Assignment 06 – Federici
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.
