This is a leaflet that some members of the Madrid working group on Feminisms within the 15M movement made for the strike organised on 29th March 2012 – I found it recently and thought it might be nice for starting to collect some leaflets, graphics and flyers. Translation coming up… here a link to their call for a strike of care work, possibly inspired by the ‘caring strike’ of Precarias a la Deriva…
this is a space to throw in thoughts and questions to do with how we may define reproduction and care, why/how those matter to us, and so forth – via the comments thread below.
The document below is our code of ethics, a kind of collectively edited compass that helps us orient, define and do our work as a group and network. This is a document that will always be in draft form, since our considerations on ethics evolve with time and different experiences. This is not law but rather constitutes an attempt at instituting our practice/s with view to consistency, and generate a space for reflection on our collective processes.
**PWB: THE BIGGER PICTURE. WHY ARE WE HERE?**
– We want to be an organising group, working with people in the education and cultural sectors, in solidarity with other groups working on issues of precarity.
– We operate a critical analysis and invent resistant practices to neoliberal capitalism and the different ways in which it produces precarity.
– We want to develop a differentiated approach to (self-)‘organising’ that neither consists in ‘organising others’ nor in just reflecting on ourselves.
– We want to bring new people into the group and campaigns when appropriate.
– We want to be in solidarity and collaboration with other groups.
– We make use of creative and analytic training to engage in direct action and campaigns towards concrete change.
– We engage in consciousness-raising (but not in circumstances in which we know that everyone is already conscious but inactive).
– We want to strike a balance between organising work on the ground (eg. campaigns, demonstrations, etc.), administration and the ‘representational’ (eg. writing texts, giving talks, workshops, etc.) and organising aspects of our work – whilst recognising that they are not necessarily separate activites, but inter-connect.
– We would like to ensure that roles do not get fixed and that work is recognized and valued within the group.
– We operate both as a group and a network, and try to find different modalities of participation between these. Continue reading
[ the extract below has been lifted out from a draft chapter of my phd. ]
It’s pertinent to speak of ‘domestication’ of work in a triple sense. Firstly, paid jobs are showing similar characteristics to those developed in the domestic-familial environment: they are elastic, fragmented and dispersed. For some, they are sometimes undertaken in the domestic space – either, for the more precarious, because they mean a return to proto-industrial models such as home service, or because it’s new forms of work linked to the development of information and communication technologies […]. Finally, paid jobs increasingly implicate the ‘taming’ of a dimension – affect – which until now had been considered as belonging exclusively to the private domain of the life of individuals, absolutely dissociated from any conceptualisation of work.0
Tapping associational forms: networks, chains
In the current capitalist context, the purpose of human association is set to be an ascent towards higher socio-economic strata, gaining wealth and professionalized recognition. Tricks of accumulation prevail across all registers in the neoliberal paradigm, making it hard to distinguish the reproduction of communities and groups from the reproduction of the capitalist system at large. This ambivalence makes itself variously, as many theorists have explored in recent decades, whether with regards to post-fordist labour or care work. I will be dwelling on the seemingly unrelated contexts of networked ‘immaterial’ production and of global care chains here, drawing some connections across currently predominant modes of value extraction and organisation and pointing to some questions this raises for radical politics. Continue reading
As workers in the sex industry we are often denied a voice, we are considered only passive victims, we are taught to be ashamed of our work, we are made invisible by discriminatory laws that illegalise our work and us, and we are spoken for and about but rarely are we allowed to speak for ourselves. As migrants even more so. Sometimes our voices are not heard even amongst each other because we don’t speak the same languages. The x:talk project is a sex worker-led workers co-operative which approaches language teaching as knowledge sharing between equals and regards the ability to communicate as a fundamental tool for sex workers to work in safer conditions, to organise and to socialise with each other.
We understand language to be a politically and socially charged instrument of power, which we aim to teach critically and thoughtfully. Our English classes are organized to create a space where sex work as work can be openly talked about and does not have to be concealed or hidden. Through providing such a space we aim to challenge the stigma and isolation attached to our profession while at the same time we guarantee confidentiality and respect for those involved. In addition to providing free English classes to migrant sex workers, we support critical interventions around issues of migration, race, gender, sexuality and labour, we participate in feminist and anti-racist campaigns and we are active in the struggle for the rights of sex workers in London, the UK and globally. 
Continue reading
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