CRACK CAPITALISM

THESIS 16
1. Note that the relation between labour and other activities not immediately
productive of capital is a hierarchical one, a relation of subordination and
not just of coexistence, as Massimo De Angelis (2007) suggests. In other
words, these other activities (doing) exist in-against-and-beyond labour,
but not outside it. There is a relation of rupture but not of externality.
2. See Federici (2004: 184): 'Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry
from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated the women from
their bodies, which were thus "liberated" from any impediment preventing
them to function as machines for the production of labour.'
3. As Horkheimer and Adorno (1947/1979) put it, 'humanity had to horribly
mutilate itself to create its identical, functional, male self, and some of
it has to be redone in everybody's childhood', quoted by Krisis Gruppe
(1999/2004: 18, s.7).
4. See Federici (2004: 192-8 ), on the witch hunt and the capitalist rationalisation
of sexuality, and her comment (192) that 'The witch-hunt ... was the
first step in the long march towards "clean sex between clean sheets" and
the transformation of female sexual activity into work, a service to men,
and procreation.'
5. Even so, about one person in a thousand is born with genitals that are
not clearly either feminine or masculine; in these cases, the definition as
masculine or feminine is often by medical intervention (Baird, 2007: 124f£').
And see Baird's comment (ibid.: 133): 'The so-called biological line between
male and female is frankly quite fuzzy.'
6. This does not mean that women and men did not exist before capitalism,
but that the specific force of their separation and classification is peculiar
to capitalism. Thus, for example, the self-presentation of women as men
came to be seen as criminal only with the advent of capitalism.
7. This process can be seen as the suppression of the Dionysian: see Ehrenreich
(2007).
THESIS 17
1. See Thomas More's denunciation of the enclosures at the beginning of the
sixteenth century: 'Sheep ... These placid creatures, which used to require
so little food, have now apparently developed a raging appetite, and turned
into man-eaters. Fields, houses, towns, everything goes down their throats'
(151611965: 46).
2. Marx (1844/1975: 276), cited by Foster (2000: 158).
3. The earlier translation (1867/1965: 177) translates the original 'Sto{fwechsel'
(1867/1985: 192) as 'material re-actions' rather than metabolism: I have
opted here for the later version.
4. Here too I follow Foster (2000: 155) in using the more recent translation of
Capital by Ben Fowkes (Marx, 1894/1976: 949-50): large landed property
'produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent
process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of
life itself'. The older translation (1894/1971: 813) speaks of 'an irreparable
break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws
of life'. On the importance of this concept, see also Wilding (2008).
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