On the occasion of the publication of an anthology of her
writing and the accession of a Wages for
Housework NY archive at Mayday Rooms in London, Marina Vishmidt interviewed
Silvia Federici on her extensive contribution to feminist thought and recent
work on debt activism (with contributions by Mute, Mayday Rooms and George
Caffentzis)
Mute: In the text ‘Wages Against Housework’ (1975) you refer
to the problem of women’s work (even waged) as the impossibility of seeing
where ‘work begins and ends’. Just as French group Théorie Communiste argue
that ‘we’ are nothing outside of the wage, you also speak of the problem of
unwaged women as being outside of a ‘social contract’. How does this reflect
the capital-labour relation today? How much has this situation, then specific
to women and some other workers, generalised? How are we to act from the
perspective of this being ‘nothing’? Is it still a question of
self-identification or dis-identification?
Silvia Federici: We should not assume that those who are
unwaged, who work outside the social contract stipulated by the wage, are
‘nothing’ or are acting and organising out of a position of no social power. I
would not even say that they are outside the wage relation which I see as
something broader than the wage itself. One of the achievements of the
International Wages For Housework Campaign, that we launched in the 1970s, was
precisely to unmask not only the amount of work that unwaged houseworkers do for
capital but, with that, the social power that this work potentially confers on
them, as domestic work reproduces the worker and consequently it is the pillar
of every other form of work. We saw an example of this power – the power of
refusal – in October 1975, when women in Iceland went on strike and everything
in Reykjavik and other parts of the country where the strike took place came to
a halt.
Undoubtedly wagelessness has expanded worldwide and we could
say that it has been institutionalised with the ‘precarisation of work.’ But we
should resist the assumption that work conditions have become more uniform and
the particular relation that women as houseworkers have to capital has been
generalised or that work in general has become ‘feminised’ because of the
precarisation of labour. It is still women who do most of the unpaid labour in
the home and this has never been precarious. On the contrary, it is always
there, holidays included. Access to the wage has not relieved women from unpaid
labour nor has it changed the conditions of the ‘workplace’ to enable us to
care for our families and enable men to share the housework. Those who are
employed today work more than ever. So instead of the feminisation of waged
work we could speak of the ‘masculinisation’ of ‘women’s labour,’ as employment
has forced us to adapt to an organisation of work that is still premised on the
assumption that workers are men and they have wives at home taking care of the
housework.
If I understand it correctly, the question of
‘dis-identification’ revolves around the assumption that naming your oppression
and/or identifying your struggle as that of a particular type of worker
confirms your exploitation. In other words, a struggle waged by a slave, or a
wage worker or a housewife could never be an emancipatory struggle. But I do
not agree with this position. Naming your oppression is the first step towards
transcending it. For us saying ‘we are all housewives’ never meant to embrace
this work, it was a way of denouncing this situation and making visible a
common terrain on the basis of which we could organise a struggle. Recognising
the specific ways in which we are exploited is essential to organising against
it. You cannot organise from a position of ‘nothingness.’ ‘Nothingness’ is not
a terrain of aggregation. It does not place you in a context, in a history of
struggles. To struggle from a particular work-relation is to recognise our
power to refuse it.
I also find it problematic to refer to specific forms of
work and exploitation as ‘identities’ – a term that evokes unchanging,
essentialising characteristics. But there is nothing fixed or ‘identifying’ in
the particular forms of work we perform, unless we decide to dissolve ourselves
in them, with what Jean-Paul Sartre would call an act of ‘bad faith’. Whatever
the form of my exploitation this is not my identity, unless I embrace it,
unless I make it the essence of who I am and pretend I cannot change it. But my
relation to it can be transformed by my struggle. Our struggle transforms us
and liberates us from the subjectivities and social ‘identities’ produced by
the organisation of work. The key question is whether our struggles presume the
continuation of the social relations in which our exploitation is inscribed, or
aims to put an end to them.
For the same reason I am sceptical about calls to ‘abolish
gender’.
All over the world women are exploited not only as generic
workers or debtors, but as persons of a specific gender, for example through
the regulation of our reproductive capacity, a condition that is unique to
women. In the United States poor, black women are at risk of being arrested
just for the fact of being pregnant, according to a health report issued in the
US in January. In Italy single mothers who turn to the social services for some
help risk having their children taken away from them and given up for adoption.
Again, women in jail receive very different treatment to men. And we could
multiply the examples. How do we fight against these ‘differences’ without
using categories such as gender and race? From the call centres to the prisons
gender and race matter, the bosses know it, the guards know it, and they act
accordingly; for us to ignore them, to make them invisible is to make it
impossible to respond, because in order to struggle against it we have to
identify the mechanisms by which we are oppressed. What we must oppose is being
forced to exist within the binary scheme of masculine and feminine and the
codification of gender specific forms of behaviour. If this is what ‘abolishing
gender’ means then I am all for it. But it is absurd to assume that any form of
gender specification must always, necessarily become a means of exploitation
and we must live in a genderless world. The fact that gender historically, in
every society based on the exploitation of labour, has been turned into a work
function and a mark of social value does not compel us to assume that gender
will necessarily, always be a means of exploitation and we have to pretend that
there is no difference between women and men or that every difference will be
abused. Even in my own lifetime, what ‘woman’ means has changed immensely. What
being a woman meant for my mother is very different to what it means for me. In
my own life, for example, I have reconciled myself to being a woman because
I've been involved in the process of transforming what being a woman means. So
the idea that somehow gender identities are frozen, immutable, is unjustified.
All the philosophical movements of the 20th century have challenged this
assumption. The very moment you acknowledge that they are social constructs you
also recognise that they can be reconstructed. It will not do to simply ignore
them, push them aside and pretend we are ‘nothing’. We liberate ourselves by
acknowledging our enslavement because in that recognition are the reasons for
our struggle and for uniting and organising with other people.
M: The other side of the same question: how would you
characterise the ongoing division of labour today, particularly the conflict
between work covered by the wage and that outside of it? How does this still
structure the distribution of roles? Arguably, for some time, ‘wages’ have been
paid to women (particularly women with families in the UK – tax credits, child
benefit etc.) yet these social ‘wages’ still reproduce division within the
class. How have these measures recomposed class and class division?
SF: Generally speaking I’d say that the social division of
labour internationally is still structured by the sexual division of labour and
the division between waged and unwaged work. Reproductive work is still mostly
done by women and most of it, according to all statistics, is still unpaid.
This is particularly true of childcare, which is the largest sector of work on
earth, especially in the case of small children, aged one to five.
This is something now broadly recognised, as most women live
in a state of constant crisis, going from work at home to work on the job
without any time of their own and with domestic work expanding because of the
constant cuts in social services. This is partly because the feminist movement
has fought to ensure that women would have access to male dominated forms of
employment, but has since abandoned reproductive work as a terrain of struggle.
There was a time, in the US at least, when feminists were even afraid to fight
for maternity leave, convinced that if we asked for ‘privileges’ we would not
be justified in demanding equal treatment. As a result, as I mentioned already,
the ‘workplace’ has not changed, most jobs do not have childcare and do not
provide paid maternity leave. This is one struggle feminists today should take
on.
I don’t think that ‘wages’ are being paid to women for the
domestic work they do. Tax credits and family allowances are not wages. They
are bonuses to those who are employed and in most countries they are paid to
the family, which most often means to men. They do not remunerate reproductive
work, which is why they reproduce the divisions within the class.
Marina Vishmidt: I suppose child benefits are paid
regardless of employment, so that would be a second form of benefit?
SF: I don’t know about England. In the US, until the 1990s,
there was a federal program called Aid To Families with Dependent Children that
allocated some monies to sole mothers. It was not sufficient, but it was
important because it gave women some autonomy, the ability to leave a man if
they wanted to, and the recognition that raising children is work. We used to
say that ‘Welfare is the first wages for housework.’ However, since the mid
1990s, AFDC has been practically eliminated. We are told that Welfare has been
replaced by Workfare because now after two years women are forced off the
rolls, even though many cannot find employment. Also, what women receive has
been reduced. This has been a defeat, because many women now live in miserable
conditions, in fact the image of the poor is that of a state-supported single
mother. Because it was a public declaration that reproductive work is not work,
it hid how much employers and the state exploit this work. In the US we still
have to fight even to have paid domestic workers recognised as workers. So far
only New York State has taken this step, partially adopting in 2010 a Bill of
Rights that domestic workers had fought for years. But then, recently, Governor
Brown in California turned down a similar Bill.
Forces of (Re)production
M: In an interview for LaborNet TV [http://linkme2.net/tf]
you respond to a question about your disagreement with the Marxist position on
capitalism as a precursor to communism. You argue that the development of the
forces of production is predicated upon the sexual division of labour and thus
the notion that a communist project can simply seize the forces of production
and repurpose them for the ends of egalitarian form of society is misconceived.
Certainly, many forms of technology would have little application without a
profit motive, but how, without technology, would new social relations breaking
with capitalist domination avoid the re-imposition of work, either through
‘return to nature’ to primitivist conditions – i.e. work as the entire future
horizon of humanity – or as in utopian communitarian co-operatives where work
is ‘fairly’ re-distributed under communal pressure?
SF: I am not against technology. Technology is an
indispensable part of our lives and it existed long before the advent of
capitalism. In fact, Karl Marx underestimated the technological achievements of
pre-capitalist societies. Think of the technology of food production. The
populations of Mesoamerica invented most of the foodstuffs that we eat today.
