{"id":12529,"date":"2018-06-17T23:18:24","date_gmt":"2018-06-17T23:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=12529"},"modified":"2021-02-19T15:32:06","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T15:32:06","slug":"feeling-powers-growing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/17\/feeling-powers-growing\/","title":{"rendered":"FEELING POWERS GROWING"},"content":{"rendered":"

The question about how socialists or communists should organise is the subject of this interchange between Silvia Federici and carla bergman and Nick Montgomery. It was posted by bella caledonia (https:\/\/bellacaledonia.org.uk\/2018\/06\/08\/feeling-powers-growing-an-interview-with-silvia-federici\/).<\/strong><\/p>\n

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FEELING POWERS GROWING – AN INTERVIEW WITH SILVIA FEDERICI<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Silvia Federici<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This interview was conducted by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery for\u00a0Joyful Militancy<\/a>\u00a0(building thriving resistance in toxic times)\u00a0<\/a>published by AK Press.\u00a0Silvia Federici is an Italian\u00a0activist and author of many works, including\u00a0Caliban and the Witch<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle<\/em>. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign in the \u201870s. In it they discuss new ways of acting and destructive cultures within political movements.<\/p>\n

Silvia Federici<\/strong>:\u00a0My politics resonate with your idea of \u201cjoyful militancy.\u201d I\u2019m a strong believer that either your politics is liberating and that gives you joy, or there\u2019s something wrong with them.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gone through phases of \u201csad politics\u201d myself and I\u2019ve learned to identify the mistakes that generate it. It has many sources. But one factor is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of what we can do by ourselves, so that we always feel guilty for not accomplishing enough.<\/p>\n

When I was thinking about this conversation, I was reminded of Nietzsche\u2019s metamorphoses in\u00a0Thus Spoke Zarathustra\u00a0<\/em>and his image of the camel. The camel is the prototype of the militant who burdens herself with huge amounts of work, because she thinks that the destiny of the world depends on her overwork. Inevitably she\u2019s always saddened because the goal is always receding and she does not have the time to be fully present to her life and recognize the transformative possibilities inherent to her work.<\/p>\n

carla and Nick<\/strong>:\u00a0You said that you feel like there are so many sources to sad militancy\u00a0[1]<\/a>\u00a0and can you speak to some more of those?<\/p>\n

Federici<\/strong>:\u00a0Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected into the future and you feel continuously defeated. \u00a0\u201cSad politics \u201c is also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I\u2019m encouraged by the fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.<\/p>\n

Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already in the present. This is not to deny that political engagement often involves suffering. In fact our political involvement often is born of suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something about it, it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is feeling the solidarity of those around us. Militants in Argentina speak of \u00a0\u201cpoliticizing our sadness.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is why I don\u2019t believe in the concept of \u201cself-sacrifice,\u201d where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals. Again, what we do may lead to suffering, but this may be preferable to the kind of self-destruction we would have faced had we remained inactive.<\/p>\n

The inability to make politics a rewarding experience is part of the reason why, I think, the radical Left has been unsuccessful in attracting large numbers of people. Here too we are beginning to learn however. I see that many young militants today are recognizing the importance of building community, of organizing activities that are pleasurable, that build trust and affective relations, like eating together for instance. It is not an accident that Indigenous peoples\u2019 movements in Latin America give so much importance to the organization of events like the fiestas.<\/p>\n

Nick and carla:\u00a0<\/strong>We wanted to ask you specifically about the feminist movement and what are some of the ways that feminists and other movements have struggled with sad militancy in the past. We\u2019re thinking of Jo Freeman\u2019s essay on \u201ctrashing\u201d from the \u201870s, where she talks about real tendencies to destroy relationships within the feminist movement.[i]<\/a>\u00a0In one of the interviews that you\u2019ve done, you mention \u201ctruculent forms of behavior that were typical of the movement in the \u201860s\u201d and that you see new forms of kindness and care emerging that maybe were absent back then. So we wanted to ask you about how things have changed from your perspective, and whether you see a connection between trashing and what is now called call-out culture in contemporary movements.<\/p>\n

Federici:\u00a0<\/strong>When I wrote about truculent behavior, I was thinking of relations in the male Left and male-dominated organizations, where you found a lot of protagonism and peacock-like competition, as well as a manipulation of women, sexual and otherwise. These were among the factors that motivated the rise of the women\u2019s liberation movement. Not only women\u2019s demands were pushed off the agenda, but everyday relations were often degrading for them.<\/p>\n

