Common Notions

On George’s Caffentzis “Debt and/or Wages: Organizing Challenges” (Tidal, Feb 2013)

commonnotionsny — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 17:52:09 +0000

Those Not Busy Born are Busy Dying

BY MITCHEL COHEN

George Caffentzis draws an interesting dichtomy between workers and debtors and lays out some of the antinomous implications of each, when it comes to “what to do” (George Caffentzis, “Debt and/or Wages: Organizing Challenges”, Tidal, Feb 2013).

A parallel way to look at the wages vs. debt organizing implications is to not see these as separate categories but as consequences of the intersection of the realm of production and that of consumption. Consumers (debtors) are simply workers (wages) when they get home from work. But capital expends enormous amounts of energy to keep the fight around consumer debt separate and distinct from the fight over wages and working conditions on the job.

Our job is to show that they are really two artificially separated moments of the same historical force; they are not contradictory. No matter which “window” (the ‘debt’ window, or the ‘wages’ window) one looks through, one is looking at the same beast.

Furthermore, both expressions exist simultaneously within every moment, like yin and yang. You can’t have the one without the other, no matter how finely you fractalize the moment.

Capital works hard at maintaining the illusory wall between “workers” and “consumers” — a pitiful and disempowering way to describe workers when we’re not at work. Most of us have internalized this split, to capital’s advantage; it keeps the 99% from taking action where capital is most vulnerable and where we have the most leverage — on the job and in resistance to work.

At the first Left Green Network gathering at Hampshire College in Massachusetts in 1987, I outlined the need to reject that workers vs. consumers framework and proposed ways for our burgeoning environmental movement to overcome that false divide. What has come to pass since then is that capital has expended enormous sums — part of its overall cost of production — to maintain the acquiescence of worker organizations to its labor/management rules. Unions, where they have not been demolished outright by neoliberalism, have been instrumental in assisting the imposition of capital’s “structural adjustment programs” at home as well as abroad. Such agencies as the AFL-CIO’s “Solidarity Center” and National Endowment for Democracy serve as cops (AFL-CIA?) for the system where workers in slave conditions in Maquilladoras and “free trade” export zones produce goods that are purchased by “debtor” workers elsewhere (that is, workers who have no choice but to go into debt to meet their everyday needs). In so doing, they undermine their wider interests, solidarity, and direct action impulses.(1)

Most leftist parties also have accepted the worker/consumer distinction; they proselytize workers to vote for candidates who would better tend to their interests but often at the expense of workers elsewhere. Even the progressive campaigns of consumer advocate Ralph Nader for President presented the primary clash in our society as between “consumers” and “irresponsible corporations,” therein upholding (at least in theory) “responsible” ones, and ignoring the exploitation and expropriation on which capitalism as a system is built.(2)

In accepting the false dichotomy between workers and consumers, we allow invisible constraints to strap us to the gears of capital, the periodic bluster of trade union hacks and “minimum common-denominator coalitionites.” We need to bust them open.

Worker organizations rarely encourage their members to take action on the job to put into effect non-waged (or “debtor”) portions of the new society they’d want to live in. That was part of the 1935 legislation legalizing trade unions, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. Even for much of the Left, implementation of a socialist program is to occur only aftersocialists come into control of the state — a major squabble between the old Left socialist parties and the new left of the 1960s, and still remaining to be resolved.

So I resume my 1987 appeal for radicals to find ways to break down that false dichotomy between “consumers” and “workers” — between organizations and activities built on debtors and those built on wage-labor. We need to create new organizational forms that go beyond the traditional trade union, consumer advocacy and political party models, all of which accept that duality to one degree or another. We need to expand what is seen as legitimate to fight for on the job, and merge those fights with what we need in our communities.

All of this entails reframing the question – challenging what we take for granted today, what is perceived as “natural” or “legitimate” — so that in all areas of our lives we take direct responsibility for the world around us instead of ceding it to others exalted as “experts”: politicians, bankers, priests, corporate execs, scientists, media moguls, union managers, or even professional activists.

The challenge for any radical organization of-a-new-type is not so much to proselytize around political questions arising out of one side or the other in the wage/debt debate or exhort the exhausted to hustle back to the barricaded Zuccotti Squares of our lives, but to enable us all — particularly workers (who are, after all, us) — to dramatically expand our organizations’ purview to include what is produced, how it is produced, and how it the end-product is made available to all.

One way to do that is by revealing the hidden environmental, political, racial, sexual, class and cultural dimensions within every seemingly economic issue. And, second, we must make it possible to organize and fight for so-called “consumer” demands on the job and not just in the community, by taking direct action on the job and forcing the company or government to comply with whatever we are demanding in our communities. In that way, we can begin the process of taking political, ecological and social responsibility for the world around us.

In Australia in the late 1970s, worker and community organizing pressured unions to issue “Green Bans”. In what would have been developer and power-broker Robert Moses’ worst nightmare, the workers refused to construct highways and malls unless they were first approved at public meetings by the communities impacted by such “development.” They would not build anything unless both the workers and the community approved it.(3)

There is a wealth of similar but not widely known direct action collaborations between workers on the job and the communities they serve — an alliance previously seen as outside the purview of labor organizing in the U.S. In the last decade, for example, the California Nurses Association heroically took the lead in mobilizing its membership to oppose attempts to make Swine Flu and smallpox vaccinations mandatory.(4) What if nurses in the U.S. took it a step further, and decided to challenge the patriarchal and denigrating hospitals? What if they set up their own community-based worker- and client-run clinics? And what if they combined with AIDS activists, midwives, holistic and herbal healers, acupuncturists, chiropractors and nutritionists to create underground buyers’ cooperatives and a qualitatively better complementary health care system, not the same old medical meat-market mauling us with industrial medicine at the beck and call of pharmaceutical corporate profits and the insurance racket that too many current health care proposals, including Obamacare, are bent on preserving? That would be a health plan worth investing in!

What if newspaper workers in San Francisco kept publishing their strike newspaper even after the strike ended, as the “voice of labor, community & environment” in the region?

What if mass-transit workers advocated on behalf of so-called “consumers”, and fought against fare hikes, demanding — as part of their union negotiations — that transportationbe free? What if they’d “look the other way” when people walk through the gates, instead of calling the police?

What if homeless people began squatting the thousands of abandoned housing units, and community groups and unions rallied to defend them and hold back the police, as they did in NYC on that heroic November morning in 2011?

What if construction unions stopped treating jobs as private fiefdoms and accepted the homeless, squatters and homesteaders as apprentices, teaching skills and fixing up their buildings? Anti-community and ecologically destructive “development” projects (hydro-fracking, tar-sands pipeline, nuclear power plant construction) pit workers who need jobs (especially as so many are outsourced) against the neighborhoods they’d be destroying, setting up a downward spiral of competition between people who should be allies and who are, in fact, the same people when they get off work!

What if progressive scientists and ecologists circumvented the U.S.-imposed embargo on Cuba and worked with their counterparts there to develop and learn from Cuba’s organic agriculture and alternative energy programs, relieving it of its dependence on foreign oil, domestic nuclear power plants, one-crop sugar economy and petroleum-based fertilizer? What if we, acting in solidarity with the Cuban revolution, helped make that island a beacon for ecologically-sound planning and alternative health care?

And what if instead of shutting down buildings to protest tuition hikes and cutbacks in services, students began “opening them up” — building by building, libraries, gymnasiums, study areas — keeping them open all night for people to use, putting the goals of open admissions and free tuition — once standard operating procedure in New York City and state-run California colleges — into immediate practice?

Framing the issue in that way forces the university administration to shut down the buildings in the face of people acting directly to keep them open. That permits us, as Karl Marx put it, to “retain the moral ascendancy” by exposing and directly doing something about the university’s complicity with the austerity budgets, larger scandals and crimes. Then, when government or university bureaucrats try to close buildings claiming the need to lay off workers and cut back services (or, in the new euphemism of the day, “to downsize”), we’d say, “No, we’re not going to let you. We’re going to keep them open so people could use them to study.” The tactical advantages are obvious; we would enjoy overwhelming popular support, putting our vision of the type of society we’d like to live in directly into effect. We’d be breaking out of symbolic forms of “protest” that, though once powerful, have largely been co-opted and integrated into the system.

What if we begin occupying and directly opening up those schools, libraries, subway stations, hospitals, day care centers, foreclosed homes and farms, post offices, fire houses and public parks slated for privatization or “structural adjustment” cutback? It’s time to reclaim, occupy, and “open up” property stolen from us, the 99 percent!

What if the Transportation Workers Union — now to its credit heavily supporting Occupy — worked with Greens to devise a comprehensive transportation program based on renewable energy, slowing the destruction of the ozone layer and reducing society’s dependence on Exxon-Mobil, BP and Shell? And what if the workers also exposed the nefarious role of General Motors, DuPont and Firestone Rubber in tearing up ecologically friendly electric trolley systems in dozens of cities across the country in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s? That conspiracy – and aren‘t all corporate decisions “conspiracies” by their boards of directors to rip as much labor as possible out of workers, sell products to consumers, and maximize profits? – was rewarded by local and federal governments with billions of dollars in write-offs, subsidies and tax-breaks. It forced ground transit to switch to more costly and environmentally destructive gasoline-fueled diesel buses that poisoned the air for 60 years.

What if, instead of limiting ourselves to petitioning the government to stop financing the junta in Haiti and cracking down on the popular movement there, we in the U.S. targeted those corporations (Disney, Sears, J.C. Penney, WalMart, Texaco, Wilson Sporting Goods, Halliburton and MacGregor, among others) that outsource to sweatshops to produce their goods and break the unions, oppose attempts to raise the minimum wage, fund the death squads and rake in millions off the earthquake in Haiti and slave labor there?

What if striking telephone workers not only marched against cutbacks in health benefits but occupied, en masse, the telephone exchanges – can you hear me now? – blocking the state’s surveillance of our movements, reaching out and touching AT&T and Verizon where it hurts?

What if workers at the Schenectady General Electric plant fought to end G.E.’s spewing of PCBs and other deadly chemicals into the Hudson River as part of their contract negotiations? What if they said, “We will not allow the company to dump this crap into our Hudson river,” and took direct action to stop it? What a difference workers — organized through their debts as well as through their wages –could make in the fight to save that river, let alone the planet.

Turning Motion into Movement

All of these “What Ifs” embody a radical vision that is fundamentally democratic (with a small “d”); they are based upon direct community participation through which people take charge over the decisions that affect their lives on every level and minimize relying upon those in power to make the changes they seek. The kind of focus provided by these direct action contexts differs from what one might expect in customary issue-oriented organizing. A key frame of direct action is that with every “demand” we raise we need to ask: “How might we begin fulfilling the demand we‘re making for ourselves, here and now?” That approach shapes the demand; it differs significantly from the way unions, Leftist parties and coalitions have historically seen their mission and approached their work.

It is that false separation of “workers” (producers of value) and “consumers” (users of value) that has locked us into an increasingly untenable situation, and renders us controllable and impotent. What would it take for unions to stop accepting the rigid constraints imposed by capital and government on working class organizations, and insteadreframe the production and purchase of commodities as a continuously re-negotiated struggle between big capital and the 99 percent?

Breaking down the imposed dichotomy between wages and debts — between workers and consumers — involves new organizational formations that take action to prevent the waves of cutbacks, privatization, layoffs, housing and farm foreclosures, bank bailouts and huge consumer and student debts, to say nothing of the massive destruction of the planet’s biosphere and imperialist wars. Empire has no conscience; neither the system nor those running it can be shamed into ending exploitation of labor and domination (expropriation) of nature – the twin sources of capitalism’s profits, which drive the economic system and propel it to expand, at the planet’s expense.

Such direct action interferes with the system (including capitalism’s integration of customary modes of protest); it sets the conditions for activities, demands, and new kinds of organization. Witness the power and creativity unleashed by the sustained direct action campaigns in Tunisia and Egypt (the Arab Spring), followed quickly by Wisconsin, and now Occupy Wall Street. These so reinterpreted social reality that, looking back on 2011, it becomes absolutely stunning that the “demand” to democratize economic and social institutions has, all of a sudden, caught fire and articulated with exceptional clarity the undemocratic class rule to which we all are subject.

That doesn’t mean we should never petition those in power; it means we don’t rely on it. Instead, we focus on putting the world we want directly into effect, and create in the here-and-now some tiny sliver of a future society worth living in. These will hopefully inspire others, and become bases — liberated zones — from which to launch further sorties against the system. Direct Action/Participatory Democracy serves as both means and ends at the same time.

Clearly, direct action as conceived here is not simply a more militant form of protest, as some portray it, but a total reconceptualization of how societal transformation comes about and the role of conscious activists in organizing themselves to achieve it. That is, direct action is a strategy for achieving a new society and not just a tactic used in attempts to attack the policies of the old one.

The strategy of direct action explicitly draws out connections between what to demand, how to achieve it and what forms of organization we’d need. It seeks to bring everything that impacts on our lives within our control. Direct action as strategy, therefore — even over the most mundane and seemingly non-political aspects of daily life — is inherently political; it has no need to bring in “the political” from the outside, but — in this new way of seeing our “mission” — it uncoils the politics already present and wound up in everything. As a result, it necessarily expands our conception of what to consider valid political work.

Direct action is, most of all, a way – a Tao. It is a strategy of dual power based on participatory grassroots democracy, of building up the embryo of liberated or autonomous zones (often quite temporary ones; sometimes they are not even geographical but based on affinities around subverted norms), which serve as communities of resistance and nurturance within the shell of the old. They create in effect a parallel socialist universe; but these differ from utopian communes in that they are continuously engaged, they can’t withdraw from the effects and pressures of the system even if they want to. The more successfully they see wage-workers and debtors as two sides to the same coin, the more powerful our chances of saving ourselves – all of us — and the planet we live on.

——————————————————-
Much of this is taken from Mitchel Cohen’s new book, “What Is Direct Action? Lessons to (and from) Occupy Wall Street,” available from the author atmitchelcohen@mindspring.com.

NOTES

1. See the website IEFD.org, set up by NYU Professor Bertell Ollman, originating as a spoof of the National Endowment for Democracy. The IEFD website houses a very good library of readings and reference material on the question of “democracy”.

2. To the U.S. Green Party’s credit, however, it has maintained a very strong opposition to imperialist wars. Unlike some of their European sister parties, the U.S. Green Party has repeatedly mobilized its membership for every antiwar movement – a huge step, given the pro-imperialist history of many of the erstwhile socialist factions that had dominated the U.S. electoral Left for the last century.

3. The Communist-led unions enacting Green Bans were finally broken up when the government hired Maoist thugs in “alternative” unions to assassinate the leadership, with the support of the Australian government.

4. Mitchel Cohen, West Nile Story.

Building The Commons: 2013 Forum

commonnotionsny — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:17:30 +0000

Making Worlds invites you to:

BUILDING THE COMMONS

Making Worlds’s 2nd Forum on the Commons

Friday, March 29th
6 PM to 10 PM
(Potluck dinner)

Saturday, March 30th
10 AM to 8PM
(Potluck Lunch & Dinner)

The Commons Brooklyn
388 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn 11217

*Children Welcome / Wheelchair Accessible / Free and open to the Public*

See below for more info
AQUI PARA ESPAÑOL
“Making Worlds: a Commons Coalition” was formed during the occupation of Zuccotti Park in order to bring projects working to reclaim the commons to the fore of the Occupy movement.

Initially Occupy Wall St (OWS) focused on protests against corporate greed and income inequality. However, many OWS supporters understand the movement as a way of creating solutions to inequality and envisioning a future inspired by the concept of the “commons.” Commons can be defined as resources managed and sustained by the communities that make use of them. The commons belong to the 99% yet are endangered by privatization and commodification.

We invite you to participate in a conversation to explore, strengthen, and connect our efforts, projects, and lives through practices of commoning. A core of commoning practices has always sustained human life. This is a call to envision new ways of organizing our lives and our activism through the lens of the commons.

Our last year’s Forum on the Commons sought to conceptualize and explore different areas for commoning – natural resources, arts and education, care and reproduction, alternative economies.

This year, we would like to open up space for a horizontal conversation with a strong focus on the concreteprocesses of commoning that are taking place or could take place in New York City now. Instead of the usual format of speaker presentations followed by discussion, we would like to see if an open conversation can take place in which knowledge and experience are shared horizontally. We acknowledge and value all the projects, processes, investigations and networks people are building in their daily lives and in their collaborations with others.

In order to have a common point of departure we are posing the following questions to reflect on projects that have taken place around the city and to launch a new commons space project to link and strengthen commons groups.

The questions are:

1) How are people in NYC creating common spaces?
2) How can commoning efforts support and strengthen each other?
3) How do communities identify with and participate in the process of commoning?
4) How can commoning be a form of resistance to neoliberal privatization?

We would like to finish the conversation with the creation of a tool for commoning spaces. This responds to a sense we have regarding the amazing speed with which many projects have started in the city, but without strong links among them. The goal will be to learn about them and to connect them.

We invite you to participate in the conversation! Come join us in Making New Worlds. Another World is Possible!

We would be really grateful to have you in the conversation!

PROPOSED SCHEDULE

We would like to address the 4 mentioned questions in each session. Also, we propose some keywords as threads for the different sessions.
At the end of each session we would like to dedicate some time to collect ideas for a toolbox of the commons, which we would like to add later to the common text.

FRIDAY 29, 6 – 10pm
1. Introduction: 6 pm -7 pm

Reflections about last year’s Forum on the Commons

This year: what we would like to do?

2. Dinner. Potluck: 7 pm-8 pm

3. Session: 8 pm – 10 pm

How do communities identify with and participate in the process of commoning?

How do we envision the future of the commons? What would people like to see?

SATURDAY 30, 10am – 8pm
1. Session: 10-12pm

CARING

How can commoning be a form of resistance to neoliberal privatization?

2. Lunch (Potluck). 12-1pm

3. Session: 1-3pm

SPACE

How are people in NYC creating common spaces?

4. Coffee Break: 3-3:30 pm

5. Session: 3:30-6

NETWORKS/NETWORKING

How can commoning efforts support and strengthen each other?

6. Potluck Dinner and open assembly: 6-8pm

REGISTRATION

* For the RVSP, please specify the sessions that you would like to attend.

Metamute Review of Revolution at Point Zero

commonnotionsny — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 16:51:54 +0000

A review of Silvia Federici’s anthology, Revolution at Point Zero, by Joshua Eichen

[By Joshua Eichen, 22 November 2012 | Posted on Metamute]

In 2012, we all pay at least lip service to the entanglements of class, gender, and race when not also struggling to incorporate other threads into our explanatory frameworks and actions. So when you come across clarity of vision that precisely explains those relations, one can only marvel that it was written 37 years ago and try not to be too dismayed that it isn’t more widely known. Hopefully this new collection of work by Silvia Federici will change that.

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.
Heterosexuality and homosexuality are both working conditions… but homosexuality is worker’s control of production, not the end of work.¹

So opens the first essay in this necessary collection of Federici’s writings. It includes essays from two periods and is organised into three sections: the first as part of her work with the Wages for House Work campaign and in dialogue with the feminist movements of the time; the second covering social reproduction since 2000 and the rise of the Movement of Movements; and the final part on the reproduction of the commons and communing. The constant optic running through her work is the centrality of social reproduction to production, and women’s labour at the heart of that reproduction globally. The first set of essays, written at the height and in the afterglow of the social struggles of the time, posit the demand of wages for housework and explains the logic behind it, drawing attention to the impossibility of production without reproduction, particularly its affective dimensions, or as she writes in the preface, ‘nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.’² In the later sets of essays, her optic is expanded to reflect the changes in the international division of labour and unalienated forms and communities of care.

As part of the Wages for Housework campaign, and as part of the generalised struggle against work, her writings lay bare the connection between waged labour, the unwaged labour necessary to reproduce it, and its international dimension. Taking an Autonomist Marxist line against the dominant liberal and socialist feminisms of the time, these essays argue two points.³ First, that women are already part of the working class and the tasks labeled ‘housework’ produce and reproduce both the current and the next generation of labor power that is required by the ever expanding circuits of capital, making money from their ‘cooking, smiling, fucking’.⁴ Second, bringing women into the factories was no more of a victory than bringing factories to the 3rd world. And that going to work in a factory was a defeat in itself, or as the Marxist groupuscule propagandises at the beginning of Elio Petri’s 1971 La classe operaia va in paradise [The Working Class Goes to Heaven], to the workers as they go into the factory on a bright winter’s day, ‘today the sun will not shine for you’.

As the book’s introduction notes, her life’s work had its genesis in the matrix of 1960s Italy, in the social struggles of the time and the insights and problematics of operaists and autonomists, particularly Mario Tronti’s seminal Operai e capitale. Wages for Housework engaged with Tronti’s notion of the social factory, that at a ‘certain stage of capitalist development capitalist relations become so hegemonic that every social relation is subsumed under capital and the distinction between society and factory collapses’, that an increasing reorganisation of social space is and has taken place for the needs of capitalist production.⁵ For Federici and the other members of the Wages for Housework campaign, the heart of this reorganisation is in ‘the kitchen, the bedroom, the home’, where the labour of social reproduction is performed and given a much more concrete reading, and more importantly, a much more concrete demand.⁶

Federici’s success as a writer and theorist is in the grounded nature of her proposals and her irrefutable axiom that if we weren’t fed, able to sleep and make ourselves presentable, we wouldn’t be able to sell our labour power. The demands of Wages for Housework are an argument against housework, its invisibility, its gendering and its devaluation and ultimately, for wages. Wages that could be used to refuse other work, that receiving a wage for the work would no more guarantee its performance than the union contracts of the 1970s prevented widespread absenteeism, and that is the first step against struggling against it. It is a revolutionary demand, ‘not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it forces capital to restructure social relations in a way more favorable to us and consequently more favorable to the class.’⁷

The rest of the book collects a subsection of her interventions in the debates on globalisation and the commons, or commoning from the point of view articulated during her time with the Wages for Housework campaign but expanded to reflect the changed dynamic of the international division of labour.⁸ The articles are strong but lack the urgency that informs the first section of the book. Overall the shortcomings of the book are minor but threefold. There is a dark age, a lack of biographical information and a lack of in-depth theorisation about the relation between housework and the possibility of unalienated communities of care work, which she deals with in her essay ‘On Eldercare and the Limits of Marxism’, but not to the extent one would like. The dark age consists of a fifteen-year gap from which no writings are included. Given the strength of the rest of the material, the fact she was publishing during this time as part of the Midnight Notes Collective, and the marked difference in tone between the two periods, albeit not the analytic lens, at least a small sample of the period would have been appreciated. Finally, a lacuna of biographic information hurts the collection. She draws attention to the fact that second wave European feminists grew up in the rubble of the Second World War and the effects it would have on the idea of choosing or not to raise children after having spent a childhood in such marked scarcity and destruction. Beyond that, there is still a great history to be written on the social nexus of a small but vital section of the Marxist U.S. Left starting in the 1970s and continuing to the present. The lines running through the Wages for Housework campaign, the short lived journal Zerowork, the Midnight Notes Collective⁹, the publishing house Autonomedia, Federici, Peter Linebaugh, Harry Cleaver, and George Caffentzis, among others, deserves to be examined. Autonomists posited the theory of the circulation of struggle, that forms and discourses of struggle travel. The inverse, the circulation of strugglers, needs to be investigated as well. (The circulation of defeats is also worth investigating, and perhaps more critical in understanding working class defeats globally in the era of neoliberalism, but a much less happy point to reflect upon).

Finally, since at least 1968, social movements have been struggling with their relation to the state. Federici offers a useful insight into the nexus between social movements, the state, and how values are encapsulated in every demand and in the organisation to achieve it:

It is one thing to set up a day care center the way we want it, and then demand the state pay for it. It is quite another thing to deliver our children to the State and then ask the State to control them not for five but fifteen hours a day. It is one thing to organize communally the way we want to eat (by ourselves, in groups) and then ask the state to pay for it. It is the opposite thing to ask the State to organize our meals. In one case we regain some control over our lives, in the other we extend the State’s control over us.¹⁰

Info:

Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero; Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland: PM Press, 2012

Bibliography

“The Commoner.” Web. 17 Oct 2012. <http://www.commoner.org.uk/> [2].

Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press, 2012. Web. 13 Oct. 2012.

“Midnight Notes Collective.” Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://www.midnightnotes.org/mnpublic.html> [3].

Petri, Elio. La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso. 1971. Film.

Wright, Steve. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism,

Pluto Press, 2002. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

“Zerowork.” Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://zerowork.org/> [4].

1Federici 17.

2 Federici 3.

3 Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism remains invaluable for understanding the history and theoretical debates of the period.

4 Federici 19.

5 Federici 7.

6 Federici 8.

7 Federici 19.

8 The Commoner web journal is a good place to familiarize oneself with the commons and communing.

9 Most content of both journals are available online.

10 Federici 21.

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The Girl, a film by David Riker

commonnotionsny — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:53:48 +0000

The Girl, a new film by David Riker is opening in NYC and L.A. on International Women’s Day, before traveling the circuit elsewhere in the country. There are also plenty of options for those in NYC to see it. For listings in L.A., click here.

AMC Village 7

Friday, March 8th after 6:45pm show

Q&A with Abbie Cornish & David Riker

Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center

Friday, March 8th after 7:30 pm show

Q&A with Abbie Cornish, David Riker and Paul Mezey,

Saturday, March 9th after 7:30 pm show

Q&A with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) and David Riker

Sunday March 10th after 5:15 pm show

Q&A with David Riker and Jeremy Scahill, reporter (The Nation), author (Blackwater), and producer and co-writer (with Riker) of documentary, Dirty Wars.

http://davidrikersthegirl.com/theaters/

https://www.facebook.com/DavidRikersTheGirl

Here is a quite substantial commentary by Peter Linebaugh:

Nurses and doctors, bring your patients! Teachers, bring your students! Children, bring your parents, and parents, bring your children! Pastors, rabbis, imams, bring your flocks! Hipsters bring the grungies. Zapatistas bring the Anglos and, Anglos, parlez à vos voisins! Boys, bring your girl-friends, and girl-friend bring the sisters. Lawyers bring your clients and vice versa. Same with cops and cons, fops and fools, Dads and Moms. Dudes, bring the nerds. CEOs, bring your consciences. Hard-hearts, bring a flask, softies, bring hankies. Patriots, leave your guns at the door. Occupiers, check your mike. O beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, for here is a sad tale from Nuevo Laredo. And remember all, the border is within.

Opening on International Women’s Day 2013 in N.Y. and L.A. is “The Girl,” a movie written and directed by David Riker, with its profound but terrifying questions, what is humanity? where is its home?

David Riker is himself a man of the border. Gloucester, London, Brussels, Corsica, Oaxaca, Brooklyn, Silver City. He is not easily side-tracked by human differences of language, mores, costume, or ethnicity, but strikes at the heart. Follow the “milestones” – three minute videos on YouTube – expressing the making of the film. the continuation of his work in “La Ciudad” in which he outlined his theory of film-making, engagé, “cinema from the bottom up,” letting the story protagonists tell the story, it affects his language, his work as a critic, which obviously arises from talking with hundreds, thousands of people from all walks of life.

What does this movie show us about the world? How does it cause us to think about the world? We are enthralled, and almost swept away by its pensive moods which the film so lyrically creates.

The movie is in three parts. Part one is set in the North where commerce, bad attitudes, cars and trucks, shattered families, and the English language prevail. A young woman, Ashley Colton (played magnificently by Abbie Cornish) fails in her job, fails as a mother, and seeks in her father, Tommy Colton, guidance to “a streak of luck.” Part two is set in the South of the mountains where a commons, the Spanish language, and pedestrians exist. A seven-year old girl, Rosa (majestically played by Maritza Santiago Hernandez) is at the center, an activist with demands. The third part of the movie is the middle, the tragic turning point from one direction to the other. We watch this change of direction, not just in the 180º turn of the Jeep Cherokee (Wagoneer) that Ashley Colton drives, but we see a change in the direction of her attitudes, language, values, and habits.

The trucks cross the bridge, an endless conveyor belt of commodities from the maquiladora of the south to the malls of the North. Beneath the bridge the Rio Grande flows along and one officer with his own hands pulled out six hundred drowned corpses. Unbelievable! 600 bodies! Commerce in one direction, naked bodies or corpses in the other. Yes, I am left aghast. Lamentation upon lamentation! For humanity’s sake, could this really be? O Mankind what has become of thee!

Yet this movie does not want us to weep and wail. We know the problem. That’s not the issue.

Here is a story of those who cross the border and of those whom the border crossed. The central myth of the border – that hope resides in the North – Riker seeks to turn on its head: he proposes that for the hopeless, resentful anglos of the North it may be found in the South. This is not the story of atrocity or terror on the border. The violence is off-screen; it is assumed rather than enacted. Rather, like the plot which moves from the North to the South, the emotions wrung are not of fear but hope.

We have a Brechtian distance from this woman. Her voice of complaint is a whine without conviction. “You didn’t get a raise because of your attitude,” the boss explains. Already in her voice before the first image of the film we sense her downfall; we are warned not to identify with this ordinary, anglo girl clinging to a scrap of white-skin privilege.

Automobile civilization is established in the first few minutes of the film with images of motion, lights, and traffic. We cruise along a Texas highwayscape with the single-pole tower signage designed for long-range, high-speed identification, the only thing between earth and sky. Speed + product + machine = high-tech traffic = money.

Tommy, her father (skillfully played by Will Patton), drives an eighteen-wheeler, a Kenworth. In England such trucks are termed “juggernauts” after the Hindu parade float, or the temple vehicle, that ran over devotees in sacrifice. The film before us must deal with both the traffic on the bridge and the traffic beneath it, the commodities and the people. These eighteen wheelers are driven in the service of Mammon. The U.S.A. worships Mammon, the ancient deity of money. Ashley accepts her father’s ‘southern comfort’ of alcohol. Tequila promises comradeship, solidarity, love, truth, the ‘real world.’ Wrapping herself against the evening chill in plaid shirts like her father, expressing her father’s stance to the world with curses of anger, surprise, and despair, she will emulate his career path and become a coyote.

Traffic and commerce originated with capitalism in the 16th century when likewise the enclosures, the witch-burnings, the slave trade, the genocide of Aztec and Inca occurred. Take Latin com (together), add it to merx (merchandise) and you get commerce. Trafficke meant the same thing but with a north European origin, the transportation of merchandise for the purpose of trade, or buying and selling for profit. It is not until the 19th century that its other meaning arises, the collective name for vehicles passing to and fro along the road.

How are the two flows connected? The political economists among us can answer quickly. It is a question of push-pull. The push comes from expropriated labor power. The pull comes from immigrant workers needed for production. In between the push and the pull is the historic violence of the labor market written in letters of blood and fire. But no, this film is not about this, not about production, not about sweat-shops or factories in the field. This film is about reproduction. What is a human being? Who is the girl? Seen through the lens of social reproduction these are political questions.

Ashley is shut out from the heart of the American dream. She is denied access to the white picket fence, the play-set, and “the god-damned jungle gym” to quote her Dad, and instead finds in the border “endless rows of walls within walls.” Her son, Georgie, resides in foster care while Social Services determine whether with sobriety, a job, and a permanent address Ashley is fit to have him back. Meanwhile, in self-righteous anger she tells the foster parent, “The only reason you got Georgie is money.”

Abbie Cornish’s performance, her whisper, her scooped t-shirt, her high-tops, her ease behind the wheel, her ease at the bar, her curses which she utters with expressive inflection and Texas accent. She can say God Damn! In disappointment or despair and she can say God Damn! in elated discovery. She says it as a prayer.

Rosa has eyes that seethe with anger, eyes of accusation, watchful eyes absorbing the world. The word “stressed” is tossed back and forth between Ashley and Rosa, as a creation of shared meaning.

The secondary characters are brilliantly cast, the welfare case-worker, the foster parent, the coyote in Nuevo Laredo, the border patrol man, the grandmother in Oaxaca, and of course the nocturnal portraits in Nuevo Laredo of lonely people on journeys of danger. These are masterful portraits. Riker is a Rembrandt of the border. Emotions are evoked by music, color, pace. The language of emotion is subtle, conveyed by gesture, like Ashley’s recognition of Rosa’s mother in the book of the drowned in the municipal record office by a sudden, barely detectable but unmistakable, quickening of breath.

“Your Daddy’s run into a streak of luck.” Tommy knows what he is doing, where his money comes from. So, off Exit 8 onto the World Trade Bridge, they tool along to Nuevo Laredo. She says, “I don’t care what anyone says, you gotta have money.” True enough. She has learned her father’s knowledge along with the cigarettes, shots, and beer. He has access to truth, a realist.

Rio Grande becomes the River Styx. Ashley becomes Charon, the conductor of the ferry of mythology who carries souls across the river into the underworld. A full moon shines through the stygian darkness onto the assemblage of frightened, near naked, desperate men, women, and a child, Rosa. A helicopter hovers overhead, its blades making a racket, search-lights on the river, the current treacherous, the river deep. Rosa’s mother may be lost.

The middle part of the movie begins with Rosa’s insistent cry. “Where’s my mom? I want my mom!” Rosa is determined. She argues with Ashley, she blames her. Over breakfast they begin to argue. Slowly Ashley is transformed by a hundred subtle changes in relationship between the little girl and the woman who in actuality has been sitting “child”-like on a pity pot. Quoting her grandmother, Rosa will tell Ashley that beer is “the devil’s drink.” The devil is the reality principle. Money does rule. Mutual recrimination, excuse-making, follow. Her acceptance of the world without complaint contrasts with the self-pity of Ashley. Paradoxically, it is Rosa who is the active one. She fights with Ashley, argues with her. Ashley on the other hand is fatalistic. Her one attempt to score that streak of luck that her father spoke of ends in tragedy.

They learn that both were abandoned by their fathers at an early age, “Well now we have something in common,” Ashley’s bitterness remains. Both are practically ‘orphaned.’ Rosa moves to the front seat. No longer in hiding, she has become partner, a navigator.

On the Mexican side of the border we have a study of institutions – the orphanage, a church, a shelter, the city hall. The public servants are not ogres but modest and helpful. The face of the state on both sides of the border tries to be human. While this is a deeply political film – if you only submit to its pensiveness – it is not a condemnation of government as such.

There is a blinding moment when Tommy refuses to look at Rosa face to face and raises his hand momentarily in front of his eyes to conceal from himself the recognition of a human being. “I don’t know who they are and I don’t ask.” Self-imposed ignorance, he is the commodity dealer, the trafficker of vulnerable human bodies, the coyote. Yet his daughter is his “princess.” Colton-family “blood” runs in their veins, as if they were royalty, as if their kinship lineage, or “blood,” could preserve them from working-class destiny. “Colton blood?” she responds, “I thought it was just bad luck.” Fatalism or “blood.”

At the gas station with the highway trucks rolling passed, she detects people in the trailer. It’s after this discovery that he delivers himself of his class consciousness. “You know how many trucks cross the bridge every day?” he righteously explains. “Five thousand of them. You think they’re gonna stop me with a hundred of them? No! Shit, there ain’t no border for General Motors or Wal-Mart. You can cross with your pants down as long as the trucks keep rolling, as long as I keep hauling their shit.” America is riven with class consciousness. Even Abe Lincoln would sympathize. One class labored, another class ate. Lincoln contrasted “the common right of humanity” with the “divine right of kings.” One labored so the other could eat. Class consciousness is not the problem either.

“You walk away, you don’t look back. Drop her at the corner and you never look back.” Now we know the actual utility of alcohol. After Ashley is near raped in a bar, Rosa will say, “You shouldn’t drink beer.” She is the unsmiling witness. And Ashley does not look back but instead of leaving Rosa, she leaves her father.

What the film shows is that children are part of humanity, and moreover, “humanity” is not a condition of age or biology. It is made; it is an achievement; it is collective. To speak of Rosa as a child is to miss the theme of this movie. Go to Wikipedia, read its articles on childhood, and be instructed. Childhood is conceived without a sense of fairness or justice. Justice is not age-exclusive.

“Humanity” is an accomplishment arising from social relations. The little girl lost comes to lead the Big Girl and to help her grow. Together they find “home” and “humanity”. The “children” teach the corrupted, cynical elders, and lead them to both maturity and ‘the commons.’ I have begun to think a little bit about the struggle of children whose lives, if they are seen only in the perspective of psychological development, are deprived of precisely the political power which is dramatized in the film. We are familiar with the child as protagonist of religion but the child as a protagonist of history is not so well known.

Philipe Ariès showed us that the notion of “childhood” is a recent development historically speaking; in the middle ages children were little adults. When the machines of the factory system ground up children, we get the first testimonies, such as that of Robert Blincoe in 1832. Anna Davin wrote one of the first histories of the ‘little adults’ of the city slums in Growing Up Poor. Marcus Rediker’s Slave Ship puts the little adults in the nadir, the absolute pit, of history.

