#human strike

In the critical debate weekly appointment, we investigated the concept of Human strike and the feminist movement.   I am from Italy, where the movement 'Wages for housework' started in the ’70s finding the manifesto in Silvia Federici’s writing. I just recently discovered more of the fight for equal pay here in the UK through the movie “Made in Dagenham” directed by Nigel Cole. The movie is about the historical facts and “women strike” in the Ford car plant in Dagenham in 1968. The story, with a cheesy romantic sight on the ’60s, effectively explains the working-class women rights fight at work, while they are dealing with family commitments and personal life at home. I loved how the movie shows women characters different in personality, commitments and social extraction. The movie gives a great image of how women supported each other during the time. The main character is Rita O'Grady, the worker that took the reins of the strike, confident that she could achieve an improvement in the women workers condition. She can count on the help of other workers and friends in the factory while dealing simultaneously with her family matters and man workers’ malcontent because they want to come back to work and they don’t care for the wage inequality. In the movie, Rita develops a friendship with Lisa, an educated woman from a different social status “married to the enemy”, one of the directors of the Ford factory; this relationship gives the public a better idea about the woman condition in the society at the time.

I think there is a strong relation between emotion and form, just as there is between emotion and bodies. In fact, they’re not different. It is my body that is angry, and that thinks, and that cuts through certain conventions to find ways of working with language that feel direct, liberatory. What we’re talking about here is bodies, their imperative to act. We can’t free bodies without listening to bodies, including our own. But I want to say too that it has been crucial to continue to seek out, craft a balance, between solitude and social visibility. Retreat is also an economy. As well as developing social and political critiques, we need to nourish our inner lives. This is also something we can help each other with. The neo-liberal economy has put financial and institutional survival at the foreground of nearly every intellectual’s life. And as women we are conditioned to serve others. We can’t let this exigency obscure the parallel need to be improductive, to locate value otherwise. I am more and more Epicurean as time passes. I’m referring to the school of philosophy as examined living, not the popular myth of gourmandise. We need to form communities that help us live outside the general economy, to cultivate resistant paths of thought. I’m interested in exploring the notion of a feminist solitude. I’m interested in experimenting with time. I believe that thinking is emancipatory. That is why it is frightening, to individuals and to political regimes and institutions. Thinking is a form of acting, an acting within the space of language. I don’t mean language in any autonomous sense. Language is already historical, it’s never not political and historical. To act within language is always to act among others, and in the temporality of others. We change language itself by thinking and writing. Other people’s thinking and writing has given me the space and the will to work. I hope to contribute to this quorum, however modestly, because this is what it means to live in history and in politics. It is already a world, already a utopia. I want to insist that creative and intellectual activity is real, although it’s situated outside the mainstream of the economy. The neo-liberal political economy is not real. It is violent, and aggressive because it wants to claim the space of reality in order to quantify it. What we are doing, speaking together, reading and publishing and critiquing one another’s texts, eating at tables and arguing, loving each other, giving life to one another, is already embodied utopia. That doesn’t mean it’s simple. It has to be reinhabited at each turn. This ongoing reinhabitation is the necessary amazement. It’s politics, it’s the future, and it’s happening in kitchens and in online spaces and classrooms and gardens right now. It’s a resistance. Full text here.

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the hypothesis of the self

Claire Fontaine, Human Strike Within the Field of Libidinal Economy