During lockdowns, women took on most of burden of childcare

#WAGESFORHOUSEWORK #UBI POSTPANDEMIC ECONOMICS

HEALTH NEWS
JAN. 18, 2021 / 11:50 AM


Thirty-seven percent of couples surveyed relied on the wife to provide most or all childcare, 44.5% used more egalitarian strategies and nearly 19% used strategies that were not gendered or egalitarian. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

Despite being locked down during the pandemic, childcare responsibilities often fell on women's shoulders, a new study shows.

"Most people have never undergone anything like this before, where all of a sudden they can't rely on their normal childcare, and most people's work situation has changed, too," said researcher Kristen Shockley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. "We thought this would be a chance for men to step in and partake equally in childcare, but for many couples we didn't see that happen."

In mid-March, as schools and day care centers shut down, Shockley's team surveyed couples, both of whom worked and had at least one child under the age of 6. The team researchers first surveyed 274 couples and followed up with 133 of the same couples in May.

"When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple," Shockley said in a university news release. "It's not just bad for the wife, it's also bad for the husband, including in terms of job performance although his work role presumably hasn't changed. When one person's doing it all, there's a lot of tension in the relationship, and it's probably spilling over into the husband's ability to focus at work."

Although about 37% of couples relied on the wife to provide most or all childcare, 44.5% used more egalitarian strategies and nearly 19% used strategies that were not gendered or egalitarian.

Co-parenting strategies included alternating workdays, planning daily shifts that included both work and childcare for husband and wife, and alternating schedules that changed based on the couple's work needs. These strategies actually increased the productivity of both parents.

"When you look at the more egalitarian strategies, we found the best outcomes for people who were able to alternate working days," Shockley said. "The boundaries are clear. When you're working, you can really focus on work, and when you're taking care of the kids, you can really focus on the kids. But not everybody has jobs amenable to that."

The paper doesn't include qualitative quotes, but Shockley clearly remembers the participants' comments.

"People were saying, 'I'm at my breaking point,' and this was just two weeks in. A lot of people said, 'I'm just not sleeping.' You could feel people's struggle, and there was a lot of resentment, particularly when the wife was doing it all," she said.

"This really highlights some infrastructure issues we have with the way we think about child care in this country," Shockley said. "The default becomes, 'Oh well, the wife is going to pick up the slack.' It's not a long-term solution."

Shockley noted that the couples surveyed had relatively high incomes.

The report was published in the January issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.More information

For more on coping during the pandemic, see the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Copyright 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Wages for Housework is part of more general social wage campaigns in the 1970s interested in late capitalism. These campaigns used analysis of Fordist compromises during the twentieth century to argue that family wages or social security payments had amounted to wages paid for housework in the advanced capitalist West.

The History of the Wages for Housework Campaign - Louise ...

https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/wages-housework-campaign-history

The Wages for Housework perspective was a completely original school of thought, and a toolbox for action, at the beginning of second-wave feminism. It was accused of being a simple demand for money, partial and reformist – even reactionary – that went counter to the objective of women’s equality in society. But it was much more than that.

Wages for housework - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework

• Overview
• History
• Relation with Global Women's Strike
• Controversies
• Early influences
• Publications
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The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) is a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. It was started in 1972 by Selma James who first put forward the demand for wages for housework at the third National Women's Liberation Conferencein Manchester, England. The IWFHC state that they begin with those with least power internationally – unwaged workers in the home (mothers, housewives, domestic workers de…

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WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK CAMPAIGN

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INTERNATIONAL WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK CAMPAIGN Since 1972, the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC), a net­ work of Third World and metropolitan women, has been organizing to get rec­ ognition and compensation by govern­ ments for the unwaged work women do in the home, on the land and in the com­ munity, to be paid by dismantling the

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Wages for Housework Campaign Bulletin – Rise Up! Feminist ...

https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/.../wages-for-housework-campaign-bulletin

The Wages for Housework Campaign Bulletin was a publication of the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee. The International Wages for Housework Campaign was co-founded in 1972 by Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and Brigitte Galtier, and was organized around the principle that women should be paid for performing the socially necessary labour of housework and childcare.

I founded the Wages for Housework campaign in 1972 – and ...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/international-womens-day-wages...

2020-03-10 · Selma James is founder of the Wages for Housework campaign which coordinates the Global Women’s Strike, based at the Crossroads Women’s Centre. WS and other organisations based at …

• Author: Selma James

Wages For Housework | New Internationalist

https://newint.org/features/1988/03/05/wages

1988-03-05 · Yet the Wages for Housework campaigners remain vociferous, as do their opponents. Wages for Housework is more than a single demand; it offers a controversial perspective on a wide range of feminist concerns, and the politics and economics of housework have been debated in the context of Greenham Common, campaigns for the rights of prostitutes, campaigns against racism, campaigns against rape.

Silvia Federici reflects on Wages for Housework : New Frame

https://www.newframe.com/silvia-federici-reflects-wages-housework

18 Oct 2018. Features. 'The goal was to get wages for housework in order to raise the level of our struggle, not to end it,' says Silvia Federici. (Photograph by Luis Nieto Dickens) In 1972, Silvia Federici participated in founding the Wages for Housework campaign of the International Feminist Collective, which formed chapters in Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States to demand wages from their …

The Women of Wages for Housework | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wages-for-houseworks-radical-vision

2018-03-14 · From the gathering in Padua, Italy, that launched the international campaign in 1972 to the spin-off groups like the New York Committee, the women of Wages for Housework 

A mother refused to do housework after husband said she does ‘nothing’ around the home. The results say it all

Amber Raiken
Sat, 24 June 2023


A mother refused to do housework after husband said she does ‘nothing’ around the home. The results say it all

A mother has shared how she refused to do housework for a few days, after her husband made a comment about her doing “nothing” at home.

The woman, Lindsay, posted a video to TikTok earlier this month about the remark her husband, Brian, made. “My husband made a comment that I do nothing around the house,” she wrote in the text over the footage, while looking at the camera.

She then revealed how she responded to this comment, writing: “So for two days, I really did nothing around the house.”

The short clip continued with Lindsay documenting what happened when she didn’t clean the home, as there were toys on the floor of her kitchen, as well as dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter.

Lindsay then showed the papers all over her dining room table and a basket of dirty laundry next to her couch, which had a bunch of clothes on it. She ended her video with a picture of her bathroom, as it had clothes and towels on the floor. There was also a hair brush, straightener, bottle of mouthwash, and more skin products on the sink.

In the caption, she added: “Then I left town for a girls trip…,” before poking fun at her relationship with a marriage humour hashtag.

The video quickly went viral, as it has amassed more than 18.6m views. In the comments, many people criticised Brian for his remark and praised Lindsay for her reaction to it.

“The way I would never do anything again,” one quipped, regarding how they’d respond to Lindsay’s partner.

“I hope you had him clean it after the two days,” another added

“Where the hell do they get all the audacity,” a third wrote, referring to the woman’s husband.

Meanwhile, other people expressed their anger over the situation, with claims that Lindsay should have divorced her husband after what he’d said.

@lindsaydonnelly2

Then I left town for a girls trip… #marriagehumor♬ Karma (feat. Ice Spice) - Taylor Swift

The next day, Lindsay shared a follow-up video, in which she had a chat with her husband. After recalling how she didn’t clean the house for a few days, Lindsay also noted that her husband has “since apologised”, She then revealed to Brian that she made that TikTok video about the situation and that it quickly went viral.

She also told him about some of the comments on her initial clip, in viewers claimed that she should leave him. However, she then acknowledged that her Brian is “actually a really good husband”.

“That was just a real a**hole move to say that,” she added, referring to Brain’s remark about her doing nothing around the house. In the caption, she also added that her partner realised that this was a “real s****y thing to say”.

Speaking to People, Lindsay revealed that when she went on her “strike”, as she took a break from doing housework, she got some amusement out of the decision.

“I went out with my girlfriends the night before I made the TikTok and I was telling them how I was literally doing nothing around the house and we were all kind of laughing about it,” she said.

The mother added: “And then the next day, I’m getting ready to head out to a girl’s trip and the thought crossed my mind like, ‘I’m really just gonna leave the house like this.’ I felt so bad and it hit me that, wait, this is funny. This is a moment.”

@lindsaydonnelly2

Replying to @kris he agreed that was a real 💩 thing to say♬ original sound - Lindsay D

As she recalled that “she was kind of pissed at my husband”, she noted that she had to make a shift to her daily routine. More specifically, in order to make sure that she wasn’t doing housework, she had to unmake her daughter’s bed.

