ABSTRACT
This chapter presents several concepts that together constitute a framework useful for analyzing class relations and class struggle as they are racialized and gendered. This theoretical-methodological framing is especially valuable in assessing actual struggle because it prioritizes those at the very bottom of a global hierarchy of labour power: Indigenous women and women of colour, along with other class fractions of the unwaged. When these mobilize, the whole hierarchy is destabilized. This destabilization is an expression of the general class interest and therefore is potentially revolutionary. This is in contrast to resistance from the upper echelons of the hierarchy, which are usually reformist, and at the expense of those at the very bottom. The Black and female fraction of the dispossessed is not just the most immiserated by capitalist threats and exploitation. It is also the most engaged with self-sufficiency and is consequently most autonomous from capital’s commodity chains. This relative autonomy is an essential grounding for the defense and expansion of the commons: that is to say, ecofeminist ecosocialism. This new society promises to be characterized by solar-fueled commoning and the end of the deadly relationships among people and between people and extra-human nature that have characterized the epoch of fossil capitalism.
Key to this framing is the understanding of unwaged people as part of the working class, who, in resisting exploitation, are resisting the power of capital. Another premise is that women’s work in producing labour power is work producing the most important commodity in the capitalist system. It cannot be downgraded to the mere reproduction or “care” so ubiquitous in liberal feminist discourse. This special kind of exploitation cannot be eliminated through system recuperation reforms such as “gender sensitization” or a more equal division of household chores. It can be eliminated only through women overcoming dispossession by way of class struggle. Ethnicized, gendered class struggle always targets both the exploiters and their allies from among the exploited, who together constitute a “male deal.” Women’s exploitation under capitalism would be impossible were it not for a special kind of deal between selected exploited men and capitalists. Male workers, in particular white men, receive a range of benefits in return for disciplining women under their control to ensure that labour power and low-priced consumer goods are produced to capital’s specifications. Men who refuse and oppose this deal readily form alliances with insurgent women. These “ethnicized, gendered class alliances” then confront collaborating men and capitalists directly. Out of this complex of racialized, gendered class relations there arise myriad expressions of new and “ancient futures” that constitute global commoning.
