Dies-non: refusal of work in the 21st century

Abstract

My comments aim to cast light on a specific political proposal that can arise from a discussion of the topic of the ‘refusal of work’ and its implications for a social radical change. Autonomist, anarchist and feminist activism, have been and are the main sources of a long-term conceptual and empirical work on the refusal of work. Refusal of work is a very complex concept that has traversed history and is reduced for uncritical dominant common sense to unemployment, laziness, idleness, indolence but it is in reality one of the basic foundational qualification to think any radical change. Among many important intuitions, the added value of Silvia Federici’s work is to have offered a different perspective on the refusal of work discussion and how it can be expressed to develop different forms of communing. Her work provides the backbone for this brief excursion on the issue of the refusal of work. Emerging and consolidated social movements, for example in Southern Europe, have, consciously or not, taken position, often contradictorily, regarding what refusal of work means. In the context of current neoliberal capitalism, an increasing structural unemployment and precarious jobs are one of the trademarks of austerity policies to ‘revive’ economies. Drawing on Federici’s insights on the women exclusion as a useful way of thinking about the spatial dimension of these issues in feminist theory, this article looks at examples of prefigurative politics that define their strategies of refusal of work building significant spatial patterns.

Keywords:

• commons
• feminism
• neoliberalism
• radical needs
• refusal of work
• squatting

Acknowledgments

I have to thank Silvia Federici for her incredible capacity of analysis, perseverance and support. I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to Sutapa Chattopadhyay for her significant effort to introduce Silvia’s work among geographers and her important personal encouragement. I thank three anonymous reviewers that in a very constructive way suggested important improvements that I hope I have incorporated in the article. I am also sincerely grateful to Andrea Aureli for suggesting further important readings to sustain the arguments of the article. I dedicate this article to Simonetta Tosi that open the Consultorio Autogestito di via dei Sabelli 100 in 1974 and taught me the implications of non-sexist use of the language.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Pierpaolo Mudu

Pierpaolo Mudu is a geographer collaborating with the faculties of ‘Urban Studies’ and ‘Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences’ at the University of Washington in Tacoma (USA). Latest publications: (2017) Pierpaolo Mudu and Sutapa Chattopadhyay (Eds.). Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy. London and New York: Routledge); (2017) Andrea Aureli and Pierpaolo Mudu (2017) Squatting movements: Reappropriating democracy from the state. Interface, 9(1): 497–521; (2014) Self-managed Social Centers and the right to urban space, in Isabella Clough Marinaro, Bjørn Thomassen (Eds). Global Rome (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press); (2014) Ogni sfratto sarà una barricata: squatting for housing and social conflict in Rome in SqEK, Claudio Cattaneo and Miguel Martínez (Eds.). The squatters movement in Europe (London: Pluto). He is also the editor of a special symposium for Antipode on the Italian squatting and ‘occupy’ practices published on March 2018.