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| Author | Silvia Federici |
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| Language | English |
| Publisher | Autonomedia |
Publication date | 2004 |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 978-0-241-53253-9 |
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.
The title of the book references Shakespeare's The Tempest : Caliban's mother was the witch Sycorax:
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Caliban and the Witch explores gender and the family during the primitive accumulation of capital. [1] As part of the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition, [2] the book offers a critical alternative to Marx's theory of primitive accumulation. [1] 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. [3]
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." [4]
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. [5] 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). [6] 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). [7] 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.
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. [8]
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 persection", 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" [9] 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. [10]
Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax, is an important character in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.
The emancipation reform of 1861 in Russia, also known as the Edict of Emancipation of Russia, was the first and most important of the liberal reforms enacted during the reign (1855–1881) of Emperor Alexander II of Russia. The reform effectively abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire.
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Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria from 1984 to 1986. In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade. She was also a member of the Academic Association of Africa Scholars (ACAS) and among the voices generating support for the struggles of students across the African continent and in the United States. In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition. From 1979 to 2003, she was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
Affective labor is work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. This is in contrast to emotional labor, which is intended to produce or modify one's own emotional experiences. Coming out of Autonomist feminist critiques of marginalized and so-called "invisible" labor, it has been the focus of critical discussions by, e.g., Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Juan Martin Prada, and Michael Betancourt.
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Marxian class theory asserts that an individual's position within a class hierarchy is determined by their role in the production process, and argues that political and ideological consciousness is determined by class position. A class is those who share common economic interests, are conscious of those interests, and engage in collective action which advances those interests. Within Marxian class theory, the structure of the production process forms the basis of class construction.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
Serfdom has a long history that dates to ancient times.
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They Carry Death is a 2021 Spanish-Colombian drama film written and directed by Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado, at their feature film debut. It is inspired by Silvia Federici's essay Caliban and the Witch: Women, Body and Primitive Accumulation.
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