Re-enchanting the World

Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

Silvia Federici

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781629635859
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Silvia Federici is one of the most important contemporary theorists of capitalism and feminist movements. In this collection of her work spanning over twenty years, she provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues and debates in contemporary thinking on this subject.

Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the "new enclosures" at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation. Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, this collection centers on women and reproductive work as crucial to both our economic survival and the construction of a world free from the hierarchies and divisions capital has planted in the body of the world proletariat. Federici is clear that the commons should not be understood as happy islands in a sea of exploitative relations but rather autonomous spaces from which to challenge the existing capitalist organization of life and labor.

PART ONE

On the New Enclosures

Introduction to Part One

The articles included in this section focus on a set of programs that, starting in the late 1970s, opened a new process of ‘primitive’ (originary) accumulation. The purpose is to show the continuity between the World Bank and IMF ‘structural adjustment programs,’ which by the mid-1980s had been imposed on most of the former colonial world, and the transition of communist China to capitalism, as well as the development of a debt economy, by which individual debt has amplified the consequences of national debt. To these structural developments I have given the name of ‘new enclosures,’ taken from a 1990 issue of Midnight Notes dedicated to this topic, because their effects have been as devastating as the effects of colonization and the expulsion of the peasantry from communal land, the processes that, as we know, set the conditions for capitalist development in sixteenth-century Europe and the so-called New World.

The decision to begin my discussion of the commons with a set of articles on the new enclosures stems from the need to contextualize the new interest in communitarian relations in different radical movements—feminist, ecological, anarchist, and even Marxist—and because I realized that these developments, which only three decades ago were epoch-making, have faded in the memory of many among the new generations, at least in Europe and the United States. Yet we cannot understand the depth of the emergency that we are living unless we reckon with the cumulative impact of these policies, which have resulted in the displacement of millions of people from their ancestral homes, often condemning them to a life of misery and death. As such, I have included in Part One the three articles published in Midnight Notes under the title of The New Enclosures, heavily edited to bring out those aspects of the analyses that are more relevant to present concerns. This section also discusses the formation of a ‘debt economy,’ and in particular the global spread of microcredit and microfinance, which I describe as an egregious attack not only on people’s means of subsistence but on mutual aid and solidarity relations among women.

As an overview on the war on the commons this section is far from complete. Absent is an account of the demise of the commons caused by the worsening ecological crisis. Also, the consequences of ‘extractivism’ on communal economies and cultures are only discussed in general terms, as is the violence, especially against women, which is their necessary condition. For a discussion of these aspects of the new enclosures I refer the reader to the growing body of literature on these topics. My goal in Part One is primarily to identify the social developments to which the new interest in the commons and the new forms of resistance being organized worldwide in rural and urban sites are responding. By highlighting the structural/systemic character of the new enclosures and their continuity with past trends in capitalist development, I also wish to demonstrate that the growing interest in the commons is not a passing political fad. Even to the many of us who have grown up in a world where most of the wealth that we need for our sustenance has been enclosed, the principle of the commons today appears as a guarantee of not only economic survival but social agency and social solidarity—in sum that harmony with ourselves, others, and the natural world that in the South of the American continent is expressed by the concept of the buen vivir.

On Primitive Accumulation, Globalization, and Reproduction

Rethinking Primitive Accumulation

Starting with the 1990 issue of Midnight Notes on the “new enclosures,”¹ followed by David Harvey’s theory of “accumulation by dispossession”² and by the many essays on primitive accumulation that have been published in the Commoner,³ an extensive body of literature has explored the political meaning of this concept and applied it to an analysis of ‘globalization.’ Artists have contributed to this process. An outstanding example is the 2010 Potosí Principle exhibit presented by German, Bolivian, and Spanish artists and curators,⁴ who worked to demonstrate the continuity between the imagery found in several sixteenth-century colonial paintings produced in the Andean region at the peak of primitive accumulation in the ‘New World’ and the imagery coming from the ‘new enclosures’ that have been central to the globalization program. The work of feminist writers like Maria Mies, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Claudia von Werlhof, who recognized “the extent to which [the] modern political economy, up to the present, builds upon the producers’, men’s, and even more so women’s, permanent worldwide expropriation and deprivation of power” has also been very important in this context.⁵

