å Sunday, March 12th, 2017

Silvia Frederici analyses the development of a capitalist economy in a different way that Marx did. Marx explains in a logical and historical way the development of capitalism through his concept “primitive accumulation” which is all about expropriation of land from peasantry, exploitation of slaves, the looting in the East Indies which all of it lead to the accumulation of labor never seen in other times . However, he fails to analyze the prominent role of women in the 16 and 17 centuries during capitalism. Frederici argues that land privatization and the price of revolution were not enough to reach the proletarianization, but the degradation of women’s power.

With the expropriation of land women where the ones who suffered the most because since they had no source to work and make money, it was so hard for them to support themselves. “Women’s labor” or reproductive labor continued to be paid but decreased significantly, so it was nothing compare to men’s wage. As a result women become depended on men, and it allowed the state to make an accumulation of capital out of the unpaid women’s labor.

After the general crisis in the 16 and 17 centuries where millions of people died for hunger, reproduction and population growth became an important topic to gain European power again, so the state have total control over women’s bodies. Through the witch-hunt women were not allowed to take any birth control or anything that prevents reproduction. New severe penalties and punishment were imposed for women agains contraception, abortion and infanticide. In fact, in France every woman who became pregnant had to register her pregnancy. If the child died before baptism, the mother was sentence to death whether guilty or not. Consequently,  it was a time of terror for women and midwives who were soon replaced by doctor because they were incompetent in the labor room and furthermore  “complicit”  of the crimes. And therefore male doctors became to be seen as the true givers of life. Women’s wombs were territory of the state at the service of capitalist accumulation (89) , working with their bodies as machines for the reproduction of population and obviously workers for their labor.

Even for proletarian women it was difficult to find work, even simple work. They could just “work” at home, which was not considered even work, but domestic tasks or housekeeping whereas if a man would the same word it was considered productive. So the only career women could do was marriage. All of this injustices made women unable to support themselves, which leaded them to prostitution the only way to subsidize. Frederici talks about this degradation of women’s work force.

In Silvia Frederici’s work “The Caliban and the Witch” she describes, in various points, how in the transition of feudalism to capitalism between the 13th and 17th centuries, the degradation of women became prominent. It all began when the communal lands and open field systems were closed off and became privatized, so the cooperation of the labor of agriculture was affected. Individual contracts of labor became more favorable than collective ones, thus producing inequalities in wage earnings and spiking an increase in vagabonds. This greatly affected families, which disintegrated, and most predominantly, women. Even elderly women were affected, no longer being able to be supported by their children, having to steal, and borrow to survive.

As the enclosures (privatization of mass areas of land) began to spread, women suffered the most. It became difficult for women to become vagabonds because misogyny was growing and they would ofter succumb to male violence. Women were also less able to do much on account of children and pregnancy. Women could not become soldiers nor help out the army in other ways because they were expelled from following the armies as they have done before. Furthermore, women were not included in occupations for wage and when they were it was reduced to one-thirds of the reduced wage men made. Many women turned to prostitution as a means of survival for themselves and children.

In the later part of the 17th century, to aid in the rapid decline of the population there were laws that were passed that upheld marriage and penalized celibacy. This was where witch hunting was born, where women would be criminalized for exercising control over their own bodies and not using it for the sole purpose of repopulating. Any form of birth control would be demonized: celibacy, contraception, abortion and infanticide, and severe punishments ensued. In France, women were sentence to death if pregnancies and births were not registered and/or if infants died before baptism. During this time, women were executed in large numbers.
Also during this time, woman’s labor was deemed non-work and their bodies were seen as a natural resource. With the continued privatization of land, came a new sexual division of labor. Women were forced and used only for reproductive purposes. Through women there was capital to be made by producing a constant supply of workers. Women were subjected to a double dependency: on employers and on men.

