I’ve been simultaneously reading Keith Thomas’s magisterial and canonic Religion and the Decline of Magic and Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. They complement one another really well, obviously, and my mind is now a swamp of feminist rage and sorrow but also that kind of speculative obsession where you can’t stop thinking about medieval society.
Thomas published his book in 1971 after what I can only imagine was a thousand years of archival work. I think it’s he who recently said something like how the work that took him a lifetime could now be done by a talented undergrad in a couple of weeks (because of the internet). On the one hand that statement is terrifying; on the other it’s sort of charmingly modest. But yeah, this book is the kind of old-school “here’s some stuff” scholarship that always makes loosey-goosey interpretive/hermeneutical/whatever scholars like myself feel sort of sick and awed at the same time. It’s 1,000 pages or so of dense documentation. He just went around to every archive and painstakingly pieced together a history of religion and magic in 16th- and 17th-century England. It’s unreal. The introduction is so delightful, I urge you to read it even if you can’t deal with the rest of the book (I myself spent over a year reading just 200 pages and then skipped to the witchcraft section).
Federici is a “radical autonomist feminist Marxist,” so we are of course very ready to be on her side and believe basically everything she says (not a joke). She is a beautiful old Italian-American scholar who has written many incredible things, one of which is this book Caliban and the Witch, published in 2004. It’s so rare to read serious politically activist feminist stuff ever since Postmodernism ruined everything in the 90s or whatever (possible generalization). I keep thinking this book was written in the 70s, but in a good way.
In this book, Federici argues with Marx about the roots of Capitalism. For Marx, capitalism is a necessary step in the progression of human economic history, as we work our way inexorably toward some sort of socialist utopia. He also thinks that “primitive accumulation” lays the groundwork for capitalism. A brief explanation of the prevailing theories on primitive accumulation, by the wonderfully dry David Harvey, my hero:
There were some people that were hard working and some people who were not. Some people who could be bothered, and some people who could not be bothered. And the result of that was that, bit by bit, those who were hard working, and could be bothered, accumulated some wealth. And eventually, those who could not be bothered, could not accumulate wealth, and in the end, in order to survive, preferred, actually, to give up their labor power as a commodity, in return for a living wage.
For Adam Smith, primitive accumulation happened naturally–i.e. NOT at the hands of the state–because Adam Smith has that big bug up his butt about the invisible hand and how markets are self-governing etc. and that’s why we shouldn’t have Obamacare.
Marx definitely points out how the state actually plays a role in primitive accumulation, via “enclosing” the land (I will talk about this later) and expelling peasants from it (now called “land expropriation” and still being deliberately done in developing nations by the IMF and the World Bank as part of their “structural adjustment” program). So basically the governing power “accumulates” all these resources (thus capital) from the earth and from the lower classes, and that’s the foundation of capitalism. Federici argues that actually “primitive accumulation” isn’t a foundation–it’s an ongoing process and a defining feature of global capitalism at all stages. Heavy!
Also, for Marx, there are actually some elements of capitalism that are liberatory/progressive. This is a story everybody tells, in fact–the main thing you learn about the Black Death and how it helped consolidate capitalism as the governing economic system of Europe is that it gave peasants control over their own labor power for the first time, as because everybody was dead they could suddenly demand really excellent conditions for their work–as the grain was rotting in the fields and livestock were wandering around the blighted landscape–and they became mobile and were able to choose where they worked, and they could demand things like a weekend, etc. And this is true! This did happen. There was this brief “golden age” where the working class was just killing it, and having a grand old time. Obviously, this couldn’t last.
Federici counters these conventional arguments about the “transition” to capitalism after the fall of feudalism. By revisiting this “transition” (she always puts “transition” in quotes, because she doesn’t like how the phrase “transition to capitalism” implies that it was a natural process, rather than one implemented by bloody force from the top down) from the viewpoint of women primarily, but also of colonial subjects, slaves, and all members of the disenfranchised lower classes, she finds that the subjugation of vast segments of the population is a necessary AND ONGOING feature of capitalism:
…capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations–the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of perosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury–by denigrating the ‘nature’ of those it exploits: women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slavery, the immigrants displaced by globalization…it is impossible therefore to associate capitalism with any form of liberation.
There are a couple of things I particularly like about this book:
– it provides a road map for moving towards uniting the working class. As many people (like David Harvey) have demonstrated, capitalism splits us into warring factions. Black, white, women, men, immigrants, citizens, etc. Only when we realize that these distinctions are essentially meaningless in the face of our universal enslavement to a destructive and oppressive system will this system be in any danger whatsoever
– at the same time, and a bit contradictorily, it helps me find ways to understand why I continue to be so married to gender categories. At the same time as I am excited by the possibilities presented by shifting our ideas of gender, and even by the possibility of obliterating “gender” as a set category altogether, a part of me feels really committed to my experience AS A WOMAN in this world; a part of me feels that gender does matter in some ways that I haven’t totally been able to put my finger on. I think what I’m realizing is that it matters HISTORICALLY and thus needs to continue to matter to historians. Here’s Federici:
If it is true that in capitalist society sexual identity became the carrier of specific work functions, then gender should not be considered a purely cultural reality, but should be treated as a specification of class relations.
Meaning, we shouldn’t just say “oh gender is a cultural construct,” which frees it from any PARTICULAR CULTURE. Rather, it is a construct of CAPITALISM and needs to be understood in that way. So, if “femininity” has been constituted in capitalist society as a work-function (as a carrier of/explanation for the kind of work that women do/are allowed to do/are forced to do) and furthermore if a lot of this work-function (HAVING BABIES, i.e. reproducing the work force itself!!) is MASKED under the cover of “a biological destiny,” then, for Federici, “women’s history” IS “class history.” This feels powerful to me. She’s saying we can’t insist on the erasure of race and gender, as historians, because these epic historical shifts were PREDICATED on race and gender, and by ignoring this we miss what really happened. This is why she says dudes like Marx and Foucault FAIL to understand the “transition” to capitalism in its fullness–because they, being dudes, are incapable of thinking through the viewpoint of women. “Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women.”
– She also gives me a more powerful theoretical and political hook to hang my desire to remain childless on. I’ve always kind of lazily said that I don’t want to contribute yet another cog to the capitalist wheel, but then here comes a book about the emerging capitalist power structure’s deliberate enslavement of women to their bodies and to childbirth. After the periods of population decline in the 14th-15th and then the 16th-17th century (declines caused first by plague and then by mass starvation after the enclosure of the commons, see below), reproduction became a state interest, and after the second decline the population crisis was blamed NOT on the fact that the upper class was intentionally starving the lower class to death, but on SELFISH WOMEN for REFUSING TO REPRODUCE (sound familiar???? I’m looking at you, NYT trend pieces, and you, Ted Cruz or whatever). So then in the wake of all this, across the 15th-16th centuries basically in waves:
– birth control is criminalized
– abortion is criminalized (it used to be okay in the case of poor women who couldn’t support a baby)
– the persecution of witches as specifically WOMEN who prevented childbirth in various ways (sometimes by eating children) is institutionalized
– severe penalties are introduced for all these crimes but ALSO FOR CELIBACY (women living alone)
– more women were EXECUTED during this period for reproductive crimes than for any other crime
– during this period, “witchcraft” and “infanticide” were THE ONLY CHARGES in which a woman was allowed to be a full legal citizen–in all other crimes she’d be represented by her husband/father
– same period, the obliteration of midwifery, for millennia a female-only world and skill set. Midwives started being criminalized as COLLUDING with evil women to disguise pregnancy, perform abortions, etc. Midwives started being forced to perform surveillance on local women–if a foundling was discovered on the church steps, midwives had to go examine all the local women for signs of lactation, etc. If they refused to do this they were called witches too.
– new laws prioritizing the fetus over the mother (SOUND FAMILIAR)
Federici says that Marx treats reproduction as genderless, and thus he never imagined that procreation could be a terrain of exploitation and thus also a terrain of resistance. He never imagined that women could refuse to reproduce–that they could GO ON STRIKE from “their” labor!!!!!!! I’m on strike!
The body has been for women what the factory has been for male waged workers…thus the importance which the body in all its aspects–maternity, childbirth, sexuality–has acquired in feminist theory and women’s history has not been misplaced
She says a lot of the work done by feminists since the 70s to “revalorize” the body is really meaningful and necessary in combating the “negativity attached to the identification of femininity with corporeality” but that we can not “return to the body” until we destroy the “work discipline” defining it. Until our whole conception of work, work-relations, work-discipline, etc., is completely changed, the body will remain the site of a “fundamental alienation.” She elaborates on this in her sad chapter about how Cartesian philosophy separated our minds from our bodies, which became meat robots and disgusting to us.
:(
This book helps explain so much. Our suspicion of pleasure. Misogyny of all kinds. Modern poverty. All kinds of witchy imagery and rhetoric that pop up whenever there is a threat to the social order. And also the rise of misogynist violence in all countries where global capitalism is being implemented by the World Bank and the IMF. Holy shit!
The end of feudalism and the enclosure of the commons
So, for thousands of years, there were these tracts of land known as the “commons.” These were wildernesses that no one owned. Villages were surrounded by commons, and the commons provided the peasantry with a huge portion of their livelihood. As a serf, you had to work on the lord’s land, and the products of your labor went to the lord. But no matter what, you were always able to catch fish, hunt game, get wood for fuel, and graze your livestock in the commons. This meant that the lord couldn’t use starvation as a weapon against his serfs.
After the plague, as the social order governing Europe really was kind of up in the air, the remaining aristocracy and clergy instituted a massive land grab whereby they “enclosed” the commons all across Europe. They fenced them in, declared them private property, and kicked all the peasants off them. “Poaching” became a crime. The powers that did this used exactly the neoliberal rhetoric with which we’re still so familiar today–the workers couldn’t be trusted to utilize these natural resources in the best way; these valuable resources should be shepherded by educated, scientifically-minded nobility who could maximize production; the peasants were too dumb and lazy to be trusted with the care of nature.
These enclosures also couldn’t have happened without the monetization of the economy. When wheat and sheep and ore and brick (ha) cease having merely use-value–you need brick to make a house; you need wheat to make bread–and start becoming commodities that you exchange for shifting amounts of MONEY, everything changes. Now we start getting ideas like “productivity” as detached from subsistence. The whole system of VALUE is fundamentally altered. Now a forest is valued not for its ability to provide sustenance for the people living near it, but for its potential for bringing in x amount of money on the MARKET. This is also when labor began being monetized–in the past, serfs would work all day long, both on their own land and on the lord’s land, in their own homes and in his home, making babies, tending cattle, etc., and they got to keep a percentage of the results of their cumulative labor, in various ways (labor on the commons; labor on their own plot of land if they’d been given one) and the rest went to the lord. Now, the lord started paying them in WAGES, which Federici argued contributed to alienating the worker from his own labor–making it abstract. It became harder to see which labor was for you and which labor was for the lord.
Wage labor plus the enclosure of the commons basically caused the massification of poverty and prostitution that characterizes the 15th-16th centuries. Accounts of travelers from this time describe SEAS and OCEANS of beggars, covered in sores, emaciated, pulling at you and showing you their dead children and wailing in the streets. Cities had to build walls to keep out the starving. In the past, no matter how poor you were–if you were crippled, insane, if you didn’t have your own plot of land or your own hut, if you were a widow–no matter what, you could always go into the commons and catch a fish or make a fire. Now that the commons were closed to the peasantry, the ability to support themselves vanished, and lords could now effectively control them via wages. They could make wages as low as they wanted, and nobody could protest, because there was literally no other option. This created the first real poverty class–the first real problem with homelessness and beggars. Federici says something like 30% of the population of Europe starved to death. I don’t know where that number comes from but there you go. It explains the labor crisis that is soon to follow.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism is usually heralded as positive. Feudalism is really just glorified slavery, after all, and in capitalism at least we have freedom. Right? Hmm. FURTHERMORE, the transition to capitalism is usually explained as a revolution from the ground up–the peasants successfully fought to attain freedom via getting paid money for their labor instead of just subsistence farming.
Federici talks about how actually the transition to capitalism was resisted at every step of the way by the peasant class, and that this entire period is characterized by violent, consistent class struggle. They protested against the monetization of their labor; they protested against new rules governing their labor; they protested against working too much; they protested against the appropriation of the commons; after the mass impoverishment and starvation caused by the enclosure of the commons, their uprisings start being about HUNGER–they protest starvation; they protest the price of bread; they protest hoarding; they protest being forced to grind wheat in the lord’s mill for a fee.
Most peasant uprisings during the late 15th century, according to Federici, centered on the commons–villagers would mass together and “pull down the fences” and “level the ditches” that had been implemented to separate them from the land. In effect, like so many later popular protest movements (the Paris Commune; Occupy), they were protesting the privatization of public space and of nature’s bounty. These protests were often led by women, who had been the most negatively impacted by the transition to wage labor–in the past, “work” was just “work,” everybody did it, and there wasn’t such a distinction between the sexes. You were all working in the fields, around the home, dealing with cows, hoeing/sowing/plowing/harvesting, spinning, weaving, disciplining children. In the medieval period in fact, women were members of 72 of the 87 guilds in France or something (not looking at my notes)–they were surgeons, doctors, merchants, candle-stick makers, butchers. And men contributed to parenting–they taught, disciplined, etc. children. There was definitely work men did and work women did but these types of work were not VALUED differently. With the implementation of waged labor, certain types of labor were able to be turned into VALUELESS WORK (here is the roots of the housewife, who won’t make her full appearance until the 19th century). Work in the home–spinning, cooking, cleaning, having babies, raising children–didn’t accrue a wage under the new regime, and so over time it came to appear to be of less value, as society became increasingly monetized. Women were barred from many types of wage labor during this period (Federici says because the emerging capitalist class NEEDED half the population to be engaged in supporting the other half for no pay, because it was cost effective) and so they were more likely to be beggars than men, and they were also forced to turn to prostitution in droves.
Federici also points out that not only are there all these documented peasant uprisings during this period that’s supposedly all about peasants demanding waged labor, but also these protests were BRUTALLY put down by governments and militaries. After the brief “golden age of the proletariat” following the Black Death, there are peasant revolt after peasant revolt, all of them insisting that they were being made to work too much and for too little gain. This was the age of the heretic sects–thousands and thousands of peasants who protested the emerging new social order by abandoning it, and starting communes based on their own interpretations of scripture, and practicing free love and raising children all together and working for the common good. These were internationally-established revolutionary sects, they were not just a few wandering weirdos. And the explosion in the numbers of heretics and heretical sects coincides with this transitional period between feudalism and capitalism, when city governments were fencing off the commons, legislating against female magic and medicine, and imposing new laws forcing maternity on women.
Many of these sects refused to procreate! They didn’t believe in marriage or childbirth, “not to bring new slaves into this ‘land of tribulations,’ as life on earth was called in one of their tracts.” They refused a life “degraded to mere survival.” Shades of my buddy Théophile Gautier in 1830, and his wonderful screed against utility. He says if all we care about is whatever is useful then we might as well all live in our own coffins. “It is not very ‘useful’ that we are on this earth and alive.” GO GIRL
These acts of popular defiance of the emerging new social order were viciously repressed by governments. Armies would come in to where these heretical sects were just minding their own beeswax, working together and living together peacefully following Jesus’s teachings, and SLAUGHTER them. Thousands massacred at once, and in really hateful ways too, like the leader of the Cathars (I think) was forced to watch his wife roasted slowly alive before his eyes, and then he was driven naked through the rocks and crags of the wilderness until his flesh was torn from his bones. Nobles and clergy alike colluded in this persecution of the heretics, murdering droves of men, women, and children, who were literally doing nothing but just living their lives in a way that didn’t accord with capitalist value systems. Imagine THE CHURCH torturing people to death for refusing wage labor. You know, like Jesus.
Thus by the end of the 15th century a counter-revolution was at work, with governments, nobles, and clergy violently repressing heretical societies and also women’s bodies as a means of consolidating their class power. I love that Federici calls this a counter-revolution! She’s calling CAPITALISM a “counter-revolution,” whereas it’s supposed to be this great “revolution.” It’s actually a revolution AGAINST a cooler revolution—if all those peasants had had their way maybe communist utopia would’ve been reached 500 years ago BUT NO.
End of the 15th century we suddenly see:
– THE DECRIMINALIZATION OF RAPE. Rape had been a crime; now it’s not a crime anymore! Go for it, boys
– this encourages the new common practice for lower-class men to rampage on gang rapes at night, preying on women who don’t have male protection. Federici is all about tracing all the different ways women were subjugated during this period and one of her big bugbears is that women who lived ALONE (i.e. who weren’t having babies to contribute to the workforce; who were perhaps practicing magic, herbal healing, birth control) presented this conceptual threat that had to be brought into order. She says decriminalizing rape all across Europe was one way this was accomplished, creating a climate of fear in which women were scared to do anything weird or on their own
– this new “semi-official rape culture” destroyed the reputations of victims, who were then reduced to prostitution because no men would have them near; desensitized the population to violence against women, which will later help the spread of the witch-hunt; created a climate of misogyny that degraded all women regardless of class or whether they had been raped. Overall, this period heralded a new “divisive sexual politics” that effectively split the working class into warring factions and destroyed its sense of unified purpose.
– during same period, we see the institution of publicly-managed, tax-financed brothels in every town and village in Italy and France in numbers far higher than those of even the 19th century (institutionalizing sexual differences; institutionalizing the male worker’s use of the female body as commodity for purchase; creating a link between one of the only waged jobs available to women and the colonization of her body by men)
– same period: The State also passes new laws FORBIDDING VAGRANCY, setting limits to the cost of labor, and encouraging workers to reproduce
– the urban bourgeois–the artisans and merchants who lived in the cities–who in the past had considered themselves on the side of the peasantry–now start voluntarily submitting to the rule of the prince (because they start feeling threatened by peasant uprisings, which are increasingly directed at them as traitors hoarding food) which Federici says is “the first step on the road to the absolute state.”
So, ultimately, the working class threat to feudal power failed, ultimately, because all power sources–church, nob ility, and bourgeoisie–moved against them united (this reminds me of what Harvey says about how the Business Class has learned to “act as a class,” while the working class–the entire rest of us–has not).
THE WITCH
…the power-difference between women and men and the concealment of women’s unpaid-labor under the cover of natural inferiority, have enabled capitalism to immensely expand the ‘unpaid part of the working day,’ and use the (male) wage to accumulate women’s labor; in many cases, they have also served to deflect class antagonism into an antagonism between men and women. Thus, primitive accumulation has been above all an accumulation of differences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves.
I am skipping SO MUCH INTERESTING STUFF like her whole chapter on the mind/body split and how fucked up Descartes and Hobbes are, but I’m sure you are thinking, but wait, I thought this was a book about witch hunts. So okay!
Basically what happened was a 3-century-long “campaign of terror” directed specifically (and intentionally) at women, as a means of brutally instituting a new social order and destroying the communal unity of the working class, as men became afraid of women, as children turned in their mothers, as husbands betrayed wives.
In the medieval world, of course witchcraft and magic are huge and a real part of life. You go to see a sorcerer, a witch, a “cunning man” or a “cunning woman” for basically all your problems, from love potions to cancer treatments (not that there was much cancer back then, lol capitalist pollution of our environment). Keith Thomas (I did get back around to him!) talks about how for the medieval population, there was no real difference between PRIESTS and WITCHES. All of them were seen as harnessing the occult invisible powers of the world that were just obviously and unproblematically present. They had an animistic conception of the world, of nature as this swirl of supernatural forces you could neither explain “rationally” (whatever that meant–they didn’t even have that concept yet) nor control. Magic was just a normal thing, like using a fishing pole to catch a fish. You could use magic to grab some of the power of nature.
Thus, during the previous 1,000 years before capitalism or whatever, “witchcraft” wasn’t a crime really. It only became a crime if you used it FOR HARM. And even so, there are hardly any witch trials from before the 15th century. ALSO, “witch” was GENDER NEUTRAL. Men were witches too. It’s not until the 15th century that “witch” becomes synonymous with “woman.” Previously, it had been more synonymous with “healer.”
Keith Thomas talks about the church’s growing efforts to stamp out magical beliefs, because they were seen as competition. He documents all the ways the populace refused to see a distinction between the church and the occult. They’d go see a witch and then go to mass the next day. They’d steal holy water and feed it to a sick horse. God and Jesus were just two more occult mysteries you could appeal to for help, etc. And priests were in a weird bind, because they WANTED people to believe in THEIR MAGIC, so it was hard to counter “magic” generally as mere superstition. “Well yes of course there are invisible magical powers at work in the universe and yes of course some people can harness those powers but only THESE types of people and NOT these other types,” to which the medieval peasant responded with “…?”
In the 15th century Federici says we see a SWIFT CHANGE:
– the first witch trials
– the first description of The Sabbath (a horrible witches feast where all these awful old evil women would get together and eat white bread and mutton and children (remember, this was a time when the defining feature of poverty was starvation))
– the conception of “witchcraft” changed from harnessing invisible natural powers to MAKING A PACT WITH A SINGULAR, MALE, SATAN
– “sorcery” gets declared “the highest crime against God”
– 1435-1486 sees the publication of TWENTY EIGHT treatises on witchcraft, many of them written by our great heroes of rational science–indeed, she points out that tons of the men of science until the 18th century are totally on board with prosecuting and killing witches. Hobbes in particular said that he didn’t believe in witchcraft but still thought witches should be burned to death as an example against superstition. COOL
– by the mid 16th century the witch trials have turned into a full on WITCH HUNT, where professional witch hunters are traveling around Europe helpfully letting authorities know who is a witch in the local village.
– the persecution of witches shifts from being under the purview of the Inquisition (i.e. the church) to the SECULAR COURTS
– the persecution of witches casts suspicion on all women–such that it was common for the daughters of a witch to be publicly flogged in sight of the pyre where their mother was burning alive, as a cautionary lesson about not letting their evil vaginas do the devil’s work (WTFFFFFFFFFF)
In short, the witch hunt “was not a spontaneous process.” It was not a “panic” or a “craze” or the product of “mass delusion.” And, like capitalism, it was NOT a popular movement that the authorities were forced to tolerate. It was implemented BY those in power AGAINST the working class.
Capitalism has to destroy magical beliefs because magic is uncontrollable and can’t be predicted and graphed on spreadsheets:
– magic undermines the authority of the state, as it represents a higher authority (God would also represent this were not the organized religions in collusion with the state—as we can see with the heretical sects who were like “fuck the church, I’m going to do what JESUS says” and then the church murdered all of them)
– magic gives people the belief that they can control stuff that is outside capitalism’s purview
– magic is a labor problem–in the past, people performed their labor underneath magical assumptions, like via omens and astrology. It was common to just NOT WORK on some day if you’d received a magical omen, etc.
Similarly, capitalism has to control women’s bodies:
– population is the source of labor for the capitalist class
– any population decline causes labor crisis
– babies = women’s labor
– therefore women’s bodies must be brought under state control
The witch-hunt worked toward both these objectives simultaneously. TIME-SAVER
She also has this devastating part about science. Everybody says “oh, with the rise of Real Science in the 17th century the witch hunt came to an end because people stopped being such superstitious dumbasses.” Federici is like, maybe, but what are we to make of the fact that all the great scientists were enormously preoccupied with witchcraft, such that they wrote treatises and pamphlets denouncing witchcraft and advocating for witches to be burned alive so that the magic residing in their flesh would have no time to escape, and other batshit stuff that doesn’t sound very scientific to me. Thus, Federici argues that the new Rationalism DIDN’T end the witch trials and that actually it was a major CAUSE of them. Deeper!
– Cartesian mechanistic understanding of nature replaces the old organic one: Science now explains that nature is a MACHINE (that we can use and tinker with to our fiscal advantage); previous beliefs saw Nature as a nurturing force (maternal).
– “the witch” comes to represent all that is WILD AND UNGOVERNABLE in nature, thus bad
– thus all this shit also has worked to alienate us from nature
– (so interesting to think about all this w/r/t the 19th century Romantic stuff I’m more familiar with–the way the male Romantics would write these weird poems about encountering a feminized nature and then using their powerful intellects to contain and control it; or the way they write about subsuming the love object into themselves; or the way they appropriate gestation and birth imagery to describe their own creative acts–suddenly male poets are giving birth to ideas and suckling them at the breast of their creative powers etc. This is all the shit Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a critique of—the male devaluation of women’s contributions to society at every conceivable level, such that Frankenstein’s dearest dream is to create a human life ALL BY HIMSELF)
I’m also skipping her powerful connection between women and slaves. How both women and colonized Others had to be understood as “biologically prone to evil” so that controlling them could be morally correct. Both were associated with their bodies; both had to do unpaid labor for capitalism to succeed. Federici is relentless on this point: Capitalism COULD NOT HAVE SUCCEEDED without the international slave trade and without the subjugation of women. This chapter digs heavily into racism–she points out that until the 16th century THERE WEREN’T LAWS AGAINST MISCEGENATION in the colonial world. White indentured servants and black African slaves lived together; married each other; had babies together; and engaged in popular uprisings together. The abolition of indentured servitude AND the implementation of the first race laws–under which having a mixed-race baby legally consigned that baby to ETERNAL SLAVERY regardless of the status of the parents!!!–put an end to collaboration between that working class and created racial divides that persist to this day.
ALSO, it’s all tied together in an awful knot. The same population declines that caused wages to rise in Europe (“a good thing”) generated massive expansions of the slave trade (“a bad thing”). And check this out: until the ABOLISHMENT of the importation of slaves in America, male and female slaves were treated exactly the same way (i.e. horribly). Once the slave trade was abolished, all of a sudden plantation owners became highly concerned with BREEDING THEIR WORK FORCE–just like what was happening with all the new reproductive laws over in Europe post population-decline–and they started treating female slaves slightly better in terms of feeding them and letting them rest, AND they started controlling their sexual lives–who they could have sex with, to generate the strongest work force. So this positive thing (the abolishment of the slave trade) actually leads to a whole new level of horror, under the capitalist value system.
So, it is wages that are the problem. It is capital that is the problem. It is private property that is the problem. If higher wages here mean slavery there; if monetization of labor means subjugation of massive numbers of the population; if capitalism is PREDICATED on the accumulation of natural resources that used to be held in common; then I don’t see how anything positive can come of working within the existing system, and this is why people like Thomas Friedman are such unbelievable morons. Oh, with Air BnB nobody will have to have a job anymore! SHUT THE FUCK UP THOMAS FRIEDMAN
In conclusion, this witchy imagery persists whenever there are popular uprisings. The Communards, for example, suddenly were portrayed in the newspaper as wild and crazy old women lurking around Paris with bombs, and this hysteria became so widespread that soldiers would arrest and incarcerate any old poor woman who seemed weird to them. Also I’d add that the characterization of the French Revolution by people who opposed it REGULARLY took the form of a feminized rhetoric—the fishwives’ march on Versailles, e.g., and Edmund Burke’s crazy feminine imagery in describing the crimes of the Revolution, NOT TO MENTION the way the European press depicted the revolutionaries as EATING BABIES.
I also am thinking of the siege at Waco–how 900 members of the federal government used tanks, helicopters, and hundreds of cannisters of tear gas and cyanide gas to contain the threat presented by like 100 dudes doing bible study together. Persecution of heretics!!! AND, the Branch Davidians were depicted as child molesters, and as monsters because they refused to send their children out during the negotiating process.
And so life continues to be awesome
ZOMG ok Keith Thomas was basically the god?/muse??/something of my early modern history class in grad school, and I totally have RATDOM in the other room Right Now. All the destroyings of the altars! The other one was not published yet then but yes v interested. History is the best. I need to read this again tomorrow because I will have real things to say when I am not asleep! PS you need to go to the library and get copies of Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and Juniper if this is where your brain is right now. Forget the 3rd in the series but just those 2. PPS do you have a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, pls say yes
no I don’t!!! I was just thinking I need to get one!
MAN you are the best!!! thank you for exercising my brain. i need both of these books.
I really love this post