Federici, Silvia

feminist scholar and activist, author of "Caliban and the Witch"

(ENG) Silvia Federici - Caliban et la sorcière : Femmes, corps et accumulation primitive

Artesquieu · Jun 9, 2022 · partial coverage

• Silvia Federici
• Caliban and the Witch
• witch hunts
• primitive accumulation
• Marxist feminism
• wages for housework
• reproduction of labour power
• sexual division of labour
• enclosures
• body and capitalism
• lecture

Coverage note: full (a lecture of about 25 minutes; the English auto-captions are slightly garbled in places, and unclear passages are omitted or paraphrased cautiously)

Core ideas

Federici explains that the book grew out of her activism in the feminist and Black Power movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, shaped by anti-colonial struggles, which challenged the classical Marxist account of capitalism for leaving out whole areas of exploited labour, above all the reproduction of labour power (housework, procreation). She campaigned for "wages for housework," arguing that this work is invisible because unwaged, and went looking in Marx and Engels for the history of the unpaid housewife, which she did not find. Her premise is that the sexual division of labour is not a legacy of pre-capitalist society but a capitalist construction, and that history cannot be told from the viewpoint of an abstract universal subject, because capitalism has been a history of creating differences and hierarchies.

To understand how it was built she went back to the crisis of feudalism: late medieval peasant movements, urban conflicts and "social heresies" (she stresses a heretical movement, rendered "catholics" in the captions and presumably the Cathars, with its relatively egalitarian practices toward women and its critique of marriage and procreation) that challenged feudal lords and the Church, and the "exodus" of serfs from the land. She argues that the feudal class could no longer reproduce its power, and that capitalism developed not through an evolutionary process but as a response to class struggle, restoring the ruling class's power to command labour. The two-century witch hunt (peaking between about 1550 and 1650, in Germany, France, England, Scotland and elsewhere) coincided with the slave trade, enclosures, colonization and the market economy; she places the number of victims in the hundreds of thousands, between those who speak of millions and those who speak of a few thousand. She rejects both the Enlightenment view (a mere superstition) and the feminist myth of the witch as heir of an archaic matriarchal religion: in her reading, the witches were mostly poor peasant women, dispossessed, begging, or older, accused in the context of a village "class war."

She reads the recurring accusations (theft, cursing, devouring cattle, killing children, impotence, contraception and abortion, sexual crimes) as mapping onto capitalist concerns: property, the poor, population growth and procreation (mercantilists saw "the more bodies, the more wealth"), the control of sexuality, and a new division between women and men. She notes that medieval penitentials were relatively tolerant toward abortion before the quickening, and that infanticide was the second most prosecuted crime after witchcraft. She links this to primitive accumulation as accumulation of workers, and to the "mechanization of the body": the passage from a body credited with magical powers to a body seen as a machine for extracting work. She also covers witch hunts in the American colonies.

She ends with the claim that witch-hunting has returned in the last twenty-five years (mid-1980s onward) in Africa, India (tribal areas), Nepal and Papua New Guinea, in the context of global capitalist expansion (mining, agribusiness, agrofuels) that requires dispossessing communities attached to subsistence, with women at the forefront of defending that world, and with evangelical movements that promote a "prosperity" creed and the demonization of the poor, fomenting fear of witchcraft and dividing communities that should be united against new enclosures.

Excerpts