Thanks to these studies and artistic contributions we now recognize that primitive accumulation is not a one-time historical event confined to the origins of capitalism, as the point of departure of ‘accumulation proper.’ It is a phenomenon constitutive of capitalist relations at all times, eternally recurrent, “part of the continuous process of capitalist accumulation”⁶ and “always contemporaneous with its expansion.”⁷ This does not mean that primitive accumulation can be ‘normalized’ or that we should underplay the importance of those moments in history—the times of clearances, wars, imperial drives “when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled onto the labor market as free, unprotected and right-less proletarians.”⁸

It means, however, that we should conceive the ‘separation of the producer from the means of production’—for Marx the essence of primitive accumulation—as something that has to be continuously reenacted, especially in times of capitalist crisis, when class relations are challenged and have to be given new foundations. Contrary to Marx’s view that with the development of capitalism a working class comes into existence that views capitalist relations as “self-evident natural laws,”⁹ violence—the secret of primitive accumulation in Marx¹⁰—is always necessary to establish and maintain the capitalist work discipline. Not surprisingly, in response to the culmination of an unprecedented cycle of struggle—anticolonial, blue-collar, feminist—in the 1960s and 1970s, primitive accumulation became a global and seemingly permanent process,¹¹ with economic crises, wars, and massive expropriations now appearing in every part of the planet as the preconditions for the organization of production and accumulation on a world scale. It is a merit of the political debates that I have mentioned that we can now better understand the “nature of the enclosing force that we are facing,”¹² the logic by which it is driven, and its consequences for us. For to think of the world political economy through the prism of primitive accumulation is to place ourselves immediately on a battlefield.

But to fully comprehend the political implications of this development we must expand the concept of primitive accumulation beyond Marx’s description in more than one way. We must first acknowledge that the history of primitive accumulation cannot be understood from the viewpoint of an abstract universal subject. For an essential aspect of the capitalist project has been the disarticulation of the social body, through the imposition of different disciplinary regimes producing an accumulation of ‘differences’ and hierarchies that profoundly affect how capitalist relations are experienced. We, therefore, have different histories of primitive accumulation, each providing a particular perspective on capitalist relations necessary to reconstruct their totality and unmask the mechanisms by which capitalism has maintained its power. This means that the history of primitive accumulation past and present cannot be fully comprehended until it is written not only from the viewpoint of the future or former waged workers, but from the viewpoint of the enslaved, the colonized, the indigenous people whose lands continue to be the main target of the enclosures, and the many social subjects whose place in the history of capitalist society cannot be assimilated into the history of the waged.

This was the methodology that I used in Caliban and the Witch to analyze primitive accumulation from the viewpoint of its effects on ‘women,’ the ‘body,’ and the production of labor power, arguing that this approach gives us a much broader understanding of the historical processes that have shaped the rise of capitalism than we gain from Marx’s work, where the discussion of primitive accumulation centers on preconditions for the formation of waged labor.¹³

Two processes in particular have been most essential from a historical and methodological viewpoint: (a) the constitution of reproduction work—that is the work of reproducing individuals and labor power—as ‘women’s labor’ and as a separate social sphere, seemingly located outside the sphere of economic relations and, as such, devalued from a capitalist viewpoint, a development coeval with the separation of the peasantry from the land and the formation of a commodity market; (b) the institutionalization of the state’s control over women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity, through the criminalization of abortion and the introduction of a system of surveillance and punishment that literally expropriates women’s bodies.

Both these developments, which have been characteristic of the extension of capitalist relations in every historical period, have had crucial social consequences. The expulsion of reproductive work from the spheres of economic relations and its deceptive relegation to the sphere of the ‘private,’ the ‘personal,’ ‘outside’ of capital accumulation, and, above all, ‘feminine’ has made it invisible as work and has naturalized its exploitation.¹⁴ It has also been the basis for the institution of a new sexual division of labor and a new family organization, subordinating women to men and further socially and psychologically differentiating women and men. At the same time, the state’s appropriation of women’s bodies and their reproductive capacity was the beginning of its regulation of ‘human resources,’ its first ‘biopolitical’ intervention, in the Foucauldian sense of the word,¹⁵ and its contribution to the accumulation of capital insofar as this is essentially the multiplication of the proletariat.¹⁶

As I have shown, the witch hunts that took place in many countries of Europe and the Andean regions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading to the execution of hundreds of thousands of women, were fundamental to this process. None of the historic changes in the organization of reproductive work that I have outlined would have been possible or would be possible today without a major attack on the social power of women, in the same way as capitalist development could not have succeeded without the slave trade or the conquest of the Americas without a relentless imperial drive continuing to this day and the construction of a web of racial hierarchies that have effectively divided the world proletariat.

Primitive Accumulation and the Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the Global Economy

It is with these assumptions and this theoretical framework in mind that, in this essay, I analyze ‘globalization’ as a process of primitive accumulation, this time imposed on a global scale. This view undoubtedly is at odds with the neoliberal theory that celebrates the expansion of capitalist relations as evidence of a ‘democratization’ of social life. But it is also in contrast to the Marxist autonomists’ view of the restructuring of the global economy, which, focusing on the computer and information revolution and the rise of cognitive capitalism, describes this phase of capitalist development as a step toward the autonomation of labor.¹⁷ I propose, instead, that the pillar of this restructuring has been a concerted attack on our most basic means of reproduction, the land, the house, and the wage, aiming to expand the global workforce and drastically reduce the cost of labor.¹⁸ Structural adjustment, the dismantling of the welfare state, the financialization of reproduction, leading to the debt and mortgage crisis, and war: different policies have been required to activate the new accumulation drive. But in each case it has entailed the destruction of our ‘common wealth,’ and it has made no difference that over the years its architects have multiplied with the arrival of China and other emerging capitalist powers, joining the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the governments that support these institutions as competitors at the feast. Behind the nationalist appearances and particularities, there is only one logic driving the new forms of primitive accumulation: to form a labor force reduced to abstract labor, pure labor power, with no guarantees, no protections, ready to be moved from place to place and job to job, employed mostly through short-term contracts and at the lowest possible wage.

What is the political meaning of this development? Even if we accept that primitive accumulation is an endemic part of life and work in capitalism (as Massimo De Angelis, among others, has insisted),¹⁹ how can we account for the fact that after five hundred years of relentless exploitation of workers across the planet, the capitalist class in its different embodiments still needs to pauperize multitudes of people worldwide?

There is no obvious answer to this question. But if we consider how ‘globalization’ is changing the organization of social reproduction we can reach some preliminary conclusions. We can see that capitalism can only provide pockets of prosperity to limited populations of workers for limited amounts of time, ready to destroy them (as it has done during the last several decades through the globalization process) as soon as their needs and desires exceed the limits which the quest for profitability imposes. We can see, in particular, that the limited prosperity that waged workers in industrial countries were able to achieve in the post–World War II period was never intended to be generalized. As revolt spread from the colonial plantations of Africa and Asia to the ghettos, the factories, the schools, the kitchens, and even the war front, undermining both the Fordist exchange between higher wages and higher productivity and the use of the colonies (external and internal) as reservoirs of cheap and unpaid labor, the capitalist class resorted to the strategy it has always used to confront its crises: violence, expropriation, and the expansion of the world labor market.

A Marx would be needed to describe the destructive social forces that have been mobilized for this task. Never have so many people been attacked and on so many fronts at once. We must return to the slave trade to find forms of exploitation as brutal as those that globalization has generated in many parts of the world. Not only is slavery reappearing in many forms, but famines have returned, and cannibalistic forms of exploitation unimaginable in the 1960s and 1970s have emerged, including human organ trafficking. In some countries, even the sale of hair, reminiscent of nineteenth-century novels, has been revived. More commonly, in the more than eighty countries affected, globalization has been a story of untreated illnesses, malnourished children, lost lives, and desperation. Impoverishment in much of the world has reached a magnitude never seen before, now affecting up to 70 percent of the population. Just in sub-Saharan Africa the number of those living in poverty and chronic hunger and malnutrition by 2010 had reached 239 million,²⁰ while across the continent immense amounts of money were obscenely siphoned off to the banks of London, Paris, and New York.

As in the first phase of capitalist development, those most directly affected by these policies have been women, especially low-income women and women of color who in communities across the world today lack the means to reproduce themselves and their families or can do so only by selling their labor on the world labor market and reproducing other families and other children than their own in conditions that separate them from their communities and make their reproductive work more abstract and subject to multiple forms of restriction and surveillance. As an alternative, many give up their children for adoption, work as surrogate mothers, or (in a more recent development) sell their eggs to medical labs for stem cell research. They are also having fewer children, as the need to secure some income has a sterilizing effect. But everywhere their capacity to control their own reproduction is under attack. Paradoxically—and again recapitulating the very conditions that shaped women’s entrance in capitalist society and instigated two centuries of witch hunts—the same political class that makes it almost impossible for w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One. On the New Enclosures
• Part Two. On the Commons
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Index