Re-enchanting the World: 
Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

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Introduction

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• the International Monetary Fund as part of its “structural adjustment program” and the campaigning in the antiglobalization movement (p.2)

• The need for a politics that refuses to separate the time of political organizing from that of reproduction is a lesson that many Occupiers have not forgotten and is one of the main themes of this volume. (p.5)

• An important aspect of it (reproduction) is the reproduction of our collective memory and the cultural symbols that give meaning to our life and nourish our struggles. (p.5)

• “the root of oppression is loss of memory” Paula Gunn Allen (p.6)

• ... the principle of the commons ... contrasts with the assumption shared by Marxist developmentalists, accelerationists, and Marx himself concerning the necessity of land privatization as a path to large-scale production and of globalization as the instrument for the unification of the world proletariat. (p.7)

 

 

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Part One

On the New Enclosures

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On Primitive Accumulation, Globalization, and Reproduction

• ... violence is always necessary to establish and maintain the capitalist work discipline (p.16)

• in the 1960s and 1970s, primitive accumulation became a global and seemingly permanent process... (11) (p.16)

• ... we can now better understand the “nature of the enclosing force that we are facing,”(12) the logic by which it is driven, and its consequences for us. (p.16)

• we have different histories of primitive accumulation - this means that the history of primitive accumulation past and present cannot be fully comprehended ... until it is written also from the viewpoint of the enslaved and colonized - those whose place cannot be assimilated into the history of the waged. (vgl.p.17)

• The two most essential processes from a historical and methodological viewpoint:

  • “the constitution of reproduction work as women´s labor and as a separate sphere” and thereby devalued from a capitalist viepoint (p.17)

    • the expulsion of reproductive work from the shperes of economic relations and its deceptive relegation to the sphere of the private, the personal, outside of capital accumulation, and, above all, feminine has made it invisible as work and has naturalized its exploitation. (p.17)

    • basis of a new sexual division of labour and a new family organization, subordinating women to men. (p.17)

    • witch hunts as a major attack on the social power of women (p.18)

    • racial hierarchies have divided the world proletariat (p.18)

  • “the institutionalization of the state´s control over women´s sexuality and reproductive capacity, through the criminalization of abortion and the introduction of a system of surveillance and punishment that literally expropriates women´s bodies.” (p.17)

• In contrast to Marxist autonomists´view of the restructuring of the global economy, which, focusing on the computer and information revolution and the rise of cognitive capitalism, describes this phase of capitalist development as a step toward the autonomation of labour. (17) (p.18) Federici proposes that there has been a concerted attack on our basic means of reproduction, the land, the house, and the wage to expand the global work force and reduce the cost of labor. (p.18)

• only one logic driving the new forms of primitive accumulation: “to form a labor force reduced to abstract labor, pure labor power, with no guarantees, no protections, ready to be moved from place to place and job to job, employed mostly through short-term contracts and at the lowest possible wage.” (p.18)

• Impoverishment in much of the world has reached a magnitude never seen before, now affecting up to 70 percent of the population. (p.19)

• organ trafficking, reproducing other families, giving up own children for adoption, work as surrogate mothers, sell their eggs for stem cell research (p.19,20)

• having fewer children, as the need to secure some income has had a sterilizing effect. (p.20)

• political class that makes it almost impossible for women to proved for themselves and their families criminalizes them for trying to obtain an abortion. (p.20)

• subsistence farming stands in the way of the World Bank´s attempt to create land markets and place all natural resources in the hands of commercial enterprises. (p.20)

• capitalist accumulation continues to require the degradation of human life and the reconstruction of social hierarchies and divisions on the basis of gender, race and age. (p.21)

• by undermining the self sufficiency of every region and creating a total economic interdependence, even among distant countries, globalization generates (...) a need for an unlimited exploitation of labor and the natural environment. (p.21)

• extractivism (mineral extraction) (p.22)

• Africa : impoverishment and displacement; the figure of the worker has become that of the migrant, the itinerant, the refugee (p.22)

• life expectancy for the working class in diminishing (p.22)

• ... “unspeakable devastation unfolding under our eyes, I would affirm that worldwide a consciousness is taking shape - more and more translated into action - that capitalism is unsustainable and creating a different social economic system. (p.23)

 

 

Part Two

On the Commons

 

From Crisis to Commons: Reproductive Work, Affect Labor and Technology, and the Transformation of Everyday Life

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• Lefebvre argued that social theory must address the life of the “whole worker”(1) and set out to investigate how “everydayness” is constituted and why the philosophers have constantly devalued it. → Situationists / discussion of consumerism and technological alienation (p.175)

• By rebelling against women´s confinement to reproductive work and the hierarchies constructed through the sexual division of labour, the women´s movement gave a material basis to the critique of everyday life and uncovered the “deep structure”, the “arch”, underlining and binding the multiplicity of daily acts and events... (p.175)

• the structured reality (p.176)

• A theoretical and practical revolution has followed from this discovery that has transformed our concept of work, politics, “femininity”, and the methodology of the social sciences, enabling us to transcend the traditional psychological viewpoint that individualizes our experiences and separates the mental from the social. (p.176)

• realization at the core of the feminist revolution: we cannot look at social life from the viewpoint of an abstract, universal, sexless social subject.... (vgl.p.176)

• In the absence of wage, domestic work has been so naturalized that it has been difficult for women to struggle against it without experiencing an enormous sense of guilt and becoming vulnerable to abuse → if they refuse they are not treated as workers on strike but as “bad women” (p.176)

• the personal is political and the private/public divide is a ruse mystifying women´s unpaid work as a “labor of love” (176)

• the feminist critique of everyday life (p.176)

• More broadly, women have transformed their everyday interactions with the world, asserting a new power with regard to language, knowledge, relations to men, and the expression of their desire. (p.17

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• the feminist movement:

  • has rehabilitated and revalorized everyday life (p.177)

  • has established that women will no longer accept a subordinate social position and a relation to the state and capital mediated by men (p.177)

  • was somewhat tamed because it needed to be controlled to prevent any more drastic changes

  • International Conference in Mexico City in 1975 → institutionalisazion of the feminist movement and integration of women into the globalizing world economy (p.178)

  • Reproduction was abandoned as terrain of feminist struggle (p.178)

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• The lesson we have learned in this process is that we cannot change our everyday life without changing its immediate institutions and the political and economic system by which they are structured. (p.178)

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Everyday Life as Permanent Crisis

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• Nancy MacLean has pointed out, the fight for entrance into male dominated jobs has contributed to “our own era´s heightened consciousness concerning the social contruction and instability of the categories of gender, race and class.” (10) (p.179)

• The new Problems: childcare, commercialization of domestic work, high cost of this work and low quality, obesity in children, cuts in education, health care, and hospital care, caring of children and elderly or those with illnesses and disabilities (p.179)

• ... even among those who were career bound, there has recently been a return to the home and revalorization of deomesticity.(12) ← many women “throwing in the towel” because of the workplace that no longer tries to care for workers´reproduction, still assuming they have wives at home → dedicate themselves to provide their families with a “high-quality” reproduction (p.179)

• the newly reclaimed domesticity is also shaped by ecological concerns and the desire to know where food comes from → refusal of convenience food (p.179)

• They are a manifestation of the rise of a new individualism pursuing the “good life”, but not through a social struggle for the “common good”. (p.180)

• Because of the double load to which many women are condemned, the long hours of work, the low wages they earn, and the cuts of essential reproductive services, for most women everyday life has become a permanent crisis (this crisis is not limited to women). (p.180)

• much of womens´work is emotional/affective labor (...) which over time leads to a profound sense of depersonalization and an incapacity to know what one really desires. (13) (p.180)

• women are twice as likely to suffer from clinical depression and anxiety as men (p.180)

• breakdown of social solidarity and family relations (p.180)

• (1960) economic restructuring, gentrification, and forced mobility (p.181)

• Men´s refusal to accept women´s autonomy (surfacing as increasing male violence against women) has contributed to weakening social bonds. (p.181)

• many are fleeing everyday life and cannot sustain interpersonal relations that appear too laborious and difficult to handle (vgl. p.181)

  • care work is not attended to (vgl. p.181)

  • interpersonal, face-to-face communication is also declining amongst adults and between adults and children and has become purely instrumental - the internet gradually replaces it (p.181)

    • Technology - communication technology in particular - plays a role in the organization of domestic work and is now an essential part or our daily life. But, as Fortunati argues, it has primarily served to replace, rather than to enhance, interpersonal communication, allowing each family member to escape the communication crisis by taking refuge in the machine. (p.184)

    • attempt to robotize our reproduction (nursebots and lovebots) (p.184)

    • signs of a growing solitude (p.184)

  • crisis of reproduction (vgl. p.181)

  • the new technologies contribute to a further devaluation of everyday life (p.181)

  • life expectancy is diminishing as daily experience is characterized by a profound sense of alienation, anxiety, and fear → mental disorders (p.181)

  • domestic work is extremely isolating (p.182)

• urban gardens, community-supported agriculture, time banks (p.182)

• Deprivatize our daily lives - pave the way for a world where care for others can become a creative task rather that a burden (break down isolation, create solidarity bonds) (p.184)

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Re-enchanting the World: Technology, the Body, and the Construction of the Commons

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• Max Weber in “Science as a Vocation”: “The fate of our times is characterized, above all, by the disenchantment of the world” - referring to the vanishing of the religiouse and the sacred from the world (p.188) ← here: recognize the existence of a logic other than that of capitalist development

• What prevents our suffering from becoming productive of alternatives to capitalism is also the seduction that technology exerts on us, as it appears to give us powers without which it seems impossible to live. (p.188)

• Need to acknowledge the cost of the technological innovations by which we are mesmerized and, above all, to remind us of the knowledges and powers that we have lost with their production and acquisition (p.188)

• Societies not prepared to scale down their use of industrial technology must face ecological catastrophes, competition for diminishing resources, and a growing sense of despair about the future of the earth and the meaning of our presence on it. (p.188)

• “re-enchantment” = to reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies, enabling us not only to escape the gravitational pull pf capitalism but to regain a sense of wholeness in our lives. (p.189)

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Technology, the Body, and Autonomy

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• Federici argues that the seduction that technology exerts on us is the effect of the impoverishment - economic, ecological, cultural - that five centuries of capitalist development have produced on our lives. (...) It has devalued the activities by which our bodies and minds are reconstituted after being consumed in the work process and has overworked the earth to the point that it is increasingly incapable of sustaining our life. (p.189)

• ... it becomes difficult for us to assess the full cost of any new forms of production (p.190)

• Otto Ulrich (German sociologist): “Only modern technology´s capacity to transfer its costs over considerable times and spaces and our consequent inability to see the suffering caused by our daily usage of technological devices allow the myth that technology generates prosperity to persist. (3) (p.190)

• the generalization of the capitalist application of science would only be possible if another planet were available for more plunder and pollution (4). (p.190)

• ... This is the loss produced by the long history of capitalist assault on our capacities that millions of years of evolutionary development in close relation with nature have sedimented in us, which constitute one of the main sources of our resistance to exploitation. → the need for sin, wind, sky, touching, smelling, sleeping, making love, and being in the open air, instead of being surrounded by closed walls. (p.190)

• Insistence on the discursive construction of the body has made us loose sight of this reality. Yet this accumulated structure of needs and desires is the precondition of our social reproduction and has been a powerful limit to the exploitation of labor. (...) Capitalism had to wage a war against our body, making it a signifier for all that is limited, material, and opposed to reason (5). (p.190)

• Foucault´s ontological primacy of resistance: can be explained on the basis of a constitutive interaction between our bodies and an “outside” - call it the cosmos, the world of nature - that has been immensely productive of capacities and collective visions and imagination, though obviously mediated through social/cultural interaction. (p.190)

• Also the most important scientific discoveries have originated in precapitalist societies, in which people´s lives were profoundly shaped at all levels by a daily interaction with nature. (p.191)

• ... the great impoverishment that we have undergone in the course of capitalist development, for which no technological device has compensated. (p.191) (reading the elements, navigating through nature, being guided by the stars) The development of capitalist industrial technologies has been built on that loss and has amplified it. (p.191)

• Federici in Caliban and the Witch: the mechanization of the world was premised on and preceded by the mechanization of the human body... (p.191)

• It is important to remember that technologies are not neural devices but involve specific systems of relations, “particular social and physical infrastructures”(12), as well as disciplinary and cognitive regimes capturing and incorporating the most creative aspects of living labor used in the production process (digital technologies). (p.191)

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• Computerization

  • what computerization has required casts a long shadow over any optimistic view of the information revolution and knowledge-based society. It has also increased the military capacity of the capitalist class and its surveillance of our work and lives (p.192)

  • has neither reduced the workweek nor burden of physical work. We work now more than ever (Japan: “death by work”) (p.192)

  • the abstraction and regimentation of work is reaching its completion and so is our alienation and desocialization (p.192)

  • the level of stress digital labor is producing can be measured by the epidemic of mental illnesses - depression, panic, anxiety, attention deficit, dyslexia - now typical in most technologically advanced countries like the U.S. → a refusal to become machine-like and make capital´s plans our own. (17) (p.192)

  • Julian de La Mettrie´s idea of the “man-machine” (p.192)

  • illusion of interconnectivity and the production of a new type of isolation and new forms of distancing and separation (p.192)

  • every move we make is being monitored, registered, and possibly punished; social relations have broken down, as we spend weeks in front of our screens; communication has become more superficial as the attraction of immediate response replaces pondered letters with superficial exchanges; impatience is growing in our daily interactions with other people, as these cannot math the velocity of the machine (p.192-3)

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• Social Media platforms can bring thousands of people to the streets, but only if thy are already mobilized. (p.193)

• The way we come together is free a fruit of a desire for the other, for body-to-body- communication, and for a shared process of reproduction (p.193)

• the internet can be a facilitator, but transformative activity is not triggered by the information passed online; we need to solve problems together and affirm ourselves of our collective power (p.193)

• In reality, the regions less technologically advanced from a capitalist viewpoint are today those in which political struggle is most intense and most confident in the possibility of changing the world. (p.193)

• Sam Moyo “re-peasantization”

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Other reasons

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• In the industrialized countries, as well, as Chris Carlsson has documented in his “Nowtopia”, more people are seeking alternatives to a life regulated by work and the market, both because in a regime of precarity work can no longer be a source of identity formation and because of their need to be more creative. (p.195)

• a search for new models of protest and new relations between human beings and between human beings and nature (p.195)

• gender identity, the rise of the transsexual and intersex movements and the queer rejection of gender, with its implied rejection of the sexual division of labor (p.195) → breakdowns of disciplinary mechanisms and a profound desire for a remoulding of our humanity in ways different from those that capitalist industrial discipline has tried to impose in us. (p.195)

• As such, reproductive work potentially generates a deeper understanding of the natural constraints with which we operate on this planet, which is essential to the re-enchantment of the world I propose. (p.195)