Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

Communalist groups often embraced “free love” and sexual egalitarianism - unmarried men and women lived together, and some communes were all-women - and even the Catholic church only punished abortion with a few years’ penance.įor serfs, who tilled the land in exchange for a share of its crops, home was work, and vice versa men and women grew the potatoes together. In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Federici argues, there was an intervening revolutionary push toward communalism. And, thank goodness, we seem to know it half the young leftist women writing today are riffing on Federici’s work.įederici’s latest, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, updates and expands the core thesis of Caliban, in which she argued that “witch hunts” were a way to alienate women from the means of reproduction. Her work is essential to decoding the present moment, as capitalism and patriarchy entwine to produce increasingly grotesque offspring: predatory adoption agencies coercing women into giving up their babies the exorbitant cost of childcare causing single working mothers to go bankrupt entire industries where the opportunity to abuse women with impunity is a perk for the powerful men up top. Throughout her work, she traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work she excavates intimacy, uncovering all its toxic layers of lead paint and asbestos, until its exploitative foundations are clear.

Federici traces how capitalism affects and infects the “private,” feminine sphere of unwaged domestic and reproductive work.įederici is not just relevant but getting more so every second.

Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici