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zachcarter 's review for:
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
by Silvia Federici
There are a few books whose effect on me is so profound that it marks an inflection point in my understanding of history and theory: Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa"; Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"; and Gerald Horne's "The Counterrevolution of 1776" are perhaps at the top of the list. With Silvia Federici's "Caliban and the Witch" I find a new entry. The level of detail she provides to offer an incisive critique of Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation in the "transition" from feudalism to capitalism is astounding. Admittedly, the Middle Ages in Europe is a period I have not read nearly enough about, and suffice it to say, I was blown away with what I didn't know. She links the mass execution of hundreds of thousands of heretics and witches - both in Europe and in the colonies in America - to the enclosure of land and the conversion of the body into a machine. In fact, she goes further: "the witch-hunt was, at least in part, an attempt to criminalize birth control and place the female body, the uterus, at the service of population increase and the production and accumulation of labor-power"
As it relates to the expansion of colonialism in the New World, she says "the counterparts of the typical European witch, then, were not the Renaissance magicians, but the colonized native Americans and the enslaved Africans who, in the plantations of the "New World" shared a destiny similar to that of women in Europe, providing for capital the seemingly limitless supply of labor necessary for accumulation."
I think one of the more powerful claims she makes has to do with the totality and institutionalization of mass murder of women, calling it a war on women. In fact, she goes on, the witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-state, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
There are so many other points I wish I could go into here, but I'll just say this: it is a full analysis of communalism, feudalism, and capitalism, and the role that women played (and play) in each social formation. Reading this work and understanding the crucial positioning of women allows a more nuanced understanding of the "inevitability" of capitalism, the "transition" period between feudalism and capitalism, and, as she brilliantly describes, how it was in the torture chambers and on the stakes on which the witches perished that the bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged.
As it relates to the expansion of colonialism in the New World, she says "the counterparts of the typical European witch, then, were not the Renaissance magicians, but the colonized native Americans and the enslaved Africans who, in the plantations of the "New World" shared a destiny similar to that of women in Europe, providing for capital the seemingly limitless supply of labor necessary for accumulation."
I think one of the more powerful claims she makes has to do with the totality and institutionalization of mass murder of women, calling it a war on women. In fact, she goes on, the witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-state, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.
There are so many other points I wish I could go into here, but I'll just say this: it is a full analysis of communalism, feudalism, and capitalism, and the role that women played (and play) in each social formation. Reading this work and understanding the crucial positioning of women allows a more nuanced understanding of the "inevitability" of capitalism, the "transition" period between feudalism and capitalism, and, as she brilliantly describes, how it was in the torture chambers and on the stakes on which the witches perished that the bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged.