The Rise of the Creative Class

Capitalism and Freedom

Starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continuing up to the present, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years. From the down fall of the Ottoman Empire, through the turbulent nationalist years of the nineteenth century, up to World War I, the idea of the Balkans was fiercely, often violently, contested. In the wake of WWI, the beginnings of a tradition, largely enforced by academics, emerged stigmatizing the Balkans. Since then, the region has suffered from the neglect, abuse, and scant regard of both western Europe and the world. The result has been in many direct ways to compound the Balkan's poverty, internal violence, and lack of national self-image. A startling history of ideas, Imagining the Balkans provides a much needed exploration into a region too long neglected.

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Imagining the Balkans

THIS is a book of great length (444 pages of text), great learning (168 pages of notes), but not of commensurate understanding. It is a pity, because its defects may conceal its undoubted merits. When Dr. Popper is not caricaturing writers whose views he dislikes-and he dislikes a great many-he has a useful contribution to make to political thought, and his general moral theory (mainly to be found in the notes) is eminently sane and sensible. But for his passion for tilting at windmills he would have written a better and shorter book. The Open Society and its Enemies By K. R. Popper. Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato. Pp. vii + 268. Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy—Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. Pp. v + 352. (London: George Koutledge and Sons, Ltd., 1945.) 2 vols., 42s. net.

The Open Society and its Enemies

Over the last 30 years, the self-determination efforts and objectives of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of ‘recognition’ — recognition of cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an inherent right to self-government, recognition of state treaty obligations, and so on. In addition, the last 15 years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical work aimed at fleshing out the ethical, legal and political significance of these types of claims. Subsequently, ‘recognition’ has now come to occupy a central place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in colonial contexts more generally. In this paper, I employ Frantz Fanon's critique of Hegel's master–slave dialectic to challenge the now hegemonic assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition. Against this assumption, I argue that instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian ideal of reciprocity, the contemporary politics of recognition promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.

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Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada

Revolution at Point Zero is a collection of twelve important essays (plus a preface and introduction) by the Marxist-feminist political theorist Silvia Federici. As a collection, it is remarkable for its combination of historical breadth – the earliest essay was originally published in 1975, and the latest in 2011 – and sustained engagement with the topic of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is not just the book’s organizing theme; it emerges through the process of reading Federici’s essays in sequence as the political problem that manifestly joins what would otherwise appear to be very different historical conditions of struggle, from the Wages for Housework campaign in the ‘70s to the anti-globalization movements of the fin de siècle. It is, as Federici affirms in the preface, “the work in which the contradictions inherent in ‘alienated labor’ are most explosive, which is why it is the ground zero for revolutionary practice, even if it is not the only ground zero,” (2012, p. 2, emphasis in the original). Federici’s concept of reproductive work (or labour) is maximally inclusive without ever seeming to be imprecise. It includes everything that goes into the reproduction of labour-power, that is, of human beings, from the constitutively unwaged labour of motherhood, to subsistence agriculture, to the grossly underpaid services of personal care workers. It excludes, by definition, the so-called productive labour of commodity production that generates surplus value for capital at the expense of the worker. Still, because this latter expense is measured in the difference between what the working class requires to reproduce itself and what it is capable of producing, reproductive and productive labour are inextricably linked, even as they are constantly opposed by the movement of capital. This is important because it clarifies Federici’s relationship to

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

The work Caliban and the witch is the result of a more than thirty years research project developed by the historian Silvia Federici. Its central aim is to rethink the development of capitalism from a feminist point of view with the care not to delimit and segregate the history of women in the working-class male sector. It retakes Marxist concepts, feminist critical theories and an analysis on the body and its politicization in the light of the Foucaultian theory. For Federici there are aspects that are hidden in the said theories in what concerns the discussions on domination and exploration. It also highlights how many analysis on the witch-hunting period has been neglected over the years and what this period essentially has to contribute to the analysis of the consolidation of capitalism. The concept of primitive accumulation developed by Karl Marx in his work Capital is fundamental for the unfolding and understanding of this historical process marked by violence, domination and exploitation and that redefined structures of the sexual division of labor. Federici is concerned about the contemporary context in which intensification of violence against women and the resumption of witch-hunt albeit in a “new outfit” in some countries, with a major emphasis on countries that have suffered colonization.

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions. . . but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work. More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile. Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

Wages against housework

This essay contrasts the logic underlining the production of 'commons' with the logic of capitalist relations, and describes the conditions under which 'commons' become the seeds of a society beyond state and market. It also warns against the danger that 'commons' may be co- opted to provide low-cost forms of reproduction, and discusses how this outcome can be prevented.

Commons against and beyond capitalism

http://repositorio.dpe.gob.ec/bitstream/39000/3013/1/DEPE-DPE-027-2021.pdf

Silvia Federici

Papers

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Wages against housework

Commons against and beyond capitalism

Calibán y la bruja : Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria