POSTED ON September 10, 2013 BY admin
PADKOS NO 43
With about a week to go, here are the details of where & when you need to be, to catch Silvia Federici in ‘Maritzburg. This really is an extraordinary opportunity to hear from and engage with one of world’s leading radicals – DO NOT MISS THIS!
Friends and comrades on the Padkos mailing list should gather at the University Club (Golf Rd, UKZN) at 9:30am for input and conversation with Silvia as she shares her thinking on a radical politics of the commons.
We’ll have lunch together at the Club from 12 noon – and walk down together to the next event…
At 1:30pm Federici will give a public seminar in Room 67 of the Education Building at UKZN, co-hosted with the Paulo Freire Project and the Centre for Adult Education.
To end off, relax & join us for conversations, snacks, drinks and some music back at the Varsity Club from 3pm till 5pm.
Please RSVP: Call Cindy at (033) 2644 380 or email padkos@churchland.co.za.
Your Padkos reading is attached – “Feminism and the politics of the commons”. Towards the close of this extraordinary essay, Federici argues:
“As the capitalist crisis destroys the basic elements of reproduction for millions of people across the world, … the reconstruction of our everyday life is a possibility and a necessity.
[W]e cannot build an alternative society and a strong self-reproducing movement unless we redefine our reproduction in a more cooperative way and put an end to the separation between the personal and the political, and between political activism and the reproduction of everyday life
Arguing that women should take the lead in the collectivization of reproductive work and housing is not to naturalize housework as a female vocation. It is refusing to obliterate the collective experiences, the knowledge and the struggles that women have accumulated concerning reproductive work, whose history has been an essential part of our resistance to capitalism.
Reconnecting with this history is a crucial step for women and men today both to undo the gendered architecture of our lives and to reconstruct our homes and lives as commons” (Federici, 2010).
Federici Feminism-and-the-Politics-of-the-Commons