147: Caliban and the Witch #1

"It’s not exactly 'we are the granddaughters of the witches they couldn’t burn'--it’s definitely more radical than that, albeit flawed."

*Alice in Twilight voice* It’s time! Let Silvia Federici summer commence….If you’re just joining us, friend of the Report,

Tia Glista

and I are reading Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004) together. The book is a key text in Marxist feminist scholarship and offers compelling ideas on how the advent of capitalism transformed how we think about our social relations and the body. In this dispatch, Tia and I chat about the first two chapters of the book, “All The World Needs a Jolt: Social Movements and Political Crisis in Medieval Europe” and “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women: Constructing ‘Difference’ in the ‘Transition to Capitalism.” If you’re reading along, or have read the book before, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (1798)

Akosua: [I’m] excited to chat with you about this, though a little nervous about how it’s gonna go.

Tia: I feel a little nervous too, because while there were several moments when reading that had me excited, I felt like there was a lot of information coming at me and it was sometimes hard to keep track. I also have terrible retention for Marxist terminology so there are some things I’m bound to get wrong (though I will at some point seriously sit down and get it all straight).

Ultimately, we’re not experts. I think we have that on our side. Did you end up finishing the whole book?

Just up to today. I overestimated my availability/speed. You finished?

Nope! I read up to the end of the chapter, “The Great Caliban,” which we’re actually chatting about in the next part. I’ve tried to read this book a few times and this was the first time that I felt like reading was a bit smoother/more engaging. How have you found the reading experience so far?

I think one of the big things is that whenever I read an academic book from the field of history, I always struggle with the conventional orientation toward recounting information over synthesis. In literary studies or cinema studies, we are always theorizing and analysing and making claims, but a lot of historical study is just like collecting and showing data. And that’s fine, but I love an argument and that’s often what I want to get out of the reading experience. That said, I like that Federici does seem to always zoom out on whatever information she’s given us and say “hey, this is why this matters and the effect that it had!” That helps anchor me, especially since she traverses so much ground and time—like, one thing I am maybe suspicious about is how she is covering all of Europe, and it seems to me that especially at that time there might have been some more meaningful differences between Eastern and Western Europe, as there are today, and even when she refers to Italy, I’m like, well, Italy didn’t officially exist until the Risorgimento, so what are you really referring to? Which isn’t to say I think she is being inaccurate—I don’t know anything about this period—but rather she has a lot in her net that I am interested in, but it’s all getting mixed around so it’s helpful when she has moments of reflection to sort of pin down the major ideas we should be working with.

I’m really glad that you said that. I’m no history expert—I’ve taken exactly one history class in the course of my graduate studies—but this book is interesting because at times Federici throws so many facts at us, without any attempt at weaving together a narrative and analysis feels lost. At other times, she’s so much in her narrative/analysis and I’m like, can you please show your work? How did you get to that from this? It’s not a fault per se that she collapses all her examples since ultimately I think the conclusions she makes are pretty accurate, but it does make it a little weaker if you look too close. Caliban and the Witch is a response to two books: Karl Marx’s Capital, vol.1 and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. I read Capital in a class a few years ago and I think it has made me more sensitive to her critiques of Marx. I feel like she doesn’t recognize (in the text) that whereas Marx’s model of capitalism is rooted in what he considers to be an exemplary situation (England), hers expands the area of study to focus on countries and nation-states that Marx thought had not developed a significant enough capitalist economy to build a sufficient analysis on. I think it’s important that their case studies are significantly different and I wish Federici would speak to those distinctions a bit more to really demonstrate where she diverges with Marx and where she meets him.

Ok, that’s a really interesting point! In some ways then, having a more expansive view has its affordances—she is taking into consideration gender, as well as colonization—but also certain flattenings, or breadth over depth. What aspects of her argument are working for you, or where do you feel like she has taken us so far?

I’m really drawn to her discussion of enclosures and how the enclosure of the commons didn’t just transform the economic aspects of feudal life, but also the social ones. For example, she notes that the commons “were the sites of popular festivals and other collective activities” that helped a “peasant solidarity and sociality…thrive.” With enclosure, where the open lands of the commons were essentially privatized, that social aspect and the power that it offered was lost which, she argues, significantly impacted women. Federici builds this into a meaningful discussion about the emergence of the family as a key element to capitalist production and how state-based family planning is often rooted in the capitalist desire to reproduce the working class. Thinking about the social aspects of enclosure also really resonates with her argument that “primitive accumulation”¹ was about accumulating “differences and divisions within the working class” and changing the way that people relate to one another.

