Michael > Recent Status Updates

Incredible comedy of errors from Gorbachev. Doesn't visit Chernobyl until 3 years later. Lets Yeltsin meet Bush Sr. before he can when Iron Curtain falls. Allows state enterprises and cooperatives to set own consumer prices while maintaining state fixed prices for inventory, leading to price gouging and inflation. Prohibition of alcohol (a third of GDP). Empowered ethnonationalist political factions under perestroika

30 pages in, beginning with the succession of Andropov through to Gorbachev and Gorbachev is crashing the economy and destroying the state.

"forcing women to procreate against their will or (as a feminist song from the 1970s had it) forcing them to "produce children for the state," only in part defined women's function in the new sexual division of labor. A complementary aspect was the definition of women as non-workers, a process much studied by feminist historians, which by the end of the 17th century was nearly completed."

"In all phases of capitalist development the state has had to resort to regulation and coercion to expand or reduce the workforce. Down to the present, the state has spared no efforts in its attempt to wrench from women's hands control over reproduction. Consequently women have often been forced to procreate against their will, and have experienced an alienation from their bodies, their labor and even their children"

"The outcome of these policies that lasted for two centuries… was the enslavement of women to procreation. While in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives, and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation."

"Also, the suspicion under which midwives came in this period - leading to the entrance of the male doctor into the delivery room - stemmed more from the authorities' fears of infanticide than from any concern with the midwives' alleged medical incompetence... With this shift, a new medical practice also prevailed, one that in the case of a medical emergency prioritized the life of the fetus over that of the mother."

"New forms of surveillance were also adopted to ensure that pregnant women did not terminate their pregnancies. In France, a royal edict of 1556 required women to register every pregnancy, and sentenced to death those whose infants died before baptism after a concealed delivery, whether or not proven guilty or any wrongdoing. A system of spies was also created to survey unwed mothers and deprive them of any support."

"the main initiative that the state took to restore the desired population ratio was the launching of a true war against women clearly aimed at breaking the control they had exercised over their bodies and production. …this war was waged primarily through the witch-hunt that literally demonized any form of birth-control and non-procreative sexuality, while charging women with sacrificing children to the devil."

"an almost fanatical desire to increase population prevailed in all countries during the period when mercantilism was at its height...in France and England the state adopted a set of pro-natalist measures that, combined with Public Relief, formed the embryo of a capitalist reproductive policy. Laws were passed that put a premium on marriage and penalized celibacy"

"...It cannot be a pure coincidence, however, that at the very moment when population was declining, and an ideology was forming that stressed the centrality of labor in economic life, severe penalties were introduced in the legal codes of Europe to punish women guilty of reproductive crimes."

"other factors contributed to increase the determination of the European power-structure to control more strictly women's reproductive function. Among them, we must include the increasing privatization of property and economic relations that (within the bourgeoisie) generated a new anxiety concerning the question of paternity and the conduct of women..."

"[1580s Europe] was a population crisis without precedents… Death struck at "the poor". It was not the rich, for the most part, who perished when the plague or the smallpox swept the towns, but craftsmen, day-laborers, and vagabonds…We also have the complaints of ministers who from the pulpit charged that the youth did not marry and procreate, in order not to bring more mouths into the world than they could feed."

the introduction of public assistance was a turning point in the state relation between workers and capital... It was the first recognition of the unsustainability of a capitalist system ruling exclusively by means of hunger and terror. It was also the first step in the reconstruction of the state as the guarantor of the class relation and as the chief supervisor of the reproduction and disciplining of the workforce.

Even the individual's relationship with God was privatized: in Protestant areas with the institution of a direct relationship [with God]; in the Catholic areas by individual confession. As a result, the physical enclosures [were] amplified by social enclosure, the reproduction of workers shifting from the openfield to the home, from the community to the family, from the public space (commons & church) to the private.

"That in the industrializing regions of Europe, by the 19 c., the most extreme forms of proletarian misery and rebellion had disappeared is not a proof against this claim. Proletarian misery and rebellions ... only lessened to the degree that the super-exploitation of workers had been exported, through the institutionalization of slavery, at first, and later through the continuing expansion of colonial domination."

"Today, these aspects of the transition to capitalism may seem (for Europe at least) things of the past... But the... new phase of globalization that we are witnessing tells us otherwise. Pauperization, rebellion, and the escalation of "crime" are structural elements of capitalist accumulation as capitalism must strip the work-force from its means of reproductions to impose its own rule."

"In the middle ages, migration, vagabondage, and the rise of "crimes against property" were part of the resistance to impoverishment and dispossession...Meanwhile, the crime rates also escalated, in such proportions that we can assume that a massive reclamation and reappropriation of the stolen communal wealth was underway. "

Federici has identified the advent of inflation (!!) in its contemporary form originating from the separation of workers from their means of subsistence, and the prominence of wage labour - supplanting subsistence agricultural labour from land privatization (enclosures) - forcing women into an unwaged "sector" of household reproductive labour, upon which the entire system of capitalist production depends. Monumental!

"The separation of workers trom their means of subsistence and their new dependence on monetary relations also meant that the real wage could now be cut and women's labor could be further devalued with respect to men's through monetary manipulation. It is not a coincidence then, that as soon as land began to be privatized, the prices of foodstuffs, which for two centuries had stagnated, began to rise."

"But the economic importance of the reproduction of labor-power carried out in the home, and its function in the accumulation of capital became invisible, being mystified as a natural vocation and labelled "women's labor." In addition, women were excluded from many waged occupations and, when they worked for a wage, they earned a pittance compared to the average male wage."

"In the new monetary regime, only production-for-market was defined as a value-creating activity, whereas the reproduction of the worker began to be considered as valueless from an economic viewpoint and even ceased to be considered as work. Reproductive work continued to be paid - though at the lowest rates - when performed for the master class or outside the home..."

"With the demise of the subsistence economy that had prevailed in pre-capitalist Europe. the unıty ot production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to an end, as these activities became the carriers of dif ferent social relations and were sexually differentiated. In the new monetary regime, only... "

"That the transition to capitalism inaugurated along period of starvation for worts ers in Europe which plausibly ended because of the economic expansion produced by colonization - is also demonstrated by the fact that, while in the 14th and 15th cen- turies, the proletarian struggle had centered around the demand for "liberty" and less work, by the 16th and 17t, it was mostly spurred by hunger... "

"It is difficult to retrospectively tell how far playing the "sex card" helped the state to discipline and divide the medieval proletariat. What is certain is that this ... was part of a broader process which, in response to the intensification of social conflict, led to the centralization of the state, as the only agent capable of confronting the generalization of the struggle and safeguarding the class relation."

"Thus, between 1350-1450, publicly managed, tax-financed brothels were opened in every town and village in Italy and France, in numbers far superior to those reached in the 19th century. "

Another aspect of the divisive sexual politics that the princes and municipal authorities pursues to diffuse workers' protest was the institutionalization of prostitution, implemented through the opening of municipal brothels soon proliferating throughout Europe. Enabled by the contemporary high-wage regime, state-managed prostitution was seen as a useful remedy for the turbulence of proletarian youth..."

"And as the water table drops, Palestinian wells are running dry. Palestinians are not allowed to deepen their wells or sink new ones without Israeli permission —- and permission is almost never granted. If they build without permission, as many do, Israeli bulldozers arrive the next day. So Palestinians are forced to buy their own water back from Israel at arbitrarily high prices."

"... with the backing of the US military, [Israel] asserted total control over the aquifers beneath the [occupied] territory. Israel draws the majority of this water — close to 90 per cent — for its own use in settlements and for irrigation on large industrial farms."

"The sign announced a USAID initiative ‘to help alleviate recurring water shortages’ by adding a new well in the area. It was branded with the American flag and bore the proud words: “This project is a gift from the American People to the Palestinian People"... But Palestine doesn’t have a shortage of water. When Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank in 1967..."

"The charity paradigm obscures the real issues at stake: it makes it seems as though the West is 'developing the global South, when in reality the opposite is true. Rich countries aren't developing poor countries, poor countries are effectively developing rich countries - and they have been since the late 15th century. So it's not only that the aid narrative misunderstands what really causes poverty, it's backwards."