They invented the tomato, 200 types of corn and potatoes. Marx credits
capitalism too much for having unleashed the productive power of human labour.
But my criticism of Marx concerns, above all, his belief that large scale
industry is a necessary precondition for the advent of communism and generally
for human development. In reality, much of the technology that capitalism has
developed was aimed at destroying workers’ organisations and reducing the cost
of labour production, so it cannot be taken over and redirected to positive
goals. How do you take over a nuclear or chemical plant for instance? Marx himself
recognised (in Capital Vol. 1) that the industrialisation of agriculture
‘depletes the soil as it depletes the worker,’ although he also upheld it as a
model of rational exploitation of our natural resources. Most capitalist
technology is destructive of the environment and our health. We see clearly
today that industry is eating up the earth, and if we had a communist society
much of the work we would have to do would be spent just cleaning up the
planet. This means we have to rethink every type of technology. Take the
computer, for instance, just one computer requires tons of soil and pure water.
So the idea that we can have a world in which machines do all the work and we
can just be their supervisors, Marx’s vision in the Grundrisse, is untenable.
First we have to work to build the machines. They are not self-reproducing.
Somebody has to take the minerals out of the ground and build them. They also
require a particular form of social organisation and social control that is the
opposite of the type of co-operation that people need for the construction of
an egalitarian society.
Another important issue is that large scale
industrialisation cannot reduce socially necessary labour, since a large part
of the work on this planet – the work of reproducing human beings – is work
that is very labour intensive, in which emotional, physical and intellectual
labour are inseparably combined, and cannot be industrialised except at a
tremendous cost for those we care for. Think, for example, of the work of caring
for children or for those who are sick and not self-sufficient. I know that in
Japan and the US they are inventing household robots and even robots that care
for people like nursebots. But is this the society we want?
MV: But as we were discussing last time, the question of
technology is also very contradictory in different parts of Marx’s work.
SF: Yes, in different parts of his work Marx recognised the
destructive impact of industrialisation, on agriculture, for instance. But he
obviously assumed that the technology capitalism has developed could be
restructured and re-channelled towards different goals. He idealised science
and technology. He assumed they could be appropriated by workers and
transformed in a way that would enable us to liberate ourselves from much work
that we do out of necessity, not because it enhances our capacities and powers.
The Refusal of Work
MV: I guess if ‘refusal of work’ were thought of as the
refusal of particular social relations then, as Mariarosa Dalla Costa writes,
we would not want the industrialisation and collectivisation of food service
because there would still be women working in those kitchens. But we can also
think of collectivised laundries as social spaces in Soviet and social
democratic states, for example. So we see how certain types of reproductive
work can be industrialised, but it's the social relations of that work that matter.
SF: Certainly. When we speak of ‘refusal of work’ we have to
be careful. We need to see that the work of reproducing human beings is a
peculiar type of work, and it has a double character. It reproduce us for
capital, for the labour market, as labour power, but it also reproduces our
lives and potentially it reproduces our revolt against being reduced to labour
power. In fact, reproductive labour is important for the continuation of
working class struggle and, of course, for our capacity to reproduce ourselves.
This is why we need to understand the double character of this work, so that we
refuse that part of the work that reproduces us for capital; whereas we cannot
refuse this work as a whole, because labour-power lives in the individual, and
if we refuse it completely we risk destroying ourselves and the people we care
for. I think that one of the most important discoveries the women’s movement
made was that we could refuse some of this work without jeopardising the well
being of our families and communities. Recognising that this work is not just a
service to our families, but it is also a service to capital liberated us from
the sense of guilt we always experienced whenever we wanted to refuse it. It
was important for us to realise that this work does not simply reproduce
children, partners, communities, but reproduces us as present or future workers
because in this way we could think of a struggle against housework as a
struggle against capital rather than against our families. We began to disentangle
those aspects of domestic work that reproduced us from those that reproduced
capital. So the issue is not so much the ‘refusal’ of reproductive work, but
its reorganisation in a way that makes it creative work. This, however, can
only happen once this work is not aimed at providing workers for the labour
market, when it is not subsumed to the logic of capital accumulation, and we
control the means of our reproduction.
The Tyrannies of Microfinance
MV: I think I'd also like to come back to your talk on
microfinance with regard to this. What you said, that was so important, was how
community bonds are actually used by microfinance banks to hyper-exploit the
recipients of the loans. I guess that’s what I had in mind, how these forms of
non-capitalist or pre-capitalist communal bonds are actually de-composed by
capital and how that can be resisted. Witch-hunts would be another aspect of
this.
