Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Cross-posting from the "What are you listening to right now?" thread.

This one is powerful- well worth checking out:

"Vuolgge mu mielde Bassivárrái" (Come With Me To The Sacred Mountain) is a dream of freedom from Western civilization's oppression of minorities. Mari Boine portrays a woman who tries to escape from the darkness, the bleak conditions of the Sami people after the Norwegian colonization.

[American Dream]

The "good old" days?

[American Dream]

http://www.yourownhealthandfitness.org/blogs/?p=325

Standing in Line

By Jeffry Fawcett, November 22, 2011

When my daughter Laural started school, a friend of mine asked what she was learning. After a moment, Laural answered, “How to stand in line and how to take tests.” There you have it: social order and stability are the foundation of education—which should make us ponder the relationship between education and learning.

That memory was stirred when I read an article in the New York Times titled “Drugs Used for Psychotics Go to Youths in Foster Care.” Based on a study published in the journal Pediatrics, children in foster care are given psychiatric medications at twice the rate of other children. In absolute terms, the number treated this way is about 3%—around 15,000 children out of the half million in foster care.

A researcher at Washington University acknowledged that “the psychiatrists who are treating these kids on the front lines are not doing it for the money; there are very low reimbursement rates from Medicaid.” He informs us that there’s “enormous anguish” among the people doing this work because they know that the solutions are psychosocial and not pharmaceutical. Yet nowhere in the article does anyone discuss what might explain the greater use of psychotropic drugs among foster children.

I think the cause is the need to maintain social order and stability.

As I’m sure you’re aware, schools have increasingly worked to suppress disruptive behavior through medication. Counterpunch recently published an article titled “How America’s Shrinks Collude with Drug Industry in Turning America’s Children into Zombies.” Somehow I don’t think I need say much about the perspective from which the article is written nor the conclusions it draws. However, I want to review some of the horrors discussed there.

In 2005, 11 million children were prescribed antidepressants. During the decade of the 1990s, use of drugs like Ritalin for ADHD increased by a factor of 20—at 3 times the rate for boys as for girls. But these are passé. Today’s medication of choice is the antipsychotic—taken by half a million children.

The horror is that the FDA doesn’t require testing of how these drugs affect children. One of the common effects is massive weight gain. Another is symptoms similar to Parkinson’s Disease.

There are three basic forces at work here. The big dog is the pharmaceutical industry. The second is the institutional psychiatric profession that defines what counts as a mental disorder and prescribes the standard of care for those disorders. And third is the administration of schools and Medicaid.

This last point needs a little explanation. It turns out that parents receive more aid if their child has a diagnosis, which is encouraged by the school, which is controlled by the psychiatric profession, which is heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry: three quarters of the people responsible for defining mental disorders for the psychiatric profession have ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Ironically, all of these institutions are trying to help.

Although this is all quite awful, I’m struck by how ordinary it all is. After all, most parents don’t drug their children. Most children aren’t disruptive. Most know how to stand in line and take tests. It is for the sake of those stable citizens that something is done to those who are disruptive. And, of course, for those disruptive children themselves who need to be helped in their capacity to stand in line and take tests.

As social beings, we crave stability. We do not like chaos. We actively suppress it. This creates a powerful tailwind for institutions in the business of maintaining social order and stability. On the other hand, we crave the new and better—things which are inherently disruptive. The drugging of children is an example of the balancing act our institutions perform in satisfying those conflicting cravings.

Most cultures have myths of the trickster. In general, the trickster is a troublemaker. He follows his own interests, usually violating taboos and social norms. Trickster is the ultimate in disruptive behavior. He would almost certainly be given antipsychotics.

While people hate him because he ruins things as they are, taking pleasure in his punishments, they also take guilty pleasure in his antics as well as the changes he makes with gifts such fire.

Traditionally, trickster is an outcast, an outsider. Today, tricksters are in charge. We celebrate ambition and change and the new and the better. We celebrate progress.

As I mentioned, there are three driving forces behind the rise in the use of antipsychotics on disruptive children: the pharmaceutical industry, the psychiatric profession, and the administration of Medicaid and schools.

Like all capitalist enterprises, the pharmaceutical industry has at its very heart ambitious people seeking to change things. It’s clear that they set out to change the way psychiatric medications are used on children. I’m sure they don’t think of it as chaos any more than the traditional trickster does, yet chaos it is. It is the engine that has showered us with the new and the better.

The psychiatric and other professions as well as for Medicaid and other institutions of social welfare have followed in the pharmaceutical industry’s wake: progress; change for the better. The trickster is right in the middle of social order and stability.

And it all works. After all, most children and adults don’t exhibit disruptive behavior. Most children and adults know how to stand in line and take tests.

An alternative is almost unimaginable. Almost.

[American Dream]

This week's Sprouts:

A Bitter Harvest Part 2: California, Marijuana, and the New Jim Crow

Produced by:
Chris Moore-Backman, KZFR Community Radio, Chico, California

Download at: http://audioport.org/index.php?op=progr ... 5620&nav=&


This is the second half of a documentary by producer Chris Moore-Backman which views Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" through the lens of California's marijuana industry.

Marijuana is the single largest agricultural commodity in California and it is the primary vehicle for the war on drugs' racialized arrest and incarceration system, which has our prisons bursting at the seams nationwide. Great numbers of predominantly white men and women grow, harvest, and process marijuana in California for distribution throughout the United States.

Local law enforcement and the communities they represent - communities whose economies are marijuana-dependent - benefit from letting this part of the illegal process go mostly undetected, while the crackdown happens almost exclusively in poor inner-city neighborhoods of color.

Through interviews with Michelle Alexander, Stephen Gutwillig (Drug Policy Alliance), and Vincent Harding (renowned veteran of the African-American Freedom Movement), this program cracks open the question of why and how this discrepancy exists, and it explores some of its devastating consequences. It's a show that grapples head on with the reality of white privilege in the United States.

Medical marijuana and legalization issues are treated tangentially.

[American Dream]

Occupy Wall Street Rag (Where’s the LOVE- Where’dat money Go?)

[American Dream]

A beautiful discussion between two beautiful women discussing the disability lens as a radical way of seeing the world, the way we interact with our bodies, and the way our bodies interact with our social and physical environments.

[American Dream]

I have recently learned that your organization is compiling dossiers on professors at U.S. academic institutions who oppose the Israeli occupation and its brutality, actively support Palestinian rights of self-determination as well as a more informed and intelligent view of Islam than is currently represented in the U.S. media. I would be enormously honored to be counted among those who actively hold these positions and would like to be included in the list of those who are struggling for justice during these times.

---Judith Butler (Email sent to Campuswatch).

For a criticism of Israel to be taken as a challenge to the survival of the Jews, we would have to assume not only that 'Israel' cannot change in response to legitimate criticism, but that a more radically democratic Israel would be bad for Jews. This would be to suppose that criticism is not a Jewish value, which clearly flies in the face not only of long traditions of Talmudic disputation, but of all the religious and cultural sources that have been part of Jewish life for centuries.

Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).

