PERSON
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Italian autonomist feminist theorist (1943–2020) whose 1972 thesis that housewives produce the commodity labor-power itself transformed Marxist categories and founded social reproduction theory alongside Federici.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa was a founding theorist of the Wages for Housework movement and co-architect of social reproduction theory. Her 1972 essay 'Women and the Subversion of the Community,' co-authored with Selma James, made the theoretical breakthrough that domestic labor produces not merely use-values for family consumption but the commodity labor-power — the worker who appears at the factory gate each morning, capable of working. This insight transformed Marxist analysis by identifying a form of productive labor that Marx's framework had classified as consumption. Dalla Costa argued that the housewife's unwaged labor was not peripheral to capitalist accumulation but foundational: without the reproduction of labor-power, there is no labor to exploit. The argument provided the analytical foundation for the Wages for Housework campaign and established that women's liberation required not integration into waged work but recognition and compensation for the reproductive labor capitalism depends on.
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Dalla Costa's work emerged from the Italian autonomist movement of the 1960s and 1970s,