Juan Martín Prada, “Economies of affectivity”

“Economies of affectivity”

Juan Martín Prada

Life and biopolitics

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that we are in the “biological century”, judging by the intense development and the dimension of the achievements attained in recent years in some of the life sciences, such as Genomics and Biotechnology. However, let us not forget that the increasingly more efficient knowledge of the biological processes or genetic determinations of life and its functional mechanisms is only a small part of biopolitical action, whose real capacity for regulation is much more extensive, spanning all of the vital processes that ultimately make up the collective production of subjectivity.  Thus, the capacity to improve or transform bodies or the biological conditions of a life are no longer prevalent among the keys of biopolitics but rather, more than anything else, the production and reproduction of ways of living.

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.

First National Chicana Conference, “Workshop resolutions”

“Workshop Resolutions”

First National Chicana Conference [1971]

SEX AND THE CHICANA

We feel that in order to provide an effective measure to correct the many sexual hangups facing the Chicano community the following resolutions should be implemented:

I. Sex is good and healthy for both Chicanos and Chicanas and we must develop this attitude.

II. We should destroy the myth that religion and culture control our sexual lives.

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.

Roberta, “The hand that rocks the cradle should be paid”

“The hand that rocks the cradle should be paid”

Roberta

Pittsburgh: Know, Inc

Women without an independent source of income in a society which celebrates the acquisition of wealth occupy a very special position. The appeal of a future where everyone is employed at socially productive, personally fulfilling work is undeniable. Unfortunately, that future isn’t in the immediate offing. Consequently, we must deal with the present.

Jason Read, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The Politics and Ontology of Living Labor”

What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx: The Politics and Ontology of Living Labor
Jason Read
from Chapter Two, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, 2003. [PDF]

 

In effect when Marx concerns himself with the essence of capitalism, he begins by invoking
the establishment of a single global and nonqualified subjectivity, which capitalizes
all the processes of subjectification. And this unique subject (“the unique subjective essence
of wealth”) expresses itself in “whatever” object. According to Marx capitalism liberates the
subjectivity of all of the traditional codes which limit it, only to fall back on [rabattre sur]
it in the production of value.
—Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri, “Annex 2”

A B S T R A C T L A B O R
For Karl Marx the two constitutive components of the capitalist mode of production
are labor, or the capacity for labor freed from the means of its employment,
and wealth, freed from the objective means of its investment. The capitalist mode
of production is formed in the encounter between a free flow of labor and a flow
of undifferentiated wealth. The encounter of these two flows, in the form of wage
labor, are sufficient to constitute what Marx calls “formal subsumption,” the initial
stage of capitalism.

Housewives’ trade union Santa Fe, Argentina, “Women’s manifesto”

“Women’s manifesto”
Housewives’ trade union Santa Fe, Argentina
Off Our Backs,  Mar/Apr 2002

The people of Argentina have undergone severe economic and political shocks in the past few months. The government has frozen all bank accounts and people cannot withdraw their money. This is particularly severe in Argentina because people don’t tend to use credit cards.

There have been popular protests in response. Two governments resigned because of the protests and Argentina had three presidents within one week. However, bank accounts are still frozen. In addition, the government has said that the money in the accounts, when people can withdraw it, will be available only in pesos, which are worth less than dollars, even though many people had saved the money in dollars.

In the face of the increasingly serious situation of our people, we feel we have the responsibility and also the renewed hope for our voices to be heard. Here is our proposal.

-Sindicato de Amas de Casa

Cindy L’Hirondelle, “Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”

“Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”
Cindy L’Hirondelle
Off Our Backs,  Jan/Feb 2004

I’ve worked laying sod, painting cars, selling donuts, and flipping burgers. I have also lived and felt the invisibility of being “only a mom.” Nothing compares with the stress of looking after small children, cooking for them and cleaning up after them. Housework gets no recognition, no status, and is the most wearing job I have ever done.

But the subject of household labor is seen as dull, and gets ignored even by progressive groups. Paid work gets recognition; it is “real” work. Yet the most common, exhausting, and tedious work is done for free and is invisible to those who fight against capitalism for social justice. As an anti-capitalist activist, I have attended countless meetings and protests, read stacks of alternative magazines-but I was unaware of the role that domestic labor played in the larger economic picture.

Stijn Vanheule, “Caring and its Impossibilities: A Lacanian Perspective” [excerpt]

“Caring and its Impossibilities: A Lacanian Perspective” [excerpt]
Stijn Vanheule
Organizational and Social Dynamics 2(2): 264-284 (2002)

WHAT ABOUT CAREGIVING PROFESSIONS?
Freud’s and Lacan’s comments regarding neighbour-love and altruism
are directed towards a general attitude rather than professional
caregiving. We suggest the same mechanisms especially apply to
professional caregiving (cf. Ansermet and Sorrentino, 1991; De Soria,
1996).

