Imagine that everyone doing unpaid care work decided to stop. Not strike — just stop. The economy would not slow down. It would collapse within days.

This episode is about the labour that capitalism runs on and refuses to name. Cooking, childcare, emotional support, tending the sick and old — not domestic life separate from political life, but the economy underneath the economy. Silvia Federici's argument: the housewifisation of women was not a natural development. It was enforced.

Sometimes violently. The witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, in her reading, a mechanism of social control.

Also: the Wages for Housework campaign of 1972, its founders and its internal feminist debate. Arlie Hochschild on the second shift and the global care chain. And the anarchist question underneath all of it: what would a society look like if care were its central organising value?

Topics: care work, Silvia Federici, anarcha-feminism, Wages for Housework, Arlie Hochschild, global care chain, reproductive labour, capitalism, feminist theory.

Further reading: — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (2012) — Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (1989) — Arlie Hochschild & Barbara Ehrenreich (eds.), Global Woman (2002) — Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (2017)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.