SF: The World Bank and other financial institutions have
realised that social relations are crucial, they see them as a ‘social capital’
and they used them, manipulate them, co-opt them to neutralise their subversive
potential and domesticate the commons. The World Bank, for instance, uses the
idea of protecting the ‘global commons’, presumably preserving them for the
well being of humanity, to privatise forests. They expel the populations –
fishermen, indigenous people – who lived in them. In the ’90s, in Africa, the
Bank also set up communal groups, artificially created, often made up of local
authorities, that had the power to alienate land. This allowed them to get
around the fact that people resisted the dismantling of communal land ownership
and introduction of individual land titling.
In the case of microfinance, banks and other financial
agencies are turning the support groups that women have organised into
self-policing groups. I’ve read that in Bangladesh, when one of the women in
the group does not pay back the loan she has taken, the others put a lot of
pressure on her and even attack her physically to force her to pay. The banks’
or the NGOs’ officers and the other women in the group ‘break her house’ and
take away her pots, which is a great humiliation for a woman.
This is more than an attack on people's means of
reproduction. It is an attack on the bonds that people have created on the
basis of shared resources. This attack on communal solidarity, on the forms of
co-operation people have created to strengthen their capacity for resistance,
is probably the most destructive aspect of microfinance.
We need to understand the historical conditions that make it
possible for these groups to be destroyed. Generally the areas in which
microfinance has taken root are areas where the population has been weakened by
years of authoritarian rule, or by austerity programs, or by natural disasters
or all of the above, as in the case of Haiti after Hurricane Sandy, which
prompted the intervention of the World Bank with a two million dollar
investment in micro-loans. There is also the ideological work of the religious
sects, fundamentalists of one type or another. Not all communal forms have the
same capacity to resist the assault made on them through various forms of
privatisation and dispossession.
This is something that has to been taken into account in the
discussions of the commons. We need to examine what is happening to the
existing commons. In parts of Latin America, new commons have been created, as
in the case of the Zapatistas or the MST. Also, in response to structural
adjustment, women have set up communal kitchens, communal cooking, communal
shopping. In other parts of the world, like Africa and India, communal lands
have become battlefields. In parts of Africa, as the land is shrinking because
of massive land-grabbing and giveaways by governments to companies (mining,
agro-fuels, agribusiness), the male commoners are pushing women out of the
commons. They are introducing new rules and regulations concerning who
‘belongs’ and who doesn’t. They may expel a wife from the usufruct of land,
saying she belong to a different clan. It is important to see in what context
commons can be turned against themselves.
The story of microfinance demonstrates how pernicious the
idea that salvation comes through money borrowing is. Reports from many parts
of the world, e.g. Bangladesh, Bolivia, Egypt, show that most women who took
micro-loans are worse off than they were at the time they took them. Their
support group may not be there any longer, they are far more in debt than
before, so that they have to go to moneylenders to pay back the debt. Often
they have to keep their children at home (working?) to help them pay the debt.
So the World Bank’s argument that money is the creative power of society and
borrowing some will pull you out of poverty has to be rejected. Some women do
profit from the micro-loans, but they are usually those who co-operate with the
managers in the policing and supervising work.
Financialisation and the Wages of Debt
MV: I’d like to follow-up on that with something else you
said on Monday evening which was that financialisation shows a shift in
capital’s investment in the working class, insofar as once there was an idea of
long-term investment and a kind of social wage and welfare state institutions,
and now there is a kind of foreshortening of that investment, so the
financialisation of reproduction means extracting value in every moment.1
SF: Yes, every aspect of reproduction is becoming an
immediate a site of accumulation. This is because you now have to pay for many
services that in the past were provided by the state. In the post-WWII period,
the capitalist politics was to invest in the reproduction of the workforce that
was seen as a sort of ‘human capital’ to be developed. This is what is usually
referred to as the ‘welfare state’. Behind it there was the idea that investing
in workers’ health, education, housing, would pay out in terms of increased
workers' productivity and discipline. But clearly the struggles of the ’60s
convinced the capitalist class that having more space and time would not make
workers more productive but only more rebellious. This is why we have seen an
inversion. Now we have to pay for our reproduction, they tell us it is our
responsibility. It is a major change. First of all it is a change in the temporal
structure of accumulation. Employers now don’t invest in the long term, in our
future productivity. They do not expect us to become more productive in the
future. They want to accumulate immediately from our ‘investment’ in our
education, from the interest on our credit cards: they want to cash in
immediately. So, reproduction becomes immediately a point of accumulation.
That’s a very important change. This has also changed the relation between
workers and capital. Being indebted to a bank hides the fact that there is a
relation of exploitation. As a debtor, you don’t appear any longer as a worker.