People engaged in the helping professions are often driven by strong
and sometimes idealised ideas about charity. Many start their jobs with
a rescue-fantasy, wanting to remedy other’s problems. What appeals to
them is the lack they perceive in the person needing help which they
long to suture in one way or another. The ideal of caregiving is thus an
ego ideal for most caregivers. It has a strong narcissistic value (cf.
Grosch and Olsen, 1994) and is rooted in the personal oedipal history

(cf. Freud, 1957; Ferenczi, 1955).

Valerie Bryson, “Production and reproduction”

“Production and Reproduction”
Valerie Bryson

Chapter Eight, Marx and Other Four-Letter Words (2005)

My starting point in this chapter is the classic Marxist theory of
historical materialism: the idea that the basis of human society,
the key to understanding its history and future potential, lies in
the production and reproduction of material life. While accepting
the value of this approach, I also use feminist theory to argue that
‘malestream’ theorists have interpreted production and reproduction
in unhelpfully narrow ways to produce an analysis which is not only
male based but also male biased. I argue in favour of an expanded
notion of (re)production that includes the socially necessary work
disproportionately performed by women; I conclude that without
such an expansion we can neither understand existing society nor

develop effective strategies for changing it.

Harriet Fraad, “Children as an exploited class”

“Children as an exploited class”

Harriet Fraad

excerpt from Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order. 1994.

Transformation of our system of private child rearing to a system of public services would be costly and require government action. It could address some of the problems of inequity while providing top quality child care. It is precisely because social responsibility for child rearing could accomplish these goals that it encounters right-wing opposition. Although Americans generally cringe when discussing collective kitchens, they generally embrace the collective kitchens of McDonald’s and the rest of the monumentally profitable fast food industry. Although the idea of collective noncommodity child care is anathema to many, quality child care centers are so attractive that they must turn away many of their applicants.

COLLECTIVE, COMMUNAL CHILD CARE

What would collective child care mean? It would mean a different organization of society with children’s care shifted from the individual shoulders of parents to collectively shared public child care facilities. Ingenious and varied possibilities for communal child rearing have been developing since the 19th century (Hayden 1985). To implement these kinds of child rearing strategies on a national scale would require a revolutionary transformation of our society, which does not seem imminent. However, at this moment there are transitional forms such as parenting centers, group homes, after-school, weekend and summer camps, and neighborhood family counseling centers. None of these services would have to be mandatory. They are so desperately needed that I am convinced they would be sought after and fiercely defend once established on a voluntary basis.

For children this could mean the beginning of a change from being a serf, isolated and dependent on the care of whomever bore them, to full personhood. In class terms, it could mean a transition from household serfdom to full citizenship in a communal household setting. At present, the only possibility for children’s liberation from oppressive homes occurs if their parents recognize their own inability to care and voluntarily bear the social stigma of relinquishing them to what are often inadequate state agencies or inadequate relatives.

George Caffentzis / Silvia Federici, “Notes on the edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism”

“Notes on the edu–factory and Cognitive Capitalism”

George Caffentzis / Silvia Federici, 2007. [link]

 

In the framework of the “edu–factory” discussion we want to share some reflections on two concepts that have been central to the debate: the edu–factory and cognitive capitalism. We agree with the key point of the “edu–factory” discussion prospectus: As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. This is to say the university is not just another institution subject to sovereign and governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social struggles are won and lost.

George Caffentzis, “Throwing away the ladder: The universities in the crisis”

“Throwing Away the Ladder: The Universities in the Crisis”
George Caffentzis

Zerowork I, 1975

Strikes, sit-ins, mass demonstrations? The stuff of the Sixties have appeared on the campuses of the U.S. in the last year. But as the media have pointed out, there is a “hardheaded” economic character to these actions. No more psychodelic guerrillas dropping pig’s blood on the college president. In its place we have “student worker strikes” in Athens, Ohio; a sit-in to protest tuition increases in Cornell; the first statewide college teacher’s strike in N.J.; strikes and demonstrations protesting the cutting of student funds and teacher firings in New York City University of N.Y. The “political” demands of the late Sixties: end university complicity with the draft and war-research, end grading and “free speech” restrictions, institutions of “`alternative” courses, open admissions to all students (“end stratification”) have turned to the “economic” demands of the middle 70’s: no tuition increases, no productivity deals, no firings, wages for schoolwork. From day-glo politics to grey economics all in the space of four years?

