Tag: capitalism

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Communiqués

Bifo: ‘Lesson of Insurrection’ by Franco Berardi Bifo. A call to revolt on a European scale.

I would like to talk about something that everybody knows, but that, so it seems, no one has the boldness to say. That is, that the time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt.

Arise. In the dictionary, the word ‘Insurrection’ is described in different ways. But I stick to the etymology. To me, the word insurrection means to rise up, it means to take on ourselves our dignity as human beings, as workers, as citizens in an uncompromising way. But it also means something else. It means to fully unfold the potency of the body and of collective knowledge, of society, of the net, of intelligence. To entirely unfold what we are, in a collective way. This is the point. Those who say that insurrection is a utopia are sometimes cynics, sometimes just idiots. Those who say that it is not possible to revolt, don’t take into account the fact that, to us, almost everything is possible. Only, this ‘almost everything’ is subjugated by the miserable obsession for profit and accumulation. The obsession for profit and accumulation led our country and all European countries to the verge of a terrifying catastrophe, into which we are now sinking, and we should realize we are already quite far into it. It is the catastrophe of barbarism and ignorance.

In Italy, the reform of the Berlusconi government and of his crawlers has already taken 8 billion euros away from the school, university and the education system, and soon it will take away even more. Everyone knows what the consequences will be, and not only in Brera, which is still a privileged place within the Italian education system. I have also taught in 3 or 4 other schools in this country, and I know what are, for example, the consequences of the reform of the crawler-minister Gelmini for an evening school for adults in Bologna. The Gelmini reform meant that the available budget for that school has shrunk to one third of that of three years ago. In the face of this process of devastation and barbarization produced by this reform, we can’t continue complaining. We must say: first of all, you all have to go, then we will take care of it. They have to go, just like the citizens of Tunis and Cairo said. I don’t know how the revolutions and insurrections in the Arab countries will end. A lot is up to us, I believe: whether or not Europe will be able to open a secular and innovative perspective. I don’t know how it will end up, but I know that they revolted and they won. What did they do? They said: we won’t leave this place. We won’t leave this square, we won’t leave this station, we won’t leave this parliament. We won’t leave until the tyrant and his crawlers go. This is what we have to say, what we have to do. By the end of spring 2011, this is what has to happen in Italy. We will occupy the central train stations in Milan, in Bologna and we will hold them until the tyrant and his crawlers will go.

But the tyrant and his crawlers are not the real problem. The real problem is an obsession, embodied in financial power, in the power of banks and in the idea that the life of society, the pleasure, well-being and culture of society is worthless. The only worthy things are accounting books, the profits of a minuscule class of exploiters and murderers. From our point of view, at the moment, these two problems, that of the tyrant and of his crawlers and that of the European financial dictatorship are one single problem. But we must understand that it would be useless to get rid of the tyrant and of his crawlers, if their places were taken by the murderers, by people like D’Alema or Fini, who are just as responsible. The destruction of the Italian school did not start with the tyrant and his crawlers. From what I know, it started with the Rivola Law, of which few have memory. It was a law issued in 1995 by the Emilia Romagna region, and it was the first law to give private schools the right to receive public funding. That is, it opened the door to the destruction of the public school and the sanctification of private universities such as Cepu.

So, there is one immediate problem: to hold the country, the squares and stations until the tyrant and his crawlers will go. But at the same time we have to be aware that power, true power, is no longer held in Rome. The Minister of Economy, Tremonti, said this. In an interview that appeared in La Repubblica on 30 September 2011, Tremonti replied to a silly journalist, who was trying to criticize him and instead fell in his trap, saying: ‘Why are you so angry at the Berlusconi government? Listen, we don’t decide anything. Decisions are taken in Brussels.’ Well, we don’t know it very well – who should tell us? La Repubblica, maybe? – but since 1st January 2011 the economic, social and financial decisions over individual countries such as Italy, France, Portugal or Greece are no longer taken by national parliaments. They are taken by a financial committee, formally constituted at European level. This is the rule and the ferocious application of the neoliberal, monetarist principle, according to which the only worthy things are bank profits and nothing else. It is in the name of growth, of accumulation and profit at the European level, that you are forced to live a shit life. And your life will be more and more of a shit life, if you do not rebel today, tomorrow, immediately! Because with every passing day your life increasingly, inevitably becomes a shit life.

They say: insurrection is a dangerous word. I repeat: arms are not implicit in the word insurrection, because arms are not our thing, for a number of reasons. First of all, because we don’t know where they are kept, secondly because we know that somebody has them, thirdly because we know that there are professional armies ready to kill, like they killed in Genova in 2001 and many other times. So, this is not the kind of confrontation we are looking for. We know that our weapons are those of intelligence and critique, but also the weapon of technology. For example, we learnt Wikileaks’ lesson, and we know that it is not only a lesson on sabotage and information; it is also a lesson about the infinite power of networked intelligence. This is where we will re-start. We know how to do it, how to enter your circuits, how to sabotage them, but we also know how those circuits – which are not yours, are ours – can be useful for our wealth, our pleasure, our well-being, our culture. This could be the use of those circuits that the collective intelligence produced and that capitalism stole, privatized, impoverished, that capitalism uses against us. This is the meaning of insurrection: to take possession of what is ours, to perform a necessary action of recognition of the collective body, which for too long has been paralyzed in front of a screen and needs to find itself again in a Tahrir Square.

An American journalist, Roger Cohen, wrote in a clever article: ‘Thank you Mubarak, because with your resistance you allowed the Egyptian people, who hadn’t talked to each others for years, to stay in that square for weeks and weeks.’ Like in wars, also during revolutions there are moments of boredom, and during those moments what is there to do? Talk to each other, touch each other, make love. Discovering the collective body, which has been paralyzed for too long. We will say ‘Tank you Berlusconi’, after weeks spent fighting on the streets of Italy. Afterwards, from the moment when the collective body will have awakened, the process of self-organization of the collective mind will begin. This is the insurrection I am calling you to. This is the insurrection that could even start from the Brera Academy, on a day in March 2011. Because the problem is that everyone knows what I just said. Maybe they don’t say it in such detail, but they know it. All that is necessary is to say: it is possible. There are millions of us, thinking this way. So, the next time 300,000 of us will take on the streets, let’s no go back home at the end of the day. Let’s go on the streets with our sleeping bags, knowing that on that night we won’t sleep in our beds. This is the first step, this is the step we need to take. It’s easy! Then, the rest is complicated…

I have almost finished my lecture. I just want to come back to this place. This initiative of mine was born within the situation you all know. Students, lecturers, technicians, precarious workers at the Brera Academy, like those in any other school or university in Italy or abroad, they all know well what is happening. They know that, beyond a complex dance made of ‘I’ll give it you / no I won’t give it to you / maybe I will / but not tomorrow’, beyond the smoke screen of incomprehensible baroquisms, the problem is that there is no more money. How is this possible? What happened? How come all that money disappeared? Brera used to be loaded. It’s all gone. One could say: but Europe is rich, how come all of a sudden there’s no money? Europe is rich, with millions of technicians, poets, doctors, inventors, specialized factory workers, nuclear engineers… How come we became so poor? What happened? Something very simple happened. The entire wealth that we produced was poured into the strongboxes of a minuscule minority of exploiters. This is what happened! The whole mechanism of the European financial crisis was finalized towards the most extraordinary movement of wealth that history has seen, from society towards the financial class, towards financial capitalism. This is what happened! So, what is now happening in Brera is just a small piece, one aspect of the immense movement of wealth, our wealth, the wealth of collective intelligence, which is now being counted inside the strongboxes of the banks.

Well, we decide to pay some attention to the banks. And I communicate to you that from this moment, I, as a professor at Brera, will hold my classes inside a bank. My next lecture will be held on 25th March just there, inside the building of the Credit Agricole. It will be held there. Behind this statue, of which we can now see the ass, on the other side of the square there is a bank where I ask to hold my next lecture, on 25th March, at 11.30am. I’m not doing this because I am a deranged individualist. Well, I might also be a deranged individualist… But the reason why I took this decision and I communicated it to you is that in Europe, it has now been constituted the Knowledge Liberation Front. Maybe these kids could have been a little less rhetorical… The Knowledge Liberation Front called a teach-in in 40 European cities, on March 25th. First of all in London, because, as you know, after many years, on March 26 there will be a general strike in the U.K. This is because the U.K. is now under an exceptionally strong storm of financial violence, and thus on March 26th they will strike and will take on the streets. The day before, the Knowledge Liberation Front will perform 40 teach-ins in 40 European cities. In London, but also in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, Madrid, Bologna, Milan and many other cities. We will do something very simple: we will dress smart, will go to the offices of a bank, will sit on the ground, will take out a banana, a cappuccino and a panini, just like civilized people do, and we will talk about molecular biology, about Goethe, we will read Faust, we will read poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, someone will talk about the poetics of Kandinsky and someone else about nuclear physics. This is what we will do on 25th March, in 40 European cities. Because the time has come for the society of Europe to become, once again, what it could have been in several moments of its history: purely and simply a civil society. Thank you.

Translation and subtitles: Federico Campagna, Anna Galkina, Manlio Poltronieri

Categories
Communiqués

BIFO: Brera a call to teach in European banks

by FRANCO BIFO BERARDI

The Italian government, in perfect agreement with the European central Bank is destroying the school, particularly the Brera Academy where I am precariously teaching media sociology.

The following lines are my contribution to the discussion among the teacher of this school. As I’m expected to start my course in Brera on March 14th, I want to understand if I should prepare my lectures. My answer is: no. I’ll go to the Brera Academy, on March 14th at 11.30, but I’ll not talk about cybercultures, as scheduled. I’ll talk about a different subject: how to organize a insurrection, because this is the only intersting subject at the moment.
The “riforma Gelmini” is cutting 8 billions euros in the Italian school system. The effect is easy to see, and in the next years the definancing of the school is going to produce misery ignorance and violence.
It’s not an Italian problem: in the UK thousands and thousands of students are leaving their schools as the taxes have become impossible to pay, while five hundred thousand public workers are waiting to be fired, and the british society is falling in a nightmare of devastation.
Therefore we should forget that the Milano Academy of Brera can be saved through some negotiations. The only way now is to fight against the financial dictatorship that is oppressing  European society as Gheddafi and Mubarak have been oppressing Arab people.
Is this a task too difficult for the teachers of Brera? Yes, it is, but we are not alone. Millions of worker, all over Europe, – in the school, in the factories, in the hospitals and inn the social services – are facing a choice between misery and revolt, between radical struggle and depression. This is the moment to prepare insurrection. It’s better to be frank on this point: our future is over, as the future of our students, unless we forget fear and dare to fight for the right to teaching, and the right to studying, and the right to a decent salary, and for our dignity.
Discussing with the bureaucrats of the Brera school is useless, as they are only the tool of a devastating projects they cannot change at all. Useful is to occupy a square, a station, a parliament, and stay there as long as the government of mafia will be chased away, as long as the  Trichet-Sarkozy-Merkel directorate will have been defeated. Is this prospect too much?
May be, but we have to be radical, as the situation has become extreme.
The Knowledge liberation front gathered in Paris Saint Denis on February 12th and called to a day of teach in in the banks of many European cities on March 25th. In London they are already doing this: groups of students and researchers go into the bank, and they occupy the place and read poems, and discuss molecular biology, and talk about their problems, and eat something, and sleep.

Occupying banks has to  become a daily practice. Is it  dangerous? It is, but it is more dangerous to wait for somebody to come and help us to have jobs and money and schools and house, when financial capitalism is destroying our lives. Financial capitalism has declared war against society.

We cannot avoid this war, but we can win.

I beg your pardon if my language may seem emphatically tragic. Unfortunately the tragedy is not an effect of my imagination.

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Features

Ask About An Autonomous University: 5 Exam Questions For Life

When I talk about the current crisis with people who use universities, I like to find out what they want, so I ask questions. Since I can’t imagine a level of funding that would make the education industry tolerable under capitalism, I ask how we can imagine simultaneous occupation of and withdrawal from school. Common university ideology makes us feel that our work is a labor of love, yet resentment and fear fill our days. Exhaustion grips us to such an extent that we have no choice but to withdraw, but rather than fleeing into our families, the latest 3D entertainment or the hippest new bar, perhaps we could collectively seek refuge in an autonomous school we might tolerably call our own. Perhaps such a university could somehow open a future.

I ask soft questions at first, leaving more difficult issues for others to ask in discussion. Starting with our immediate desires for working and learning allows a group to wonder about the kind of world an autonomous university needs and might help to produce. Almost always, someone, usually an undergraduate, wants to know how militancy can become part of education and how a school might become a dynamic seed of revolutionary change. Someone else, usually a faculty or staff member, usually asks what sorts of change would be needed so that a parent who needs time wouldn’t have to worry about child care. In order to answer that question, the group has to imagine radical restructuring of what it means to live and work at a school.

All of these questions ask how we can imagine a university independent of the state and designed by our desires: a communized school. Most people think this crazy at first. Then they start to fantasize. The gap between what they really want and what they currently have to do to participate in universities starts to educate us about the challenges we face. More importantly, our fantasies could be realized if we stopped attending to our masters. Our bosses say that outside of science and business education, the university doesn’t produce anything worth paying for. I choose to take them at their word and suggest we let them try to live without us.


1) Why are we interested in continuing to work in universities as they are?

If we remain at our jobs for our paychecks, let’s admit it. Compensation for students, staff and faculty dwindles every year while our workload increases. Recently, group of department heads at my institution proposed unpaid furloughs and increased teaching loads to help solve the schools financial woes. Such an offer assumes that we love teaching and learning. Surely we do, but we can also imagine ways to act on that love other than by rendering ourselves daily to an institution that betrays the very premises of education and makes every creative act painfully frustrating. We must sort aspects of our current situation that we value from the conditions that revolt us.


2) How can temporary autonomous schools be made more stable without becoming institutions?

We can think of many examples of temporary autonomous zones within and around universities: reading groups, support forums, certain kinds of exhibitions, self-funded film series, informal athletic communities etc., etc. Historically, in times of extreme hardship such as the Russian revolution, classes taught by figures like Lev Kuleshov became autonomous zones because there weren’t any institutions to receive support from. The glories of 1920s Soviet cinema emerged from Kuleshov’s winter classes in a roofless room without a projector, camera or film stock. One might also think of the Bahktin Circle from which works emerged as powerful as Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Marxism And The Philosophy Of Language, and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. After the revolutionary the period, what had been autonomous became institutional once again. How can we learn and live without reifying ourselves and reproducing our current hardships within yet another system?


3) What role does accreditation play in what we do?

People often tell us that even if we could occupy the buildings of a university and build our own curriculum there, we would lack legitimacy. Accreditation mostly serves as a sign that a school can legitimately create a hierarchy of job candidates for employers. As labor at all levels become increasingly precarious, a degree and a high GPA become increasingly expensive but illegitimate commodities. If jobs don’t exist, a degree can’t help us get them. The idea that education aims at employment lacks any legitimacy in the first place. Many faculty members got into the business partly out of a profound discomfort with the lived experience of capitalism. We all must eat and care for our children. Can we imagine a way to do so and have the world respect us without serving as a motor of social reproduction in a system that makes so many of us want to flee?


4) Would autonomous universities evaluate learning?

An autonomous university might not have grades. Perhaps the faculty would be able to acknowledge that they learn as much as the students do. Perhaps the students would be able to be open and honest about what they get out of their experiences at the school. Like accreditation, grades serve to differentiate the labor force while rendering future workers servile. To add insult to injury, of all the onerous tasks current universities demand, those who do it complain about grading the most. We can think of more productive forms of feedback.


5) How can the exploitative character of self-administration be corrected?

Aside from the utterly unnecessary managers, underpaid women do most university secretarial work. In the late 1980s and the 1990s universities used personal computers to shift some of the administrative burden onto faculty members without compensating them for the work. Teachers became more exploited and many secretaries became unemployed. Today’s institutions oblige faculty not just to print out their own syllabi and do their own accounting, they also require teachers to use poorly designed web-based learning software for every class and help build the departmental websites, creating more work while salaries get reduced. Perhaps in a university we could call our own, administration would take a different form.


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Features

Masks, or The Illusion of Power

The following text is a script for a participatory performance. Copies of the text are handed out to the audience and volunteers are asked to read aloud the questions that are underlined along with the performer. The script was first performed at the UCIRA conference State of the Arts at UCSD on 11/20/2010.

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down. –Ellwood Cubberly, Public School Administration, 1916 quoted in School is a Factory by Allan Sekula, 1980.

The students’ movement in California and around the US is a real opening for radical politics. It raises basic questions about what society has become and where it is going. I am a long-term critic of neoliberalism, I am convinced that this form of capitalism is totally unsustainable and unlivable. Since, however, it is squarely installed in the realms of knowledge, culture and information — since it is cognitive capitalism — it seems there is no more strategic point for opposition than the universities. That doesn’t mean that every point of opposition is not important, just that this one could become crucial if enough people would raise the basic questions of value, what’s society good for, how am I participating, which consequences does that have on others, etc. Those kinds of questions form the basis of the practical philosophy that interests me. –Brian Holmes in an interview by Michael Wilson  (http://occupyeverything.com/features/interview-with-brian-holmes-steps-toward-a-cultural-strategy/)

“a) The struggle for public education is a struggle against privatization throughout the economy, against the exclusions of the marketplace, and finally against an economy based on private resources.

b) The defense of staff and adjunct teachers is part of a program against the precaritization of workers’ lives in every sector.

c) The student (witness the recent revelations about the scope of student debt) is not a privileged case but a true subject of the market in its credit-fueled plunderings of the future — and the fight against capitalism will necessarily happen on campuses, among other places. –via facebook by Joshua Clover

“A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic.” -Joseph Brodsky


Thanks everyone for coming and thanks to the organizers of the conference. I would like to dedicate my time today to reflecting on my engagement – both individually and collectively – with the struggles around the meaning of public education over the past year and in doing so I hope to consider what I see as an unresolved tensions within this struggle that are both productive and debilitating. And those are, in part, the tensions around symbolic action and modes of engagement – The tensions that surround the meaning of public education when what constitutes ‘the public’ is itself a contested term full of the sorts of antagonisms that animate collective fictions. By focusing on the arc of my own involvement in this struggle I hope not to engage in a kind of narcissistic blow by blow of the last year or so but rather to re-examine my experiences in light of questions that faced and still face those of us who seek to link the struggles around public education with a broad social, political and economic climate and the ways that the university administration manages various forms of resistance to privatization.

I warn you in advance that some listeners may find a certain naivete and redundancy in what follows but what I would like to say, without a hint of anti-intellectualism, is that I’m looking to avoid further mystification without oversimplifying the complexity of our predicament. I should also say by way of introduction something about my format. When I proposed this talk for the conference I was under investigation by Labor relations at UCR for my involvement with the website which announced Mark Yudof’s resignation last March. I’ve structured this presentation in an intentionally open ended way so that we might have a conversation and really use the experiences and questions that I present as a starting point. I don’t want to preach to the choir here and I do think that we have to ask difficult questions of ourselves so that as the administration puts the final touches on dismantling the UC system as we know it, this conference does not become hamstrung by hand wringing OR by patting ourselves on the back. The question is not only WHAT TO DO NOW but also how do we move from protest to action, from managed, reactionary politics towards spaces of potential?

On september 24th last year, after making a number of protest signs and teaching an abridged version of my web-based art class at UCR, I encouraged my class to attend the rally together which was beginning to form just outside of the art building. I had already spent a large portion of the class explaining the so-called crisis as I understood it then, the logic of the walk-out and I made what I thought was a rational appeal to my students: namely that the interests of staff, faculty and students were being undermined in the name of austerity and efficiency. This logic, I explained, could only be countered by a large demonstration of refusal. Most of my students wandered off sheepishly and the rally, though organized with good intentions and a sense of commitment, was poorly attended and felt more like a rehearsal than an event. Meanwhile other campuses saw rallies attended by thousands and the building occupations that have given this “struggle” such as it is, its real meaning and charge. One of the questions I faced was how to activate meaningful struggle on a campus that seemed and still seems almost oblivious to the gravity of the present-day dynamics of the university.

Between that September day and the regents meeting at UCLA in November was a crucial germination period in terms of my own thinking about what the stakes of this particular struggle represent. A teach-in in Berkeley – still available on youtube – set out very clearly that in fact everything was and is at stake. Wendy Brown, the renowned political scientist, suggested the legacy of prop 13 and 30 years of right wing propaganda have ushered in a political moment in which we risk absolutely every aspect of human experience being reduced to equations of dollars and cents. And I probably don’t need to tell all of you that we are fighting, to put it very bluntly, to stop the utter commodification of absolutely everything. The 50,000 students marching in London last week and the relatively timid actions in CA this week, are loud reminders that this is only the beginning of that struggle…

The day of the November regents meeting at UCLA last year was perhaps the decisive moment in my understanding of this struggle… I recall vividly walking between a large confrontational protest in front of the building where the regents were approving the 32% fee hike with students linking arms defiantly in front of cops in full riot gear. The scene was tense and vital but also predictable. Both the cops and those of us protesting had rehearsed our roles many time before… if not literally then in some cinematic, phantasmagorically inflected dream. On the other side of campus, students had occupied a building, issued a beautifully open statement, and renamed the building after two murdered black panthers bunchy carter and John Huggins. The space around the building was mysteriously quiet. I tried to enter but was not allowed in… I stood outside in solidarity and argued with the odd passerby who was willing to engage with me about the merits of the occupation. Towards the end of the day I drove home in the blank and contorted traffic of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, the place that Jason Brown describes as “a hellscape of ash and banality, a metastasizing agglomeration of darkness and pain, a fungal architecture engulfing the earth in erasures and hyperrealities…” So… when our actions become too rehearsed, we search for ways to re-animate our own sense of what constitutes collective, direct action. We try to shake off the distracted paralysis and the tormented mask. We look for ways to inject into our cynical narratives moments of off kilter gestures, we try to most of all to surprise ourselves. But on that November day I wrote: “Some say the economy is shattered. I say the economy shatters us all. At least for today. Today is an economy of shatters. Or, shattering, today is an economy of alternative economies.”

It was a desire to overcome the stale habits of protest, retaining of course a spark of that oppositional spirit, that led me to think about strategic ways to push the meaning of the struggle elsewhere… or everywhere. Conversations and communication with Marc Herbst, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Caleb Waldorf, Sean Dockray, Micha Cardenas, Michael Wilson, Brett Stalbaum and Ricardo Dominguez gave me the impetus and the inspiration to buy the domain name markyufof.com and begin thinking “what to do?” How best to use this site and when? How best intervene in and interfere with the impoverished symbolic logic and economy of the university? How best to target those who turn a crisis of priorities into a budget crisis? How to extend the logic and spirit of the building occupations? How to “occupy everything?” as we decided to put it…
The thing that surprised me most on the morning of March 3, when yudof’s resignation site was made public was the speed with which events unfolded. Threads began to circulate on discussion boards:

– this is a gag, right. probably would be a good idea to hold the jokes for a while. too many jokers around who don’t know when something is not funny.(ucsd)

– This is funny. “I have decided to go back to school to study the history of social movements.” as if…

–Is this a joke? I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone? Is it April 1st?

– Read it more closely…. and see links to “occupy everything ” , “destroy capitalism ” and the like……??Well done, authors! You had me going

– If ONLY it was true. And in this hyper-reality, who knows, who knows?

And it was only a couple of hours before I received an e-mail from the office of strategic communications at UCR, cc’d to the chair of the art department Charles Long:


Hi to both,
We have a problem. A Web site pretending to say that Yudof has resigned can
be traced back to Ken Ehrlich and the UC art department.

Anything we can do about getting that down?

We have one media request already and we are likely to see more….

Thanks, Kris

Kris Lovekin
Director of Media Relations
Office of Strategic Communications

The question of anonymity, or the potential for certain forms of digital masking, quickly came to the foreground. When I purchased the domain name, I chose not make the domain information private. This was a quick decision, not without consideration, but also not entirely cognizant of the ramifications of this choice. Even though the site was hosted through the BANGLAB server here at UCSD with the support and encouragement of Ricardo and Micha and Brett, a quick web search revealed me as the owner of the domain. As the gesture played out in the media, I was trying to strike a delicate balance: I did not want to claim sole credit for the project in a way that would take away from the idea of using yudof’s “power’ in the media and directing it towards the actions in support of public education scheduled for March 4. I also felt that the longer the gesture played ambiguously in the media, the more attention it would generate. In an effort to strike the right balance, when media relations asked me “if there was anything I could do about getting it down” I changed the domain registration to private and wrote back, saying that the site should no longer be connected to me or UCR. Later when the investigation was underway, and I went public asking for support and citing Ricardo’s idea of radical transparency, this caused some confusion. The fact is that I never explicitly denied my involvement, I simply attempted to mask it slightly in an attempt to give the gesture more legs.

The local chapter of the AFT, the union that represents lecturers and librarians across the campuses, was completely supportive and immediately and assertively working with me to end the labor relations investigation as soon as it began. Letters of support poured in from around the country and all over the world. As amazing as the showing of support was, the question quickly became: How to use the energy and organizing around the investigations and turn it towards a continued activation of the struggle to re-imagine public education? The administration seemed to be using investigations as a means to suppress dissent. Was the goal of the investigation meant to have a chilling effect on protest as much as it was to persecute my individual actions? Certainly potentially losing my job was consequence I could not take lightly – and the criminal investigation that ricardo, micha, brett and bang lab were facing even more so – but the investigations became a distraction from many people using creative energy and time from organizing, agitating and articulating ways forward in the face of a bureaucratic and managerial structure whose main purpose it seems is to reinforce the narrow logic of administration and by extension, capital accumulation for the few and massive debt for the many. In this way, the investigations themselves became mired in the machinations of endless memos, meetings, conference calls and corporate communications. There might be an argument to be made that if the university were so bogged down by endless investigations into similar activities, the bureaucratic structure might fall in on itself in some sort of Kafkaesque joke, but as we’ve seen, so far the university has proven remarkably fluent at maintaining high levels of managerial gravitas and public relations flim flam.

