Two weeks of reading, a regular group session, and a study group session later, and I find it hard to start this because really it's all so overwhelming and takes a while to put all those floating thoughts together. But I will. But also know that a really awesome way to get more on this is listening to an hour long lecture by Silvia Federici, available here.
The grapefruit metaphor
So in the previous session, as our lovely Catalyst leaders were prepping us for the coming readings and session, lovely Clare went into this beautiful extended metaphor about how one of the pieces was so full of sweet and nourishing juicy fruit, but the skin on it was thick as a grapefruit, and we'd really need to sink our teeth in but keep our eye on the prize of that luscious fruit underneath. We all kind of marveled at the metaphor for a while, then someone raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's inaccessible," and Clare said no, and talked more about the thick peel. We all marveled again for a minute. Someone else raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's boring?" and Clare returned to the grapefruit story. Then another person rose their hand and said, "Is it Marxist?" and we all cracked up because just that day I had been airing my disconnection with Marxist theory. Clare refused to put any labels on it, told us we should read it and judge it for ourselves. Well, it was inaccessible and marxist, but I guess I can't really call it boring.
Transition from feudalism to capitalism
It was actually the most major piece of this week, and pretty groundbreaking. It was the coming together of feminist theory and anti-capitalist theory. A woman named Silvia Federici did some amazing historical research deep into the dank & dark Middle Ages of Europe, and essentially laid bare how the transition from feudalism to capitalism was predicated on totally destroying women's power. Not to say patriarchy began then (we tried to look up on wikipedia "when did patriarchy begin" and we got the date of 3 BC. wow!), but that our economic system was (and therefore) totally built on it, gives us more reason to fight capitalism! (like how in the US it was built on racist slavery & theft of native lands)
How did that happen? Well, read the damn book! Or at least the excerpts. Or listen to this lecture. The Book is called "Caliban & the Witch."
Transition to Wage Economy
But I'll share some of the points I came to understand. The most major illumination for me was around the idea of unpaid labor. I know feminists talk about women's unpaid labor all the time, and we try to enumerate it, but I've always had a bit of a hard time visualizing how that work would ever be paid. Mostly cause capitalism is all I know. But under feudalism, no one was paid wages - work was whatever people did to survive - men did some of those things and women did some of those things, and stuff had equal value in terms of survival. As capitalism was imposed, some people - namely, men - were chosen to receive money for their work, and then people's idea of value changed from "this helps me survive" to "this pays me money."
Things changed from a division of labor to a hierarchy of labor.
How did money even come into play? People had been used to surviving off the common forests and natural resources, and paying taxes (in the form of goods mainly), but the feudal lords decided to seal off the commons - via the Enclosures - and privatize them. So then people had to get "jobs" working for the Lords and get paid - and thus the transition to a wage economy. As the forests/lands were privatized, Silvia Federici says that women themselves became the "commons," the natural resources - places to extract what you needed: housework, children, sex - without having to pay for it.
Oh, and the women resisted. We learned a little about the movement of people and groups that were labeled heretics - (and whose visions and goals were strikingly similar to current social justice/anarchist/liberation movements!!! damn, now that's some history to the movements) that really put out an alternative vision to feudalism and certainly capitalism. And many of those movements were lead by women, who were really locked out of the new economy. And what happened to the heretics - burnt at the stake.
Bodies into Machines
Another course of events was the Black Death, which really decimated the population of Europe. As capitalism began, a new vision of a place's wealth developed - and it was calculated by the number laborers available. So as the population died out, there was a desperation by those with resources to find enough workers to exploit. This is when we see intensification of punishment for things like abortion, birth control, and midwifery - generally women's control of reproduction. The ruling/owning class needed women to be literally producing new workers. And a whole 'nother part about divorcing people from their bodies - that bodies needed to become laboring machines, able to give as much as possible, so religious ideologies spread that made people feel that bodies were disgusting and needed to be controlled. And the joys of the body - dancing, sex, etc - also needed to be judged and squashed - people needed to be working, not fucking all the time! There's a whole lot more to explain about this, but I'm finding it hard to recreate all of the theory and discussion - it really was so dense that article!
Witch Burnings
I'm trying to leading up to the significance of the massive genocide of women via the witchhunts. Take into consideration all the stuff above, then add in a bit about needing to break the solidarity of the new working class - and doing that by pitting the men against the women. The author talked about the rampancy of gang-rape of lower class women, and says that in some towns the rate was as high as half the men of the town having participated in some attack on the women. Then women who were poor, lived outside of the new order being established, or retained knowledge of human bodies (herbalism, etc) were viciously pursued and murdered as witches. I don't know a death toll, but it lays somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 women killed for these reasons - and that doesn't include the execution of heretics as part of the Great Inquisition, which also targeted women living outside the new economic systems and the ideologies that supported them. That is huge. That is a notable genocide.
A painful thing to look at is that during the witchhunts, there was only one documented case of the men of the town acting together to prevent the wholesale murder of their women.
Precursor to White Supremacy
How does all this relate back to white supremacy?
The story of white supremacy we've been learning is that of capitalist motivation, the fabrication of divisions to keep people poor and exploitable, and the vicious and brutal violence to keep people oppressed. I have known about the unfathomable genocide of native peoples, I have known about the brutal violence against Africans through slavery and lynching, yet I never saw it put together so clearly how women too lived through a similar experience of fatal oppression. I have always approached patriarchy as something real, but not as powerful as racism. This week has helped me to see how it was just as integral to the development of economic injustice - in fact, even a precursor: the foundation of the system. For one thing, people had gotten used to the idea of a hierarchy of labor (as opposed to a division of labor) because of how women's work were devalued. Before Europeans were out robbing and devastating other lands and other peoples to gain their wealth - and in fact, in order to be able to do so - they accumulated wealth by violently stealing it from half of the population and testing out the the theories and methods that they would later use on peoples of other continents.
Contemporizing
The parallels to contemporary situations were astounding - it's crazy that centuries later the game plan is so similar. A huge one for me being the story of Mexico. Think of NAFTA as the modern "Enclosures" - the privatization of communal lands. People being forced into a wage economy - and often into cities. Women becoming the target of violence. A few people talked about their personal connections to Cuidad Juarez - where femicide is rampant and hundreds/thousands of women are subjected to rape/murder - the intraclass violence imposed by capitalism.
As a group, we really listed out a lot of ways we could see this information relating to our modern lives. When I get the notes I'm gonna post that up here, as a separate post.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment