Rethinking surplus-value: recentring struggle at the sphere of reproduction
Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 2019

Jared Sacks

Since the 1970s, autonomist feminists have critiqued Karl Marx for failing to appreciate the sphere of reproduction as a key driver of capitalism. They have shown how unpaid reproductive work contributes to the production of surplus-value-something orthodox Marxism has refused to reckon with. This is in part because of a fetishisation of categories such as productive and unproductive labour as the theoretical building blocks of Marxism. However, if we understand Marx's critique of political economy as a method for understanding capitalism in terms of process, we are forced to rethink our understanding of categories such as surplus-value. Within current debates around the production of value under capitalism, it is useful to make an explicit conceptual distinction between where surplus-value is produced and where it is extracted. In doing so, we are foregrounding the sphere of reproduction and the key role it plays in upholding capitalist social relations.

This contrast, then, can inform the struggle against capitalism in the following ways. Firstly, it advocates for social movement unionism that transcend boundaries of production and reproduction. Secondly, it provides theoretical justification for withdrawing and disrupting reproductive labour, supporting a decentred politics of resistance outside the factory. Finally, it speaks to the importance of building autonomous movements for the production of "the commons". This paper uses examples from recent struggles in South Africa and South America to theoretically valorise the diversity of struggles that have emerged since the 1960s.

Issue: 1
Volume: 11
Journal Name: Interface: a journal for and about social movements
Page Numbers: 147-177
Publication Date: Jul 25, 2019
Publication Name: Interface: a journal for and about social movements

Gender and Social Reproduction

Amy De'Ath

Recent key developments in critical theory by Cinzia Arruzza, Rosemary Hennessy, and Kevin Floyd have approached questions of gender and sexuality through the lens of ‘the cultural’. Building on the Lukácsian critique of reification, these critics have sought to revise and develop the outmoded field of ideologiekritik (especially its elaborations on the notion of ‘false consciousness’) with new analyses of how gendered social relations are defined by commodity exchange. In part, my aim is to show how insights and concepts from this work can help to extend and deepen a Marxian critique of gender and social reproduction in ways that may be especially useful for grasping, at a systemic level, what is often understood only in terms of gratuitous or symbolic violence. To present these insights and concepts at an angle somewhat askew from their original frameworks, most notable in this regard is Arruzza’s clarifying attention to the relationship between gender and the logic of capital accumulation and her emphasis on the production of gender as an active social process, and Hennessy’s concept of ‘outlawed need’, which provides a way to conceive of gendered social relations as a movement of negative dialectics.

At the same time, this chapter argues that any theory of social relations based at the level of exchange or circulation falls short of accounting for the relationship of gender to capital’s general laws of motion, and thus for gender’s continued existence (in this way, my argument resonates with Moishe Postone’s critique of what he calls traditional Marxism’s focus on ‘the sphere of distribution’, as opposed to ‘the form of labor (hence of production) [which] is the object of Marx’s critique’ (Postone, 2005: 69). Far from theoretical nitpicking, this point has significant consequences for social reproduction feminism because a focus on the reification of gender at the level of exchange necessarily excludes a consideration of how gender is produced through reproductive activities that, as we shall see, are defined by their unpaid and unsubsumed status – in other words, their dissociation from exchange.

Reproduction

The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, 2019

Amy De'Ath

With the revival of Marxist-feminist critique, the concept of "reproduction" has acquired a new sense of urgency in Marxist theory. Marx viewed reproduction expansively, as the process through which capitalist society reproduces itself both materially and socially. But he also missed a key stage in his theory of capitalist reproduction when he wrote that the worker reproduces himself, requiring only "a certain quantity of the means of subsistence, " as if by magic the commodities "he" consumed turned themselves into hot meals, ironed shirts or bathed babies. This chapter will highlight some of the central aspects of Marx's theory of capitalist reproduction, including his models of simple and expanded reproduction and his reproduction schemas from Capital, Vol. II, where he explains how capitalism requires expanded reproduction in order for accumulation to take place. Following this, it will briefly gesture to some of the other ways in which Marx's writings have informed theories of capitalist reproduction that focus on periodic developments in the capital-labor relation; systemic crises in capital's ability to reproduce itself; and the expulsion of labor from cycles of accumulation. Finally, it will address Marxist-feminism's substantial and recently sharpened critique, which demonstrates how the gendered labor of social reproduction--the reproduction of commodity labor power, but also of capitalist social relations writ large--constitutes the very ground upon which capitalist reproduction is built, as well as a key site of resistance to capitalist forces.

