New ways to deal with arsenic in Chile’s copper mines

Staff Writer | August 4, 2022 | 

Chuquicamata copper mine in Chile. (Reference image by Diego Delso, Wikimedia Commons).

German and Chilean researchers are working on a project aimed at optimizing and advancing copper production processes with a particular focus on addressing the problems posed by sulfur-based ores that contain arsenic.


In Chile – the world’s top copper producer – the red metal is extracted mostly from open-pit mines. Ore is blasted from holes with diameters of up to two kilometers. This ore has a copper content of around 2%, which is extracted in several stages: The ore is first ground and then subjected to flotation, which involves the wet chemical foaming of the material, in order to separate the high-copper ore from the low-copper ore. This results in copper concentrate, which Chile also sells. It contains around 20 to 30% copper. The concentrate is then smelted in blast furnaces and finally purified in electrochemical electrolysis processes in order to obtain pure copper.

Together with copper, the excavated ore layers often also contain arsenic, which, due to its toxicity, needs to be extracted from the ore. This takes place almost automatically when the ore is heated: The arsenic turns into gas. In Chile, the current procedure is to capture the gas, dissolve it in sulfuric acid and then transform it into solid calcium arsenate or calcium arsenite through precipitation. These calcium compounds are then deposited in the Atacama Desert.

The fact that these compounds are water-soluble hasn’t been a problem since the Atacama Desert is one of the driest regions in the world. However, in recent years, climate change has caused an increase in rainfall, which now raises the issue of environmental contamination. At the same time, some mines are penetrating layers that are no longer oxygen-based but sulfur-based and thus contain more arsenic. As a result, the amount of arsenic to be deposited will increase in the future, particularly given that there are currently no industrial uses for arsenic.

“These two developments are now making Chilean mine operators rethink the way in which they previously disposed of arsenic and adapt to these new circumstances without delay,” Anna-Lisa Bachmann, who coordinates the ‘ReAK—Reduction of Arsenic in Copper Concentrates’ project, said in a media statement. “We are investigating new ways of separating and depositing the arsenic as part of this project so that the environmental impact is minimized as much as possible.”
Looking at different options

Since 2019, Bachmann and her team have looked into several different potential process steps, starting with the further processing of arsenic-rich copper concentrate and including arsenic-selective flotation, sulfation roasting, and microbial and sulfidic leaching.

Alternative oxidation processes resulting in more stable and less toxic arsenic5+ compounds instead of unstable and water-soluble arsenic3+ compounds are also being considered.

“One option for this oxidation step could be the use of hydrogen peroxide, but this is very expensive,” Bachmann said. “This is why we at Fraunhofer IWKS are investigating electrochemical oxidation with diamond electrodes as a viable alternative in the course of this project. They feature a particularly large electrochemical window, resulting in the formation of hydroxyl radicals in aqueous solutions. These then oxidize the dissolved arsenic efficiently and reliably without the need for additional chemicals.”

Other project partners are also evaluating UV- and ozone-assisted as well as microbial oxidation processes.

The first step of all work packages is to test whether the method in question actually works and whether it delivers the desired result. Fraunhofer IWKS will compare their cost-effectiveness and environmental impact in the context of life cycle assessment and life cycle costing analyses as soon as all of the individual results are available.

“We will use this to develop a new concept for landfilling that will provide recommended actions to the Chilean government, considering both governmental requirements and the available financial resources,” Bachmann noted.

This is particularly relevant given that much of Chile’s copper industry, including one of the mines participating in the project, is state-owned.

Albemarle studying ways to recycle lithium in North America
Reuters | August 4, 2022 | 

E-waste recycling facility in Rwanda. (Reference image by Rwanda Green Fund, Flickr).

Albemarle Corp on Thursday said it is studying ways to develop a battery recycling business in North America and believes there would be many similarities with its current lithium operations.


“We’re evaluating just how we partner, invest and develop that supply chain,” Eric Norris, head of Albemarle’s lithium division, said on a Thursday conference call after the company posted better-than-expected quarterly results. “Many of the technologies are practiced in our existing operations.”

Albemarle aims to build a lithium processing facility in the US Southeast later this decade to process and recycle lithium. Li-cycle Holdings Corp and privately-held Redwood Materials Inc are among the existing North America battery recyclers.

(By Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Lithium miner ioneer finds workaround for wildflower that’s stalling US project

Bloomberg News | August 4, 2022 | 

Tiehm’s Buckwheat flower. (Credit: Flickr – Jim Morefield)

A prospective lithium supplier to Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. expects to clear an environmental hurdle involving a rare flower next year, paving the way for deliveries to electric-vehicle makers ahead of looming shortages of the battery metal.


Ioneer Ltd. seeks to build its Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron project in Nevada, but the Australian company has been unable to get federal permits because public lands near the site are home to the endangered wildflower Tiehm’s buckwheat. The US Fish and Wildlife Service said in February it planned to designate about 910 acres near the project as a critical habitat for the pale yellow flower.

Ioneer submitted a revised plan of operations for the project that will protect the wildflower while the mine is being built, Executive Chairman James Calaway said in an interview.

“We’ve figured out how not to touch the plants and build the mine,” Calaway said. “There’s a consensus building that our plan of operations should be moving forward into the public review process.”

Ioneer expects to get US approvals that will allow them to start building the project next year, he said. The company aims to start producing lithium in 2025, with an annual capacity of 21,000 metric tons.

Getting federal permits is crucial for Ioneer’s lithium mine to fulfill supply pacts with automakers. Ioneer signed a supply deal in July with Prime Planet Energy & Solutions, a battery joint venture between Toyota and Panasonic Corp., to provide 4,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year in the first five years of production. Ioneer also signed a deal last month with Ford.

“These agreements we have just signed are to support US domestic supply chain. America needs this,” Calaway said. “We’re going to need a ton of it.”

The operations would also help ensure supply of the metal for EV makers and large-scale battery factories in the US while also reducing dependence on China. There are growing concerns on China’s dominance of refining and manufacturing capacity of battery materials, and reliance on the Asian nation is now seen as a vulnerability as trade and political tensions spur a rethink of global supply lines.

“The crisis in my opinion is coming on in around 2025,” Calaway said. “That’s when everybody is really worried about having enough production to keep these mega-factories running.”

(By Yvonne Yue Li)

Rio Tinto attracts several proposals to build 4 GW of wind, solar power

Reuters | August 4, 2022 | 

Yarwun alumina refinery. Credit: Rio Tinto

Global miner Rio Tinto has received several offers to build 4 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar farms to power its alumina and aluminum operations in Australia’s Queensland state, the company’s Australia head said on Friday.


Rio Tinto Chief Executive Officer Australia Kellie Parker said the company, the country’s biggest single power user, had received proposals for “a lot more than the 4 GW” that it asked for in its call for proposals key to slashing its carbon emissions.

Rio Tinto said in June its Boyne aluminum smelter, Yarwun alumina refinery and Queensland Alumina refinery need a combined 1,140 megawatts (MW) of reliable power, and was seeking offers to build at least 4,000 MW, or 4 GW, of wind and solar power backed up by energy storage which would be required to supply steady power.

Parker, however, gave no cost estimate for the projects on Friday.

“All of us understand that Australia remains an expensive location to build, so it won’t be easy,” she said in a speech to the Melbourne Mining Club.

Several issues need to be sorted out before the massive build of renewables – equal to more than a third of the total wind and solar capacity Australia already has – could go ahead.

“A coordinated grid solution in Queensland will be critical and requires the collaboration of suppliers, users, regulators, transmission providers and policymakers. Technology will also play an important role,” Parker said.

The company had yet to decide what role it would play in the generation or supply of renewable energy as the proposals it had received involved it being owner, operator, partner, investor and customer for the projects, she said.

(By Sonali Paul; Editing by Rashmi Aich)

One of mining’s top female leaders vows change after abuse shame

Bloomberg News | August 5, 2022 |

Kellie Parker, Rio Tinto Chief Executive, Australia. Credit: Rio Tinto.

Complaints about workplace conduct at Rio Tinto Group have almost doubled in the wake of inquiries that exposed a mining industry rife with sexual abuse, harassment and racism, according to one of the sector’s highest profile female executives.


“It has encouraged our people to speak up about poor conduct on our sites or in our offices, with the number of reports up by 95%,” Kellie Parker, chief executive for Australia at Rio, the world’s No. 2 miner, said in a speech Friday. “The process of publicly airing these matters has built trust and accelerated the momentum for change.”

A landmark report on Australia’s mining sector published in June detailed a shocking catalog of abuse and violence against women working for top miner BHP Group, Rio and other major companies. That investigation — by the Western Australia government — followed Rio’s own earlier inquiry which found more than a quarter of its female staff had experienced sexual harassment, and more than half of all employees had been bullied.

Rio’s report “sent an immediate and unmistakable message to our people that we were treating the matter seriously,” Parker, who joined the company in 2001, said in Melbourne. The company is implementing recommendations that include greater accountability and efforts to encourage individuals to report abuse.

The industry’s toxic workplace culture is now a focus for legislators and investors who’ve pushed commodities giants to improve their environmental and social governance. Areas of concern span relations with indigenous communities to gender diversity and timid progress on climate issues.

Those who are skeptical on the industry’s willingness to reform point to events like the annual Diggers and Dealers conference held this week in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Male speakers vastly outnumbered women, and delegates mingled outside the conference venue at bars that employ topless bartenders, known locally as skimpies.

“If you had asked me at the start of my professional career whether I thought I would still be talking about gender diversity in 2022, I would have thought that we would be living it by now,” Fortescue Metals Group Ltd. CEO Elizabeth Gaines said in a speech Tuesday via videolink to the Kalgoorlie forum. Gaines, stepping down this month as one of the industry’s few female leaders, was the only woman among 26 presenters on Tuesday, she said.

The sector’s C-suites need to do more to understand the challenges faced by women and employees from diverse backgrounds, Lynas Rare Earths Ltd. CEO Amanda Lacaze told the same conference Wednesday. “It breaks my heart, really, that our industry is still not making significant progress in this area,” Lacaze said. “I talked to a lot of my peers and none of them are in denial about the challenges we need to address.”

Rio is also seeking to repair relations with Australia’s indigenous communities and the wider public after revulsion over its decision in 2020 to blast for iron ore at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia, decimating two ancient Aboriginal heritage sites. Artifacts found at the cave-like shelters had indicated the locations were used by people as many as 46,000 years ago.

