Silvia Federici

The history of the body is the history of human beings, for there is no cultural practice that is not first applied to the body. Even if we limit ourselves to speak of the history of the body in capitalism, we face an overwhelming task, so extensive have been the techniques used to discipline the body, constantly changing, depending on the shifts in the different labor regimes to which our body was subjected.
A history of the body can be reconstructed by describing the different forms of repression that capitalism has activated against it. But I have decided to write instead of the body as a ground of resistance, that is, the body and its powers—the power to act, to transform itself and the body as a limit on exploitation.

Capitalism was not the first system based on the exploitation of human labor. But more than any other system in history, it has tried to create an economic world where labor is the most essential principle of accumulation. As such it was the first to make the regimentation and mechanization of the body a key premise of the accumulation of wealth. Indeed, one of capitalism’s main social tasks from its beginning to the present has been the transformation of our energies and corporeal powers into labor powers.

I have spoken of the historic battle it has waged against the body, against our materiality, and the many institutions it has created for this purpose: the law, the whip, the regulation of sexuality, as well as myriad social practices that have redefined our relation to space, to nature, and to each other.

I cannot here evoke all the ways in which the mechanization of body has occurred. Enough to say that the techniques of capture and domination have changed depending on the dominant labor regime and the machines that have been the model for the body.

Resistance here was imagined in the form of inertia, with the body pictured as a dumb animal, a monster resistant to command.
With the nineteenth century we have, instead, a conception of the body and disciplinary techniques modeled on the steam engine, its productivity calculated in terms of input and output, and efficiency becoming the key word.

Our struggle then must begin with the reappropriation of our body, the revaluation and rediscovery of its capacity for resistance, and expansion and celebration of its powers, individual and collective.

“Liberation from sex” means liberation from the conditions in which we are forced to live our sexuality, which transform this activity into an arduous work, full of incognita and accidents, not least the danger of remaining pregnant, given that even the latest contraceptives are taken at a considerable health risk. Until these conditions prevail, any “progress” brings more work and anxieties.

But the main difference is that our mothers and grandmothers looked at sexual services within a logic of exchange: you went to bed with the man you married, that is, the man who promised you a certain financial security. Today, instead, we work for free, in bed as in the kitchen, not only because sexual work is unpaid but because increasingly we provide sexual services without expecting anything in return. Indeed, the symbol of the liberated woman is the woman who is always available but in return does not ask anything any longer.

The mistake is setting goals that we cannot reach and always fighting “against” rather than trying to construct something. This means that we are always projected toward the future, whereas a joyful politics is constructive already in the present. More people today see that. We cannot place our goals into a future that is constantly receding. We need to set goals that we can achieve in part also in the present, though our horizon must be obviously broader. Being politically active must positively change our life and our relations with people around us.

Doing political work must be healing. It must give us strength, vision, enhance our sense of solidarity, and make us realize our interdependence. Being able to politicize our pain, turn it into a source of knowledge, into something that connects us to other people—all of this has a healing power. It is “empowering” (a word, however, I have come to dislike).