Publication Date: 2019

Publication Name: The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx

Queer Capital: Marxism in Queer Theory and Post-1950 Poetics
Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018

Nat Raha

This creative and critical doctoral dissertation undertakes a detailed consideration of the uptake of Marxism in twenty-first century queer theory, constituting this body of work as the field of queer Marxism. The dissertation analyses significant contributions to the field, such as the work of Rosemary Hennessy (2000, 2013) and Kevin Floyd (2009), alongside the key concepts elaborated in Marx’s Capital, value, labour and the commodity, in order to establish a solid theoretical basis for queer Marxism. The thesis includes an invigoration of Marxist feminist social reproduction theory through a queer and trans studies perspective, establishing the concept of queer and trans social reproduction through a synthesis of historical materialist methodology and intellectual herstories of queer and trans activist groups Wages Due Lesbians and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. The thesis argues that queer Marxism elaborates an interrelation between economic and cultural spheres that understands their influence on material conditions and affect in the political present. It elaborates the affective condition of transfeminine brokenness in the context of contemporary challenges facing liberal transgender politics.
Queer Marxist theory is then deployed in an extended literary analysis that focuses on the work and life of gay femme poet John Wieners, and is finally developed in a creative portfolio – a collection of poems of sirens / body & faultlines. On the basis of archival research, the thesis situates Wieners’ writing and political activities of the 1970s in the Gay and Mental Patients’ Liberation movements of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, as a form of queer labour, which includes the production of Gay Liberation newspaper Fag Rag and the publication of Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol, or Cincinnati Pike (1975) by Boston’s Good Gay Poets. Furthermore, reading letters, journals and other poems through a Mad Studies lens, I elaborate Wieners’ survival of numerous psychiatric incarcerations from 1960 – 1972 in the context of institutional homophobia, and its influence on his politics and aesthetics.
of sirens / body & faultlines develops a linguistically-innovative queer lyric, elaborating experiments in language and life, amid contemporary transformations of capital and neoliberal regimes of social and economic divestment in London. Inhabiting the present tense and attending closely to to its material conditions, the poems deploy language and its visual permutations on the page in the service of queer and trans life and a queer of colour, anti-capitalist politics that refuses assimilation, attempting to rupture the syntax of homonormativity and transnormativity. The poems capture moments of political and affective affirmation and tumult, provide radical elaborations and defamilarisations of trans and queer embodiment under the conditions of neoliberal capital disinvestment, wage labour, and queer life while dreaming in the service of queer and trans world-making.



Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex

Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence

New Labor Forum, 2015

LGBT/Q people make up a disproportionately high number of the people in many of these low-wage sectors

Margot Weiss

Amber Hollibaugh

This essay begins to explore and articulate the concept of queer precarity. Queer precarity emphasizes the particular vulnerabilities of LGBT, queer, and GNC (gender non-conforming) people to the current economic transformations. Contrary to the myth of gay affluence, research from at least the mid-1990s shows that queer and gender non-conforming people are more vulnerable to poverty than their straight and cisgendered male or female counterparts. Yet this myth is sustained by the mainstream LGBT movement and too often shared by the progressive and activist labor movement. It is a particularly destructive myth for labor organizers because LGBT/Q people make up a disproportionately high number of the people in many of these low-wage sectors. The concept of queer precarity centers LGBT/Q lives, as our multiple genders, sexualities, and orientations intersect with the lived realities of class and race. This essay seeks to develop a new political vision that centers sexuality, gender and desire in our movements for social and economic justice.

Issue: 3

Volume: 24

Page Numbers: 18-27

Publication Date: 2015

Publication Name: New Labor Forum

WWW.IWW.ORG

Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (1970s-2010s)
Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2018

Margot Weiss

Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on post-1970s LGBT/queer cultures and politics. This essay reviews how, by privatizing social services, fostering consumer citizenship, and promoting corporate welfare and urban redevelopment, neoliberal policies have pit “deserving” gays and lesbians against “undeserving” others: the same-sex married couple vs. the “welfare queen,” the gay/lesbian consumer-citizen vs. the poor queer, and the gay gentrifier vs. the “dangerous” other. Historicizing these oppositions reveals the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, race, and social policy that remain central to queer politics today.

