Like ‘terrorism’ today, witchcraft was a charge that criminalized a whole demographic of people and punished a wide range of behaviors. This Witch-Hunt and the Capitalist Rationalization of Sexuality. The witch hunts occurred in the context of rising prices and peasant uprisings, often led by women. Labor scarcity led to wage increases while “familiarity with death undermined social discipline”44 and empowered resistance against the ruling class. The three terms in the subtitle – Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation – are nods to each, respectively. Women’s position in feudalism was less than men but they enjoyed some benefits that were stripped from them in the transition to capitalism, including access to shared communal lands, women’s solidarity through working together, and being held by a rooted village community. The European witch hunts happened in the context of a major shift in labor relations. Heretics were violently persecuted by church and state, most famously in the Inquisition. Heretical sects lived their ideals by residing together in “alternative community structure[s].” Many embraced poverty and communalism. State authorities examined the naked bodies of the accused and tortured them to force confessions. There is evidence of cross pollination between narratives and strategies used in both places. Through resistance over the 12th to 14th centuries serfs gained more autonomy, reduced responsibilities, and benefited from clear written agreements with landlords. Such tales served to mask colonization as a benevolent “converting mission” and justify increasingly violent exploitation. I read a book a few years ago entitled "Caliban and the Witch" by the Marxist feminist author Sylvia Federici. 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. Women’s histories can fail to speak to broader historical trends. Unknown to us, in her ground-breaking book, Caliban and The Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries served to create and enforce a newly established role in society for women, who were consigned to unpaid reproductive labour to satisfy the needs of an ascendant capitalist order. Capitalist wealth is derived from exploiting labor, and the body is “the container of labor power.” The bourgeoisie led an ideological transformation that was key to capital’s ability to control the proletariat and harness their labor power. He demonstrates that by focusing on the experiences of the most marginalized we can learn important information about all of society. The witch hunts were an offensive by European ruling class to break the power of the peasantry. When the importation of slaves was outlawed in the American colonies, policies were implemented to control slave women’s biological reproduction. Caliban represents the partially colonized subject, and thus signifies a relatable character to those fighting empire who have been deeply molded by it. Gang rapes were common. It became unsafe for them to be alone in public and they were discouraged from spending time together. This was not the end of the heretic movement, however. Differences in standards of living between the poor and rich decreased dramatically. The book aims at “(..) housework now [being] understood as the reproduction of labour-power, the reproduction of the most important commodity (…)”. Open resistance looks like serfs refusing to work, refusing military service, avoiding taxes, and occasionally violent struggle. Review of Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2005, Autonomedia, NYC) By Ann Ferguson, UMass/Amherst Philosophy and Women's Studies One of Sylvia Federici’s main projects in this important and fascinating new book is to argue that “women” is a legitimate analytic category of analysis, in spite of differences between women of … Second wave feminism can suffer from gender essentialism: defining “women” by inherent biological or psychological characteristics. << /BaseFont /PPEGQW+Helvetica /Encoding /MacRomanEncoding /FirstChar 32 /FontDescriptor 43 0 R /LastChar 122 /Subtype /TrueType /Type /Font /Widths [ 278 0 0 0 0 0 0 191 333 333 0 0 278 333 278 278 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 278 278 0 0 0 0 0 667 667 722 722 0 611 0 0 278 0 0 556 833 722 0 667 0 0 667 611 722 0 944 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 556 556 500 556 556 278 556 556 222 222 500 222 833 556 556 556 556 333 500 278 556 500 722 500 500 500 ]>> This movement included the growth of disciplines studying human bodies and behavior. witch-hunt, trials, burnirtgs and torture at the center of a methodical subjugation of women and appropriation of their labor. The witch-hunts have been downplayed and depoliticized in most historical accounts. Invisible resistance includes “‘foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, feigned ignorance, desertion, pilfering, smuggling, poaching'”. The myth of the Witches Sabbat, a subject of wild speculation by witch-hunters, reveals the ruling class’ fear of peasant gatherings, in these tales “we hear the echo of the secret meetings the peasants held at night, on lonesome hills and in the forests to plot their revolts.” The Sabbats were described as scenes of orgies and cannibalism, reflecting bourgeois fears of peasants’ sexual freedom and threats to eat the rich. In this famous work, Silvia Federici gives a radical feminist reading to the 16th- and 17th century witch-hunts in Europe, arguing that capitalism began with systemic violence against women and colonised people, and that in order for capitalism to keep functioning, it needs an infusion of expropriated capital – and that women’s unpaid labour, including reproductive work in the … She argues that the witch hunt was not just based on superstition (though that was a big part of it) but also the desire by elites to repopulate in … The witch-hunts “…destroyed the methods that women had used to control procreation… and institutionalized the state’s control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power.” Peasant women were accused of witchcraft for a broad range of behaviors that represented their