Selma James, “Sex, Race and Class”

“Sex, Race and Class”
Selma James, 1975. [PDF]

There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.

Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, “Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001″

“Working for worthy wages: The child care compensation movement, 1970-2001”

Marcy Whitebook, Center for the Study of Childcare Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley (2002)

View the full report here.

Introduction
In 2001 and 2002, over $100 million dollars will be spent to augment the earnings
of child care teachers and providers across the United States. These financial rewards
will come in the form of annual stipends, health insurance coverage, and, for a small
number, targeted, sustained pay increases.  Driven in part by a robust economy in the late
1990s, combined with a growing demand for child care services and a shortage of trained
child care workers, many states, including California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina,
Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin, have initiated or expanded publicly-funded
programs focused on building a more skilled and stable child care workforce.  Initiatives
are also being developed in Connecticut, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania.
Additionally, workers in Head Start, Department of Defense and some pre-kindergarten
early childhood programs are benefiting from salary enhancements built into those
delivery systems (Whitebook & Eichberg, 2002; Montilla, Twombly & De Vita, 2001).
While most child care teachers and providers continue to earn poverty-level
wages, and many beneficiaries of the above-mentioned compensation initiatives still are
woefully underpaid, there is little argument within the child care field, and a slowly
dawning awareness among policy makers, that improved services for young children in
the U.S. require better compensation for the child care workforce.  This level of
acknowledgment was not present a decade ago, even within the child care community.  In
many communities, the focus is not on whether to raise wages, but on how best to do so,
and a great deal of experimentation and debate is underway (Whitebook & Eichberg,
2002).

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”

“Women and the Subversion of the Community”
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
December 29, 1971 (html markup by Harry Cleaver) [PDF]

These observations are an attempt to define and analyze the “Woman Question”, and to locate this question in the entire “female role” as it has been created by the capitalist division of labour.

We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this female role. We assume that all women are housewives and even those who work outside the home continue to be housewives. That is, on a world level, it is precisely what is particular to domestic work, not only measured as number of hours and nature of work, but as quality of life and quality of relationships which it generates, that determines a woman’s place wherever she is and to whichever class she belongs. We concentrate here on the position of the working-class woman, but this is not to imply that only working-class women are exploited. Rather it is to confirm that the role of the working-class housewife, which we believe has been indispensable to capitalist production is the determinant for the position of all other women. Every analysis of women as a caste, then, must proceed from the analysis of the position of working-class housewives.

Philip J. Kain, “Marx, Housework and Alienation”

“Marx, Housework, and Alienation”
Philip J. Kain
Hypatia vol. 8, no. 1 (Winter 1993)

For different feminist theorists, housework and child rearing are viewed in very
different ways. I argue that Marx gives us the categories that allow us to see why
housework and child care can be both a paradigm of unalienated labor and also involve
the greatest oppression. In developing this argument, a distinction is made between
alienation and oppression and the conditions are discussed under which unalienated
housework can become oppressive or can become alienated.

bell hooks, “Revolutionary parenting”

“Revolutionary Parenting”

bell hooks

excerpt from Feminist theory: from margin to center. [1984]

During the early stages of contemporary women’s liberation movement, feminist analyses of motherhood reflected the race and class biases of participants. Some white middle class, college-educated women argued that motherhood was a serious obstacle to women’s liberation, a trap confining women to the home, keeping them tied to cleaning, cooking, and child care. Others simply identified motherhood and childrearing as the locus of women’s oppression. Had black women voiced their views on motherhood, it would not have been named a serious obstacle to our freedom as women. Racism, availability of jobs, lack of skills or education and a number of other issues would have been at the top of the list – but not motherhood. Black women would not have said motherhood prevented us from entering the world of paid work because we have always worked. From slavery to the present day black women have worked outside the home, in the fields, in the factories, in the laundries, in the homes of others. That work gave meager financial compensation and often interfered with or prevented effective parenting. Historically, black women have identified work in the context of family as humanizing labor, work that affirms their identity as women, as human beings showing love and care, the very gestures of humanity white supremacist ideology claimed black people were incapable of expressing. In contrast to labor done in a caring environment inside the home, labor outside the home was most often seen as stressful, degrading, and dehumanizing.

Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor”

“Affective Labor”

Michael Hardt

boundary 2 2:26 [1999]

Focus on the production of affects in our labor and our social practices has often served as a useful ground for anticapitalist projects, in the context of discourses for instance on desire or on use-value.  Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.  The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization.  Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor.  Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.