Jaqueline Katharina Singh
Silvia Federici is a former university teacher, political philosopher and militant in the women’s movement. Together with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and others, she founded the International Feminist Collective in 1972, which launched the international ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign. Over the years, Federici has published numerous books and essays on Marxist and feminist theory, critiques of globalisation and the concept of the ‘commons’. Here we will look at her main work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, first published in in the USA in 2004, and recently published in a new German translation.
Federici’s analysis of the witch hunts and their significance for understanding women’s oppression and capitalism has been widely discussed and taken up by left-wing feminism. Many authors now rely on the ideas developed in the book and use them as the basis for their own theories and concepts.
Basic ideas
For Federici, the views developed in Caliban and the Witch form the basis of a political-strategic orientation that assumes that the actual source of wealth and thus its increase in capitalist society does not, or at best only partially, consists in the appropriation of other people’s labour in the capitalist exploitation process:
In this sense, Caliban and the Witch shows that the body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male wage laborers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance.
‘Primitive accumulation’, which Federici sees the persecution of witches and the murder of hundreds of thousands of them as an integral part of, is therefore not simply at the beginning of the establishment of capitalism as a social formation. Rather, she sees it as a ‘universal process’ that forms a complementary, if not fundamental moment of the overall process ‘in every phase of capitalist development’. For her, colonialism, imperialism, globalisation and private domestic work represent fundamental forms of this permanence of primitive accumulation.
In the introduction, Federici summarises her thesis:
Indeed the political lesson that we can learn from Caliban and the Witch is that capitalism as a social-economic system is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations: the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the equally widespread misery.
Central to this is her thesis that the burning of witches played a decisive role in primitive accumulation. In doing so, she takes up Marx’s concept, but at the same time criticises it and offers her own (mis)interpretation. For Federici, the persecution of witches was just as constitutive for the emergence of capitalism as the ‘discovery’ of colonies and slavery as well as the enclosure and expulsion of peasants from their land. According to her, this could not be seen by Marx, as he had examined primitive accumulation almost exclusively from the viewpoint of the waged industrial proletariat as the protagonist in his view of the revolutionary process of his time and the foundation for the future communist society.
She also adds what she regards as the most damming charge that:
we do not find in his work any mention of the profound transformations that capitalism introduced in the reproduction of labour power and the social position of women … [nor does he] mention the Great Witch Hunt of the 16th and 17th centuries, although this state sponsored terror campaign was central to the defeat of the European peasantry.
Federici focuses on the position of women and the changes that the primitive accumulation brought about in the production of the commodity of labour power. For her, this also results in a different assessment of the role of capitalism in world history. She categorically rejects the basic idea of Marxism that the implementation of this mode of production creates the conditions for a socialist society (social production, formation of the proletariat as a universal class) and thus represents a necessary prerequisite for this. For Federici, a transition from the crisis of feudalism to a common, non-oppressive economy and social formation would have been possible.
Another important point is the examination of bodies. Her aim is to go beyond the existing analyses of ‘body politics’ by Foucault and various feminists by analysing the transition to capitalism and primitive accumulation. Caliban and the Witch aims to show that the body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for men: the main site of exploitation and resistance. This thesis is based on the fact that the female body was appropriated by the state and men as a means of accumulating and reproducing labour.
As we will see, this has a number of theoretical and political consequences for the understanding of the capitalist mode of production, its role in history, the revolutionary subject and the alternative to capitalism. For Federici, the necessary form of overcoming capitalism is not the expropriation of capital and the conscious socialisation of work in production and reproduction within the framework of a global, democratically planned economy, but a return to communal forms of the commons, albeit adapted to modern productive forces.
These conclusions are only briefly hinted at in Caliban and the Witch and are presented in detail in other writings and interviews. However, it would go beyond the scope of this article to subject these to detailed criticism. It is reserved for a future work. However, Caliban and the Witch forms something of a theoretical foundation for these universal political conclusions. We will therefore concentrate on a critique of her book.
