Caliban and the Witch (2004)
In Europe, at the dawn of the era in which we now live, the heretic, dreaded enemy of church and society, became a woman. So began the “era of enlightenment” and the violent expropriation of land and bodies in the mad rush of colonialism and capitalist takeoff; we all still live there. The systematic persecution of women in early modernity, as Silvia Federici makes clear, is no atavistic regression, nor any backwater anomaly, but is the bad and bloody path of the primitive accumulation of capital (privatization), together with the demeaning of the body and the production of a work force (body as machine). The Christian state-run terror-campaign known as the witch-hunt (that has not ended) enforces through violence the inflexible gender binaries that structure our regime. This book, with its world-bewildering thesis, is as profound as it is disturbing; which thesis is—if I can find the courage to say it: the subjugation of women is a defining feature of capitalist modernity itself.