After one tense meeting and months of waiting, anticipation and silence from the administration, I finally in July received a counseling memo. I definitely need counseling of all sorts, but I couldn’t help wonder about the semiotic implications of declaring me the counseled one. I suppose it’s better than rehabilitated. The memo encouraged me, in the course of my research, to be careful to abide by University policy and cited two specific violations of that policy. One was impersonating a university official. Clearly satire is not impersonation. Second, I improperly used the seal of the university. The authenticating image that ironically enough reads “let there be light” is of course meant to be used after receiving proper approval and signifies the real in the domain of the University.

One of the most successful aspects of the gesture, admittedly quite limited in scope given the dynamics at hand, was that it forced the members of my department to have a series of difficult conversations about the website and ultimately come out in public either in support of me and the work (as most chose to do) or implicitly identify themselves as complicit with the corporate logic of the University. With some notable exceptions, in the last year faculty across the campuses have been remarkably complacent and uncreative in responding to this series of assaults on public education that have now resulted in a 40% fee hike, furloughs, layoffs, etc.. The question is why? Have faculty members either fully internalized the corporate logic of the university or do they imagine that they can hold onto whatever position thru this storm without causing a fuss? What else goes on in the minds of faculty members who are disengaged and silent?? Do faculty and students perceive engagement in the terrain of education as just another demand? Be more rigorous, more political, more engaged, funnier, more media savvy, more politically adroit, more sensitive to race, gender and sexuality. Since rebellion is packaged and re-packaged as a refusal to submit to demands, whether they are familial, cultural or political, do faculty and students imagine disengagement itself as a form of protest? Part of what I wanted to say with the website, either symbolically or otherwise, was that Yudof does not have power unless we reaffirm it. The mask he wears is one that we help sustain…. I had little faith that yudof or the regents or the stunted bureaucracy of the administration would respond favorably to protest… But masks are ambiguous. Unmasking power does not reveal some formerly unseen truth, it reveals hidden or partially eclipsed potential. Students and faculty absolutely have the potential to structure the terms of the battle and, again with a few exceptions, we have failed to do so… How then, playfully, absurdly or otherwise, to transform masks of power?

Now I would like to step back to ask a series of questions specifically in relation to the arts. Given that traditionally and historically images have always had a charged relationship to truth claims, how can we possibly frame or understand critical image making in relation to the utterly fragmented and spectacular information overload that is endemic to cognitive or cultural capitalism? As the cops and students compete to analyze video and photographs of tense standoffs are we once again, as artists, caught up in debates about the relativism of meaning in relation to images? Does the political landscape of the university itself become a series of abstract images?

An artist whose own work is instructive in thinking through these problems is Allan Sekula. In particular his 1978 project School is a Factory points out some of the historical remnants of critical image making in relation to the politics of education. As a scholar of photography and an image maker, Sekula uses sophisticated prose to situate and problemitize his own photographs, relying on language to lift images out of the abstract and ambiguous space in which they circulate culturally.

Part of Sekula’s strategy in school is a factory is polemic, perhaps one that underestimates the complexities and nuances of power, for strategic ends. And here I will quote Sekula at length:

We have been led by the champions of corporate liberalism to believe that schooling and the media are instruments of freedom. Accordingly, these institutions are seen to fulfill the democratic promise of the enlightenment by bringing knowledge and upward social mobility within reach of everyone, by allowing each individual to reach his or her own limits. This ideology hides the relentless sorting function performed by school and the media. Both institutions serve to legitimate and reproduce a strict hierarchy of power relations, tracking individuals into places in a complex social division of labor while suggesting that we have only ourselves to blame for our failures. School and the media effectively situate most people in a culture and economy over which they have no control, and thus are mechanisms by which an “enlightened” few promote the subtle silencing of the many.


School and the media are inherently discursive institutions, sites within which discourse becomes a locus of symbolic force, of symbolic violence. A communicative relation is established between teacher and student, performer and audience, in which the first part, as the purveyor of official “truths,” exerts an institutional authority over the second. Students and audience are reduced the status of passive listeners, rather than active subjects of knowledge. Resistance is almost always limited only to the possibility of tuning out. Domination depends on a monologue of sorts, a “conversation” in which one party names and directs the other, while the the other listens deferentially, docilely, resentfully, perhaps full of suppressed rage. When the wholly dominated listener turns to speak, it is with the internalized voice of the master. This is the dynamic of of all oppressions of race, gender and class. All dominating power functions semiotically through the naming of the other as subordinate, dependent, incomplete as a human being without the master’s discipline and support. Clearly such relationships can be overthrown; the discourse of domination finds its dialectical antagonist in a discourse and practice of liberation. Like home, factory, prison and city streets, school and the media are sites of an intense, if often covert, daily struggle in which language and power are inextricably connected.

Sekula’s positioning of education as central to “the sorting function” under capitalism echoes the current demand that we understand the fight for public education in the broadest possible context. Do we defend public education in its current problematic form or do we see the organizing around public education as an opening for an other kind of politics? Certainly we can also draw on Sekula’s strategy here to produce an engaged critique. The work in question was made while Sekula was teaching at a southern CA community college and part of its success and long term meaning is based on his own self implication: For Sekula this is not a detached analysis, but a provocation. A set of questions about institutions from within.

In context, this kind of politically minded artistic work constitutes a move from representation to engagement. While many readings of most so called political art might justifiably render an artwork a simple illustration of nuanced political questions, Sekula’s work demonstrates the potential to imagine forms of artistic engagement that oscillate across aesthetic, subjective and social spheres. Sekula’s practice circulates around the documentary form; while the gesture of a satirical website that plays with the conventions of authenticity is situated in the domain of hyperreality (or whatever other awful term we’ve come up with to describe the contemporary digital landscape). Sekula’s work and this gesture, as different as they might be, both traffic in forms of text and image making in which verifiability and abstraction are central. At the end of the essay that accompanies these images, it is precisely forms of abstraction that Sekula critiques.

