#i do wholeheartedly agree with the article's criticism of federici's sour view on rationality and science this shit is annoying af

[weiszklee]

Very interesting read, thanks! I can't really comment on Federici's historical accuracy or lack thereof, but I will say that while reading Caliban, I got the impression she was pretty much just collecting the established knowledge on the topics and stringing it into a coherent story. If the history she presents is actually that controversial and not really a collection of established facts, then at the very least she is being misleading.

I still think a weaker but more defensible variant of her main point remains worthy of consideration though. To her, "primitive accumulation" or "enclosure" (she uses these almost synonymously, which is indeed annoying) is pretty much any process of exploitation that doesn't bother with the conceit of exchange of equivalents. Conquest and slavery are the obvious examples which build the treasure troves which can then be subjected to the process of capitalist accumulation in order to grow it further.

She says this primitive accumulation never stopped, it is instead the principal reaction to the crises that capitalism inevitably produces. Capitalist accumulation hits a deadend (or even just a lull), so it falls back on primitive accumulation. And she says that the relatively stronger oppression of women is the result of one (or rather, of a collection of several) of these bouts of primitive accumulation during early modern times.

I agree that for this argument, it doesn't matter much whether or not women's reproductive labour is remunerated, since to Federici, 21st century imperialist practices are also examples of primitive accumulation, and these typically involve paying the workers at least a little bit. What matters more is women's relatively greater unfreedom, since it allows for greater exploitation. Less effort goes into making women's lives enjoyable, and more effort is squeezed out of women, so that on the whole, there is more effort to go around which can be expended to enrich the capitalists (especially but not exclusively through the indirect route of women labouring in order to enable their husbands to labour more fiercely for the capitalists directly).

This seems to me like a solid basis on which to build feminist theory, but also a great basis for enkindling solidarity (between men and women, between workers in the global north and the global south, ...) against a shared enemy.

it's communists grasping at straws to read something new out of shit from the 1800s.

Yeah I never really understood the appeal of this approach either. At this point, these theories are more inspired by Marx than they are applications of Marx. And this is a good thing, Marx said a lot of wrong stuff! But why still use this outdated jargon which by now has accumulated (hah!) a dozen different meanings depending on context?

Just gonna tag @notallmensheviks as well in case they are interested in this discussion, no pressure though.

Atp I've come around to butler and serano just on the principle that we can't be mad at transfeminists for being insufficiently Marxist in a world where marxfems haven't come up with much outside of like 1st wave revivalism