Open Threads

On the occasion of the publication of an anthology of her writing and the accession of a  Wages for Housework NY archive at Mayday Rooms in London, Marina Vishmidt interviewed Silvia Federici on her extensive contribution to feminist thought and recent work on debt activism (with contributions by Mute, Mayday Rooms and George Caffentzis)

Mute: In the text ‘Wages Against Housework’ (1975) you refer to the problem of women’s work (even waged) as the impossibility of seeing where ‘work begins and ends’. Just as French group Théorie Communiste argue that ‘we’ are nothing outside of the wage, you also speak of the problem of unwaged women as being outside of a ‘social contract’. How does this reflect the capital-labour relation today? How much has this situation, then specific to women and some other workers, generalised? How are we to act from the perspective of this being ‘nothing’? Is it still a question of self-identification or dis-identification?

Silvia Federici: We should not assume that those who are unwaged, who work outside the social contract stipulated by the wage, are ‘nothing’ or are acting and organising out of a position of no social power. I would not even say that they are outside the wage relation which I see as something broader than the wage itself. One of the achievements of the International Wages For Housework Campaign, that we launched in the 1970s, was precisely to unmask not only the amount of work that unwaged houseworkers do for capital but, with that, the social power that this work potentially confers on them, as domestic work reproduces the worker and consequently it is the pillar of every other form of work. We saw an example of this power – the power of refusal – in October 1975, when women in Iceland went on strike and everything in Reykjavik and other parts of the country where the strike took place came to a halt.

From Miles Ahead

“You been hurt and you're all cried out/you say You walk down the street pushin' people outta your way /You packed your bags and all alone you wanna ride, You don't want nothin', don't need no one by your side /You're walkin' tough baby, but you're walkin' blind to the ties that bind ….

..."You sit and wonder just who's gonna stop the rain/Who'll ease the sadness, who's gonna quiet the pain/It's a long dark highway and a thin white line/Connecting baby, your heart to mine./We're runnin' now but darlin' we will stand in time/To face the ties that bind. The ties that bind.

...

We had a healthy even heated debate among Kasama moderators today about how to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher. Afterwards, wandering around, thinking over what others had said, I stumbled upong this gem of an essay from AWOL (Angry Women of Liverpool).

With a special wave to my comrades here at Kasama! Here is an excerpt (it is the last part of the essay):

Where do you stand on singing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead?”

"Tough one. The history of witch persecution is fraught with the very foundations of modern capitalist and patriarchal oppression, as anybody who’s read Silvia Federici knows. But there are so few songs you can sing joyfully about the death of somebody thoroughly deserving.

"You want a proper argument in defence? Give me a minute.

"OK, got one. The cultural connotations of “witch” in the modern day are so fragmented, having passed from fairy tale and myth through church/state persecution, a modern reinvention as “Wicca”, developing into a full-fledged sub-culture with often positive portrayals in TV drama and children’s literature, it could be argued that the word “witch” is now primarily a fairly neutral term for a female magic-user and serves only to denote the profession of the woman in question, not her moral status. After all, the song takes care to distinguish: “Which old witch? The wicked witch,” suggesting that wickedness is by no means assumed by the term’s use.

"If Glinda, the good witch, can allow the munchkins their song of triumph over the ruby-slippered menace that has oppressed them for so long, who am I to begrudge it?"

By Nat Winn

The liberation of humanity, the aim of our communist goal and vision is impossible without the liberation of women. Millions and ultimately billions of women must emerge as fierce fighters against male supremacy and for a radical egalitarian society. Communists, both women and men, need to investigate where the cracks are in society that may lead to the eruption of a powerful women's movement with its eyes set on emancipation for all women and all humanity.

I recently had a chance to read through a blog exchange between Zora and Ba Jin on the Fire Next Time blog and Eve Mitchell on the Unity & Struggle blog over debates within a trend called Marxist Feminism, including such figures as Selma James and Sylvia Federici. I felt the discussion was suffocated in its scope because of its confinement within in a certain “workerist” conception of how to look at women, sexuality, reproduction, and liberation. I found the discussion confined to questions placed narrowly at the relations of production in the society, reducing the oppression of women to relations of work that is waged or unwaged, while ignoring the question of the superstructure and how the oppression of women has actually broken into the realm of politics.

This interview appears on the radical queer website "HOMO." (Caution: very graphic NSFW content). Without endorsing all of its arguments, I thought it introduced a lot of concepts relevant to the discussions on how queer revolutionaries relate to civil rights successes and rightward community drift that we've been having here on Kasama. --ISH

INTERVIEW / Sociologist Gary Kinsman on the emergence of the neoliberal queer

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This article appeared on the editorial blog of the New York Times. It opines on the current state of abortion rights.

 The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade