Embodying Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21St Century
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Notes on Gender in Marx's Capital
CONTINENTAL THOUGHT & THEORY: A JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM Notes on Gender in Marx’s Capital Volume 1 | Issue 4: 150 years of Capital 19-37| ISSN: 2463-333X Notes on Gender in Marx’s Capital Silvia Federici Abstract As interest in Marxism and Feminism is reviving and Marx’s views on ‘gender’ are receiving a new attention, some areas of agreement among feminists are emerging that also shape my approach to the subject. 1 First, while denunciations of gender inequalities and patriarchal control in the family and society can be found in Marx’s work from an early stage, it is agreed that Marx “did not have much to say on gender and the family” 2 and, even in Capital his views on the subject must be reconstructed from scattered observations. Nevertheless, Marx’s work has given a significant contribution to the development of feminist theory, although not primarily based on his direct pronouncements on the subject. Not only has his historical materialist method helped demonstrate the constructed character of gender hierarchies and identities.3 Marx’s analysis of capitalist accumulation and value creation have given feminists of my generation powerful tools to rethink the specific forms of exploitation to which women have been subjected in capitalist society and the relation between ‘sex, race, and class.’4 However the use that feminists have made of Marx has at best taken them in a different direction from the one he traced. 19 CONTINENTAL THOUGHT & THEORY: A JOURNAL OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM Notes on Gender in Marx’s Capital Key words: Gender, Marx, Labour-Power, Feminism, Wages for Housework Movement, Domestic Work, Reproduction Writing about gender in Capital, then, is coming to terms with two different Marxes and, I add, two different viewpoints on gender and the class struggle. -
Sos Political Science & Public Administration M.A.Political Science
Sos Political science & Public administration M.A.Political Science II Sem Political Philosophy:Mordan Political Thought, Theory & contemporary Ideologies(201) UNIT-IV Topic Name-Utopian Socialism What is utopian society? • A utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens.The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia. • Utopia focuses on equality in economics, government and justice, though by no means exclusively, with the method and structure of proposed implementation varying based on ideology.According to Lyman Tower SargentSargent argues that utopia's nature is inherently contradictory, because societies are not homogenous and have desires which conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied. • The term utopia was created from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the south Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South America Who started utopian socialism? • Charles Fourier was a French socialist who lived from 1772 until 1837 and is credited with being an early Utopian Socialist similar to Robert Owen. He wrote several works related to his socialist ideas which centered on his main idea for society: small communities based on cooperation Definition of utopian socialism • socialism based on a belief that social ownership of the means of production can be achieved by voluntary and peaceful surrender of their holdings by propertied groups What is the goal of utopian societies? • The aim of a utopian society is to promote the highest quality of living possible. The word 'utopia' was coined by the English philosopher, Sir Thomas More, in his 1516 book, Utopia, which is about a fictional island community. -
They Call It Love Wages for Housework and Emotional
THEY CALL IT LOVE WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK AND EMOTIONAL REPRODUCTION ALVA GOTBY A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of West London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 1 Abstract This thesis is a study of two sets of literature on capitalism, gender, and emotion. Firstly, it explores the writings of the Wages for Housework (WFH) movement – a network of Marxist feminist activist groups, founded in 1972, whose activity was centred on women’s reproductive labour. Secondly, this thesis draws on the body of writing on emotional labour. Coined by Arlie Hochschild in 1983, this term describes the work of producing emotional states in another person. While WFH were attentive to emotional aspects of reproductive labour, their writings mention emotional labour only in passing. Hochschild’s work concentrates on emotional labour in particular service occupations, but neglects broader issues of social reproduction. Synthesising these bodies of work, I introduce the concept of emotional reproduction, thus applying the WFH perspective to the theme introduced by Hochschild. Emotional reproduction denotes processes across waged and unwaged forms of labour, intended to enhance the relative emotional wellbeing of a recipient, to the extent that they are able to participate in waged labour. These processes often take place in the private sphere, and are constructed as a typically feminine activity. I argue for the importance of understanding these processes as a form of labour, which is integral to capitalist social reproduction. Through the notion of emotional reproduction, this thesis offers an account of gendered subjectivity. It highlights the construction of gendered and historically specific forms of skill, which are essential for emotional labour. -
