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4.52 AVERAGE
4.52 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Great for rethinking our understanding of the course and shape of women's rights in Europe and expanding our understanding of proletarianization & the closing of the commons, all while pointing to the implications for today.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
La caza de brujas es un momento histórico importantisimo en la historia de las mujeres, la historia de la sexualidad y la opresión vivida por las mujeres desde el comienzo de los tiempos.
Es necesario saber la historia de la transición del feudalismo al capitalismo porque este ultimo es el sistema actual. Necesitamos conocer los hechos del pasado, aprender y aprehender de ellos, para que no vuelvan a ocurrir. Uno de los pocos libros que realmente habla de America Latina, Africa y lo vivido durante la colonización y exterminio de los pueblos originarios.
Lo recomiendo muchísimo, es un libro increible. 5 estrellas, pero merece 100
Es necesario saber la historia de la transición del feudalismo al capitalismo porque este ultimo es el sistema actual. Necesitamos conocer los hechos del pasado, aprender y aprehender de ellos, para que no vuelvan a ocurrir. Uno de los pocos libros que realmente habla de America Latina, Africa y lo vivido durante la colonización y exterminio de los pueblos originarios.
Lo recomiendo muchísimo, es un libro increible. 5 estrellas, pero merece 100
informative
slow-paced
During the late Middle Ages, European thought and philosophy shifted to a view of man as machine. This separation between body and mind created a larger cultural distaste for anything natural and animalistic. The church also reinforced these same ideas. Church and state united to encourage European people to think of their body as inherently sinful and to instead use their minds to avoid lazy or hedonistic behavior. Work was godly. Work was good. Work required disciplining your mind and treating your body like a tool. Thus, we have the dawn of assessing humans by their labor-power. The foundation for capitalism. Additionally, the church and state disdaining all things bodily made it so that women's traditional work and knowledge became necessary to destroy. Thus, the dawning of the witch-hunt.
"The witch-hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, demonize them, and destroy their social power."
The witch-hunt was essential to early capitalism. So many of the harmful views that Western culture still retains were established during the witch-hunt era specifically to create and serve an increasingly labor-obssessed capitalist society. Not only that, but so much was lost. Unknown amounts of communal culture burned at the stake alongside the "witches." A culture of resistance, of healing & midwifery, of art, of feminine and collective power... It is incredibly unsettling to think of how little this literal and cultural genocide is studied in modern world history courses. I am so grateful that reading this book has allowed me to see how the intentional omission of this topic has allowed some of the worst aspects of witch-hunts to be perpetuated to this day.
I highly recommend this book. If you hate the patriarchy and hate capitalism then this book is for you.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness, Genocide, Rape, Sexism, Torture, Violence, Religious bigotry, Colonisation
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
The world we live is not natural; it was made. It is a simple truth, but one difficult to internalize and allow to seep into your thought processes. But this thought is at the core of being able to conceive of a world better than the one we live in.
What this book does, then, is take you back to the start, to the pre-capitalist world to find the origins of our present condition, so we can see that things are not rooted in natural forces but were constructed for a specific reason. Federici is mainly concerned with the way misogyny, and especially the witch hunt, was weaponized as a way for mostly male workers to accept the loss of the commons to the ruling class, which was the primary incident in the creation of capitalism.
The argument is this: the process of primitive accumulation (i.e, the consolidation of land and capital into the ruling class’ hands) required the seizure of the land previously held in common by the workers that they used as their livelihood. What came for them in replacement was the advent of waged labor. Workers were, of course, infuriated by their land being taken from them, so the ruling class managed a compromise: the public ownership of land was replaced by the public ownership of women’s bodies, and by making the only labor they could perform reproducing. With this comes a whole host of repressive changes: women being forced out of the workplace (ensuring dependance on men, leading to abuse and degradation), the destruction of contraceptive methods and other healing methods passed down through generations, and, of course, the witch hunt. The witch hunt was an attack on woman’s autonomy, on their bodies; the state dropped all pretense of “causing harm” on the part of the accused witches and attacked anyone outside the bounds of the newly imposed order, primarily as a means of founding the new social order. Women did not take this lying down, but their rebellions lacked the support necessary to overcome, and the threat of excruciating torture, rape, and execution made any resistance risky to muster and doomed to ultimately fail.
The book also looks for the justifications and the reasoning behind the changes. Mercantilism held that the strength of a country was based almost exclusively in the amount of labor power it had, so reproduction must be incentivized at all costs. This leads to many of the changes mentioned above, such as the removal of woman from the workforce and their lack of autonomy, the destruction of contraception, as well as other changes, such as the stigmatization and punishment of homosexuality. At the same time, conceptions of the body that interacted with the emerging capitalist thought saw the body as mechanical, just a tool that needed to be adjusted right to be a labor machine. To get the workforce in a position to be this perfectly honed tool, all elements of spirituality, of frivolity, needed to be stripped, which includes the spiritual practices often associated with witches but also sex for the purpose of pleasure and ultimately friendships and communal relations.
Federici uses the present to show how the process of primitive accumulation has not stopped. In India and in Africa, the witch hunt persists even as the Anglo world has moved on, a sign those societies are being exploited by the West with little recourse other than violence against their own people. The countries themselves may no longer be explicitly colonized and occupied, but the scar tissue of years of control lives on in their culture.
While it details the changes that were made, it also details the conditions beforehand, which were almost always across the board better for women. They could take part in the commons and be self sufficient, they were allowed in various guilds and to be part of the workforce, their friendships with other women were not treated as suspicious, and they had far more bodily autonomy with regards to reproduction. Their lives were not perfect, and misogyny was still present, but the transition from feudalism to capitalist production hit them the hardest and they paid the largest price for it. Their treatment, from the witch hunt to now, is not something natural to the human condition, but something constructed, just as other prejudices are, to divide the working class from itself, to prevent them from realizing the true enemy.
The present condition is not some fundamental part of our nature, not intrinsic to who we are as creatures. Society can be molded, can be shaped in the image of those who choose to do so. What this book does is lift the hood over this image and reveal the work and the act of creation behind it. A must-read if you’re interested in politics or feminism in my opinion.
(Federici has made an apparent TERF turn in recent years, so perhaps better to check this book out at the library rather than give her your money, but this still is worth reading IMO)
What this book does, then, is take you back to the start, to the pre-capitalist world to find the origins of our present condition, so we can see that things are not rooted in natural forces but were constructed for a specific reason. Federici is mainly concerned with the way misogyny, and especially the witch hunt, was weaponized as a way for mostly male workers to accept the loss of the commons to the ruling class, which was the primary incident in the creation of capitalism.
The argument is this: the process of primitive accumulation (i.e, the consolidation of land and capital into the ruling class’ hands) required the seizure of the land previously held in common by the workers that they used as their livelihood. What came for them in replacement was the advent of waged labor. Workers were, of course, infuriated by their land being taken from them, so the ruling class managed a compromise: the public ownership of land was replaced by the public ownership of women’s bodies, and by making the only labor they could perform reproducing. With this comes a whole host of repressive changes: women being forced out of the workplace (ensuring dependance on men, leading to abuse and degradation), the destruction of contraceptive methods and other healing methods passed down through generations, and, of course, the witch hunt. The witch hunt was an attack on woman’s autonomy, on their bodies; the state dropped all pretense of “causing harm” on the part of the accused witches and attacked anyone outside the bounds of the newly imposed order, primarily as a means of founding the new social order. Women did not take this lying down, but their rebellions lacked the support necessary to overcome, and the threat of excruciating torture, rape, and execution made any resistance risky to muster and doomed to ultimately fail.
The book also looks for the justifications and the reasoning behind the changes. Mercantilism held that the strength of a country was based almost exclusively in the amount of labor power it had, so reproduction must be incentivized at all costs. This leads to many of the changes mentioned above, such as the removal of woman from the workforce and their lack of autonomy, the destruction of contraception, as well as other changes, such as the stigmatization and punishment of homosexuality. At the same time, conceptions of the body that interacted with the emerging capitalist thought saw the body as mechanical, just a tool that needed to be adjusted right to be a labor machine. To get the workforce in a position to be this perfectly honed tool, all elements of spirituality, of frivolity, needed to be stripped, which includes the spiritual practices often associated with witches but also sex for the purpose of pleasure and ultimately friendships and communal relations.
Federici uses the present to show how the process of primitive accumulation has not stopped. In India and in Africa, the witch hunt persists even as the Anglo world has moved on, a sign those societies are being exploited by the West with little recourse other than violence against their own people. The countries themselves may no longer be explicitly colonized and occupied, but the scar tissue of years of control lives on in their culture.
While it details the changes that were made, it also details the conditions beforehand, which were almost always across the board better for women. They could take part in the commons and be self sufficient, they were allowed in various guilds and to be part of the workforce, their friendships with other women were not treated as suspicious, and they had far more bodily autonomy with regards to reproduction. Their lives were not perfect, and misogyny was still present, but the transition from feudalism to capitalist production hit them the hardest and they paid the largest price for it. Their treatment, from the witch hunt to now, is not something natural to the human condition, but something constructed, just as other prejudices are, to divide the working class from itself, to prevent them from realizing the true enemy.
The present condition is not some fundamental part of our nature, not intrinsic to who we are as creatures. Society can be molded, can be shaped in the image of those who choose to do so. What this book does is lift the hood over this image and reveal the work and the act of creation behind it. A must-read if you’re interested in politics or feminism in my opinion.
(Federici has made an apparent TERF turn in recent years, so perhaps better to check this book out at the library rather than give her your money, but this still is worth reading IMO)
challenging
informative
reflective
informative
slow-paced
challenging
informative
slow-paced