Th e article presents the Marxist feminist perspective on primitive accumulation and early capitalist history put forward by Silvia Federici in her work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. According to Federici and other Marxist feminists, Marx’s description of the origins of capitalism lacks an important diff erentiation. Whereas in Capital the main focus is placed on the male, waged proletariat, Federici focuses more on the changes in gender relations and status of women that accompany the process of primitive accumulation. Th e article fi rstly situates the origins of feminist perspectives on primitive accumulation into their historical context and links them with their preceding debates. Th e following sections then present a comparison of Marx’s and Federici’s account of primitive accumulation and the early history of capitalism. Th e article mainly focuses on the forms of primitive accumulation that are absent in Capital. Th ese forms include, above all, a new division of labour, subjugation of reproduction to the needs of capital, and an economical, legal, cultural, and symbolical degradation of women.
Blaženka Despot (1930–2001) was a Yugoslav philosopher who applied a critical reading of Marxism to the philosophy of technology and, after the mid-1970s, proposed a form of Marxist feminism that took into account the context of Yugoslav self-managing socialism. In the short text “Women and Self-Management,” Despot summarises the ideas she developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially her Marxist-feminist critiques of socialist women’s emancipation in Yugoslavia. She calls for re-focusing on women and revisiting Marx’s concept of nature through a reading of Hegel. While doing so, she raises the issue of violence against women as a key matter of women’s equality. Zsófi a Lóránd, in her introduction, discusses the text in light of Despot’s broader oeuvre and in light of the history of feminism in Yugoslavia.