rev at point zero
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by silvia federici (2012) via 178 (ish) pg apple books book/excerpt [pg number changes as you resize/reopen.. so 2nd number will be what it currently says for total]..
notes/quotes:
2/178
“Praise for Revolution at Point Zero
“..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
to me only one from that list – 3\ via hari rat park law.. for (blank)’s sake
findings from on the ground ness:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to facil the seeming chaos of 8b legit free people
“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
neoliberalism.. david on neoliberal capitalism
earn a living ness
*“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
*to me.. the thing is.. we’ve not seen anything legit ‘new’ to date.. everything has been same song
3/178
Revolution at Point Zero
8/178
“Part I: Theorizing and Politicizing Housework
Wages against Housework (1975)
Why Sexuality Is Work (1975)
Counterplanning from the Kitchen (1975)
The Restructuring of Housework and Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s (1980)
Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet (1984)
Part II: Globalization and Social Reproduction
Reproduction and Feminist Struggle in the New International Division of Labor (1999)
War, Globalization, and Reproduction (2000)
Women, Globalization, and the International Women’s Movement (2001)
The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution (2008)
Part III: Reproducing Commons
On Elder Care Work and the Limits of Marxism (2009)
Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization: An International Perspective (2004)
Feminism and the Politics of the Common in an Era of Primitive Accumulation (2010)”9/178
PREFACE
This book collects more than thirty years of reflection and research 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. It is a book that mixes politics, history, and feminist theory. But it is also one that reflects the trajectory of my political activism in the feminist and antiglobalization movements and the gradual shift in my relation to this work from “refusal” to “valorization” of housework, which I now recognize as expressive of a collective experience.
There is no doubt that among women of my generation, the refusal of housework as women’s natural destiny was a widespread phenomenon in the post-World War II period.
*only legit alt would get at the root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
When I wrote in “Wages against Housework” (1975) that becoming a housewife seemed “a fate worse than death,” I expressed my own attitude toward this work. And, indeed, I did all I could to escape it.
In retrospect, it seems ironic, then, that I should spend the next forty years of my life dealing with the question of reproductive labor, at least theoretically and politically if not in practice. In the effort to demonstrate why as women we should fight against this work, at least as it has been constituted in capitalism, I came to understand its importance not only for the capitalist class but also for our struggle and our reproduction.*Through my involvement in the women’s movement I realized that the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system, and that the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving. But this theoretical realization grew on the practical and emotional ground provided by my own family experience, which”“exposed me to a world of activities that for a long time I took for granted, and yet as a child and teenager I often observed with great fascination. Even now, some of the most treasured memories of my childhood are of my mother making bread, pasta, tomato sauce, pies, liqueurs, and then knitting, sewing, mending, embroidering, and attending to her plants. I would sometimes help her in selected tasks, most often however with reluctance. As a child, I saw her work; later, as a feminist, I learned to see her struggle, and I realized how much love there had been in that work, and yet how costly it had been for my mother to see it so often taken for granted, to never be able to dispose of some money of her own, and to always have to depend on my father for every penny she spent.
*caring labor et al.. but even that has not been truly ‘repro of human beings’.. it’s been repro of whales.. we need a global detox leap to get to what legit free human being ness might be..
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
..*the need to not measure our lives by the demands and values of the capitalist labor market was always assumed, and at times openly affirmed, as a principle that should guide the reproduction of our lives. .t By the same token, it is through the day-to-day activities by means of which we produce our existence, that we can develop our capacity to cooperate and not only resist our dehumanization but learn to **reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care.”..t
*literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
**ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
“Silvia Federici,Brooklyn, NY, June 2011”
9/129
intro
The confrontation with “reproductive work”—understood, at first, as housework, domestic labor—was the defining factor for many women of my generation, who came of age in the aftermath of World War II. For after two world wars that in a space of three decades decimated more than seventy million people, the lures of domesticity and the prospect of sacrificing our lives to produce more workers and soldiers for the state had no hold on our imagination. ..in recalling the visits that as school children in Italy we made to exhibits on the concentration camps, and the tales told around the dinner table of the many times we barely escaped being killed by bombs, running through the night searching for safety under a blazing sky, I cannot help wondering how much those experiences weighed on my and other women’s decisions not to have children and not to become housewives.
*This antiwar perspective, perhaps, is why unlike previous feminist critics of the home, family, and housework, our attitude could not be that of the reformers..t Looking backward at the feminist literature of the early 1970s, I am struck by the absence of the type of concerns that preoccupied feminists into the ‘20s, when reimagining the home, in terms of its domestic tasks, technology, and space organization was a major issue for feminist theory and practice.
*part\ial ness is killing us .. for (blank)’s sake.. keeping us from us
While for most feminists the points of reference were liberal, anarchist, or socialist politics, the women who launched WfH came from a history of militancy in Marxist-identified organizations, filtered through the experiences of the anticolonial movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Student Movement, and the “Operaist” movement. The latter developed in Italy in the early 1960s as an outcome of the resurgence of factory struggles, leading to a radical critique of “communism” and a rereading of Marx that has influenced an entire generation of activists, and still has not exhausted its analytic power as the worldwide interest in the Italian autonomist movement demonstrates.
