Silvia Federici, “The reproduction of labour-power in the global economy, Marxist theory and the unfinished feminist revolution”

“The reproduction of labour-power in the global economy, Marxist theory and the unfinished feminist revolution”

Silvia Federici

Reading for Jan. 27, 2009 UC Santa Cruz seminar “The Crisis of Social Reproduction and Feminist Struggle”

 

Women’s work and women’s labor are buried deeply in the heart of the capitalist social and economic structure.
(David Staples, No Place Like Home, 2006)

It is clear that capitalism has led to the super-exploitation of women. This would not offer much consolation if it had only meant heightened misery and oppression, but fortunately it has also provoked resistance. And capitalism has become aware that if it completely ignores or suppresses this resistance it might become more and more radical, eventually turning into a movement for self-reliance and perhaps even the nucleus of a new social order. (Robert Biel, The New Imperialism, 2000)

The emerging liberative agent in the Third World is the unwaged force of women who are not yet disconnected from the life economy by their work. They serve life not commodity production. They are the hidden underpinning of the world economy and the wage equivalent of their life-serving work is estimate at &16 trillion.” (John McMurtry, The Cancer State of Capitalism, 1999)
The pestle has snapped because of so much pounding tomorrow I will go home.
Until tomorrow Until tomorrow… Because of so much pounding Tomorrow I will go home.
(Hausa Women’s Song, from Nigeria)

INTRODUCTION

This essay is a political reading of the restructuring of the [re]production of labor-power in the global economy, but it is also a feminist critique of Marx that, in different ways, has been developing since the 1970s, first articulated by activists in the Campaign for Wages For Housework, especially Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, among others, and later by the feminists of the Bielefeld school, Maria Mies, Claudia Von Werlhof, Veronica Benholdt-Thomsen. (1) At the center of this critique is the argument that Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hampered by its almost exclusive focus on commodity production and its blindness to the significance of women’s unpaid reproductive work and the sexual division of labor in capitalist accumulation. (2) For ignoring this work has limited Marx’s understanding of the mechanisms perpetuating the exploitation of labor, and led him to assume that capitalist development is both inevitable and progressive, on the assumption that scarcity is an obstacle to human selfdetermination, but capital’s expansion of the forces of production, through large scale industrialization, would in time lead to its transcendence. Marx had apparently second thoughts on this matter in the later years of his life. As for us, a century and a half after the publication of Capital, we must challenge this view for at least three reasons.

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, “Capital and the Left”

“Capital and the Left”

Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici

Falling Wall Press, 1975 [PDF]

With its traditional blindness to the dynamics of class movements, the left has interpreted the end of a phase within the women’s movement as the end of the movement itself. Thus, slowly but surely, they are trying to regain the political terrain which in the sixties they had been forced to relinquish. Now that the ground appears to be clear, we increasingly see them drop their ‘feminist’ mask and pour out those dearest beliefs which, though stifled by the movement’s power, were never really snuffed out.

And first and foremost among these is the belief that they, not women, are in the best position to decide what we really need and where the women’s movement should go. In the sixties, when women were leaving the leftist groups in droves, the left had to espouse the validity of autonomy. (They had already gone through the painful experience of complete repudiation by the autonomous black movement.) Reluctantly, they had to concede that women too are part of the revolution. They even went so far as to beat their breasts over their newly discovered sexism. But, most important, they learned to speak in respectful and even subdued tones. Now in the midst of what they perceive as a feminist funeral, their voices are raised again and this time not only to utter the final word, but to pass judgement on our achievements and shortcomings. Their story strikes us with a familiar ring. In the words of one of these self-appointed ‘feminists’: “women also need a socialist movement… and no movement that is composed only of women can substitute for this” (1), which means it was all very well while it lasted, but ultimately we have to be led by them. And in order to do that, they want first to re-establish the correct political line.

“Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism”

“Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism”

First posted on Bash Back News. [PDF]

a note on gender This essay deals with the discursive and material histories of people I refer to as “trans women,” which I broadly define as anyone not assigned-female at birth who experiences their bodies as female, lives their gender in a way that could be taken as female, and/or identifies as woman/trans-female-spectrum/transfeminine. I rather begrudgingly use this term with a degree of hesitance as it certainly erases the complexities of my gender experience, but I aim to broadly relate to those who have been coercively assigned a gender category other than Woman but who still inherit much of the legacy of such a category.

Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism

Trans people remain strangers and outcasts within much of the contemporary discourses of insurrectionary feminism. Essays about “male-bodied” perpetrators of sexual assault and “socialized men and women” seem to leave much to be analyzed about the ways in which trans people have historically related the functioning of gender systems and the development of capitalism as a system. It is in this context that we discursively intervene with that which we might term insurrectionary trans-feminism, an analysis which distinctively analyzes the ways in which trans bodies relate to the legacy of capitalism and the possibilities of living communism and spreading anarchy. In order to imagine the possibilities of subversion, however, we must first recognize the historical relations of capitalism to the formulation of the trans subject.