“We had focused too much on our short-term needs and transactional dealings, and neglected the connections and rapports that we spent so long building over the previous generation,” Rio’s Parker said in her speech. The miner is currently working with traditional owner groups across its operations to improve the co-management of sites, she said.

(By David Stringer, with assistance from Liz Ng and Annie Lee)

Nutrien says potash will remain tight even as Russia ships more

Bloomberg News | August 5, 2022

Image courtesy of Nutrien.

Global potash will remain tight even as more buyers shed their fear of buying from Russia and Belarus, according to a top fertilizer maker’s chief executive officer.


Supplies from Russia may remain as much as 20% below 2021 levels even as access to export markets grow into the coming year, Ken Seitz, interim CEO of Nutrien Ltd. said in a Thursday interview. Shipments from Belarus may lag as the nation doesn’t have port access. Its production could fall by as much as half, he said. The two nations are among the top-three largest producers of the crop nutrient.

“We’re going to have pent-up demand,” Setiz said in an a telephone interview. “We’re going to have soils craving potash.”

Prices soared earlier this year to multiyear highs after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roiled markets. Many potash buyers avoided Russian supplies for fear of getting wrapped up in international sanctions. However, fertilizer sales have so far escaped the types of bans levied against other commodities. Wholesale prices are dipping as Russian product finds its way into global markets.

Weekly wholesale US Cornbelt potash prices and Brazil potash prices both fell to the lowest since March for the week ending July 29, according to Bloomberg’s Green Markets.

Nutrien has said it will ramp up potash production capability to 18 million tons by 2025, a 40% increase compared to 2020. Farmers will buy more potash if it’s available, Seitz said.

(By Jen Skerritt and Elizabeth Elkin)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
British Columbia lithium junior fined for misleading advertising

Nelson Bennett - Business in Vancouver | August 5, 2022 |

Rugged Atacama Landscape, Chile – Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A Vancouver-based junior mining company focused on a lithium salar mine project in Chile and a former CEO of the company have agreed to pay C$35,000 ($27,000) in penalties for misleading advertising.


According to the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), Bearing Lithium Corp. (TSX-V:BRZ) misled potential investors through an advertorial promoting the company and its lithium project without properly disclosing that Bearing had paid for the promotion.

The company had hired Stock Social Inc. to write an advertorial that was published and posted on newswires, and on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, investFeed and iHub, according to the BCSC.

“The advertorial was written to look and read like objective journalistic content, but did not disclose that it was issued on behalf of Bearing, nor did any of the social media posts make such disclosures,” the BCSC says in a press release.

That is a violation of the Securities Act, which requires anyone engaged in investor relations on behalf of a publicly traded company “to clearly and conspicuously disclose when promotional materials are issued by them or on their behalf.”

Bearing admitted it had violated the Securities Act by failing to disclose promotional materials had been issued on Bearing’s behalf. Former Bearing CEO Jeremy Arthur William Poirier admitted his involvement in the misleading promotion.

In a settlement with the BCSC, Bearing agreed to pay C$25,000 in fines. Poirier was ordered to pay a C$10,000 fine.

Bearing owns a 17% stake in the Maricunga project in Chile, a lithium brine salar. Australia’s Lithium Power International owns 51%. At the end of June, Lithium Power and Bearing announced an agreement in which Lithium Power will acquire 100% of the Maricunga project from Bearing and MSB SpA, a Chilean company that owns 31% of the project.

(This article first appeared in Business in Vancouver)

EPA funding for battery recycling ‘part of the piece’ in handling of scrap metals, says CEO

Amanda Stutt | August 5, 2022 | 

Scrap battery metal. (Stock image)

Re-mining from mining waste could go a long way in bridging gaping emerging material supply gaps, the International Energy Agency suggested in its latest report this week.


The US Environmental Protection Agency announced in June $375 million in funding for recycling and waste programs as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, including a major battery recycling initiative. The Department of Energy is also investing $3 billion to strengthen the recycling supply chain.

The Agency is seeking public comment on battery recycling best practices as it develops voluntary battery labeling guidelines.

Call2Recycle is an Atlanta, Georgia-based non profit that manages the country’s largest consumer battery recycling program. The company is an intermediary of the recycling industry and was created to essentially keep batteries out of landfills, drive awareness and better safety measures in the supply chain, such as fire risk avoidance. It recycled over 8 million pounds of batteries in 2020.

The EPA funding is the biggest investment in the sector Call2Recycle CEO Leo Raudys, a former regulator and course instructor in sustainability and regulatory strategy at the University of Minnesota, has seen.

Its also part of the piece in the context of what the government is doing to address handling of scrap metal materials, Raudys told MINING.com.

“The EPA funding is pretty interesting because its going to really, I think, supercharge the work that needs to happen to get more and more batteries recycled and understand what we’ve been doing for almost 30 years,” Raudys said.

The core of its business is coordinating collection points to recycle and the company oversees public education programs and coordinates pick ups – they have over 16,000 recycle sites in the US alone.

“Technology is in some ways, of all the things we have to do to get recycling done is the easiest thing, but when it comes to recycling batteries its about human behaviour,” Raudys pointed out.

The everyday lesson is don’t throw batteries in with regular trash – they are recycling waste.

“When you look at the demand for the metals that we need to be able to make more batteries, make clean energy technologies, and put EVs on the road, the demand for those metals is going to go up by multiple factors – a lot of that is going to continue to be provided through raw materials – mining,” Raudys said. “But, increasingly its got to come from recycling The demand is that high.”

“When you pull a substance out of the earth and put it into materials, the last thing you want to do is drop it into a landfill,” he said. “You want to actually reclaim it, because these metals can have, essentially, infinite life.”

“We’re not going to supply materials just through mining ores – its got to be a combination of things. Its just reality.”

Hundreds of new mines required to meet 2030 battery metals demand — IEA report

Henry Lazenby | August 5, 2022 | 

Stock image.

Global battery and minerals supply chains need to expand ten-fold to meet projected critical minerals needs by 2030, a report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found.


The report concludes the industry needs to build 50 more lithium mines, 60 more nickel mines and 17 more cobalt mines by 2030 to meet global net carbon emissions goals.

Source: IEA.

Pressure on the supply of critical materials will continue to mount as road transport electrification expands to meet net-zero ambitions. According to the IEA, demand for electric vehicle (EV) batteries will increase from around 340 GWh today to over 3500 GWh by 2030.

“Additional investments are needed in the short-term, particularly in mining, where lead times are much longer than for other parts of the supply chain. In some cases requiring more than a decade from initial feasibility studies to production, and then several more years to reach nominal production capacity,” the report reads.

The projected mineral supply until the end of the 2020s is in line with the demand for EV batteries in the ‘stated policies scenario’ of the IEA’s world energy model. But the supply of some minerals, such as lithium, would need to rise by up to one-third by 2030 to satisfy the pledges and announcements for EV batteries in the ‘announced pledges scenario (APS) of the same energy model.

“For example, demand for lithium – the commodity with the largest projected demand-supply gap – is projected to increase sixfold to 500 kilotonnes by 2030 in the APS, requiring the equivalent of 50 new average-sized mines,” according to the report.

By 2030, nickel is facing the largest absolute demand increase as high-nickel chemistries are the current dominant cathode for EVs and are expected to remain so.

For cobalt, the opposite is true as battery makers continue to thrift to lower cobalt content chemistries (and even potentially cobalt-free chemistries by 2030) to reduce costs and due to environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns.

Despite the trend, the report cautions that the surge in global demand for EV batteries still increases total cobalt demand this decade.

The IEA believes that to meet the projected demand in 2030 in the Stated Policies Scenario, 41 nickel and 11 additional cobalt mines are needed – a significant scaling up of the current project pipeline.

“For the Announced Pledges Scenario, 60 nickel and 17 cobalt new mines are required in 2030, (assuming average annual mine production capacity of 38,000 tonnes for nickel and 7,000 tonnes for cobalt).”

After an extractable resource is identified through exploration, the IEA says it can take four to more than 20 years for a mine to begin commercial production.

Coupled with this critical need for new mines is that mine development timelines have telescoped to up to 16 years to undertake the necessary feasibility studies, and engineering and construction work. In addition to the time required to begin commercial production, mines often require around ten years before they reach nameplate production capacity.

Source: IEA

The IEA says upstream mineral extraction can cause significant bottlenecks unless adequate investments are delivered well in advance. “It appears that EV battery metals demand in the Stated Policies Scenario will likely be met for all metals up to 2025 if announced new supply comes online as scheduled.”

It would also not help if midstream processing didn’t keep up with rapidly expanding supplies. “Also, in order to translate this into EV deployment, tens of cathode and anode plants, gigafactories and EV production plants are required,” according to the report.
Innovative approaches

The IEA suggests innovative new extraction and processing technologies such as direct lithium extraction (DLE), high-pressure acid leaching (HPAL), and re-mining from mining waste could go a long way in bridging the gaping emerging supply gaps.

“Direct lithium extraction can increase production from existing mines. It bypasses the time-intensive need to evaporate the unconcentrated brine water and chemical removal of impurities,” the EIA says.

“As well as offering cost and lead time advantages, DLE has sustainability advantages and widens the pool of economically extractable lithium supply.”

However, the technology is not yet economically proven and is yet to be applied commercially in the field.

HPAL offers a solution for increased nickel production. The process uses acid separation under high temperature and pressure to produce nickel at Class 1 grade for battery applications using laterite resources.

However, the technology is not a panacea. “Capital costs for HPAL projects typically are double that of conventional smelters for oxide ore and take about four to five years to reach capacity,” according to the IEA.

“There are also concerns with the environmental impact of HPAL as it often uses coal or oil-fired boilers for heat, thus emitting up to three times more greenhouse-gas emissions than production from sulphide deposits.”

The IEA also highlighted the mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP) process, an intermediate product produced from laterite that can be refined into nickel and cobalt sulphates needed for batteries at a low cost.

MHP can also be processed into nickel and cobalt products from selective acid leaching, a process with a lower environmental footprint.

Anglo American to appeal El Soldado project rejection
Cecilia Jamasmie | August 5, 2022 

El Soldado copper mine

Anglo American (LON: AAL) is planning to appeal a Chilean environmental commission’s rejection of its $40 million operational continuity project for El Soldado copper mine, 125km north of the capital Santiago.


