In Europe, this war climaxed with the enclosures, a process of privatisation that kicked peasants off the land and forced them to take on what work they could find in towns and cities. In Africa, Asia and the Americas, the class war took the form of genocide, enslavement and indentured labour.
Capitalism could have never happened without this theft: it provided the capital needed to drive the industrial revolution. Federicis contribution was to show that the theft of womens bodies and labour was just as indispensable to kick-starting capitalism.
All that genocide and land grabbing had inconvenient side effects. According to Federici, the population of South America dropped by 75 million while in Europe the enclosures helped generate the first modern inflation crisis, by allowing landlords to raise rents and merchants to hoard grain and hike prices. Real wages fell by two-thirds.
The starving poor had little resistance to plague or smallpox and populations began to decline. In Germany one third of the population was lost by the early 1600s.
From a commercial viewpoint, this decimation of the population was bad news. In the 1620s and 30s, markets shrank, trade stopped and unemployment became widespread, in the first international economic crisis, otherwise known as the General Crisis. The fledgling capitalist economy was on the verge of collapse.
What could be more logical, then, for the new ruling alliance than to seize control of womens bodies and their reproductive powers?
Women werent hunted at random. Witches were usually poor and were frequently accused either of crimes against property or of reproductive crimes. They were tried for procuring abortions, murdering children, sucking their blood, and making potions of their flesh.
Many witches were midwives or wise women, traditionally the holders of womens reproductive knowledge. In the Middle Ages, women had some access to contraception in the form of herbs turned into potions and pessaries, but now this was proof of the devils work.
When my friend Tim said that the government should protect unborn babies from the people gestating them, he was probably unaware that its only in the last few hundred years that the uterus has become the business of the state.
Federici described a process whereby male doctors took over birthing chambers. Strict laws were set around reproduction, on punishment of beheading. Womens sexuality ceased to be something for women to enjoy and was put to the service of the economy and of men.
Accompanying this assault on womens bodies was a devaluing of their work, and a redefinition of womanhood itself. The heterosexual, patriarchal family became the engine of the new economy. Strict gender roles were assigned. The womans place was now seen as being in the home, and all the work they did there was designated as non-work.
Non-work included all reproductive labour: both in the sense of literally having babies, and all the care and domestic work needed for humans to sustain and reproduce themselves. Not only were women expected to do all this reproductive work for free, they were supposed to do it with a smile on their faces, born out of that handy thing called maternal instinct.
This is not to say that under feudalism there was no gender inequality. But capitalism didnt exactly spell progress. The devaluing of womens work also affected their earning power when they did try to earn a wage. According to Federici, in 14th-century western Europe, women received half the pay of men for the same task. By the mid-16th century they were getting a third of the male wage.
For Federici, just as capitalism was grounded on genocide, slavery and land theft, it was grounded on womens free and cheap labour, taken from them by fire.
It wasnt by chance that Federici chose to write her history of capitalism during the 1990s and early 2000s. She was witnessing a new phase of capitalism, a new class war and a new war on women.
This was the era of globalisation and structural adjustment. The previous, social democratic phase of capitalism that had been built after the Second World War had ended in a deep stagflation and oil crisis. From the 1980s, neoliberalism was the response of business leaders and governments around the world.
Central banks hiked interest rates, inducing a deep recession. Governments and employers launched an onslaught on trade unions and wages. The IMF and World Bank forced newly independent countries to sell off land and resources to foreign corporations, cut public spending and worsen labour conditions in response to a debt crisis triggered by the interest rate hikes.
Governments and mass media criminalised migrants, cheapening their labour. And police forces and judiciaries incarcerated working class Black and brown people on a mass scale.
At the same time, Federici was seeing a feminisation of poverty (a widening gap between men and women living in poverty) and a surge in violence against women. In South Africa, Brazil and other places, this included actual witch hunting, often targeting those who fought back against corporate land grabs.
Neoliberal politicians like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, though they had mixed records on abortion, espoused family values: the cis-gendered, heterosexual, patriarchal family model that had been forged centuries previously by Federicis witch hunters.
The parallels with today are too glaring to ignore. What with the climate apocalypse, the 2008 financial crash and its eternal aftermath, the COVID pandemic and now the new stagflation crisis, capitalism has utterly shat the bed. In response, capitalists and states have sought new money-making opportunities, requiring fresh onslaughts in the class war.
Central banks are again hiking interest rates. Corporations are grabbing land in response to the food and climate crises. Governments and firms have launched new attacks on trade unions, new privatisation and austerity drives, and new attacks on migrants. Debt has rocketed and wages are falling at record rates while profits are soaring.
Original post:
Capitalism and the crisis of reproduction - Open Democracy
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