Silvia Federici quotes the evidence that 3% of households with children aged eight to eighteen included care-givers who were children. Mothers and fathers long learned that it is the children who teach them how to become parents. At the same time we were also taught that this was a perverse inversion of natural relations. The crisis of child-care is thus also a crisis of elder-care and neither can be resolved without nurturance of the ‘sandwich’ generation, or those in between, the adults who are at the pinnacle of their strength in the labor market where, however, insecurity makes life precarious for themselves much less able to care for others. Child-care once a demand of the women’s movement is here a demand by the young. Rosa demands home.

“I’m going to take you home,” Ashley announces to Rosa. When we speak of the “home” of the characters, what do we mean? Etymologically, “home” is a Teutonic word referring both to the world and to a safe dwelling. Home has meant the village; the place of dwelling and nurturance where refuge, rest, and satisfaction reside. It is not the “coming to carry you home” brought by the sweet chariot. It must be on earth, not heaven. In the U.S. its meaning has descended increasingly to mean a private residence, a soulless designation of real estate, a debt-producing, revenue-enhancing asset.

Ashley explains that she lives in a “box” or a trailer. Trailer signifies rootlessness, mobility, and it is both the filthy place in south Texas where Ashley “lives” and it signifies the “box” pulled by the Kenworth cab upon eighteen wheels concealing migrants across the border. Rosa responds saying that she lives amid corn, beans, squash, – the three sisters – and that delicious fruit hangs from trees for the picking. Two cultures meet: one barbaric, the other not.

Who gives birth to humanity may seem stupid to ask on International Women’s Day. We know where babies come from, but whence humanity? Labor is more than parturition or a surgeon’s knife, a Caesarian, an epidural; “humanity” is more than this. The OED says “humanity” is a disposition to others of kindness, compassion, and courtesy. To the romantic poet John Keats love and friendship sat high on the forehead of humanity. Does it exclude fairness or justice? Is humanity that “species-being” which Karl Marx wrote about? Man is “a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering he is a passionate being. Passion is man’s essential power vigorously striving to attain its object.” Certainly this applies to Woman and to Man. Here it applies not so much to Man as to Girl and then from Girl to Woman. This is signified with the locomotive driving across the penny on the rail, the same locomotive whose power caused the two persons, the two humans, Rosa and Ashley, to run to one another’s protective arms.

Simone de Beauvoir anticipated the abolition of “the slavery of half of humanity together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies.” On International Woman’s Day, we remember the passionate proletarian fighters like Emma Goldman or “La Pasionaria”, the nom de guerre of Dolores Ibárruri who fought the Fascists in Spain. On being elected to Parliament her first act was to go to prison and demand the keys and unlock the doors and free the prisoners. Which she did. In our age we learn from this movie “humanity” is made by a girl. Her passions, her demands, her knowledge, her understanding transform the proletarian victim, Ashley, to an actor capable of making her fate.

Wordsworth heard “the still, sad music of humanity” and felt its presence, in motion and spirit in the mind of man, though these abstractions evade his experience of witness to the straggling, defeated Irish revolutionaries fleeing to England from the English terror in Ireland. Nevertheless, it is humanity that he heard. In the U.S.A. today we are led by sneaks, cowards, liars, blowhards, and bullies amplified into monstrous institutions. We imitate, as Hamlet said (III.ii.38), though not referring to the president, we imitate humanity abominably.

What I saw were a succession of portraits of an American woman, the face of the proletariat, framed by the windshield of the automobile. The movie is less about the “maternal instinct” than the renewal of humanity. The movie provides a steady study of proletarian consciousness. Ashley is not alone but the portraits in the car are with Rosa, and the solidarity across borders and across generations.

The commons in this case is the grandmother and the village in Oaxaca it is female, multigenerational, quasi-rural, simple, and vital. The commons is beautiful with village festival, tortillas, and forest. The first smile from little Rosa, the new dress, the comforting hand on the shoulder, a circle of stones arranged on the sands of the river bank symbolically indicate a new stage, and then into the mountains with utterly sublime camera work. Here a brass band, a small herd of goats, the cock crowing at dawn, bird-song, and a children’s festival.

Ashley is puzzled. What is the meaning of this life in contrast to the roaring traffic of south Texas? It is the place of the mortar-and-pestle, the kitchen, children laughing in the road, and flying kites down the hill. The evocation is not poverty or under-development but satisfaction, simple labor in the field, human needs met by human means, jolly colors of fabric and flower, a song of innocence. That the commons of Oaxaca here takes on a romantic, Rousseau-like quality is unfair critique, because the romantic finds immanence and roads not taken yet. Tommy is the realist. The historical issue, as opposed to the aesthetic issue, is, What has happened to Ashley?

For one thing she must tell the truth. She confesses to Rosa that she has been an unfit mother, and Rosa flees in rejection. But wait! Rosa comes running after with a gift. It is the penny flattened by the train engine, the lucky penny, and in this movie the talisman symbolizing a human bond. Filthy lucre, the root of all evil, has been crushed. We are in the presence of social relations that are not fetishized by money, anymore than the grandmother’s tortillas, succor for the road, are commodities.

Marx again, “… as everything nature must come into being, so man also has his process of origin in history. But for him history is a conscious process, and hence one which consciously supersedes itself.” To Tolstoy “humanity” was the subject of history. How will Ashley Colton supersede her history? We await her decisions. What will she do? What must she do? Humanity hangs breathless on her fate. This is the open question at the end of the movie.

It is sometimes said that children are pure potential. This too is an enclosure shutting out grown-ups. At the end of this movie, Ashley drives off, all potential herself. Will she live happily ever after? We imagine a metamorphosis of the proletariat from a whinging worm into a soaring embodiment of humanity.

What can we learn from “The Girl” about the connections among the ideas of home, humanity, and commons? Apart from speculation derived from the etymology of these words and without romantic projections of futurity, the potential we see in Ashley is the result of understanding that Rosa is the protagonist of this history. The ideas of home, humanity, and commons cannot exclude children. They assert subsistence needs and solidarity, affirming the dignity of human reproduction.

The young woman with the bad attitude does not linger in bucolic escapist arcadia but returns to her duties within the empire, and the tasks of raising a new generation which will be nothing if not international and revolutionary, challenging the borders within as well as those outside.

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. His latest book is the Magna Carta Manifesto. He can be reached at:plineba@yahoo.com

[Originally posted to Retort]

Books

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1962)

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

Robert Blincoe, Memoir (1832)

George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire (2013)

Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor (1996)

Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (2012)

John Keats, Endymion (1818)

Abraham Lincoln, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858)

Karl Marx, The 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007)

Shakespeare, Hamlet (1602)

Howard Slater, Anomie/Bonhomie (2010)

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)

William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey (1798)

Gigi Roggero on Debt and Insolvency

commonnotionsny — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 21:25:33 +0000

Gigi Roggero is a researcher and is part of UniNomade and EduFactory collectives. In this interview he speaks about the right to insolvency —understood as the collective organization of debt outstanding- in relation with household debt as well as with sovergin or public debt. Insolvency is, in both cases, the way to struggle aganist the mecanisms of accumulation caractheristic of financial capitalism.

See also:

Silvia Federici: Capitalism Destroys Us, Movements Heal Us

commonnotionsny — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 02:00:41 +0000

“To me, the struggle is a healing process. If the struggle itself is not a healing process, it’s not worth it! There’s something wrong with it. You struggle because you need to liberate yourself. If the struggle does not liberate you, if it doesnt carry that hope, why bother?”

flyer by Ivan

On March 3 and 4, 2011, Silvia Federici gave two talks in Philadelphia. On the 3rd, she spoke at the Wooden Shoe anarchist bookstore about her book,Caliban and the Witch, on “The True Nature of Capitalism.” That event literally overflowed with an audience eager to connect the pieces of the historical violence against women, and the ongoing crisis of capitalism.

