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Keerim Kim completed Assignment 04

According to Silvia Frederici in her article “The Caliban and the Witch,” women had been discounted as part of the capitalist’s investment. In the Middle ages, feudalism was deeply rooted into European society for a very long time. Until the shift between workers and masters occurred, nothing was sufficient enough to demolish the old concept and hierarchies. Frederici brings up Marx’s idea of which connects the feudal reconstruction to the development of capitalism. According to that, European working class set up the foundation of capitalist system. However, in Marx’s introduction of “transition to capitalism,” he does not mention the social position of women and how it was shifted due to social and economic changes. According to Frederici, women were only treated as a working machine. In other words, they were merely the reproduction of work force. The accumulation of wealth was eventually made by exploited workers, but the more important thing is that there was also a division within the working class and people suffered much more due to race and gender. Therefore it supports Frederici’s idea that capitalism is committed to both sexism and racism. The capitalist class in Europe had policies that shaped the proletariat. One of the policies was cutting wages of women. There also was a hierarchy between indigenous, African and European women. These were happened to discipline and reproduce the capitalist class. The means of self sufficiency brought wealth of people in some sense, but it excluded certain class from the hierarchy, which does not fit the general capitalist idea. As a result, capitalism brought different forms of enslavement. The exploitation was not just about physical abuse and labor, but was intensified in terms of ideology. Also, derived from this idea the clear division of gender and race was created. The whole process of degradation came into place. Eventually it became the foundation of capitalist accumulations that shaped a big part of the society.