Assignment 6
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.