A good description of women\u2019s lives in male-dominated organizations is Marge Piercy\u2019s The Grand Coolie Dam,<\/em>[ii]<\/a>\u00a0where she powerfully describes the many forms of subordination women suffered in male-dominated groups. In comparison, the organizational forms the women\u2019s movement adopted were a major improvement. Possibly feminists moved too far in the opposite direction. I am thinking of Jo Freeman\u2019s critique of the \u201ctyranny of structurelessness.\u201d[iii]<\/a>\u00a0But she\u2019s excessively critical of the feminist movement. I don\u2019t agree that feminists were especially prone to trashing each other. The attack on leadership, for instance, though it often worked against people\u2019s capacity to express themselves, also opened the way to more egalitarian relations\u2014like ensuring that everyone would have a change to speak in a meeting. The resistance against women getting credit for authoring articles or speaking too much in public was a legacy of the experiences we had made in male-dominated organizations. In time, it is a fear that most women left behind, as they felt more confident in their own powers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem has been the wedding of \u201cidentity\u201d with the politics of rights, as when we speak of women\u2019s rights, Indigenous peoples\u2019 rights, as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities and the possibility of a common struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the bitterness that you find in Jo Freeman comes perhaps from the fact that, when we joined the women\u2019s movement, many of us believed that we had reached a sort of paradise. As I wrote in Putting Feminism On Its Feet<\/em>, when I began to work with other women I truly felt that I had found my home, my tribe.[iv]<\/a>\u00a0We thought that we had reached a place where everything would be harmonious; where there would be love, care, reciprocity, equality, cooperation\u2014sisterhood as we called it. So we dis-activated our critical thinking and left our defenses down. Unfortunately, we didn\u2019t reach paradise, and the disappointment was especially severe because we assumed that in the women\u2019s movement we would find happiness, or at least we would not encounter the kind of jealousies, power plays, and power relations we had experienced with men.<\/p>\n

Spinoza speaks of Joy as coming from Reason and Understanding. But we forgot that all of us bear on our bodies and minds the marks of life in a capitalist society. We forgot that we came to the feminist movement with many scars and fears. We would feel devalued and easily take offense if we thought we were not properly valued. It was a jealousy that came from poverty, from fear of not being given our due. This also led some women to be possessive about what they had done, what they had written or said.<\/p>\n

These are all the classical problems and distortions that life in a capitalist society creates. Over time you learn to identify them, but at first, many of us were devastated by them. For me coping with this realization has been an important learning process. But I have also seen women leaving the movement because they were so deeply hurt by it.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the feminist movement, because it stressed the importance of sharing experiences and engaging in a collective examination of our everyday lives and problems, gave us important tools to deal with this situation. Through \u201cconsciousness-raising\u201d and the refusal to separate politics from our everyday reproduction it created forms of organization that built trust and showed that our strength was rooted in our mutual solidarity.<\/p>\n

I found a vision in the women\u2019s movement that allowed me to overcome some bitter experiences and over time insulated me from disappointment. I see politics now as a process of transformation; a process by which we learn to better ourselves, shed our possessiveness and discard the petty squabbles that so much poison our lives.<\/p>\n

I think that this has been a collective experience that has left a mark on other organizations as well. It seems to me that, over the last two or three decades, the women\u2019s movement has been the most important influence on the organizational forms of most radical movements. You don\u2019t find today, on a general level, the kind of behavior that was common among men thirty or forty years ago, not at least among the new generations, although there is still a good amount of machismo around. But you also have men who genuinely want to be feminist, and define themselves as anti-patriarchal, or organize against male supremacy\u2014all unthinkable stands\u2014with few exceptions\u2014in the \u201860s.<\/p>\n

carla<\/strong>:\u00a0I have all these questions! There seems to be some kind of paradox in this: that joy is about feelings and relationships, but not just an individual feeling. And while we want to speak to the power of joy, it can\u2019t be turned into a commandment, and in fact it gets lost when it becomes something imposed on people. But it also can\u2019t be about just feeling happy or feeling good, or being okay with the way things are. It feels like a little bit of a paradox and I haven\u2019t figured out how to think that through. A lot of my activism over the years has been around youth liberation and working with children having more of a say, and getting that form of oppression into the discussion and into activist spaces, and my work was very centered around that in a public way. I don\u2019t want to replicate individualism in liberation; I want it to always be connected to the larger systems and social struggles. But it also needs to be about thriving right now, because they\u2019re kids! And when things were working well it seemed that there was a lot of room for freedom and growth but it was held and felt collectively, without a bunch of rules or norms. There was happiness, sure, but also difficulty and a willingness to work through it. So it feels like a constant paradox to work through joy \u2026<\/p>\n

Federici<\/strong>:\u00a0I like the distinction between happiness and joy. Like you, I like joy because it is an active passion. It\u2019s not a static state of being. And it\u2019s not satisfaction with things as they are. It\u2019s part of feeling powers and capacities growing within yourself and in the people around you. It\u2019s a feeling, a passion that comes from a process of transformation and growth. It does not mean that you\u2019re satisfied with your situation. It means, again using Spinoza, that you\u2019re active in accordance to what your understanding tells you to do and what is required by the situation. So you feel that you have the power to change and feel yourself changing through what you\u2019re doing, together with other people. It\u2019s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.<\/p>\n

