Female care work seen as a “Common”

Provoking: Female care work seen as a “Common”:

“The roots of sexism and racism are the same: a situation where you need workers without rights. Enslavement is essential to this process of accumulation and these have not been one time events; these developments became structural to capitalist society. In the last twenty years you can see similar developments. A globalisation based on land expropriation, migration, an increase in the impoverishment of women, mass prostitution, baby markets etc. As a result of present globalising drives, there has been an explosion of violence against women. Over the last fifteen years there has been a return to witch hunting, in Ghana for instance. The redefinition of the social position of women turns the woman into a kind of compensation for the man’s loss of power. The woman is a new common, seen as the new nature, like water etc, something everyone can go and get.” Silvia Federici, 2006

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An Interview on the Commons with de Angelis and Stavrides

pingThe term “commons” occurs in a variety of historical contexts. First of all, the term came up in relation to land enclosures during pre- or early capitalism in England; second, in relation to the Italian autonomia movement of the 1960s; and third, today, in the context of file-sharing networks, but also increasingly in the alter-globalization movement. In a public interview, Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides explain their interest in the commons.

Article: Escaping the bondage of the dominant agrifood system: community-based cooperative strategies

agrifoodThe “Missouri School” of critical agrifood studies has provided an effective framework for documenting and understanding the structural dimensions of the global agrifood system and locating important nodes of power. This has directed attention toward the negative impacts of industrialization and corporate concentration on agricultural producers, local communities and economies, and the environment. Using these critical insights, pressure on the dominant agrifood system by civil society organizations has resulted in important changes to production and marketing strategies and related public policies. We broaden this discussion by using social movement and livelihoods theory to explore the position of limited resource and minority producers in the southern United States. This analysis helps us to identify spaces for local responses in community-based cooperatives and other organizations. Read more (pdf) or see Southern Rural Sociology 2009 TOC

Who owns Google’s revenues?

googleAdSense, the advertisement company behind Google, is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products. Read more

Really Really Free Markets

According to the capitalist lexicon, the “Free Market” is the economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Any sensible person can recognize immediately that neither human beings nor resources are free in such a system; hence, a “Really Really Free Market” is a market that operates according to gift economics, in which nothing is for sale and the only rule is share and share alike. In the interest of not taxing the reader’s patience, a single apostrophe stands in for the two “Really”s throughout this text. Read more