Written Compulsion

Monique Wittig was a French lesbian feminist, co-founder of two important French feminist organizations, the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Women’s Liberation Movement) and Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes), as well as an important theoretical contributor to materialist feminism, lesbian feminism, and literary theory. She also wrote several novels and short stories that express her radical lesbian feminist visions of a world without sex or gender. Her texts express the material basis of women’s and lesbians oppression in heterosexuality and not in any sort of essentialist idea of womanhood. Wittig died in 2002 and was survived by her partner and collaborator Sande Zeig.

Theoretical Works (Some in French)

The Straight Mind

The Category of Sex

Avatars

The Constant Journey: Preface

The Point of View: Universal or Particular?

The Trojan Horse

The Mark of Gender

One is Not Born a Woman

Homo Sum

On the Social Contract

Fiction

Un jour mon prince viendra (French)

L’opoponax (French)

The Lesbian Body

Paris, la politique et autres histoires (French)

Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016) was a Marxist historian and political thinker of enormous significance. We are proud to publish many of her books and, in order to encourage readers to engage with her work more broadly, we have collected the following list of articles and interviews currently in the public domain. With the kind permission of her publishers a number of the pieces are being made freely available for the first time. 

1978 - ‘C.B. Macpherson, Liberalism, and the Task of Socialist Political Theory’, Socialist Register 15, 215–240 1981

- ‘Liberal Democracy and Capitalist Hegemony: A Reply to Leo Panitch on the Task of Socialist Political Theory’, Socialist Register 18, 169-189

- ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review 127, 66-95 1982 - ‘The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E.P. Thompson and His Critics’, Studies in Political Economy 9, 45–75 1983 - ‘Marxism Without Class Struggle?’, Socialist Register 20, 239-271 1984 - ‘Marxism and the Course of History’, New Left Review 147, 95-107 1985 - ‘Beyond Class? A Reply to Chantal Mouffe’, Studies in Political Economy 17, 141–165 1987 - ‘Why Class Struggle is Central’, Against the Current 10, 7-9 - ‘A reply to ‘Looking for alternatives to reformism’, International Socialism 35 1988 - ‘Capitalism and Human Emancipation’, New Left Review 167, 3-20 1989 - ‘Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?’, New Left Review 177, 41-88 1990 - ‘The Uses and Abuses of ‘Civil Society’, Socialist Register 26, 60-84 - ‘Explaining Everything or Nothing’, New Left Review 184, 116-128 1991 - ‘Review of Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism’, History of the Human Sciences, 4(3), 469-471 1992 - ‘Custom Against Capitalism’, New Left Review 195, 21-28 1994 - ‘Ralph Miliband, 1923-1994: The Common Sense of Socialism’, Radical Philosophy 68, 62-63 - ‘Edward Palmer Thompson: In Memoriam’,  Studies in Political Economy 43, 26-31 1995 - ‘A Chronology of the New Left and its Successors, or: Who’s Old-Fashioned Now?’, Socialist Register 31, 22-49 1996 - ‘Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood - Democracy & Capitalism: Friends or Foes?’, New Socialist Magazine, January 1996 1997 - ‘Back to Marx’, Monthly Review 49(2), 21-39 - ‘Labor, the State, and Class Struggle’, Monthly Review 49(3), 1-17 - ‘A Note on Du Boff and Herman’, Monthly Review 49(6), 39-43 1998 - ‘Capitalist Change and Generational Shifts’, Monthly Review 50(5), 1-10 - ‘The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years’, Monthly Review 50(1), 14-35 - ‘The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism’, Monthly Review 50(5), 1-10 1999 - ‘Kosovo and the New Imperialism’, Monthly Review 51(2), 1-8 - ‘Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation-States’, Monthly Review 51(3), 1-12 - ‘The Politics of Capitalism’, Monthly Review 51(4), 12-26 2001 - ‘Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentrism’, Against the Current 92, 29-35 - ‘War Without Boundaries’, Canadian Dimension 35(6), 16-17 2002 - ‘Class, Race, and Capitalism’, Political Power and Social Theory 15, 275-284 - ‘Contradiction: Only in Capitalism?’, Socialist Register 38, 275-293 - ‘Explaining September 11’, Studies in Political Economy 67, 25-31 2003 - ‘Christopher Hill and the Recovery of History’, Against the Current 104, 43-45 - ‘Capitalist Empire and the Nation State’, Against the Current 106, 21-26 2008 - ‘Why it Matters’, London Review of Books, 30(18), 5-6 - ‘Review of Pierre Dockès, Medieval Slavery and Liberation’, Social History, 9(1), 1010-103

