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Remembering Resistance: A Review of Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004)

By Fiona Jeffries
The Rain 4:1 (Winter 2006): 3


“Whatever their weaknesses,” wrote Protestant leader Martin Luther in the mid-sixteenth century amidst the European Witch-Hunts, “women possess one virtue that cancels them all: they have a womb and they can give birth.” Luther’s comments were far from shocking at the time. Rather they echoed a powerful current of thought that linked population growth to national wealth. So argues Silvia Federici in her impressive book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, that this connection between church and the state power and the production of labour power in early capitalism launched the Witch-Hunts that peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and the Americas. Federici’s book is a crucial contribution to the long history of resistance to the violence of the global capitalist enclosures. The long-time anti-empire, feminist activist and scholar situates the Witch-Hunts within a history of five centuries of capitalist globalization. The Witch-Hunts, her book argues, were as foundational to the production of the modern proletariat and global capitalism as the expropriation of the European peasantry, the genocidal campaigns of colonization in the Americas and the African slave trade. Caliban presents a sprawling global history, not of nations but of a collection of places connected through an historical web of exploitation and resistance. Caliban, the anti-colonial rebel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, she explains, is a symbol of the world proletariat and proletarian body as a site of resistance to capitalism. The figure of the witch at the centre of this story is an embodiment of a world that had to be destroyed for capitalism to flourish. The book sets out to answer several core questions: What fears prompted this concerted policy of genocide? Why was such savage violence asserted? And why were women its principal targets?

The charges laid against persecuted women in Europe and in the Americas were so outrageous, Federici contends, that they were incommensurable with any crime. The violence is not accountable by conventional analyses of greed, she argues, since the majority of the women killed were very poor. While the Inquisitors documented their violence with intricate, sadistic detail, we are missing the viewpoint of the victim. Drawing on the rich archives of the radical “history from below” perspective, which privileges the voices of ordinary people and the hidden histories of resistance that have always dogged the dreams of the powerful, Federici’s book traces change through social struggle. Capitalism, she shows, is not the pre-ordained march of history that its early and contemporary ideologues, and often its Marxist adversaries, suggest. Rather, early modern Witch-Hunting capitalism, like its contemporary “War on Terror” variant, was a counter-revolutionary movement to halt the surge of anti-Feudal revolts and women-led heretical movements sweeping medieval Europe. “Capitalism,” she argues, “was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle—possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that had marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide” (21-22).

Emphasizing a methodology of material effects in opposition to revisionist history devoted to speculating on the intentions of the powerful, Federici sets out to demonstrate the extent to which the early modern Witch-Hunts constituted a war on women that was grounded in two foundations of capitalism. First, that capitalism was imposed through an unprecedented drive to harness and accumulate labour power, a system based on the necessarily relentless expansion of workforce and intensification of exploitation. The Witch-Hunt actualized capital’s strategic reliance on controlling women’s bodies, sexuality and reproductive power and the articulation of this violence through accusing women of making men impotent, of infanticide and criminalizing contraception and calling it demonic. It separated women from control over their reproduction and turned the female body into a technology of reproducing the labour force.

The enclosures of the common lands in early modern Europe during these centuries have been considered a seminal period marking the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism and Federici’s history both draws on and critiques this perspective. The second foundation of her hidden history draws on the theoretical work associated with autonomous Marxism’s re-thinking of the place of so-called “primitive accumulation” in capitalism. Here, Federici complicates the Marxian lexicon of primitive accumulation, a description of the processes of capitalist transformation that appropriate both land and body, turning people into machines and land into property. She, like the authors such as Massimo De Angelis and others associated with the Commoner journal, emphasize the unbroken character of primitive accumulation and argue it is not set in the historical moment of the “transition” from feudalism to capitalism but rather is defined by an ongoing process of separation of people from access to independent sources of livelihood. To abolish the commons it was necessary to break solidarities between women and men. Primitive accumulation, she argues, was not only an accumulation of capital and exploitable workers but “also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class” (63).

