Silvia Federici — Caliban and the Witch
By: A Well-Read Menace
Tags: Anarchism, Marxism, Socialism, Communism, Silvia Federici

“Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women.”¹

Summary

Though her book Caliban and the Witch, autonomous Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federici shows that class struggle is not the only struggle that counts. While many Marxist figureheads have swept women to the sidelines, commanding revolutions full of sexism and machismo, Federici brings the issue front-and-center. She shows that women’s oppression was central to the formation of capitalism, and as such, women’s liberation must be central in its undoing.

As feudalism faded, rising state power was used to undermine women’s agency. Unruly women were accused of witchcraft and executed in record numbers. Multimedia propaganda campaigns were waged in order to break women’s control over reproduction and trap them in domestic roles. Employment was restricted, common lands were enclosed, and previously self-sustaining women were suddenly forced to depend on male wages. Women’s social value became limited to their reproductive capacities — how many laborers could they provide for exploitation?

Peasants revolted, egalitarian movements spread, but reactionary forces broke the solidarity between poor men and women. For many, capitalism was not the progressive step Marx thought it to be. Instead, it was a counter-revolution.

Important Concepts

Primitive accumulation — In traditional Marxist theory: the original, often violent process by which workers were divorced from the means of production.² Federici expands upon this in two ways:

Federici argues primitive accumulation was not a one-time occurrence. While Marx assumed the ‘fire and blood’ that accompanied the birth of capitalism would fade with time, Federici shows that it is integral to the capitalist system. She writes,

A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one…³

This strongly parallels Rosa Luxemburg’s position on primitive accumulation. In her pivotal work, The Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg writes,

‘Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe’ characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step.⁴

In short, as capital expands, it continually seizes productive forces and undermines resistance, often through open violence. Though this violence has ebbed and flowed over time, it has always been present in the capitalist system.

Federici also argues that in the original transition to capitalism, primitive accumulation had a gendered component that Marx failed to recognize. While men were proletarianized and forced to work for wages, women, on the other hand, became increasingly exploited for reproductive labor. Independent work was restricted for women and control over birthing was denied through force. Through this process, capital heightened its domination of women’s bodies, their birth rate, and the growth of the labor force. She writes,

…the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism at all times.⁵

Given this, women’s oppression will never fully end until capitalism is overthrown.

Two-Stage Theory — The idea that societies must first adopt capitalism before progressing on to socialism. This is typically justified by arguing that a capitalist system is required for developing the material conditions necessary to support a socialist society. Federici rejects this entirely. She writes,

Though Marx was acutely aware of the murderous character of capitalist development… there is no doubt that he viewed it as a necessary step in the process of human liberation… In this, he was deeply mistaken.⁶ Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle — possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide.⁷

According to Federici, capitalism was never the path to liberation. Egalitarian systems could have supplanted feudalism, but capital broke the resistance of peasants and workers who wanted such an alternative. Instead, capitalism brought,

…the development of a new sexual division of labor subjugating women’s labor and women’s reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force… the construction of a new patriarchal order, based upon the exclusion of women from waged-work and their subordination to men… the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers.⁸

Marx largely assumed the social division between men and women was rooted in innate characteristics. He therefore failed to notice many of the ways in which this division had been culturally constructed and amplified by capitalist relations. On these grounds, Federici rejects the stagist portion of Marx’s analysis.

Further Reading

Rosa Luxemburg — The Accumulation of Capital

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — Capital, Vol. I — part 8, ch. 26–33

Endnotes

[1] Federici 12

[2] Marx 508

[3] Federici 12

[4] Luxemburg 433

[5] Federici 13

[6] Ibid. 12

[7] Ibid. 21–22

[8] Ibid. 12

Works Cited

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Autonomedia, 2014.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Translated by Agnes Schwartzchild, Routledge, 2003.

Moore, Samuel, and Edward Aveling, translators. “Primitive Accumulation.” Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, edited by Friedrich Engels, by Karl Marx, vol. 1, Progress Publishers, pp. 506–549.