Engaging the Imperial Mode of Living

In their powerful book The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (Verso, 2021), Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen demonstrate how our life in the capitalist centres and its dominant forms of production, distribution and consumption can only be maintained, because the related social and ecological costs are externalised to other parts of the world. Published originally in German in 2017, this volume is now also available to the English reading audience. In this blog post, I will draw out some of the authors’ crucial findings.

 

Is capitalism structurally indifferent to gender?

A sweep through key arguments about the abstracting logic of capital will yield a common emphasis, which is a stress on the “indifference” of capital to those it exploits. For sure this is evident in some of Marx’s own writings. Witness points in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts on how capital stands in an indifferent relationship to labour, with the latter existing as ‘liberated capital’. Or, equally, Marx’s more sophisticated point in Grundrisse that ‘since capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of its substance’ then ‘the labour which confronts it likewise subjectively has the same totality and abstraction in itself’.

 

More widely, though, this emphasis crops up in the writings of others, such as Moishe Postone, William Clare Roberts, or Martha Giménez. At first blush it may seem reasonable to contend at an abstract level that capitalism is “indifferent” to the social identities of the people it exploits. But does adhering to this form of abstraction result in a flawed theory of labour and social mediation under capitalism? As Doreen Massey reminds us, is there an abstracting logic here that fails to recognise that the world is not simply the product of the requirements of capital? Adam D. Morton and I pursue these questions (and more) in our latest article in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space through an engagement with debates in Marxist Feminist social reproduction theory.

Ecofeminism as Politics in times of crisis

In 2017, Ariel Salleh published the second edition of her book Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (Zed Books, 2017). In her outstanding engagement with multiple oppressions within the capitalist global economy, Salleh convincingly argues that patriarchal oppression is inextricably internally related to the destruction of nature in capitalism’s relentless search for accumulating ever higher levels of surplus value. In this blog post, I will provide an overview of the main arguments of the book as well as offer some critical reflections.

Revisiting the 'Mode of Production': Enduring Controversies over Labour, Exploitation and Historiographies of Capitalism

The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham organised a one-day workshop Revisiting the ‘Mode of Production’: Enduring Controversies over Labour, Exploitation and Historiographies of Capitalism on the 1^st July 2019. The event was dedicated to the re-examination of two important debates in historical materialism related to the conceptualisation of the mode of production and domestic labour that were thriving in the 1970s and attracted fresh interest more recently. The organisers of the event were delighted to host two distinguished contributors, Jairus Banaji and Silvia Federici as keynote speakers who presented alongside other prominent authors, including Andreas Bieler, Tony Burns, Neil Davidson, Jens Lerche, Alessandra Mezzadri and Benno Teschke. In this guest post Jokubas Salyga and Kayhan Valadbaygi share video-recorded proceedings of the event.

Witch-Hunt and the Birth of Capitalism: reflections on Federici’s re-interpretation of primitive accumulation.

In her powerful book Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia 1998/2014), Silvia Federici makes the important claim that the medieval witch-hunt across Europe constituted part of the processes of primitive accumulation, preparing the ground for the emergence of capitalism. While the enclosures put an end to people’s access to the commons, the witch-hunt resulted in the loss of women’s control over their bodies. In this blog post, I will reflect critically on Federici’s assessment of the role of the witch-hunt in the emergence of capitalism.