became the obvious scene of alternate agency.’ Culture became the field from which to imaginatively work against the disfranchisements of nationalism and the debilities of global capital. 29 Many of the interviewees in this volume are poets, fiction writers or photographers, and have engaged other media (such as film) as part of their praxis, providing many rich examples of how cultural and artistic practices are central dimensions of radical thought.
Of course, another major difficulty with which Black feminists in both the UK and the United States have had to contend is the racism of mainstream or white feminist movements (whether liberal or socialist).30 Julia Sudbury, in her groundbreaking book ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation,31 utilises the term ‘womanist’ as a means of recognising how fraught the term ‘feminist’ was for some Black women activists in the 1990s. She writes:
Womanism is also symbolic of my accountability to a community of Black women activists for whom the term ‘feminism’ is associated with daily struggles against racist exclusion by white women’s organisations. The interviewee whose funding application for a Black women’s refuge had been undercut by the local [white] women’s refuge claiming to serve ‘all’ women. The organisation which had been allocated a white feminist project officer by the local authority only to discover that the latter was opposed to ‘Black separatism’ and consistently sought to undermine their work. The black women who have had to oppose white feminist calls for increased policing in primarily black neighbourhoods, in the name of ‘women’s safety’ … For many black women in 1990s Britain, ‘sisterhood’ with white feminists is a luxury which may be afforded at an abstract level, but when issues of funding and power are at stake, it would be naïve to assume that sisterly solidarity will determine white women’s actions.32
One may query how much has changed since the 1990s on this score. While the term ‘intersectionality’ rolls off the tongues of many white feminists with quotidian frequency, it is clear that the lack of meaningful solidarity between women of colour and white feminists has not been ameliorated.
Oftentimes, Marxist and socialist (feminist) events and spaces, even when well intentioned, involve groups of people who are poorly informed about histories of colonialism and issues of race, and, one surmises, deeply attached to their refusal to think through the ways race is central to capitalist social and political orders. Thus, for many women of colour feminists, to engage with them is an exercise in frustration, at best – and at worst, requires subjecting oneself to a kind of invisibility and erasure. While this project itself was initially motivated by a justifiable sense of plaintiveness, and fatigue, at the continual marginalisation of left, anti-racist feminist thought and praxis, that sense of complaint was fairly quickly overwhelmed by a satisfying sense of the peripherality of ‘white feminism’ to the thought and praxis explored in this volume.
Nonetheless, it remains crucial to note that the institutionalised power of white feminism remains an obstacle for those of us who centre race and colonialism in our work; many of us have experienced the nonrecognition of white feminist colleagues (particularly in academia) who refuse to even acknowledge our work as ‘feminist’.33 Recently, several feminist scholars have critiqued the way the discourse of intersectionality has been appropriated by white feminists without sufficiently acknowledging or engaging with the feminists of colour who developed the concept.34 In a not dissimilar fashion, we have also seen socialist feminists criticising the concept of intersectionality without taking the time, we would argue, to adequately study the diverse body of scholarship that evolved the concept and its associated forms of praxis, prematurely dismissing it as inadequate to challenge contemporary forms of capitalism.
Methodologies: Historical Materialism and its Feminist Instantiations
If there is a common thread among the feminists interviewed in this book, it is their long-standing and critical engagement with historical materialism. What is historical materialism? At its most elemental level, it can be understood as a form of critique that situates itself within social relations.35 Marx understood ‘social relations of production’ to be the totality of relationships that encompass our personal and family lives, our interactions in the workplace and with the state, and our associations with communities or groups of people.
Capitalist social relations, the form that has come to dominate the globe, have always been differentiated by forces generated by colonial history, imperialism, war economies, and the patriarchal, racial and heteronormative nature of those formations. More than ‘stretch’ Marxism to account for colonialism (as Frantz Fanon did), feminists have had to remake Marxist categories of analysis to more fully account for the centrality of race, gender and sexuality to capitalist social relations.
These critical feminist engagements with historical materialism have taken many different forms.36 One is the trajectory of work that emerged in the 1970s in Italy, shaped by the defeat of fascism and the aftermath of the Second World War. Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati and others undertook highly significant critical interventions into Marxist theory and practice by emphasising the centrality of women’s reproductive labour in the home to the reproduction of capitalist social relations – a massive absence in Marx’s and Marxist labour theories of value. Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (1981) embodies a form of immanent critique whereby the value of women’s labour is thought of in terms of Marx’s critique of capitalist social relations. Here, she shows how women’s housework is a process of value creation by demonstrating that it is a process of commodity production: it is only through the socially reproductive labour of women in the home that the individual male worker is able to reproduce himself as labour power, as use value for value.37 Fortunati’s work shows how women’s housework is fundamentally productive labour, in Marx’s own definitions of the term.
The difficult question of how to value such productive labour, given the temporality, duration and nature of reproductive housework – it is, after all, work that never ends – is one Fortunati took up at a theoretical level. At a political level, it was taken up by the Wages for Housework (WFH) campaign, also rooted in the idea that housework is productive, value-producing labour which both capital and the state rely upon to function. In terms of its ‘methodology’, the WFH campaign reflected a form of praxis influenced by a diverse range of critical engagements with Marxist thought and political work. The campaign occupied a very ambivalent, if not divisive, place in feminist organising. One of the critiques pertinent to our concerns in this volume is the early one rendered by Angela Y. Davis, namely, that WFH utterly failed to account for the histories of Black women’s servitude and domestic labour, both unpaid and paid.38 The same could be said for Fortunati’s work, published a decade after Davis’s critical work on Black women and reproductive labour.
In Italy during the 1960s and ’70s, the work of Mario Tronti and the concept of operaismo (workerism) rose to some prominence in Europe.39 In particular, the idea of the ‘social factory’ – which articulated the view that capitalist forms of production seen in the factory would increasingly extend outwards, eventually encompassing all of social life – was quite influential on the work of Silvia Federici and other Italian feminists. However, Federici’s intellectual work and political experiences took her in radically different directions from operaismo; as explored in her interview in this volume, her time in both the United States and Nigeria shaped her understanding of reproductive labour to account for global political economies of labour, and histories of colonisation and racism. Federici’s method was influenced in part by the work of Tronti, particularly with regard to the idea that radical change always begins with workers themselves rather than exogenous forces.40 This remains embedded in her theorisation of socially reproductive labour, which does not begin with the abstract but is resolutely grounded in the productive work and activities of people who are usually invisibilised within mainstream political economic work. Despite the critiques of WFH, the crucial need to recognise and value
