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

Diba

Mari🦇 🤎🗡️

the body can be for women both a source of identity and at the same time a prison, 

At the core of capitalism there is not only the symbiotic relation between waged- contractual labor and enslavement but, together with it, the dialectics of accumulation and destruction of labor-power, for which women have paid the highest cost, with their bodies, their work, their lives.

It is impossible therefore to associate capitalism with any formn of liberation or attribute the longevity of the system to its capacity to satisfy human needs. If capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the welb of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat, and because of its capacity to globalize exploitation. 

Aiming at controlling nature, the capitalist organization of work must refuse the unpredictability implicit in the practice ofmagic, and the possibility of establishing a privileged relation with the natural elements, as well as the belief in the existence of powers available only to particular individuals, and thus not easily generalized and exploitable. Magic also an obstacle to the rationalizaion of the work process, and a threat to the establishm of the principle ofindividual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal  of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be disenchanted in order to be dominated.

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. 

soochie

“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”

“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

“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.”

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

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.

Caliban and the Witch quotes

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