In her recent, and very enjoyable, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia 2004), Sylvia Federici offers an account of the transition to capitalism which posits Capitalism as a "counter-revolution" aimed at the struggle of European peasants against feudalism in the 14th century. Thematically, the notion that capitaism develops in response to the autonomous action of the working class connects Federici to a particular tradition including the Johnson-Forest Tendency (CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya) in the United States, Socialisme ou Barbarie (Castoriadis and Lefort) in France, and, most directly for Federici, the feminist movement that developed out of (and in critique of) the Italian Operaismo movement of the 1960s, namely the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s (Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James) (for an overview, see Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically).
Federici emphasizes that Feudal society was the site of "relentless class-struggle," occassioned by the action of the serfs (a category/class relationship instituted in the 5th to 7th centuries in response to the breakdown of the Roman slave system, and which for Federici was also the result of a compromise designed to forestall working-class struggles). In the Fedual struggle, the goal for serfs was to gain control over "surplus-labor" and products and also ensure various rights,the right to use non-cultivated lands as a kind of collective property (this theme is one of the inspirations for Peter Linebaugh's recent Magna Carta Manifesto [2008], which I will be writing about soon), as well as struggles against labor service and the many differect kinds of taxes (manomorta, mercheta, heriot, tallage, tithe, etc.)the nobility leveled on the serfs. "Servile Struggles" led to a number of concessions by the nobility, including the early charters granting a measure of autonomy to some villages and the commutation of labor service into monetary payments, effectively ending serfdom and leading to the monetization of social life more generally. This monetization, however, ended up "splitting" the peasantry, as differences in income became class differences leading to a new landless class. These landless peasants became the "protagonists" of the millenarian movements of the 12th and 13th centuries. The heretical movements were attractive both to women, and to (male) urban workers, etc.) A counter-revolutionary movement emerged in the 15th century, in part by dividing men and women (decriminalizing rape, institutinalizing prostitution), an illustration of the role of the state in creating capitalism.
In her second chapter, "The accumulation of Capital and the Degradation of Women," Federici argues that the creation of capitalism required "the transformation of the body into a work machine and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force." The latter goal required the destruction of the power of women, carried out under the guise of witch-hunts. "Primitive accumulation" thus required not just expropriation, but also the creation of differences and divisions within the working class, and thus it was not a process of "freeing" workers, but rather of subjecting them in a new, and more brutual, way.
In my next post, I will summarize Federici's arguments concerning land-privatization and pauperization, which I think are particularly interesting perspectives to be applied to what happened to Indigneous communities during the development of American states in the 19th century (something to be explore in future posts).
More to come...
