Abstract
The continuity of an organized system of gender oppression throughout the transitions from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production has been the topic of heated debates across the socialist and radical feminist traditions. In Caliban and the Witch, Federici makes a significant intervention into these debates by revisiting the transition from a specifically feminist lens and investigating the structural components that allow and facilitate the continuation of exploitative gender relations. However, Federici’s investigation relies on world systems theories’ overly expansive geographic and temporal reading of the transition, and, thus, does not spell out a historically specific account of the transition. This chapter works with the best aspects of Federici’s feminist intervention while recognizing and critically addressing theoretical shortfalls that leave unfinished the project of accounting for both the emergence of capitalist social property relations and the continuation of women’s oppression. I argue that critical engagement with political Marxism provides an opportunity to build from the methodological work of social reproduction feminists, such as Federici, and to properly reorient feminist approaches to the question of capitalism’s origins.
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Notes
- 1.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004).
- 2.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 267.
- 3.
Paul Sweezy, “Paul Sweezy: A Critique,” in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, ed. Rodney Hilton (London: Verso, 1978), 33–68.
- 4.
Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
- 5.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976); M.M Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
- 6.
Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Trevor Henry Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10–63; Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
- 7.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 5.
- 8.
Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 158.
- 9.
Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole McCann and Kim Seung-Kyung (New York: Routledge, 2003), 206–221; Iris Marion Young, “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of Dual Systems Theory,” Socialist Review 50, no. 5 (1980): 169–188.
- 10.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 62.
- 11.
Ibid., 21.
- 12.
Ibid., 63–65.
- 13.
Ibid., 24.
- 14.
Ibid., 28–29.
- 15.
Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 157.
- 16.
Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe.”
- 17.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Class, Race, and Capitalism,” How does Race Relate to Class? A Debate (2009), 9, http://advancethestruggle.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/how_does_race_relate_to_class-2.pdf.
- 18.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 64.
- 19.
Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”; Xavier Lafrance, “Citizens and Wage-Labourers: Capitalism and the Formation of a Working Class in France” (PhD thesis, York University, 2013); Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Teschke, The Myth of 1648.
- 20.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 63.
- 21.
Gary Blank, “Marxism, Gender and ‘the Transition’: A Comparative Review of Federici and Seccombe,” Analize 2, no. 16 (2014), 3.
- 22.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 63–64.
- 23.
Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” 21.
- 24.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 44.
- 25.
Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 168.
- 26.
Ibid., 169.
- 27.
Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (1977), 30.
- 28.
Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, 267.
- 29.
Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).
- 30.
Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, 147.
- 31.
Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” 11.
- 32.
For an extended conversation on social reproduction feminism’s troubling of Marxist conceptions of labor, see Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, eds., Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/Security in the Global Political Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Sue Ferguson, “Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor,” Race, Gender & Class 15, no. 1/2 (2008): 42–57; Leach, “Transitions to Capitalism: Social-Reproduction Feminism Encounters Political Marxism.”
- 33.
Sebastien Rioux, “Embodied Contradictions: Capitalism, Social Reproduction and Body Formation,” Women’s Studies International Forum 48 (2015), 197.
- 34.
Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989), 383.
- 35.
Laslett and Brenner, Gender and Social Reproduction, 382–383.
- 36.
Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, “Ontology, Method, and Hypotheses,” in Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/Security in the Global Political Economy, ed. Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 17–18.
- 37.
Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. Trevor Henry Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 217.
- 38.
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population and A Summary View of the Principle of Population (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 76–92.
- 39.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 711.
- 40.
Bakker and Gill, “Ontology, Method, and Hypotheses,” 17–18.
- 41.
Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” 223.
- 42.
Quoted in Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” 14.
- 43.
Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” 268.
- 44.
Ibid., 225.
- 45.
Ibid., 217.
- 46.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 605.
- 47.
Marx, Grundrisse, 606.
- 48.
Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” 282.
- 49.
Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development,” 29.
- 50.
Marx, Capital, 718.
- 51.
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 91.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women.
- 54.
Sue Ferguson and David McNally, “Capital, Labour-Power, and Gender-Relations: Introduction to the Historical Materialism Edition of Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” in Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, by Lise Vogel (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), XXIII.
- 55.
Marx, Capital, 718.
- 56.
Leach, “Transitions to Capitalism,” 126.
- 57.
Ferguson and McNally, “Capital, Labour-Power, and Gender-Relations,” XXIX.
- 58.
Ferguson, “Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor,” 50.
- 59.
Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, 147.
- 60.
Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 31.
- 61.
Leach, “Transitions to Capitalism,” 131–132.
- 62.
Gary Blank, “Gender, Production, and ‘the Transition to Capitalism’: Assessing the Historical Basis for a Unitary Materialist Theory,” New Proposals 4, no. 2 (2011), 14.
- 63.
Michael Levien, “Gender and Land Dispossession: A Comparative Analysis,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 6 (2017): 1111–1134.
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Leach, N. (2019). Rethinking the Rules of Reproduction and the Transition to Capitalism: Reading Federici and Brenner Together. In: Lafrance, X., Post, C. (eds) Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95657-2_13
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