Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

16
The abstraction of doing into labour
is the creation of the male labourer
and the dimorphisation of sexuality.
Labour is constituted by its separation or abstraction from lifeactivity.
This separation is supported by a radical subordination
of life-activity to the requirements of labour. Life-activity (having
children, bringing them up, getting food and preparing it, and
so on) continues to exist outside the immediate domination of
value-production, but its subordination to labour is secured
by its dependence on the labourer's wage (or the sale of other
commodities produced).
The constitution of labour is the constitution of a new
hierarchy between labour and other activities.! The creation of
the labourer is at the same time the creation of a new hierarchy
between him and those whose primary responsibility is the
performance of those other activities of reproduction. In other
words, primitive accumulation is the brutal and bloody creation
of a new hierarchy between men and women.
This is not to say that patriarchy did not exist in pre-capitalist
societies, but there did not exist the same separation of labour
and other activities, nor the same dependence of the other
activities upon the wage of labour. Thus, Federici says of the
feudal village:
Female serfs were less dependent on their male kin, less differentiated
from them physically, socially, and psychologically, and were less
subservient to men's needs than 'free women' were to be later in capitalist
society ... In the feudal village no social separation existed between the
production of goods and the reproduction of the work-force; all work
contributed to the family's sustenance. Women worked in the fields, in
addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an
herb garden; their domestic activities were not devalued and did not
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