#federici

‘The witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline, thus redefining the main elements of social reproduction’ (Federici, 1998: 165).

In other words, the witch hunt was an essential aspect of the establishment of capitalist social relations of production. ‘There is no doubt that in the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” women suffered a unique process of social degradation that was fundamental to the accumulation of capital and has remained so ever since’ (Federici, 1998: 75). The control of women and their bodies became a direct part of capitalist accumulation.

‘The female body, the uterus, [was placed] at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labour-power’ (Federici, 1998: 181).

As Federici powerfully clarifies, if “femininity” has been constituted in capitalist society as a work-function masking the production of the work-force under the cover of a biological destiny, then “women’s history” is “class history”

“As a scholar and activist, [Silvia] Federici is one of a cohort of thinkers who have, for decades, critiqued the way capitalist societies fail to acknowledge or support what she calls ‘reproductive labor.’ She uses this term not simply to refer to having children and raising them; it indicates all the work we do that is sustaining — keeping ourselves and others around us well, fed, safe, clean, cared for, thriving. It’s weeding your garden or making breakfast or helping your elderly grandmother bathe — work that you have to do over and over again, work that seems to erase itself. It is essential work that our economy tends not to acknowledge or compensate. This disregard for reproductive labor, Federici writes, is unjust and unsustainable.”

"When the lockdowns started, this growing malaise [about whose work is valuable] exploded into a crisis. First came the discussion of ‘essential workers,’ a category that, it was quickly noted, frequently corresponded with the most critically underpaid workers. Then came the acute realization among the middle and upper classes that their lives had run smoothly because they’d been able to subcontract domestic labor — and, critically, elder care and child care — to other people. After nearly a year of school closures, working parents are keenly aware of the amount of child care they rely on underpaid teachers to provide for eight hours a day. Without even the ad hoc systems for managing the constant work of child care (day care; grandparents; after-school programs; summer camp; babysitters), American parents have discovered that the requirements of caring for a family match or even exceed the requirements of the full-time jobs needed to support that family.”

“How might this year have looked different had the work we do to care for one another, ourselves and the world around us been valued at a premium? How would the future look different if, as Federici suggests, ‘we refuse to base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others,’ if ‘we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them’?”

The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 17, 2021: “The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew.” by Jordan Kisner

Federici S (2017) Caliban And The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York, NY: Autonomedia. p135

This quote from Federici, similar to Barnwell’s article Durkheim as affect theorist, is a good reminder that the tendency to speak of the sociology of the body and emotions as turning focus to what was historically neglected by sociology misleadingly gives the impression the Cartesian dualism was universally shared rather than arising from the way sociology was institutionalised as a discipline. Weber with his writings on ‘rationality’ has often been accused of Cartesianism. Yet as Turner (2008: 59) notes whilst “Weber’s sociology of religion is conventionally approached in terms of a contradiction between meaning and knowledge [’the disenchantment of the world’], there is a major component of Weber’s analysis of religions as various systematizations of irrational salvational paths where the opposition between body and meaning becomes critically important”.

It’s not that Weber accepts the mind-body division as metaphysically fixed, but instead sees this division as a product of socio-historical developments. As Turner puts it, also nicely highlighting similarities between Weber and Foucault -

In mediaeval times, the attempt to create a rational and systematic regimen of denial was largely confined to the religious orders who, as it were, practised asceticism on behalf of the lay man. Expressing this differentiation in spatial terms, reason was allocated to the internal domain of the monastery, while desire ran rampant in the profane world of the lay society. In this respect, we could perceive the principal argument of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) as an account of how the Reformation took the ascetic denial of desire out of the monastic cell into the secular family. Protestantism thus sought to break the distinction between the elite and the mass by transforming elite practices into everyday routines of self-control. Abstinence, the control of passions, fasting and regularity were thus held up as ideal norms for the whole society, since salvation could no longer be achieved vicariously by the labours of monks. The disciplines and regulations of the family, school and factory thus have their historical roots in the redistribution of monastic practices within the wider society. The monastic cell was installed in the prison and the workshop, while ascetic practices spread ever outwards (Foucault, 1979: 238).