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chris_chester 's review for:
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
by Silvia Federici
When I think of witch hunts, the thing that immediate comes to mind is religious hysteria. I was born in the '80s, so I never really experienced all the renewed commotion about cults and satanic rituals that reemerged in the Reagan years. At best, I framed the entire idea through an arrogant atheist lens, taking the Salem witch trials for instance as further evidence of the irrationality that undergirded the religious experience that I so despised growing up.
Silvia Federici's work in Caliban and the Witch reframes and recontextualises the original witch hunts in Europe by looking more closely at the origins of the practice, who they actually affected and what the practical effect of it all was.
The headline argument is that the witch hunt was a practical tool used to break the back of the peasantry in the transition from the feudal system of primitive accumulation to capitalism. She argues that the transition as it happened was not inevitable, but required winning a war against the peasants who resisted the enclosure of the commons.
Where in the system of feudalism, women's contribution to a subsistence economy put them on more or less equal footing with men, a wage-based system began a shift in the perception of "women's work" that essentially removed their labor from the moneyed economy.
"In the transition from feudalism, the working class more generally was separated from the land, removing their ability to subsist outside a moneyed economy. Women become a collective replacement for the commons, their labor removed from the formal economy. And that was cemented by changes to the family that functionally criminalized independent women while making them dependent on the family."
Since women -- particularly older women -- stood to lose the most from this transition, they were often at the head of the movements resisting the enclosures. As the itinerate healers, herbalists and keepers of the lore, they were also in many ways the cultural focal points of feudal communities. They also retained stores of knowledge that helped control reproduction for feudal women -- with herbal forms of sterilization, birth control and abortion as well as a role as midwives.
So when you then consider a lot of the iconography of the witch, you can see all the ways that their contributions to their communities were warped and turned into Satanic imagery. Worship of pagan gods become worship of the Devil. Revolutionary meetings in the woods at night (plus some polygamy!) become Satanic orgies. Herbalism becomes a disposition to poisoning. Abortion becomes the ritual sacrifice and consumption of babies.
Even with the loss of the peasant resistance and the ultimate victory of capitalism, you see how the witch is just used to beat down and level off any woman who dares resist the patriarchal status quo.
"Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus 'liberated' from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women's bodies than were ever erected by the fencing of the commons."
This is a model that Federici notes continues unabated even today, as global capitalism continues to enforce "enclosures" in as-yet-untapped regions like sub-Saharan Africa.
"[T]he political lesson that we can learn... is that capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations -- the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury - by denigrating the 'nature' of those it exploits."
It's amazing how it takes Federici only 200 pages to totally change my perspective of the persecution of witchcraft into a really potent critique of the essential patriarchal nature of capitalism. To be sure, once the witch hunts are unleashed, they still take on a hysterical religious character, but it's a lot easier to see what their effect is as a tool of social control.
This was a great read. One I am glad I bought and that I am almost certain to return to again.
Silvia Federici's work in Caliban and the Witch reframes and recontextualises the original witch hunts in Europe by looking more closely at the origins of the practice, who they actually affected and what the practical effect of it all was.
The headline argument is that the witch hunt was a practical tool used to break the back of the peasantry in the transition from the feudal system of primitive accumulation to capitalism. She argues that the transition as it happened was not inevitable, but required winning a war against the peasants who resisted the enclosure of the commons.
Where in the system of feudalism, women's contribution to a subsistence economy put them on more or less equal footing with men, a wage-based system began a shift in the perception of "women's work" that essentially removed their labor from the moneyed economy.
"In the transition from feudalism, the working class more generally was separated from the land, removing their ability to subsist outside a moneyed economy. Women become a collective replacement for the commons, their labor removed from the formal economy. And that was cemented by changes to the family that functionally criminalized independent women while making them dependent on the family."
Since women -- particularly older women -- stood to lose the most from this transition, they were often at the head of the movements resisting the enclosures. As the itinerate healers, herbalists and keepers of the lore, they were also in many ways the cultural focal points of feudal communities. They also retained stores of knowledge that helped control reproduction for feudal women -- with herbal forms of sterilization, birth control and abortion as well as a role as midwives.
So when you then consider a lot of the iconography of the witch, you can see all the ways that their contributions to their communities were warped and turned into Satanic imagery. Worship of pagan gods become worship of the Devil. Revolutionary meetings in the woods at night (plus some polygamy!) become Satanic orgies. Herbalism becomes a disposition to poisoning. Abortion becomes the ritual sacrifice and consumption of babies.
Even with the loss of the peasant resistance and the ultimate victory of capitalism, you see how the witch is just used to beat down and level off any woman who dares resist the patriarchal status quo.
"Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus 'liberated' from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women's bodies than were ever erected by the fencing of the commons."
This is a model that Federici notes continues unabated even today, as global capitalism continues to enforce "enclosures" in as-yet-untapped regions like sub-Saharan Africa.
"[T]he political lesson that we can learn... is that capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations -- the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury - by denigrating the 'nature' of those it exploits."
It's amazing how it takes Federici only 200 pages to totally change my perspective of the persecution of witchcraft into a really potent critique of the essential patriarchal nature of capitalism. To be sure, once the witch hunts are unleashed, they still take on a hysterical religious character, but it's a lot easier to see what their effect is as a tool of social control.
This was a great read. One I am glad I bought and that I am almost certain to return to again.