The Witch-Hunt, she argues, is a story of terror exacted to enclose not only land but social relations and to turn the body into a work-machine. Turning the body into a factory required both violence and terror and the theoretical scaffolding of state theorists such as French jurist and demonologist Jean Bodin who authored a “handbook” for the Witch trials: “We must spread terror among some by punishing many,” he advised. Terror was essential to enclose the body, the land and social relations by force before these relations appeared normal to the multitudes of ordinary people losing their livelihood: “The witch-hunt grew in a social environment where the ‘better sorts’ were living in constant fear of the ‘lower classes’, who could certainly be expected to harbor evil thoughts because in this period they were losing everything they had” (173).

Caliban explores the role of the Witch-Hunts in the imposition of a separation of production for the market and production of human beings. Federici shows how the mass killings of women served the purpose of at once devaluing reproductive labour and imbuing production for the market with economic value, meanwhile making women the main subject of reproductive work. This division created another, crucial, separation, inaugurating a new sexual division of labour that drove a wedge of differentiation between male and female labour and hence men and women. In some sixteenth century European towns, women were forbidden to work for a wage and women’s reproductive work was subordinated to men’s productive work, effectively condemning women to unpaid work and dependence on men for their survival. She demonstrates this through examples of how in witch-hunt ideology women associated with making money were accused of making a pact with the devil. This process was central to normalizing the separation between productive and reproductive labour, a distinction unique to modern capitalism. Upon women’s unpaid labour was built a new patriarchal domination, what she calls the “patriarchy of the wage”.

Caliban is influenced by two connected movements: autonomous feminism and resistance to the new enclosures, also known as neoliberal globalization. Her feminist history challenges the conventions of “women’s history” as somehow separate from the history men live in. It also takes on Marxian historiography, arguing that it fails to recognize the specificity of women’s exploitation and resistance, evidenced by the fact that this history has barely acknowledged the Witch-Hunts as integral to the much-theorized “transition” from feudalism to capitalism. The murders of hundreds of thousands of women in the name of crushing the presence of the devil in the bodies of the communities undergoing enclosure was, she argues, happening in tandem with the expropriation of people from the land, the colonization of the Americas, the waves of “bloody laws” against the vagabonds and the launching of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was while teaching in Nigeria in the 1980s when the country was subjected to World Bank/International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment programs” that Federici witnessed the continuity of this history in action. The experience suggested a resurgence of a new round of enclosures not laying waste to communities through the robed figure of the sadist Inquisitor, but armies in suits on IMF/WB expense accounts. These agents, dispatched to preside over a new phase of “primitive accumulation”, wield briefcases full of statutes governing the privatization of land and the incorporation of labour into the 24-hour global casino. Since then, Federici has combined her ongoing activities as coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa with rich critical analyses of contemporary African struggles in her collections Enduring Western Civilization (1995), African Visions (2000), and A Thousand Flowers (2000), and through her work with the Midnight Notes collective.

Hence Federici’s charged historical critique aims to read the past in the present to elaborate an understanding of exploitation and resistance to global capitalism that challenges the conventional historiography of not only the long-line of state theorists who treat the rise of capitalism as a natural evolutionary process. She also challenges a line within the Marxist tradition, which has either ignored or relegated the significance of the Witch-Hunts to a minor event in this history. While Marx’s observation that capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe from every pore, with blood and dirt” the Witch-Hunts, Federici argues, have been overlooked by Marxist historians who treated it as irrelevant in the history of class struggle. But the relation between the femicide of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries and the production of labouring bodies so central to capitalist development is what Federici so provocatively explores in this book. Here she concurs with Mary Daly’s 1978 observation that much history of witch hunts is written from a “woman-executing viewpoint”.

US Sociologist Steve Colatrella calls Caliban the most important book on the origins of capitalism since Emmanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World System, published thirty years ago. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of this fascinating history is its contemporary resonance. The Witch-Hunts, Federici argues, are analogous to today’s “War on Terror”. “The very vagueness of the charge—the fact that it was impossible to prove it, while at the same time it evoked the maximum of horror—meant that it could be used to punish any form of protest and to generate suspicion even towards the most ordinary aspects of daily life” (170). Federici’s book shows us how the terror of the Witch-Hunts was designed to break solidarities and impose consent by the force of fear to establish a new world of violent hierarchy. In documenting how much hard work and what resources it takes to make these hierarchies seem natural and fixed, Caliban demonstrates how contested and even fragile they continue to be.