[The] cultural Leftism has somehow abandoned the project of Marxism, and … it fails to address questions of economic equity and redistribution, and it fails to situate culture in terms of a systematic understanding of social and economic modes of production, … the cultural focus of Left politics has splintered the Left into identitarian sects, and … we have lost a set of common ideals and goals, a sense of a common history, common set of values, language and we've lost objective and universal modes of rationality.

Butler, Judith (Conference.) "Left Conservatism, II." in: Theory & Event. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1998.

"Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a "doing" rather than a "being".

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. November 15, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415900433.

[American Dream]

Judith Butler at Occupy Wall Street

BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT


Judith Butler


Judith Butler, the renowned academic and feminist theorist at the University of California Berkeley, became on Sunday the latest intellectual to express solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

In brief remarks to the occupiers at Liberty Plaza, Butler offered her take on the continuing “demands” debate:

People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible — that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible.

The full video is worth a watch:

[American Dream]

Excerpted from:

Judith Butler: As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up

http://www.haaretz.com/news/judith-butl ... p-1.266243

Once you became "Judith Butler," we began to hear more about Jews and Jewish texts. People came to hear you speak about gender and suddenly they were faced with Gaza, divine violence. It almost felt like you had some closure on the previous matter. Is there a connection, a continuum, or is this a new phase?

Let's go back further. I'm sure I've told you that I began to be interested in philosophy when I was 14, and I was in trouble in the synagogue. The rabbi said, "You are too talkative in class. You talk back, you are not well behaved. You have to come and have a tutorial with me." I said "OK, great!" I was thrilled.

He said: "What do you want to study in the tutorial? This is your punishment. Now you have to study something seriously." I think he thought of me as unserious. I explained that I wanted to read existential theology focusing on Martin Buber. (I've never left Martin Buber.) I wanted look at the question of whether German idealism could be linked with National Socialism. Was the tradition of Kant and Hegel responsible in some way for the origins of National Socialism? My third question was why Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue. I wanted to know what happened and whether the synagogue was justified.

Now I must go Jewish: what was your parents' relation to Judaism?

My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

My mother's uncles and aunts were all killed in Hungary [during the Holocaust]. My grandmother lost all of her relatives, except for the two nephews who came with them in the car when my grandmother went back in 1938 to see who she could rescue. It was important for me. I went to Hebrew school. But I also went after school to special classes on Jewish ethics because I was interested in the debates. So I didn't do just the minimum. Through high school, I suppose, I continued Jewish studies alongside my public school education.

And you showed me the photos of the bar mitzvah of your son as a good proud Jewish Mother...

So it's been there from the start, it's not as if I arrived at some place that I haven't always been in. I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn't trust anybody outside. You'd bring someone home and the first question was "Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?" Then I entered into a lesbian community in college, late college, graduate school, and the first thing they asked was, "Are you a feminist, are you not a feminist?" "Are you a lesbian, are you not a lesbian?" and I thought "Enough with the separatism!"

It felt like the same kind of policing of the community. You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. Is that person really Jewish, maybe they're not so Jewish. I don?t know if they're really Jewish. Maybe they're self-hating. Is that person lesbian? I think maybe they had a relationship with a man. What does that say about how true their identity was? I thought I can't live in a world in which identity is being policed in this way.

But if I go back to your other question... In Gender Trouble, there is a whole discussion of melancholy. What is the condition under which we fail to grieve others? I presumed, throughout my childhood, that this was a question the Jewish community was asking itself. It was also a question that I was interested in when I went to study in Germany. The famous Mitscherlich book on the incapacity to mourn, which was a criticism of German post-war culture, was very, very interesting to me.

In the 70s and 80s, in the gay and lesbian community, it became clear to me that very often, when a relationship would break up, a gay person wouldn't be able to tell their parents, his or her parents. So here, people were going through all kinds of emotional losses that were publicly unacknowledged and that became very acute during the AIDS crisis. In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, "I have just lost the love of my life."

This was extremely important to my thinking throughout the 80s and 90s. But it also became important to me as I started to think about war. After 9/11, I was shocked by the fact that there was public mourning for many of the people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, less public mourning for those who died in the attack on the Pentagon, no public mourning for the illegal workers of the WTC, and, for a very long time, no public acknowledgment of the gay and lesbian families and relationships that had been destroyed by the loss of one of the partners in the bombings. Then we went to war very quickly, Bush having decided that the time for grieving is over. I think he said that after ten days, that the time for grieving is over and now is time for action. At which point we started killing populations abroad with no clear rationale. And the populations we targeted for violence were ones that never appeared to us in pictures. We never got little obituaries for them. We never heard anything about what lives had been destroyed. And we still don't.

I then moved towards a different kind of theory, asking under what conditions certain lives are grievable and certain lives not grievable or ungrievable. It's clear to me that in Israel-Palestine and in the violent conflicts that have taken place over the years, there is differential grieving. Certain lives become grievable within the Israeli press, for instance - highly grievable and highly valuable - and others are understood as ungrievable because they are understood as instruments of war, or they are understood as outside the nation, outside religion, or outside that sense of belonging which makes for a grievable life. The question of grievability has linked my work on queer politics, especially the AIDS crisis, with my more contemporary work on war and violence, including the work on Israel-Palestine.

It's interesting because when the war on Gaza started, I couldn't stay in Tel Aviv anymore. I visited the Galilee a lot. And suddenly I realized that many of the Palestinians who died in Gaza have families there, relatives who are citizens of Israel. What people didn't know is that there was a massed grief in Israel. Grief for families who died in Gaza, a grief within Israel, of citizens of Israel. And nobody in the country spoke about it, about the grief within Israel. It was shocking.

The Israeli government and the media started to say that everyone who was killed or injured in Gaza was a member of Hamas; or that they were all being used as part of the war effort; that even the children were instruments of the war effort; that the Palestinians put them out there, in the targets, to show that Israelis would kill children, and this was actually part of a war effort. At this point, every single living being who is Palestinian becomes a war instrument. They are all, in their being, or by virtue of being Palestinian, declaring war on Israel or seeking the destruction of the Israel.

So any and all Palestinian lives that are killed or injured are understood no longer to be lives, no longer understood to be living, no longer understood even to be human in a recognizable sense, but they are artillery. The bodies themselves are artillery. And of course, the extreme instance of that is the suicide bomber, who has become unpopular in recent years. That is the instance in which a body becomes artillery, or becomes part of a violent act. If that figure gets extended to the entire Palestinian population, then there is no living human population anymore, and no one who is killed there can be grieved. Because everyone who is a living Palestinian is, in their being, a declaration of war, or a threat to the existence of Israel, or pure military artillery, materiel. They have been transformed, in the Israeli war imaginary, into pure war instruments.

So when a people who believes that another people is out to destroy them sees all the means of destruction killed, or some extraordinary number of the means of destruction destroyed, they are thrilled, because they think their safety and well-being and happiness are being purchased, are being achieved through this destruction.

And what happened with the perspective from the outside, the outside media, was extremely interesting to me. The European press, the U.S. press, the South American press, the East Asian press all raised questions about the excessive violence of the Gaza assault. It was very strange to see how the Israeli media made the claim that people on the outside do not understand; that people on the outside are anti-Semitic; that people on the outside are blaming Israel for defending themselves when they themselves, if attacked, would do the exact same thing.