The Order of the Prophets: Series in Early French Social Science and Socialism
Hist. Sci., xlviii (2010) THE ORDER OF THE PROPHETS: SERIES IN EARLY FRENCH SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIALISM John Tresch University of Pennsylvania Everything that can be thought by the mind or perceived by the senses is necessarily a series.1 According to the editors of an influential text in the history of social science, “in the first half of the nineteenth century the expression series seemed destined to a great philosophical future”.2 The expression itself seems to encourage speculation on destiny. Elements laid out in a temporal sequence ask to be continued through the addition of subsequent terms. “Series” were particularly prominent in the French Restoration and July Monarchy (1815–48) in works announcing a new social science. For example, the physician and republican conspirator J. P. B. Buchez, a former fol- lower of Henri de Saint-Simon who led a movement of Catholic social reform, made “series” central to his Introduction à la science de l’histoire. Mathematical series show a “progression”, not “a simple succession of unrelated numbers”; in human history, we discover two simultaneous series: “one growing, that of good; one diminishing, that of evil.” The inevitability of positive progress was confirmed by recent findings in physiology, zoology and geology. Correlations between the developmental stages of organisms, species, and the Earth were proof that humanity’s presence in the world “was no accident”, and that “labour, devotion and sacrifice” were part of the “universal order”. The “great law of progress” pointed toward a socialist republic in fulfilment both of scripture and of the promise of 1789. -
Acts of Displacement: Lea Lublin's Mon Fils
Acts of Displacement: Lea Lublin’s Mon Fils, May ’68 and Feminist Psychosocial Revolt On May 4, 1968, the day after confrontations between students and police initiated the événements that would bring Paris to a standstill for the entire month and trigger strikes across France, the 24e Salon de Mai opened at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. First proposed in 1943 by Gaston Diehl, with the ambition of expanding the existing salon system, by 1968 the Salon de Mai had settled into a conservative venture ‘honouring the modern tradition through homages to established artists.’1 However, for this iteration an unusually unconventional work lay in wait for visitors among the sculptures and paintings. For Mon fils (My Son), the artist Lea Lublin displayed her baby son Nicolas, born the year before, in the galleries with his crib, nappies, clothes and toys (fig. 1). Lublin reflected that Mon fils entailed ‘displacing a moment of my everyday life into an artistic site … I exhibited myself with my son.’2 Lublin consistently framed the work as a ‘displacement’, reiterating this formulation in a 1989 interview: ‘the previous year, my great joy had been the birth of my son, and I said to myself: the best thing for me is to displace a moment of my everyday life to an artistic space, the Museum [sic].’3 Lublin’s act of displacement, this essay proposes, occupies an intriguing interstitial zone between Marxist feminist analyses of domestic labour and childcare on the one hand, and feminist re-readings of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis on the other. -
Dies-Non: Refusal of Work in the 21St Century P
University of Washington Tacoma UW Tacoma Digital Commons Urban Studies Publications Urban Studies 2019 Dies-Non: Refusal of Work in the 21st Century P. Mudu University of Washington Tacoma, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/urban_pub Recommended Citation Mudu, P., "Dies-Non: Refusal of Work in the 21st Century" (2019). Urban Studies Publications. 131. https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/urban_pub/131 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Urban Studies at UW Tacoma Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Urban Studies Publications by an authorized administrator of UW Tacoma Digital Commons. 1 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1551780 2 3 4 5 Dies-non: refusal of work in the 21st century 6 7 Pierpaolo Mudu 8 Department of Urban Studies and Department of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University 9 of Washington-Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA 10 11 ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY 12 My comments aim to cast light on a specific political pro- Received 17 September 2017 posal that can arise from a discussion of the topic of the Accepted 27 April 2018 13 ‘refusal of work’ and its implications for a social radical KEYWORDS change. Autonomist, anarchist and feminist activism, have 14 commons; feminism; been and are the main sources of a long-term conceptual 15 neoliberalism; radical needs; and empirical work on the refusal of work. Refusal of work refusal of work; squatting 16 is a very complex concept that has traversed history and 17 is reduced for uncritical dominant common sense to unemployment, laziness, idleness, indolence but it is in 18 reality one of the basic foundational qualification to think 19 any radical change. -
Utopianism and Prefiguration
This item was submitted to Loughborough's Research Repository by the author. Items in Figshare are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Utopianism and prefiguration PLEASE CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION https://cup.columbia.edu/book/political-uses-of-utopia/9780231179591 PUBLISHER © Columbia University Press VERSION AM (Accepted Manuscript) LICENCE CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 REPOSITORY RECORD Kinna, Ruth. 2019. “Utopianism and Prefiguration”. figshare. https://hdl.handle.net/2134/19278. Utopianism and Prefiguration Ruth Kinna For anarchists, utopias are about action. As Uri Gordon argues, utopias are “umbilically connected to the idea of social revolution”.1 The kind of action utopia describes is a matter of debate. This essay examines how utopian thinking shapes anarchist thought and highlights some recent shifts in the political uses of utopia. Utopianism is not treated as an abstract concept or method, nor as a literary genre or place – because that is not how anarchists have understood the idea. Utopia, Gordon notes, “has always meant something more than a hypothetical exercise in designing a perfect society”. As a revolutionary idea, utopia is instead linked to the principle of prefiguration. Prefiguration has been identified as a core concept in contemporary anarchist thinking and it is increasingly invoked to highlight the distinctiveness of anarchist practices, actions and movements. In 2011, two months after the start of Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber identified prefigurative politics as one of the movement’s four characteristically anarchist principles, the other three being direct action, illegalism and the rejection of hierarchy. Hinting at the utopianism of the concept, he described Occupy as a genuine attempt “to create the institutions of the new society in the shell of the old”. -
Rethinking the Failure of the French Fourierist Colony in Dallas
Praktyka Teoretyczna Numer 3(29)/2018 ISSN 2081-8130 DOI: 10.14746/prt.2018.3.6 www.praktykateoretyczna.pl RETHINKING THE FAILURE OF THE FRENCH FOURIERIST COLONY IN DALLAS MICHEL CORDILLOT Abstract: It has generally been accepted that the attempt of the French Fourierists to set up a colony in Texas on the eve of the Civil War was a complete failure. But was that really the case? A reexamination of the colony’s legacy will show that it was more complex and far-reaching than previously thought. Key words: Fourierism, La Réunion, phalanstery, Texas, the 19th century, Victor Considerant Michel Cordillot: Rethinking the failure… Why does the failed attempt of the French Fourierists to set up a socialist colony in Texas on the eve of the Civil War deserve reexamination?1 After all, that colony broke down quickly and might at first sight seem to have been a far from remarkable case on the long list of failed utopian experiments in the history of the United States of America. The point is, however, that when considering its legacy and the consequences that ensued in a broader perspective, the story of Reunion can hardly be written off as a complete disaster. Besides, a reexamination of this largely forgotten episode may also prove helpful in rethinking the problems that appear when yearnings for a brighter future collide with harsh reality. Let us first return to the context in which a group of European followers of the French social philosopher Charles Fourier (1772-1837) decided to cross the Atlantic ocean in 1855 to settle in the middle of nowhere in the Texan prairie to found Reunion under the guidance of his main disciple, Victor Considerant.2 This attempt took place a few years after Louis- Napoléon Bonaparte’s violent seizure of power in France on December 2, 1851. -
Socialist Anti-Semitism, Defense of a Bourgeois Jew and Discovery of the Jewish Proletariat Changing Attitudes of French Socialists Before 1914*
