How to end domestic servitude
Today I found myself in the local supermarket counting the number of shelf feet displaying home cleaning products. The total came to 60 feet, four shelves tall. I then walked over to the shelves with kitchen utensils and gadgets – 25 feet.
Abigail Susik’s recent essay devoted to Silvia Federici’s work delved into her evocative response to an inquiry about threats to social reproduction. She approached the subject in a wholistic manner:
I call it a war—a war on people’s reproduction. Wherever you turn your eyes you can see that.
The Politics of Time: Retrieving our lives
(an excerpt from the section TIME from Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit.)
The protagonist of Fernando Trías de Bes’ The Time Seller decides one day to quit his bullshit job.
This concluding section on The (Hawthorne) Club is long. My argument for the significance of leisure-time at the Hawthorne Works as opposed to work-time has, I believe, wide implications. I first contest the assumptions about home faber, or homo laborans, as popularly understood, here.
No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea by James Livingston
To refer to economists as a priesthood has become a commonplace. Economists practice “a religion couched in the language of mathematics and statistics,” say Yanis Varoufakis. Their church, to carry the symbolism further, has a magnificent gold and marble altar where they offer praise to Capital.
Pre-industrial European societies, for the most part, didn’t conceive of time in the abstract as a scarce commodity that indicated when to work and when not, but as an elastic measure embedded in social relations. The seasons determined work: as daylight waned in winter so too did toil.
Beyond Localism
Occupy was a rarity in America – an explicitly “post-political” movement. It was not your textbook rebellion. No manifesto! No demands! No Villa, no Lennon, no Malcolm X to lead the masses, just a messy, somewhat incoherent, but ultimately a critical and joyful experience – until the truncheons, gas, rubber bullets, and all arrived.
Monthly Review’s February, 2015 issue contains two essays on the cooperative sector. “Neoliberal Co-optation of Leading Co-op Organizations and a Socialist Counter-Politics of Cooperation” by Carl Ratner explores the tepid economics and the conformist politics of these “leading” organizations. The other essay by Peter Marcuse, “Cooperatives On the Path to Socialism?”
– Basic Income or Job Guarantee?
REFUSING TO WORK
Periodically, the New York Times publishes sobering long-form articles depicting the economy in dark tones that clash with their more upbeat business page reportage. For example, the NYT recently noted a poll indicating the decline of belief in The American Dream – Many Feel that The American Dream is Out of Reach, Poll Shows (December 10, 2014).
An error in an article on cooperatives that appeared on one continent – Europe, last March – only to be transmitted to another – North America, recently (byline dated 22 Feb.), and which by now may have gone around the world a few times and possibly be translated (at least by machine) into several languages.