Each year, February 14 inspires a slew of invective on the vulgarization of romance into a consumer holiday — one that manipulates us into proving our love by buying oversized teddy bears and Hallmark cards. But the monetization of love is neither new nor unique to Valentine’s Day: it is the heart of the capitalist project.

“Nothing, in fact, has been so powerful in institutionalizing our work, the family, and our dependence on men as the fact that not a wage but ‘love’ has always paid for this work,” the Italian academic Silvia Federici writes in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. The work of care — of cooking, washing, child-rearing, and so on — has traditionally been represented as a woman’s duty done in the name of love. What gets mystified in the process is its function as labor necessary for reproducing and sustaining the global market.

Federici historically locates the delegitimation of care work in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Under the feudal serf system, peasants were given protection and the right to use certain fields for their own subsistence in exchange for free labor and crops. Under feudalism “all work contributed to the family’s sustenance.”