“[My daughter] was in there with me while I was making the bed,” she explained. “And then I stopped myself and said, ‘You know what?’ and unmade the bed. And she asked, ‘What are you doing?’ and I said, ‘Mommy’s not doing any housework.’”

She emphasised that she has a “good relationship” with her partner, “even in [their] weak moments”. She also encouraged viewers to stop making comments on her content about getting a divorce.

“It’s reality and comedy at the same time,” she added about her videos. “I really hope to make more content that resonates with people in a way that doesn’t make people think we should get a divorce.”

The Independent has contacted Linsday for comment.

Selma James - Global Women's Strike/ Wages for Housework/ Selma James (globalwomenstrike.net)

Selma James is an antisexist, antiracist campaigner and has fought for justice for over 50 years. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930 she became the wife of the internationally renowned West Indian Historian and political philsopher C.L.R James. In Britain during the 1960s, she became a leading activist in the movements for the rights of immigrants and people of colour. 

Selma is the author or several seminal books among them A Women's Place; Sex Race and Class; The Perspective of Winning; Wageless of the world and Women, the Unions and Work. She has lectured and led workshops all over the World and is the founder of the Wages for Housework and Care Income Now campaign.

Selma's most recent book Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race and Class and Caring for People and Planet is steeped in the tradition of Marx. She draws on half a century of organizing across sectors, struggles and national boundaries with others in the Wages for Housework Campaign and the Global Women’s Strike, an autonomous network of women, men, and other genders that agree with their perspective. There is one continuum between the care and protection of people and of the planet: both must be a priority, beginning with a care income for everyone doing this vital work. This book makes the powerful argument that the climate justice movement can draw on all the movements’ people have formed to refuse their particular exploitation, to destroy the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the world. Our time is now.

Antiracism, anti-discrimination and the justice work we do for ourselves and with others are at the heart of Selma James' campaigning.

https://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/collections/wages-for-housework-archive

Wages for Housework Archive - Bishopsgate Institute 

In March 1972, at the Women's Liberation conference in Manchester, England, Selma James put forward Wages for Housework for the first time.

https://files.libcom.org/files/sex-race-class-2012imp.pdf

Sex, Race and Class - Libcom.or 

Brooklyn's Selma James is the founder of the International. Wages for Housework Campaign and coordinator of the. Global Women's Strike.

https://www.reimaginerpe.org/files/19-2.james_.pdf

Women's Work - Reimagine! 

By Selma James. Women's Work he Wages for Housework Campaign has always spelled out the connection between the unwaged and invisible.

https://thecommoner.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/the-commoner-15.pdf

the-commoner-15.pdf 

Book and Cover Design: James Lindenschmidt ... and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion ... Also the demand for Wages For Housework con-.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Power_of_Women_Vol_1_No._1.pdf

File:Power of Women Vol 1 No. 1.pdf - Wikimedia Commons 

Mar 1, 2022 ... Power of Women Collective, Wages for Housework, Falling Wall Press, Selma James et.al. LicensingEdit. w:en:Creative Commons attribution share ...

https://spheres-journal.org/contribution/every-moment-of-our-reproduction-as-a-moment-of-struggle-the-new-york-wages-for-housework-archive

The New York Wages for Housework Archive – spheres 

Mar 12, 2020 ... ... Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James. In effect, what the Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign intended to do was become a ...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/international-womens-day-wages-housework-care-selma-james-a9385351.html

I founded the Wages for Housework campaign in 1972 

Mar 8, 2020 ... Forget basic income, those who care for people and the planet deserve to be recognised for the unpaid work they already do. Selma James.

Not a labour of love
Interview with Silvia Federici

Catrin Ashton
Silvia Federici
31 January 2022


Unpaid housework – forgotten by Marx, championed by the 1970s feminist Wages for Housework Campaign – has become a point of pandemic contention for working mothers. And care workers, mostly underpaid women with families, are facing the worst. Could vaccine mandates that sidestep the autonomy of workers’ bodies therefore be a stage too far?


Catrin Ashton: I first came across your work at a personally ideal moment: I had been at home for a few months with a newborn when I read Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s 1974 essay ‘The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community’. What struck me was how little had changed in 40 years. I had grown up with a concept of feminism which no longer seemed to apply with a baby. My job had involved travelling. I gave that up and was suddenly at home with no transport, no money of my own.

