We are trapped in a state of limbo, neither one thing nor the other. For more than two years, the world has been wracked by a series of interrelated crises, and they show no sign of being resolved anytime soon. The unshakable certainties of neoliberalism, which held us fast for so long, have collapsed. Yet we seem unable to move on. Anger and protest have erupted around different aspects of the crises, but no common or consistent reaction has seemed able to cohere. A general sense of frustration marks the attempts to break free from the morass of a failing world.
The issue of a generational exchange in Italian feminism has been crucial over the last decade. Current struggles over precariousness have revived issues previously raised by feminists of the 1970s, recalling how old forms of instability and precarious employment are still present in Italy. This essay starts from the assumption that precariousness is a constitutive aspect of many young Italian women’s lives. Young Italian feminist scholars have been discussing the effects of such precarity on their generation. This article analyses the literature produced by political groups of young scholars interested in gender and feminism connected to debates on labour and power in contemporary Italy. One of the most successful strategies that younger feminists have used to gain visibility has involved entering current debates on precariousness, thus forcing a connection with the larger Italian labour movement. In doing so, this new wave of feminism has destabilized the universalism assumed by the 1970s generation. By pointing to a necessary generational change, younger feminists have been able to mark their own specificity and point to exploitative power dynamics within feminist groups, as well as in the family and in the workplace without being dismissed. In such a layered context, many young feminists argue that precariousness is a life condition, not just the effect of job market flexibility and not solely negative. The literature produced by young feminists addresses the current strategies engineered to make ‘their’ precarious life more sustainable. This essay analyses such strategies in the light of contemporary Italian politics. The main conclusion is that younger Italian women’s experience requires new strategies and tools for struggle, considering that the visibility of women as political subjects is still quite minimal. Female precariousness can be seen as a fruitful starting point for a dialogue across differences, addressing gender and reproduction, immigration, work and social welfare at the same time.
The Luddites were not, as not only popularizers of theories of technology but also capitalist apologists for unregulated innovation claim, universally technophobes. The Luddites were artisans -- primarily skilled workers in the textile industries in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Cheshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Flintshire in the years between March 1811 and April 1817 -- who when faced with the use of machines (operated by less-skilled labor, typically apprentices, unapprenticed workers, and women) to drive down their wages and to produce inferior goods (thereby damaging their trades' reputations), turned to wrecking the offensive machines and terrorizing the offending owners in order to preserve their wages, their jobs, and their trades. Machines were not the only, or even the major, threat to the textile workers of the Midlands and North. The Prince Regent's Orders in Council, barring trade with Napoleonic France and nations friendly to France, cut off foreign markets for the British textile industry
“Counting marketable achievements such as how many leaflets were distributed, or the quantity of funds raised, prevents us from reflecting on what changes have been achieved, or the strength of our resistance to corporates or government, or, more realistically, from analysing our effectiveness long- term in a struggle against power that isn’t meant to come with quarterly ‘successes.’
The Soviet government parades missiles and marches soldiers on May Day. The American government has called May First "Loyalty Day" and associates it with militarism. The real meaning of this day has been obscured by the designing propaganda of both governments. The truth of May Day is totally different. To the history of May Day there is a Green side and there is a Red side. Under the rainbow, our methodology must be colorful. Green is a relationship to the earth and what grows therefrom. Red is a relationship to other people and the blood spilt there among. Green designates life with only necessary labor; Red designates death with surplus labor. Green is natural appropriation; Red is social expropriation. Green is husbandry and nurturance; Red is proletarianization and prostitution. Green is useful activity; Red is useless toil. Green is creation of desire; Red is class struggle. May Day is both.