power and sexuality. Intended to serve as an alternative to or companion with complete text. endobj Academics likened black Africans to devils and speculated that they were naturally hyper-sexual and thus needed to be controlled. For capitalism, proletarian sex was necessary to make babies who would become laborers but it also threatened capitalism’s need for workers to practice delayed gratification of their desires. He controlled witches and was their lover. “Caliban” and “The Witch” both represent archetypal enemies of capitalism. “[N]ew laws and forms of torture were introduced to control women’s behavior in and out of the home…”101 Women were cast as inferior “excessively emotional and lusty, unable to govern themselves”, “unreasonable, vain, wild, [and] wasteful”101 There was a similarity between archetypes of women and colonial subjects to justify their respective exploitation. “Caliban,” a character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “represents not only the anti-colonial rebel … but is a symbol for the world proletariat and… for the proletarian body as a terrain and instrument of resistance to the logic of capitalism.” The “witch” represents “the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt.”, Federici asks, “Why, after 500 years of capital’s rule, at the beginning of the third millennium, are workers on a mass scale still defined as paupers, witches, and outlaws? Women were the majority of those who left villages for towns and cities. Witches were imagined to travel from across the region to attend nighttime Sabbats which represents the threat of deviation from capitalist work-time and travel regulations. Some European peasants came to the Americas, as prisoners or indentured servants. “Like sexism, racism had to be legislated and enforced.” European colonizers enforced sexism on colonized populations by granting privileges to men that they denied to women. Then a new archetype of women emerged at the end of the 17th century imagining them as “passive, asexual beings, more obedient, more moral than men, capable of exerting a positive moral influence on them.” 103, Colonial exploitation, especially of African slave labor and stolen resources in the American colonies, “fueled the Industrial Revolution,” providing European workers with cheap “commodities necessary to produce labor-power.” and “provid[ing] the European ruling class with the silver and gold used to pay the mercenary armies that defeated the urban and rural revolts.” Capitalism emerged from this creation of “an international division of labor that integrated the work of slaves into the reproduction of the European work-force, while keeping enslaved and waged workers geographically and socially divided.”. Why is Caliban and not his mother — Sycorax, a powerful witch — a symbol of resistance in Latin America? The biological and social sciences developed and reified a mechanical concept of the human body, divesting it of its sacrality and remaking human society in their image. Federici employs Foucault’s model of power in her examination of shifts in the ideological terrain bolstered by state-sponsored violence which increased and dispersed discipline, necessary prerequisites to industrial capitalism. For those new to Federici’s work, it is an excellent summary of key arguments of Caliban and the Witch, re-emphasised through current gender wars in different parts of the world. Discussion. Through her exploration of the multi-generational shaping of capitalist subjectivity, Federici hopes to offer clues towards an effective strategy against capitalism. Its final consummation came in … A Pan-Andean resistance movement began to coalesce, appealing to traditional gods, encouraging rejection of Spanish religion, culture, taxes, and forced labor. This book is very much a history of the making of the European working class, a re-telling of the … Academics speculated widely about witches, distinguishing between witchcraft and High Magic, which was practiced by the elites and granted legitimacy as part of the natural sciences. Prospero has made Caliban his servant or, more accurately, his slave. In Europe witch hunts were concentrated in places that were in the process of transitioning to capitalism. In the nuclear family, men were held responsible for disciplining their wives and children. The newly landless migrated to cities and towns — young people, single people, widows, poor families, etc. He names this process “primitive accumulation.” Federici offers a feminist analysis to expand the concept of “primitive accumulation” to include the creation of differences and divisions within the working class, the ideological shift to conceive of the body as machine, and a campaign to break women’s power and control their reproductive labor. The victims of the witch hunts include whole communities of women who suffered fear and trauma as they watched their sisters’ deaths. There is a clear historical continuity between persecution of heresy and of witchcraft, but a major difference is that witchcraft came to be considered a “female crime.” Another difference is that reproductive crimes were central to witch trials and the specter of the witch. But few books that I’ve read recently have proven this rule of thumb so … The episode of the plague known as the Black Death (1347-52) killed about a third of the European population. Together, they created a “mass psychosis among the population.” Villagers turned against each other as hundreds of thousands of women were executed as witches. Caliban and the witch - Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. As persecution in the Americas tapered off there was a narrative shift to imagine the witch as African. The synthesis of these two theories, the centralization of state power and the proliferation of self-management, allows capitalism to control laborers with less outward expressions of violence. To prevent  them from allying with local populations against the ruling class… in the mid 17th century a process to divide the working class along racial lines began. 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