NANCY L. GREEN SOCIALIST ANTI-SEMITISM, DEFENSE OF A BOURGEOIS JEW AND DISCOVERY OF THE JEWISH PROLETARIAT CHANGING ATTITUDES OF FRENCH SOCIALISTS BEFORE 1914* The anti-Semitism of the mid-nineteenth-century French socialists has often been cited. Charles Fourier saw the Jews as the incarnation of commerce: parasitical, deceitful, traitorous and unproductive. Pierre- Joseph Proudhon attacked the Jews even more violently, declaring the Jew the incarnation of finance capitalism and "by temperament an anti-pro- ducer". The Fourierist Alphonse Toussenel argued in Les Juifs rois de I'epoque that finance, that is to say, Jews, were dominating and ruining France, while Auguste Blanqui sprinkled his correspondence with remarks about Jewish usury and "Shylocks", and in a general anticlerical critique blamed the Jews for having given birth to Catholicism, an even greater evil than Judaism. In the late 1860's Gustave Tridon, who was a close follower of Blanqui, wrote a book entitled Du Molochisme juif, in which he also attacked the Jews on anti-religious as well as racial grounds, in addition to using the usual economic terms of disparagement.1 Socialist anti-Semitism, just as non-socialist, can be seen to have three modes of expression: economic, "religious" (actually anti-clerical) and racial, although for the socialists the first two would have a particular meaning in their criticism of capitalism and of religion as the "opium of the people". In elaborating their various critiques of contemporary society these early socialists often used the Jews as a symbol of the rise of capitalism. Whether it was commercial or finance capitalism, the Jewish * I would like to thank M. -
Loughborough Talk, 7 March 2012. Seriality and “Everyone's Place
Loughborough Talk, 7th March 2012. Seriality and “Everyone’s Place Under the Sun”: Proudhon with Kant. Whole Earth, Fragile Planet? …Ainsi le principe d’occupation est abandonné: on ne dit plus : La terre est au premier qui s’en empare…désormais l’on avoue que la terre n’est point le prix de la course ; à moins d’autre empêchement, il y a place pour tout le monde au soleil. Chacun peut attacher sa chèvre à la haie, conduire, sa vache dans la plaine, semer un coin de champ, et faire cuire son pain au feu de son foyer. …Thus, the principle of occupation is abandoned ; no longer is it said : « The land belongs to the one who first seizes it… But henceforth… it will be admitted that the earth is not a prize to be won in a race; in the absence of any other obstacle, there is a place for everyone under the sun. Each one may tie his goat to the hedge, lead his cow to pasture, sow a corner of a field, and bake his bread by his own fireside. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon What is Property? (2009, 215; 2007, 69). …ein Besuchsrecht, welches allen Menschen zusteht, sich zur Gesellschaft anzubieten, vermöge des Rechts des gemeinschaftlichen Besitzes der Oberfläche, auf der, als 1 Kugelfläche, sie sich nicht ins Unendliche zerstreuen können, sondern endlich sich doch neben einander dulden zu können, ursprünglich aber niemand an einem Orte der Erde zu sein mehr Recht hat, als der andere.. ..a right of resort, for all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface. -
Theories About Sex and Sexuality in Utopian Socialism
Journal of Homosexuality ISSN: 0091-8369 (Print) 1540-3602 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjhm20 Theories About Sex and Sexuality in Utopian Socialism Saskia Poldervaart To cite this article: Saskia Poldervaart (1995) Theories About Sex and Sexuality in Utopian Socialism, Journal of Homosexuality, 29:2-3, 41-68, DOI: 10.1300/J082v29n02_02 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J082v29n02_02 Published online: 18 Oct 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 144 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=wjhm20 Download by: [Vanderbilt University Library] Date: 25 October 2017, At: 04:27 Theories About Sex and Sexuality in Utopian Socialism Saskia Poldervaart Universiteit van Amsterdam SUMMARY. It was the utopian socialists of the period 1800-50 (Fourier, Saint-Simon, and the Saint-Simonians in France, as well as the Owenites in Great Britain) who not only challenged the imperial- ism of reason but sought to rehabilitate the flesh by valuing its plea- sure and incentives. Sex and sexuality were central issues for the first socialists, who were scorned as ‘‘utopian’’ by Marx and Engels for seeking to improve the status of all members of society through peaceful means. Because Marxism has played a greater role in the history of socialism, the utopian socialist discussions have been largely disregarded. This essay analyzes the works of the utopian so- cialists Fourier, Saint-Simon, and the Saint-Simonians, arguing that resurgences of the utopian socialist tradition can be discerned around 1900 and again circa 1970. -
Changing Anarchism.Pdf
Changing anarchism Changing anarchism Anarchist theory and practice in a global age edited by Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Manchester University Press 2004 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC- ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6694 8 hardback First published 2004 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset in Sabon with Gill Sans display by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by CPI, Bath Dedicated to the memory of John Moore, who died suddenly while this book was in production. His lively, innovative and pioneering contributions to anarchist theory and practice will be greatly missed.