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Feminism and Marxism

In The Caliban and The Witch, Silvia Federici traces the subjugation of  women and the decline of their status in society, which were rooted in the development of capitalism in Europe in the 1500’s. The rise of the capitalist society as a political economy not only expropriated women from their means of production and labor power, it also enslaved women as a domestic non-waged worker, and made them property of their husbands. Women’s participation in society was diminished with the regulations and violence imposed by the sate. Women became alienated from their own species being, and without access to their reproductive rights, they became machine-like entities to produce the proletariat class, the cheap labor for manufacture  that created the surplus value and accumulation of capital for the bourgeois class. These dynamics not only applied for women in Europe, but expanded to the women of the American colonies and the African women that were forced to work in sugar, cotton and rum plantations.

The appropriation of land by part of the state and the lost of the means of subsistence for rural families and women workers of the Medieval Europe were the beginning of a number of changes that generated the degradation of the status of women in society. The redistribution of land and wealth favored the bourgeois class that collected money and products from agricultural workers who were left to live on the streets. Capitalism would generate a rearrengemnt of classes. The capitalist who owns the means of production, and the proletariat, who has labor power. However, women would not be allowed to sell their labor power under capitalism. Women would be subjugated to work for their husbands without receiving wages, to do the housework without recognition, to prostitute themselves on the streets in order to get food.

Without land to work, women were taken away from their labor power and the production of their own crafts and social life. The commonality of production favored the interaction of women until the new mode of production was imposed by the capital system. Women would suffer poverty, famine, and would revolt against their oppressors and would pay a high price for it. Women were forced to leave the public space and to be secluded into a domestic space where her presence became invisible for society even though the hard work and demands imposed in the house by her husband.

Also the regulations of the state in regard to reproductive rights would impose women to populate Europe and America to generate armies, to replenish the factories with workers, to travel overseas and participate in genocide in the extraction of slaves, goods and materials form the colonies. Women’s  reproductive bodies were the cheapest way to get workers, to sell slaves and to produce surplus value and accumulation of capital. Women were tortured, killed and treated as witches for standing for themselves and for denouncing their unjustified mistreatment and subjugation in society.