Amaia Pérez Orozco - The Feminist Subversion of the Economy: Contributions for a Life Against Capital

Through a rigorous, relentless exposure of the destructive logic governing capitalist development, Amaia Prez Orozco sets the foundations for a feminist politics capable of subverting the myths propagated by capitalist economy and radically transforming the conditions and ends of our social reproduction. The Feminist Subversion of the Economy is a must, not only for feminist movements but for all engaged in the struggle to create a more just society.Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero

Amaia Prez Orozcos contributions for life against capital remind us of our humannessand the contributions of ecofeminism to dismantling hierarchies, exploitation, and invisiblenessin order to fulfill our collective responsibilities to establish a good life for all. The Feminist Subversion of the Economy well articulates the road to creating a clear commitment to achieve the interconnections and solidarity that will create and sustain a better world. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

Amaia Prez Orozco skillfully recenters the feminist critique of contemporary capitalist economics on the practices of sustaining life. The result is analytically rich and politically provocative.Kathi Weeks, author of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

In the last decade, feminist political economy has experienced an efflorescence, as a generation of new thinkers has critically revised the practice of reading the interconnected spheres of misery produced by capitalism, in all its debilitating forms. Why? Because such heterodox, ruptural feminisms offer the most robust theorization of the multidimensional confluence of ecological devastation, state-sanctioned racism, deteriorating mental and physical well-being, colonial exploitation, reliance on unpaid work (including care), heteropatriarchal division, and social murder. These crises are synthetically and historically produced in and through capitalism, a global totality and the epicenter of these problems.

Amaia Prez Orozcos The Feminist Subversion of the Economy is not just the exemplar of this critical-analytic tradition, this book is a further contribution towards the construction of a solid base from which to fight; a utopian horizon; a life-sustaining collective pedagogical project of buen convivir; and a feminist degrowth transition. This book will compel you think differentlyand even better, with others!as to how we can create a life-sustaining economy.Kai Bosworth, author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the 21st Century

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy fires a thousand shots at the deadly, destructive, and exploitative economy at the heart of capitalist growth. These shots come from many perspectives interwoven in this carefully researched and passionately argued feminist textthat is, the many perspectives of ordinary people who constitute the labor necessary to reproduce this world and better worlds still; those silenced, exploited, discarded by a global capitalist system that equally disavows and destroys our rich but imperiled ecological world; and those whose organized power everywhere constitutes the forces that can overthrow the conditions of its imprisonment, and that of our planet.

Amaia Prez Orozco reminds us that we all have contributions to make for a shared life of dignity and autonomy in balance with our other-than-human world; contributions that demand we organize against capital, colonial violence, climate catastrophe, racism, and sexism. The feminist and ecological analysis, the militant tools and methods, the refusal of the lies and myths that prop up a crisis-making world order, and the pluralist vision of a life worth living found in this book warrant collective study and coordinated action. Saru Jayaraman, lawyer, activist, and author of One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America

Any glimpse into the future forecasts care work as an ever-growing portion of our economy. The Feminist Subversion of the Economy is a lush provocation that reexamines the fundamental work that nurtures and sustains communities around the globe, shedding new light on the internationalization of precarious and feminized labor. Amaia Prez Orozco lifts up the chosen family as a queer, anticapitalist network, one of many ways to pivot away from the defanged third sector as delineated in the Global North, and toward a transformative social solidarity economy. Such cooperative economics are essential for our own thriving. The book serves as a timely reminder of the centrality of reproductive labor in making, and therefore remaking global systems through this type of queer, feminist, antiracist praxis. In doing so, it recasts feminized labor as the nexus of so many seemingly disparate crisesfrom ecology to gender exploitation to capitalism itselfand therefore the crux of solidarity through building power and new modalities of living together. Esteban Kelly, Executive Director of the US Federation of Worker Co-ops, cofounder of AORTA

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy: Contributions for Life Against Capital

Amaia Prez Orozco

Translated from Spanish by Liz Mason-Deese

2022 Amaia Prez Orozco

This edition 2022 Common Notions

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

This book was supported by a grant from Accin Cultural Espaola (AC/E).

ISBN: 978-1-94217-319-9 | eBook ISBN: 978-1-94217-367-0

Library of Congress Number: 2022934106

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Cover illustration: The Flying Chairs from The Sedition Series, a collection of hand-pulled prints created in London between 2014 and 2018 under the artistic name Alex Reisen.

Cover design by Josh MacPhee / Antumbra Design

Layout design and typesetting by Graciela Chela Vasquez / chelitadesigns

Printed by union labor in Canada on acid-free, recycled paper.

The Feminist Subversion of the Economy: Contributions for Life Against Capital

Amaia Prez Orozco

Translated from Spanish by Liz Mason-Deese

Brooklyn, NY

Philadelphia, PA

Translating from One Crisis to Another

Liz Mason-Deese

This book was written in the wake of one crisis, the financial crash and economic crisis of 2008, and translated in the midst of another, the COVID-19 health/social/economic/political crisis. In that earlier crisis, a conflict between capital and life became apparent when public funds were used to bail out banks and corporations, but not the people affected by the crisis. While people were being left homeless and hungry following evictions and loss of income, there was a massive transfer of wealth to private corporations and their owners. In that crisis, certain transformations of the world we were living in became apparent: widespread precarity in both labor and life, the violence of financial and extractivist capitalism. Of course, much of the world had already been experiencing these crises; indeed, a global perspective poses a new chronology and map of crisis.