The Body as Work-Machine

Federici argues that the transition to capitalism required the reconstruction of the human body from an end in itself into a means of production. The body that had existed for its own pleasure, its own sociality, its own sacred relationship to the natural world was replaced by the body disciplined for labor — trained to operate within the temporal and spatial constraints of capitalist production, stripped of autonomous desires, rendered instrumentally useful. This disciplining was gendered: men's bodies were trained for waged labor in factories and fields, women's bodies for unwaged reproductive labor in households. The AI economy extends this disciplining into the nervous system: the body's reward circuits, attentional capacities, and stress responses are engaged by tools designed to maximize productive engagement without regard for the body's long-term integrity.