Debt is very mystifying. It brings about a change in the management of class
relations. This is what is at stake in the ideology of ‘self-investment’ and
‘micro-entrepreneurship’, which pretends that we are sole beneficiaries of our
education and our reproduction, and occludes that the employers, the capitalist
class, benefits from our work. Debt also has a disaggregating effect; it
isolates us from other debtors, because we confront the banks as individuals.
So, debt individualises, it fragments the class relation, in a way that the
wage did not. The wage in a sense was a sort of common. It recognised not only
the existence of a work relation but of a collective relation strengthened by a
history of struggle. Debt dismantles both. We see it with the struggle of
students indebted because of their education loans. Many feel guilty, they have
a sense of failure when they cannot repay that would be unthinkable in a wage
struggle. There, you know you are exploited, you know your boss, you see the
exploitation, you have your comrades. Whereas as a debtor, you say ‘oh my god I
miscalculated,’ ‘I took more money than I should have’ etc.
That’s why debtors’ movements are so important. The first
big debtors’ movements developed in Latin America. Perhaps the most important
was El Barzon, that developed in Mexico in the late 1980s. It was a powerful
movement composed mostly of small traders, small businessmen who had got some
loans from the banks. El Barzon is the piece of leather that keeps together the
wooden yoke between oxen. It’s a symbol of slavery. You have a yoke on, that’s
the debt. They built a movement that organised large demonstrations all over
Mexico, they marched in the streets with their pockets turned inside out to
show that nothing had been left to them.
Also there were massive protests by women against
microfinance in Bolivia in 2002. Women came from different parts of the country
and laid siege for 90 days to the banks in La Paz demanding an end to their
debt, stripping themselves to dramatise the fact that they had been reduced to
almost nothing. We can see that debt can provide a common ground for different
struggles.
Self-Reproducing Movements
MV: The question of the durability and expansion of social
struggles is something you have discussed in terms of building
‘self-reproducing movements’. Movements for which reproduction is a necessary
aspect of transforming social relations in the present, and thus is
constitutive of the political horizons of the struggle. I guess my question
here would be operating backwards and forwards. Given the decomposition of the
pre-capitalist ‘proletariat’ as experienced in something like the witch hunts
in early modern Europe, the colonies and many places undergoing enclosures or
‘primitive structural adjustment’ at the current moment and in the recent past,
I’m interested in what kinds of solidarity or re-composition you can envision which
are far ranging enough for this not only to be resisted, but for capital to no
longer be able to impose its reproductive crises as the breakdown of our social
reproduction.
SF: One example that comes to mind is what has taken place
in some countries of Latin America, where in response to the brutality of
neoliberal economic policies, thousands of people are constructing new forms of
reproduction outside of the state. As Raúl Zibechi writes in Territories InResistance (2012), in Latin America, in the last decades, the struggle for land
has turned into a struggle for control over a territory, where to practice
autonomous forms of reproduction and forms of self-government, as in the case
of the Zapatistas or the Movement Sans Terre (MST) movement in Brazil. In
Bolivia too, the massive struggles that took place in 2000 against the
privatisation of the water system reached such a level of co-ordination and
co-operation between the different indigenous populations – the Quechua in the
Cochabamba area, the Aymara in El Alto – that there was the possibility of
establishing forms of communal caretaking and self-management of formerly
public resources. This is taking place in Latin America because through the
long struggle against colonial and neo-colonial domination people have
maintained and created strong co-operative forms of existence which we
certainly no longer have.
This is why the idea of creating ‘self-reproducing’
movements has been so powerful. It means creating a certain social fabric and
forms of co-operative reproduction that can give continuity and strength to our
struggles, and a more solid base to our solidarity. We need to create forms of
life in which political activism is not separated from the task of our daily
reproduction, so that relations of trust and commitment can develop that today
remain on the horizon. We need to put our lives in common with the lives of
other people to have movements that are solid and do not rise up and then
dissipate. Sharing reproduction, this is what began to happen within the Occupy
Movement and what usually happens when a struggle reaches a moment of almost
insurrectional power. For example, when a strike goes on for several months,
people begin to put their lives in common because they have to mobilise all
their resources not to be defeated. At the same time, the idea of a
self-reproducing movement is not enough, because it still refers to a
particular population – the movement – while the goal is to create structures
that have the power to re-appropriate the ‘commonwealth’ and that requires what
Zibechi calls ‘societies in movement’.
Commons and Communism
M: What is the relationship between commons and communism?
Is communism an expanded common? Are the commons just about reproduction? Given
your rather positive conception of reproduction as capable of containing within
itself the germs for revolution how do you separate between social, potentially
revolutionary and capitalist reproduction? That is, what is there in the
commons that is not just more sustainable than but actively antagonistic to
capital and the state?
