Silvia Federici: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012–) [EN, ES]

“Written between 1974 and 2012, Revolution at Point Zero collects forty years of research and theorizing on the nature of housework, social reproduction, and women’s struggles on this terrain—to escape it, to better its conditions, to reconstruct it in ways that provide an alternative to capitalist relations.

Indeed, as Federici reveals, behind the capitalist organization of work and the contradictions inherent in “alienated labor” is an explosive ground zero for revolutionary practice upon which are decided the daily realities of our collective reproduction.

Beginning with Federici’s organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the essays collected here unravel the power and politics of wide but related issues including the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, the development of affective labor, and the politics of the commons.”

Publisher PM Press, Oakland, CA, and Common Notions, Brooklyn, NY, 2012
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781604863338, 1604863331
188 pages

Reviews: Joshua Eichen (Mute, 2012), Nicholas Beuret (Red Pepper, 2012), Ashley Bohrer (spectrezine, 2012), Seth Sandronsky (Z Magazine, 2012), Dayna Tortorici (n+1, 2013), Laura Schwartz (Labor & Society, 2013), Emma Dowling (Feminist Review, 2014), Danielle DiNovelli-Lang (Alternate Routes, 2014), Marina Vishmidt (J Cultural Economy, 2015), Sutapa Chattopadhyay (Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2015), Leontina M. Hormel (Monthly Review, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

Revolution at Point Zero (English, 2012, EPUB, MOBI)
Revolución en punto cero (Spanish, trans. Carlos Fernández Guervós and Paula Martín Ponz, 2013)

Matrix: Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment (1984)

“One of the first moves of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative set up in 1980 was to publish the book, where they explored the socio-political context of designing the built environment, and traced the implications of feminist theory and critique on urban design, such as the viewing of domestic work also as a form of labour. In the book they set out one of the fundamental guiding principles of their work, the idea that ‘because women are brought up differently in our society we have different experiences and needs in relation to the built environment’.” (Source)

Publisher Pluto Press, 1984
ISBN 0861046013, 9780861046010
ix+148 pages
via dubravka

Reviews: Ruth Madigan (Crit Soc Policy, 1985), Anne Gartner (Urban Policy and Research, 1985), Pleasantine Drake (Atlantis, 1988).

WorldCat

PDF (28 MB)

New World Academy Reader, 5: Stateless Democracy (2015)

“New World Academy, an alternative learning platform for art and politics established by artist Jonas Staal and BAK has entered its fifth sequence. Developed together with the Kurdish Women’s Movement as a nomadic platform that unfolding throughout 2015, the fifth sequence of the New World Academy explores—from artistic, activist, and scholarly perspectives—the proposition of delinking democracy from the nation-state: the notion of “stateless democracy.” On this occasion, the fifth reader of the New World Academy, titled Stateless Democracy, has been published.

If initially the Kurdish struggle, led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), had aimed to establish an independent state, since the 1990s PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, together with the Kurdish Women’s Movement, have turned to questioning the patriarchal and capitalist nature of the very concept of the nation-state itself. Within this process the Kurdish revolutionary movement developed an alternative model called “democratic confederalism” or “stateless democracy” that invoked a confederate composition in which gender-equality, self-governance, secularism, cultural diversity, communal economy, and social ecology form key pillars.

Since 2012 this proposition has been put fully into practice in Rojava, Western Kurdistan in Syria, in alliance with the peoples of the region. New World Academy Reader #5: Stateless Democracy provides key texts that offer an overview of both the political and cultural dimensions comprising what has now come to be known to history as the Rojava Revolution. The texts in the reader are as much an introduction to the model of stateless democracy practiced in Rojava, as a potential political paradigm through which to confront the many related crises in politics, economy, and ecology that we face across the world.”

With contributions by: Kajal Ahmed (poet and journalist), Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya (political and social scientist), Janet Biehl (writer, editor, and graphic artist), Murray Bookchin (libertarian socialist author), Dilar Dirik (researcher and representative of the Kurdish Women’s Movement), Zîlan Diyar (Kurdish guerrilla fighter), David Graeber (anthropologist), Havin Güneşer (journalist and spokesperson of “Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan – Peace in Kurdistan”),Joost Jongerden (sociologist and anthropologist), Gönül Kaya (journalist and representative of the Kurdish Women’s Movement), Abdullah Öcalan (founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)), Pinar Öğünç (journalist), Jonas Staal (artist and writer), and Hito Steyerl (artist, documentary filmmaker, and writer).

Edited by Renée In der Maur and Jonas Staal in dialogue with the Kurdish Women’s Movement (and in particular Dilar Dirik, Kurdish activist and a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge)
Publisher BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2015
ISBN 9789077288221
256 pages
Out of print, now open access

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (5 MB)