02/12/2022
Citations:
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Buy here!
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Buy here!
Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Buy here!
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A witch ought never be frightened in the darkest forest because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her. A witch doesn’t always have to be with a cat on a broom. So light a fire and listen to a story about the witches that were the kindling of capitalism.
(Whispered: The heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired, the hag, the spinster, the midwife, the prostitute, the pauper, the slave… These were the witches that were the kindling of capitalism)
It is I, Lady Hexerai, here to bring you the good news about witchcraft. But this isn’t the witch craft you’ve been taught by phallogocentric historians. This is all about what you should know. Today, we’ll explore the introduction to the book Caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation by the philosopher Sylvia Federici.
If you think you know about the witch-hunts, you’re wrong. Fake news! Bubkiss! We weren’t devil worshippers driven mad by our intense lust of Lucifer’s ding-a-ling. We were the women, like myself, who didn’t behave, and that was something capitalism simply couldn’t tolerate.
Even the unspeakable tortures to which the accused women were subjected acquire a different meaning when we conceive them as a form of exorcism against their powers.
Caliban & the Witch attempts to reconstruct history with a feminist lens thereby revealing hidden forms of exploitation and domination during the before and genesis of capitalism.
Throughout this book, Sister Federici is in constant conversation with various warlocks throughout the ages. Warlocks such as William Shakespeare, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault. In her critique, she liberates the women from a male-centered history that has covered over them for centuries.
From Shakespeare, we see a representation of the time period Sister Federici focuses on: the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in the 16th & 17th century.
From Marx, Sister Federici takes the labor theory of value, the hypothesis that economic value is largely created by workers, those who do the work, and drives it to its logical conclusion by including women. Since the 1970s, Sister Federici was involved in the Wages for Housework movement. This movement stated that housework, or reproductive work, i.e., the labor one does to reproduce the species (gestation, birthing, cleaning, feeding, educating children, and so on and so forth) created just as much value as the productive work that occurred at factories or plantations; and therefore, those who do housework (mainly women) should receive a wage for reproducing the species.
Finally, from Foucault, Federici analyzes the different discourses surrounding women during the transition to capitalism, especially around witchcraft.
The scope of our work is broad, connecting the social struggles of the feudal period to the formation of the proletariat. And the task itself is fraught with darkness. Written accounts from these time periods are scant, and those that do exist were often written from the point of view of the nobility, the clergy, or the bourgeoisie: the enemies of the witch.
My dear sister-witch Federici puts the witch at center-stage, as the exemplification of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to crush: the apostate, the healer, the defiant spouse, the lady who challenged to live alone, the Obeha lady who harmed the master’s nourishment and propelled the slaves to revolt. The title ‘Caliban and the witch’ is inspired by Shakespeare’s The tempest! In The Tempest, Caliban the slave is treated as inherently inferior, born of a witch, a native rebel. His mother, the witch Sycorax, is entirely absent from Shakespeare’s play, described only by the male, noble, European Prospero.
She is branded a foul wretch; her magic is considered evil, while Prospero’s magic is seen as good or at least a necessary evil to accomplish his ends. Just like male historians, the witch is entirely covered over.
Federici throws the entire play on it’s head. She rips the hidden witch from the clutches & obscurity of the white man’s words, and places a fully fleshed out character center-stage. Federici liberates the history of witches and slaves.
She says, “Caliban represents not only the anti-colonial struggle but is a symbol of the world proletariat and, more specifically, for the proletarian body as a terrain and instrument of resistance to the logic of capitalism.” (11)
Here we are at the origins of this book, so it only makes sense we review the origins of capitalism called primitive accumulation.
Well, apparently there was this guy named Karl Marx who coined the term in the 19th century, and he said primitive accumulation is the foundational process which creates the existence of capitalism. Primitive Accumulation: Primitive means originary; a precondition; and primitive accumulation is the historical processes which capitalist relations are premised. Can’t have any capitalism without a lotta primitive accumulation, my dears. It is the initial hoarding of land & wealth that generates the capitalist class on the one side, and the waged-labor proletariat on the other side. Capitalism is only possible with a concentration of capital & labor.