It was a very strange situation to be in, quite suddenly. Then we started a campaign in Wales inspired by Wages for Housework. Could you give an overview of the campaign’s beginnings and explain the inspiration behind your involvement?

Silvia Federici: Our campaign began in the early 1970s with women from different countries, mostly from Italy and some from England. I was in the US at the time but from Italy. The Wages for Housework Campaign was an alternative to the strategies that many feminists were organizing as a path to women’s liberation. The dominant trend within the feminist movement back then mostly came from a leftist tradition.

Actually, you had two trends: one from radical feminists, who identified patriarchy behind the system of women’s oppression but never clearly defined how male dominance had evolved historically (the strategy of radical feminists was usually to create cultural spaces that would mostly be women’s spaces); then you had the socialist feminists / Marxist feminists who told us that the way to liberation was to take waged jobs and join the working class, that the problem with women – discriminated on the basis of gender – originated from women’s confinement to domestic work.

It was argued that domestic work doesn’t produce any social wealth, that domestic work is a backward activity, that it isn’t really part of the capitalist organization of work and, therefore, women who are mostly involved with this kind of work do not have power to change society.

Men, for instance, can withdraw their labour. They can go on strike because they are producing capital, and so they can stop the flow of capital. Therefore, the argument, which you find in Marx and Engels and the whole Marxist communist tradition, was that women’s liberation means going out, joining the union, etc. But I came from a whole set of feminists who began analysing the condition of women’s work, of domestic work, and we came to a very different conclusion.

‘Capitalism also depends on domestic labour” (1970s-80s) poster by See Red Feminist silk-screen collective Photo via womensart1 from Twitter.

We concluded that domestic work – housework – is an extremely important part of the capitalist organization of work. What is being ‘produced’ through housework is the workers themselves.

In other words, the capitalist organization of work, as described by the left tradition, was a very partial one, because it only recognized production and wage labour production, industrial production, office work. It only recognized wage labour and the production of goods. It never saw the whole organization behind the production of the worker, the production of the capacity to work. So, for us, the Wages for Housework Campaign had many meanings.

First of all it made visible that this work is not just a natural activity, something women do because they are women. It is not the leftover of a pre-capitalist society but work that is central to every activity, to every economic activity.

Although not the only goal of the campaign, saying we wanted a wage for housework – the support system, the pillar of every economic activity – because we are working for the same employers that wage workers are working for, was very central. It was an epistemic strategy to make visible what until then had remained invisible.

Catrin Ashton: It was this aspect of the campaign that I found so exciting. It radicalized being a mother or being at home. You gave some power to that position, making it possible to talk about changing society from there rather than having to leave the home.

Silvia Federici: Yes, because in the left tradition, in the Communist Party and in the organization of women on the left, they became workers only when they went to the factory or when they went to work outside the home. Otherwise, they were not considered workers, and this is something very important, because it meant that this organization never recognized not only the work that women do but also the function of housework in the production of the workforce.

They never looked on the home as a place of struggle. The place of struggle was wage labour only, in line with Marx.

And they didn’t understand something profound about the capitalist organization of work, about capitalist accumulation as a whole: by not seeing the unpaid labour that women do, not acknowledging that whole capitalist class, every employer has exploited that labour, has benefited by naturalizing it, by making it appear as a ‘labour of love’, by not recognizing it as work.

Silvia Federici, photographed by Dani Blanco, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By ignoring all of this, not only did they embrace – legitimize and embrace – the capitalist viewpoint, but they also presented a very distorted image of capitalist accumulation. Capitalist accumulation, in their view, takes place in the factory, in the office, takes place through wage labour.

They didn’t see that the wage organizes the work of the community, organizes the work that takes place in the home, that with these wages, employers employ not only one worker but more than one worker: they also employ the people who are reproducing them, who are reproducing their capacity to work.

We realized that capitalist accumulation depends on the huge amount of unpaid labour, which is much wider than the Marxist socialist tradition ever acknowledged.

And we also recognized the connection between sexism and racism. Wage capitalism has created a labour hierarchy with paid workers on top: mostly white, mostly male. Unpaid workers – women, houseworkers, colonial subjects – are, of course, at the bottom. Slaves and slavery have been hugely significant for the accumulation of capital.

Looking at the discrimination of women from the point of view of reproduction has given us a different perspective on capitalism as a whole.

Catrin Ashton: The connection you make between the work that a woman does privately in her own home and all unpaid work done everywhere, globally and historically, which you describe as central to capitalism, is particularly inspiring.

Silvia Federici: Once we understood the significance of what reproductive work, what housework represents in the organization of work, in the process of accumulation, then we also began to understand the role of the wage. We saw that the wage is not compensation for work done or even a way of extracting some unpaid labour from the working day of the waged worker. Rather the wage is a whole way of organizing society. It’s also a way of concealing entire fields of exploitation by describing only certain workers, only waged workers, as workers.

It naturalizes and conceals entire fields of exploitation. We know, for instance, that Marx, as an abolitionist, wrote to Lincoln during the US civil war about the first international campaign to boycott the cotton trade for its use of slave labour, both congratulating him on the emancipation declaration and criticizing him for not really analysing slave work as a producer of capitalist accumulation in an entire three volumes.

There are passages here and there, but, for Marx, the fundamental terrain of struggle – industrial work – was underrepresented. Marx saw slavery in the same way he saw domestic work, as a kind of activity that would be left behind, that is historically backward, to be transcended by a future of capitalist development.

See Red Women, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done,
(screenprint in red ink, 1976). Gift of the American Friends of the V&A;
Gift to the American Friends by Leslie, Judith and Gabri Schreyer and Alice Schreyer Batko.

But we have seen that this hasn’t really been the case. The abolition of slavery has been more formal than real. We have seen, for instance, that with the process of globalization, the world expansion of capitalization since at least the late 1970s, has led to an expansion of informal labour. This has led to the expansion of all kinds of unpaid activities, of informal activities that are outside the wage relation. So, when we spoke of housework, we interpreted it as a prism, as a window to look at the capitalist system, which was really important for me.

I think that the work we did in the 1970s – analysing housework, analysing wages – was fundamental to decipher, interpret and analyse the whole process of recolonization that happened in the 1980s and 1990s and still continues throughout Latin America, Africa, influenced by the work of the IMF, structural adjustment, privatization, etc. It helped me tremendously with the work we had done because we understood capitalism’s relevance in relation to unpaid labour and hierarchy.

Capitalism is a producer of differences. Capitalist development has to continually develop new hierarchies, new divisions. It always responds to its crises through a massive process of expropriation, a massive process of expulsion from any means of reproduction.

When Maria Rosa Dalla Costa says that the housewife is iconic – which, of course, is a statement that has to be qualified – there’s something very profound there. She is iconic as a figure that embodies the unpaid worker. She is both the ‘unpaid worker’ and the ‘worker’, who is not recognized as such. She is a marginal figure or one destined to be surpassed by capitalist development.

Capitalism’s expansion has augmented unpaid labour. Students in the US and Europe, for example, are asked to do an enormous amount of unpaid work under the pretence of gaining skills, experience. We know of companies who are laying off workers because universities are sending them unpaid interns.

Catrin Ashton: And, despite the idea that women are somehow emancipated from housework, because we could go out to work if we wanted to and even earn high wages in some cases, the pandemic has shown that women still do most of the housework.

So after capitalism, who will do the dishes? Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash.

Wages for Housework was a campaign for much more than just a wage. Amongst other things it called for women’s autonomy over their own bodies. There was a pro-abortion campaign, anti-sterilization campaigns and campaigns against the medicalization of women’s bodies. The call was for women to be able to understand their own bodies. There was also a call for the state to stop controlling women’s bodies, in order, for example, to control birth rates.

In the UK, a large proportion of care home staff comes from the Global South or Eastern Europe. They tend to be a demographic that’s wary of COVID vaccinations, and yet, here they are, mostly women, greatly underpaid and being told to do something to their bodies that they are reluctant to do, for the good of the people. You’ve written about how capitalism has transformed the body into a work machine, and here’s an example of the work machine being adapted so that it can work ‘better’ in pandemic conditions.

Other than questioning the timing of decisions – whether reactions were too quick or too slow – I don’t think we, on the left, have adequately critiqued the UK government’s response to the pandemic. Do you think that this is fair, due to the nature of this crisis, or do you think that, as Marxists, as feminists, as activists on the left, we need to be asking more questions?

And, going back to care workers, how does the current issue fit into the wider historical context of state control over working-class women’s bodies? Is there a question over the negative responses they receive if they don’t comply?

Silvia Federici: Yes, there are many questions. But let me quickly give some context first.

The Wages For Housework Campaign also dealt with abortion. We were critical, as many black women’s organizations were too, of the exclusive position that the feminist movement held on abortion. Abortion meant the right to choose and, we said, in order to choose, in order to control our reproductive capacity, we must also fight for the right to have children.

In the US, black women have always been denied maternity rights. This has been the case from the time of slavery to the present day. Control over our bodies has two aspects: we want to be free to decide not to have children, but we also want the right to have children. In order to have children, there’s a struggle for the necessary resources so that we don’t have to be dependent on a man.

Also – and this is important – we have seen over the years that women who have gone on to take a job outside the home, with some exceptions, take precarious, underpaid jobs without autonomy. In the US, working class women have huge amounts of debt, because the wage is never enough: it is a big struggle to earn 15 US dollars an hour; most people make 7 dollars an hour; and millions are making only 15,000 dollars a year, including migrants who also need to send some money home. Clearly, these are not liveable wages, so people have recourse to loans. It’s the only way to survive.

During the pandemic 5 million women have lost paid employment. And 2.5 million have spontaneously left their jobs because they had children at home when schools were closed. The situation is desperate.

Domestic workers are in a terrible situation. First, in both Europe and the US, they are largely migrant women from Africa, the Caribbean, the Philippines who have left impoverished countries, either destroyed by wars, by the politics of the IMF, international capital, the European Union, the US government and so forth. Then, when the COVID-19 epidemic began, many were left with nothing from the families they worked for.

Not only have they suffered personally but also their entire families, whom they support, have suffered. I feel it’s unjust to force them to be vaccinated against their will.

Tolls of a trade? Photo by Félix Prado on Unsplash.

It’s very difficult for people such as myself to take a proper position on vaccination because we don’t know all the details. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have the qualifications to understand all aspects of these new vaccines. But there are certain questions that stand out, such as why is it that we never hear of therapy, or other means that can also help.

We aren’t aware of how many people are equally dying of cancer compared with COVID-19. Yet cancer raises questions about wider issues of pesticide use, water and air contamination, an environment that is more and more destructive to our bodies, especially in underprivileged parts of the world. This is not being talked about which makes me extremely suspicious that what is at stake is not really concern for our health but concern for the profit of big corporations.

COVID-19 vaccines are sold as a universal solution, the miracle. We are told not to worry about the long-term consequences. But we don’t know what they are yet. Of course, this doesn’t mean that COVID vaccines aren’t providing protection. But we are told anything is better than death, so we embrace the philosophy. I think there are many remaining questions centred on healthcare systems that have been destroyed over the years.


The great mortality COVID-19 has engendered is a political disaster. Such mortality could have been avoided if our healthcare systems, our nutritional care, had not been continually undermined. But raising a doubt about vaccines makes you a Trump supporter and a fascist. I really resent that now when we go out, the first thing anybody asks each other is, ‘are you vaccinated?’ I think that the discussion is more complex.

The pandemic provides a moment of truth. The system we follow is destructive. It puts us all in danger but some more than others: black communities, the elderly, people of the former colonial world. And we have also seen the incredible mercenary character of many pharmaceutical companies. They have used public money for their research and are now making everyone pay and often limiting the right to patents.

It’s clear that the capitalist class is going to use COVID-19 internationally for a major restructuring of capitalist development. The World Economic Forum is talking about a capitalist reset: a new form of capitalist development, the reorganization of work, a redistribution of wealth. I want to know if the people who are interested in a different kind of society are also those who are going to organize a reset. For me, the question is who exactly is going to set the stage for what is going to come next.

An edited Welsh version of this interview was published in O’r Pedwar Gwynt, summer 2021. Based on an interview held by Undod and the Communist Party in Wales in December 2020.

Published 31 January 2022
Original in English
First published by O’r Pedwar Gwynt

Contributed by O’r Pedwar Gwynt, summer 2021 

© Catrin Ashton / Silvia Federici / O'r Pedwar Gwynt / Eurozine

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