| This study contributes to demonstrating how capital has organized, united and disciplined the exploited, both waged and unwaged, to resist their exploitation; and how, in the instances presented, peasant women have been at the forefront of these persistent, and increasingly global movements against capitalist enclosure. Kenyan commoners' world historic struggles provide critical examples for activists, scholars, commoners and others, of the reconstruction and defense of a life-centred subsistence political economy.; The dynamics of popular struggles for the gendered commons in Kenya between 1870 and 2007 are traced through an analysis of fifteen instances of struggle, including short lived uprisings and long-term social movements. Special attention is paid to the gendered and ethnicized class character of Kenyan social movements and to the subsistence content of the relationships being wrought in the process of 'globalization from below.' This approach reveals: (1) the ways in which Kenyan peasant women have contributed to the mobilization of social movements for subsistence over the long twentieth century; (2) the ways 'gendered class alliances' and the creative amalgams of indigenous and exogenous 'social forms,' developed and used in the course of struggle, have been able to break the 'male deals' that channeled the fruits of Kenyans' fertility into the commodified marketplace, and (3) the potential of the subsistence-oriented demands of 21st century Kenyan social movements for strengthening Kenyan and global movements for the gendered commons. |
