Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction radically extends Marxist analysis by arguing that capitalist production cannot be understood unless reproduction is recognised as a hidden but indispensable site of value creation. Against the apparent separation between the factory and the home, wage labour and housework, production and reproduction, Fortunati shows that capitalism depends upon a structural mystification: reproductive labour appears as non-work, natural affection or personal service, while in reality it produces and reproduces labour power, the commodity without which capital cannot valorise itself. The central contradiction is that the worker appears “free” only because the work necessary to regenerate that worker is displaced onto women and rendered invisible. Housework, therefore, is not external to capital, nor a pre-capitalist residue inside modern society; it is an internal relation of capitalist production, indirectly mediated through the male wage. The male worker formally receives the wage, but that wage also functions as variable capital in relation to the housewife, who performs unpaid reproductive labour for capital through the apparent private relation of marriage. Fortunati’s analysis of prostitution sharpens this argument by showing that sexual reproduction, intimacy and bodily service are also organised through capitalist relations, even when they appear as morality, deviance or private exchange. Her case synthesis of housewives, prostitutes and workers reveals a gendered architecture of exploitation in which women are positioned as a “natural force of social labour”, while men become intermediaries between women and capital. The book’s decisive contribution is to expose the family as a capitalist institution, not merely a sentimental or biological unit. Reproduction is thus productive because it creates the living conditions, bodies, affects and capacities that capital consumes as labour power. Consequently, any critique of capitalism that ignores reproductive labour reproduces capital’s own concealment of women’s exploitation.
