Histories have not only been simply histories but gendered histories, where women, as both subject-object of studies and writer-reader of such works, have been systematically pushed to the margins and silenced. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici originally written in 2004 (and published by Autonmedia), is a powerful work against the above said norm. The author methodologically brings “women” back, right at the centre of history, with a critical Feminist-Marxist lens. In her work “women” become a legitimate and specific category of analysis. She relooks at the history of the ‘transition’ of feudalism to capitalism while critiquing the classical Marxist assumptions, even as she looks at how the body was transitioned during that transition, especially the bodies of women, the rebel bodies. The book is an essential read for those who want to find the wiped-out women in history, those whose interest lies in knowing the demise of feudalism and the birth of capitalism and those who want to trace the trajectory of how capitalist development proceeded over the bodies of women to reach the present stage. It questions the widely held liberatory potentials of capitalism and objects to the unilateral history which projects the arrival of capitalism as natural and necessary. She argues that it is impossible to associate capitalism with any form of liberation or attribute the longevity of the system to its capacity to satisfy human needs.

The title of the work, Caliban and the Witch was inspired by the famous play by Shakespeare, The Tempest. Federici uses the terms metaphorically- Caliban as a symbol of the world proletariat which serves as an instrument of resistance against capitalism and Witch as the embodiment of female subjects that capitalism intends to destroy. And it proceeds by deconstructing the very meaning of primitive accumulation. She explains, as contra to what Marx (Capital vol I) held, that primitive accumulation is not something which characterised a historical process necessary for capitalism to take roots, but as a past which survives into the present; primitive accumulation is an ongoing process, though with changing forms and instruments of action. Proceeding further she deals with how this process of primitive accumulation introduced (i) a new sexual division of labour, (ii) constructed a new patriarchal order and (iii) how it mechanized the proletarian body. While doing so, she placed at the heart of her work the witch-hunts during the 16th and 17th centuries which engulfed Europe for around 200 years.

Her work revisits the ‘transition’ from the viewpoint of the struggle(s) waged against feudalism and the rise of ‘heresy’ during the middle ages, which did provide an alternative to not only feudalism but also capitalism. Bursting the myth that capitalism was the natural outcome of evolutionary developments, she argues instead that capitalism was the response, a counter-revolution, posed by the feudal lords, merchants, bishops and popes against the anti-feudal struggle(s) embedded in social conflicts, which if realised, might have saved the world from the wrath of blatant capitalism. Moreover, this ‘transition’ was a war against women as Federici put it. The control over women’s bodies and consequently reproduction was and remains the main feature of primitive accumulation. This war was waged to reproduce a mass which could be disciplined and managed like machines, to bring a new model of patriarchy to degrade and minimise women to their wombs, to confiscate all the labour power to be turned into profit, and to build a society over bourgeoisie Cartesian rationality.

Federici argues that witch-hunting has been one of the most crucial events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the world proletariat, which deepened the divide between men and women. Further, she says that the witch hunt undertook in close collaboration between the state and the church. What made the capitalist regime deeply upset was the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of magic, the very possibility of having higher individual relations with nature and contested special powers with specific individuals which could not be exploited. “Magic was an obstacle to the rationalisation of the work process”, she pressed. The claim of women as healers, sorcerers, and performers of incarnations and divinations as against the claim of the capitalist authority gave the state enough reason for the execution of such women in the name of prohibiting anti-social and demonic activities. The witches were seen as deviant women from the bourgeois ideal of womanhood. They were accused of generating uncalled erotic passions in men. A parallel was drawn between female sexuality and bestiality. Female sexuality was made to be called the source of evil. Such repression of sexuality was in the line of capitalist work discipline which criminalised any sexual activity that did not aim for procreation. Consequently, witches were identified as prostitutes. As she mentions the saying, “a prostitute when young, a witch when old”.  Thus, witch-hunting played an extremely important role in the development of the bourgeois world order and legitimised the capitalist discipline of sexuality. She concludes that the ruling class repressed the entire proletariat by repressing women.

The book connected all the dots between the rise of capitalism, the subjugation of women and consequent witch-hunting and colonialism. It documents the often erased anti-feudal peasant struggles which turned into a movement to fight the oppression, to save their lands and their way of living. Federici succinctly locates the birth of capitalism in the fall of these movements and the ordering of society, the making of the working class and the new form of patriarchy that followed. However, the analysis that she does of women is limited to their bodies and reproducing roles only. In arguing against the capitalist reduction of women to their wombs she could not go beyond it. Also, the alliance of Feminism and Marxism that she uses has her methodology can also be looked at critically as reflected in the works of Heidi Hartmann (1981) and Ann Ferguson (1991) who argues that these two thinking systems have always been in a constant tussle with each other and require frequent negotiations. Hartmann (1979) commented that the “marriage” of Marxism and Feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in the English common law; Marxism and Feminism are one and that one is Marxism. Recent attempts to integrate Marxism and Feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists as they subsume the feminist struggle into the “larger” struggle against capital. We need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce!

The concerned book was a strong work of historiography or better say genealogy in Foucaultian terms, tracing the Middle Ages from the vantage point of a woman which is often not considered a legitimate lens or used as a token only. Written smoothly, and historically grounded with no unnecessary jargon, it is easy for even a layperson to understand the complex nuances of the then times. Concepts whose content is mostly taken as pre-defined and lone standing like patriarchy, work and labour are dealt with at length. It enriches the understanding of primitive accumulation as a continuing process rather than being a thing of the past,  used time and again by organisations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) in the name of Structural Adjustment Programmes. Lastly, it gave the debates around capitalism a new direction and makes the reader rethink it from the feminist point of view.

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Anjali Chauhan is a PhD research scholar at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi.