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4.52 AVERAGE
4.52 AVERAGE
A must read, very clear, and extremely important. Federici eloquently explains and exposes her thoughts and takes on marxism, women and the reasons behind witch hunting among other forms of control, capitalism, colonization, and much more.
I can't believe I didn't read this book earlier in my life.
All I want to do now is gift it to every person I know.
I can't believe I didn't read this book earlier in my life.
All I want to do now is gift it to every person I know.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
informative
medium-paced
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
This book was amazing. Incredible analysis, well cited, and (shockingly) very easy to read, even hard to put down at times. This book also covers an impressive amount of ground for being only 250ish pages including pictures and graphs.
The main thesis of this book is that degradation of women’s position in society is a necessary part of the primitive accumulation and that the Witch Hunts (in Europe and the New World) were key in the degrading and expropriation of women (not to mentioned it killed hundreds of thousands of innocent women. The book argues by first outlining the periods leading up to, and the processes of primitive accumulation, reminding readers of the condition of women before during and after. It then transitions to a slightly boring but necessary and interesting dissection of scientific rationalism and philosophies of the time that were key to the conversion of the human body to a machine in the unconsciousness of many Europeans, particularly the ruling class. We then get an extensive breakdown of how the witch hunts were not just a panic, but were started by members of the ruling class and encouraged by the church and state all the way up until the point when the women they were trying to silence or eliminate were no longer a threat. This is the part of the book that realllllly shines, as it seems like it was Federici’s main goal for this work.
There are a lot of links she convincingly draws between the persecution of non traditional sexuality and persecution of women which I see a lot in pop culture. I think you could easily draw a line from the purity culture that was instituted to degrade and expropriate women in the period of primitive accumulation to the ideas we still here about promiscuity, non monogamous relationships, and breaking gender roles. The constructed nature of gender roles is not specifically discussed, but it shines pretty clearly through her history of women’s position. Overall great read I highly recommend and will lend to anyone interested! Any1 wanna start a coven and participate in a Sabbat??
A must read. Primitive Accumulation required more than the demolishment of all public entities in order to create a mollified and docile populace that needs to sell their labour to survive. It also required the eradication of the body, and sex, and reproduction from its role in public society in order to create the kind of control over the populace required for capitalism to take root. However, this mollification required the creation of a particular cosmology; this cosmology is the mechanical, deistic view of the universe that stands on a shallow and parochial understanding of reason. It took centuries for this cosmology to be beaten into the masses, and they beat this into the masses in various ways. This book analyzes the role of witch hunts in the creation and inculcation of this cosmology in the masses. It says that the witch hunts were necessary in order to strip women of any public role in society; proto-capitalists needed to strip women of these rights in order to create an adequately stratified, industrial reserve army of labour. They demanded that women be relegated to the home so they could provide free labour to their families, while also creating new labourers via unpaid reproduction. Obviously, these ideas about the role of women in society is unnatural, and it had to be inculcated through force. The witch hunt provided a rationale for removing women from public places, demonizing women who did not fit into prescribed familial roles, and relegating them exclusively to state-approved private spheres.
Read this book.
Read this book.
dark
informative
medium-paced
I absolutely loved this book! Federici makes point after point -- my favourite thing about this was the intellectual honesty with which she makes those points. It truly did make me see the Middle Ages in a completely different light and contextualised the which hunt in such a clear manner. Definitely a book I would like to reread periodically throughout my life!!
Indispensable, necesario, impactante. No sé cómo agradecer este libro. Una revision histórica necesaria sobre la caza de brujas en Europa durante los siglos XV-XVIII (también algunos breves apuntes en América durante la colonización). Un profundo ensayo con una muy potente investigación detrás para entender cómo la caza de brujas tuvo tanta importancia como el expolio de América en el establecimiento del sistema capitalista. Federici escribe de una manera muy cercana y circular. No te pierdes en ningún momento. Magnífico