The relation between capitalism and the trans subject is a contentious one. While many theorists such as Leslie Feinberg have sought to piece together a universal, ahistorical narrative of trans people throughout history across the world, we see such a task as ultimately failing to take into account the precise economic and social conditions which gave rise to each specific instance of gender variance. Gender nonconformity is not a stable or coherent phenomenon which appears in history due to the same conditions, rather it contextually can have a multiplicity of meanings.

While it could certainly be useful to analyze the ways in which capitalism has instituted binary-based gender systems as a means to organize reproductive labor in colonial contexts with different gender systems, for the purposes of this essay we will begin with the notion of the transsexual in context of the early 20th century United States, where the first narratives of transsexuality began to appear. These narratives are intimately tied to the rise of capitalist ventures in experimental medical procedures which gave rise to the the first forms of gender reassignment surgery. By the 1950s, transsexuality had gained public attention in the United States with gender reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen’s narrative, as some narratives just twenty years before her, became a model for the transsexual identity narrative, in which the subject feels that she is in the “wrong body” and that surgery has made her feel whole and relieved the immense feeling of body dysphoria now that she is a real woman. It is in this narrative that we find the experiences of gender dysphoria taking shape to define a concrete subject position of “trans.” By this we do not mean to imply that trans identity is based upon a particular form of body modification or access to medical technology, but rather that these early narratives of trans experience are foundational in the ways in which trans identity has grown, whether in the broadening terms of constituting a political “trans community” on the basis of sharing a feeling of dysphoria or the emergence of genderqueer as a politicized subjectivity which has become delight of postmodernism.

At the same time, as capital has created the ability for trans individuals to modify their bodies in the ways that they see fit, it has also, with biomedical and psychological apparatuses, proliferated the means by which to discipline the trans body. Two of the most notable apparatuses to this effect are the Standards of Care, which enforced rigorous standards of femininity and passibility as a necessary first step towards access to medical technologies of transition, as well as the “charm schools” which accompanied many GID clinics which sought to properly resocialize trans women as “proper ladies” with manners, grace, and all of the feminine wiles of “natural women.” The trans subject’s desires are easily molded into that which can be profitable to capitalism, whether it is countless sessions of laser hair removal sessions, gender reassignment surgeries, or hormone therapy. That is, trans subjectivity is bound to the conditions of capitalism and disciplinary techniques which have given rise to it.

We deploy these words carefully, however, as we also recognize the ways in which “radicals” and “feminists” have deployed the very same as a means of constructing trans women as capitalist-created penetrators of vanity and artificial artifacts of femininity. Yet the constructedness of the trans subject is no more tied to the history of capitalism and domination than the constructedness of woman as an identity, or the constructedness of racialized identities. And as trans people, we feel this in the corporeality forcibly pushed onto us in an attempt to render us intelligible, to use the state of our bodies to comprehend our gender. We feel our bodies outweigh our chosen identities when we interact with others and do not pass. As trans *women*, as we experience the legacy of trans subjectivity within capitalism, we also feel the weight of the corporeality of women in capitalism crush our existences. We experience the gendered division of labor every time we are raped and beaten and condescended to and treated as a hot she-male sex toy. Yet it is in this experience that we might see the possibilities of human strike for the trans woman.

Trans women experience corporeality in a unique way. While capital hopes to continue to use the female body as proletarian machine to reproduce labor-power, trans women’s bodies cannot produce more workers. Perhaps in valorizing this inoperability in reproduction, and willfully extending it to all forms of reproductive labor, we see the potentiality of human strike. Ways of extending this remain to be seen, but in this affront to capitalist-produced nature and matrices of heteronormativity which are crucial to the functioning of capitalism, we see the kinship between the human strike of trans women and the creation of a non-reproductive, purely negative queer force. It seems that the trans woman too has no future, and thus through the building of this negative force might have a stake in wrecking everything and abolishing herself in the process. In any case, we do not have the answers that will render society inoperable, that will end the reproduction of this world. An insurrectionary transfeminist force has yet to be materialized, and it is up to us to make this a reality.

gender strike is human strike,

some bitches.

Silvia Federici, “Putting feminism back on its feet”

“Putting feminism back on its feet”

Silvia Federici

Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60’s without Apology (Spring – Summer, 1984), pp. 338-346

Conducted in New York City, summer 1983, by S. Sayres. Questions have been deleted.

Almost fourteen years have passed since I became involved with the women’s
movement. At first it was with a certain distance. I would go to some
meetings but with reservations, since to a “politico” like I was it seemed
difficult to reconcile feminism with a “class perspective.” Or this at least
was the rationale. More likely I was unwilling to accept my identity as a
woman after having for years pinned all my hopes on my ability to pass for
a man. Two experiences were crucial in my becoming a committed feminist.

