France, Alternative Libertaire AL #249 - Read Silvia
Federici, "Caliban and the Witch" (fr, it, pt) [machine
translation]
The Entremonde and Senonevero editions published in April 2014, the translation of the
book by Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch , subtitled Women, Body and Primitive
Accumulation and published in 2004 in the English version. The aim of the author is to
consider the transition from feudalism and capitalism (from the late fifteenth century to
the late eighteenth century) through the history of women. It develops the thesis that the
oppression of women has played a role in the emergence of capitalism and the primitive
accumulation of capital, as well as the enclosure movement[1], the colonization of the New
World and industrial revolution. Basically, it offers nothing less than adding a chapter
to the Capital!
The first part provides an overview of social struggles in the late Middle Ages, the
second deals with the general dynamics of expropriations in Europe in the late fifteenth
century (hence the repression of these struggles for power in transition to capitalism)
while the last two chapters deal with the specific oppression of women during this period,
in Europe and in the newly colonized America. During this period, the body of workers is
transformed into "power tool", while that of women is dedicated to the reproduction of the
labor force, and that they are gradually dispossessed of their livelihoods and activities
they previously exercised.
The example of the witch hunt is a good place to this story: according to the author, it
is all heretics who are repressed-es at the beginning of the reporting period, then a
shift is progressive, the women beggars or thieves, midwives (who practice abortion and
contraception), but also women considered immoral (that is to say, exercising their
sexuality outside marriage and procreation) are designated as witches and harshly
persecuted. The witch-hunt was invented in Europe, but it was later extended to women the
"New World" in order to break the indigenous resistance to colonization resistance
implemented largely by women. Let Silvia Federici care to conclude on the witch hunt:
"Just as enclosures expropriated peasant communal land, the witch hunt expropriated women
of their bodies, which were thus" liberated "all obstacles preventing them from
functioning as machines for production work. Thus the threat of the pyre erected barriers
goshawks women's body, more formidable than were the only ones drawn up by the enclosure
of the commons.»
Elsa (AL Toulouse)
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch - Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation ,
translated from the English (United States) by Senonevero collective Entremonde, 2014, 464
pages, 24 euros.
[1] English history Period in which the landowners, asking fences in the fields,
challenging the use rights over land by farmers to profitable sheep farming. Period by
Marxists as a first step in the development of capitalism.
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Lire-Silvia-Federici-Caliban-et-la
