You have written about university struggles in the context of neo-liberal
restructuring. Those struggles responded to attempts to enclose the
knowledge commons. Do you see the university struggles of the last years
as a continuation of the struggles against the enclosure of knowledge?
Or as something new? Has the economic crisis altered in some fundamental
way the context of university struggles?
Silvia Federici:
I see the students’ mobilization that has been mounting on the
North American campuses, especially in California, as part of a long
cycle of struggle against the neo-liberal restructuring of the global
economy and the dismantling of public education that began in the mid-1980s
in Africa and Latin America, and is now spreading to Europe—as
the recent student revolt in London demonstrated. At stake, in each
case, has been more than resistance to the “enclosure of knowledge.”
The struggles of African students in the 1980s and 1990s were particularly
intense because students realized that the drastic university budget
cuts the World Bank demanded signaled the end of the “social contract”
that had shaped their relation with the state in the post-independence
period, making education the key to social advancement and participatory
citizenship. They also realized, especially on hearing World Bankers
argue that “Africa has no need for universities,” that behind
the cuts a new international division of work was rearticulated that
re-colonized African economies and devalued African workers’ labor.
In the US as well, the gutting of public higher
education over the last decade must be placed in a social context where
in the aftermath of globalization companies can draw workers from across
the world, instituting precarity as a permanent condition of employment,
and enforcing constant re-qualifications. The financial crisis compounds
the university crisis, projecting economic trends in the accumulation
process and the organization of work that confront students with a state
of permanent subordination and continuous destruction of the knowledge
acquired as the only prospect for the future. In this sense, today’s
students’ struggles are less aimed at defending public education
than at changing the power relations with capital and the state and
re-appropriating their lives.
We can draw a parallel here with the revolt of
French workers and youth against the decision by the Sarkozy Government
to expand the working-life by two years. We cannot understand the vehement
opposition this decision has generated if we only focus on the time-span
workers have to forfeit on the path to pension. Clearly, what brought
millions to the streets was the realization that in the balance was
the loss of any hope for the future, which is the reason why so many
young people also joined the barricades.
This same understanding is what has made this
cycle of university struggles different and given them more or less
an openly anti-capitalist dimension. This is the significance, in my
view, of the circulation of the idea of the common/s in the rhetoric
of the student movements internationally. The call for “knowledge
commons” reflects not only a resistance to the privatization and
commercialization of knowledge, but the growing awareness that an alternative
to capitalism and the market must be constructed starting in the present.
It also stems from the realization that engagement in a collective process
of knowledge production is not possible in today’s academic environment.
Skyrocketing fees, courses tightly tailored to narrow economic goals,
oversized classes and overworked, underpaid, precarious teachers—all
these conditions devalue the knowledge produced in the universities,
calling for the creation of alternative forms of education and of spaces
where they can be organized. This, perhaps, is how we can begin to think
of the “politics of occupation,” i.e. as a means to take
over spaces needed for the creation of new commons.
Maya Gonzalez and
Caitlin Manning: You have written extensively about
education struggle and global resistance to austerity measures as struggles
over institutional sites of social reproduction rather than production.
What do you think is revealed by conceiving educational struggles as
part of a larger set of struggles over sites of social re-production?
And what kind of social inequalities and labor exploitation remain beyond
the scope of this approach?
Silvia Federici:
I should first stress that the shift from production to reproduction
in the analysis of class relations has been the product of a transformation
that, in different ways, has traversed the theoretical field since the
1970s, visible both in post-structuralist as well as neo-liberal critique,
from Foucault to Becker. The main impulse towards it has come from the
feminist rethinking of work and redefinition of reproductive labor as
the “hidden part of the iceberg” (in Maria Mies’ words)
on which capitalist accumulation is based. This shift has had a powerful
illuminating effect enabling us to think together a heterogeneous set
of activities—such as housework, subsistence agriculture, sex
work and care work, education both formal and informal—and recognize
them as moments of the social (re)production of the work-force.
From this perspective, we can read the changes
that have taken place in the universities politically. We can read the
introduction of fees and the commodification of education as part of
a broad process of disinvestment in the reproduction of labor-power.
It is an attempt to discipline the future labor force, a process that
began in the late 70s with the abolition of open admission, clearly
a response to the 1960s campus revolts and the insubordination of which
youth were the protagonists.
Making reproduction the window from which to
analyze the capital-work relation should not be seen however as a totalizing
operation. Reproduction (of individuals, of labor-power) should not
be conceived in isolation from the rest of the capitalist “factory”.
Recently, instead, we have seen the development of theories (e.g. Negri and Hardt concept of “bio-political production”) that preclude a synoptic view of the field of capitalist relations, assuming that all production can be reduced to production of subjectivities, life styles, languages, codes and information. In this way, the immense struggle that is taking place across the planet, in fields, mines, and factories is lost, ironically at the very time when we are witnessing the most extensive international cycle of industrial struggles (in China and much of South and East Asia) since the 1970s.
Recently, instead, we have seen the development of theories (e.g. Negri and Hardt concept of “bio-political production”) that preclude a synoptic view of the field of capitalist relations, assuming that all production can be reduced to production of subjectivities, life styles, languages, codes and information. In this way, the immense struggle that is taking place across the planet, in fields, mines, and factories is lost, ironically at the very time when we are witnessing the most extensive international cycle of industrial struggles (in China and much of South and East Asia) since the 1970s.
Maya Gonzalez
and Caitlin Manning: The approximately $830 billion
in student loan debt has been getting quite a bit of attention recently
in the media since the total student debt now surpasses credit card
debt. The international network of academics and educators you work
with, Edu-Factory, has made debt a central rallying point for university
struggles. As Jeffrey Williams points out, if you attend an Ivy League
or comparable expensive private university, you would have to work 136
hours a week all year to be able to afford it without debt.(2)
Some have said that the current protracted economic crisis is not a
recession but a depression masked by debt. How do you think the issue
of deepening indebtedness could be turned into a significant site of
struggle?
Silvia Federici:
Indebtedness is already a site of struggle, but until now, at least
in the US, it is a struggle that has taken place silently, under the
radar, articulated through hidden forms of resistance, escape, and defaults,
rather than an open confrontation. The default rate on federal student
loans is continuing to rise, especially at for-profit colleges where
it has topped 11.6%.
Discussions with students suggest that debt is
an issue that tends to be evaded, at least in the immediate present.
Many don’t like speaking about it. Weighing on them is a relentless
neoliberal propaganda portraying education as a matter of individual
responsibility. As Alan Collinge writes in his Student Loan Scam,(3)
many are ashamed of admitting they have defaulted on their student loans.
The idea that (like pensions) free education should no longer be a social
entitlement is seeping into the consciousness of the new generations,
at least as a form of intimidation, contributing to blocking any attempts
to make abolition of debt an open movement.
Still, the Edu-Factory network was right in making
debt a central rallying point for university struggles. The struggle
against student debt has a strategic importance. As Jeffrey William
points out, debt is a powerful instrument of discipline and control
and a mortgage on the future.(4) Fighting against
it is about reclaiming one’s life, breaking with a system of indentured
servitude that casts a long shadow on people’s lives for years
to come.
How to build a movement? I think it will require
a long mobilization involving the cooperation of many social subjects.
A key step towards it is an education campaign about the nature of debt
as a political instrument of discipline, dispelling the assumption of
individual responsibility and demonstrating its collective dimension.
The moralism that has been accumulated over the question of indebtedness
must be exposed. Acquiring a degree is not a luxury but a necessity
in a context where for years education has been proclaimed at the highest
institutional levels as the fault line between prosperity and a life
of poverty and subordination. But if education is a must for future
employment, it means that employers are the beneficiaries of it. From
this viewpoint, student debt is a work issue that unions should take
on, and not academic unions alone. Teachers too should join a debt abolition
movement, for they are on the frontline: they must save appearances
and pretend that for the university, cultural formation is of the essence.
Yet, they have to accommodate to profitability requirements, like oversized
classes, the gutting of departments, overworked students, carrying at
times two or three jobs. Debt is also a unifying demand; it is everybody’s
condition in the working class worldwide. Credit card debt, mortgage
debt, medical debt: across the world, for decades now, every cut in
people’s wages and entitlements has been made in the name of a
debt crisis. Debt, therefore, is a universal signifier and a terrain
on which a re-composition of the global work force can begin.
Maya Gonzalez
and Caitlin Manning: Last year building occupations
and other kinds of direct action were critiqued as the strategies of
the privileged. How can there be mass direct action in a country like
the US where the carceral state is so massively over-funded and where
police repression continues to fall so much more heavily on particular
racialized or at-risk populations?