12/185
*It was through but also against the categories articulated by these movements that our analysis of the “women’s question” turned into an analysis of housework as the crucial factor in the definition of the exploitation of women in capitalism,..t which is the theme running through most of the articles in this volume.. **to see the home and housework as the foundations of the factory system,..t rather than its “other.”. Since at least the nineteenth century, it has been a constant in American history that the rise of feminist activism has followed in the footsteps of the rise of Black liberation.
*yes.. cancerous distraction.. unless by anal of housework ness means/leads to bachelard oikos law et al
**rather.. home and housework ness in sea world.. as foundations of factory system.. need to try oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space..
17/185
“*The creation of common/s, then, must be seen as a complement and presupposition of the struggle over the wage, in a context in which employment is ever more precarious, in which monetary incomes are subject to constant manipulations, and in which flexibilization, gentrification, and migration have destroyed the forms of sociality that once characterized proletarian life. .. **What matters most, as Massimo De Angelis and Peter Linebaugh have so often stressed in their works and political activity, is the production of “commoning” practices, starting with new collective forms of reproduction, confronting the divisions that have been planted among us along the lines of race, gender, age, and geographical location…t This is one of the issues that has most interested me during these last years and to which I intend to dedicate a good part of my future work, both on account of the current reproduction crisis—including the destruction of an entire generation of young people, mostly of young people of color, now rotting in our jails—and on account of the recognition growing among activists.. ***a movement that does not learn to reproduce itself is not sustainable..t
*rather legit common\ing from letting go of all the part\ial ness.. all the cancerous distractions
ie: the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
**again.. if we focus on those (cancerous distractions).. we’ll just keep perpetuating the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world
***to repro self.. need to get to root of problem (aka: be for all)
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
18/185
I – THEORIZING AND POLITICIZING HOUSEWORK
19/185
“WAGES AGAINST HOUSEWORK (1975)
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.
smiles ness.. nika & silvia on divorce.. interpretive labor.. et al
Many times the difficulties and ambiguities that women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the fact that they reduce wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end “result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society.
much deeper.. ie: 10-day-care-center\ness.. earn a living ness.. makes no diff what perspective.. if still talking money/wages et al.. still not getting to root of problem.. again.. legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
When we *view wages for housework in this reductive way we start asking ourselves: what difference could more money make to our lives? We might even agree that for a lot of women who do not have any choice except for housework and marriage, it would indeed make a lot of difference. But for those of us who seem to have other choices—professional work, an enlightened husband, a communal way of life, gay relations or a combination of these—it would not make much of a difference. For us **there are supposedly other ways of achieving economic independence, and the last thing we want is to get it by identifying ourselves as housewives, a fate that we all agree is, so to speak, worse than death. The problem with this position is that in our imagination we usually add a bit of money to the wretched lives we have now and then ask “so what?” on the false premise that we could ever get that money without at the same time revolutionizing—in the process of struggling for it—all our family and social relations. But if we take wages for housework as a political perspective, we can see that struggling for it is going to produce a revolution in our lives and in our social power as women. It is also clear that if we think we do not need that money, it is because we have accepted the particular forms of prostitution of body and mind by which we get the money to hide that need. As I will try to show,”
*wages for housework.. for anything.. already dehumanizing
**cancerous distraction.. not getting to root of problem.. and again.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
20/185
“A Labor of Love”
It is important to recognize that when we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job like other jobs, but we are speaking of *the most pervasive manipulation, and the subtlest violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class. True, under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his or her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss each get what’s owed; while **in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle around and against the terms and the quantity of that wage, the terms and the quantity of that work. ***To have a wage means to be part of a social contract, and there is no doubt concerning its meaning: you work, not because you like it, or because it comes naturally to you, but because it is the only condition under which you are allowed to live “Exploited as you might be, you are not that work. Today you are a postman, tomorrow a cabdriver. All that matters is how much of that work you have to do and how much of that money you can get.”
*nika & silvia on divorce.. marriage\ing ness et al
**again.. already dehumanized if still talking wage ness.. if still measuring things
***again.. to social contract ness.. ie: 10-day-care-center\ness.. need life over survival ness
26/260
The difference with housework lies in the fact that not only has it been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework was transformed into a natural attribute, rather than being recognized as work, because it was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable, and even fulfilling activity to make us accept working without a wage. In turn, *the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further reducing the protagonist of a struggle. We are seen as nagging bitches, not as workers in struggle.
*oh my.. such whalespeak.. perfect for the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world
Yet, how natural it is to be a housewife is shown by the fact that it takes at least twenty years of socialization, day-to-day training, performed by an unwaged mother, to prepare a woman for this role, to convince her that children and husband are the best that she can expect from life. Even so, it hardly succeeds. No matter how well trained we are, few women do not feel cheated when the bride’s day is over and they find themselves in front of a dirty sink. Many of us still have the illusion that we marry for love. A lot of us recognize that we marry for money and security; but it is time to make it clear that while the love or money involved is very little, the work that awaits us is enormous. This is why older women always tell us, “Enjoy your freedom while you can, buy whatever you want now.” But unfortunately it is almost impossible to enjoy any freedom if, from the earliest days of your life, you are trained to be docile, subservient, dependent and, most importantly, to sacrifice yourself and even to get pleasure from it. If you don’t like it, it is your problem, your failure, your guilt, and your abnormality.
all of us trained.. in one way or another.. aka: socrates supposed to law of sea world
We must admit that capital has been very successful in hiding our work. It has created a true masterpiece at the expense of women. By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone.
makes no diff if all the birds are already dead..
we need to try a legit nother way.. for (blank)’s sake
27/260
Every woman knows that this is what she should be doing to be a true woman and have a “successful” marriage. And in this case too, the poorer the family the higher the enslavement of the woman, and not simply because of the monetary situation. ..the more blows the man gets at work the more his wife must be trained to absorb them, the more he is allowed to recover his ego at her expense.
marriage\ing et al.. and again.. nika & silvia on divorce et al
28/160
..wife has to learn: to wait in silence when he is moody, to put him back together when he is broken down and swears at the world, to turn around in bed when he says, “I’m too tired tonight,” ..The problem, then, becomes *how to bring this struggle out of the kitchen and the bedroom and into the streets.
anonymous ones heavy law.. olivier wrong about you law.. et al
*rather to let go of it all.. and try something legit diff.. something for all of us
The Revolutionary Perspective
29/260
.. Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it forces capital to *restructure social relations in terms more favorable to us and consequently more favorable to the unity of the class. In fact, to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do this work. It means precisely the opposite. **To say that we want wages for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.
*not favorable to us is still any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
**oooof.. cancerous distraction
30/260
..Our faces have become distorted from so much smiling, our feelings have got lost from so much loving, our oversexualization has left us completely desexualized.
smiles ness.. evans polite\ness law.. et al
..nothing can be more effective than to show that our female virtues have already a calculable money value: until today only for capital, increased in the measure that we were defeated, from now on, against capital, for us, in the measure that we organize our power.
oi
The Struggle for Social Services
This is the most radical perspective we can adopt because, although we can ask for day care, equal pay, free laundromats, we will never achieve any real change unless we attack our female role at its roots
may be done reading.. for a while anyway..
actually .. just going to skip to
143/260
Part III: Reproducing Commons
My main objective here is to call for a redistribution of the social wealth in the direction of elder care, and the construction of collective forms of reproduction, enabling older people to be provided for, when no longer self-sufficient, and not at the cost of their providers’ lives.
i’ve lived it.. i get it.. huge.. but still not root of problem.. so still spinning wheels
so skipping to
173/260
FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF THE COMMON IN AN ERA OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION (2010)
Our perspective is that of the planet’s commoners: human beings with bodies, needs, desires, whose most essential tradition is of cooperation in the making and maintenance of life; and yet have had to do so under conditions of suffering and separation from one another, from nature and from the common wealth we have created through generations.
177/260
What Commons?
A second concern is that, while international institutions have learned to make commons functional to the market, *how commons can become the foundation of a noncapitalist economy is a question still unanswered. From Peter Linebaugh’s work, especially The Magna Carta Manifesto (2008), we have learned that commons have been the thread that has connected the history of the class struggle into our time, and indeed the fight for the commons is all around us.
*findings from on the ground ness:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to facil the seeming chaos of 8b legit free people
179/260
It is in this context that a feminist perspective on the commons is important. It begins with the realization that, as the primary subjects of reproductive work, historically and in our time, women have depended more than men on access to communal resources, and have been most committed to their defense
makes no diff till global detox leap.. until then.. ie: all our supposed needs are whalespeak
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
181/260
Undoubtedly, this is a formidable task that can only be accomplished through a long-term process of consciousness raising, cross-cultural exchange, and coalition building,..
takes a lot of work as huge red flag we’re doing it/life wrong
183
One crucial reason for creating collective forms of living is that the reproduction of human beings is the most labor-intensive work on earth, and to a large extent it is work that is irreducible to mechanization. We cannot mechanize childcare or the care of the ill, or the psychological work necessary to reintegrate our physical and emotional balance. Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are making, we cannot robotize “care” except at a terrible cost for the people involved.
again.. takes a lot of work as huge red flag we’re doing it/life wrong
184/260
The times are propitious for such a start. As the capitalist crisis is destroying the basic element of reproduction for millions of people across the world, including the United States, the reconstruction of our everyday life is a possibility and a necessity.
indeed.. this is why the time is opp to try something legit diff.. ie: something for everyone.. no more us & them ness.. for (blank)’s sake
185/260
If the house is the oikos on which the economy is built, then it is women, historically the house-workers and house-prisoners, who must take the initiative to reclaim the house as a center of collective life,..t one traversed by multiple people and forms of cooperation, providing safety without isolation and fixation, allowing for the sharing and circulation of community possessions, and above all providing the foundation for collective forms of reproduction.
don’t think it has to be women.. but yeah.. oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
ff
______
______
______
_____
______
_____
_____
be you. 