Counterplanning in the Crisis of Social Reproduction

Abstract

In this interview Silvia Federici discusses the prospects for counterplanning from below in the current crisis of social reproduction. The organization of care and social reproduction by capital, in alliance with governmental and non-governmental organizations, has created massive structural suffering and devalued vital social activities from which capital extracts value for which it pays nothing. As this crisis of social reproduction has developed internationally and taken on increasingly racialized forms, new and different forms of struggle over social reproduction have arisen. Starting from the Wages for Housework campaign and her 1975 call for “Counter-planning from the Kitchen,” Federici refines her thinking about the struggle over social reproduction and the reproductive commons today. She sketches the shifting grounds of the present crisis, and stresses what can be learned from current struggles over social reproduction in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, to organize and value social reproduction differently.