Primitive Accumulation
Before we can look at and understand Federici’s arguments in more detail, it is worth starting with Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation. In Part Eight (So-called Primitive Accumulation, chapter 26, of the first volume of Capital, Marx goes into this in more detail. He understands this term to mean the historical processes that precede the establishment of the capitalist mode of production, leading to the formation of a class of owners of capital who monopolise the essential means of production and a class of agricultural workers who are ‘doubly free’—free from being tied to labour service on the land and ‘free’ of ownership of it and the means of production used. After all, capitalism did not fall from the sky: Marx mercilessly mocks the explanation given by capitalist apologists:
In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living … Thus, it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work. (Capital vol. 1, chapter 26).
The history of the emergence and implementation of capitalism as the predominant mode of production is a long process, lasting from the 14th to the 19th century, in which different modes of production prevailed and sometimes existed simultaneously in different regions due to their respective conditions.
After all, capitalism is about increasing capital by combining it with wage labour. The surplus value gained in the process is added to the total capital so that it continues to increase on an upwardly open scale of accumulation. In order for such self-sustaining capital growth to begin, however, there must first of all be capital that can be used, which cannot itself have been created through its use in the industrial production process. And there must be a class of wage labourers who have no alternative to selling their labour power in order to eke out their existence. Marx examines this process primarily for England, as this is where the capitalist mode of production developed first and most consistently:
In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market.
These include:
a) The forcible appropriation of land
In order to have sufficient ‘free’ labour available for capital, the peasantry had to be forcibly expelled from their land, which meant not only the expulsion of independent producers, but also the expropriation of the common land, ‘the commons’, in order to deprive the population of any basis for subsistence farming.
b) Bloody code/reduction in wages: The dissolution of feudal allegiances and the intermittent, violent expropriation of land gave rise to masses of beggars, brigands and vagabonds, partly out of inclination, in most cases due to forced circumstances, as they could not be absorbed by the emerging manufactories. To counteract this, the ‘bloody code’ was enacted in Western Europe at the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century. Punishments ranged from flogging and branding to execution. Under Henry VIII alone, 72,000 vagabonds are said to have been executed.
The decisive point of these measures was to criminalise all forms of alternative income and thus effectively force the dispossessed into wage labour, often even in the form of direct forced labour (in workhouses) and at extremely low wages, which conversely massively increased the profits of the resulting factory owners.
c) The formation of the capitalist class and the capitalist tenant: The expropriation of the land and the enforcement of wage labour forms the basis for the emergence of the industrial capitalist and the capitalist tenant (agrarian capitalist). Historically, commercial capital had developed earlier. However, in order for the capitalist mode of production to become dominant, it had to destroy the barriers of feudal ties to land and guilds plus the property of small landowners.
Colonialism, the plundering of the Americas, the slave trade, the expansion of national debt and the emergence of an international credit system created powerful levers for the accumulation of industrial capital, because they enabled the mobilisation of much greater masses of capital (and thus means of production and labour) than would have been possible without these catalysts.
d) Commoditisation and creation of the internal market for industrial capital: The crisis of feudalism and even more so the expulsion of the rural population led to an increasing commodification of reproduction. An important example of this is the transition from rent in kind to money rent in the feudal system. Of course, this process is even more comprehensive when it comes to the expropriation of small farmers. They now have to buy their food and their living space as commodities. This not only forces them into wage labor, but also creates an internal market for capital by expanding entire branches of production (production of consumer goods, retail trade).
The historical significance of primitive accumulation as the midwife of capitalism emerges from all of this. The violence and brutality of the process is based precisely on the fact that the mode of production first asserts itself as the predominant social relationship. It is essentially a history of the enforcement of the law of value. Once it has established itself as such, similar processes continue to take place on a global scale—but against a fundamentally different background, namely the long-established rule of large scale capital. The violence with which the dispossessed still had to be forced into wage labour has largely given way to the silent power of social relations.
Marx and Federici
Now that we have a rough understanding of Marx’s primitive accumulation, we can move on to Federici’s thesis. It is important to understand that her interpretation of history is not simply a positive addition to primitive accumulation. Rather, it contradicts Marx’s views on fundamental points, which are particularly evident in her proposals for the struggle against capitalism—and thus also against the oppression of women. But more on this later.
