by Sarah Jaffe
15. Fisher, K-punk, loc. 6984, 12617; Harvey, Brief History, 7–8, 14–15; Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot. (New York: Verso, 2019), loc. 1652–1654, Kindle; Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis, 57. Orlando Letelier, “The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll,” The Nation, August 1976, www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll. See also Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010).
16. Harvey, Brief History, 23, 61; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 9308; Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis, 130.
17. Fisher, K-punk, loc. 7548.
18. Harvey, Brief History, 25; Tim Barker, “Other People’s Blood,” n+1, Spring 2019, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/reviews/other-peoples-blood-2; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 7100; Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot., loc. 1708–1710, 1861–1877, 2033–2036.
19. Nick O’Donovan, “From Knowledge Economy to Automation Anxiety: A Growth Regime in Crisis?,” New Political Economy 25, no. 2 (2020): 248–266, https://doi.org.10.1080/13563467.2019.1590326.
20. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis, 63; Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, loc. 170, 649, 707, 710; Harvey, Brief History, 5; Adam Kotsko, The Prince of This World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 199–200; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 7674, 11308, 12574; Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2019), loc. 2684–2687, Kindle.
21. Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, loc. 71, 1823, 1831; Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis, 110; Standing, The Precariat, loc. 995, 1001. See also Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zer0 Books, 2009).
22. Margaret Thatcher, Interview for Women’s Own, 1987, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689; Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, “Introduction,” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 9; Rene Almeling, “Selling Genes, Selling Gender,” in Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors, 60; Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 33; Kristen Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism (New York: Bold Type Books, 2018), 3; Laura Briggs, “Foreign and Domestic,” in Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors, 49. In Japan, Guy Standing wrote, the company-as-family “was taken to its limit.… The company became a fictitious family so that the employment relationship became ‘kintractship,’ in which the employer ‘adopted’ the employee and in return expected something close to a gift relationship of subservience, filial duty and decades of intensified labour.” Standing, The Precariat, loc. 512. UsTwo Games, “About Us,” company website, www.ustwo.com/about-us; Harvey, Brief History, 53; Kathi Weeks, “Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work,” Verso Blog, February 13, 2018, www.versobooks.com/blogs/3614-down-with-love-feminist-critique-and-the-new-ideologies-of-work.
23. Weeks, “Down with Love”; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 8907; Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, loc. 2622.
24. Fisher, K-punk, loc. 8222; Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons, loc. 1891; Sarah Jaffe, “The Post-Pandemic Future of Work,” New Republic, May 1, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/157504/post-pandemic-future-work.
25. Fisher, K-punk, loc. 12661.
26. David Harvey, “Reading Capital with David Harvey,” Episode 5, podcast audio, 2019, https://open.spotify.com/episode/6TFZkkswzQGAVcfizfWiJy?si=h42pT1HUSZuWEsykk9qfKA.
27. Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 96; Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 70; Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 8.
28. Gramsci, Selections, 5083, 8338. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, education scholar Eleni Schirmer explains, is “the struggle to arrange the pieces of the world—the ideas and the images and the language and the culture and the politics and the music and the sexual norms.” Eleni Schirmer, “Hello, We Are from Wisconsin, and We Are Your Future,’” Boston Review, April 7, 2020, http://bostonreview.net/politics/eleni-schirmer-wisconsin-primaries-scott-walker-act-10.
29. Harvey, Brief History, 39; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 8610–8617.
30. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster Digital, 2013), loc. 690, 794–795, 891, 1891–1894, 2160, Kindle. The work ethic was built upon what Melinda Cooper called “an austere philosophy of desire.” Cooper, Family Values, loc. 797–801; Weeks, The Problem with Work, 45.
31. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2018), loc. 1307–1313, 1403–1404, Kindle.
32. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, loc. 1453–1453, 1562–1564; Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” in Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, 25.
33. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 46–49, 59–60; Ronnie Schreiber, “Henry Ford Paid His Workers $5 a Day So They Wouldn’t Quit, Not So They Could Afford Model Ts,” The Truth About Cars, October 13, 2014, www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/10/henry-ford-paid-workers-5-day-wouldnt-quit-afford-model-ts; Fraser, “Crisis of Care,” 25; Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, loc. 1339–1342.
34. Fraser, “Crisis of Care,” 25; Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, loc. 1376–1378, 2223–2225, 2344–2346, 2393–2395, 2484–2487, 2568–2569, 2660–2662, 2745–2748; Weeks, “Down with Love.”
35. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 2705–2708, 1809–1813, 1813–1815, 1824–1828; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, American Crossroads Book 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “What Is to Be Done,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (June 2011): 245–265.
