Date: 2014
Nationality: italian
Description: “Call me a former politician, a former member of Parliament, a former teacher, but never call me a former partisan. Because I will be a partisan forever“.
Lidia Menapace was born in Novara (Piedmont, Italy) on 3 April 1924. A life spent in study, research, militancy for democracy and against every war.
In her contribution to Lunàdigas, Lidia Menapace talks about common goods and a type of economy that is not often talked about, which she calls it the economy of reproduction.
“There are a whole series of jobs that do not produce goods, for example, motherhood in terms of the use of resources is a job, but it does not produce goods; politics is a job but it does not produce goods. So, if it is a job, it will have its own way of working, which I call care. Care is not a job, it is a way of carrying out a job; all reproduction jobs have to be done with care because they are jobs that are aimed at people, so you have to do any reproduction job with care, from the presidency of the Republic to the janitor of the nursery. And who can talk about reproduction without thinking about a female body? If politics has war in its womb, sooner or later it will give birth to it, but if politics has in its womb the being together of citizens it generates polis, the place of human coexistence”.