There is first the abstraction inherent in what he calls the “supposedly realistic world picture of a bureaucratic, commodity centered society: the abstraction that emerges from the triumph of exchange value over use value, and so on.” And secondly, the abstraction that emerges from the separation of aesthetic culture from the rest of life, the imagined freedom of the disengaged play of signifiers. Against these forms of abstraction, Sekula argues for a kind of political geography. What does this political geography look like? Analyzing the interrelated dynamics of intellectual labor, cultural capital, the rise of a managerial class inextricably linked to the politics of education, Sekula’s designation of political geography is a prescient identification of the territory we currently inhabit. Produced at around the time of prop 13 and before the Reagan era set in, the work stands as both a critique of and a warning against the surge of cognitive capitalism witnessed since the time of it’s production. If Sekula seeks to move from representation to engagement through contextualizing his photographs with text, there are certainly other and perhaps more complex ways to consider engagement. So too must there be other ways of engaging the political geography of the university than creating a satirical website announcing the resignation of a corporate bureaucrat. Far from an exemplary example of a nuanced engagement with the political geography of the University, the yudof website represents an experiment: an attempt to find a form for that kind of engagement.

Directly connected to my teaching digital media the gesture was created at a time when many in the university are re-considering pedagogical strategies. If we are to fundamentally engage the political geography of this place – where we teach, study, learn, socialize, do research, and so many other things – we might begin by asking What constitutes our own assumptions about pedagogy? And how might we continue to integrate experiments in pedagogy into our efforts to dismantle the logic and the structure of a university that does not prioritize education in the broadest sense of the word.

2010 ken@kenehrlich.net

Categories
Communiqués

Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint

Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint
Silvia Federici

Precarious work is a central concept in movement discussions of the capitalist reorganization of work and class relations in today’s global economy. Silvia Federici analyzes the potential and limits of this concept as an analytic and organizational tool. She claims reproductive labor is a hidden continent of work and struggle the movement must recognize in its political work, if it is to address the key questions we face in organizing for an alternative to capitalist society. How do we struggle over reproductive labor without destroying ourselves, and our communities? How do we create a self-reproducing movement? How do we overcome the sexual, racial, and generational hierarchies built upon the wage?

This lecture took place on October 28th 2006 at Bluestockings Radical Bookstore in New York City, 172 Allen Street, as part of the ‘This is Forever: From Inquiry to Refusal Discussion Series’.

Tonight I will present a critique of the theory of precarious labor that has been developed by Italian autonomist Marxists, with particular reference to the work of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and also Michael Hardt. I call it a theory because the views that Negri and others have articulated go beyond the description of changes in the organization of work that have taken place in the 1980s and 1990s in conjunction with the globalization process – such as the “precariazation of work”, the fact that work relations are becoming more discontinuous, the introduction of “flexy time”, and the increasing fragmentation of the work experience. Their view on precarious labor present a whole perspective on what is capitalism and what is the nature of the struggle today. It is important to add that these are not simply the ideas of a few intellectuals, but theories that have circulated widely within the Italian movement for a number of years, and have recently become more influential also in the United States, and in this sense they have become more relevant to us.

History and Origin of Precarious Labor and Immaterial Labor Theory

My first premise is that definitely the question of precarious labor must be on our agenda. Not only has our relationship to waged work become more discontinuous, but a discussion of precarious labor is crucial for our understanding of how we can go beyond capitalism. The theories that I discuss capture important aspects of the developments that have taken place in the organization of work; but they also bring us back to a male-centric conception of work and social struggle. I will discuss now those elements in this theory that are most relevant to my critique.

An important premise in the Italian autonomists’ theory of precarious labor is that the precariazation of work, from the late 1970s to present, has been a capitalist response to the class struggle of the sixties, a struggle that was centered on the refusal of work, of as expressed in the slogan “more money less work”. It was a response to a cycle of struggle that challenged the capitalist command over labor, in a sense realizing the workers’ refusal of the capitalist work discipline, the refusal of a life organized by the needs of capitalist production, a life spent in a factory or in office.

Another important theme is that the precariazation of work relations is deeply rooted in another shift that has taken place with the restructuring of production in the 1980s. This is the shift from industrial labor to what Negri and Virno call “immaterial labor”. Negri and others have argued that the restructuring of production that has taken place in the eighties and nineties in response to the struggles of the sixties has begun a process whereby industrial labor is to be replaced by a different type o work, in the same way as industrial labor replaced agricultural work. They call the new type of work “immaterial labor” because they claim that with the computer and information revolutions the dominant form of work has changed. As a tendency, the dominant form of work in today’s capitalism is work that does not produce physical objects but information, ideas, states of being, relations.

In other words, industrial work – which was hegemonic in the previous phase of capitalist development – is now becoming less important; it is no longer the engine of capitalist development. In its place we find “immaterial labor”, which is essentially cultural work, cognitive work, info work.

Italian autonomists believe that the precarization of work and the appearance of immaterial labor fulfills the prediction Marx made in the Grundrisse, in a famous section on machines. In this section Marx states that with the development of capitalism, less and less capitalist production relies on living labor and more and more on the integration of science, knowledge and technology in the production process as the engines of accumulation. Virno and Negri see the shift to precarious labor as fulfilling this prediction, about capitalism’s historic trend. Thus, the importance of cognitive work and the development of computer work in our time lies in the fact that they are seen as part of a historic trend of capitalism towards the reduction of work.

The precarity of labor is rooted in the new forms of production. Presumably, the shift to immaterial labor generates a precariazation of work relations because the structure of cognitive work is different from that of industrial, physical work. Cognitive and info work rely less on the continuous physical presence of the worker in what was the traditional workplace. The rhythms of work are much more intermittent, fluid and discontinuous.
In sum, the development of precarious labor and shift to immaterial labor are not for Negri and other autonomist Marxists a completely negative phenomenon. On the contrary, they are seen as expressions of a trend towards the reduction of work and therefore the reduction of exploitation, resulting from capitalist development in response to the class struggle. This means that the development of the productive forces today is already giving us a glimpse of a world in which work can be transcended; in which we will liberate ourselves from the necessity to work and enter a new realm of freedom.

Autonomous Marxists believe this development is also creating a new kind of “common” originating from the fact that immaterial labor presumably represents a leap in the socialization and homogeneization of work. The idea is that differences between types of work that once were all important (productive/reproductive work e.g. agricultural/industrial/“affective labor”) are erased, as all types of work (as a tendency) become assimilated, for all begin to incorporate cognitive work. Moreover, all activities are increasingly subsumed under capitalist development, they all serve to the accumulation process, as society becomes an immense factory. Thus (e.g.) the distinction between productive and unproductive labor also vanishes.