First my living with Ruth Geller, who has since become a writer and recorded
in her Seed of a Woman the beginning of the movement, and who
in the typical feminist fashion of the time would continually scorn my enslavement
to men. And then my reading Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s The Power
of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1970), a pamphlet that
was to become one of the most controversial feminist documents. At the
last page I knew that I had found my home, my tribe and my own self, as a
woman and a feminist. From that also stemmed my involvement in the
Wages for Housework campaign that women like Dalla Costa and Selma
James were organizing in Italy and Britain, and my decision to start, in 1972,
Wages for Housework groups also in this country.

Selma James/Johnson-Forest Tendency, “On the Woman Question: An Orientation”

“On the Woman Question: An Orientation”

Selma James [Sept. 3, 1951]

Selma James delivered this report on behalf of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Selma James was an important figure in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a co-author of the pamphlet, A Woman’s Place, during the Correspondence period. In the 1955 split with Dunayevskaya, she sided with C.L.R. James and married him after he divorced Constance Webb. She eventually separated from James and became a leader in the radical women’s movement in Britain in the 1970s. She was also closely associated with the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the wages for housework campaign. She is involved now with the Global Women’s Strike organization (www.globalwomenstrike.net).

A new stage has been reached. We are finished with endless discussions on male chauvinism. We have no more time for individual attacks against individual men who are backward or against individual women who do not want to be “emancipated.” These people will reorient themselves and will be drawn into their own struggles.

Now for the first time we know where we are going. We did not develop accidentally. The ideas explicit in this document are the concrete manifestations of the movement of capitalism and the reaction of the masses of women today. It is this reaction that we shall attempt to concretize in this document.

Bebel and the other historians on the woman question have analysed women in other ages, other struggles, other cultures. But it is we who must express women in 1951, what they feel about their lives, what they want and how they plan to get it.

We counterpose this to any external plan of the bourgeoisie, put forth by social workers, magazine writers, psychoanalysts, and any section of women who place themselves not within the struggle of women but above it, and therefore in opposition to it.

Martha A. Ackelsberg, “Organizing Women: First Steps”

“Organizing Women: First Steps”

Martha A. Ackelsberg

excerpt from Free Women of Spain: anarchism and the struggle for the emancipation of women [1991]

Lucia and Mercedes were instrumental in beginning Mujeres Libres in Madrid. Amparo joined them on the editorial board of Mujeres Libres and later became active in Barcelona as the director of Mujeres Libres’ education and training institute, the Casal de la Dona Treballdora. All three were spurred to action by their prior experiences in male-dominated organizations of the anarcho-syndicalist movement. But the groundwork for the organization was also being laid by women around the country, many of whom were virtually unaware of one another’s existence.

In Barcelona, for example, Soledad Estorach, who was active both in her ateneo and in the CNT, had also found existing movement organizations inadequate to engage women workers on equal terms with men.

In Catalona, at least, the dominant position was that men and women should both be involved. But the problem was that the men didn’t know how to get women involved as activists. Both men and most women thought of women in a secondary status. For most men, I think. The ideal situation would be to have a companera who did not oppose their ideas, but whose private life would be more or less like other women. They wanted to be activists twenty-four hours a day-and in that context, of course, it’s impossible to have equality …. Men got so involved that the women were left behind, almost of necessity. Especially, for example, when he would be taken to jail. Then she would have to take care of the children, work to support the family, visit him in jail, etc. That, the companeras were very good at! But for us, that was not enough. That was not activism!!!

Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement”

“The Combahee River Collective Statement”

Combahee River Collective [1977]

We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. [1] During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

Jane Alpert, “Birth of Mother Right”

“Birth of Mother Right”

Jane Alpert

from “Mother Right: A new feminist theory” [1972]

My first year underground was very hard. Expecting to die for the Revolution in a matter of months, I was unprepared to find myself not only alive but living a rather unadventurous and secluded existence less than a year after “disappearing.” I found it increasingly difficult to get along with the friends with whom I was still in touch, especially with the men who were becoming increasingly overbearing and critical of all my actions, as I was growing increasingly sensitive to their interference. Chafing at every restriction, hostile even to the one woman friend I really cared for, I finally decided to take off on my own, reasoning that it couldn’t get much worse. I started to travel and for a few months roamed, almost aimlessly, from one community to another across the country.

Mary Ann Weathers, “An Argument For Black Women’s Liberation As a Revolutionary Force”

“An Argument For Black Women’s Liberation As a Revolutionary Force”
Mary Ann Weathers
[Originally published in No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation. Cambridge, Mass: Cell 16. vol. 1, no. 2 (Feb 1969)]

“Nobody can fight your battles for you; you have to do it yourself.” This will be the premise used for the time being for stating the case for Black women’s liberation, although certainly it is the least significant. Black women, at least the Black women I have come in contact with in the movement have been expounding all their energies in “liberating” Black men (if you yourself are not free, how can you “liberate” someone else?). Consequently, the movement has practically come to a standstill. Not entirely due however to wasted energies but, adhering to basic false concepts rather than revolutionary principles ant at this stage of the game we should understand that if if is not revolutionary it is false.