Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

“In the feudal village no social separation existed between the production of goods and the reproduction of the work-force; all work contributed to the family’s sustenance.” 

For working people, life in the medieval manor was fundamentally different from life under capitalism. Reproductive work held real value during the Middle Ages and primarily served the family. In contrast, reproductive work is valueless in capitalist societies, where women’s invisible labor goes unpaid, although capitalism depends on this labor because it provides a ready supply of workers, without which capitalism could not function.

“The monetization of economic life, then, did not benefit all peoples.”

Capitalists claim that the development of a money-economy was positive. However, this change caused divisions among peasants as some accrued more wealth than others, who were often left impoverished and dependent on community support.

“Popular heresy was less a deviation from the orthodox doctrine than a protest movement, aspiring to a radical democratization of social life.”

Federici sees the heresies of the late Middle Ages, such as Catharism, as socioeconomic movements rather than primarily driven by religious ideology. Heretics engaged in social protest, according to her assessment, because many of them embraced apostolic poverty and challenged extant social norms, questioning both the Church and medieval society broadly.

“In the Church women were nothing, but here [in the heretical sects] they were considered equal; they had the same rights as men, and could enjoy a social life and mobility (wandering, preaching) that nowhere else was available to them in the Middle Ages.”

Federici claims that women had little power or voice in the medieval Church, unlike in heretical sects such as Catharism. While it is true that some heretical movements provided new opportunities to women, Federici’s assertion that they were nothing like the Church is debatable. Research by medieval feminist scholars such as Fiona J. Griffiths shows that religious women could play influential roles within the Church and in the lives of male clergy. In fact, influential female mystics abounded in the late Middle Ages. Catherine of Siena, for example, wrote letters to the Papacy encouraging the Church to resolve the Great Schism.

“What followed has been described as the ‘golden age of the European proletariat’ […] a far cry from the canonical representation of the 15th century, which has been iconographically immortalized as a world under the spell of the dance of death and memento mori.”

European art after the Black Death (1347-1351) is filled with images of skulls and the “dance of death.” The perpetuation of this imagery leads some to conclude that European attitudes toward death changed as they became more fearful that it could strike at any time and mourned the mass death of the pandemic. However, with population decline and a need for laborers came better working and living conditions for the peasant survivors, who demanded higher wages and lower rents. 

“The development of capitalism was not the only possible response to the crisis of feudal power. Throughout Europe, vast communalistic social movements and rebellions against feudalism had offered the promise of a new egalitarian society built on social equality and cooperation.”

Federici believes there was potential for an alternative to capitalism to fill the void left by feudalism’s collapse. The numerous peasant movements that appeared in the late Middle Ages that promoted a more egalitarian world are a testament to this potential, according to Federici. For example, in the German town of Niklashausen a mystic shepherd named Hans Behem encouraged the peasantry to revolt against both the nobility and the clergy. He said that this revolt would usher in a new age in which all people would be equal.

“In England, however, land privatization was mostly accomplished through the ‘Enclosures,’ a phenomenon that has become so associated with the expropriation of workers from their ‘common wealth’ that, in our time, it is used by anti-capitalist activists as a signifier for every attack on social entitlements.”

The English enclosures marked the removal of peasant access to common lands. Elites seized control of commons for their own use and enclosed them with hedgerows. These lands included forests and hay meadows, for example, that small farmers and laborers had previously been able to use for their own benefit. These communal lands had also promoted cooperation among villagers and served a significant social function, so enclosure had a detrimental effect on proletarian communal bonds. “Social enclosure” was a direct consequence of physical enclosure. 

“As with the commutation, women were those who suffered most when the land was lost and the village community fell apart.”

Both enclosure and the money-economy negatively affected proletarian women. Enclosure removed proletarian women from communal spaces that encouraged social bonding while the money-economy gradually forced women out of the paid workforce. This shift slowly gave rise to the modern housewife and the unpaid, invisible labor of “women’s work” that persists today.

“The outcome of these policies that lasted for two centuries […] was the enslavement of women to procreation.”

Land expropriation and the money-economy confined women to the domestic sphere and diminished opportunities for paid labor. Women’s primary role thus became to fulfill capitalism’s need for labor by having children/workers. This work, while vital to the perpetuation of capitalism, nonetheless goes unpaid and unrecognized as true work.

“By denying women control over their bodies, the state deprived them of the most fundamental condition for physical and psychological integrity and degraded maternity to the status of forced labor, in addition to confining women to reproductive work in a way unknown in previous societies.”

Early modern authorities made traditional contraceptive practices criminal. Women therefore lost control over their bodies, sexuality, and reproduction. Under capitalism, childbearing was compulsory, because the system could not survive without it.

“We should not assume, then, that the European proletariat was always an accomplice to the plunder of the Americas, though individual proletarians undoubtedly were.”

Federici distinguishes between European elites who undertook the conquest of the Americas and working-class Europeans. The European proletariat suffered from colonialism, she suggests, because exploitative labor practices and enslavement in the Americas further degraded wages in Europe. European proletarians were thus natural allies of marginalized people of color in the colonies, which elites worked to combat by sowing division along racial lines. 

“The body had to die so that labor-power could live.”