The next night, on March 4, Silvia spoke at Studio 34 Yoga in West Philly to another packed crowd, on the subject of “Our Struggles, Ourselves: Rethinking Healing Work.” This was a more personal, and in many ways a much deeper talk, which touched on a multitude of subjects from capitalism’s attacks on humanity and the Earth, to how to build self-reproducing movements that avoid the mistakes of past generations.

Click here to read notes from the presentation.

Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life: Bay Area events with Donald Nicholson-Smith

commonnotionsny — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:06:33 +0000

Via: Retort (via PM Press)

[Donald Nicholson-Smith will be making several appearances around the Bay Area on the occasion of the West Coast launch of his re-translation of Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life (PM Press). See below for times and places. IB]

Raoul Vaneigem’s ‘treatise on savoir-vivre’ will soon be fifty years old. The work has never gone out of print and has long been freely downloadable in several languages from the Internet. It would be impossible to quantify its circulation over the decades, but there is no doubt that it has been a ‘life-changing book’ for a host of readers and that it fully deserves its reputation as a ‘classic of subversion’.

As for the Traité’s life in English translation, the version which I settled for in 1983, published jointly by Rebel Press in London and Left Bank Books in Seattle, was the culmination of the efforts of several translators in the 1970s (see my preface to that edition below). In the effervescence of the sixties and seventies portions of the book were very widely circulated as pamphlets in the English-speaking world. In those days (and I believe I can speak for all of us), we wanted to maximize the practical impact of Raoul Vaneigem’s words, to produce a texte de combat, and to this end we subordinated the customary criteria of literary translation to considerations of accessibility and topicality. We thought (correctly, I think) that the text belonged to us—to ‘our party’ in the sense in which Marx and Engels used this expression—and that we could (and should) do more or less what we liked with it—or rather what best served our collective aims.

Much time has passed, and when I returned to the translation I discovered to my surprise—and somewhat to my distress!—that a proper revision would entail not perhaps a reversal, but at least a shift of perspec- tive. What I now offer, therefore, is a version much more faithful to the original, making no attempt to find ‘English’ equivalents for cultural references, and striving, so far from ‘updating’ anything, to preserve a feeling for those times. Which said, it is my hope that this newfound fidelity to the French and respect for the venerability of Vaneigem’s work will in no way detract from its enduring relevance and power to provoke, not to mention its stunning prescience. How far I have succeeded in this I naturally leave it to the reader to judge.

D. N.-S., September 2011

——————————————————

See the PM Press website for more information.

Date: Wednesday 20 Feb
Time: 7.30pm
Where: Shaping San Francisco
Address: 518 Valencia, SF, CA

Date: Thursday 21 Feb
Time: 12.00pm
Where: San Francisco Art Institute
Address: 800 Chestnut St, SF, CA

Date: Thursday 21 Feb
Time: 7.00pm
Where: Sol Collective / The Marxist School of Sacramento
Address: 2574 21st St, Sacramento, CA

Date: Friday 22 Feb
What: In Conversation with Sasha Lilley
Time: 7.00pm
Where: California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)
Address: 1453 Mission St, SF, CA

Date: Sat 23 Feb
Time: 7.00pm
Where: The Public School
Address: 2141 Broadway, Oakland, CA

Politics of Workers’ Inquiry Conference Call

commonnotionsny — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:56:55 +0000

Politics of Workers’ Inquiry Conference Call
May 2-3, 2013 @ University of Essex
http://ephemeraweb.org/conference/index.htm

Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms.

Mario Tronti argues that weapons for working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal. But, has not it often been suggested, to use Audre Lorde’s phrasing, that it is not possible to take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? While not forgetting Lorde’s question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good reason, for he was writing from a context where this is precisely what was taking place. Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from borrowing from sociology and industrial relations – and by using these tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the grounds of politics.

Of these adaptations the most important for autonomist politics and class composition analysis is workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry developed in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass migration, and the use of industrial sociology to discipline the working class. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a sort of parallel sociology, one based on a radical re-reading of Marx and Weber against the politics of the communist party and the unions. While the practitioners of workers’ inquiry were often professionally-trained academics – especially sociologists – its proponents argued their research differs in important ways from ‘engaged’ social science, and all varieties of industrial sociology, even if there are similarities. If bourgeois sociology sought to smooth over conflicts, and ‘critical’ sociology to expose these same conflicts, workers’ inquiry takes the contradictions of the labor process as a starting point and seeks to draw out these antagonisms into the formation of new radical subjectivities.

This is not to say that workers’ inquiry is an unproblematic endeavor. We remain skeptical that the weapons of managerial control can be cleanly re-appropriated without reproducing the very social world they were designed to take apart. For as Steve Wright argues, “the uncritical use of such tools has frequently produced a register of subjective perceptions which do no more than mirror the surface of capitalist social relations.” As the legacy of analytical Marxism reveals, imitation is never far removed from flattery, and at its worst moments, workers’ inquiry risks becoming its object of critique. To be fair there are disagreements among the proponents of workers’ inquiry over the limitations of drawing from the social sciences. But to continue the metaphor, like any potentially dangerous ‘weapon’, sociological techniques must be carefully examined, and when necessary, disabled.

Today we find ourselves at a moment when co-research, participatory action research, and other heterodox methods have been adopted by the academic mainstream, while managerial styles like TQM carry a faint echo of workers’ inquiry. In the contemporary firm workers are already engaged in self-monitoring, peer interviews, and the creation of quasi-autonomous ‘research’ units, all sanctioned by management. Workers’ inquiry is now part of the accepted social science repertoire: its techniques no longer seem dangerous, but familiar, at least at the methodological level. The bosses’ arsenal now includes weapons mimicking the style, if not the substance, of workers’ inquiry. And as George Steinmetz has suggested, while blatantly positivistic research styles have fallen out of favor, this obscures the ‘positivist unconscious’ that continues to interpellate even apparently anti-positivist methodologies.

The pioneers of workers’ inquiry argued researchers must work through/against the ambivalent relations of (social) science; now, there may be no other option. Wherever there are movements organizing and addressing the horrors of capitalist exploitation and oppression, the specter of recuperation is never far behind. The point is not to deny these risks, but to the degree such dynamics confront all social movements achieving any measure of success. It is by working against and through them that recomposing radical politics becomes possible. Today workers’ inquiry remains, as Raniero Panzieri argues, a permanent reference point for autonomist politics, one that informs continuing inquiries into class composition. With this issue we seek to rethink workers’ inquiry as a practice and perspective, and through that to understand and catalyze emergent moments of political composition.

Keynotes from:
Anna Curcio, University of Messina
Matteo Mandarini, Queen Mary, University of London
Gigi Roggero, University of Bologna

Contributors
We invite presentations and interventions that update the practices of workers’ inquiry for the present moment of class de-/recomposition. Can we develop, taking up Matteo Pasquinelli’s suggestion, a form of workers’ inquiry applied to cognitive and biopolitical production? The very possibility of a workers’ inquiry begs reconsideration when official unemployment figures drift toward 50% among sectors of the industrial working class.

We are particularly interested in research that expands and/or deconstructs the project of workers’ inquiry, or that transposes workers’ inquiry onto unconventional terrain such as archival research and cultural studies. Additionally, we encourage contributors to include a substantial reflection on method, possibly addressing some of the tensions outlined above and engaging with recent debates about method and measure.