Page Numbers: 107-120
Publication Date: 2018
Publication Name: Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg (ed.). New York: Routledge

Towards a Queerer Labor Movement: the politics and potential of LGBT-labor coalitions

Raechel Tiffe
PhD DISSERTATION 

Publication Date: Jul 1, 2013

Abstract

Towards a Queerer Labor Movement: The Politics and Potential of LGBT- Labor Coalition

examines the relationship between the contemporary US labor movement and LGBT workers. Through an investigation of the ways in which minoritized subjects resist injustice in our contemporary neoliberal climate, I provide a new theory social movement building. Using a combination of media analysis,ethnography, and participatory action research, I argue that the union movement is an ideal place from which to struggle for LGBT justice—through and alongside the struggle for racial and economic justice. Further, given the weakened state of organized labor in the US, I contend that labor’s explicit inclusion of and attention to LGBT workers will also strengthen the union movement. In many ways, the labor movement is already doing this important work, and LGBT and labor communities are benefiting from the shift toward what some scholars and activists describe as
social movement unionism
. Rather than approaching oppression and discrimination through a single-issue lens, union members and leaders have developed campaigns,training's, and strategies that acknowledge how the struggles faced by LGBT workers are connected to the struggles faced by the working-class more generally. More than just suggesting that these issues are interrelated, the coalitions I discuss have workedto point out that these positionalities are not mutually exclusive—unlike the mainstream gay rights movement, LGBT-union efforts center the fact that not all LGBT people are wealthy and white. However, there are still ways in which some facets of organized labor fail as a vehicle for social change, and through this critique, I argue that a truly liberatory social movement unionism could be possible with the guidance of radical militancy and critical queer politics

EVERYBODY'S QUEER

Sexual Revolutions

OAH Magazine of History, 2006

Leisa Meyer

Publisher: maghis.oxfordjournals.org

Publication Date: Jan 1, 2006

Publication Name: OAH Magazine of History

TOUT! FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY PRESS 1968-73

Tout! in context 1968-1973: French radical press at the crossroads of far left, new movements and counter-culture

Manus McGrogan

More Info: PhD 2010

Abstract

With this thesis on the aftermath of 1968 in France, I have recreated the moment and environment of the libertarian paper Tout!

Usually associated in historiography with the birth of the gay liberation movement in France, my initial research revealed its influence as more penetrative and revealing of the diverse left and new, counter cultural movements of the early 1970s. I sought the testimony of former militants, writers and artists to uncover historical detail and motivations, and consulted relevant textual archives, aiming to situate and examine the paper within a number of interrelated contexts.

Results showed the paper‟s historical touchstones of scurrilous Revolutionary papers and 19th/20th

caricature typified by L’Assiette au Beurre.

The parallel paths of Dada, surrealism and situationism, and the Marxist legacy of the Russian Revolution, foreshadowed the blend of cultural and political in Tout!May „68 was the crucible of militant, festive currents and speech, a time of rupture and reorientation for the various activists later at Tout!, the paper Action and posters of the Beaux-Arts inspiring new forms of agit-prop. In the aftermath of 1968, Mao-libertarian current Vive La Révolution converged with an ex-Trotskyist, faculty-based group seeking cultural revolution. Figureheads Roland Castroand Guy Hocquenghem oversaw the merger of these groups and outlooks, coinciding with the launch of Tout! as a „mass‟ paper. With anew look and "new political attitude‟, influenced by Italian radicals and the US underground, Tout! challenged all forms of authority in Pompidou‟s France, climaxing with the eruption of gay liberation in no.12. It was Tout! ‟s role in promoting„autonomous‟ gender, sexual and youth movements that led to the disaggregation of Vive la Révolution, and despite successful sales the paper came to a sudden end in the summer of 1971.Like the rest of the far left, Vive La Révolution and Tout!suffered State repression, but evolved from a „proletarian‟ Marxist critique of capitalism to attack the life routine of work, school and the family, judging the political Right and the Parti Communiste Français as equally reactionary.The paper testified to the importance of international, indeed transnational activities of the far left in the early 1970s. It provided a formidable impulse for the gay liberation movement FHAR,and foreshadowed the first feminist paper Le Torchon Brûle. As such it was a crucial press conduit for American radical left forms and practices, spearheading a shift from gauchisme

to the growing counterculture. Tout! exemplified a brief, intense and fast-changing moment in French subcultural history and set new trends in left political journalism for the 1970

HISTORIES BY SIMON WEBB DURHAM HISTORIAN

THERE ARE THREE SIMON WEBB'S WRITING HISTORIES

THIS IS THE SELF PUBLISHED SIMON WEBB

About the Author
Simon Webb lives near the historic English city of Durham, and has published over fifty books, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Publisher is The Langley Press 

The Book of Esau: A Murder Mystery of Victorian Durham 

by Simon Webb  (Author)

1895: an enigmatic American has come to live in the English cathedral city of Durham. What is the nature of his hold over the widows and spinsters of the city? What is his interest in 'Tiger' Terris, the young Durham Light Infantry veteran? Is there a connection between the American and the strange ape-like creature seen down by the river? And more to the point, who killed the mysterious foreigner?

A tale of plumbing, elephants, photography, vegetarianism, and murder.

Crippen's Secret, or, The Doctor and the Demons
Oct 20, 2013 by Simon Webb

In 1910 an American 'doctor' called H.H. Crippen was hanged in London for the murder of his wife, Cora. Long regarded as a cut-and-dried case, recent DNA evidence suggests that Crippen may have been the innocent victim of a far-reaching conspiracy...


The London Vampires: A Gothic Tale in Verse
Mar 7, 2015 by Simon Webb

'Black-haired, white-skinned, they stalked the sleeping town,
And if the watchmen tried to knock them down,
They made a bloody feast of the patrol,
And left each constable without a soul.'

Was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets a vampire? This darkly comic poem entertains the possibility, telling the story of of a darkly beautiful Elizabethan vampire who also turns up in modern London.


Mary Ann Cotton: Victorian Serial Killer Dec 31, 2015
by Simon Webb , Miranda Brown

A native of County Durham, Mary Ann Cotton is regarded as the most prolific female serial killer in British history.This book from Simon Webb and Miranda Brown re-tells her story, re-examines the evidence and includes a startling new theory about the so-called West Auckland Poisoner.



Though he features in the first of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Nicholas Flamel was a real person who lived in medieval Paris.

Simon Webb's new book attempts to reconstruct his life, and also looks into the legends that have attached to his name over the centuries. Was he an alchemist, could he make gold from mercury, and are Nicholas and his wife Perenelle still alive after over six hundred years?

Published by the Langley Press.



The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor Faustus Kindle Edition
by Anonymous (Author, Translator), Simon Webb (Editor)

The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor Faustus is the classic account of Johann Faust, the scholar who sold his soul to the devil in return for twenty-four years of wealth and power. Simon Webb’s edition includes the complete text, and his introduction speculates on the lasting appeal of the story, examines its sources, and describes how it influenced both Marlowe and Shakespeare.

The Book of Ashoka: Warrior Prince to Emperor of Peace

by Simon Webb, H.G. Wells, 


Macbeth (With Zombies)

Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain

I FOUND A THIRD SIMON WEBB WRITING HISTORIES 

About the Author

Simon Webb has written for various newspapers and magazines, including True Detective magazine, and is the author of Unearthing London: The Ancient World Beneath the Metropolis.

Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain
by Simon Webb
 Publisher: The History Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2012)
Judicial hanging is regarded by many as being the quintessential British execution. However, many other methods of capital punishment have been used in this country; ranging from burning, beheading, and shooting to crushing and boiling to death. Execution explores these types of executions in detail. Readers may be surprised to learn that a means of mechanical decapitation, the Halifax Gibbet, was being used in England five hundred years before the guillotine was invented. Boiling to death was a prescribed means of execution in this country during the Tudor period. From the public death by starvation of those gibbeted alive, to the burning of women for petit treason, this book examines some of the most gruesome passages of British history. This carefully researched, well-illustrated, and enthralling text will appeal to those interested in the history of British executions.