In Silvia Federici’s work, In The Caliban and the Witch, she makes a strong analogy that struck me with powerful imagery. Upon discussing and referencing Marx, she makes a connection between capitalistic development and colossal concentration camps. Automatically, my thoughts drew back on my prior knowledge of Hitler’s sovereignty and concentration camps created to dehumanize Jews, and to ultimately, use in the process of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Federici even mentions later, after using this analogy, that in the seventeenth century, there has never been more exploitation of workers that resulted in “genocidal proportions” (p. 66) than under the Nazi government. The power in her analogy emphasizes the acknowledgement of the enterprise culture, or creation of capitalism, being responsible for its own sort of concentration camps including coerced workers, or slaves, who were/are exploited, and ultimate control over a fabricated hierarchical system. Within this system of hierarchy, women have been and still remain considerably of lower ranking, and yet, are still significant assets when degraded for accumulations of wealth in a capitalist political economy.

During pre-capitalist Europe, women had some social cohesion or connections among other women at “The Commons,” where social gatherings and festivals often took place. Unfortunately, this area and these events were abolished, along with a rapid decline and closing of agricultural labor. As a result, land and property was lost and men and women had to find alternative ways of making a living. Women were “being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers,” (p. 75). Women are emphasized as taking on more suffering due to the fact that women were either pregnant, expected to take care of their children, and ultimately could not take on jobs that needed physical strength and skills. Any jobs that were available to them were not even worth it, considering that their compensation was exceptionally lower than that of males, even in a society that solely hired very cheap labor.

 
This transition into capitalism meant a transition into social conflict, impoverished statuses, scarcity of food, lack of labor, production and consumption. There were many rights, many that included and were led by women, against capitalism, but ultimately, this transition also meant a reliance for capitalism’s production, distribution and exchange of wealth and goods. Regarding women once more, there was even more power of authority evident, where the system gained concern about a growth in population, and where women were held legally responsible and were supervised for mass reproduction. At one point, celibacy was penalized, in the interest of maintaining reproduction of the work force, which, obviously, is the responsibility of the only humans who can actually reproduce. “…Procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation,” (p. 89). Federici brings acknowledgement to control over and degradation of the womb, to contraceptives, to reproduction, all as a means of an investment and industry for capitalist economies. Women in history were integrated only to serve men and marriage contracts, to carry children and for continuation of humanity, for cheap labor and to contribute to gradual increases in the capitalist economy.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism started in the 16th and 17th centuries when land privatization and enclosures began to take place. People were removed from their land against their will and once they were removed they lost their means of production and sustenance.

Before the transition to capitalism women had access to land (commons) and the food they planted. They had control over the land and resources and were able to take care of themselves. They did not necessarily need men to tend to the land and they earned income from the crops the sold. But once the transition to a capitalist society began to take shape “women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource”(pg 97).

The economic and population crisis of the 16th and 17th centuries led to a “bio-power regime” which basically created policies that the state used “to punish any behavior obstructing population growth” (p. 86) which made reproduction and population growth a space where the state exercised control.

Federici argues that control over women’s bodies is linked to this crises. This is where the criminalization of reproduction began. In Europe “severe penalties were introduced in the legal codes to punish women guilty of reproductive crimes”(p87). Repopulization and reproduction of the labor force was what women were reduced to.

The degradation of women and the accumulation of wealth came in the form of state control over reproduction and the construction of women as the non-worker. In constructing the woman as a non worker it relegated them to the home (private sphere) which led to the devaluation of their labor. Women’s work was then viewed as a “communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will”(p.97).

The state controlled women’s reproduction and procreation through strict laws and penalties for using contraception, surveillance of pregnant women by midwives, neighbors and even family members. Women’s was so closely survelled that women were “required to register every pregnancy”(p.88).

Women were viewed as reproductive machines forced to reproduce the labor force. Women’s “wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation”(p.89). Women were not only constituted as reproductive laborers without being paid but because they were relegated to the private sphere their labor became invisible while at the same time reproducing the conditions that enabled men to go to work.

Bodies were  viewed as “raw materials, workers and breeders of the state”(p.88). The witch hunts were another way that women were degraded. Women were the ones that resisted the enclosures and physically removed many of them. Women are the ones that stood in protest during meat and food shortages. It was these women that were targeted by the witch hunts because they resisted.

Over time women were not to live alone. They could not be seen in the streets alone and even at some point could not even be seen peering out of a window. The state continued to enact strict laws that  criminalized any activity women took part in. Prostitution was previously an acceptable practice but as the attack on women continued prostitution too became criminalized. .

