Caliban And The Witch, By Karl Marx

Furthermore, Marx analyzes the dialectic of private property which political economy regards as homogeneous. There are generally two kinds of property according to Marx, one that involves the labour of producers themselves to render it alienable, meaning it can be sold or exchanged, and the other which is maintained by exploiting the labour of others (Marx, 1990, p.930). The two forms of private property are the antithesis of one another and when one converts to the other, consumers who were once self-sufficient become dependent on wage labour. This relates to Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation since the transition to capitalism required the commodification of land. As individuals were expropriated from their land, they were required to
While Marx did understand the significance of the reproduction of the working class, he exclusively stated that the “capitalist may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation” (Marx, 1990, p.718). With this statement, Marx deems reproductive labour and domestic work as ahistorical (Rioux, 2015, p.197). In contrast, Silvia Federici refers to corporeal interpretations in Caliban and the Witch by arguing that women’s bodies are shaped by the social relations of capitalism. She begins her novel with a critique that gender is a set of relations, unnatural, and socially constructed within specific historical contexts becoming material when it impacts the lives of individuals (Federici, 2004, p.13). Federici then provides an intersectional approach to capitalism by stating that while capitalism may require the accumulation of land and resources, it also requires the accumulation of bodies as well as differences. She acknowledges the dual-systems theory (Rioux, 2015, p.197) by emphasizing that patriarchy and capitalism are two discrete systems that exist in tandem historically. Although patriarchy as a social relation predates capitalism, a new dimension was instituted with the
She argues that the interminable conditions of social reproduction is separate but also necessary for capital accumulation as both relations fundamentally impact one another. Federici then historicizes her argument by describing the plague that occurred during the fourteenth century which led to a decrease in population and primarily, to a lack of workers (Federici, 2004, p.40). This demographic crisis altered the social relations within the epoch as contraceptive practices were demonized while reproduction for the enlargement of population was encouraged. Within this context, Federici depicts the assembly of women into reproductive machines concluding that “not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism” (Federici, 2004, p.146). Additionally, while Marx introduced the argument that workers are alienated from their labour within capitalism, Federici argues that the ultimate alienation occurs when women are separated from their reproductive abilities (Federici, 2004, p.91). Nevertheless, it is acknowledged that the biology of women does not intrinsically induce oppression, but rather capital’s reliance on the biological processes unique to women such as pregnancy and childbirth result in a “male-dominant gender order” (Rioux, 2015, p.198). In order to preserve the reproduction of the working class,