Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are making, we cannot robotize “care” except at a terrible cost for the people involved.

Through my involvement in the women’s movement I realized that the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system, and that the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving.

In sum, we are too busy performing, too busy pleasing, too afraid of failing, to enjoy making love. The sense of our value is at stake in every sexual relation.

It is power—not power over others but against those who oppress us—that expands our consciousness.

The wage and the lack of it have allowed capital to obscure the real length of our working day.

In the neoliberal workplace, where understaffing makes speedups the order of the day, and where precarity generates high levels of insecurity and anxiety, AL is more conducive to tensions and conflicts than to the discovery of commonalities.

IL, therefore, does not divide intellectual and manual labor, the head and the hand, nor is it a product of the separation of the worker from the intellectual faculties of production, as intellectual labor was in earlier phases of capitalism discussed by Alfred Sohn-Rethel.4

Equally important for the development of our perspective was the Operaist concept of the “social factory.” This translated Mario Tronti’s theory, in Operai e Capitale (1966), according to which at a certain stage of capitalist development capitalist relations become so hegemonic that every social relation is subsumed under capital and the

Even for the most creative workers, autonomy has turned out to be transitory and unsustainable, or it has been an effect of identification with employers’ interests.