She treated the middle ages as having favorable aspects, namely among its active peasantry. This was the other “secret of primitive accumulation.” If the transition to capitalism was written in letters of blood and fire, then the pen inscribing these letters was wielded by capitalist patriarchs upon the commons, whose community was created, nurtured, and maintained by women.įederici’s generalizations ran counter to college history department orthodoxy as well as against Marxist interpretation. Patriarchal control over the uterus was as important to the foundation of capitalism as the conversion of the earth to real estate. Challenging conventional Marxism Federici argued that before there was the expropriation of the land there was the expropriation of the female body.
This was a definition of the revolutionary subject that was bound to piss off standard Marxism as well as orthodox labor history.Ĭaliban and the Witch was conceived as an active intervention in the major post-war scholarly debate in Marxism, “the transition debate” about the movement from feudalism to capitalism. The wageless, she and others argued, were radical agents of world history. The debate of the mid-1970s concerned wagelessness- people outside the collective bargaining matrix who nevertheless contributed to surplus value, yet whose valorization was near nil. She was not in thrall to positivist interpretations of Marx nor to empiricist reductions of history. It owes much to the feminist movement (the Italian divorce referendum of 1974) and the world-wide struggle for reproductive rights and freedom.Ĭoming from Italy, Silvia Federici was steeped in theoretical breaks from traditional Marxism. I think it was conceived in the early seventies: Attica (1971) -Wounded Knee (1973)-Roe V. It has bridged the divides between the generations. This October, Verso is hosting a roundtable on Silvia Federici’s incantatory and incendiary Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004), inviting reflections from activists, writers, and scholars to discuss the provocations of Federici’s arguments on capitalism and colonialism, bodies and reproduction, race and slavery-and the powerful figure of the witch.Ĭaliban and the Witch became a movement meme.
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