Silvia Federici

Literary Nonfiction. CALIBAN AND THE WITCH is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization."It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda." Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged"

Caliban and the Witch

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As Silverblatt points out, the concept of witchcraft was alien to Andean society. In Peru as well, as in every pre-industrial society, many women were "specialists in medical knowledge,” being familiar with the properties ofherbs and plants, and they were also diviners. But the Christian notion of the devil was unknown to them. Nevertheless, by the 17dl century, under the impact of torture, intense persecution, and “forced acculturation" ’ the Andean women arrested, mostly old and poor, were accusing tetnselves of the same crimes with which women were being charged in the European witch trials : pacts and copulation witli the devil, prescribing herbal remedies, using oint ments, flying through the air, making wax images

Destroying them or forbidding their worship was to attack the community, its historical roots, people's relation to the land, and their intensely spiritual relation to nature. 

Similarly, the cannibalistic rituals they discovered in America, which figure promi nently in the records of the Conquest, must not have been too diferent from the med ical practices that were popular in Europe at the time. In the 16th 17th and even 18th centuries, the drinking of human blood (especially the blood of those who had died of a violent death) and mutiny water, obtained by soaking human flesh in various spirits, was a common cure for epilepsy and other illnesses in many European countries. Furthermore, this type of cannibalism, "involving human flesh, blood, heart, skull, bone marrow, and other body parts was not limited to fringe groups of society but practiced in the most respectable circles” 

The witch-hunt tumed the image of llie old woman upside down: traditionally considered a wise woman, slie became a symbol of sterility and hostility to life.

Magic ww also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment ofthe principle of individual responsibility.Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to opposed The world had to be “disenchanted" in order to be dominated.

That the spread of rural capitalism, with al its consequences (land expropriation, toe deepening of social distances, the breakdown of collective relations) was a decisive factor in the background of die witch-hunt is proven by the fact that the majority of women  accused were poor peasant women — cottars, wage laborers — while those who K^ed them were wealthy and prestigious members of the community, often their employers or landlords, that is, individuals who were part of die local power structures and often had close ties with the central state. 

According to Max Weber, reform of the body is at the core of the bourgeois ethic because capitalism makes acqui sition "the ultimate purpose of life,’ ' instead of treating it as a means for the satisfaction of our needs; thus, it requires that we forfeit al spontaneous enjoyment of life

 “I told him it not honorable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou has no sense. You French people love oily your children; but we love al the children of our tribe.' I began to laugh see ing that he philosophized in horse and mule fashion” (ibid.: 50).

With this shift, a new medical practice also prevailed, one that in the case of a medical emergency prioritized die life of the fetus over that of the mother.This was in contrast to the customary birthing process which women had controlled; and indeed, for it to happen, die community of women that had gathered around the bed of the future mother had to be first expelled from the delivery room, and midwives had to be placed under the surveillance of the doctor, or had to be recruited to police women.

Even the individual's relation with God was privatized in Protestant areas, with the institution of a direct relationship between the individual and the divinity; in the Catholic areas, with the introduction of individual confession. The church itself, as a community center, ceased to host any social activity other than those addressed to die cult. As a result, the physical enclosure operated by land privatization and the hedging of the commons was amplified by a process of social enclosure, the reproduction of workers shifting from the openfield to the home, from the community to the family, from the public space to the private.

But women were also those most ruined by high prices for. having less access to money and employment than men, they were more dependent on cheap food for survival.This is why, despite their subordinate status, they took quickly to the streets when food prices went up, or when rumor spread that the grain supplies were being removed from town.This is what happened at the time of the Cordoba uprising of 1652, which started “early in the morning ... when a poor woman went weeping through the streets of the poor quarter, holding the body of her son who had died of hunger” 

Land privatization and the conmiercialization of agriculture did not increase the food supply available to the common people, though more food was made available for the market and for export. For workers they inaugurated two centuries of starvation. in the same way as today, even in the most fertile areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, malnutrition is rampant due to the destruction of communal land-tenure and the "export or perish” policy imposed by the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs.

On the contrary, capitalism has created more brutal and insiclious forns of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. It is in great part because of these imposed divisions — especially those between women and men — that capitalist accumulation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet.

“we are made in the image of God, but we are treated like beasts,”

Things degenerated to the point that the clergy would not bury the dead, baptize or grant absolution from sin unless it received some compensation. Even the communion became an occasion for a bargain. and “[i]f an unjust demand w\.vas resisted the recalcitrant was exconunul1.icated, and then had to pay for reconciliation in addition to the original sum” (Lea 1961:11). In this context, the propagation ofthe heretical doctrines not only channeled the contempt that people felt for the clergy; it gave them confidence in their views and insti gated their resistance to clerical exploitation.Taking the lead from the New Testament, the heretics taught that Christ had no property, and that if the Church wanted to regain its spiritual power it should divest itselffrom all its possessions

Further, it explains how body can be for women both a source of identity and at the same time a prison, and why it is so important for feminists and, at the same time, so problematic to valorize it.

.A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times. 

As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged work- ers,“wage slavery” has been built, and the secret of its productivity.

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“Marx never acknowledged that procreation could become a terrain of exploitation and by the same token a terrain of resistance. He never imagined that women could refuse to reproduce, or that such a refusal could become part of class struggle.”

“Her vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital investment the capital investment being the sex-act and the resulting child the accumulated surplus. - Barbara Omolade, "Heart of Darkness" 1983

“the body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance, as the female body has been appropriated by the state and men and forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor”

Mari🦇 🤎🗡️

It also links the witch-hunt to the destruction of the environment, and connects the capitalist exploitation of the natural world with the exploitation of women. 

This book is a great start for understanding the intersectionality of class struggle, the patriarchal system, and capitalism.

Loreng

I adore this book. I now see it as a prerequisite for anyone interested in leftist politics— particularly around Marxism, women, bodily autonomy, and the State’s inclination to control reproduction and sexuality to force and maintain social order. I learned so much. 

Before this book I had only heard of the witch hunt in the context of folklore and scary stories. “Caliban” plainly lays out the lasting real world consequences of this mass extermination of women.

Caliban and the Witch

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