This means that capitalism is not only leading us beyond labor, but it is creating the conditions for the “commonization” of our work experience, where the divisions are beginning to crumble. We can see why these theories have become popular. They have utopian elements especially attractive to cognitive workers – the “cognitariat” as Negri and some Italian activists call them. With the new theory, in fact, a new vocabulary has been invented. Instead of proletariat we have the “cognitariat”. Instead of working class, we have the “Multitude”, presumably because the concept of Multitude reveals the unity that is created by the new socialization of work; it expresses the communalization of the work process, the idea that within the work process workers are becoming more homogenized. For all forms of work incorporate elements of cognitive work, of computer work, communication work and so forth.

As I said this theory has gained much popularity, because there is a generation of young activists, with years of schooling and degrees who are now employed in precarious ways in different parts of the culture industry or the knowledge-production industry. Among them these theories are very popular because they tell them that, despite the misery and exploitation we are experiencing, we are nevertheless moving towards a higher level of production and social relations. This is a generation of workers who looks at the “Nine to Five” routine as a prison sentence. They see their precariousness as giving them new possibilities. And they have possibilities their parents did not have or dreamed of. The male youth of today (e.g.) is not as disciplined as their parents who could expect that their wife or partners would depend of them economically. Now they can count on social relationships involving much less financial dependence. Most women have autonomous access to the wage and often refuse to have children.

So this theory is appealing for the new generation of activists, who despite the difficulties of resulting from precarious labor, see within it certain possibilities. They want to start from there. They are not interested in a struggle for full employment. But there is also a difference here between Europe and the US. In Italy (e.g.) there is among the movement a demand for a guaranteed income. They call it “flex security”. They say, we are without a job, we are precarious because capitalism needs us to be, so they should pay for it. There have been various days of mobilization, especially on May 1st, centered on this demand for a guaranteed income. In Milano, on the May Day of this year [2006], movement people have paraded “San Precario”, the patron saint of the precarious worker. The ironic icon is featured in rallies and demonstrations centered on this question of precarity.

Critique of Precarious Labor

I will now shift to my critique of these theories – a critique from a feminist viewpoint. In developing my critique, I don’t want to minimize the importance of the theories I am discussing. They have been inspired by much political organizing and striving to make sense of the changes that have taken place in the organization of work, which has affected all our lives. In Italy, in recent years, precarious labor has been one of the main terrains of mobilization together with the struggle for immigrant rights.

I do not want to minimize the work that is taking place around issues of precarity. Clearly, what we have seen in the last decade is a new kind of struggle. A new kind of organizing is taking place, breaking away from the confines of the traditional workplace. Where the workplace was the factory or the office, we now see a kind of struggle that goes out from the factory to the “territory”, connecting different places of work and building movements and organizations rooted in the territory. The theories of precarious labor are trying to account for the aspects of novelty in the organization of work and struggle; trying to understand the emergent forms of organization.
This is very important. At the same time, I think that what I called precarious labor theory has serious flaws that I already hinted at in my presentation. I will outline them and then discuss the question of alternatives. My first criticism is that this theory is built on a faulty understanding of how capitalism works. It sees capitalist development as moving towards higher forms of production and labor. In Multitude, Negri and Hardt actually write that labor is becoming more “intelligent”. The assumption is that the capitalist organization of work and capitalist development are already creating the conditions for the overcoming of exploitation. Presumably, at one point, capitalism, the shell that keeps society going will break up and the potentialities that have grown within it will be liberated. There is an assumption that that process is already at work in the present organization of production. In my view, this is a misunderstanding of the effects of the restructuring produced by capitalist globalization and the neo-liberal turn.

What Negri and Hardt do not see is that the tremendous leap in technology required by the computerization of work and the integration of information into the work process has been paid at the cost of a tremendous increase of exploitation at the other end of the process. There is a continuum between the computer worker and the worker in the Congo who digs coltan with his hands trying to seek out a living after being expropriated, pauperized, by repeated rounds of structural adjustment and repeated theft of his community’s land and natural sources.

The fundamental principle is that capitalist development is always at the same time a process of underdevelopment. Maria Mies describes it eloquently in her work: “What appears as development in one part of the capitalist faction is underdevelopment in another part”. This connection is completely ignored in this theory; in fact and the whole theory is permeated by the illusion that the work process is bringing us together.

When Negri and Hardt speak of the “becoming common” of work and use the concept of Multitude to indicate the new commonism that is built through the development of the productive forces, I believe they are blind to much of what is happening with the world proletariat. They are blind to not see the capitalist destruction of lives and the ecological environment. They don’t see that the restructuring of production has aimed at restructuring and deepening the divisions within the working class, rather than erasing them. The idea that the development of the microchip is creating new commons is misleading; communalism can only be a product of struggle, not of capitalist production.

One of my criticisms of Negri and Hardt is that they seem to believe that the capitalist organization of work is the expression of a higher rationality and that capitalist development is necessary to create the material conditions for communism. This belief is at the center of precarious labor theory. We could discuss here whether it represents Marx’s thinking or not. Certainly the Communist Manifesto speaks of capitalism in these terms and the same is true of some sections of the Grundrisse. But it is not clear this was a dominant theme in Marx’s work, not at least in Capital.

Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work

Another criticism I have against the precarious labor theory is that it presents itself as gender neutral. It assumes that the reorganization of production is doing away with the power relations and hierarchies that exist within the working class on the basis of rage, gender and age, and therefore it is not concerned with addressing these power relations; it does not have the theoretical and political tools to think about how to tackle them. There is no discussion in Negri, Virno and Hardt of how the wage has been and continues to be used to organize these divisions and how therefore we must approach the wage struggle so that it does not become an instrument of further divisions, but instead can help us undermined them. To me this is one of the main issues we must address in the movement.

The concept of the “Multitude” suggests that all divisions within the working class are gone or are no longer politically relevant. But this is obviously an illusion. Some feminists have pointed out that precarious labor is not a new phenomenon. Women always had a precarious relation to waged labor. But this critique goes far enough.
My concern is that the Negrian theory of precarious labor ignores, bypasses, one of the most important contributions of feminist theory and struggle, which is the redefinition of work, and the recognition of women’s unpaid reproductive labor as a key source of capitalist accumulation. In redefining housework as WORK, as not a personal service but the work that produces and reproduces labor power, feminists have uncovered a new crucial ground of exploitation that Marx and Marxist theory completely ignored. All of the important political insights contained in those analysis are now brushed aside as if they were of no relevance to an understanding of the present organization of production.

There is a faint echo of the feminist analysis – a lip service paid to it – in the inclusion of so called “affective labor” in the range of work activities qualifying as “immaterial labor”. However, the best Negri and Hardt can come up with is the case of women who work as flight attendants or in the food service industry, whom they call “affective laborers”, because they are expected to smile at their customers.