Amid the resurgence of anti-capitalist movements across the globe, the centenary of Lenin’s What is to be Done? in 2002 has largely gone unnoticed. Leninism has fallen on hard times – and rightly so. It leaves a bitter taste of a revolution whose heroic struggle turned into a nightmare. The indifference to Leninism is understandable. What, however, is disturbing is the contemporary disinterest in the revolutionary project. What does anti-capitalism in its contemporary form of antiglobalization mean if it is not a practical critique of capitalism and what does it wish to achieve if its anti-capitalism fails to espouse the revolutionary project of human emancipation? Anti-capitalist indifference to revolution is a contradiction in terms. Rather then freeing the theory and practice of revolution from Leninism, its conception of revolutionary organization in the form of the party, and its idea of the state whose power is to be seized, as an instrument of revolution, remain uncontested. Revolution seems to mean Leninism, now appearing in moderated form as Trotskyism. Orthodox Marxism invests great energy in its attempt to incorporate the class struggle into preconceived conceptions of organization, seeking to render them manageable under the direction of the party. The management of class struggle belongs traditionally to the bourgeoisie who ‘concentrated in the form of the state’ (see Marx, 1973, p.108), depend on its containment and management in the form of abstract equality. The denial of humanity that is entailed in the subordination of the inequality in property to relations of abstract equality in the form of exchange relations, is mirrored in the Leninist conception of the workers state, where everybody is treated equally as an economic resource.
The critique of class society finds the positive only in the classless society, in communism. The difficulty of conceiving of human emancipation has to do with the very idea of communism. In distinction to the pursuit of profit, seizure of the state, pursuit and preservation of political power, and economic value and human resource, it follows a completely different entelechy of human development. Communism means Commune, an association of the direct producers where each contributes according to her abilities, and where each receives according to her needs. In distinction to the second and third Internationals, which subscribed to naturalised conceptions of society and history, there is no universal historical law that leads human kind from some imagined historical beginning via capitalism to communism. If, however, history is not the consequence of either divine revelation or abstract historical laws, what is it? History does not make history. Neither is history on the side of the working class. History takes no sides: it can as easily be the history of barbarism as of socialism. History is made, and will be made. The future that will come will not result from some objective laws of historical development but will result from the struggles of today. The communist future is a future present. Its reality is the everyday struggle over the production and appropriation of surplus value.
Communisation and socialisation is not forming a contradiction. The contradiction remains that between capital and the proletariat. It does not become an internal contradiction within the proletariat. Even if there is a future total opposition between the two perspectives they are intertwined and both implicated in the contradiction capital–proletariat. The struggle of the proletariat against capital becomes the abolition of classes by the expropriation of capital. But this very action, in its opposition to capital, revives the affirmation of work when it is interrupted by the capitalist class (it is there that the gains exist that we have seen). This provisional and default affirmation of work advances a social state of which the future will be a social State, thus a counter-revolutionary form. The revolutionary movement must ceaselessly oppose itself to that which it has posed. The process of self-transformation into immediately social individuals can, in the struggle against capital and thus the capitalist class, also be a struggle against proletarians defending the proletarian condition. A struggle of communisation against socialisation.
We want to understand the world in its historical particularity, how and why it has gotten to be the way that it is, and why that is insupportable. You, however, simply want to make sure that it goes on as long as possible. Regardless of the quality, regardless of the consequences, regardless of anything other than your collected capacity to declare that it's a nasty world out there, but at least we have our decency. At least we sit high enough to look out over the killing fields. At least we got here by legal measures. And how dare they. How dare they.
Up there, they intend to repeat their history. They once again want to impose on us their calendar of death, their geography of destruction. When they are not trying to strip us of our roots, they are destroying them. They steal our work, our strength. They leave our world, our land, our water, and our treasures without people, without life. The cities pursue and expel us. The countryside dies and we along with it. Lies become governments and dispossession is the weapon of their armies and police. In the world, we are illegal, undocumented, unwanted. We are pursued. Women, young people, children, the elderly die in death and die in life. And up there they preach to us resignation, defeat, surrender, and abandonment. Down here we are being left with nothing. Except rage. And dignity
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