"The Micro-Physics of Theoretical Production and Border Crossings"
Angela Mitropoulos

Reviewing:
Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Pre-history of the Present
(New York: SUNY Press, 2003)

"The encounter between the flows of money and those who have nothing but their labour power to sell is constitutive of and constituted by new desires, new habits and new subjectivities." — Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital

1. If for Althusser it seemed necessary to read "to the letter" — by which he did not mean a kind of punctilious scholasticism but alertness to both overt meanings and hesitations — it was just as important to declare what sort of reading one is guilty of. This is as much a review of a book that brilliantly puts that approach to work reading a number of theorists as it is a reading with regard for particular struggles and debates. What interests me here, given that I share the theoretical perspectives which inform The Micro-Politics of Capital, are what I see as the more troublesome details of those perspectives as they are brought to bear on political practices, specifically recent struggles around border policing and the writing of them.

"Witches of the 'First International'"
Steven Colatrella

Reviewing Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch:
Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation
[Autonomedia, 2004]

During the 16th and 17th century, hundreds of thousands of women were burned as witches across Europe. This holocaust, unprecedented in the history of any society before or since, is at the center of this brilliant new book by Silvia Federici, an early opponent of the IMF's role in Third World countries and veteran feminist theorist. This book is the most important new work on the origins of capitalism to appear in thirty years, since Immanual Wallerstein's The Modern World System. For activists today, Caliban and the Witch is more relevant and useful to our anticapitalist struggles and movements. For the inspiration for the book came from the author's years in Nigeria where she witnessed and participated in struggles against IMF and World Bank structural adjustment and privatization of land and resources. The book is part and parcel of the anticapitalist globalization movement (or global justice movement) and links the struggles at the dawn of the capitalist era with those in Chiapas, in Bolivia, in the oil fields of southern Nigeria, in the forests of Indonesia, against privatization of communally owned land and wealth.