Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Feudalism is a historical construct that refers to relationships of mutual political and military support that existed in some parts of medieval Europe. According to this construct, vassals pledged loyalty and agreed to provide military service to local overlords in exchange for land. This land, known as a fief, operated as a manorial estate that included countryside, villages, and towns where free peasants rented land as small farmers or worked as laborers. Many serfs also worked the lord of the manor’s fields in exchange for small plots of land. Serfs were bound to the estates, required to provide labor to their lord a certain number of days each week, and owed various dues to the landlord. Feudal lords thus generated income, typically in kind, from their manors. Marxist scholars such as Federici center this economic component of feudalism. Many medieval historians, however, dispute the characterization of medieval society as “feudal” and argue that feudalism did not exist as it is understood today because there was not a systemic and cohesive form throughout Europe. Practices varied significantly and were localized. Medieval people did not conceive of a “feudal system.” Further, the term feudalism is not medieval in origin but an invention of the Italian Renaissance. Federici employs this term, however, in her work to refer specifically to the subordination of the peasantry, particularly serfs, to landed elites. She regards feudalism as pervasive and systemic, in contrast to much current historical scholarship. She also suggests that the proletarian rejection of feudalism failed, thus giving rise to Primitive Accumulation and the Rise of Capitalism. 

Federici uses this term to refer to the capitalist practice of forcibly removing working people from their land through a variety of methods. These methods historically included enclosure, or fencing off, of formerly common lands in England, and the seizure of land from Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

Capitalism increasingly confined proletarian women to reproductive, or domestic, labor during the early modern period. Financial necessity, however, required that many also work outside their households, often providing domestic labor that supported the elites who employed them. However, as a new patriarchal social order emerged, the wages these women generated were no longer theirs but instead became their spouse’s income. Patriarchy, or male dominance, extended to women’s income.

Federici employs Karl Marx’s term in reference to Europe’s transition to capitalism, which she sees as the defining development of the early modern period. Primitive accumulation is the early accumulation of capital (including goods and human labor) by elites. This accumulation of capital created class divisions between the haves and the have-nots, which facilitated capitalism’s development. Federici argues that this process happened by force and divided the working class based on new gender, racial, and age hierarchies. 

Proletariat is the Marxist term for the working class as a unit. Federici’s monograph traces the European proletariat’s resistance to feudal power, suppression, and division, particularly along racial and gender lines, under rising capitalism. However, Federici argues that this proletariat also includes colonized indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans, whose suppression and exploitation was integral to capitalism’s success.