Revolution at Point Zero

Silvia Federici

Description

Written between 1974 and 2016, Revolution at Point Zero collects four decades of research and theorizing on the nature of housework, social reproduction, and women’s struggles on this terrain—to escape it, to better its conditions, to reconstruct it in ways that provide an alternative to capitalist relations.

Indeed, as Federici reveals, behind the capitalist organization of work and the contradictions inherent in “alienated labor” is an explosive ground zero for revolutionary practice upon which are decided the daily realities of our collective reproduction.

Beginning with Federici’s organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the essays collected here unravel the power and politics of wide but related issues including the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, the development of affective labor, and the politics of the commons.

This revised and expanded edition includes three additional essays and a new preface by the author.

Sujets

• Care work
• Caregiver
• Autonomism
• Witch-hunt

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638072
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Revolution at Point Zero
Federici has become a crucial figure for young Marxists, political theorists, and a new generation of feminists.
-Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
Federici s attempt to draw together the work of feminists and activist from different parts of the world and place them in historical context is brave, thought-provoking and timely. Federici s writing is lucid and her fury palpable.
- Red Pepper
Real transformations occur when the social relations that make up everyday life change, when there is a revolution within and across the stratifications of the social body . Silvia Federici offers the kind of revolutionary perspective that is capable of revealing the obstacles that stand in the way of such change.
- Feminist Review
Reading Federici empowers us to reconnect with what is at the core of human development, women s labor-intensive caregiving-a radical re-thinking of how we live.
- Z Magazine
It is good to think with Silvia Federici, whose clarity of analysis and passionate vision come through in essays that chronicle enclosure and dispossession, witch-hunting and other assaults against women, in the present, no less than the past. It is even better to act armed with her insights.
-Eileen Boris, Hull Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Finally, we have a volume that collects the many essays that Silvia Federici has written on the question of social reproduction and women s struggles on this terrain over a period of four decades. While providing a powerful history of the changes in the organization reproductive labor, Revolution at Point Zero documents the development of Federici s thought on some of the most important questions of our time: globalization, gender relations, the construction of new commons.
-Mariarosa Dalla Costa, coauthor of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and Our Mother Ocean
As the academy colonizes and tames women s studies, Silvia Federici speaks the experience of a generation of women for whom politics was raw, passionately lived, often in the shadow of an uncritical Marxism. She spells out the subtle violence of housework and sexual servicing, the futility of equating waged work with emancipation, and the ongoing invisibility of women s reproductive labors. Under neoliberal globalization women s exploitation intensifies-in land enclosures, in forced migration, in the crisis of elder care. With ecofeminist thinkers and activists, Federici argues that protecting the means of subsistence now becomes the key terrain of struggle, and she calls on women North and South to join hands in building new commons.
-Ariel Salleh, author of Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern
The zero point of revolution is where new social relations first burst forth, from which countless waves ripple outward into other domains. For over thirty years, Silvia Federici has fiercely argued that this zero point cannot have any other location but the sphere of reproduction. It is here that we encounter the most promising battlefield between an outside to capital and a capital that cannot abide by any outsides. This timely collection of her essays reminds us that the shape and form of any revolution are decided in the daily realities and social construction of sex, care, food, love, and health. Women inhabit this zero point neither by choice nor by nature, but simply because they carry the burden of reproduction in a disproportionate manner. Their struggle to take control of this labor is everybody s struggle, just as capital s commodification of their demands is everybody s commodification.
-Massimo De Angelis, author of The Beginning of History: Values, Struggles, and Global Capital
In her unfailing generosity of mind, Silvia Federici has offered us yet another brilliant and groundbreaking reflection on how capitalism naturalizes the exploitation of every aspect of women s productive and reproductive life. Federici theorizes convincingly that, whether in the domestic or public sphere, capital normalizes women s labor as housework worthy of no economic compensation or social recognition. Such economic and social normalization of capitalist exploitation of women underlies the gender-based violence produced by the neoliberal wars that are ravaging communities around the world, especially in Africa. The intent of such wars is to keep women off the communal lands they care for, while transforming them into refugees in nation-states weakened by the negative effects of neoliberalism. Silvia Federici s call for ecofeminists return to the Commons against Capital is compelling. Revolution at Point Zero is a timely release and a must read for scholars and activists concerned with the condition of women around the world.
-Ousseina D. Alidou, Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, director of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University, and author of Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Second Edition
Silvia Federici 2020 Silvia Federici
This edition 2020 PM Press

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-62963-797-6
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-62963-857-7
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-62963-807-2
LCCN: 2019946085
Cover and interior design: Antumbra Design/ antumbradesign.org
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PM Press
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Common Notions
314 7th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
www.commonnotions.org
Autonomedia
PO Box 568 Williamsburg Station
Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568
www.autonomedia.org
This edition first published in Canada in 2020 by Between the Lines
ISBN: 978-1-77113-494-1
401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada 1-800-718-7201 www.btlbooks.com
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication information available from Library and Archives Canada
Printed in the USA
C ommon Notions is an imprint that circulates both enduring and timely formulations of autonomy at the heart of movements beyond capitalism. The series traces a constellation of historical, critical, and visionary meditations on the organization of both domination and its refusal. Inspired by various traditions of autonomism in the United States and around the world, Common Notions aims to provide tools of militant research in our collective reading of struggles past, present, and to come.
Series Editor: Malav Kanuga
[e-mail] www.commonnotions.org
In the Common Notions series
Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class-The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings, 1952-2011
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and Value in the Bad Infinity of Capitalism
Strike Debt, The Debt Resisters Operations Manual
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Political ideas come from movements but their journey to a book requires the work of many individuals. Among the people who have made this book possible I wish to thank two in particular, for their contribution to this project and the creativity and generosity of their political activism: Malav Kanuga, the editor of the Common Notions Series, who encouraged me to publish this work and assisted me through this process with enthusiasm and excellent advice; and Josh MacPhee whose design for the book cover is one more example of the power of his art and his conception of images as seeds of change.
I also want to thank Nawal El Saadawi, feminist, writer, revolutionary, whose work Woman at Point Zero has inspired the title of this book and much more.
Revolution at Point Zero is about the transformation of our everyday life and the creation of new forms of solidarity. In this spirit, I dedicate this book to Dara Greenwald who through her art, her political activism, and her fight against cancer brought into existence a community of care concretely embodying that healing island Dara constructed during her disease.
Wages against Housework was first published as Wages against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). Also published in The Politics of Housework , ed. Ellen Malos (Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 1980) and Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women s Liberation Movement , eds. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Why Sexuality Is Work (1975) was originally written as part of a presentation to the second international Wages for Housework conference held in Toronto in January 1975.
Counterplanning from the Kitchen was first published as Counterplanning from the Kitchen (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975). Also published in From Feminism to Liberation , ed. Edith Hoshino Altbach (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 2007).
The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s was a paper delivered at a conference convened by the Centro Studi Americani in Rome on The Economic Policies of Female Labor in Italy and the United States, December 9-11, 1980, sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Also published in The Commoner 11 (Spring-Summer 2006).
Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet first appeared in The Sixties without Apology , eds. Sohnya Sayres, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
On Affective Labor first appeared in Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor , ed. Michael A. Peters and Eergin