Despite having the backing of the country’s top environmental evaluation authority, which recommended the project’s approval, local regulator Coeva rejected last month El Soldado Phase V project with 10 voting against and only two in favour.

The decision was based on a technicality, as Coeva argued Anglo American should have submitted an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and not an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

An EIA is a process for anticipating the effects on the environment a project can cause before taken a decision on whether not to proceed with it. An EIS is the document produced as a result of that process that is presented to decision makers.

Aaron Puna, executive president of Anglo American Chile, said the decision sent a “confusing signal” and added uncertainty to the environmental assessment processes.

“As in any country in which we operate, we need a relatively stable environment, both fiscally and politically, to allocate capital to projects in the country,” Puna said in a public statement in Spanish.

“The decisions we are seeing make investment difficult and have a direct impact, not only on how we are looking at the future of our operations, but on how the global mining industry sees Chile’s business climate,” he noted.

Anglo American is analyzing the resolution and plans to ask the authority to review project’s rejection.
Longer, greener operation

The El Soldado Phase V is part of an operational continuity plan to extend the useful life of the mine by ten years — from 2027 to 2037.

The mining giant says the project was designed following sustainability standards, and with the aim of adapting the operation to climate change by reducing the use of water and emissions.

It includes the construction of a bulk ore sorting pilot plant to classify minerals according to their copper grade, which reduces the use of energy and waste generation.

Anglo has been the majority-owner of El Soldado since 2002. The mine started operations in 1980 and produced 42,300 tonnes of copper last year, making it relatively small by Chilean standards.

This is the sixth mining project vetoed by the government of President Gabriel Boric, who assumed the position in March this year, and the second for Anglo American.

In May, a Chilean environmental regulator formally rejected the company’s application for a $3 billion expansion of its flagship Los Bronces copper mine.

Los Bronces is Anglos’s flagship mine in Chile. 

(Image courtesy of Anglo American | Flickr)

The asset, one of Anglo American’s two largest copper operations, has been mined for over 150 years and is running out of high-grade ore. The Los Bronces Integrated Project (LBIP) would have allowed the company to tap higher grade ores from a new underground section of the mine, extending its life through 2036.

Copper deposits are among the hottest assets in mining right now, mainly due to the metal’s use in electric vehicles (EVs) and the global green energy revolution.

Experts estimate the copper industry needs to spend more than $100 billion to build mines able to close what could be an annual supply deficit of 4.7 million tonnes by 2030.

Feminism and Communism: A Debate with Silvia Federici

Communes or communism? A debate with autonomism and the work of Silvia Federici, from the perspective of socialist feminism.

Josefina L. Martínez 

July 17, 2022


In the introduction to Revolution at Point Zero,1 Silvia Federici offers a look back on her own work and partially reconsiders her theoretical elaborations initiated in the 1970s, and also the strategy carried out by the Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign. She states,

The WfH movement had identified the “house-worker” as the crucial social subject on the premise that the exploitation of her unwaged labor and the unequal power relations built upon her wageless condition were the pillars of the capitalist organization of production. However, the return of “Primitive Accumulation” on a world scale, starting with the immense expansion of the world labor market, the fruit of multiple forms of expropriation, has made it impossible for me to still write (as I had done in the early 1970s) that WfH is the strategy not only for the feminist movement “but for the entire working class.” The reality of entire populations practically demonetized by drastic devaluations in addition to proliferating land privatization schemes and the commercialization of all natural resources urgently poses the question of the reclamation of the means of production and the creation of new forms of social cooperation. These objectives should not be conceived as alternatives to the struggles for and over the “wage.”

This paragraph encapsulates several aspects of Federici’s most important elaborations, while at the same time showing how these have shifted over time. In other articles we have looked at the question of social reproduction and the debate with autonomist feminism on the question of domestic work, as well as the position of the housewife as a “crucial social subject.” In a more recent article, we polemicized with the elaborations of Maria Mies as taken up by Silvia Federici, around the mechanisms of dispossession and “primitive accumulation” that capitalism produces.2 We have analyzed the author’s argument that the key to the struggle against capitalism can be found in the women of the Global South. We have explained that the phenomena of dispossession, as a tendency within capitalism today, do not invalidate but rather reaffirm the need for a hegemonic revolutionary strategy for the working class. The working class today is larger, more racialized, and more feminized than ever, and it can constitute a powerful social force against capitalism, in alliances with all oppressed sectors.

Now we want to look at what Federici presents as the final goals of anti-capitalist feminism. What are the commons? Why does the author counterpose them to communism? Can the means of production be recovered and new forms of social cooperation be created without a revolutionary break with capitalism? On the basis of these questions, we want to introduce another aspect to the debate between Federici’s thought — autonomist feminism — and socialist feminism.
What Are the Commons?

In the preface to Silvia Federici’s book Re-enchanting the World, Peter Linebaugh3 offers a preliminary definition of the commons. He writes,


What are the commons? While Federici eschews an essentialist answer, her essays dance around on two points, collective reappropriation and collective struggle against the ways we have been divided. Examples are manifold. Sometimes she offers four characteristics: 1) all wealth should be shared, 2) commons requires obligation as well as entitlement, 3) commons of care are also communities of resistance that oppose all social hierarchies, and 4) commons are the “other” of the state form. Indeed, the discourse of the commons is rooted in the crisis of the state, which now perverts the term to its own ends.

In this definition, the commons are an attempt to establish forms of social cooperation outside the state, prioritizing cooperative forms of care. Federici explains that the “politics of the commons” refers to different practices by social movements that “seek to enhance social cooperation, undermine the market’s and state’s control over our lives, promote the sharing of wealth, and, in this way, set limits to capital accumulation.”4

The project is based on the autonomist idea of “changing the world without taking power,” as John Holloway formulated it 20 years ago. This tendency believes it is possible to build alternative, noncapitalist forms of cooperation at the margins of the system, avoiding the state (since it is impossible to defeat it). This is a form of anti-strategic thinking that philosopher and Trotskyist thinker Daniel Bensaïd described as “contemporary utopias” characteristic of the “eclipse of politics” during the period of the neoliberal offensive.

This idea is not new. It goes back to pre-Marxist utopian socialism or anarchist mutualism, which Marx argued against in the International Workingmen’s Association. French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s followers called for the expansion of cooperatives for production and consumption, to be financed by cooperative banks. In this way, they aimed to gradually overcome the most “negative” aspects of capitalist society without the need for a revolution. In opposition to such positions, the “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association,” written by Marx, stressed that “like slave labor, like serf labor, hired [wage] labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor.” But it also stated that “to save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means.” This was going to face resistance, as “the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economic monopolies.” The conclusion was that the working class needed to conquer political power, in order to break the power of the capitalists.

And if this was the case in Marx’s time, how much more so today? Not only because the internationalization of capitalist production and circulation has expanded to a degree unimaginable back then, making any idea of creating small communes on a local scale a chimera. But also because the experience of more than a century of class struggle shows that the capitalists and their states respond with their entire counterrevolutionary arsenal whenever their privileges are at stake.

For Marxists, the socialization and internationalization of capitalist production is a precondition for the working class and the oppressed to take up the revolutionary struggle for communism. For Federici, however, this is not the case. For her, the goal is to turn back the historical clock, since she denies the need to put modern science and technology in the hands of the producers. She aims for a ruralization of life and the abandonment of modern technology.
Technological Pessimism and Resistance at the Margins

Federici’s point of view on this question is diametrically opposed to that of another sector of autonomism represented by Italian sociologist Toni Negri. Negri sees the techno-scientific development and digitization of the capitalist economy as leading to the primacy of cognitive labor, which will open the possibility for creating communism “here and now.” Federici criticizes this hypothesis in two ways.5 On the one hand, she argues that Negri invisibilizes the domestic and informal labor of women in the Global South. If he were to take this into account, she says, then he could not speak of the supremacy of cognitive labor. In this respect, her position is much more attuned to the profound inequalities in the capitalist world — between the Global North and the South, and also those created by patriarchy and racism — than Negri’s. Her other critique, however, is much more problematic. For Federici, technology cannot form the basis of any communist perspective, nor can it lead to other forms of cooperation, because its origin and development is linked to capitalism and cannot be separated from its logic. By identifying technological development with domination and destruction, Federici falls into an essentialist technological pessimism.

Let us trace her arguments step by step, as she elaborates them in a polemic with Marx — although she employs a rather distorted view of him. Federici argues that her elaborations on domestic work led her to “rethink one of the main tenets of Marx’s theory of revolution, that is, the assumption that with the development of capitalism all forms of work will be industrialized and, most important, that capitalism and modern industry are preconditions for the liberation of humanity from exploitation.” On the first point, what she identifies as a tenet of Marx (a total industrialization of labor is supposedly disproved by the existence of other forms of nonwage labor, such as informal labor, domestic work, rural subsistence, etc.). But she ignores that Marx was addressing a tendency, not an absolute law. We can nonetheless see that capitalist social relations are immensely more widespread and that rural areas are more industrialized now than they were in the 19th century (or even 30 years ago).

On the relationship between modern industry and socialism, Federici attributes to Marx a kind of “technological determinism” that would inevitably lead to communism. According to Federici,


Marx believed that once this process was completed, once modern industry reduced socially necessary labor to a minimum, an era would begin in which we would finally be the masters of our existence and our natural environment, and we would not only be able to satisfy our needs but would be free to dedicate our time to higher pursuits.

We should first say that nothing could be more absurd than ascribing to Marx this kind of technological inevitability that is supposed to automatically lead to communism. Marx and Engels, followed by the whole tradition of revolutionary Marxism of Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Gramsci, focused on the class struggle and the need to build political organizations of the working class that are independent of the bourgeoisie precisely because this historical leap is not assured.

But Federici goes further, arguing that Marx was wrong to claim that the capitalism’s development of the productive forces makes socialism possible. For her, this is false, since


a century and a half after the publication of Capital, Vol. 1, capitalism gives no sign of dissolving, though the objective conditions that Marx envisioned as necessary for social revolution would seem more than mature.

We can leave aside the small detail that Marx never spoke of capitalism “dissolving” — Federici appears to be debating more with Negri than with Marx. If we want to avoid falling into a technological determinism, as Federici attributes to Marxism, we need to look at what has occurred on the terrain of the class struggle, and of the political and strategic struggles of the exploited. If we are to search for a serious explanation of why capitalism has not been defeated, we should at least take into account the great historical experiences of revolution and counterrevolution that took place throughout the 20th century. We should also consider the role of trade union and political bureaucracies, from social democracy to Stalinism, that led to defeats and setbacks. Yet Federici does nothing of the sort. In fact, her work contains practically no reference to the Russian Revolution or to the great revolutionary struggles of the working class in the 20th century. Instead, an (anti)technological determinism marks her entire argumentation.

She explains it this way:


We must also stress that none of the means of production that capitalism has developed can be unproblematically taken over and applied to a different use. In the same way — as we will see later — that we cannot take over the state, we cannot take over capitalist industry, science, and technology, as the exploitative objectives for which they have been created shape their constitution and mode of operation.

Yet if the exploited and oppressed cannot place any hope in the struggle to expropriate the expropriators and seize the means of production for their own ends, then what future is left? Federici’s technological pessimism leads back to a utopian anti-capitalism anchored in the past — as if the only solution were to seek refuge in spaces far removed from the technological societies of the 21st century. More concretely, this would mean generating spaces for subsistence, linked to the land, rural areas, and shared care work. From this perspective, Federici looks at the struggles of peasant and Indigenous communities against the expansion of extractivism in Latin America, the informal work cooperatives in shantytowns or slums, and other communal experiences in certain African countries. The problem is that she ends up transforming necessity into virtue. She presents experiences of subsistence as a model, in communities that have been deprived of access to goods and technological resources that should be available to everyone: from energy sources to the means for supplying drinking water, from technology for rural work to public health, etc. In the central countries, her vision of the commons would be realized with time banks, urban gardens, or barter systems.

This technological pessimism and the associated call for the ruralization of life overlaps with the idea of degrowth, which has gained prominence in the debates about the ecological catastrophe generated by capitalism.6 A large part of this school of thought maintains that technology is not an “instrument” or a “neutral” tool that depends on who uses it — rather, they argue, it contains “traces” of capitalist hierarchies. This is partially true: technological developments are “shaped” by capitalism, which discards or obstructs thousands of discoveries that are not useful to the monopolies, while others are developed based solely on their potential for commercialization. We have seen dramatic proof of this during the pandemic years. Marx also analyzed that technological-scientific development, in the hands of capital, did not create more free time for workers, but was rather transformed into surplus labor; instead of liberating workers from the burden of labor, capital binds them with heavier chains and uses technical means to discipline and control their labor power.

It is also a fact that technology in capitalist hands has created terrible destructive forces, means of mass annihilation, and all kinds of tendencies toward ecological catastrophe. This impetus, however, is not to be found in the mechanization of the world — as if machines had a spirit of their own — but rather in the private appropriation of humanity’s common goods by monopolies. If we have to forsake science and technology, this would mean renouncing (or handing over to the bourgeoisie) the fruits of several centuries of human labor. And how far does this technological pessimism go? Should we abandon vaccines, cancer research, artificial intelligence, photovoltaic solar energy, robotics? Federici argues that the politics of the commons does not consist of “the promise of an impossible return to the past but the possibility of recovering the power of collectively deciding our fate on this earth.” Yet the negation of the common goods of humanity limits these collective possibilities.

We support the opposite idea: while there can be no capitalism without industrial development, we can keep modern industry and scientific development functioning without capitalists. This would make it possible to reorganize production while creating new foundations for scientific research. Entire branches of the capitalist economy could be drastically reduced: automobile production, for example, could be reoriented toward nonpolluting collective transport. Capitalism generates consumerism and “artificial needs” (via advertising and planned obsolescence) as outlets for the production of commodities, while at the other pole it generates oceans of poverty. In a society where production is not determined by private profit, it would be possible to “degrow” in some sectors while expanding production and applying new technologies in others. Such questions should be decided by democratic planning based on social needs and a nondestructive relationship with nature.

Socialization and Mechanization: On Domestic Work

Federici argues that care work or domestic work cannot be fully mechanized because it requires skills, emotions, and affections that cannot be provided by a machine. Her conclusion is that this “derails” Marx’s program, because all social labor cannot be mechanized.

Two questions on this. First, Federici wrongly assumes that the socialization of domestic work — as we Marxist feminists demand — means the absolute mechanization of these tasks. But socializing domestic work does not necessarily imply total mechanization — it means removing this work from the private sphere of the home and transforming it into a task assumed and organized by society as a whole. In other words, it means recognizing these tasks, which contribute to the reproduction of labor power and to social reproduction. This socialization of course implies a greater degree of mechanization for certain tasks, which in many households are still done by hand. In Soviet Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, this took the form of communal laundries, day care centers, social kitchens, etc. In much of the world today, many of these tasks of social reproduction have already been socialized — as wage labor — and partially mechanized, either in the private sphere (restaurants, fast food chains, commercial laundries) or in the public sphere (hospitals, public education, etc.). Even so, in the 21st century there is still a significant burden of domestic work that remains invisible in households and is naturalized as “women’s work.” Much of this work could be socialized: in communal canteens, laundries, childcare centers, and nursing homes — public, high-quality institutions with specialized staff that would be available for free to everyone. This would reduce the tasks that remain in the private sphere to a minimum.

On the other hand, in a society not based on private property, care work could be transformed into self-organized labor by all members of society, and it would no longer be perceived as a burden. The affections and emotions involved in the relations between people would no longer be mediated by money, the need for wages, precarious conditions, patriarchal oppression, racism, or the lack of free time. Affection could unfold in new ways. And it could also unlock the imagination and unleash enormous creativity in other fields, such as redesigning cities, developing nonpolluting energy sources, or researching the movement of the stars. All of society would benefit from such social labor.
The Past and Future of Communism

In The German Ideology, Marx stated that


things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but, also, merely to safeguard their very existence. This appropriation is first determined by the object to be appropriated, the productive forces, which have been developed to a totality and which only exist within a universal intercourse.

Estimates say that by the end of 2022, 860 million people will be living in extreme poverty, while the richest 10 percent owns 76 percent of all social wealth. Various international organizations are warning of catastrophic famines as a consequence of the war in Ukraine, inflation, and grain shortages. Under these conditions, existence is not assured for a large part of humanity. The subsistence communes proposed by autonomist feminism do not provide a way out of this situation. They do not go beyond the utopian idea of “set[ting] limits to capital accumulation” and socializing the misery that exists today.7

Federici holds up communal peasant experiences in precapitalist societies as well as the peasant rebellions led by Thomas Münzer and the heretical sects in 16th century Germany. That is where she finds precedents for the commons: Omnia sunt communia (All property should be held in common) was the banner that the Anabaptist peasants and the urban plebeians raised against the princes and the Vatican. Indeed, those massive insurrections can be seen as the first seeds of communalism against class societies. Engels explained that Münzer’s ideas were the anticipation of communism in the imagination.8 In his analysis, establishing the Kingdom of God on earth meant establishing a society without class differences, without private property, and without a state power rising above the members of society.

In that historical epoch, however, despite their commutativity and heroism, these particularist and fragmented movements had no way to defeat capitalism in formation, nor to construct an alternative society to overcome it. The brutal defeat of the peasant rebellions, by the arms of the nobility and the nascent bourgeoisie, gave tragic proof of this. It is surprising, in any case, that Federici has to go all the way back to the peasant struggles of the 16th century in search of precedents for the politics of the commons. At the same time, she seems to overlook the enormous historical creativity unleashed by millions of workers and peasants — men and women — in the last 150 years in the struggle against capitalism. From the Paris Commune, which shook the power of bourgeois Europe, to the Russian Revolution, in which workers and peasants, after defeating czarism and 14 imperialist armies, resolved to construct their own state, to reorganize the economy on new foundations, and to be a springboard for the extension of the world revolution. Many other examples of self-organization show the potential of the working class when it takes its destiny into its own hands: the Spanish Revolution, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, and many experiences of workers’ control and self-management in factories and other companies. This includes recent experiences of recovered factories in Argentina and Greece, where in times of crisis, workers took over the management of production together with neighbors, students, and poor people.

The return of these “contemporary utopias,” in Bensaïd’s words, which deny the possibility of working-class socialist revolution as a means to open the way to a classless and stateless society, has its historical basis not only in the neoliberal offensive but also in the monstrous experience of the Stalinist bureaucracy. In this context, it is necessary to clearly separate revolutionary Marxism from Stalinism, to understand the historical conditions for the emergence of that bureaucracy, and to assess the historical failure of the theory of “socialism in one country.”

Federici comments on a well-known passage of Marx and Engels, in which they argue that


Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

She concludes that the commons is linked to the real movement to abolish the state of things. But to really overcome the present state of things, the movement — the day-to-day struggles — cannot be detached from the goal of an emancipated society. By only holding on to that first moment, and rejecting the goal, the politics of the commons is limited to seeking small reforms at the edges of existing society.

The pandemic, the economic and environmental crises, and now war and militarism — all these things show that the destructive tendencies of capitalism continue to operate unrelentingly. The exploited and the oppressed need to expropriate the expropriators, and to take the totality of the existing productive forces into their hands. Only in this way can the desire for a society where “all property should be held in common” become a reality.

First published in Spanish on June 5, 2022, in Contrapunto.

Translation: Nathaniel Flakin


Notes

Notes↑1 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).
↑2 Josefina L. Martínez, “Patriarcado, acumulación de capital y desposesión,” Contrapunto, May 7, 2022.
↑3 Peter Linebaugh, a U.S. historian and a student of E. P. Thompson, is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective together with Federici and George Caffentzis. The collective is dedicated to the study of “the historical commons.”
↑4 Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland: PM Press, 2018).
↑5 According to Federici, Italian autonomists have an excessive “fascination” with Marx’s Gründrisse; Federici, Re-enchanting the World.
↑6 One of the first systematic presentations of degrowth is by the French author Serge Latouche. In the Spanish State, an important defender of degrowth is Carlos Taibo.
↑7 As argued by Andrea D’Atri, “El capital nos empuja a la lucha por la subsistencia, pero no puede ser el horizonte estratégico de nuestro feminismo,” La Izquierda Diario, November 13, 2021.
↑8 Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, 1850.

Left Debates

Josefina L. Martínezis a historian from Madrid and an editor of our sister site in the Spanish State, IzquierdaDiario.es.