IN LEFT-WING THOUGHT, there’s always been a powerful emancipatory possibility associated with understanding the past; the specific opposite of false consciousness is historical consciousness. To see yourself in time is to grasp the way the world is in flux. Anyone who has ever done any kind of political organizing learns this intuitively: the work of mobilizing is always in urging people to un-forget, to see how their circumstances came to be, how others responded to similar circumstances, and how they might also—now, today. To engage in political struggle is necessarily to do history. Multiple rounds of upheaval in the historical profession since the 1960s—accompanying political upheavals at large—have sharpened this weapon in the hands of the left.

But like everything else, historical interpretation must live in time. Any understanding of history, articulated in the terms of its own age, eventually fades. The inescapably engaged nature of historical inquiry is why for Genovese, writing at midcentury, the slaves mapped onto the docile Western proletariat while slaveholders looked something like the captains of late-Fordist industry, doling out high wages and benefits to keep the lower orders in line. And why for Johnson, trying to give expression to how the past looks from our own moment, the slaves look like the policed, starved, terrorized underclass of global capitalist enterprise; and the slaveholders, or more properly “slave society,” become practically everyone who buys into this world order. Whether the leaders of neoliberal capitalism or the average beneficiaries of cheap commodities—who have something in common with the “poor whites” that planter ideologues hoped to win to their side by making the slave empire large enough to benefit white people across class lines—the white race as such appears out of the shared experience of imperial bounty. Slavery as we’ve come to remember it is the ideological residue of this social order, a memory recycled and processed into a romantic form, in order to quiet contemporary anxieties of dominance.

The enlightening, progressive force of liberalism has carried us far from slavery, we like to think. We are not those people and never could have been. In River of Dark Dreams, we are reminded that between the slave empire and our own age lies only a handful of generations. Johnson shows the historical meaning of this proximity. We are connected not just through the shortness of time but through the persistence of the liberal capitalist tradition itself. The form of freedom fantasized by the slaveholding South, in turn, is the freedom of our own society: ensuring a standard of living sufficient to confirm our self-image and limit domestic conflict; built upon ecological degradation, the conquest of darker nations by international bureaucracies, their enslavement by debt, their forcible integration into a global commercial network; enforced by our own armies of the night, surveilling, killing, torturing without oversight. The myth of our great distance from slavery—of the old South’s fundamental illiberalism—exists precisely to give us a way of managing our experience of this continuity, and to let us continue to enact it.

The common strategy of these early essays — which extends throughout Federici’s work — is one of accounting: by recasting all the social activities women perform as “work,” Federici economizes them to the point of logical extremity. The point isn’t actually to put a price on perfunctory marital sex, or to max out categories of value so that their utility disintegrates; it’s to illuminate how supposedly noncapitalist activities shore up the economic system that structures and controls so much of our lives. It’s a conceptual trick to trigger political and feminist consciousness — and in the 1970s, when much of what needed revolutionizing stood in plain sight, in the form of one’s most intimate relationships, this trigger seemed enough.

But even while she relies on this flip of the switch to start a movement, Federici seems to recognize early that her ideas might suffer from conceptual ambiguity. Shifting the title from wages for to wages against housework, she reiterates that the goal is not reform but revolution: “To demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do this work. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want wages for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it.” In “Counterplanning from the Kitchen,” co-authored with Nicole Cox in 1975, Federici reiterates: “We do not say that winning a wage is the revolution. We say that it is a revolutionary strategy because it undermines the role we are assigned in the capitalist division of labor and consequently it changes the power relations within the working class in terms more favorable to us and the unity of the class.”

In the 1970s, Western women who were radicalized by feminism were women doing housework. They knew firsthand what that work was like: how strained and boring it was, what social obligations it involved, how it shored up their position in relation to men. Self-knowledge was fundamentally what made consciousness-raising — talking in a room to other women — such a powerful tool: it confirmed that your personal experience of sexism didn’t belong to you alone. It offered solidarity as well as a theoretical framework, a picture of social reality, on a scale that made the personal, as they say, political. The early work of people like Rosler and Federici — and Flo Kennedy, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Kate Millett, Valerie Solanas, and many others — allowed women, suddenly, to see their lives anew. It was like changing the lights in a room: all the furniture was the same, but, seen in a new cast, never quite the same again.

Decades later, the daughters of the predominantly white, middle-class women at the front lines of the WLM (if they had daughters) were no slaves to housework. If they valued it, they hired someone else to do it — and the people they hired were overwhelmingly women from the global south, pulled by the growing demand for domestic work in the West and pushed by structural and political forces in their home countries. This happened on such an enormous scale that an international division of labor emerged: maids, nannies, and nurses working in the US, Canada, Europe, and Saudi Arabia increasingly came from South Asia, North and East Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America, and the former Soviet countries — and still do. This was, and is, no mystery to employers, but what may seem mysterious is why these women left their countries to begin with.

Economists have known for a long time that women do a lot of work for free in times of social need. Remarkably, they have used this fact against women as part of the rationale behind massive neoliberal retrenchment: Why fund state services when you know that women will supply them for free? In the ’80s and ’90s, policy planners called this “crossing the desert,” a catchall for phenomena like maternal autostarvation (not eating and giving food to children), trekking to faraway water sources, and generally picking up the slack when state services retreat and infrastructure collapses. There’s another side to this sacrificial tendency of women, though, that doesn’t always compromise their health and well-being: during WWI, the British government discovered that income given directly to women, as opposed to men, raised the quality of life of an entire household. Later “experiments” in microfinance revealed the same. If the goal for neoliberal planners was to inflict the least damage on the tightest budget, you’d think this fact — sound enough to justify massive austerity programs — would also be sound enough to make the case for a universal income for women. In other words: wages for housework.

When we’re very young, many of us subscribe to the “great man” theory of history: things are the way they are because someone wanted them to be that way. As we become educated, we learn that adults see beyond individuals and focus on systems (hence the elevation of “process” over substance, which in journalism leads to the exaltation of media reporters at the expense of other beats). The problem with the worldview of Slate, where all events are phenomenalized and all outcomes foretold by demographic destiny, is not that it threatens the “inexplicable nature of genius” or steals the spotlight from the litterateur, but rather that it erodes our sense of history, delivering us into a postapocalyptic reverie where individuals no longer shape the world except to the extent that they represent certain types. Learning to view the world from a mature, aerial perspective often coincides with losing the revolutionary sensibilities of childhood and acquiring the fatalism of the urban professional.

For those who obtain real power, though, or witness it in action, there lies the further insight that the great man theory is mostly correct, and that false consciousness lies not so much in clinging to the fantasy of individualism but in failing to realize that many seemingly impersonal institutions and processes — from Fordism to the Metropolitan Opera to the Justice Department — are in fact the expression of individual wills. When assessing the ways that Wal-Mart, one of the world’s largest employers, is shaping the 21st century, we make a grievous error if we lose sight of the Waltons, who stand directly behind the corporate Leviathan as majority shareholders.

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The answer to the abuse of sociological categories, which often but not always coincides with a pseudostatistical rigor, is not to retreat into the pseudospirituality of aesthetic formalism. Some phenomena lend themselves to systematic explanations; others do not. What’s crucial for commentators is to acknowledge the limits of modeling human behavior. We should welcome contributions from the likes of Nate Silver, who for every confident prediction issues seven warnings about how prognosticators overplay their hands. The answer to “too much sociology” is not to fall back on myth, but to embrace the priority of individual choice in the face of epistemological humility.