That’s a really helpful and succinct way of synthesizing things, thank you for that! I think one of the big things for me is the way in which she responds to the commonly held belief that capitalism is synonymous with progress—that its necessitation of growth and expansion has benefited humanity, advanced us, and improved quality of life. Obviously we know this teleological understanding of history—where things happen in a linear, cause and effect fashion and move toward improvement or resolution—is always pretty much bogus, especially given the ways in which capitalism has engineered new forms of inequality. But I think what is really striking to me is how some of the historical facts she unearths testify to this in new ways. For instance, her revelation that women were widely employed as doctors prior to primitive accumulation—wow!? There were numerous other trades in which women were skilled and working almost to equal numbers with men, and this skilling was something lost with the sexual division of labour and isolation of the domestic sphere that transpired at the advent of capitalism. This included the loss of knowledge shared by women in the public sphere about things like birth control and sexuality, because, as you’ve laid out, there was motivation both to suppress this kind of knowledge and to privatize the home.

I think I’ve mostly just been fascinated by some of these tidbits about a history of women that I’ve never heard before, even as I’m ostensibly a feminist theorist! I think a lot about how ahistorical my students can be, in that they’ll read a text about the 1920s with a woman character who is opinionated or strongwilled or adventurous, and they’ll say “that’s so unrealistic,” as if no one had had a feminist thought until the end of the 20th-century. I can be hard on this tendency, but I’m realising through this as well that we collectively have such an impoverished sense of the past and that our perception of things developing in a linear fashion towards ‘progress’ is neither accurate nor actually useful to the pursuit of social justice, since it always axiomatically puts forward the idea that ‘now’ is better than ‘then.’

YESSSS. In the preface, Federici writes that felt that Caliban and the Witch was a necessary text in the face of what she calls “the enclosure of knowledge…the increasing loss, among the new generation, of the historical sense of our common past.” She wrote this in 2004 (?) and yet, over twenty years later, it is more relevant than ever. I think this is where Federici’s wide-ranging perspective is super important. Her global analysis of capitalism, as well as sex and gender politics, emphasizes the interdependence required for the capitalist system of production. Marx mentions imperialism and colonization,but more as an aside. But as scholars like Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery) have shown, capitalism could never have reached the heights that it had without colonization. There is no real story of capitalism without it. Caliban and the Witch’s emphasis on globalization and neoimperialism, particularly international “aid” organizations like the International Monetary Fund, is really significant.² Federici insists that we cannot properly address the violence of capitalism without thinking globally and, for me, a global vision emphasizes how any progress we make is dependent on thinking about how there is not one solution to ending capitalism—there has to be many.

Absolutely, which is especially true given the ways in which primitive accumulation catalysed the division of workers from the means of production, which in the case of globalization, is exacerbated through the reach of multinational corporations, as well as the increasing distances (literal and imagined) between labourers and consumers.

Right. Federici’s discussion of “the international division of labor” in “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women: Constructing ‘Difference’ in the ‘Transition to Capitalism’” (Chapter Two) is really compelling to me. She makes the argument that the possibility for solidarity between the enslaved in the colonies and the proletariat in Europe was thwarted by the international division of labor that framed slave labor as separate and distinct from industrial “free” labor. This was easy to do because of the distance and also the vague understanding most Europeans, particularly the proletariat, had of what went on in the colonies. However, Federici notes, as more white workers appeared in the colonies, revolution and revolt based on this solidarity caused the capitalist overlords to introduce “racial hierarchies.” She writes that “starting in the 1640s, the accumulation of an enslaved proletariat in the South American colonies and the Caribbean was accompanied by the construction of racial hierarchies, thwarting the possibility of such combinations.” This was done through the rescinding of civic rights previously given to Africans, as well as the change of slavery from a social position to a “hereditary condition.” Again, Federici is emphasizing the ways in which “primitive accumulation” and the success of the capitalist system of production was dependent on creating differences across racial and gendered lines. She gives more texture to the concept of “alienation” this way.

Maybe this is a weird segue, but this could actually be an opening to talk about the Shakespeare of it all through her recourse to The Tempest? We could start with the contention on page 11, which opens the book, where the figure of the witch, Caliban’s mother Sycorax, who is relegated to the background of the play, is brought forward by Federici as “the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dare to live alone, the obeha [sic] woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt.”

I’m thinking right away about Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’” (1990) that is working out the ways in which Miranda, the white European woman in the play, is made a ‘subject’ through her presentation as more rational and civilized than Caliban, who is incarnated as ‘lack’ next to Prospero—thus Wynter’s argument is that Miranda gets to access the category of the human or Western Man through the appearance of Caliban and the insistence on his inferiority, and so her whiteness suddenly becomes more salient than her gender in designating her ‘humanness’. Absent in this triangulation too however is Caliban’s ‘woman’, who would, for Wynter, represent an alternative model of gendered and sexualized relations and trouble the absolutes of sameness-difference that the colonial encounter staged by The Tempest articulates.