Why Israel-Palestine? Is this directly connected to your Jewishness?

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps. There were those who would and could speak out against state racism and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able to speak out. Not just for Jews, but for any number of people. There was an entire idea of social justice that emerged for me from the consideration of the Nazi genocide.

I would also say that what became really hard for me is that if one wanted to criticize Israeli state violence - precisely because that as a Jew one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism - then one is in a bind, because one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism. And yet for me, it comes out of a certain Jewish value of social justice. So how can I fulfill my obligation as a Jew to speak out against an injustice when, in speaking out against Israeli state and military injustice, I am accused of not being a good enough Jew or of being a self-hating Jew? This is the bind of my current situation.

Let me say one other thing about Jewish values. There are two things I took from Jewish philosophy and my Jewish formation that were really important for me... well there are many. There are many. Sitting shiva, for instance, explicit grieving. I thought it was the one of the most beautiful rituals of my youth. There were several people who died in my youth, and there were several moments when whole communities gathered in order to make sure that those who had suffered terrible losses were taken up and brought back into the community and given a way to affirm life again. The other idea was that life is transient, and because of that, because there is no after world, because we don't have any hopes in a final redemption, we have to take especially good care of life in the here and now. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

I realized something, through your way of thinking. A classic mistake that people made with Gender Trouble was the notion that body and language are static. But everything is in dynamic and in constant movement; the original never exists. In a way I felt the same with the Diaspora and the emancipation. Neither are static. No one came before the other. The Diaspora, when it was static, became separatist, became the shtetl. And when the emancipation was realized, it became an ethnocratic state; it also became separatist, a re-construction of the ghetto. So maybe the tension between the two, emancipation and Diaspora, without choosing a one or the other, is the only way to keep us out of ethnocentrism. I suppose my idea is not yet fully formulated. It relates to the way I felt that my grandfather was open to the language of exile while being connected to the land at the same time. By being open to both, emancipation and Diaspora, we might avoid falling into ethnocentrism.

You have a tension between Diaspora and emancipation. But what I am thinking of is perhaps something a little different. I have to say, first of all, that I do not think that there can be emancipation with and through the establishment of state that restricts citizenship in the way that it does, on the basis of religion? So in my view, any effort to retain the idea of emancipation when you don't have a state that extends equal rights of citizenship to Jews and non-Jews alike is, for me, bankrupt. It's bankrupt.

[American Dream]

“But historicizing homosexual identities without also historicizing heterosexual identities, thus leaving unchallenged the supposedly transhistorical ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality, lost much of the value in historicizing sexuality in the first place. Subjects accept the search for their truth in sex precisely because of the presumption, much trumpeted by priests and physicians, that heterosexuality is ‘natural’, a word that means many different things, but always means ‘transhistorical’. Unexamined, heterosexuality functions as ideal signification, as a purportedly universal category beyond the contingencies of history.”

— William B. Turner

[American Dream]

“The division of labour by sex can therefore be seen as a “taboo”: a taboo against the sameness of men and women, a taboo dividing the sexes into two mutually exclusive categories, a taboo which exacerbates the biological differences between the sexes and thereby creates gender. The division of labour can also be seen as a taboo against sexual arrangements other than those containing at least one man and one woman, thereby enjoining heterosexual marriage.”

— Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Linda Nicholson (ed.), The Second Wave Reader, p. 39.

[American Dream]

Kathleen Hanna interview on GRITtv

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues -- Here's Why That's Terrifying

By Brad Jacobson, AlterNet
Posted on November 23, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/153203/co ... terrifying


Do you think that granting corporations the rights of people in the Citizens United case is disturbing? Then contemplate the fact that corporations have been patenting human genes and tissues at alarming rates -- in the last 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone.

As the Occupy movement fights against the unmitigated influence of corporations on our lives, author Harriet Washington's new book, Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future, is a timely wakeup call to protect the very essence of human life from the medical-industrial complex.

In a recent phone interview with AlterNet, Washington discussed the dark implications of corporate medical patents, how we find ourselves in this nightmarish scenario and what needs to be done to stop medical research profits from trumping human health.

Brad Jacobson: The main piece of legislation that opened the door for corporations to begin patenting human life was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Can you tell us how this law was sold to the American people?

Harriet Washington: Just to recap what the Bayh-Dole Act is, basically it was a law that permitted for the first time universities to legally transfer their patents to private corporations, to sell them, license them. That had been virtually prohibited in the past because most of these new inventions had been developed with tax dollars. And the thinking had been, "If you develop things with our tax dollars, then we shouldn't allow them to go to private corporations who can establish a monopoly with their patents."

It was sold to the American public primarily by [former Indiana Sen.] Birch Bayh, who of course partnered with [former Kansas Sen.] Bob Dole. But it was Birch Bayh who made the argument that we have all these patents lying around, no one's doing anything with them. If we let corporations get them, then they'll develop them into needed medications. So people were told this is the root to get the medications and treatments that we need.

However, what's really interesting, though -- I went behind the scenes and of course I saw that, rather than being any kind of groundswell of popular support, the law actually passed on the last hour of the last day of the last congressional session because of some good ol' boy networking.

BJ: Also in 1980, the legal counterpart for this corporate opening came with the court decision Diamond v. Chakrabarty, in which a scientist's patenting of an oil-eating bacteria was contested. But how is this different that what had been patentable in the past?

HW: It's certainly a good question because living things have been patented in the past. That's a misconception people have. Louis Pasteur had patented a yeast. Takamine [Hideo] had patented adrenaline. Numerous living things had been patented before. However, there were often legal challenges by people who would say, "This patent is not really valid because you can't patent a product of nature."

So in 1980, when Ananda Chakrabarty, a researcher at General Electric, decided to try to patent some bacteria that he had intensively engineered to be able to "eat crude oil," the U.S.] patent office said, "We'll patent the process you use, but we're not going to patent these bacteria. They're living things and only inventions can be patented. We can't patent products of nature."

So Chakrabarty and General Electric sued and the patent office decided to defer to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided that, yes, living things can be patented, which is interesting because Chakrabarty insisted he was shocked by the ruling. He said that he fully expected he had made his case, but he was surprised they decided to more broadly permit the patenting of living things.

But now it's being applied to things where the contribution of the researcher is nowhere near so extensive. So, of course, genetic sequences found in our body are being patented. Medically important animals -- like Harvard's OncoMouse which is guaranteed to get cancer -- are being patented. And so these products of nature, including products of our bodies, being patented has created huge problems for us.

BJ: In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman, was being treated for cervical cancer without success at John Hopkins University. Without Henrietta's or her family's knowledge, John Hopkins University researcher Dr. George Gey obtained a sample of her tumor from her doctors, which eventually led to his creation of an immortalized cell line used in the development of the polio vaccine as well as drugs for numerous other diseases. It also generated millions of dollars in profits around the world, yet the Lacks family was never compensated, nor did they even have health insurance at the time. How was this case a harbinger for what would follow in the context of patient rights in regard to medical patents?

HW: I actually met with the Lacks family in the mid-1990s. I wrote about her case and I think there are some things that have been promulgated that are not exactly true. It's true the family didn't have any health insurance and weren't compensated. But they never evinced concern about being paid. I think that was a focus that had been imposed later by people who I think had the best intentions in the world. Some of the people who wrote about them were very concerned they weren't paid.

But the Lacks family expressed consistently that their mother had been a medical benefactor and no one knew this. Her name had been changed in the accounts so that nobody knew who she was. They were very upset about the autonomy.

And they didn't like having been lied to of course.

BJ: You mention in the book the paternalistic nature that Dr. Gey had taken. The excuse he'd used was that he changed her name to protect her, but they didn't really accept that.

HW: Her husband thought they didn't want the world to know that this is a black lady helping science. And that seemed to be the prevailing attitude in the family. They resented that.

BJ: What's the positive impact, however, of this cell line having never been patented?

HW: So what happened to Henrietta Lacks was an abuse of her and her family. But the dissemination of her cells very cheaply, not free but very cheaply, made a lot of medical advances possible. The reason they weren't patented was this was before 1980 and it wasn't legally possible. It also wasn't part of the medical culture then. Medicine was being practiced by people in university settings. They had different motivations, not money.

Now it's impossible to speculate about exactly what would've happened. But had her cells been patentable, had this happened after 1980, there's a good chance that certainly recognizing their value, Dr. Gey or John Hopkins or some other researcher would've taken a patent out on it and then they would've, as is usual, only licensed them to the researchers and universities that would have paid them a hefty fee. Or perhaps not licensed them at all.

Which means the polio vaccine probably would still be developed, but it might've cost a lot more money than it did. It might not have been available to everybody as it was. So those are the differences.

BJ: John Moore, a leukemia patient in the 1980s, first had his spleen removed in 1976. Unbeknownst to him, it would lead to the creation of a cell line estimated to be worth $3 million by the pharmaceutical company Sandoz. Moore sued his doctor who had removed the spleen after he discovered the doctor had filed for a patent on his cells and proteins that led to this lucrative cell line. Can you talk about the difference between what happened in the case and its impact?

HW: When John Moore was initially treated, the Chakrabarty law had not been decided yet. Bayh-Dole hadn't been passed. So, as living things, his cells weren't eligible for patenting either. However, once these rulings were passed, his doctor, Dr. David Golde, and the University of California, immediately responded by taking out a patent on his cells.

His doctor recognized that his spleen and his cells were medically important. He knew that, but it was before he could take a patent out on them. I'm sure at that point he never dreamed that in a few years he would be able to take this collection and sample of his cells and tissues -- that he had assiduously kept alive and was researching -- and take out a patent on them and control the profits from them.

So when the law was passed, Dr. Golde had already established a laboratory to do research on it. He and another researcher and the university owned the patent. Now they went to Sandoz and established a contract for $3 million -- $3 million 1980 dollars. Then [Sandoz] could plan to acquire huge profits. Before that, Dr. Golde had been interested for the usual reasons. He would be able to hopefully develop some medically useful compounds and, more to the point, become famous and get some publications. Now, there was a great deal of money to be made.

BJ: You write that today, however, as opposed to the case of Henrietta Lacks and John Moore, it is normal tissues in large quantities that provides a lot of wealth for people who hold patents. So are you saying that everyone is now vulnerable to the same kind of appropriation as what happened to Lacks and Moore?

HW: Yes. Lacks and Moore's vulnerability was a bit different, but it was the same principle. And today, we're all vulnerable to that. We're vulnerable because if we undergo surgery in certain hospitals, such as the Harvard University hospitals or Duke and a number of others, we are given a consent form to sign, which will give a private corporation, in many cases Ardais [Corp.], the rights to any tissues or cells taken from our body, often described in the consent form as "discarded and worthless." But they're not worthless or the corporation wouldn't have bought them.

Also, in many cities in this country -- in fact, in more than half the states -- have something called medical examiners laws, or presumed consent law. These laws dictate that a medical examiner or coroner in these cities, when someone dies, can take any tissues from your body that could have some medical value. Then they're transferred to a broker or two, who then eventually transfers them to surgeons or hospitals. At each step, there is a hefty fee paid. And then the institution pays a fee. So although it's against the law technically to sell an organ or sell these tissues, from my point of view they are actually being sold.

And then of course medical research conducted by private corporations or in which private corporations pay medical institutions to conduct research according to the corporations' dictate, which means they control it. So one thing they have begun doing is exploiting a 1996 law that governs medical research, which says that if you are in the United States and you're the victim of a trauma -- shot in the chest, a heart attack, hit by a car -- medical research can be conducted on you without your permission.

I have spoken to research subjects who had no idea that they were used in medical research until a member of their family told them. We all expect that we're going to be offered informed consent. In medical research, this is an exception.

BJ: Is there any legislation you know of today that is being introduced to address these issues?

HW: I know of no legislation that is being promoted or that even has been suggested. I think it's because so few members of the public even know it's going on. You can't fight something if you don't know it exists. And I find it really interesting that, although a few medical journals have called me and interviewed me about this, it's not being published someplace where a great many people will read it.

I wrote an article for a magazine -- and I'll be prudent and I won't name it -- a popular magazine with a very large circulation. They said they loved the article, they'd love to publish it, right up to the moment where I got a phone call saying they were killing it and then they paid me for it anyway.

BJ: And what about the "consensual" situation, when a patient is made to sign a consent form right before going into surgery? That might be legal, but it's also very misleading, no?

HW: That's consensual. But the legality of doing this is actually kind of shadowy. I don't think it's been well established whether it's legal or not to take somebody's tissues in surgery without asking their permission first. So what happened is researchers and corporations had decided to cover themselves by getting people in this scenario to sign a consent form and the difficulty, as you suggested, is whether people really understand what they're signing.

But the piece of paper, the consent form, is not informed consent. If you have a signed consent form in a file and you go to court, that's not proof of informed consent. That's only one piece of evidence to support your claim that you informed the person. Actual informed consent is an ongoing process between the researcher and the subject. You have to not only tell them all the information about the study, about what's known about the consequences, but also if new information emerges you have to keep the person apprised of that. That's informed consent.

What they're doing is they're having signed a consent form to try to prove that they've given these people informed consent. But the truth is, you know, if you're a hospital patient and it's six o'clock in the morning, and you're still groggy from your sleeping medication from the night before, you're woken, handed a sheet of forms to sign for surgery you presumably need and there are staff people standing around you...that's not conducive to informed consent.

Most patients don't read it, but that's kind of logical. You know, you need this surgery. The last thing you want to do the second before you go under the knife is antagonize the people who are doing your surgery.

BJ: How do these medical patent laws actually impede innovation?

HW: A really good example of this, because the court case is about to go to the Supreme Court soon, are the gene patents on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that predispose women to breast cancer. They're very important genes and there are nine patents held on them by Myriad Genetics. And Myriad Genetics has behaved like a very smart capitalist. For a long time, it has minimized the number of people whom it will license access to the genes. Researchers who have been working with the genes, trying to find better treatments for breast cancer, have received cease and desist letters from lawyers at Myriad's behest, saying, "We control this gene, we hold the patent, you can't work on it without our permission," which they often decline to give.

So that's a problem right now. Then look at the pricing of the test for women who want to characterize their risk for breast cancer. And most women of course don't need this test but the direct-to-consumer advertising by Myriad confuses women and really makes it look like more women do, which will of course increase their profits. It will also unnecessarily scare a lot of women and induce many more women than should to pay Myriad's $3,000 to $4,000 fee.

A recent development is especially nasty because now you can pay the $3,000 to $4,000 fee, but there's also an additional test, a relatively new test, based again on the genes. And if you want that, you have to pay an additional $600. Obviously if you're a woman at risk, you're not going to consider that $600 optional. So that's a huge amount of money.

BJ: What happens if within the legal framework of today's medical patent process a researcher seeks a more altruistic route, similar to what Jonas Salk did with the polio vaccine? Is that even possible today or is that individual crushed by the system?

HW: It is possible today and that's a great question because one of the really exciting positive things that has happened is that, you know, certainly not just me and people like me who are criticizing them -- a lot of medical researchers, as I said before, are seeing how damaging this paradigm is and they're coming up with viable alternatives.

The Gates Foundation is probably the best-known example. Bill Gates has worked with a longstanding initiative to bring vaccines to the developing world -- its acronym is GAVI. He's also worked with the governments in the developing world and come up with a model called Advanced Market Directives. Basically, what they're doing is they're coming up with funds and pooling their funds and saying to pharmaceutical companies, "If you will develop, for example, a malaria vaccine that's cheap and works well for the developing world, we will pay you, we will make sure you earn a profit." And they were successful. They came up with a vaccine -- quite a few actually -- but one in particular costs $70 in the United States. It only cost 50 cents in Nigeria because of their model.

Now, I hasten to say, we're not out of the woods yet because all of the pharmaceutical companies that did it -- which I think is wonderful that they're going along with the model and giving it a try -- but they counted this as something beneficial that they were doing. Which is not exactly the case.

They're doing this because they're paid and it's being guaranteed by others. And GAVI, the group that helped guarantee the payment is already $3 billion in debt because of it. So that means that even though this has worked in a couple of cases, I'm worried that it may not be a viable long-term model.

We've seen this before when pharmaceutical companies, for example, provided sleeping sickness medication, Eflornithine. They provided it only on a short-term basis, for about five years, and then they left. Now the people who are at risk, and I think that's like 60 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, don't have access to that drug. So to me that's a cautionary tale because we need long-term solutions.

And there are other groups of researchers around the world who are also embracing a different non-corporate model. A man named Alan Edwards in Toronto put together a coalition of a lot of researchers. His strategy is one that has worked before for the government. He does not want their discoveries patented. So what they do is every day -- whatever they've been working on that day, whatever solution they come up with, whatever they've identified or characterized that could be medically important - they put it on the Internet. They make it public knowledge, which means it can't be patented.

So there are strategies that are now being embraced to work around corporate control of medical research.

BJ: How has the medical patent gold rush affected the accessibility of life-saving vaccines for widespread diseases?

HW: Well, simply because maximizing the profit on the patent is the focus, not curing the maximum number of people. Michael Kremer, a Harvard economist, put it best. He pointed out that during the period between 1975 and 1997, of the 1,233 new drugs the pharmaceutical industry devised, only four of them were drugs designed for people in the developing world.

The bottom line is that, although it's possible to devise vaccines that will save the lives of people in the developing world, it's not done because people there cannot pay the inflated prices a corporation charges. So they ignored these people in the developing world.

And as I point out in the case of African sleeping sickness, where Eflornithine was found affective against it, people in areas affected by African sleeping sickness cannot afford to pay high prices for drugs. So after that couple of years where they provided it for free, they stopped making it for African sleeping sickness and the exact same molecule, this Eflornithine, is now the active component in Vaniqa, which is used in the West to help women rid their faces of unwanted hair. So women pay $50 a month for Vaniqa, but people in the developing world can't pay that $50 a month to keep themselves alive, to protect themselves against sleeping sickness.

BJ: In your book, you cite a 2009 study from the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that one-third of U.S. clinical trials are conducted abroad, mostly in developing countries, where drugs can be tested more cheaply. Can you discuss the inequity of the fact that most of the test subjects partaking in these trials -- on which corporations are saving millions to perform there -- will either never be able to afford, or have a need for, the drugs being tested on them?

HW: Usually both. But even in the cases where it's a drug, as you say, that could help them, it's not going to help them because they're going to be charged the same high prices as people in the West. And knowing they can't afford it, they don't even provide it to people in that country.

What I find fascinating is that if you think about it, these people in the developing world are providing opportunity to conduct clinical trials that are a lot cheaper and a lot faster for these corporations. Corporations would have to pay a lot more money if they conducted those trials in the developed world. And so actually we're the ones in their debt.

We have a new cancer medication, for example, that has been devised by testing it on people in the developing world so that you and I can take it without fear that we're going to drop dead, hopefully. We owe the people in the developing world that. The corporations save so much money by using those people for their tests. Speed is very important because it maximizes the amount of patent time so they can make more profit from their patent. Also the FDA requires that studies be completed within two and a half years, which is sometimes difficult to do.

So providing them with drugs that they have made possible would seem to be the very least we could do. Yet there's constant reluctance to provide medications for people in the developing world.

BJ: Clinical trials in developing countries can also involve testing subjects in dangerous circumstances that wouldn't even be legal in this country. You point to the example of Pfizer's clinical trials for an antibiotic in Kano, Nigeria in the 1990s. What went wrong?

HW: They tested Trovan in Kano and they waited until -- this is quite typical, actually -- they waited until there was a meningitis epidemic to test their meningitis drug. First of all, these are people who typically go their whole life without getting any medical care. They can't go to the doctor, can't buy medicines. When they're sick they just hope and do the best they can to treat each other.

So there's an epidemic. You've got people, especially children, dying wholesale. And Doctors Without Borders had flown in and were working feverishly around the clock trying to save as many children as they could. Doctors Without Borders had a huge tent there for a clinic. Pfizer flew its people in and set up shop right next to them. The people of Kano could not discern the difference between the Pfizer tent and the Doctors Without Borders tent. All they knew was that there were doctors and medicines in both tents. If they couldn't get into one, they went into the other one.

Now I don't believe they received informed consent. First of all, the records were lost. Pfizer [said it] lost the records that would've proved informed consent. Then Pfizer produced some letters from local doctors and local medical boards saying there was informed consent, but they were clearly forged. One doctor admitted that they were forged. Another doctor pointed out that the medical institution that supposedly approved this trial had not even been set up until a year or two after the trial had ended. So all the evidence points to the probability that these people did not receive informed consent.

But then I also ask myself, even if they had gotten informed consent, did they have a real choice? They wanted their children to get any kind of medicine. So it was inherently a coercive environment.

And Pfizer would give this medication and it did not follow prescribed methods of conducting research in this country. Although some of the things they did were permissible in their country. For example, the young girl whose fate I chronicled -- she was given Trovan, didn't get any better, in fact she got worse. And had she been in, say, Connecticut or New York, if she had gotten worse, then they would've switched her from experimental therapy to one that was known to work. They didn't do that there. And she died, other children died, other children went deaf, other children had all kinds of neurological problems. In fact, there were so many deaths and so many permanent serious problems resulting from it, the FDA would not approve the drug.

In the aftermath, there were these lawsuits and finally Pfizer had to pay out a fine. But the fine they were asked to pay was just dwarfed by their amount of profits every year. It's just the cost of doing business to them. Certainly in a case like this, considering the final cost to them, you could argue it was worth it to them.

BJ: Do you see U.S. Occupy protests as a direct outgrowth of this kind of corporate encroachment on our lives?

HW: That is a parallel that's made very often. And I'm just going to plead ignorance here. As much as I read and as much as I think about that, I think that there's the same frustration with the degree of control corporations have over things that should not be controlled by monetary interests. And yet that's our habitual practice of medicine today. So as far as the Occupy Wall Street protests echo that sentiment, then I agree with them. There are other elements of course in which I think there is not a parallel between them and the people I talk about.

I began this book being really concerned about poor people, people in the developing world, people who I thought and I still think are impacted most heavily by this. But I quickly came to realize that it affects all of us. I mean it's also middle-class people. Because the drug prices are so high and because the corporate control of medical research is so extensive and our health policy so extensively protects them, middle-class people are not really faring any better. Middle-class people are caught in the same bind.

So I guess that's sort of a qualified yes [laughs].

BJ: Since the Citizens United court ruling, we're living in a time where, in effect, corporations are considered people, while simultaneously corporations are buying the property rights to the very essence of human life. You've eerily described them as our "biological landlords." This already has a nightmarish quality today. In regard to the future of medical patents, do you see the pendulum swinging back or the situation growing worse?

HW: Unfortunately, if history's taught us anything, it's that things can always get worse. But I don't think it will. The pendulum can swing back, but it's going to need a big push from us. It's not going to swing back on its own. Because the most powerful people in this country are being well served by this. The very wealthy people don't have the worries that most of us have. And corporations certainly don't have the worries we have. They're not disturbed by their high prices. They're constantly defending them. They're not disturbed by the lack of care for people in the developing world. They have no problem claiming that, "Hey, don't blame us -- it's not our patent, it's their poverty."

It can be done, but we're going to have to push it. And the way to push it is to repeal Bayh-Dole and find those lawmakers. There are lawmakers out there who are trying to repeal parts of this problem, patents on genes, for example. And researchers also are beginning to see that his system is dysfunctional and starting to come up with different models.

So it's going to be up to us to push the pendulum in the other way

[American Dream]

http://www.zcommunications.org/feminism ... max-haiven

Feminism, Finance and the Future of #Occupy - An interview with Silvia Federici

Occupations and the Struggle over Reproduction

By Max Haiven and Silvia Federici

Friday, November 25, 2011


Silvia Federici is a veteran activist and writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Born and raised in Italy, Federici has taught in Italy, Nigeria, and the United States, where she has been involved in many movements, including feminist, education, and anti-death penalty struggles. Her influential 2004 book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, built on decades of research and activism, offers an account of the relationship between the European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rise of capitalism. Federici's work is rooted in a feminist and Marxist tradition that stresses the centrality of people's struggle against exploitation as the driving force of historical and global change. With other members of the Wages for Housework campaign, like Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and with feminist authors like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Federici has been instrumental in developing the idea of “reproduction” as a key way to understand global and local power relations. Reproduction, in this sense, doesn’t only mean how humans reproduce biologically, it is a broad concept that encompasses how we care for one another, how we reproduce our physical bodies depending on our access to food and shelter, how culture and ideology are reproduced, how communities are built and rebuilt, and how resistance and struggle can be sustained and expanded. In the contest of a capitalist society reproduction also refers to the process by which “labor power” (i.e. our capacity to work, and the labor force in general), is reproduced, both on a day to day basis and inter-generationally. It was one of the main contributions of the theorists of the Wages For Housework Movement to Marxist feminist theory to have redefined reproductive work in this manner. In this interview, an extended version of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Politics and Culture, Federici reflects on the #Occupy movements, their precedents and their potentials.



Max Haiven: We hear a lot of talk about the originality of Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupations. But people have been pointing out that this movement isn't unprecedented and it has been building in various ways for a long time. What do you see as the feminist roots of the Occupations, both in New York and more broadly?

Silvia Federici: This movement appears spontaneous but its spontaneity is quite organized, as it can be seen from the languages and practices it has adopted and the maturity it has shown in response to the brutal attacks by the authorities and the police. It reflects a new way of doing politics that has grown out of the crisis of the anti-globalization and antiwar movements of the last decade, one that emerges from the confluence between the feminist movement and the movement for the commons. By “movement for the commons” I refer to the struggles to create and defend anti-capitalist spaces and communities of solidarity and autonomy. For years now people have expressed the need for a politics that is not just antagonistic, and does not separate the personal from the political, but instead places the creation of more cooperative and egalitarian forms of reproducing human, social and economic relationships at the center of political work.

In New York, for instance, a broad discussion has been taking place for some years now among people in the movement on the need to create “communities of care” and, more generally, collective forms of reproduction whereby we can address issues that “flow from our everyday life (as Craig Hughes and Kevin Van Meter of the Team Colors Collective have put it [1]). We have begun to recognize that for our movements to work and thrive, we need to be able to socialize our experiences of grief, illness, pain, death, things that now are often relegated to the margins or the outside of our political work. We agree that movements that do not place on their agendas the reproduction of both their members and the broader community are movements that cannot survive, they are not “self-reproducing,” especially in these times when so many people are daily confronting crises in their lives.

Great sources of inspiration here have been the response of Act Up to the AIDS crisis, the anarchist tradition of ‘mutual aid,’ and, above all, the experience of the feminist movement which realized that “the revolution begins at home” in the restructuring of our reproductive activities and the social relations that sustain them. In recent years, this merging of feminism and political ‘commoning’ has generated a great number of local initiatives - community gardens, solidarity economies, time banks, as well as attempts to create ‘accountability structures’ at the grassroots level to deal with abuses within the movement without resorting to the police. Often these initiatives seemed to remain confined at the local level and lack the power to link up to confront the status quo. The Occupy movements show us that this need not be the case.

The Occupy movement is also a continuation of the student movement that has grown throughout North America and internationally over the last decades in response to the commercialization of education. The very concept of ‘occupation’ connects it with the tactics that students adopted over last two years, from New York to Berkeley and beyond, and especially in Europe. For all their contradictions, these student struggles expressed the same need: not only to oppose the authorities but to produce moments of collective experience and collective reproduction on different terms than the competitive logic of neoliberal capitalism. It is significant that some of the young people who started Occupy Wall Street (OWS) were City University of New York students who, in June of this year, were involved in the creation of ‘Bloombergville,’ an around-the-clock encampment in front of New York City Hall protesting the budget cuts planned by Mayor Bloomberg’s administration.

I also cannot help thinking that the experience of the ‘tent cities’ set up by homeless/evicted people over the last few years across America has contributed to shaping the collective imagination. They also evoke the historic memory of the Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army of the Great Depression, where thousands of out-of-work families and veterans camped out, both to demand government action and to support their own survival.

