WITCHES, WITCH-HUNTING, AND WOMEN - SILVIA FEDERICI

2023 was supposed to be the year of longer books, and it will be, I swear, but I decided to start it off with something quick I could get through while I work my way through some doorstops. Its hard to believe that Caliban and the Witch came out in 2004, something about it seems so timeless and monumental that the idea that it was published when I was in high school (tho, this really might just be a comment about how old I am) is sort of mind-blowing, given how fundamental the framework Federici presents is. This book is a sort of extra chapter to Caliban and the Witch, which if you haven’t read, is absolutely mandatory. It’s a study of the European witch-hunts and its main thesis might best be boiled down to a quote from this book: “What remains unacknowledged is that, like the slave trade and the extermination of the indigenous populations of the “new world” the witch hunt stands at a crossroads of a cluster of social processes that paved the way for the rise of the modern capitalist world. Thus there is much that can be learned from it concerning the preconditions for the capitalist takeoff.” (italics in original). This book rehashes and sharpens these insights then seeks to take these findings abroad. The last few parts of this quite short book are about the rise of witch-hunting in parts of Africa and India as well as the monstrous femicides in Mexico and Central America. In both cases, Federici is able to resist the common, racist, mistake of saying this is “just part of their culture” and instead show how the social changes wrought by capitalism are creating the conditions where women are being accused of witchcraft and violently murdered. Further, she shows how these exact same changes, the social dissolution and increased exploitation required and produced by capitalism, created the exact same femicidal fury in Europe a few hundred years ago. Short, punchy and perfect. I’m not sure it would totally work without having read Caliban and the Witch, which goes much more into the European history and “proves” more of its theories, it, rather, provides sketches and insights into how this framework and understanding the the misogyny at the heart of capitalist transformation can be applied in locations beyond Europe. Each little chapter in this short book could become its own large work, and hopefully there are historians and theorists working on just such books as we speak. In the meantime, we can read and reread Federici and be amazed and horrified at her insights into how our world really works. 1271 Witches

“In other word, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europea at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social power, leaving them with no resort but dependency on the charity of the better-off at a time when the communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized beggina and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world.”

“Capitalism was born out of the strategies that the field elite - the Church and the landed and merchant classes - implemented in response to the struggles of the rural and urban proletariat that by the fourteenth century were placing their rule in crisis. It was a “counterrevolution,” not only suffocating in blood the new demands for freedom but the turning the world upside down through the creation of a new system of production requiring a different conception of work, wealth and value that was useful for more intense forms of exploitation.”