2009 - ‘Capitalism and Social Rights’, Against the Current 140, 28-32 2010 - ‘Happy Campers’, London Review of Books 32(2), 26-27 2011 - ‘Social Property Relations in the 21st Century: An Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood’, Alternate Routes 24, 159-170 2016 - ‘The Strike at York University’, Canadian Dimension

- read more about #EllenMeiksinsWood on the Verso blog

“ The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations of the flesh and the Kingdom of Heaven, a layer of dirt, lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful, it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place — hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics of leprosy, epileptic convulsions, and plague decimated the population o-f Europe regularly. The Black Death is thought to have killed 25 percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived: “

So this is wrong because: The church was not hostile to the practice of medicine (actually establishing hospitals and doing most of the medicining, and yes they did encourage prayer but they did other stuff too, and were the ones maintaining the store of classical knowledge cause they were the only classical institution fucking left), and bathing was actually common up UNTIL the plague struck and many baths had to be closed (Communal baths were a great place for a disease to spread) and one of the reasons the plague swept through was the fact that Europe was going through a mini ice age resulting in people immunocompromised from cold and hunger.

“ Hunger and misery, the serf’s constant companions, may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation which were vivid in the Christian imagination were modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life. The Christian notion of the nature of the Devil underwent as many transformations as the snake has skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistic theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f one religion become the devils o f the next, and the Church, intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas, vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified. Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed to continue their traditional vocations of healing the sick and protecting the traveler. The Church often transformed the names of the gods —so as not to be embarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, became St. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagan gods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts — shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decorated with a cross. But in northern Europe the old gods did not fare as well. The peoples of northern Europe were temperamentally and culturally quite different from the Latin Christians, and their religions centered around animal totemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adhered to a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemy of the Church), which was manifest in spirits who inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithic hunting stage, they were concerned with magical control of animals. In the later neolithic agricultural stage, fertility practices to ensure the food supply predominated. “

  Also no there was no witch cult, witches were not pagan survivals, and why second wavers love valorizing pre-Christian religions I DO NOT KNOW, Roman women?  Not treated that well.  Read the Rape Of Lucretia, look at some goddamn history.

“ T o deal with the increasing tide o f witchcraft and in conformity with the Pope’s orders, Sprenger and Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. “

Also the Church condemned the Malleus Maleficarum, most of the persecution was committed via mass hysteria and landed gentry.

Also do not get on me with that goddess crap

“ Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representation o f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f a horned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparently dancing. That figure is to be found in a cavern in Arriege. Early religions actively worshiped animals, and in particular animals which symbolized male fertility—the bull, goat, or stag. Ecstatic dancing, feasts, sacrifice o f the god or his representative (human or animal) were parts o f the rites. The magician-priest-shaman became the earthly incarnation o f the god-animal and apparently dressed in the skins o f the sacred animal (even the Pharaoh o f Egypt had an animal tail attached to his girdle) “

WRONG  WRONGITY WRONG WRONG WRONG.

“ The nobility, when not out butchering, enforced that most curious of customs, the jus primae noctis, which legitimated the rape of newly wed peasant women. “

Nope  

“It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127 “

Not that many people were killed, given the population of Europe at the time that would have been impossible

“ It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than mid wives. ” 27 The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both “

Nope, they weren’t after midwives

“The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime. “

And although most women were targeted witch hysteria was not exclusively used against women and that ratio is wrong as fuck.

https://libcom.org/files/Caliban%20and%20the%20Witch.pdf

https://viewpointmag.com/2015/11/02/issue-5-social-reproduction/

https://libcom.org/library/power-women-subversion-community-della-costa-selma-james

https://libcom.org/library/aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/the-arcane-of-reproductive-production

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder, flowed back to the mother country and were turned into capital there.