Silvia Federici:
I will not comment on the situations that developed on some of the UC
campuses and the merits of the decision to occupy buildings. I was not
a participant in these events and choices of tactics are so dependent
on context and balances of power that any comments on my side would
be inappropriate. Instead, I will point out that mass direct action
has a long history in the US, exemplified by the Civil Right Movement,
despite the existence of a repressive institutional machine operating
on many levels—police, courts, prison, death penalty. The Civil
Rights Movement and later the Black Power Movement confronted the police,
with its hydrants and dogs, they confronted the Klan, the John Birch
Society. Your question as well indicates that not all people of color
objected to more militant tactics. Still, the differences in the power
with which students from different communities face the university authority
and the police must be brought out in the open and politicized. Organizational
decisions must take them into account. This should be the case regardless
of whether or not buildings are occupied, keeping in mind the great
diversity of conditions in which students find themselves. In addition
to the higher risk incurred by people from communities of color we also
must take into account in every type of mobilization students who cannot
afford being arrested because they have children, have families who
depend on their presence, or have illnesses and disabilities preventing
them from participating in certain types of actions. These are matters
of paramount importance in a movement, and they concern all students.
Readiness to protect those who face the harshest consequences and accommodate
different types of initiatives is a measure of the strength and seriousness
of a movement, without underestimating, at the same time, the fact that
situations of struggle are always extremely fluid and transformative.
And those who may have not participated yesterday may be the first to
occupy tomorrow.
Maya Gonzalez and
Caitlin Manning: From California to New York, women
have raised concerns that there is a serious problem with gender relations
within the movement. Despite their active involvement many women feel
marginalized, they lack confidence in group settings, they feel constrained
in expressing themselves. In some cases they have been alienated by
sexist or masculinist modes of speech and action (as in “Direct
Action as Feminist Practice”(5)). As
women, we were taken by surprise. After decades of feminist struggles
of various sorts, we now—yet again—feel the need to create
feminist groups and find collective ways of confronting patriarchy.
We find ourselves struggling to open spaces that we hadn't anticipated
being quite so constricted. To what extent is our experience different
from, and to what extent similar to, yours in the ‘70s? What can
be learned about the past from our experiences in the present, and vice
versa?
Silvia Federici: The configuration of gender relations in the student movement is very different today than it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Female students have far more power than women of my generation ever had. They are the majority in most classes and are preparing for a life of autonomy and self-reliance, at least autonomy from men if not from capital. But relations with men are more ambiguous and confusing. Increased equality hides the fact that many of the issues the women’s movement raised have not been resolved, especially with regard to re-production. It hides the fact that we are not engaged collectively in a socially transformative project as women, and that, with the advance of neo-liberalism, there has been a re-masculinization of society. The truculent, masculinist language of “We are the Crisis,” the opening article of “After the Fall,” is an egregious example of it. I fully understand why many women feel threatened rather than empowered by it.
The decline of feminism as a social movement has also meant that the experience of collectively organizing around women’s issues is unknown to many female students and everyday life has been de-politicized. What priorities to choose, how to balance waged work and the reproduction of our families so that (learning from the experience of black women) we keep something of ourselves to give to our own, how to love and live our sexuality—these are all questions that female students now must answer individually, outside of a political framework and this is a source of weakness in their relations with men. Add that academic life, especially at the graduate level, creates a very competitive environment where those who have less time to devote to intellectual work are immediately marginalized, and eloquence and theoretical sophistication are often mistaken as a measure of political commitment.
Silvia Federici: The configuration of gender relations in the student movement is very different today than it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Female students have far more power than women of my generation ever had. They are the majority in most classes and are preparing for a life of autonomy and self-reliance, at least autonomy from men if not from capital. But relations with men are more ambiguous and confusing. Increased equality hides the fact that many of the issues the women’s movement raised have not been resolved, especially with regard to re-production. It hides the fact that we are not engaged collectively in a socially transformative project as women, and that, with the advance of neo-liberalism, there has been a re-masculinization of society. The truculent, masculinist language of “We are the Crisis,” the opening article of “After the Fall,” is an egregious example of it. I fully understand why many women feel threatened rather than empowered by it.
The decline of feminism as a social movement has also meant that the experience of collectively organizing around women’s issues is unknown to many female students and everyday life has been de-politicized. What priorities to choose, how to balance waged work and the reproduction of our families so that (learning from the experience of black women) we keep something of ourselves to give to our own, how to love and live our sexuality—these are all questions that female students now must answer individually, outside of a political framework and this is a source of weakness in their relations with men. Add that academic life, especially at the graduate level, creates a very competitive environment where those who have less time to devote to intellectual work are immediately marginalized, and eloquence and theoretical sophistication are often mistaken as a measure of political commitment.
A crucial lesson we can learn from the past
is that in the presence of power inequalities, women must organize
autonomously even to be able to name the problems they face and
gain the strength to voice their discontent and desires. In the ‘70s,
we clearly saw that we could not speak of the issues concerning
us in the presence of men. As the authors of “Direct
Action as Feminist Practice ” so powerfully
write, you do not need to be “silenced,” the very power
configurations that rob us of our voice take away our ability to name
the specific working of this power.(6)
How autonomy is achieved can vary. We do not
have to think of autonomy in terms of permanent separate structures.
We realize now that we can create movements within movements and struggles
within struggles, but calling for unity in the face of conflicts in
our organizations is politically disastrous. What we can learn from
the past is that by constructing temporary autonomous feminist spaces
we can break with psychological dependence on men, validate our experience,
build a counter discourse and set new norms—like the need to democratize
language and not make of it a means of exclusion.
I am convinced that coming together as women
and as feminists is a positive turn, a precondition for overcoming marginalization.
Once again, women in the student movement should not let the charge
of “divisiveness” intimidate them. Rather than being divisive,
the creation of autonomous spaces is necessary for bringing to the surface
the full range of exploitative relations by which we are imprisoned
and expose power inequalities that unchallenged would doom the movement
to fail.
Maya Gonzalez and
Caitlin Manning: In crafting feminist responses to our
current predicaments, we have repeatedly engaged in somewhat disconcerting,
if also enjoyable, moments of identification—moments when we speak
“as women,” for instance, or when we found women's reading
groups. How are we to think through such moments, especially in light
of recent interventions in feminist theory that highlight the multiple
fractures cutting across the putative collectivity of “women,”
or that insist upon the instability and mutability of gender identities?
What might come of such acts of identification? What promise might they
contain? What danger?
Silvia Federici:
I must begin with the premise that I have never discarded from my theoretical
and political framework the concept of “women.” For me “women”
is a political category, it qualifies a specific place in the social
organization of work and a field of antagonistic relations where the
moment of identity is subject to continuous change and contestation.
Clearly, “women” is a concept that we must problematize,
destabilize and reconstitute through our struggles. I have always insisted
in my writings that it is a matter of priority for feminists to address
the power differentials and hierarchies existing among women, beginning
with the power relation determined by the new international division
of reproductive work. But to the extent that gender still structures
the world, to the extent that the capitalist devaluation of reproductive
work translates into a devaluation of women, we cannot discard this
category, if not at the cost of making large areas of social life virtually
unintelligible and losing a crucial terrain of collective resistance
to capitalism.
Identification as women contains the possibility
of understanding the origins, the workings and the politics of the mechanisms
of exclusion and marginalization that many female students evidently
experienced during the occupations in California and New York. It is
a probe enabling us to decipher why and how male domination sustains
the power-structure and bring to the surface a world of experiences
that would otherwise remain invisible and unnamed.
Recognizing those aspects of the experience of
women that constitute a ground of subordination to men, while at the
same time confronting the power differences among women themselves is
today, as in the past, one of the main challenges facing feminists and
activists in any social movement. At the same time, identification contains
many risks. The most insidious, perhaps, is the idealization of relations
with women, which exposes us to the most burning disillusions. This
is a problem to which the women of my generation were especially vulnerable,
as feminism appeared to us at first as the promised land, the longed-for
home, as a protective space in which nothing negative could ever affect
us. We have discovered that doing political work with women, as women,
does not spare us from the power struggles and acts of “betrayals”
we have so often encountered in male-dominated organizations. We come
to movements with all the scars that life in capitalism imprints on
our bodies and souls, and these do not automatically disappear because
we work among women. The question however is not to run away from feminism.
That sex and gender matter is an irrenounceable political lesson. We
cannot oppose a system that has built its power in great part on racial
and gender division by struggling as disembodied, universal subjects.
The question rather is what forms of organization and means of accountability
we can build that can prevent the power differences among us to be reproduced
in our struggle.
Maya Gonzalez and
Caitlin Manning: As you know, the gender issues we've
confronted seem to be particularly pronounced in insurrectionary or
“occupationist” circles. Can we situate this tendency in
the history of a traditionally male-dominated radical Left? How are
some of the recent feminist interventions part of a history of women’s
reclamations of radical politics and tactics?
