Marx understood capitalism as a necessary stage to reach a classless society in a world without scarcity. Fascinated by the productive power of industrial capitalism that so fiercely fought, he left aside the exploitation of unpaid work, the unpaid work of women dedicated to the reproduction of labor; a work that he considered natural and archaic. These two limitations of Marx's theoretical work marked to a great extent the development of Marxist theories and struggles, focused since then on the factory and almost always magnetized by technological fetishism.

Silvia Federici and other feminists of the seventies, taking Marx but always beyond Marx, started from their idea that "capitalism must produce the most valuable means of production, the worker himself." In order to exploit this production, wage patriarchy was established. The exclusion of women from the salary grants immense power of control and discipline to men, while at the same time appreciating and making their work invisible. This invisibility is not only useful for exploiting the gigantic scope of the reproduction of the labor force. At the same time, and like the devaluation of many other figures (slaves, colonized, migrants), it serves capitalism in its main objective: to build a network of inequalities in the body of the world proletariat that allows it to reproduce.