In the concept of the Captive Maternal, Dr. Joy James examines the maternal strategies to protect and support their children under conditions of extreme oppression where there are few prospects for success, emancipation, or even survival. The Maternal is captive not merely in Silvia Federici’s sense of being unpaid reproductive labour in capitalist extraction for profits, but also is trapped in a dilemma with regard to how she prepares her children for a world where their prospects for emancipation in the prevailing system are unlikely. When material conditions determine social mobility and ‘freedom’ how does the mother besides instilling a sense of justice also discipline their child to adapt to the oppressive status quo and to seek their best prospects within it, in competition with others in similarly unfavourable and desperate circumstances. As an introduction to our reading, here's a short extract from her mentor Angela Davis' Women Race and Class which demonstrates how Ruth Schwarz-Cowen's feminist history in “More Work for Mother” could have been revolutionary had it embraced historical materialism.

“As industrial capitalism approached consolidation, the cleavage between the new economic sphere and the old home economy became ever more rigorous. The physical relocation of economic production caused by the spread of the factory system was undoubtedly a drastic transformation. But even more radical was the generalized revaluation of production necessitated by the new economic system. While home-manufactured goods were valuable primarily because they fulfilled basic family needs, the importance of factory-produced commodities resided overwhelmingly in their exchange value—in their ability to fulfill employers’ demands for profit. This revaluation of economic production revealed—beyond the physical separation of home and factory—a fundamental structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy of capitalism. Since housework does not generate profit, domestic labor was naturally defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labor.” A. Davis Women Race & Class

Interview with Dr. Joy James on abolition and The Captive Maternal

video the architects of abolition

video Captive Maternal Love and War Stories

reference: Anarchism and the Black Revolution, The Definitive Edition by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

reference: Malm, A. (2018). In Wildness Is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature, Historical Materialism, 26(3), 3-37.

read in circles session: politicaltrauma2018.pdf

Baruch's slides