandable. Feminist economists work in the lion’s cage and try to change the discipline that is tied most to the capitalist power structure. However, this hesitation in particular is a limit that must be overcome today; because as long as feminist economics does not question the foundations of the capitalist system, it risks becoming another branch of economics rather than a radical critique, and remaining in the position of “developing” a discipline that it aims to disarm.
Moreover, the production crisis we are facing is so dramatic that we cannot expect the politicians and bankers who control the world economy to humanize, to put human life before all individual and collective gains, to put all the resources they use for perpetual warfare at the service of the reproduction of our lives. If 500 years of capitalist development—500 years of colonization, occupation, dispossession—have not produced enough wealth to warrant our reproduction, and if all we can expect from the world economy is more austerity, it is time to say that the capitalist economy is not sustainable for the majority of the planet’s population.
This is what we need to consider when we ask ourselves how the feminist economy might respond to the political situation developed with the visible penetration of social movements into institutions, such as the founding example of “Barcelona en Comú”**** in Spain. It is clear that institutions cannot be ignored as long as social wealth is in the hands of the state. It is therefore necessary to discuss how to confront the state directly in order to regain control of the wealth we produce. Feminist economists can play a crucial role in this context because they have access to documents and reports, the capacity to analyse and respond to them, and a direct knowledge of the perspectives and issues that make up economic planning in general. Thus, they can offer important tools to anyone struggling, as well as to anyone within organisations who are open to interaction and trying to respond.
However, it should not be forgotten that the power to create a better world lies not in the state, but in social movements, that is, in societies in motion, and that efforts by those working in institutions to change social policies risk strengthening, not scraping, what the state is doing. This issue is particularly evident in these times, when the concentration of capital and decision-making power are taken away from local governments and left to international capitalist institutions such as the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The construction of a single commercial space between the EU and the US, which is viewed as a matter of time, – if successful – will take this process to the extreme, as the court will be able to punish any government that makes any decision that could be interpreted as an attack on the free trade agreement.
[***] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Penguin Books, 2021