ni de aquí, ni de allá

Every child cries from hunger.

Every mother prays for just one bag of flour.

Would you ignore their pain if you could ease it?

What will you do now?

I will donate now – I can’t wait while they suffer.

I will donate 10 euros to feed a hungry child.

I will donate 100 euros to save an entire family.

I will donate 1,000 euros to fight famine in Gaza.

One bag of flour costs 500 euros today.

Your donation means food for starving mouths and hope for broken hearts.

Be the reason someone survives tonight.

This campaign (@alkhleliy-family) has been vetted on the list by @gazavetters and is #21 Sami Alkhliliy.

—Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, April 30, 1868

“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself.”

—Karl Marx, Capital, volume 3 (1894)

“The metamorphosis of social systems in the West, during the 1980's and 1990's, can be synthesized in a more pertinent manner with the expression: communism of capital. This means that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. Think of the objectives which constitute the fulcrum of such a prospect: the abolition of that intolerable scandal, the persistence of wage labor; the extinction of the State as an industry of coercion and as a “monopoly of political decision-making"; the valorization of all that which renders the life of an individual unique. Yet, in the course of the last twenty years, an insidious and terrible interpretation of these same objectives has been put forth. First of all, the irreversible shrinking of socially necessary labor time has taken place, with an increase in labor time for those on the “inside" and the alienation of those on the "outside." Even when squeezed by temporary workers, the entity of employed workers presents itself as "overpopulation" or as the "industrial reserve army." Secondly, the radical crisis, or actually the desegregation, of the national States expresses itself as the miniature reproduction, like a Chinese box, of the form-of-State. Thirdly, after the fall of a "universal equivalent" capable of operating effec-tively, we witness a fetishistic cult of differences-except that these differences, claiming a substantial surreptitious foundation, give rise to all sorts of domineering and discriminating hierarchies.”

I think the paranoia about it which ascribes all of our failure to these agencies ignores that they are effective specifically because we are disorganized and isolated. This has plenty of precedent too, although at higher points of left struggles.

The First Red Scare of the 1920s for example came at a time when the left had been split into many factions in the past decade over the issues of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the Russian Revolution, especially regarding the collaboration of labor unions and Socialists with racist imperialism and anti-communism.

The Second Red Scare of the 1950s happened at a moment where the left had been divided up over the question of whether to ally with Roosevelt’s New Deal Democrats, the controversy of union leaders and the Communist Party endorsing the wartime no-strike pledge, massive compromises of the organized left on civil rights during the war (the CPUSA going a far as to endorse Japanese internment), to say nothing of Earl Browder liquidating the CPUSA with the belief that the negotiations between the US and USSR over the postwar settlement meant that the New Deal was now the revolutionary movement of America (before the New Dealers immediately turned on the left during the Korean War).

Then the repression of the New Left with psyops like COINTELPRO and outright secret police assassinations only began to have success when the left responded by shuttering its public links with the masses (many of whom anyway became disinterested in the antiwar movement once Nixon began carrying out Vietnamization) and relying increasingly on sects as a means of self-preservation and terrorism as a means of substituting themselves for open collective struggle. In her autobiography, Assata Shakur makes the great point that many chapters of the Black Panther Party began hiding at the exact moment that they should’ve been relying on their mass base to help them fight off Federal and police repression, not unlike what the early Black Power movement had done with the SNCC Freedom Rides and March Against Fear. I agree with the argument that James Boggs makes in The American Revolution that the real way to defeat the secret police is to make their repression a political issue and draw the public in to questioning and destroying them.

The first one goes into a specific example where Federici’s sourcing for the gynocide statistics is extremely poor, relying on a pretty questionable book called Witchcraze. She also misrepresents the nature of the witch hunts (they were class based, and they were gendered, but not in the totalized way she imagines). That critique is available here.

The other comes from a more explicitly Italian internationalist communist perspective and I disagree with its reading of paganism (Amadeo Bordiga took the opposite of these progressivist positions with his later emphasis on the community essence or Gemeinwesen) but it makes a very good critique of her historiography. It’s available here.

On a side note, I think her claim that Marxist historians had systematically ignored the witch hunts and the forcible disciplining of the post-Black Death masses of paupers is pretty questionable as well. Marx already discussed this in the Grundrisse, and he saw the mass criminality of the dispossessed poor as a more immediately obvious response to their situation than their forcible training in wage labor:

“[…]when the great English landowners dismissed their retainers, who had consumed a share of their surplus produce of their land; when their farmers drove out the small cottagers, etc., then a doubly free mass of living labor power was thrown on to the labor market: free from the old relation of clientship, villeinage, or service, but also free from all goods or chattels, from every real and objective form of existence, free from all property. Such a mass would be reduced either to the sale of its labor power or to beggary, vagabondage, or robbery as its only source of income. History records the fact that it first tried beggary, vagabondage, and crime, but was herded off this road on to the narrow path which led to the labor market by means of the gallows, pillory, and whip. (Hence the governments of Henry VII, VIII, etc., also appear as conditions of the historic process of dissolution and as creators of the conditions for the existence of capital.) Conversely, the means of subsistence formerly consumed by the lords and their retainers, were now available for purchase by money, and money wished to purchase them in order through their instrumentality to purchase labor. Money had neither created nor accumulated these means of subsistence. They were already present, consumed, and reproduced, before they were consumed and reproduced through the intervention of money. The only change was that these means of production were now thrown on to the exchange-market. They had now been detached from their immediate connection with the mouths of the retainers, etc., and transformed from use-values into exchange-values, thus falling under the government and sovereignty of monetary wealth. The same applies to the instruments of labor. Monetary wealth neither invented nor manufactured spinning wheel and loom. But once spinners and weavers had been separated from their land, they and their wheels and looms came under the sway of monetary wealth, etc.”

Henryk Grossman strongly emphasized this interpretation as a critique of Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic theory in 1934, arguing that the working classes, many of whom were dissident Protestants themselves, had to be forcibly trained in this ethic rather than it organically spreading. Karl Kautsky was already discussing that as tied to the witch hunt in his 1888 book about early modern utopianism. Kautsky’s work on medieval and early modern Europe was extremely influential for how Second International Marxists were thinking about the rise of capitalism, even if this specific detail of it was neglected. Of course, Federici is right that the heavily gendered nature of these witch hunts was neglected in the classical Marxist accounts, and this is after all why the 20th century feminist critical interventions into socialism were absolutely necessary.