Please send proposals of no more then 500 words conference@ephemeraweb.org by February 28th, 2013.

Attempts will be made to keep registration costs low, particularly for those without funding, and will be run on a sliding scale basis.

The conference will be preceded by PhD workshop on workers’ inquiry that will take place on May 1st (and will be free for PhD students to attend). For more information on this e-mail sshuka@essex.ac.uk.

Sponsored by ephemera and the Essex Centre for Work, Organization, and Society

Building the Common(s): Social movements, Tools, and Initiatives

commonnotionsny — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:24:21 +0000

Building the Common(s): Social movements, Tools, and Initiatives (Commons charters, Community kitchens and Citizens´ Rescue Plan)

Thursday, February 14th | 6pm to 9:30pm

16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
6:00 doors

6:30 – 8:00 Part 1: Intro to the context of today’s commons inquiry w/ discussion on The Great lakes Commons Initiative (Bradley) & Madrid City Commons Charter (Lopez).

8:00 – 9:30 Part 2: Dinner – Revolutionary Love & continuing the inquiry: Reclaiming a common(s) in the city/community kitchen/building meshworks of mutual aid in the city/Citizen’s Rescue Plan.

Making Worlds invites you to a discussion with individuals currently participating in the development of commons charters: Isidro Lopez (Observatorio Metropolitano-Madrid-Spain) and Alexa Bradley (Great Lakes Commons Initiative). We will learn about these two projects, as well as explore the potentialities of Commons Charters, and the concept of the commons in general, as useful tools for social movements.

Essentially commons charters are documents created by communities seeking to take back control of their livelihoods. The most famous is The Magna Carta’s often overlooked Charter of the Forest written in 1066 by the commoners of England demanding their right to use the land for their common needs: grazing, wood for cooking, peat for fuel, and fishing rights to name a few. In recent years, different initiatives throughout the world have recovered this kind of documents, as is the case of the Carta de los Comunes (Madrid, Spain), and the Great Lakes Initiative (US-Canada).

The conversation will include also a presentation of a Community Kitchen project

Isidro Lopez will discuss his involvement with Observatorio Metropolitano and the “Carta de los Comunes”, a Commons Charter for the city of Madrid (Spain) elaborated collectively in 2011.

Alexa Bradley will discuss her current work with the Great Lakes Commons Initiative, a broad organizing effort to catalyze a cross border citizen movement to put human need, ecological survival and democratized decision making at the center of the Great Lakes governance.

Related Articles:
Carta de los Comunes (in Spanish; Madrid)
(free download – a donation is recommended – at the bottom of the page) http://traficantes.net/index.php/editorial/catalogo/otras/La-Carta-de-los-Comunes.-Para-el-cuidado-y-disfrute-de-lo-que-de-todos-es

The Great Lakes Are Declared a Commons (Onthecommons.org)
A diverse group of activists from both sides of the border declares the lakes a common endowment http://onthecommons.org/great-lakes-are-declared-commons

Further Reading:
On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides. by Anarchitecture (two perspectives interweaving theories on the commons, with practical examples, propositions, and analysis.) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/

Crises, Movements and the Commons.
by Massimo De Angelis.
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/deangelis_crises.htm

A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the crisis of neoliberalism and question of the commons
by George Caffentzis
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/caffentzis_globalization.htm

Two Charters, Chapter 2 from “The Magna Carta Manifesto”
by Peter Linebaugh
http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/linebaugh_two_charters.pdf

Defending, Reclaiming and Reinventing the Commons
by Maria Mies & Veronika Benholdt-Thomsen
http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/mies_benholdt_defending_reinventing.pdf

The Spanish Model
by Isidro López & Emmanuel Rodríguez
http://newleftreview.org/II/69/isidro-lopez-emmanuel-rodriguez-the-spanish-model

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Former Conversations:

Beyond Good and Evil Commons
A seminar with Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, & David Graeber
http://www.16beavergroup.org/silvia_george_david/

Making Worlds Commons Coalition is a collaborative effort by OWS and other groups and individuals to explore the utility of the commons in creating a better world. http://www.makingworlds.org/

Meredith Stern, “Mutual Aid Birds (Edition 2)”

Occupied Greek Factory Begins Production Under Workers Control

commonnotionsny — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:49:17 +0000

Occupied Greek Factory Begins Production Under Workers Control
Occupy, Resist, Produce!

“We see this as the only future for worker’s struggles.”
Makis Anagnostou, Vio.Me workers’ union spokesman

Tuesday, February 12, 2013 is the official first day of production under workers control in the factory of Viomichaniki Metalleutiki (Vio.Me) in Thessaloniki, Greece. This means production organized without bosses and hierarchy, and instead planned with directly democratic assemblies of the workers. The workers assemblies have declared an end to unequal division of resources, and will have equal and fair remuneration, decided collectively. The factory produces building materials, and they have declared that they plan to move towards a production of these goods that is not harmful for the environment, and in a way that is not toxic or damaging.

“With unemployment climbing to 30% – sick and tired of big words, promises and more taxes – not having been paid since May 2011, the workers of Vio.Me, by decision of the general assembly of the union declare their determination not to fall prey to a condition of perpetual unemployment, but instead to take the factory in their own hands to operate themselves. It is now time for worker’s control of Vio.Me.!” (Statement of the Open Solidarity Initiative, written together with the workers of Vio.Me – full statement: Viome.org)

Workers in Vio.Me stopped being paid in May of 2011, and subsequently the owners and managers abandoned the factory. After a series of assemblies the workers decided that together they would run the factory. Since then, they have occupied and defended the factory and the machinery needed for production. They have continued to reach out to other workers and communities throughout Greece, receiving tremendous support. The solidarity and support of all of these groups, communities and individuals, has made an important contribution towards the survival of the workers and their families thus far.

This experience of worker’s occupation to workers recovery and control is not new – either historically or currently. Since 2001 there are close to 300 workplaces that are run democratically by workers in Argentina, ranging from health clinics and newspapers and schools, to metal factories, print shops and a hotel. The experience there has shown that workers together cannot only run their own workplace, but can do it better. The example of Argentina has spread throughout the Americas, and now to Europe and the US. In Chicago, workers of New World Windows have begun production under workers control after years of struggles with former owners and bosses. And now in Greece, workers are again showing that the way forward – out of unemployment – refusing the crisis – is workers control and directly democratic self-management.

“We urge all workers, the unemployed and all those who are affected by the crisis to stand by the workers of Vio.Me and support them in their effort to put in practice the belief that workers can make it without bosses! To participate in the struggle and organize their own fights within their work places, with directly democratic procedures and without bureaucrats.” (Union’s website: biom-metal.blogspot.gr)

As with all factory recuperations, the question of initial financing is central. While solidarity has been able to maintain the lives of the workers of Vio.Me and their families, the capital needed to continue production is huge. The workers’ union has a business plan that is sustainable, but will take time to get off the ground. These first months are crucial. Financial help can make all the difference. Any contribution is helpful.

Direct financial support can be sent to the Vio.Me workers’ union in Thessaloniki through the International Solidarity Website: viome.org

Solidarity Statements as well as questions can be sent to: protbiometal@gmail.com

Signed,
Thessaloniki Solidarity Initiative, Brendan Martin (Working World), Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin

Supporters of this initiative include:
David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, John Holloway, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, David Graeber, Mag Wompel (labournet.de) and The Cooperativa de Trabajo lavaca, Buenos Aires, Argentina