Federici is right that the first volume Capital’s 24th chapter rarely deals explicitly with the role of women with regard to primitive accumulation, though this is not really true of the entire first volume. But nowhere does Marx (or Engels) develop a detailed value-theoretical examination of reproductive labour under capitalism. But the explanations in chapter 24 already make it clear that the division of labour and the position of women change fundamentally because the working class family is now dependent on wage labour in order to exist at all. The fact that the daily reproduction of labour power and the reproduction of the labourers, generation after generation, takes place in the household becomes a subordinate moment that is determined by capitalist accumulation, and the production of surplus value has nothing to do with how essential this is in human terns, but corresponds to a system of exploitation based on the appropriation of surplus labour by capital within production.
At the same time, Federici reveals her own misunderstanding of Marx with her assertion, quoted above, that ‘the primitive accumulation is seen from the standpoint of the male proletariat and the development of commodity production’. As has become clear, primitive accumulation entails the emergence of a mode of production and is derived from changes in social structures, not from the standpoints or perspectives of male or female workers. However, this is not the most important point. What is more central is that primitive accumulation and thus also the emergence of capitalism itself are not understood by Federici as a result of the crisis of feudal society and the emergence of a new mode of production, but above all as a response to the rising peasants who fought for their liberation. Thus, she believes that capitalism does not represent historical progress compared to pre-capitalist modes of production.
Federici ultimately represents a different concept of capitalism than Marx. For the latter, the focus is on the self-expansion of capital through the appropriation of surplus value. This can only be created in the industrial production process (appropriation through plundering is a subordinate process). For Federici, on the other hand, the forms of capital are relative, which is why for her the new mode of production can already gain the upper hand with the dominance of commercial capital. For Marx and Engels, on the other hand, the creation of a universal mode of production, which overcomes the fragmentation of previous formations and creates a world market in the first place, represents historical progress—despite the necessarily extremely brutal and violent process of the formation of the working class and colonial exploitation that they vividly describe with great empathy for the victims and their resistance to it.
For Marx, the core of historical progress does not consist in the creation of a capitalist economy and bourgeois society as such, but in the fact that this forms a necessary precondition for the future universal development of human beings. The question of the expansion of the capital relation and the world market therefore also includes a fundamentally historical moment in another sense. As soon as it has asserted itself according to its own technical basis—large-scale industry—and the world market is established, and the proletariat emerges as an exploited class that begins to resist its exploitation, the bourgeoisie ceases to be a progressive class. Furthermore, with the development of the imperialist epoch towards the end of the 19th century, the world becomes divided up amongst the great powers and their capitalists, and the integration and subordination within the world market of the great majority of states which became semi-colonies of the great powers, which have euphemistically been called the Third World or the Global South.
Federici, on the other hand, clearly contradicts this and puts forward the thesis that the development of capitalism could have been prevented. The bourgeois revolution was not a historical progress, albeit a contradictory one, but essentially a counter-revolution. Thus, she writes:
Capitalism was a counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that emerged from the anti-feudal struggle: possibilities that, had they been realised, would have spared us the enormous destruction of human life and the natural environment that has characterised the advance of capitalist relations throughout the world. This must be emphasised in any case, because the belief that capitalism ‘evolved’ from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life still persists.
This goes hand in hand with a strong romanticisation of the Middle Ages:
The ‘commons’ presents itself as the appearance of a world in which goods are shared and social relationships are based on solidarity, not on the desire for selfish expansion.
Admittedly, she admits in a postscript:
The community of medieval serfs falls short of these goals and should not be idealised as an example of communalism.
However, the decisive criticism is missing. At first glance, the subsistence economy may represent something peaceful, even progressive, especially compared to the capitalist mode of production. However, this is not the case from a global perspective. On the one hand, the subsistence economy ties up an enormous amount of time, which—depending on the social formation—could be used for other purposes. However, if you are busy day in, day out providing for yourself or your own community, a large part of your working time is spent on this.
Furthermore, it does not offer the possibility of reacting quickly to fluctuations in demand. Capitalism, on the other hand, was the first mode of production in which the technical basis of production is constantly being transformed. It goes hand in hand with a world-historical increase in the productive forces, on the basis of which the possibility for the full development of all individuals becomes materially possible for the first time ever.
However, as long as so much cannot be produced that there is not only enough for everyone, but also a surplus of products to increase the social investment fund and to further develop the productive forces, there must always be a ruling and exploiting class that has the productive forces of society at its disposal and an exploited oppressed class.
In short, the development towards capitalism was associated with an incredible amount of violence, which continues to this day. However, when we talk about which social formation, viewed internationally, makes it possible to provide for the entire population, it is only capitalism that creates the basis for this—but it is incapable of implementing it. Large monopolies produce in abundance in an anarchic way that ignores the priority needs of the huge majority of humanity, and without regard to the maintenance of the environment—but only as long as they produce in the interests of the capitalists. Under first control and then expropriation by the working class, free from the competition for profits, these monopolies are centralised instruments of production that can be used to supply masses of people in a time-saving and effective way. They thus also lay the foundation for reducing the working time required to maintain one’s own life throughout society and for producing internationally according to the needs of humanity.
The concept of class
In addition to the romanticisation of the Middle Ages, it is striking that Federici does not have any real Marxist concept of class. For her, peasants and peasant women are proletarians, and feudal lords are not much different from capitalists. For her, the capitalists are basically not a new social class, but only the clergy, nobles and urban merchants and patricians, who use new techniques of domination because they can no longer keep the peasants down with the traditional forms of exploitation.
Rather, it seems that for her there is a populist division into exploiters and oppressed, which exist supra-historically and do not differ greatly. Ultimately, the capitalists do not really form a new class and the bourgeois revolution and the change in the mode of production do not constitute real progress. However, this is a fatal error. Let us first address the question of why it is important to make more precise distinctions between the forms of oppression, or in other words, why peasants and wage labourers are not the same thing.
As Engels recognised in the early Principles of Communism, the working classes lived in different circumstances at different stages of society’s development and occupied different positions in relation to the owning and ruling classes. In the ancient world, for example, there were slaves and their owners. Their relationship was characterised by the fact that the slave was the property of the owner. As miserable as this fate was, it also entailed significant differences to the proletariat. The slave is considered a chattel, not a member of society. Because he/she is the owner’s property, his/her existence is secured. They must be fed and sheltered by their masters in order for the master to defend their investment.
The proletarian, on the other hand, acts as a ‘free’ member of bourgeois society and must sell their labour power in order to survive. Their existence is therefore less secure by direct comparison. The same applies to serfs, the main working class of the Middle Ages, as opposed to the landowning nobility. Serfs received a piece of land in exchange for giving a share of its yield or the performance of serf labour on the lords’ land , or both. The proletarian worked with the instruments of production of another for his or her account in return for a share of the proceeds (wages). The serf gives, the proletarian receives. The former leads a secure existence, the latter does not. The serf stands outside the economic market competition, the proletarian within it.
The central question, however, is the abolition of competition between them. Slaves and serfs were largely free of this. Their way of putting an end to their exploitation was, for example, to flee to the cities and become artisans or to pay money to the lord of the manor instead of labour and produce and become free tenants. Alternatively, serfs could have chased away the feudal lord and become owners themselves. In one way or another, they thus enter the owning class and the sphere of competition.
The proletariat, on the other hand, liberates itself by abolishing competition, private property and all class distinctions. This is not a trivial detail, but shows that the previous working classes had the opportunity to rise and advance—but not the interest and material basis to abolish the system of exploitation altogether.
Capitalism
Thus, capitalism as a social form ironically lays the foundation for the liberation of the (waged) working class and all other working people themselves—something that was not possible before. These are just a few reasons why Federici’s thesis that capitalism is not actually necessary for further development is flawed. But it becomes clearer again when we examine her view that this development could even have been changed.
For her, the feudal economy was doomed to destruction, but a capitalist society did not have to ‘develop’ from it. She writes:
The development of capitalism was not the only possible reaction to the crisis of feudal power. Throughout Europe, huge communist social movements had offered the promise of a new, egalitarian society based on social equality and cooperation.
