Our Mother Ocean. Mariarosa Dalla Costa

       TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

      Silvia Federici

      OUR MOTHER OCEAN, the fruit of a collaboration between internationally renowned feminist political theorist Mariarosa Dalla Costa and sociologist Monica Chilese, addresses one of the most crucial issues of our time: the ongoing destruction of our seas. Since time immemorial, the sea has served as the source of our life on the planet, as provider of not only livelihoods but knowledge, beauty, spiritual strength. All of this is now at risk, however, of dying, as the oceans are turned into the poisoned receptacle of the world’s waste. Of this destruction Our Mother Ocean traces the main aspects, providing a great wealth of information about the consequences of industrial fishing, aquafarming, marine pollution, and the continuing failure of the institutional initiatives presumably predisposed to protect the Earth’s ecosystems. What makes the book special, however, is that its denunciations of the many ways in which the ocean is depleted of its immense wealth is accompanied by a passionate reflection on what the sea has signified in the history of humanity, as reflected in its literature, its myths, its philosophies and religions. The book also provides a history of the rise of the first worldwide fishermen’s movement, reminding us that the protection of Earth’s waters is as crucial in its economic, political, and spiritual implications as that of its lands and forests.

      What the ocean signifies for life on the planet is powerfully evoked by Chilese’s initial chapter, which takes us through the changes in the relationship between human beings and the sea, from its representation as a symbol of the infinite, the unknown, the sacred, a “theater of the universal struggle between life and death,” to its utilitarian reduction to a “usable object,” a container of exploitable resources to be freely appropriated and commercialized. Chilese’s central theme is that the ocean is far more than “a mass of water.” It is the producer of the oxygen we breathe, of the clouds that cool the planet, of the food on which most of the world’s populations depend for their survival. Against this background, her description (in Chapters Two and Three) of the dangers now threatening the life of the sea should give a jolt even to readers cognizant of the ecological devastation produced by industrial technology, shaped as it is by competition and the quest for the maximization of profit.

      It is now commonly acknowledged that our seas are being emptied of their fauna and flora due to overfishing, that the relentless pouring of industrial and urban contaminants in their waters is destroying the coral barriers and creating miles-long archipelagos of trash, and that the list of ecological catastrophes affecting the oceans is expanding by the day. Barely had we recovered from the horrors generated by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico when the Fukushima disaster, whose end is not in sight, confronted us with the nightmarish prospect of thousands of tons of radioactive material being daily poured into the ocean’s body, undoubtedly causing a further collapse of its network of living organisms. Still, Chilese’s detailed documentation of the devastation caused to fish stocks and the marine environment by the operations of trawlers, aquaculture, the mining of the seabeds, and the release of all sorts of contaminants into the seas paints an alarming picture, precluding any complacency or the hope that the present degradation of the ocean may be reversed through minor reforms.

      What we learn from her account is that in fishing, as in other spheres of life, technological progress has only expanded the capacity for destruction. Modern fishing boats now use sonar, satellites, ecosounding gadgets—all technologies developed for military purposes—to ensure that nothing escapes their nets, although much of the fish thus caught are ultimately rejected and thrown back, now as waste, into the water, for only what fetches a good price on the market is considered worthy of being retained. Another important lesson offered by Chilese is that the same dangers that threaten the life of the ocean also threaten the survival of the communities whose livelihoods depend on the sea, causing the disappearance of knowledge, forms of employment, and communal relations. This last theme, however, is most developed in the second part of the book, where Mariarosa Dalla Costa examines the effects of the industrialization of fishing on coastal communities, especially in the Global South, and their resistance to this process, leading to the formation of the world’s first fishermen’s movement.

      Dalla Costa is a writer widely known in U.S. radical and academic circles since at least the early seventies, when her foundational essay “Women and the Subversion of the Community” inaugurated a feminist critique of Marxism that transformed not only the debates within the women’s liberation movement but Marxist theory itself, also providing the manifesto for the International Wages for Housework Campaign of which Dalla Costa was, with Selma James, the cofounder. Based on the redefinition of women’s unpaid domestic labor as a quintessential form of capitalist production, insofar as it is a production of labor power, Dalla Costa’s theoretical work has since placed the question of social reproduction at the center of her political and theoretical activism. However, while in the 1970s the focus of her analysis was