SF: Commons and communism. Well, communism is such a big
term, but if we think of communism in the sense established by the
Marxist-socialist tradition, then one difference is that in the society of the
commons there is no state, not even for a transitional period. The assumption
that human emancipation or liberation has to pass through a dictatorship of the
proletariat is not part of the politics of the commons. Also a society of
commons is not premised on the development of mass industrialisation. The idea
of the commons is the idea of reclaiming the capacity to control our life, to
control the means of our (re)production, to share them in an egalitarian way
and to ‘manage’ them collectively. The reconstruction of our everyday life, as
a strategic aspect of our struggles, is a much more central objective in the
politics of the commons than it was in the communist tradition. Is communism an
expanded common? Not if we define it within the parameters of the Marxist
tradition. But Marx’s description of communism as a society built on the
association of free producers is compatible with it. Moreover the late Marx
seems to have become convinced that commons, for example the Russian communes
could become a foundation for a ‘transition to communism’, even though he
believed this would be possible only if there would be a revolution in Germany,
or other parts of Europe, providing a technological know-how, so that the
Russian communes wouldn’t have to go through a capitalist stage. The commons
means sharing the use of the means of reproduction, starting with the land, and
creating co-operative form of work. This is already beginning to happen. In
Greece and Italy, now, on the model of Argentina, workers that have been laid
off are taking over factories and trying to run them in a self-managed
egalitarian way to produce for people’s needs, rather than for profit.
I do not agree with Marx that capitalism enhances the
co-operation of labour. I don’t think it does even in the process of commodity
production, but it certainly does not in the process of social reproduction.
Capitalism has developed a science of ‘scooperation,’ a term that I have taken
from Leopolda Fortunati's The Arcane of Reproduction. An example is the urban
planning that took place in American cities after WWII when the capitalist
class confronted a working class that for 20 years or more had had a collective
experience – first during the Depression, when people took to the road,
creating hobo jungles, then during the war, in the army – and was now coming
back from the war restless, questioning what they had risked their lives for.
1947 saw the highest number of strikes in the history of the United States,
only matched by 1974. So, they had to ‘scooperate’ these workers and that’s
what the new urban planning did with the creation of suburbia, like Levittown.
It sent workers to live far away from the workplace, so that after work they
wouldn’t go to the bars and instead would go directly home. They planned every
detail of the new homes politically. They put a lawn in front of the houses for
the man to mow in his spare time, so he would keep busy instead of going to a
union hall. There would be an extra room for his tools – these were all
instruments of scooperation.
Scooperation
MV: Could you define what you mean by ‘scooperation’? I haven’t
heard that term before.
SF: It is disaggregating workers, preventing them from
developing the kind of bonding that results from working together and in the
case of workers who had been in the war it was breaking down the deep sense of
solidarity, brotherhood, they had developed. You can see it in the movies of
the late 1940s. The soldiers are coming home after living together and risking
death together for months, and then they separate, he has his wife, he has the
girlfriend, but the women have become strangers to them. So these movies
portray the crisis of the returning GI, and how do you prevent it from
generating some sort of rebellion? This is why, home ownership, giving them a
little kingdom, with the wife always at home, sexy with the apron on and all
that, were so important. Levittown was constructed as a buffer against
communism. This is the capitalist reproduction: Levittown. Now they have the
opposite problem. My sense is that now they confront a working class that has a
house, or at least assumes that the house is its entitlement, whereas they want
a large part of the working class to be nomadic and move wherever companies
need it. The attack on the house is not only a product of financial
speculation. I think it is an attempt to create a workforce that is more
mobile. Now their problem is ‘mobilising’ this worker. That’s an important
difference. Clearly we have to build collective ways of reproducing ourselves
so we are less vulnerable to these manipulations. Moreover reproductive work has
to be done on the basis of expanded communities, not necessarily extended
families but expanded communities, because reproducing human beings is very
labour intensive and we can destroy ourselves in the process, as it is
happening with so many women now, who live in a state of permanent crisis – of
permanent reproductive crisis.
Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee
MV: The following are a few examples that maybe you could
elaborate on, what you think about their strategic aspects or contradictions.
This would be about the Strike Debt campaign and about the Rolling Jubilee.
Here we have a weird nexus between the politics of social reproduction and
systemic reproduction, so on the one hand you are helping people who owe debt
but you are also helping people who own debt at the same time because when you
are buying the debt, you are also buying the banks’ debt... It’s impossible to
say whose debt it is.
SF: The Rolling Jubilee will liberate a number of people.
But the key thing is that it puts the question of student bondage on the map,
in front of all America. I agree with Audre Lorde that: ‘The master’s tools
will not dismantle the master’s house’. So we are not expecting to win that
struggle through rolling jubilees. Rolling jubilees is a moment, a tactic, in a
much broader struggle. But it has given this struggle a nationwide presence it
didn’t have before. This kind of publicity is very good because it shows the
world the mercenary character of this capitalism that destroys the youth's
future, and makes money selling education. It’s an effective tactic; it serves
to broaden the struggle, make it visible and put the authorities on the
defensive. It says there is a generation of youth who have been turned into
indentured servants of banks and collection agencies.
MV: It’s really important that you say that, also because
there was an editorial by Charles Eisenstein in the Guardian, saying that a
debt jubilee will restore growth, this is completely apolitical, it’s neither
left nor right.
SF: They love that... Before Strike Debt there were already
two student organisations dealing with loan debts, but they had a different
approach to it. For one organisation the strategy was consumer protection.
Their position was that as consumers of education we should have the ‘right to
bankruptcy’ –which now is denied. The other argued that if you cancelled the
student debt, which is now 1 trillion, you would boost growth. This is a kind
of Keynesian strategy. Strike Debt is much more powerful, because it says that
we should not pay, because this debt was created under duress. Students were
told they had to have an education, but they had no way of doing it except by
falling into debt. And the debt is not legitimate because education is not a
commodity and should not be bought and sold. This approach has a very different
political implication. As for Rolling Jubilee, it is a time bound tactic, but
for the moment it’s useful. People are thinking of a caravan to bring Strike
Debt throughout the country and build a nation wide network of groups.
MV: I found it quite an exciting and interesting thing too
when reading this editorial, where a guy is promoting it by saying: ‘Financial
institutions and people in debt are on the same side’. This is a bit ridiculous
in the context of a political struggle.
Debt for Life
George Caffentzis: They don’t make a distinction between
capitalist debt and proletarian debt.
MV: But is that central to the Rolling Jubilee platform, or
is that just this guy posing it this way?
GC: No. The Rolling Jubilee comes out of Strike Debt and it
is basically saying that proletarian debt is radically different from the debt
of the capitalists. The conditions for liberation from it are also quite
different and the consequences are different. What’s happening in this period
in history is that in order to satisfy our most basic life requirements we have
to get into debt.
SF: Many people live on credit cards today, going from one
credit card to another. It’s like microfinance, where people must have multiple
money lenders. In either case, you live on borrowed time until the moment when
you cannot do it any longer. In the case of microfinance, when you do not pay
back they put your picture in the streets or on the door of the bank to shame
you. In the US, they turn you in to the collection agencies. So some people
have gone underground – they have become refugees from the debt – because the
collection agencies call you day and night.
GC: Now we understand what collection agencies are all
about. They buy debt on a secondary market, so the big banks and financial
institutions when they have trouble collecting sell the debt to them for 1 to 5
percent of its original value So, you ask yourself: ‘how much is this debt?’
You’re being tortured to allow the collection agencies to make the 95 percent
difference. Again you ask yourself: is the debt $100,000 or is it $5000? What
is the real debt?
Anthony Davies (Mayday Rooms): Can I ask a question about
the normalisation of debt. For example, the banking industry has experienced
some difficulty cultivating personal debt, even quite recently in Turkey and
elsewhere due to the sense of shame and stigma associated with debt. So, I’m
wondering how this might have developed incrementally, here in Britain and the
US in the post-war period. How workers got used to the idea of being in debt,
how that experience become an entirely normalised aspect of life in general?
SF: That’s an interesting question that requires some
research. As far as I know, the promotion of indebtedness begins at a time when
workers still have some social power. Buying on instalment began in the ’20s
and then expanded after WWII. Incentivising workers to buy on credit was a way
of controlling their future. It was also a way of diffusing class antagonism by
boosting a consumer culture, the assumption being that workers would be
employed and could pay back. The novelty was that buying on credit was an
inversion of capitalist policy. Generally, in capitalism you work first, then
you get paid. This was a reversal. In different ways this policy continued
until the 1980s. Today’s indebtedness is different however. Today people go
into debt not because they are sure about their future earnings but because
they cannot get by or get certain social services without borrowing from the
banks or using credit cards. For a lot of people the response to cuts in
employment has been the credit cards and other forms of debt. So today debt is
above all a refusal of impoverishment. The point in common between these two
phases of indebtedness is that in both cases debt controls and shapes our
future. Still, we need to better understand the relation between debt and the
class struggle – how workers have tried to use debt. Even in recent times, many
workers, especially those like black/female workers, who in the past found it
difficult to secure mortgages, took advantage of the relative ease with which
mortgages were granted to have access to housing. In fact many of those who
defaulted because they were given sub-prime mortgages were black women, often
single mothers, who had always been excluded from the mortgage market.
AD: A question around entrepreneurship, particularly serial
entrepreneurship and the way in which bankruptcy law has been hauled into a
boom/bust entrepreneurial process. At what point did it become embedded that
borrowing and bankruptcy are synonymous?