She refers, among other things, to the German Peasants’ War. In Federici’s opinion, the peasants’ uprising failed due to the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility. Engels, however, explains in his work The Peasant War in Germany that this was not the only reason. Local fragmentation made any common agreement difficult. The different levels of exploitation due to the different approaches of the masters also complicated any lasting joint action. Above all, however, the peasants were incapable of making a revolution on their own as long as the organised power of the princes, the nobility and the cities stood united and united against them. Only through an alliance with other estates could they have a chance of victory. But how could they unite with other estates, whose privileges themselves rested on exploitation of the peasantry?
Federici, on the other hand, does not really deal with the German Peasant War in detail. Instead, she lumps together different protests and makes generalisations such as
Whenever the peasants rebelled, the craftswomen and day labourers stood by them, as did the growing mass of urban poor.
It may be true that this happened—but it does not reflect the whole reality. It is also true that there were always progressive factions in the peasant wars that demanded freedom and equal treatment for all people.
Engels, for example, refers positively to the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer. However, he illustrates the dilemma of one of the most progressive and outstanding leaders of the uprising, who himself came from the emerging bourgeoisie and drew on the more radical wing of the urban petty bourgeoisie, the plebeian classes and the peasantry. As Engels shows, Müntzer’s programme contained elements that not only corresponded to the immediate interests of his base, but also contained many radical, egalitarian objectives that went beyond this.
His problem, however, was precisely that he was ahead of his time, preaching the vision of a society whose material conditions did not yet exist. After the brief seizure of power in southern Germany (Mühlhausen), he himself came up against the limits of the immaturity of social conditions. As Engels observes:
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply.
Müntzer had to resort to untenable compromises and concessions. His rule was necessarily short-lived because his base was itself, albeit in a contradictory way, attached to private property and there were at best the beginnings of a proletarian class. Engels also shows that although the peasantry can develop enormous fighting power and courage, its contradictory social position means that it not only needs alliances with other classes, but also political leadership from one of the main classes in society.
It is therefore factually and theoretically incorrect to portray history in such a way that all insurgents adopted a unified position and that the peasantry itself could have produced a consistent, revolutionary ideology and leadership. On the contrary, as Engels and other Marxists show by analysing the various classes in the peasant wars, they were incapable of doing so, owing to their social position and class situation.
Engels confirms this once again in the preface, where he firstly shows that the peasantry as such does not form a unified class at all. He classifies its upper strata as the rural bourgeoisie. Economic independence was already a fiction for the lower classes in the late 19th century. They clung all the more tenaciously to their small-scale ownership of the means of production. Although this position makes them possible allies of the working class, it also makes them incapable of independently developing a consistently anti-capitalist position.
No such materialist characterisation and thus an understanding of the working class is to be found in Federici’s treatment. For her, the peasants, wage labourers and the mass of women all belong to the same class.
the witch burnings
This also applies to her main thesis, that witch-burning played a central role in the process of primitive accumulation. She sees it first and foremost as a means of disciplining the female body and would have been enforced in Europe in the interests of the state in order to increase the birth rate, reduce labour costs and reinforce the role of women as mothers.
From a historical perspective, this construction is highly questionable, as Fabian Lehr and others have shown. First of all, Lehr points out that there are problems with the temporal representation. Federici explains the urge to increase birth rates by the fact that there was an alarming decline in population in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, the persecution of witches began in the 15th century and reached considerable proportions in the first half of the 16th century. During this time, however, the problem prevalent in most of Europe was more one of excessive population growth, resulting in a sharp increase in the number of landless and dispossessed people. These had to take to the roads and this had a destabilising effect on early modern Europe. From the late 15th century onwards, massive intimidation and disciplinary measures began to curb the problem. Although she mentions this, she does not recognise that this contradicts her thesis as to the origins of the witch hunts; European states had no interest in increasing the birth rate. Rather, attempts were made to export the lower classes, who could barely be maintained, to the new colonies.
Lehr also argues that the witch burnings did not take place across the whole of Europe, but rather in different distinct episodes over time. For example, large-scale witch hunts are said to have often only taken place within a region for a few months to a few years, with longer breaks before a new wave of trials began. They were therefore not a permanent, consistently intense phenomenon anywhere, but rather occurred in repeated spurts—with a number of victims in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds, as Federici suggests. Major witch hunts only took place in some regions. If they played such a central role, there must have been greater economic, social and demographic differences between regions with and without witch trials. Federici omits this, although, as Lehr notes, it would be the most obvious and empirical test of her theory.
It makes little sense to regard the burning of witches as a key step that was absolutely necessary for primitive accumulation, while the features already listed above, such as the enclosure of land, occurred across the board.
Federici’s argument that the witch hunts were primarily an expression of the struggle against the rebellious peasantry and plebeian classes is also dubious. It is therefore no coincidence that it downplays incidents where the witch hunts—much like anti- Jewish pogroms—were an expression of irrational, reactionary public excesses fomented by the lower classes of the clergy, the nobility or even the petty bourgeoisie. She largely fails to analyse these irrational, reactionary developments.
Nevertheless, we do not want to reject Federici’s thesis regarding the disciplining of the female body out of hand.
Disciplining the body
This was central to the development of the primitive accumulation. However, as we have already noted, the burning of witches has little to do with this. But this is not the only mechanism Federici relies on. Above all, it should be noted that for her, the female body itself becomes a means of production. As she writes in her foreword:
Against the Marxist orthodoxy, which explained women’s ‘oppression’ and subordination to men as a residuum of feudal relations, Dalla Costa and James argued that the exploitation of women has played a central function in the process of capitalist accumulation insofar as women have been the producers and reproducers of the basic capitalist commodity: labour power.
That the specific form that women’s oppression takes under capitalism is merely a residue of feudal conditions is a theoretical cardboard cutout. This is blamed on ‘Marxist orthodoxy’, i.e Engels’ works, but above all their points of reference are those that Marx provides in Capital for a value-theoretical analysis of reproductive labour. In fact, these prove the exact opposite. In many parts, a comprehensive, coherent presentation may be lacking. On the other hand, authors such as Lise Vogel, for example, have provided valuable work on such an analysis. However, they come to fundamentally different conclusions than Federici (see previous article).
The body as a means of production
What is essential, however, is that for Federici, the female body in particular has become a means of production. To show this, she refers to various authors who pointed out that bourgeois society produces a completely new kind of individual. According to Max Weber, the reorganisation of the body forms the core of capitalist ethics, because capitalism makes acquisition an end in itself instead of treating it as a means to satisfy needs. It follows that the protestant ethic is a capitalist one which dictates the renunciation of the spontaneous enjoyment of life and must become the moral maxim for action.
Federici also rightly points out here that the capitalist mode of production takes the self-alienation of wage earners to the extreme:
Thus the labour process becomes the terrain of self-alienation. … This also causes a certain detachment from one’s own body, which is reified and reduced to an object with which the person no longer identifies directly.
This self-alienation characterises the capitalist labour and exploitation process and is systematically applied in the factory system, as Marx shows in Capital. The workers become appendages of the machine system, subsumed to capital not only formally but in reality.
This changing mode of production also brought with it a different organisation of reproduction, which we will discuss in more detail below. Of course, like the implementation of capitalism itself, this was anything but free of violence. To this extent, we can certainly agree with Federici.
Ultimately, the alienated work process not only shapes everyday life in the workplace, but also the relationships outside of it as well as the mindsets and ideologies of society’s members. The stripped-down, dismembered human being, reduced to a few hand movements or processes and subordinate to the process of exploitation, appears as the ‘natural human being’. Female body ideals are also reduced to this. However, in the capitalist labour and exploitation process, the body itself is not a means of production, but a bearer of human labour power. As such, it is indispensable for the production process and creates surplus value for capital.
In order for these processes to be perpetuated, this body, the human capacity to work, must be constantly reproduced outside the sphere of production. This happens in the proletarian household, whatever form it may take (the family, the single worker). In addition, not only one’s own labour power, but also the next generation of the class must be raised and reproduced in this household.
The value of labour therefore comprises the reproduction costs of the entire class—whereby the individual capitals constantly try to drive these below their value.
The gender-specific division of labour within the working class, which was basically inherited from previous societies, means that in the ‘classic’ family model, the man is the main breadwinner, and the woman is the housewife, (even if, historically, even this model had to be wrested from the employers in the earliest phases of industrialisation).
However, the following is crucial for us. Even in private domestic and care work, the female body does not generally function as a means of labour. There, too, it is primarily the carrier of the working capacity. This means that the working person cooks, cleans, looks after children or the elderly. Like all work, it changes an object. The only important exception here is the birth of children. Here the female body as such is essential for the reproduction of the species.
There is no doubt that this real difference between the sexes forms an important basis for the ideologisation, justification and reproduction of a reactionary, gender-specific division of labour and gender roles. However, the fact that women’s work in the household appears to be a natural ‘physical activity’ is itself an ideologisation that Federici is guilty of. A crucial flaw in her entire analysis is that she basically views any activity in the home as analogous to childbirth.
In Caliban and the Witch, this also goes hand in hand with an idyllic glorification of pre-industrial, pre-capitalist family forms—just like other problematic statements in the course of the romanticisation of the ‘commons’, for example. On the one hand, she writes:
In addition, work on the farms of the serfs was oriented towards subsistence, so that the gender division of labor was less pronounced and less discriminatory there than on the capitalist farms,
and follows this up with:
If we also note that collective relationships in medieval society took precedence over family relationships and that the tasks undertaken by female serfs (washing, spinning, harvesting, herding animals on the commons) were done jointly with other women, then we realize that the gender division of labour was far from isolating women. Rather, it was a source of power and protection for them. The sexual division of labor was the basis of a distinct female society and solidarity that allowed women to assert themselves against men, even though the church preached the subordination of women and canon law allowed a man to beat his wife.
The problem lies in the assessment of the gender division of labour. A simple contrast is constructed that might seem sensible when viewed in isolation, but which neither corresponds to the historical facts nor says anything about the overall course of history. At the same time, the gender division of labour is actually relativised in terms of its significance for female oppression. The exclusion of women from parts of production is not to be seen as something positive, as a ‘source of power and protection’ in any era of human history. For it is precisely this division of labour that prevents women from becoming independent actors.
Federici characterises the core of women’s oppression as much more than the mere ability to bear children. Rather, it seems in her narrative that the gender division of labour only became a really big problem for women in the context of the primitive accumulation, and that before that there was actually quite a positive situation, as there was no clear separation between production and reproduction.
With the advent of capitalism and the emergence of the proletariat, the household ceased to be the basic unit of production. Instead of producing within the family itself, one’s own labour power had to be rented out to capitalists for a certain period of time. The inclusion of women in wage labour represents an important step forward, but one that, in the context of capitalism, is always accompanied by a double burden—exploitation via wage labour and their unpaid drudgery in the household. Therefore, the socialisation of domestic work is also a central demand in the struggle against its oppression, which is inextricably linked to the struggle against capitalism. Thus Marxists from the earliest days defended the inclusion of women in social production on an equal basis to men and at the same time the socialisation of domestic labour/housework (nurseries, laundries, public restaurants etc.)
Federici, on the other hand, has a different perspective. Instead of socialisation, she offers a return to a long outdated form, the commons. This corresponds to the fact that women’s oppression is ultimately not understood as a form interwoven with class rule, but actually as an exploitative relationship that exists alongside capitalist wage labour.
Federici, for all her merits, such as her emphasis on the militant side, on the disfigurements and impositions of women and the oppressed, objectively represents a reactionary idea of how to solve these problems. She clings to the utopia that religious ‘heretics’, small owners of the means of production, peasant communities could not only have created a liberated society and progressive alternative to capitalism in the past, but that a return to a ‘modernised’ version of the commons could solve the major social problems and overcome class and women’s oppression.
This is a utopia. Even if Federici repeatedly presents the women’s struggle as a class struggle and the women as proletarians, this cannot hide the fact that in her view the workers are dissolved into in an alliance with the petty bourgeois classes and that the historically specific nature of the proletarian liberation struggle is ultimately lost. Their historical analysis is therefore ultimately not an extension or correction, but a petty bourgeois populist rejection of Marxism.