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Title: Review: Caliban and the Witch
Author: Tobie
Date: 14 September 2006
Language: en
Topics: book review, feminism, Red & Black Revolution
Source: Retrieved on 15th November 2021 from http://www.wsm.ie/c/review-caliban-witch-silvia-federici
Notes: Published in Red and Black Revolution No. 11.

Tobie

Review: Caliban and the Witch

Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch; Women, The Body and Primitive

Accumulation” does a fantastic job of taking the feminist analysis of

the body and re-conceptualizing it within a class struggle understanding

of history. She fills in the blanks that a traditional left analysis has

missed, including the concepts of difference, women, race and the body.

This work is very important, allowing feminists and socialists alike to

realize that identity and class struggle are not polar opposite

theoretical understandingsFederici’s background comes from Italian

Autonomous Marxism, from her comrades in the Midnight Notes Collective

on the US East Coast, and past influences including Maria Rosa Della

Costa — author of “The power of Women and the Subversion of the

Community” (1971) and Selma James author of “Sex, Race and Class”

(1971). She was in the wages for housework movement that discussed how

capital was dependent on domestic labour and developed the understanding

that patriarchy worked alongside capitalism to enslave women. She also

spent time in Nigeria working on issues of development and feminism

which resulted in her writing many works on globalization, structural

adjustment and the IMF. These experiences put her in a good position to

have an insight on a society that was forced to move from communal

living to that of capitalism. This book is her project to express an

understanding of women’s position in our society and the effects of

globalisation and imperialism.

Feminists have always critiqued Marxist theory for not acknowledging the

reproductive role of women and the importance of the body in production.

Feminists have taken time to show how the body is a place of struggle

and resistance. Federici continues to do this without disregarding class

struggle as fundamental. Instead she gives an argument for how the body

and female sexuality, reproduction and knowledge have been

systematically targeted in order to break solidarity of working class

struggle. She gives examples of its use in destroying the rebellious

serfs: “efforts were made by the political authorities to co-opt the

youngest and most rebellious male workers, by mean of a vicious sexual

politics that gave them access to free sex, and turned class antagonism

into an antagonism against proletarian women” (pg. 47) As anarchists

this is very important, realizing the feminism is not individualist but

involved in complex power structures.

The book jumps back and forth in both time and place so the reader

should either have good knowledge of feudalism or get ready to be a bit

confused. It goes from looking at the serfs’ struggle for land and the

heretical use of religion to challenge hierarchies and power, then moves

onto the colonization of the Americas and demonisation of aboriginal

cultures. The main argument focuses on the witch trials as the central

example of how women’s bodies were targeted in a counter-revolutionary

strategy to facilitate primitive accumulation, i.e. the historical

process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.

The period which saw the transformation from feudalism to capitalism

involved what Marx termed primitive accumulation. In Europe this saw the

working population (serfs) of Europe being deprived of the ‘means of

production’ e.g. land. Primitive accumulation also involved the

enslavement of some of the population of Africa and the America’s and

the use of this enslaved labour to extract gold and silver from the new

world. All together this primitive accumulation created both the capital

and dispossessed workforce on which capitalism was built.

One of Federici’s main arguments is that the transformation to

capitalism of primitive accumulation was not just the economic

relationship to labour and production but also includes reproduction and

the alienation from the body through science and wage work.

In Federici’s overview of the serfs’ struggle and the heretical movement

in the first part of her book, she says that it was their struggle and

the failure of feudalism that brought along capitalism. She included the

importance of women’s role during this time, where women were less

dependent on men economically and socially and where they treated on

more equal basis. This is not to say that there was any form of feminist

utopia. Saying both that this was the first women’s movement in several

European countries as well as the first proletariat international.

Unlike the American witch trials the European ones included both men and

women. Silvia concentrates on the prevalence of women being targeted.

She importantly genders and classed the witch trials by looking at who

was being prosecuted and why. The witch trials were an exemplary

performance used to discipline other unruly subjects through example. It

is interesting to note that neither men nor women stood up to stop or

challenge the witch trails and subsequent burnings.

She places the witch trials into a historical context to understand why

women were being prosecuted. Two things happened in this time. First of

all, the banned certain ways of life and secondly science and

intellectualism provided a way of understanding the world that

legitimised this change. It was a change of culture from a time of

living on commons and communal living to a time of capitalism and the

individual. Those affected most by this change were elderly women who no

longer were taken care of through the “moral economy” and had to steal

from private land to survive. It was these women who were being

persecuted as witches. Secondly there was the introduction of science,

the redefinition of the body and the interest in anatomy which changed

the body to a machine that can be modelled into a worker.

Women’s knowledge was destroyed by the transition into capitalism.

Women’s knowledge whether it was midwifery or medicine was demonized

since it didn’t work within the confines of science and intellectualism.

This intimate knowledge of the body was passed on over generations

through oral tradition. So the process of alienation from production

occurred alongside an alienation from reproduction. The witch trials

were a hunt to erase any form of control over the women’s body such as

knowledge of birth control, abortion, midwives and medicine women. She

argues that the witch trails in Europe and the Americas have a very

similar root; anyone who was using other forms of knowledge and

understanding that challenged the capitalist, imperialist goal was

targeted either as a witch or a savage.

This understanding of women’s work gives insight to the root of what is

called the feminization of poverty. This is the fact that the majority

of the world’s poor are women. According to the UN, even today women

earn about half of what men earn.

The book itself, although full of insightful and captivating ideas, is

plagued with an academic language and style. Those interested in

engaging with her work will find her examples and theoretical analysis

very interesting. For those who would rather learn in other ways, I

encourage you to listen to her talk on the book at Fusion Arts in New

York City on November 30, 2004 which is hosted on Interactivist

Exchange. She gives a detailed overview of her thesis and the reasons

she finds her work important now.