36. Harvey, Brief History, 41; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 2468, 7120; Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, loc. 4037–4041, 4065–4068, 4112–4112.
37. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, loc. 4552–4552, 4376–4387, 2722–2724; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 12756–12764, 12944, 12959.
38. Weeks, “Down with Love”; Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, loc. 3553–3556, 3889–3891, 3954–3959; Fraser, “Crisis of Care,” 25–26; Weeks, The Problem with Work, 107–110.
39. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, loc. 4404–4406, 6201–6205, 2728–2730, 3434–3436; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 7676, 7122, 10690, 12750, 12959.
40. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 2.
41. “Employment Projections,” US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 1.4: Occupations with the Most Job Growth, 2018 and Projected 2028, www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-most-job-growth.htm.
42. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 76; Standing, The Precariat, loc. 3363–3366.
43. Chuckie Denison from Lordstown said that at work, decisions made by the bosses seemed to have less to do with producing good cars, and more to do with controlling the workforce. “Management did not like to see you smiling or having a good time. They would rather see you miserable and not producing than happy and producing.” Sarah Jaffe, “The Road Not Taken,” New Republic, June 24, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154129/general-motors-plant-closed-lordstown-ohio-road-not-taken; Weeks, The Problem with Work, 20–23, 97; Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, loc. 7457, 7774–7843.
44. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Open Road Media, 2016), loc. 85–90, 624, Kindle.
45. The editors of Notes from Below describe class composition as “a material relation with three parts: the first is the organisation of labour-power into a
working class (technical composition); the second is the organisation of the working class into a class society (social composition); the third is the self-organisation of the working class into a force for class struggle (political composition).” Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Controllers, Consoles, and Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019), loc. 979–983, Kindle. See also Notes from Below, “About,” https://notesfrombelow.org/about; Weeks, The Problem with Work, 94; Marina Vishmidt, “Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with Silvia Federici,” Mute, March 7 2013, www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici; Fisher, K-punk, loc. 8888.
46. Draut, Sleeping Giant, 5. If we, as Joshua Clover invites us to, expand our lens beyond the workforce, we can see the proletariat in its original sense, “those who are ‘without reserves,’ who are nothing, have nothing to lose but their chains, and cannot liberate themselves without destroying the whole social order,” which includes those no longer useful to capital or those who labor, unwaged, in the home, doing the original labors of love. Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot., loc. 2026–2031.
47. Draut, Sleeping Giant, 120, 155; Weeks, The Problem with Work, 62; Gabriel Winant, “The New Working Class,” Dissent, June 27, 2017, www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/new-working-class-precarity-race-gender-democrats; Lois Weiner, The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 137.
48. “The existence of exploitation always assumes some form of coercion,” Boltanski and Chiapello wrote. “But whereas in pre-capitalist societies exploitation is invariably direct, in capitalism it passes through a series of detours that mask it.” Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 7251–7255. Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google, in Rare Stumble, Posts 23% Decline in Profit,” New York Times, October 18, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/technology/google-alphabet-earnings.html.
CHAPTER 1: NUCLEAR FALLOUT
1. Tom Kelly and Harriet Crawford, “Terror of Farage Children as Mob Storms Pub Lunch: Leader Brands Anti-Ukip Protesters as ‘Scum’ After His Family Are Forced to Flee Activists and Breastfeed Militants,” Daily Mail, March 22, 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3006560/Nigel-Farage-brands-anti-Ukip-protesters-scum-invaded-pub-having-family-lunch-leaving-children-terrified.html.
2. “Single Parents: Claimant Commitment Under Universal Credit,” Turn2Us, www.turn2us.org.uk/Your-Situation/Bringing-up-a-child/Single-parents-and-Universal-Credit.
3. bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (New York: William Morrow, 2002), xiii–xviii.
4. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2016); Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (New York: Verso, 2014), loc. 35–37, Kindle. French philosopher Alain Badiou suggested, “Essentially, if you play with the word ‘state’ you could define the family as the state of love.” Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 54; Angela Y. Davis, “JoAnn Little: The Dialectics of Rape,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1998), 158. See also Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
5. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 63; Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2019), loc. 29–30, Kindle; Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Kindle Edition, 2011 [1884]), 4. See also Selma James, Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012); Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 2.
6. Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson, “Introduction: ‘Explanations’ of Male Dominance,” in Women’s Work, Men’s Property: The Origins of Gender and Class, ed. Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson (London: Verso, 1986), loc. 66–205, 431–433, Kindle; Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson, “Property Forms, Political Power, and Female Labour in the Origins of Class and State Societies,” in Coontz and Henderson, Women’s Work, Men’s Property, loc. 2276–2279.
7. Coontz and Henderson, “Introduction,” loc. 608–772; Lila Leibowitz, “In the Beginning…: The Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour and the Development of the First Human Societies,” in Coontz and Henderson, Women’s Work, Men’s Property, loc. 959–982; Nicole Chevillard and Sebastien Leconte, “The Dawn of Lineage Societies: The Origins of Women’s Oppression,” in Coontz and Henderson, Women’s Work, Men’s Property, loc. 1612–1642, 1799–1800.
8. Chevillard and Leconte argue, “The exploitation of man by man did in fact begin as an exploitation of woman by man. But within this original exploitation lay the seeds of the exploitation of humans of both sexes by the ruling human (who is again male).” Chevillard and Leconte, “The Dawn of Lineage Societies,” loc. 2135–2136. Coontz and Henderson, “Property Forms,” loc. 2659–2660, 2849–2890. Engels also rather acidly noted that men “never… had the least intention” of being monogamous; monogamy was for women. Engels, Origin of the Family, loc. 42–44, 49, 58.
9. “By Euripides,” Engels wrote, “woman is designated as ‘oikurema,’ a neuter signifying an object for housekeeping, and beside the business of breeding children she served to the Athenian for nothing but his chief house maid.” Engels, Origin of the Family, 61, 70; Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” originally published as “Le marche des femmes,” in Sessualita e politica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/luce-irigaray-women-on-the-market.
10. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 25, 31, 97. Unless otherwise noted, italics in quotations are reproduced from the original sources.
11. Federici explains: “Marx introduced the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ at the end of Capital Volume 1 to describe the social and economic restructuring that the European ruling class initiated in response to its accumulation crisis, and to establish (in polemics with Adam Smith) that: (i) capitalism could not have developed without a prior concentration of capital and labor, and that (ii) the divorcing of the workers from the means of production, not the abstinence of the rich, is the source of capitalist wealth. Primitive accumulation, then, is a useful concept, for it connects the ‘feudal reaction’ with the development of a capitalist economy, and it identifies the historical and logical conditions for the development of the capitalist system, ‘primitive’ (‘originary’) indicating a precondition for the existence of capitalist relations as much as a specific event in time.” Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 14, 17, 63–64, 88–89; Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 125. The witch hunters were obsessed with women’s collective action, noted Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English: “Not only were the witches women—they were women who seemed to be organized into an enormous secret society.” Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Nurses and Midwives (New York: Feminist Press, 2010), 42.
12. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 135, 142.
13. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 97, 149, 192. Patel and Moore wrote: “To make this system work, the state developed a keen interest in enforcing the categories of man and woman. Humans whose bodies didn’t neatly fit were surgically altered to fit one category or the other.” Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 117, 121, 128. Alan Sears, “Body Politics: The Social Reproduction of Sexualities,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 173–174.
14. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Open Road Media, 2016), loc. 3881, 3974, Kindle.
15. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 4352, 4358, 4365–4376; Frances Fox Piven and Rich
ard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1993), loc. 203, 358, 372, 417–429, 431, 442, Kindle; Cooper, Family Values, loc. 1080.
16. Cooper, Family Values, loc. 1080–1089, 1107–1109. Relief arrangements, Piven and Cloward argued, are part of the process of “defining and enforcing the terms on which different classes of people are made to do different kinds of work; relief arrangements, in other words, have a great deal to do with maintaining social and economic inequities.” Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, loc. 201, 217, 978.
17. Women who went to work, Thompson noted, often looked back wistfully at the home economy, which “supported a way of life centred upon the home, in which inner whims and compulsions were more obvious than external discipline.” Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 8587, 8617, 8634, 8643. Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 128. As just one example of reshaping indigenous lifeways, in the United States, the “Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 subdivided indigenous peoples’ reserved lands into forty-acre plots, each distributed to a male-headed nuclear household.” Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” in Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, 41.
18. Kelli Marìa Korducki, Hard to Do: The Surprising Feminist History of Breaking Up (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2018), 41, 53–54; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 12.
19. Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Vintage, 2009), 60.
20. Angela Y. Davis, “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 177.
21. Mohandesi and Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” 39; James, Sex, Race and Class, 163–171, 177; Barrett and McIntosh, Anti-Social Family, loc. 266–267; hooks, Communion, 78.
22. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 24; Barrett and McIntosh, Anti-Social Family, loc. 814–815; James, Sex, Race and Class, 153.