A-Infos (en) Ireland, Anarchist journal Red and Black Revolution #11 Review: Caliban and the Witch by Tobie

women, the body and primitive accumulation
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 understandings
Federici’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.

Related articles: http://www.wsm.ie/gender
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