Translating Difference and the Common

Abstract

This essay explores how racialized and gendered subjectivities might produce a common space of social cooperation that can break down the capitalist hierarchization of society. It analyzes both the capitalistic valorization of difference and the production of resistant and militant subjectivities that exceed and overturn capitalistic segmentation and dispossession. Within this framework I consider the production of the common through praxis and mode of organization, bringing to light the necessity for heterolingual translation of difference in order to interrupt the homogeneity of the capitalist language of value. The aim of this article is twofold. On the one hand, there is the need to better understand the present time and its violent contradictions. On the other, there is the necessity to bring to the fore race and gender differences in order to neutralize the social valence of in-difference and to challenge and transform the current social order.

Keywords:

• Common
• Class
• Race
• Gender
• Subjectivity
• Translation
• Communism

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Miguel Mellino, Sandro Mezzadra, and Gigi Roggero for reading and commenting on this paper. I also would like to express my gratitude to Kenan Erçel, Yahya Madra, and especially Ceren Özselçuk for their precious remarks.

Notes

¹In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois wrote important pages on the division between white and black workers. He noted that “[the white workers,] while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white” (1998, 700).

²I am here mainly referring to Gayle Rubin's “The Traffic in Women” (1975), which argues that the functioning of the capitalist mode of production is not enough to understand the oppression of women and that greater attention is needed to ideology and culture. Nevertheless, this contribution risks removing the productive dimension from the understanding of women's oppression. Therefore, I consider another argument within feminist critiques of Marx, which refers the theme of production/reproduction as pointed out by the 1970s international campaign “Wages for Housework” (an argument mainly taking root in the works of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James [1972] and later developed by Alisa del Re [1979]). This critique brought to light the cost and the productive dimensions of reproductive labor, the neglect of which (also by Marx) has largely supported and boosted the undervaluing of women's labor and justified their exploitation.

³I discussed this topic in Curcio (2008).

⁴Certainly, this example also reveals the long history of colonialism, exploitation, and disruption that has characterized the history of India[0].

⁵On the feminization of labor, I am mainly referring to the work of Christian Marazzi (2006) and Cristina Morini (2007).

⁶The idea of refusal I am using is Tronti's: that is, refusal as the interruption of the relations of production (1966, 234–52).

⁷Here I have in mind the reflections on subjectivity by subaltern studies and, in particular, Dipesh Chakrabarty's work (2000) and the analysis of Chandra Mohanty (2004).

⁸I want to thank Alvaro Reyes for suggesting that I develop this point.