42 pages • 1 hour read
Silvia FedericiCaliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The “Great Witch-Hunt” as a Patriarchal Tool of Oppression
Witch-hunting as a means of controlling rebellious women under patriarchal capitalism is a dominant theme throughout Silvia Federici’s book. In the early modern period, a paradigm shift occurred in the way European elites conceived of the relationship between the mind and the body. Mechanical Philosophy, under the aegis of such thinkers as René Descartes, framed the body as a machine, thereby creating a hierarchical division between the rational mind, which was associated with men, and the unruly, corrupt body, which was associated with women. This paradigm shift facilitated not only the rise of patriarchy but also the spread of witch-hunting, which became a method of controlling unruly female bodies—that is, women who resisted patriarchal authority.
According to Federici, witch-hunting was undoubtedly motivated by the rise of patriarchy. However, these new patriarchal norms intersected with socioeconomic changes as Europe shifted from feudalism to capitalism. This socioeconomic shift coincided with a decreased population, creating an urgent need for a steady supply of workers. Women’s reproduction, and therefore their bodies, became a matter of public concern, with women forced out of the money-economy and into the home, where their chief task was to have children/laborers.
The transition to capitalism most negatively affected proletarian women, especially those who resisted the destruction of the commons and land expropriation. Women who likewise resisted the new norms placed on female bodies and reproductive work also became targets of capitalist, patriarchal oppression. Women who did not conform to new ideas about the body’s corruption or who challenged patriarchal ideas about the “good,” domestic wife/mother were charged with witchcraft.
Federici contends that many of the accused were women who were healers or practitioners of white magic: “Historically, the witch was the village midwife, medic, soothsayer, or sorceress” (200). Witchcraft charges therefore served as a patriarchal method of suppressing these traditional roles and women’s generational knowledge to better control women’s bodies and labor. Elsewhere, Federici goes so far as to declare witch-hunting a genocide against women.
Federici’s work builds on and adds to existing scholarship on the subject, which she cites extensively throughout her monograph. Historians do not agree on a single explanation for witch-hunting in early modern Europe, but it is undeniable that, as Federici contends, gender, social, and economic forces intersected to cause multiple phases of witch-hunting that reaffirmed patriarchal, elite power. Women often internalized these new patriarchal standards and weaponized witch-hunting against other, non-conforming women. This persecution served capitalism’s expansion, argues Federici, making it fundamentally patriarchal.
Primitive Accumulation and the Rise of Capitalism
In a break from other Marxist theorists, Federici suggests that primitive accumulation was not a singular historical occurrence in capitalism’s linear progress. Rather, primitive accumulation is ongoing and regenerative as capitalism consistently struggles to profit from the exploited. Her comparative analysis of the birth of capitalism in the early modern period and modern witch-hunting shows how this historical phenomenon can help explain current oppressive circumstances in the world. The theme of primitive accumulation runs throughout the text, surfacing in Federici’s assessment of anti-feudal peasant uprisings, the Scientific Revolution’s demonization and mechanization of the body, and witch-hunting in Europe and the Americas.
Federici juxtaposes her argument that primitive accumulation is a persistent process with feminist philosopher Carolyn Merchant’s work on modern science’s emergence. Merchant argues that the Scientific Revolution made the body a machine. This interpretation justified the natural world’s domination and suppression of women’s bodily autonomy: “The woman-as-witch, Merchant argues, was persecuted as the embodiment of the ‘wild side’ of nature” (203). On this development Federici and Merchant agree. However, Merchant’s analysis suggests that, “once capitalist science is dominant, repression of women can disappear since belief in magic will disappear,” as Ann Ferguson notes in her review of Caliban and the Witch (Ferguson, Ann. “Review of Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s & Gender Studies, 2006). Magical beliefs, of course, have never vanished, though, as Federici notes, European intellectuals and authorities came to view them as superstition and disseminated the belief in witches to colonized societies, who internalized them and weaponized accusations against their own community members. Capitalism continued to use witchcraft as a means of fomenting division and ensuring domination of land, peoples, and resources, that is, primitive accumulation. This persistence, combined with capitalism’s global reach, means that witch-hunting can periodically reappear, as it did in Paris in 1871, since it comprises an “ideological bricolage” that can be used to ensure capitalist supremacy.
Witch hunts emerged again during the 1980s and 1990s around the world:
In Nigeria, by the 1980s, innocent girls were confessing to having killed dozens of people, while in other African countries petitions were addressed to governments begging them to persecute more strongly the witches (239).
Witch-hunting’s reemergence is a sure sign, Federici says, that primitive accumulation is ongoing, as women in parts of Africa, for example, resist land expropriation and enclosures, just as they did in early modern Europe and the American colonies. Westerners should not delude themselves into thinking such a persecution of women cannot happen in their societies—because it already has. Witch-hunting remains a useful tool for removing resistance to land expropriation or as a method to “appropriate diminishing resources” (239).
Women’s Resistance
Federici’s analysis of early modern Europe’s transition to capitalism is a comprehensive one. She suggests that a confluence of early modern developments (for example, the Italian Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and colonization and imperialism) led to the birth of capitalism and global expansion. Repressing populations was a key aspect of the transition to capitalism, and Federici compares the plight of proletarian women in Europe to the submission of enslaved women and the demonization of Indigenous people in the Americas. States used accusations of diabolism and witchcraft, grounded in theological treatises, to suppress women and restrict their bodily, social, and cultural autonomy. This oppression allowed capitalist elites to exploit female proletarian labor more readily, as well as that of colonized and enslaved people; Christian thought justified their subordination while Mechanical Philosophy subordinated the “feminine” body to white, masculine reason. Intellectuals—and states—could thus “other” people they viewed as inferior. However, some women resisted capitalist authority, a theme Federici emphasizes throughout her monograph. These rebels included proletarian women involved in food riots as well as midwives and women healers. In response to this resistance, authorities demonized and punished these women as witches.
The peasantry, enslaved people, and Indigenous populations all struggled against capitalist oppression during the early modern period, but women, Federici argues, were most active in this resistance because they had the most to lose. Elites fostered racial hierarchies in response to alliances between white proletarians, especially women, and people of color in the Americas. Capitalism, thus, not only heightened misogyny but also ushered in a new age of racial inequality—indeed, the two intersected throughout the early modern period. Federici shows that the demonization of Black people coincided with gendered witch-hunting in the Americas that turned enslaved Black people into demonic figures. Colonizers associated Black men with the newly hypermasculine figure of the devil, with whom women witches were thought to copulate. Europeans similarly transformed colonized women who practiced traditional African or Indigenous religions into witches. The gendered components of witch-hunting that targeted proletarian women who resisted capitalist exploitation in Europe arrived in the Americas and suppressed women’s resistance to capitalist colonialism, too. Nevertheless, in the Americas, this oppression was not entirely successful. Women charged with witchcraft in Europe frequently became social outcasts in their communities and often faced execution. Indigenous women, alternatively, became heroic figures who preserved ritual practices.
Misogyny and racism continue to intersect today. Indeed, Federici shows that capitalist societies continue to rely on divisive labor exploitation to maintain control over working people. Racism and sexism serve this divisive purpose.