GC: Bankruptcy only begins in the United States in the 19th
century, around the time of the Civil War. Up until that time, in most states,
there was debtors’ prison – if you defaulted, you went to jail. That was one
part of the story. Towards the end of the 19th century, bankruptcy became
established for the capitalists. It was extended to workers when the working
class began to have some collateral. You couldn’t take out a loan unless you
had some collateral. Workers began to have some collateral only when the wage
became an institution. For a while personal bankruptcy was allowed and many
workers and students used it. At first it was relatively easy to use. But by
about 2005 there was a change in the level of stringency applied to it. Now,
you have the worst of all possible worlds, because you still need a house, or a
car, etc., and have to use a credit card but you do not have a guaranteed wage
and it is much more difficult to go bankrupt. Moreover, students cannot go
bankrupt when they cannot pay back the loans they have taken. They are the only
case in which bankruptcy is ruled out.
AD: If you take the legislation around Company Voluntary
Arrangements (CVA's) for example and its introduction into Britain from the US
in the mid-1980's, you find that there's a link to crisis. At each point,
there's a turn of the screw: in the economic recession of 1992, then in the
early 2000s you find the legislation around CVAs being adapted and tweaked to
suit the interests of employers – until you get to the late 2000s and the
current situation, where contractual obligations can be ripped up, workers laid
off and redundancy payments withdrawn or transferred.
GC: Now there is the possibility of a jubilee, but the
question is whether the jubilee will open a new page or simply cancel the
existing debts and in time re-propose the same situation.
SF: I doubt there will ever be a jubilee. But they may
reduce student debt because education is a sensitive matter. However there is a
part of capital that wants youth to be educated directly by the employers. They
would love to have specialised academic institutions, like a mining university,
a university serving energy companies.
MV: You were talking at the Historical Materialism plenary
about cleaners and an organising drive where they decided to co-operate with
employers against the state to get more resources from the state. I just wanted
to ask you to explain that a bit more.
SF: Domestic workers are making a big struggle in the US.
They are fighting to be recognised as workers, because the labour laws adopted
in the 1930s exclude domestic work as work. In November 2010, for the first
time in New York, an organisation of domestic workers, Domestic Workers United,
had their work recognised as work. Amazing, isn’t it? The next thing they had
to do was to make sure it would be implemented. So the same domestic workers
are now striving to create community structures that can help enforce this Bill
of Rights and function like watchdogs. They also want to organise in alliance
with the employers, to be able to confront the state and force it to place the
appropriate resources at the disposal of reproductive work. They believe it is
not in the interest of employers to underpay them and to force them to work in
wretched conditions. The argument is that a tired nanny, who is overworked, who
is anguished because her family is far away, who cannot go on vacation, and is
missing her son, cannot properly do the work expected of her. It is the same
argument nurses have made. The hospitals try to put the patients against them
when, for example, they want to go on strike. But what the nurses say is that
‘if we work 20 hours a day, we’re not going to be able to see what medicine we
are giving you.’ In other words, it is in the interest of the patients that
workers fight for better conditions and to support their struggle.
MV: But domestic workers are being paid by the employers,
not by the state?
SF: They are paid by the employers, but in many parts of
Europe in the ’80s and ’90s the state began to give money to families to be
able to take care of non-self-sufficient elderly. For example, in Italy they
introduced the salario d' accompagnamento. An elderly person, blind, or
otherwise disabled would receive up to €500 a month to pay someone to take care
of her. I guess, you could call it a sort of wages for housework. Of course it
is very little, but it is a start.
In California, instead, last year, Governor Brown rejected a
domestic workers Bill of Rights arguing that it would hurt people with
disabilities, because, he said, they would not be able to pay higher rates. In
other words, domestic workers have to work for low wages and accept there is a
conflict of interest between them and the people they care for, and have to
sacrifice their well being because the state had no intention of providing the
type of resources that could guarantee to them and the people they care for a
good life.
MV: It’s the Walmart argument. That workers benefit from low
prices because they get paid so little themselves.
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework,Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, was published by PM Press, August
2012, https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=420
The Wages for Housework: Silvia Federici Collection was
deposited with MayDay Rooms January
2013, to browse the collection see:
http://maydayrooms.org/collections/wages-for-housework/
Full audio recording of the interview is available here:
http://snd.sc/ZibwmS
Audio recordings by Rachel Baker
Footnotes
Silvia Federici talk at Goldsmiths University took place
12 November 2012. Entitled ‘From Commoning to Debt: Microcredit, Student Debt
and the Disinvestment in Reproduction’, an audio recording can be accessed
here: http://archive.org/details/SilviaFedericiTalkAtGoldsmithsUniversity-12November2012-CpAudio