But what is “affective labor?” And why is it included in the theory of immaterial labor? I imagine it is included because – presumably – it does not produce tangible products but “states of being”, that is, it produces feelings. Again, to put it crudely, I think this is a bone thrown to feminism, which now is a perspective that has some social backing and can no longer be ignored.

But the concept of “affective labor” strips the feminist analysis of housework of all its demystifying power. In fact, it brings reproductive work back into the world of mystification, suggesting that reproducing people is just a matter of making producing “emotions”, “feelings”, It used to be called a “labor of love;” Negri and Hardt instead have discovered “affection”.

The feminist analysis of the function of the sexual division of labor, the function of gender hierarchies, the analysis of the way capitalism has used the wage to mobilize women’s work in the reproduction of the labor force – all of this is lost under the label of “affective labor”.

That this feminist analysis is ignored in the work of Negri and Hardt confirms my suspicions that this theory expresses the interests of a select group of workers, even though it presumes to speak to all workers, all merged in the great caldron of the Multitude. In reality, the theory of precarious and immaterial labor speaks to the situation and interests of workers working at the highest level of capitalistic technology. Its disinterest in reproductive labor and its presumption that all labor forms a common hides the fact that it is concerned with the most privileged section of the working class. This means it is not a theory we can use to build a truly self-reproducing movement.

For this task the lesson of the feminist movement is still crucial today. Feminists in the seventies tried to understand the roots of women’s oppression, of women’s exploitation and gender hierarchies. They describe them as stemming from a unequal division of labor forcing women to work for the reproduction of the working class. This analysis was the basis of a radical social critique, the implications of which still have to be understood and developed to their full potential.

When we said that housework is actually work for capital, that although it is unpaid work it contributes to the accumulation of capital, we established something extremely important about the nature of capitalism as a system of production. We established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it is not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised.

Also, when we said that housework is the work that reproduces not just “life”, but “labor-power”, we began to separate two different spheres of our lives and work that seemed inextricably connected. We became able to conceive of a fight against housework now understood as the reproduction of labor-power, the reproduction of the most important commodity capital has: the worker’s “capacity to work”, the worker’s capacity to be exploited. In other words, by recognizing that what we call “reproductive labor” is a terrain of accumulation and therefore a terrain of exploitation, we were able to also see reproduction as a terrain of struggle, and, very importantly, conceive of an anti-capitalist struggle against reproductive labor that would not destroy ourselves or our communities.

How do you struggle over/against reproductive work? It is not the same as struggling in the traditional factory setting, against for instance the speed of an assembly line, because at the other end of your struggle there are people not things. Once we say that reproductive work is a terrain of struggle, we have to first immediately confront the question of how we struggle on this terrain without destroying the people you care for. This is a problem mothers as well as teachers and nurses, know very well.

This is why it is crucial to be able to make a separation between the creation of human beings and our reproduction of them as labor-power, as future workers, who therefore have to be trained, not necessarily according to their needs and desires, to be disciplined and regimented in a particular fashion.
It was important for feminists to see, for example, that much housework and child rearing is work of policing our children, so that they will conform to a particular work discipline. We thus began to see that by refusing broad areas of work, we not only could liberate ourselves but could also liberate our children. We saw that our struggle was not at the expense of the people we cared for, though we may skip preparing some meals or cleaning the floor. Actually our refusal opened the way for their refusal and the process of their liberation.

Once we saw that rather than reproducing life we were expanding capitalist accumulation and began to define reproductive labor as work for capital, we also opened the possibility of a process of re-composition among women. Think for example of the prostitute movement, which we now call the “sex workers” movement. In Europe the origins of this movement must be traced back to 1975 when a number of sex workers in Paris occupied a church, in protest against a new zoning regulation which they saw as an attack on their safety. There was a clear connection between that struggle, which soon spread throughout Europe and the United States, and the feminist movement’s re-thinking and challenging of housework. The ability to say that sexuality for women has been work has lead to a whole new way of thinking about sexual relationships, including gay relations. Because of the feminist movement and the gay movement we have begun to think about the ways in which capitalism has exploited our sexuality, and made it “productive”.

In conclusion, it was a major breakthrough that women would begin to understand unpaid labor and the production that goes on in the home as well as outside of the home as the reproduction of the work force. This has allowed a re-thinking of every aspect of everyday life – child-raising, relationships between men and women, homosexual relationships, sexuality in general – in relation to capitalist exploitation and accumulation.

Creating Self-Reproducing Movements

As every aspect of everyday life was re-understood in its potential for liberation and exploitation, we saw the many ways in which women and women’s struggles are connected. We realized the possibility of “alliances” we had not imagined and by the same token the possibility of bridging the divisions that have been created among women, also on the basis of age, race, sexual preference.

We can not build a movement that is sustainable without an understanding of these power relations. We also need to learn from the feminist analysis of reproductive work because no movement can survive unless it is concerned with the reproduction of its members. This is one of the weaknesses of the social justice movement in the US.
We go to demonstrations, we build events, and this becomes the peak of our struggle. The analysis of how we reproduce these movements, how we reproduce ourselves is not at the center of movement organizing. It has to be. We need to go to back to the historical tradition of working class organizing “mutual aid” and rethink that experience, not necessarily because we want to reproduce it, but to draw inspiration from it for the present.
We need to build a movement that puts on its agenda its own reproduction. The anti-capitalist struggle has to create forms of support and has to have the ability to collectively build forms of reproduction.

We have to ensure that we do not only confront capital at the time of the demonstration, but that we confront it collectively at every moment of our lives. What is happening internationally proves that only when you have these forms of collective reproduction, when you have communities that reproduce themselves collectively, you have struggles that are moving in a very radical way against the established order, as for example the struggle of indigenous people in Bolivia against water privatization or in Ecuador against the oil companies’ destruction of indigenous land.

I want to close by saying if we look at the example of the struggles in Oaxaca, Bolivia, and Ecuador, we see that the most radical confrontations are not created by the intellectual or cognitive workers or by virtue of the internet’s common. What gave strength to the people of Oaxaca was the profound solidarity that tied them with each other – a solidarity for instance that made indigenous people from every part of the state to come to the support of the “maestros”, whom they saw as members of their communities. In Bolivia too, the people who reversed the privatization of water had a long tradition of communal struggle. Building this solidarity, understanding how we can overcome the divisions between us, is a task that must be placed on the agenda. In conclusion then, the main problem of precarious labor theory is that it does not give us the tools to overcome the way we are being divided. But these divisions, which are continuously recreated, are our fundamental weakness with regard to our capacity to resist exploitation and create an equitable society.

From: In the Middle of the Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protest, Movement & Movements.
Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.

Links
http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com
http://www.thisisforever.org
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org
http://bluestockings.com