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=                       Caliban_and_the_Witch                        =
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                            Introduction
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'Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation' is
a 2004 book by Italian-American intellectual Silvia Federici.
Responding to both feminist and Marxist traditions, the book offers a
critical alternative to Karl Marx's theory of primitive accumulation.


                       Title and publication
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The title of the book references Shakespeare's 'The Tempest':
Caliban's mother was the witch Sycorax:



The front illustration is adapted from a fresco at the Scrovegni
Chapel, Italy, depicting the deadly sin of wrath.


                              Outline
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'Caliban and the Witch' explores gender and the family during the
primitive accumulation of capital. As part of the radical autonomist
feminist Marxist tradition, the book offers a critical alternative to
Marx's theory of primitive accumulation. Federici argues that the
witch hunts served to restructure family relations and the role of
women in order to satisfy society's needs during the rise of
capitalism.

In the book's introduction, Federici states that "there has been the
desire to rethink the development of capitalism from a feminist
viewpoint, while at the same time, avoiding the limits of a "women's
history" separated from that of the male part of the working class."


All the World Needs a Jolt
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The first chapter traces the history of the struggle between the
medieval proletariat and the nobility and Church -- including in
certain countries, how the nobility intensified misogyny to divide
proletariat rebellion along the axis of sex, the stigmatization of
(proletariat-dominated) heretical sects that provided for greater
female autonomy and sexual liberty, and the crushing of peasant
rebellions.

Federici begins by discussing the division of labor and the role of
women in feudal manors; she argues that while peasant women were
subject to sexist restrictions (e.g., not being permitted to hold
certain roles), they were able to control some of the products of
their own labor, and that common land and collective sex-segregated
labor provided the conditions for female solidarity.
Federici then follows the development of serf resistance against
landlords, and serfs' connections to the development of heretical
sects (e.g., Bogomils, Cathars, Waldenses, and Taborites).

From 1347 to 1352, the Black Death killed around a third of Europeans,
causing a massive labor shortage and intensifying worker resistance
(e.g. the 1381 Peasants' Revolt). By the late 1300s, France and Venice
functionally legalized raping proletarian women, and from 1350-1450
both Italy and France opened tax-funded, publicly-managed
brothels--Federici proposes that the nobility used these measures so
that proletarian men would vent their frustrations upon proletarian
women, and notes that the Church approved of prostitution as a means
to ensure workers were not lured into heretic sects (who had a
reputation for both sexual licentiousness and fomenting rebellion).
However, the European class conflict escalated into bloody wars like
the German Peasants' War of the 1500s, during which the crushing of
peasant rebels cemented the power of the nobility and Church.


The Great Witch-Hunt in Europe
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Federici begins by noting that the concept of witch-hunts was new in
European discourse in the mid-1400s. Laws and codes declaring
witchcraft itself (rather than its ill effects) punishable by death
were only created in the mid-1500s, concurrent with the Scientific
Revolution. Federici notes that the persecution of witches originated
as a preoccupation of the upper classes--and the information that
intellectuals, clergy, and magistrates created was disseminated to the
common people by the pamphlets they published, the art they
commissioned, and the laws and religious canon they wrote.

Federici states that "If we consider the historical context in which
the witch hunt occurred, the gender and class of the accused, and the
effects of persecution," then the inevitable conclusion is that it was
an attack (premeditated or not) on "women's resistance to the spread
of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue
of their sexuality, their control over reproduction, and their ability
to heal." The witches persecuted were typically poor women older than
40, often beggars; in Ireland and the Scottish Western Highlands,
where collective land-tenure and kinship ties provided a social safety
net unknown to laborers on enclosed lands, there is no record of
witch-hunts.


                              See also
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* Marxist feminism
* Wages for housework
* Witch trials in the early modern period


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