Assign 6
Toni Mitchell
Assign 6
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici makes a compelling argument stating that capitalism indeed on a constant supply of women’s unwaged labor, not to mention the violence and loss that coms along with it; imposing on them the reproduction of the workforce as forced labors without pay. What I fail to understand is why does capitalism continuously feel the need to degrade women? If it does concern wages; then theres the blame if of the “misbehaving wife.” Federici expresses synthesizes the racist and sexist dimension of discipline that capital seeks to impose in bodies and also the disobedient figures from which they resist it.
It is important the question of reproduction because we are experiencing an unprecedented crisis of reproduction. Sure, The demand for a domestic wage denaturalized female slavery. However is one is to pay closer attention, wage is not the ultimate goal, but merely a strategy put in place to achieve a change in the power relations between women and the capital. Reading Federici, i’ve come to the realization that labor force is not a natural thing, but that it must produce itself. This is to say that capitalism develops
rather in society. That society then becomes a gigantic pie of capitalist relations, as a fundamental terrain of capitalist accumulation. For this reason the discourse of domestic labor, of gender difference, the construction of the female model, would be considered fundamental. Today, for example, globalization in regards to reproductive labor allows us to understand why, for the first time, women are the ones driving the migratory process
I admit, Feminist struggled for equality under capitalism from the 1960s through the ‘80s (and even before then), but there has been some progress; not much, but some. If we look at the world, and not only the situation in the United States, Europe, or Japan, we see that what we refer to as globalization and the massive entrance of women into wage work is much less uniform than usually imagined.
Witch Hunts for example, Witch-hunts were instrumental to the construction of a patriarchal order in which the bodies of women, their work, and their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the State and transformed into economic resources. This is to say, the witch-hunters were less interested in punishing a certain transgression than they were in eliminating generalized forms of female behavior that they no longer tolerated and that had to become seen as abominable in the eyes of the population.
