Aonarán's Reviews > Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

It's pretty hard for me to give a book five stars and I'm tempted to give that to Caliban.

I recently read this with some of my friends in a reading group and not only really enjoyed it, but it made me rethink a number of concepts (primarily feminist ones) that I had earlier written off, as well as introduced me entirely new ones.

I had tried to read this five or six years ago but stopped since the language was too complicated for me. Reading it again now (with a few more years of academic-type reading under my belt and with friends) it was a little easier.

Themes and parts of the book that moved and impacted me the most:

Capitalism was a reaction by those in power to the (failed) peasant revolts of the 1200 and 1300s. Mercantilism (and then capitalism) takes into consideration the demands of the enserfed peasants as a means of recuperation and offers waged based work. This new form of managing work/labor has it's benefits such as increased freedom of mobility, but leads to wage slavery and much more strict and fucked up social roles and ultimately is much more controlling. For example, women weren't allowed to live without men in their household, they couldn't be in public without men and in extreme example were not even allowed to look out the windows of their homes (now places of confinement).

All of this is forced on women, it is not "natural", it wasn't happening for centuries. It's a concise era that can be pointed to, along with laws being passed and the views of rulers, philosophers, editors, etc. encouraging this new, extremist thinking. The depreciation and devaluing of women wasn't a problem of medieval thinking or fluke in the development of capitalism, but an intricate, vital part of it.

With the enclosure of the commons, people in general lost a lot of autonomy, but women lost the only women-only place they were allowed to legally have. As a result women often lead the fiercest resistance to the enclosure - tearing down fences and hedges, the main signs of and means of enclosure. Men will eventually be offered women as a consolation prize for losing agency once had by the commons. Apparently enough of the bastards took the offer. "A new "sexual contract" . . . was forged, defining women in terms - mothers, wives, daughters, widows - that hid their status as workers, while giving men free access to women's bodies, their labor, and the bodies and labor of their children. According to this new social-sexual contract, proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction, and a communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will. . . . But in the new organization of work *every woman . . . became a communal good*, for once women's activities were defined as non-work, women's labor began to appear as a natural resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink. . . . For in pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime *women themselves became the commons*, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations."

In a similar way that dis-empowered, working men are told that if nothing else they can at least have control over their wives and children, through mechanical thinking (emerging as common philosophical, enlightment thinking that now dominates much of our take on our own bodies) we are all told that if nothing else we can at least control, rule over and be sovereigns of our own bodies. People are taught to think of each other as mere bodies to do work and even more that our bodies are only machines. Among other things, it appears that because of this (and extreme punishments dished out by the inquisition) we have the modern concept of our bodies being something separate from ourselves. That we have an intellect that needs to keep our bodies under control. All of this re-enforces and amplifies the ideas that have at times been held by a minority of reactionaries, such as the intrinsic evil and wretchedness of humanity and the filthiness of the body/nature.

Finally, I had often heard a lot said, usually vaguely about how the witch-hunts were an era when powerful women and a lot of wisdom relating to things like health, the body, contraception was lost, but it was incredibly powerful and moving to hear the specifics of that. After a while, practicing contraception, infanticide, abortion, certain kinds of health treatment in general became capital offences, as well as resisting the implementation of those laws. This was made all the more clear to me when Federici talks about the execution and burnings as public events, and then I realized how seriously it must have been to watch your mother or sister or daughter or friend or grandmother being burned alive for using contraception. "Just as enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus "liberated" from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women's bodies than were ever erected by the fencing off of the commons."

All of this is part of the disciplining of the social body in order to make it fit within the realm of work/production. Magic was and can be subversive as far as it teaches people they can get things without "working hard" and "making sacrifices."


As I got towards the end of the book, I kept thinking, "When is Federici going to talk about examples of collective/mass resistance to the witch-burning / heretics hunts?" And then I sadly came across this section:

"That [the witch-hunts] successfully divided women from men is suggested by the fact that, despite individual attempts by sons, husbands, or fathers to save their female relatives from the stake, with one exception, we have no record of any male organizations opposing the persecution." Federici then tells about a fleet of fishermen who got word that their mothers and wives were being tortured and executed. They rushed home and the inquisitor fled, never to return. It's infuriating that it would have initially been that easy to save hundreds of thousands of lives, but people were not able to organize themselves. But there must be other examples of resisting this holocaust and I want that history.

Something I really appreciated about this text (that reminds me of books by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh) is Federici's insistence that all these fucked up things were intricate and necessary for the development of the systems that now run our lives, and that many of these injustices still exist and are necessary in keeping capitalism running. An interested "sequel" to Caliban I think would be The Many Headed Hydra - it picks up right around the time that Caliban is leaving off. While Caliban focuses a lot on gender touching often on race in regards to class, The Many Headed Hydra talks a lot about the development of race touching often on gender in regards to class.


4.7

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Summer 2018

I've debated a fair amount whether I should add this update, but here it is.

I carry Caliban and the Witch in my book distro, A Boulder on the Tracks, on a sliding scale of $12-20. My intention with the distro is not to turn a profit, and any money I make goes back into acquiring more titles or sending books to prisoners. $12 is what I pay for them, and as far as I know it's the cheapest one can get a new copy for. Pardon the self-promotion!

http://aboulder.com/product/caliban-a...