Mechanical Philosophy separated the mind from the body. This intellectual movement transformed the body into machinery that lacked autonomy and worked in the service of capitalism.

“We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.”

Cartesian thought promoted the body as automaton, distinct from—and inferior to—the rational mind. The body, then, became the first piece of machinery created in the service of capitalism, predating the invention of industrial technologies such as the steam engine.

“In this obsessive attempt to conquer the body in its most intimate recesses, we see reflected the same passion with which, in the same years, the bourgeoisie tried to conquer—we could say ‘colonize’—that alien, dangerous, unproductive being that in its eyes was the proletariat.”

Early modern elites treated the mechanical body as a metaphor for the working class. The unruly proletariat was inferior to Europe’s bourgeoisie just as Mechanical Philosophy subordinated the body to the rational mind.

“There can be no doubt, then, that the witch-hunt was a major political initiative.”

Federici contends that Europe’s witch hunts were initiated and carried out from above. Indeed, most accused witches were tried before secular rather than ecclesiastical courts, despite the religious components of European witchcraft, such as diabolism. Witch-hunting was thus a tool of the state that whipped up fears among lower classes, who then accused each other of witchcraft. 

“Magic was also an obstacle to the rationalization of the work process, and a threat to the establishment of the principle of individual responsibility. Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated.”

Capitalism, Mechanical Philosophy, and witch-hunting destroyed medieval traditions. New thought declared old beliefs irrational and superstitious. The disenchantment of the natural world was useful to capitalism because it made this world, including the human body, controllable. According to Federici, a belief in magic and an economic system based on exploitation cannot coexist. 

“The witch-hunt, then, was a war against women.”

Many scholarly works seek to explain the causes of witch-hunting and the role gender played in this phenomenon. Federici argues that witch-hunting was woman-hunting because most of the accused were women and because of the gendered nature of their crimes, such as infanticide and causing male impotence. Such crimes made a witch the antithesis of the good wife and mother upon which capitalist early modern society relied. Federici views the witch hunts as a genocide against women because victims were targeted based on their gender (as well as class and age). 

“The repulsion that non-procreative sexuality was beginning to inspire is well captured by the myth of the old witch flying on her broom.”

Witch-hunting demonized women’s unbridled sexuality just as Mechanical Philosophy inspired disgust in other bodily functions. Witches were stereotyped as older women who could no longer bear children and were thus free to engage in sex without fear of pregnancy. The witch flying on her broom to the Sabbat where she would copulate with Satan is a phallic symbol of misappropriated domesticity. She is a sexually uninhibited and demonic woman who refuses to serve capitalism by performing proper reproductive work. 

“With the persecution of the folk healer, women were expropriated from a patrimony of empirical knowledge, regarding herbs and healing remedies, that they had accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation, its loss paving the way for a new form of enclosure. This was the rise of professional medicine.”

Social enclosure accompanied physical enclosure. Women’s social bonds broke down and common, traditional knowledge was demonized or lost. This knowledge was frequently related to contraception and abortion—threats to capitalism—as midwifery became subordinate to a powerful class of male physicians. 

“This process [witch-hunting’s conclusion] began throughout Europe toward the end of the 17th century, though witch trials continued in Scotland for three more decades. A factor contributing to the end of the witch-hunt was the fact that the ruling class was beginning to lose control over it, coming under the fire of its own repressive machine, with denunciations targeting even its own members.”

Historians have put forth numerous explanations for witch-hunting’s decline within Europe. Federici, however, rejects these possibilities, like the Scientific Revolution’s rise, as explanations. She suggests that capitalism’s triumph and then accompanying sense of security its advocates felt made witch-hunting unnecessary, especially when charges spiraled out of their control. 

“It is now recognized, however, that the charge of devil worshipping played a key function also in the colonization of the American aboriginal population.”

Federici rejects Eurocentric approaches to the study of witch-hunting. She advocates for the importance of a global perspective in historical analysis because Europeans transported their beliefs to their colonies and imposed them on Indigenous people. Accusing witches of diabolism was common in Continental European witch-hunting, which is what made witchcraft a heresy, or perverted form of Christianity. The belief in diabolism appeared in the Americas, where Indigenous peoples who had no concept of the Christian figure of Satan were nevertheless accused of this crime when their idols were demonized. 

“The spread of illustrations portraying life in the New World, that began to circulate in Europe after the 1550s, completed this work of degradation, with their multitudes of naked bodies and cannibalistic banquets, reminiscent of witches’ Sabbats, featuring human heads and limbs as the main course.”

Images of Indigenous Americans spread easily throughout Europe thanks to printing technology. Many of these images showed people in unflattering and even frightening scenarios, for example feasting on human flesh. These depictions are strikingly similar to early modern artistic representations of the Sabbat. Both demonized their subjects and created fear about their activities. 

“But one of the objectives of the witch-hunt, the isolation of the witches from the rest of the community, was not achieved. The Andean witches were not turned into outcasts.”

Women accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe were frequently socially ostracized, if they were not already disdained by their neighbors. However, in South America, women targeted as witches did not face the same fate. Instead, their communities refused to participate in Europeans’ social enclosure.