Silvia Federici:
I can only formulate some hypothesis as my knowledge of “occupationist
politics” is mostly derived from the reading of After the
Fall. I’ll start then by pointing out that the takeover of
buildings and squatting in them, as a tactics, has a long tradition
in the history of world struggle. The legendary 1937 strike in Flint
Michigan was a “sit-down” strike. The Native American Movement
revival in the 1960s began with the takeover of Alcatraz. And today
students all over the world are engaging in “occupations”
to make visible their protests and prevent business as usual to prevail.
The problem, I believe, is when these actions become an end in themselves,
carried out, as “We are the crisis” states, “for no
reason.” For in this case, in the absence of any articulated objective,
what comes to the foreground tends to be the glorification of risk-taking.
The broader question is the persistence of sexism in today’s radical
politics: that is, the fact that, as in the ‘60s, radical politics
continue to reproduce the sexual division of labor, with its gender
hierarchies and mechanisms of exclusion, rather than subverting it.
We certainly confront a different situation from that described by Marge
Piercy in “The Grand Coolie Damn,” which portrayed the role
of women in the anti-war movement as that of political housewives. But
what has been attained is a situation of formal equality that hides
the continuing devaluation of reproductive activities in the content,
goals, and modalities of radical work. Crucial issues like the need
for childcare, male violence against women, women’s broader responsibility
for reproductive work, what constitutes knowledge and the conditions
of its production, are still not a significant part of radical discourse.
This is the material basis of sexist attitudes. We need a radical movement
that programmatically places at the center of its struggle the eradication
of social inequalities and the eradication of the divisions between
production and reproduction, school and home, school and community,
inherent to the capitalist division of labor. I hope I will not be charged
with gender bias if I say that it is above all the task of women to
ensure that this will occur. Liberation begins at home, when those who
are oppressed take their destiny into their hands. Challenging sexism
and racism cannot be expected from those who benefit from them at least
in the short term, although men should not be exonerated from the responsibility
of opposing inequitable relations. In other words, we should not expect
that, because we are in a radical setting, the forces that shape relations
between men and women in the broader society will have no effect on
our politics. This is why despite the leap in the number of female students
in the classrooms, the terms of women’s presence on the campuses
and in radical groups has not qualitatively changed. What has prevailed,
instead, has been the neo-liberal ideology of equal opportunity that
has validated gender and racial hierarchies in the name of merit and
valorized the social qualities needed for competition in the labor market.
These are all essentially the traditional attributed of masculinity:
self-promotion, aggressiveness, capacity to hide one’s vulnerability.
I cannot stress enough that radical politics cannot succeed unless we
challenge the existence of these attitudes in our midst. It is time,
then, that the broader transformative vision which feminism promoted
at least in its initial radical phase, before it was subsumed under
a neo-liberal/institutional agenda, be revitalized. This time, however,
we must fight for the eradication of not only gender hierarchies but
all unequal power relations in our schools, in this process also redefining
what is knowledge, who is a knowledge producer, and how can intellectual
work support a liberation struggle rather functioning as an instrument
of social division.
Silvia Federici
is a long-time feminist
activist, teacher, and writer. Her published work includes Caliban
and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New
York: Autonomedia, 2004) and A Thousand Flowers: Social
Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, co-editor
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999).
Maya Gonzalez
is a communist and revolutionary feminist living in the
Bay Area. She is a graduate student in the Department of History of
Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in Endnotes.
Caitlin Manning
is a filmmaker and Associate Professor of Film and Video
at California State University, Monterey Bay.
_________________________________________________
2. Williams, Jeffrey
J. "The Pedagogy of Debt." Toward a Global Autonomous University.
New York: Autonomedia, 2009. 89-96.
3. Collinge, Alan.
The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History, and
How We Can Fight Back (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009).
4. Williams, Jeffrey
J. "Student Debt and The Spirit of Indenture." Editorial.
Dissent Magazine (Fall 2008); Web. 27 November 2010. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1303
5. Armstrong, Amanda,
Kelly Gawel, Alexandria Wright, and Zhivka Valiavicharska, "Direct
Action as Feminist Practice: An Urgent Convergence," Reclamations
2 (April 2010). Web. 27 November 2010. http://www.reclamationsjournal.org/issue02_feministas.html