I guess it’s interesting to me how Federici sees in the potential of Sycorax an almost universal ‘woman’ rebel figure, whereas for Wynter, the category of woman has never been universal, and this is what is revealed to her by Miranda in The Tempest. Federici calls upon the figure of the witch, which is at certain moments implicitly or explicitly racialized, though not always, as a kind of alternative to the woman who is made by and in turn makes capitalism and imperialism function, and I’m curious about how this gesture works for an intersectional feminist framework, but also not quite; her reading of Maryse Conde’s I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is also curious to me because she sees in it “how Tituba and her new mistress, the puritan Samuel Parris’ young wife, gave each other support at first” amid shared sexual discrimination and oppression, but this “at first” seems quite operative, given that while the mistress first aligns herself with Tituba, she can and does align herself with the slave-owning, imperialist class in the end.

So this figure of the witch then is slippery to me because I think the solidarity it is reaching for is admirable of course, but maybe too utopian or generous, or not attentive to the kinds of complicities of white women in actively furthering colonial and economic destruction, rather than just being cogs in or victims to it. In brief then, through their readings of The Tempest, Wynter troubles the universalizing of white womanhood by feminism, or the foregrounding of gender above race, but Federici’s reach to make the racialized or indigenous figure of the witch universal seems to not be quite the right antidote either—it’s still reinscribing ‘gender’ as the more important category by ignoring internal differences and power dynamics. It’s also really curious to me that Federici would never cite Wynter, who predates her by about 14 years on this.

This is such a great insight. I agree that Federici too easily makes parallels between “white” “European” women and the racialized person that at times depends on abstracting gendered distinctions amongst the racialized. I’m curious to see how she actually develops this point when she gets into the nitty gritty of the witch-hunts, which she does later in the book.

Agree, and I will say I expected a lot less from her going into it, so I will maybe give her some small credit for trying. Like it’s not exactly “we are the granddaughters of the witches they couldn’t burn”--it’s definitely more radical than that, albeit flawed. From what you’ve read, do you think readers following along with us would benefit from brushing up on The Tempest as we head into Part 2?

Here is where I humbly admit that I have…never read The Tempest…which is really egregious considering that I study postcolonialism. So, I could probably benefit from picking it up! However, in “The Great Caliban” chapter she explains the elements of The Tempest that she is grounding her argument sufficiently enough that you can follow the argument without being too familiar with the book. In short, familiarity with The Tempest is beneficial but not necessary. Maybe for our next book club we could read The Tempest.

This is good to know and my funny story about reading The Tempest is that I was taking a graduate course in my MA where we were reading Sylvia Wynter and the week before, the professor spoke about the essay I just mentioned, and I assumed it was the one we would be reading, so I mainlined The Tempest in a day so I would feel smart and caught up. And then I read the Wynter essay which was actually “1492: A New World View” and had zero mentions of Shakespeare at all. So I’ve read it only accidentally.

I love that so much. So impressive of you to mainline a Shakespeare play that doesn’t have a Kenneth Branagh adaptation you can follow along to.

Hahahaha…. I saw his Hamlet in high school and it did not sit right with me.

Right, because Hamlet is not really supposed to be a forty-year-old man, is he?³

:P

Thank you for reading and participating! We definitely didn’t cover everything that pops up in the Introduction and the first two chapters, so please PLEASE add your thoughts, responses, etc. in the comments. We’ll be back on July 31st, this time on

No Outlet

, to discuss the rest of the book.

1. As Federici notes in an endnote of Chapter 2, "primitive accumulation" was a term first used by Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" to explain how capitalists achieved the wealth that they would then put into the production cycle to gain the surplus that would become their new wealth. Marx is critical of this term and the way that it abstracts the purposeful expropriation of land, changes in wage structure, etc. While it's often talked about as a singular moment, various Marxist scholars, including Federici, have argued that "primitive accumulation" is an ongoing process especially considering that despite the dominance of capitalism, other forms of production and exchange continue to exist.

2. In the Preface, Federici discusses what we might call modern-day enclosure in Nigeria facilitated by structural adjustment plans that require the government to privatize lands in order to receive debt relief. She also notes this in endnote 27 of chapter 2: “The ‘modernization’ defense of the enclosures has a long history, but it has received new energy from neo-liberalism. Its main advocate has been the World Bank, which has often demanded that governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania privatize communal lands as a condition for receiving loans.”

3. Branagh was 36-ish when he played Hamlet, which is not that much older than the character is supposed to be but Branagh definitely plays it in a way that feels...aged.