Under Feudalism, peasants worked on a plot of the Lord’s land that they could then pass onto their descendants. Peasants had direct access to their means of production and could directly experience the fruits of their labor. But, with primitive accumulation massive amounts of land were hoarded creating landless peasants that had to sell their labor to survive. This creates the inevitable problem Marx discovered with wage labor: alienation.
Well, what is alienation? Well, Marx says:
“We proceed from an actual economic fact.
“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.
“This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers;18 objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
“So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.
“All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”
Marx, Karl. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Did you get all that? Yes, I know, warlocks can be very long winded in their sorcery. Let me give you a witch’s spark notes. Wage-workers produce but do not keep the fruits of their labor. Their labor is appropriated by the boss and turned into more capital which is then used to reproduce the capitalist system of wage-exploitation by appropriating more of the worker’s labor. Through the objectification of labor in objects, the worker themselves becomes objectified, alienated.
Federici describes primitive accumulation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism as “primitive accumulation consists essentially in the expropriation of the land from European peasantry and the formation of the ‘free,’ independent worker.” (pg 63) and Includes:
– discovery of gold, silver, and mercury in Americas
– genocide of aboriginal population
– conquest/looting of East Indies
– African Slave Trade
Marx believed that primitive accumulation had been beneficial to the proletariat compared to feudalism and the violence necessary to achieve said accumulation would recede as capitalism advanced. In fact, in the end he thought it would bring about the worker’s liberation. These were necessary laws of history after all.
Spoiler alert! He was wrong.
Now, Marx examined primitive accumulation primarily from male waged-labor and commodity production. If he had spent much time examining women’s experiences during this period, it’s unlikely he would believe primitive accumulation had any liberatory effect. Federici examines this period through a feminist lens and finds a number of consequences unique to women but no less important in the formation of primitive accumulation that are notably absent from Marx.
Through Primitive accumulation she identifies the development of a new sexual division that excludes women from waged-labor and subjugating their labor to the reproduction of the work-force. Women had one job: make babies.
In this way, “Woman signifies not just a hidden history but a particular form of exploitation.” (13)
Furthermore, Federici notes the totalitarian measures used to discipline the proletariat along with disease and famine. She states far from receding with the advancement of time, capitalism requires violence in times of crisis to procure another round of primitive accumulation.
Federici interfaces this seizure to women’s unpaid labor and reproductive labor as a precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy. She places the institutionalization of assault and prostitution, as well as the blasphemer and witch-hunt, trials, burnings, and torment, at the center of systematic oppression of women and allotment of their labor. Punishments for contraception and abortion were instituted by the Church, amid a time period where the Black Plague had decimated the workforce and there was a frantic desire to construct the working populace back up, but this time under capitalist power where there are no limits to what can be profited from, and both labor, capital, and resources are “free” to travel beyond the limits of the Lord’s land and prerogatives.
While primitive accumulation describes a genesis or a beginning of capitalism, Federici stresses that primitive accumulation is a continuing and inherent part of capitalism. Whenever capitalism seems to be in crisis, seems to be exhausted or at its limits, a new round of primitive accumulation allows it to redefine its limits, adapt, and survive. Through globalization and the intervention of neo-liberal world banks, Federici says, “a new round of ‘enclosures’ that have expropriated millions of agricultural producers from their land, and the mass pauperization and criminalization of workers, through a policy of mass incarceration.” (PG. 11) Mass incarceration, the war on drugs, de-regulation of financial markets, so-called “free trade” agreements, and financial bubble after bubble after bubble are all new rounds of primitive accumulation providing new fuel for capitalism. Currently, during a global pandemic, (still not as bad as the bubonic, in my opinion) large land owners and investment firms are buying up property as rental units, in a new round of primitive accumulation in the attempts to create a permanent renter’s class.
She connects the colonial confiscation of early modernity to today’s struggles and gives a system for understanding the strategies and tactics of neoliberal global enterprises like the IMF & World Bank. She teaches us about a recharged cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything is privatized, a modern circular of enclosures. We can see the sexual division of labor as a capitalist instrument for collecting riches and preserving control.
This was only an introduction to Caliban and the witch. My point of view is that every woman has a witch in her who seeks the freedom, fed up of colonization, globalization whatever you call it which limits her. And representing that witch in women, here I am Lady Hexerai concluding today’s video.