The family unit (where a women lost most of her power). Women and children were considered the subordinate  class according to the new definition of the family in which the husband was responsible for disciplining and supervising them. Once women married their husbands were generally paid the wages that she  worked  for even though she worked to produce for the market The Feminization of poverty , male as bread winner, patriarchal wage were the instruments and tactics used by men and the government to strip women of social status, economic opportunity to ensure access to sex and the female body but also to continue to reproduce the labor force.

The rights for women to own land or conduct business or  to enter contracts  were all taken away, Women declared “legal imbeciles”

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3094897/Readings_S17/Student_Work_12_16.pdf

The book Caliban and the Witch written by Silvia Federici draws us to a broad arguable notion of viewing women transitioning in time, from the servitude of kings, nobles and lords to a system based on property for profit. At the same time, Federici, in her chapter “The Accumulation of Labor and Degradation of Women: Constructing ‘Difference’ in the ‘Transition to Capitalism’”, further takes us in viewing the irregularities of physical work buildup demanded during systematical economic shifts. The force requirement and expectation of women’s role during various past time periods, which actions partaken by women were not optional.

Such actions taken by women in past centuries, from feudalism to capitalism, has brought the author to an appeal in viewing the start of capitalism, known as “Primitive accumulation”, to not only being exclusively examined by men (Marx included), but by also allowing women such as the author to input her insightful lens on how historical events portrayed have a concealed form of exploitation. Point out from the differences of women’s role in society and the creation of goods by working: in how women would have to be working as sex slaves and forcing them to produce working descendants; no equal financial earnings to men and tolerating them; becoming the new machine of body to birth children.

Federici by analyzing Marx’s work in regards of the birth and development of capitalism addresses the audience by pointing out Marx’s suggestion of not involving women in the role they played when it comes to the evolution of capitalism. Needless to say, the author places women at the center of it by placing them as a powerful workforce who unfortunately meet their destruction by being labeled as “witches”. The evolution of capitalism, from a starting point to its gradual development, starts becoming barbarous towards women, to the degree that it designs a thralldom necessity with the work force to meet those economic needs of surviving. The hidden agenda of capitalism, creates a divide between men and women.

Capitalism projects itself in Europe and the Americas by slave trade, enslaving farmers, having enclosures, witch hunting women, physical abuses, imprisonments of people who stole goods and to those who falsified their inadequacy to work. Slavery between Europe and the Americas even when if it was meant to be diminished, took a change that benefited private owners. Those included in the slavery were Native Americans and Africans.

As mentioned by the first chapter, capitalism was built on sexism and racism. Feudalism, the financial society before capitalism, was based on raids, murder and control (2004; 19). With capitalism on the rise, people were curious of the new constraints, considering feudalism’s break down. Socioeconomics were changing to where the commoners were possibly able to move up in the economic ladder. However, women and minorities were affected by this decision. For example, Native Americans and Africans were exploited in the 1600s from colonists to profit (2004; 19). This was one of the most visible signs of racism and capitalism. Europeans were able to take another nationality and race, and keep them as slaves. This exploitation of a group of people led to the immense wealth of another group, starting the racial socioeconomics of the United States. How women were exploited was based on the fact that many were degraded in the process of the Industrialization of Western nations.

As people entered the New World, also known as North America, the woman’s role began to change. Beforehand, women were considered somewhat important in feudalism, being in the center of life for multiple roles (2004; 28). With capitalism, this role shifted. Thanks to the policies of privatizing land and owning property, individualism was expected for agriculture. Since this was becoming a greater need, women were expected to help the men when needed, but also not considered as important. Instead, their role was expected to juggle manual labor and housework. However, as this practice continued, women became to become more vocal and then restrained (2004; 30). The brief freedom felt during this period was immediately taken away, and continued to spiral out of control.

Women were constrained to their personal spaces in their households. They were expected to be fully responsible for reproduction and keep the family stable with their work. Thanks to this, women were becoming more financially dependent on males, while unable to make their own wage (2004; 31). This made males able to own property and become successful in the capitalist society. However, women were only as successful as their husbands, and were risking to lose this status at any time, even if their husband passed away. As Industrialization entered lives, women were expected to enter the work force to support industries. However, they were not given the same wage compensation, rights or privileges as their male counterparts (2004; 40). Males were given these economic pillars, improving capitalism at the expense of women.