Nick and carla:\u00a0<\/strong>We\u2019ve found your concept of the accumulation of divisions really compelling, and the ways you\u2019re centering how capitalism is always using white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization, and other oppressive hierarchies to create divisions and enable exploitation. Your historicization of those divisions is powerful, because you show how the state and capitalism have deepened and entrenched patriarchy and racism as a strategy to stop resistance and enable more intense exploitation. And for us, in this book we really want to center the importance of rebuilding trust and connection and solidarity across those divisions, while leaving space for difference and autonomy. One of the things that we like about your work is that you don\u2019t jump to a simple unity\u2014that overcoming these divisions doesn\u2019t look like a simple unity. And so we wanted to ask you to talk about that a little more. Is there a distinction between divisions, which are hierarchical and exploitative, and differences, which might be something else? And can you talk about the positive horizon you see for resisting the accumulation of divisions while warding off a kind of homogenizing unity?<\/p>\n

Federici:\u00a0<\/strong>Yes, the distinction between differences and divisions is important. When I speak of \u201cdivisions\u201d I speak of differences that carry hierarchies, inequalities, and have a divisive power. So, we need to be very clear when we speak of \u201cdifferences.\u201d Not all should be celebrated.<\/p>\n

The lesson we learned in the \u201860s from the women\u2019s movement and the Black Power movement is that the most effective way to respond to unequal relations is for those who have less social power to organize autonomously. This does not exclude the possibility of coming together for particular struggles. But in a society divided along racial and gender lines, unity is a goal to be achieved, not something that can be assumed to already exist. Organizational autonomy, or at least the construction of autonomous spaces within mixed organizations\u2014as it often happens in Latin America\u2014is a necessary condition to subvert these divisions. The women\u2019s movement could not have developed the understanding of the situation of women that it developed if women had remained in male-dominated organizations. It was crucial for women to move away from these organizations to even begin to think about their problems and share their thoughts with each other.<\/p>\n

You cannot think of a problem, give voice to it, share it with others, if you fear that you will be dismissed, ridiculed, or told that it is not important. Moreover, how could women have spoken of sexuality and their relations with men in front of them? And how could Black militants speak openly of their experience of racism in front of white people?<\/p>\n

Autonomy within movements that are working toward unity but are traversed by power relations is fundamental. A crucial reality would have remained hidden if the feminist movement had not organized autonomously and this is also true of the Black Power movement. Important areas and forms of exploitation would have continued to be unnoticed; would not have been analyzed and denounced and would have continued to be reproduced.<\/p>\n

carla and Nick<\/strong>:\u00a0You often point to Latin America and other places where the social fabric is much stronger in general, and movements are a lot more capable of reproducing themselves and meeting their own needs, relying less on the state and capital. The maintenance of communal and cooperative forms of life seems to be central to the capacity for sustained struggle and resistance. Can you elaborate on all this?<\/p>\n

Federici<\/strong>:\u00a0I went to Nigeria in the \u201880s and one of the big surprises for me was to discover that large amounts of land were still managed communally. That doesn\u2019t mean that in communal land regimes relationships are necessarily egalitarian. Generally men have more power than women; but until recently they could not sell the land. Clearly these communal regimes have gone through many changes, especially because of colonial domination. But the fact that communal ownership has been widespread in Africa until at least the nineteenth century and, in some regions, continues even today, has had a deep impact on relationships and people, which is why I believe so much violence has been and is necessary to privatize the land and the continent\u2019s immense natural resources.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same thing in Latin America. In Mexico, in the 1930s, during the government of L\u00e1zaro C\u00e1rdenas, some land was returned to indigenous communities that had been expropriated by colonial invasion. Today the Mexican government is trying to re-privatize everything, but until recently at least thirty percent of the country\u2019s land was still held communally.<\/p>\n

Again, this is not a guarantee of egalitarian relations. Women in these communities are coming forward, criticizing the patriarchal relations often prevailing within them. A good example are the Zapatista women. As you can read in Hilary Klein\u2019s book\u00a0Compa\u00f1eras<\/em>, many of the transformations that have taken place in Zapatista communities, like the application of the Revolutionary Law On Women, have been the product of the struggle that women have made against patriarchalism. But communal land regimes guarantee the reproduction of the communities that live on the land.<\/p>\n

Today many of these communities are facing dispossession because of land privatization, deforestation, the loss of water to irrigate their\u00a0milpas.<\/em>\u00a0But when they are forced out and come to the cities, they still act as a collectivity. They take over land though collective action, they build encampments, and take decision collectively. As a result, in many cities of Latin America, new communities have formed that from their beginning were built collectively. It appears that the narcos now try to infiltrate some of these communities. But when people take over the land and cooperate to build their houses, to build the streets, to fight with the government to connect the electricity and get water pipes, there is a good chance that that they will be able to respond to this threat, and you can see that there\u2019s a new social reality emerging in these communities.<\/p>\n

As Ra\u00fal Zibechi often points out, something new is emerging in these communities because they have had to invent new forms of life, without any pre-existing model, and politicize the everyday process of their reproduction.[v]<\/a>\u00a0When you work together, building houses, building streets, building structures that provide some immediate form of healthcare\u2014just to give some examples\u2014you are making life-choices, as all of them come with a high cost. You must fight the state, fight the police, the local authorities. So you have to develop tight relations with each other and always measure the value of all things.<\/p>\n

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__________<\/p>\n

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also see:-<\/p>\n

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A CRITIQUE OF JEREMY CORBYN AND BRITISH LEFT SOCIAL DEMOCRACY, Part 2<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n