Beyond the Periphery of the Skin

Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism

Silvia Federici

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771134927
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

More than ever, "the body" is today at the center of radical and institutional politics. Feminist, antiracist, trans, ecological movements–all look at the body in its manifold manifestations as a ground of confrontation with the state and a vehicle for transformative social practices. Concurrently, the body has become a signifier for the reproduction crisis the neoliberal turn in capitalist development has generated and for the international surge in institutional repression and public violence. In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, lifelong activist and best-selling author Silvia Federici examines these complex processes, placing them in the context of the history of the capitalist transformation of the body into a work-machine.

Building on three groundbreaking lectures, Federici surveys the new paradigms that today govern how the body is conceived in the collective radical imagination, as well as the new disciplinary regimes state and capital are deploying in response to mounting revolt against the daily attacks on our everyday reproduction. In this process she confronts some of the most important questions for contemporary radical political projects. What does "the body" mean, today, as a category of social/political action? What are the processes by which it is constituted? How do we dismantle the tools by which our bodies have been "enclosed" and collectively reclaim our capacity to govern them?

PART ONE

ONE

Lecture One The Body, Capitalism, and the Reproduction of Labor Power

There is no doubt that the body is today at the center of political, disciplinary, and scientific discourse, with the attempt in every field to redefine its main qualities and possibilities. It is the sphinx to be interrogated and acted upon on the path toward social and individual change. Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible to articulate a coherent view of the body on the basis of the theories most accredited in the intellectual and political arena. On the one hand, we have the most extreme forms of biological determinism, with the assumption of the DNA as the deus absconditus (hidden god) presumably determining, behind our backs, our physiological and psychological life. On the other, we have (feminist, trans) theories encouraging us to discard all “biological” factors in favor of performative or textual representations of the body and to embrace, as constitutive of our being, our growing assimilation with the world of machines.

A common trend, however, is the absence of a standpoint from which to identify the social forces that are affecting our bodies. With an almost religious obsession, biologists circumscribe the area of significant activity to a microscopic world of molecules, whose constitution is as mysterious as that of the original sin. As far as biologists are concerned, we come into this world already tainted by, predisposed to, predestined to, or spared from disease, for all is in the DNA an unknown god has allotted to us. As for the discursive/performative theories of the body, they too are silent concerning the social ground from which ideas about the body and body practices are generated. There is perhaps the fear that searching for a unitary cause may blind us to the diverse ways in which our bodies articulate our identities and relations to power. There is also a tendency, recuperated from Foucault, to investigate the “effects” of the powers acting on our bodies rather than their sources. Yet without a reconstruction of the field of forces in which they move, our bodies must remain unintelligible or elicit mystifying views of their operations. How, for instance, can we envisage “going beyond the binary” without an understanding of its economic, political, and social utility within particular systems of exploitation, and, on the other hand, an understanding of the struggles by which gender identities are continuously transformed? How to speak of our “performance” of gender, race, and age without a recognition of the compulsion generated by specific forms of exploitation and punishment?

We must identify the world of antagonistic policies and power relations by which our bodies are constituted and rethink the struggles that have taken place in opposition to the “norm” if we are to devise strategies for change.

This is the work I have undertaken in Caliban and the Witch (2004), where I have examined how the transition to capitalism changed the concept and treatment of “the body,”¹ arguing that one of capitalism’s main projects has been the transformation of our bodies into work-machines. This means that the need to maximize the exploitation of living labor, also through the creation of differentiated forms of work and coercion, has been the factor that more than any other has shaped our bodies in capitalist society. This approach has consciously contrasted with Foucault’s,² which roots the disciplinary regimes to which the body was subjected at the beginning of the “modern era” in the workings of a metaphysical “Power” not better identified in its purposes and objectives.³

In contrast to Foucault, I have also argued that we do not have one but multiple histories of the body, that is, multiple histories of how the mechanization of the body was articulated, for the racial, sexual, and generational hierarchies that capitalism has constructed from its inception rule out the possibility of a universal standpoint. Thus the history of “the body” must be told by weaving together the histories of those who were enslaved, colonized, or turned into waged workers or unpaid housewives and the histories of the children, keeping in mind that these classifications are not mutually exclusive and that our subjection to “interlocking systems of domination” always produces a new reality.⁴ I would add that we also need a history of capitalism written from the viewpoint of the animal world and of course the lands, the seas, and the forests.

We need to look at “the body” from all these viewpoints to grasp the depth of the war that capitalism has waged against human beings and “nature” and to devise strategies capable of ending such destruction. To speak of a war is not to assume an original wholeness or propose an idealized view of “nature.” It is to highlight the state of emergency in which we currently live and to question, in an age that promotes remaking our bodies as a path to social empowerment and self-determination, the benefits that we may derive from policies and technologies that are not controlled from below. Indeed, before we celebrate our becoming cyborgs, we should reflect on the social consequences of the mechanization process that we have already undergone.⁵ It is naive, in fact, to imagine that our symbiosis with machines necessarily results in an extension of our powers and ignore the constraints that technologies place on our lives and their increasing use as a means of social control as well as the ecological cost of their production.⁶

Capitalism has treated our bodies as work-machines because it is the social system that most systematically has made of human labor the essence of the accumulation of wealth and has most needed to maximize its exploitation. It has accomplished this in different ways: with the imposition of more intense and uniform forms of labor as well as multiple disciplinary regimes and institutions and with terror and rituals of degradation. Exemplary were those that in the seventeenth century were imposed on the inmates of the Dutch workhouses, who were forced to pulverize blocks of wood with the most backward and backbreaking method, for no useful purpose but to be taught to obey external orders and to experience in every fiber of their bodies their impotence and subjection.⁷

Another example of the debasement rituals employed to break people’s will to resistance were those imposed, since the turn of the twentieth century, by doctors in South Africa, on Africans destined to work in the gold mines (Butchart 1998, 92–110). Under the guise of “heat tolerance tests” or “selection procedures,” African workers were ordered to strip naked, line up, and shovel rocks and then submit to radiographic examinations or to measurements by tape and weighing scales, all under the gaze of medical examiners, who often remained invisible to those thus tested (94, 97, 100). The goal of the exercise was supposedly to demonstrate to future workers the sovereign power of the mining industry and to initiate Africans to a life in which they would be “deprived of any human dignity” (94).

In the same time period, in Europe and the US, Taylorism’s time and motion studies—later incorporated into the construction of the assembly line—turned the mechanization of the workers’ bodies into a scientific project, through the fragmentation and atomization of tasks, the elimination of any decisional element from the work process, and, above all, the stripping of the work itself from any knowledge and motivational factor.⁸ Automatism, however, has also been the product of a work life of infinite repetition, a life of “No Exit,”⁹ like the nine-to-five in a factory or office, where even the holiday breaks become mechanized and routine, due to their time constraints and predictability.

Foucault was right, however: the “repressive hypothesis” is not sufficient to explain the history of the body in capitalism.¹⁰ As important as what was repressed have been the “capacities” that were developed. In Principles of Economics (1890), the British economist Alfred Marshall celebrated the capacities that capitalist discipline has produced in the industrial workforce, declaring that few populations in the world were capable of what European workers at the time could do. He praised industrial workers’ “general ability” to keep working continuously, for hours, on the same task, to remember everything, to remember, while doing a task, what the next one should be, to work with instruments without breaking them, without wasting time, to be careful in handling expensive machinery and steady even doing the most monotonous tasks. These, he argued, were unique skills that few people worldwide possessed, demonstrating, in his view, that even work that appears unskilled is actually highly skilled (Marshall [1890] 1990, 172).

Marshall would not say how such wonderful, machinelike workers were created. He did not say that people had to be separated from the land and terrorized with exemplary tortures and executions. Vagabonds had their ears cut. Prostitutes were subjected to “waterboarding,” the same type of torture to which the CIA and US Special Forces subject those they accuse of “terrorism.” Tied to a chair, women suspected of improper behavior were plunged into ponds and rivers to the point of near suffocation. Slaves were whipped until the flesh was torn from their bones and were burned, mutilated, left under a blazing sun until their bodies putrefied.

As I have argued in Caliban and the Witch, with the development of capitalism not only were communal fields “enclosed,” so was the body. But this process has differed for men and women, in the same way as it has differed for those who were destined to be enslaved and those who were subjected to other forms of coerced labor, waged work included.

Women, in capitalist development, have suffered a double process of mechanization. Besides being subjected to the discipline of work, paid and unpaid, in plantations, factories, and homes, they have been expropriated from their bodies and turned into sexual objects and breeding machines.

Capitalist accumulation (as Marx recognized) is the accumulation of workers.¹¹ This was the motivation driving the slave trade, the development of the plantation system and—I have argued—the witch hunts that took place in Europe and the “New World.”¹² Through the persecution of “witches,” women wishing to control their reproductive capacity were denounced as enemies of children and, in different ways, subjected to a demonization that has continued into the present. In the nineteenth century, for instance, advocates of “free love,” like Victoria Woodhull, were branded in the American press as satanic, pictured with devil’s wings and all (Poole 2009). Today as well, in several US states, women who go to a clinic to abort have to make their ways through masses of “right-to-lifers” screaming “baby killers” and chasing them, thanks to a ruling by the Supreme Court,¹³ as far as the clinic’s door.

In no place has the attempt to reduce women’s bodies to machines been more systematic, brutal and normalized than in slavery. While exposed to constant sexual assaults and the searing pain of seeing their children sold as slaves, after England banned the slave trade in 1807, enslaved women in the US were forced to procreate to fuel a breeding industry with its center in Virginia.¹⁴ “As the power looms of Lancashire sucked up all the cotton that the South could grow,” Ned and Constance Sublette have written, “women’s wombs “were not merely the source of local enrichment, but were also suppliers in a global system of agricultural input, enslaved industrial input, and financial expansion” (Sublette and Sublette 2016, 414). Thomas Jefferson approved, going to great lengths to have the US Congress limit the importation of slaves from Africa in order to protect the prices of the slaves that women on the Virginian plantations would procreate. “I consider,” he wrote, “a woman who brings a child every two years more profitable than the best man on the farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption” (416).

Although in the history of the US no group of women, outside of slavery, has been directly compelled to have children, with the criminalization of abortion, involuntary procreation and state control of the female body have been institutionalized. The advent of the birth control pill has not decisively altered this situation. Even in countries where abortion has been legalized, restrictions have been introduced that make access difficult for many women.¹⁵ This is because procreation has an economic value that in no way is diminished on account of capital’s increased technological power. It is a mistake, in fact, to assume that the interest of the capitalist class in the control over women’s reproductive capacity may be diminishing on account of its ability to replace workers with machines. Despite its tendency to make workers redundant and create “surplus populations,” capital accumulation still requires human labor. Only labor creates value, machines do not. The very growth of technological production, as Danna (2019, 208ff ) has recently argued, is made possible by the existence of social inequalities and the intense exploitation of workers in the “Third World.” What is vanishing today is the compensation for work that in the past was waged, not the work itself. Capitalism needs workers, it also needs consumers and soldiers. Thus, the actual size of the population is still a matter of great political importance. This is why—as Jenny Brown has shown in her Birth Strike (2018)—restrictions are placed on abortion. So important is for the capitalist class to control women’s bodies that, as we have seen, even in the US, where in the 1970s abortion was legalized, attempts to reverse this decision continue to this day. In other countries, Italy for instance, the loophole is conceding to doctors the possibility of becoming “conscientious objectors,” with the result that many women cannot abort in the localities where they live.

However, control over women’s bodies has never been a purely quantitative matter. Always, state and capital have tried to determine who is allowed to reproduce and who is not. This is why we simultaneously have restrictions on the right to abort and the criminalization of pregnancy,¹⁶ in the case of women who are expected to generate “troublemakers.” It is no accident, for instance, if from the 1970s to the 1990s, as new generations of Africans, Indians, and other decolonized subjects were coming to political age, demanding a restitution of the wealth that Europeans had robbed from their countries, a massive campaign to contain what was defined as a “population explosion” was mounted throughout the former colonial world (Hartmann 1995, 189–91), with the promotion of sterilization and contraceptives, like Depo Provera, Norplant, IUDs that, once implanted, women could not control.¹⁷ Through the sterilization of women in the former colonial world, international capital has attempted to contain a worldwide struggle for reparations; in the same way that, in the US, successive governments have tried to block black people’s liberation struggle through the mass incarceration of millions of young black men and women.

Like every other form of reproduction, procreation too has a clear class character and is racialized. Relatively few women worldwide can today decide whether to have children and the conditions in which to have them. As Dorothy Roberts has so powerfully shown in Killing the Black Body ([1997] 2017), while white, affluent women’s desire to procreate is now elevated to the rank of an unconditional right, to be guaranteed at all costs, black women, for whom it is more difficult to have some economic security, are ostracized and penalized if they have a child. Yet the discrimination that so many black, migrant, proletarian women encounter on the way to maternity should not be read as a sign that capitalism is no longer interested in demographic growth. As I previously argued, capitalism cannot dispense with workers. The workerless factory is an ideological sham intended to scare workers into subjection. Were labor to be eliminated from the production process capitalism would probably collapse. Population expansion is by itself a stimulus to growth; thus, no sector of capital can be indifferent to whether women decide to procreate.

This point is forcibly made by the already-quoted Birth Strike, where Jenny Brown thoroughly analyses the relation of procreation to every aspect of economic and social life, convincingly demonstrating that politicians today are concerned about the worldwide decline of the birth rate, which she reads as a silent strike. Brown suggests that women should consciously take advantage of this concern to bargain better conditions of living and work. In other words, she suggests that we use our capacity to reproduce as a tool of political power.¹⁸ This is a tempting proposition. It is tempting to imagine women openly going on a birth strike, declaring, for instance, that “we won’t bring any more children into this world until the conditions that await them are drastically changed.” I say “openly” because, as Brown documents it, a broad-based though silent refusal of procreation is already taking place. The worldwide decline of the birth rate, that has peaked in countries like Italy and Germany since the post–World War II period, has been the sign of such a reproduction strike. The birth rate has been declining for some time in the US as well. Women today have fewer children because it means less housework, less dependence on men or a job, because they refuse to see their lives consumed by maternal duties, or have no desire to reproduce themselves and, especially in the US, because they have no access to contraceptive and abortion.¹⁹ It is hard, however, to see how an open strike could be organized. Many of the children born are not planned or wanted. Moreover, in many countries, having a child is for women an insurance p...