MH: Many people have criticized the Occupations for having a relatively narrow focus on the crimes of finance, rather than the broader systems of power of which finance is just a part. What do you make of the movement's general orientation?

SF: I do not think that this movement is exclusively concerned with the crimes of the finance world. A visit to OWS or some of the other occupations spreading across the country would demonstrate the great variety of issues discussed and the diversity of organizing going on, as well as the diverse composition of this movement. Occupations are becoming a point of convergence for all kinds of struggles: opposition to the war, opposition to the prison system, support for healthcare and education reforms. A movement of teachers and students to abolish student debt is presently being coordinated through the occupations, at least in the United States. On November 21st an anti-student debt movement was officially launched at OWS, its members pledging to refuse to pay back their debts when the pledge reaches one million signatories [2]. The Occupy movement is also developing an alternative to representative politics and becoming, in effect, a school of direct democracy and self-government.

I must add that, in the present economic context, is it impossible to take on Wall Street’s ‘crimes’ without confronting the entire economic system at the basis of its abuses. As with any other movements, there are different strands within the Occupations. Some participants may be satisfied with just obtaining a more regulated banking system, or a return to Keynesianism. But the economic crisis is bringing to light, in a dramatic way, the fact that the capitalist class has nothing to offer to the majority of the population except more misery, more destruction of the environment, and more war.

Occupations, in this context, are sites for the construction of a non-capitalist conception of society and a coming together of the practices that, in recent years, have begun to concretize this project. A sign of the broad scope of this movement and its capacity to resonate beyond downtown Manhattan is that in Egypt the people of the squares have recognized the commonality between their movement and that of OWS or Oakland.

As some have put it, the Occupy movement is the first worldwide anti-capitalist movement to appear in a long time in the US. It is the first movement in this country to give expression to the growing revolt against the present economic and political order, which is the reason why it has spread so rapidly and has excited the collective imagination to such a degree.

MH: Where do you see the Occupations going? What will be critical for their success?

SF: There are already two encouraging developments under way. On one side, the Occupations are organizing a network that is circulating experiences, information, forms of mutual support, and articulating a perspective for the construction of nationwide and worldwide mobilizations. There is now a plan to hold a general assembly on July 4, 2012 in Philadelphia that will be a test of the ‘constituent’ power of this movement, by which I mean the ability of the movement to create new models of social cooperation.

I agree with Mike Davis, however, that the movement should not be too eager to produce programmatic demands and should concentrate, instead, on making its presence more visible, on reaching out to other communities, and on ‘reclaiming the commons.’ This is beginning to happen with the migration of the occupations into the neighborhoods, which is essential to reconstruct a social fabric that has been dismantled through years of neoliberal restructuring and the gentrification and suburbanization of space.”

The most crucial test, however, will be whether the Occupy movement has the capacity to address the divisions that have structured the history of this continent. Clearly, you cannot have an egalitarian society without undoing the legacy of centuries of enslavement, genocide, and imperial warfare that have left a deeply scarred and divided social body. Confronting racism, colonialism and other forms of oppression and exploitation, both within the movement and in broader society and its institutions, will have to be the centerpiece of the drive for the production of a new “constitution,” whatever forms this may take.

A positive sign is that the composition of the movement is already quite diverse, although the degree of diversity varies in different parts of the country. It has been a long time since we've seen a movement bringing together students, nurses, veterans, radicals and trade unionists with immigrant- and people of color-led grassroots community organizations. The key questions will be whether this movement can be a bridge to the millions of incarcerated in the US jails, or to the many more who cannot take their money out of the banks because they have no bank accounts, and whether the movement's agenda can include an end to the criminalization of undocumented immigrants and the policy of deportation.

MH: Is feminism critical for this movement, and how so?

SF: Feminism is still critical for this movement on several grounds, and I am encouraged by the fact that many young women today identify themselves as feminists, despite a tendency in past years to dismiss feminism as merely “identity politics.”

First, many of the issues that were at the origins of the women’s movement have not been resolved. In some respects the position of women has worsened. Despite the fact that more women have access to paid employment, the root causes of sexism are still in place. We still have an unequal sexual division of labor, as reproductive work remains primarily a woman’s responsibility, even when she works also outside the home, and reproductive work is still devalued in this society. Though we are less dependent on individual men, we are still subject to a patriarchal organization of work and social relations that degrades women. In fact, we have seen a re-masculinization of society with the glorification of war and the increasing militarization of everyday life. Statistics speak clearly: women have the longest work-week and do most of the world’s unpaid labor, they are the bulk of the poor, both in the US and around the world, and many are practically sterilized because they cannot afford to have children. Meanwhile, male violence against women has intensified rather than diminishing, not only at the individual level but also at the level of institutions: in the US, for instance, the number of women in jail has increased fivefold since the ‘80s.

For all these reasons feminism is crucial for the Occupy movement. You certainly cannot have a ‘sustainable’ movement if the unequal power relations between women and men and male violence against women are not addressed.

I am also convinced that the Occupy movement has much to learn both from the egalitarian vision of society that the feminist movement developed in its radical phase -- which was also an inspiration for the queer and the ecological movements. Consensus-based decision-making, the distrust of leaders (formal or charismatic) and the idea that you need to prefigure the world you want to create through your actions and organization, these were all developed by radical feminist movements. Most importantly, like the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the radical feminist movement began to address the question of unequal power relations in the movement and in society by, for instance, creating autonomous spaces in which women could articulate the problems specific to their conditions. Feminism has also promoted an ethics of care and sisterhood and a respect for animals and nature that is crucial for the Occupy movement and, I believe, has already shaped its practice. I have been impressed by the tolerance and patience people demonstrate to one another in the general assemblies, a great achievement in comparison with the often truculent forms of behavior that were typical in the movements of the ‘60s.

MH: Where do you see feminism in this movement and what do you make of the gender dynamics as you have observed and encountered them?

SF: I do not want to be unduly optimistic, but it seems to me that feminists are well represented in this movement, though it would be naïve to imagine that this is sufficient to eliminate sexism from it. As a recent article published in The Nation on this subject pointed out, “women are everywhere”: they facilitate and speak in the general assemblies, organize educational forums, make videos, run the information center, speak to the press, and circulate information through scores of blogs on the net [3]. At OWS, before the eviction, they created an all-women space, a tent “for women by women,” that functioned as a safe autonomous zone. This is what I learned in my visits to OWS and from my online reading about other occupations.

What is especially promising is the diversity of women who are active and present in the occupations: this is a movement that brings together white women and women of color, young women and women with white hair. I also see the influence of feminism in the fact that this movement places its own reproduction at the center of its organizing. The lesson of the feminist movement –which is that you cannot separate political militancy from the reproduction of your everyday life, in fact you must often revolutionize your reproduction relations in order to engage in the struggle—is now being applied on a broad scale, including the creation of ongoing free food distribution, the organization of cleaning and medical teams, and the activities of the working groups that are daily discussing not only general principles and campaigns but all the issues concerning daily co-existence.

That OWS is no longer a standing camp, after its eviction from Liberty Square, does not invalidate this point. Hundreds of occupations are now taking place all over the country and around the world. The loss of the camp at Liberty Plaza in New York is only the start of a new phase of the movement. Hopefully it will be a phase in which the building of reproductive commons will take on a new meaning and dimension. Soon, in fact, the movement must begin to pose the question of how to create a reproductive network outside of the market, for instance connecting with the existing urban farming projects and other elements of the solidarity economy.

MH: Since the 2008 financial crisis, we've heard a lot of attempts to understand and critique the system, both from liberal critics and from Marxists and others on the Left. But we haven't heard a lot of feminist explanations. What does a feminist critique of finance capitalism look like?

SF: Finance capitalism is not different in nature from capitalism in general. The idea that there is something more wholesome about production-based capitalism is an illusion we must abandon. It ignores the fact that finance capitalism is also based on production and unequal and exploitative class relations, although in a more circuitous way. A feminist critique of financial capitalism, then, cannot be substantially different from a critique of capitalism in every other form. Nevertheless, looking at finance capitalism from the viewpoint of women, we can gain an insight into some of the ways in which our everyday reproduction and the relation between women and capital have changed.

We see first that financial transactions—through credit cards, student loans, mortgages—have become part of our everyday means of subsistence. Like male workers, many women too have come to rely on them to make ends meet and satisfy their desires. This by itself indicates that the world of finance is not a fictitious sphere of capitalist relations, but reaches deeply into our day-to-day lives. It also indicates that, increasingly, women now confront capital directly, rather than through the mediation of the male wage, as was the case for women who worked exclusively in the home, or through the mediation of the state, as was the case of women on welfare and other forms of social assistance. Indeed, through the entanglement of finance capital in the working of our daily lives, financialization has become one of the main grounds of confrontation between women and capital, and this is an international phenomenon.

We see the same dynamics with the development of micro-credit in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Micro-finance has become one of the main tools by which international agencies have attempted to bring a whole population of women formerly engaged in subsistence economies under the control of global monetary relations by encouraging them to see themselves as market entrepreneurs and take out loans for small enterprises. While these programs have been heavily promoted by investors, banks and “development” professionals in the global North, they have proven one of the most contested policies directed towards women worldwide, since far from ‘empowering’ women (as the rhetoric goes) they are turning them into debtors and, in this way, transforming their daily micro-reproductive/marketing activities into sources of value-creation and accumulation for others. In some cases (e.g. in Bolivia in 2002) women have besieged the banks to protests their debts and the extortionist policies banks and lenders have enforced. There have also been cases of women who have hanged themselves because they could not pay back their debts.

This situation shows that when we speak of a “financial crisis” we must be very careful not to assume that we speak of one reality alone. For surely the massive indebtedness that women have incurred both in the North and the South, through credit cards, loans or micro-credit, is a financial crisis in itself!

As for the other financial crisis, the one that capital declared in 2008 and that continues to this day, we can see that it is one more twist and turn in a process that has been unfolding now for 35 years, starting in the mid 1970s, when I wrote my first paper on women and the crisis. [4].

Since then, global capitalism has waged a continuous attack on people’s means of subsistence, women’s in particular. This has been especially devastating for women in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The difference, today, is that the crisis has been unleashed on populations that, by now, have nothing left, and the attack has also been extended to relatively affluent people in Europe and North America. But its objectives, and the effects it has on women, are predictable. Not surprisingly, the reports on this subject coming from international institutions (like the United Nations) are increasingly formulaic. Once again, we hear that “the conventional conceptual frameworks used to design macro-economic policies are gender blind.” We hear of “the disproportionate burden women bear in the financial crisis,” and the negative impact this will have on their access to education and healthcare. We are told that the crisis “threatens women’s meager gains” and will lead to a further expansion of women's unpaid and ‘informal’ labor. How many times have we heard these laments, often from women (self-described feminists included) who are totally complicit with the institutional system that is responsible for the policies that have caused the crisis in the first place, over which now they shed crocodile tears?

Clearly employers and the state once again expect women to absorb the cost of the new austerity programs that are being introduced and to compensate both for the cuts in social services and for the increased costs of food, fuel and housing with extra labour, both in the home and outside the home. This is what British Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ program is about: downloading the costs of reproduction from society and government onto women – never mind demanding a greater share from corporations and capital, despite the fact that they depend on that reproduction. The financial crisis is an excuse to extend these policies. But if the Occupy movement is a sign of the response to be expected to this new assault on our means of reproduction in the months to come, this crisis may very well backfire.

MH: How can we improve inter-generational learning in our movements?

SF: In the ‘60s there was a saying that if you were over 30 you were already on the other side. It never worked that way and the contribution of activists from the older generation was always important for the movement. But activists today are certainly more open to intergenerational learning. The question, however, is what kind of structures are necessary for knowledge to be transmitted and for intergenerational cooperation, in both directions, to be made possible.

Building archives and reproducing materials are all-important steps, but they are not enough. I think activists today need to rethink the history of the movements of the ‘60s -- their contributions and limits, and the issues they left open -- in the same way as those movements reconstructed the history of the labor movement and the old left of the pre-war and post-war periods. I am thinking, for instance, of the feminist movement. Its history has been so distorted by the media and by its subsumption within the United Nations that many young women in recent years have dissociated themselves from it. But they are discovering that they still face many of the same problems that led to the establishment of ‘women’s liberation.’ I am referring here not only to the fact that there is still evidence of sexism within social movements, but that, in the best of cases, women today can achieve some economic independence only at the cost of “becoming like men,” that is, at the cost of accepting work regimes that make no space for other relations: children, friends, families, and political activism. I have also heard, over and over, young women complaining of the balancing act they must perform in a workplace that expects them to be both ‘feminine’ and competent at the same time. Add to this that many of the achievements of the feminist movement today are in jeopardy. For instance, Access to abortion is constantly being attacked and reduced. In the US, several states are trying to pass laws which greatly extend the government’s control over a women reproductive capacity, for instance making it possible to charge pregnant women with murder for engaging in any activity that can be construed as jeopardizing the foetus. Presently, about 50 women are jail under this charge. Indeed, over the years, we have seen that no gains women have made can be taken for granted. I am convinced that learning the history of the struggles of the past is crucial in this context as they enable us to understand what forces we up against.

More generally, there is a great amount of knowledge that should be recuperated so that younger activists do not repeat the same mistakes as those who have gone before them, so that we can better understand what is new and specific about today’s struggles, and also so we can learn to anticipate the strategies our rulers will deploy to try to defeat us. That said, it is clear that the present Occupations are a great moment of intergenerational exchange, and I am confident that, as the movement grows, younger activists will see the need to re-appropriate the radical past, and that activists like myself from an older generation will be able to celebrate what is new in this movement, rather trying to put new wine into old bottles.

References
[1] http://www.whirlwinds.info/
[2] http://occupystudentdebtcampaign.com/
[3] http://www.thenation.com/article/164197 ... going-away
[4] “Wages For Housework and the Crisis” (February 1975) Presented at the Second Wages For Housework International Conference, held in Toronto in 1975.