Michael’s Reviews > Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation > Status Update

"With the use of land also came the use of the "commons'- meadows, forests, lakes, wild pastures - that provided crucial resources for the peasant economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and fostered community cohesion and cooperation. In Northern Italy, control over these resources even provided the basis for the development of communal self-administrations."

"... by denigrating the "nature' of those it exploits: vs. the reality of widespread penury women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization."

"Indeed, the political lesson that we can learn...is that capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations - the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury."

"It is not surprising, then, if large-scale violence and enslavement have been on the agenda, as they were in the period of the "transition," with the difference that today the conquistadors are the officers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who are still preaching the worth of a penny to the same populations which the dominant world powers have for centuries robbed and pauperized."

"This is what occurred in the 19th century, when the responses to the rise of socialism, the Paris Commune, and the accumulation crisis of 1873 were the "Scramble for Africa" and the simultaneous creation in Europe of the nuclear family, centered on the economic dependence of women to men - following the expulsion of women from the waged work-place. This is also what is happening today..."

"...Primitive accumulation has been a universal process in every phase of capitalist development, Not accidentally, its original historical exemplar has sedimented strategies that, in different ways, have been re-launched in the face of every major capitalist crisis, serving to cheapen the cost of labor and to hide the exploitation of women and colonial subjects."

"The analysis I propose also allows us to transcend the dichotomy between "gender" and "class." If it is true that in capitalist society sexual identity becams the carrier of specific work-functions, then gender should not be considered a purely cultural reality, but should be treated as a specification of class relations."

"A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times."

"(iii) the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers."

Thus my description of primitive accumulation includes... (i) the development of a new sexual division of labor subjugating women's labor and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the work-force; (ii) the construction of a new patriarchal order, based upon the exclusion of women from waged work and their subordination to men;...