Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender and Feminism (Patriarkhat Zarabotnoy Platy)

The renewed interest in the works of Karl Marx amid the social and economic upheavals of the early 21st century has prompted a rethinking and development of several classical Marxist concepts from a feminist critique. Drawing on Marxist theory and methodology as a research foundation, Silvia Federici proposes to examine gender issues insufficiently explored by the German philosopher. Federici focuses on the problem of unpaid female labor, which, in her view, became one of the pillars of capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 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 wage patriarchy. The researcher demonstrates that class struggle can also be waged within the proletariat itself, when men agree to act as representatives of the state vis-à-vis women within the family (and the broader community). Silvia Federici is an American scholar, teacher, and activist, and Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University.