Feminism
-
Silvia Federici: The exploitation of women and the development of capitalism
Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is a classic work of anti-capitalist feminism. The book examines capitalism’s investment in sexism and racism, showing how the consolidation of the capitalist system depended on the subjugation of women, the enslavement of black and indigenous people, and the exploitation of the colonies. Federici demonstrates that unpaid labor–especially that… Continue reading
-
Gossip Girls
Silvia Federici has been one of the most influential and widely cited Marxist feminist scholars of the last 50 years. Her landmark work, Caliban and the Witch, argued that witch hunts were an organized campaign of mass murder of women who defied the increasing implementation of a patriarchal, authoritarian order under a rapidly developing capitalist state.… Continue reading
-
Every Woman Is a Working Woman: Silvia Federici in The Boston Review
Silvia Federici, an Italian expat living in New York, attended the conference and afterward returned to New York to found the New York Wages for Housework Committee. In the following years, Wages for Housework committees were launched in a number of U.S. cities. In each case, these groups organized autonomously, apart from waged male workers.… Continue reading
-
Feminist monkey wrenches in Egypt’s revolution By Eric Walberg
The process of shaping post-revolutionary Egypt to conform to the postmodern imperial world is proceeding apace. Egypt’s long history of invasion and occupation by first France (under Napoleon) and then Britain, and less formally from 1970 on under first Sadat and Mubarak, means there is a strong secular tradition, and the current attempt by Islamists… Continue reading
-
Crisis in the Socialist Workers Party reveals a crisis of the left By William Bowles
Hmmm… I’ve been watching the ‘left’ here in the UK tear itself apart literally for decades, and it had been going on for decades prior to my arrival on the scene. What’s difficult to swallow is the attitude expressed below (which I’m reprinting in its entirety), where the writer reacts to the events that are… Continue reading
-
Black Bloc: A Misguided Tactic for June 30 By Maeve McKeown
On March 26, a movement that has existed for several decades but has largely been absent from UK politics, known as ‘Black Bloc’, emerged from the shadows and scared the living daylights out of Middle England. The media quickly vilified Black Bloc’s activities, and ‘anarchist’ became a by-word for hooligan. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 