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Review

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation is one of the most consequential works of Marxist-feminist historiography written in the last half-century. Silvia Federici does not merely add women to the existing narrative of capitalism's origins — she fundamentally rewrites that narrative, arguing that the persecution of women, the disciplining of the body, and the destruction of communal social relations were not incidental to the rise of capitalism but constitutive of it.

Federici's central intervention is to expand Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation" beyond land expropriation and the formation of the wage-labor proletariat. She demonstrates that this process also required a massive campaign against women's autonomy: the destruction of their control over reproduction, the devaluation of their labor, the severing of communal bonds, and — most dramatically — the three-century witch-hunt that killed hundreds of thousands across Europe and the colonies. The witch-hunt, Federici argues, was not a medieval relic but a foundational technology of early modern state power, contemporaneous with the enclosures, the slave trade, and colonial conquest.

The book unfolds chronologically, beginning with an illuminating account of medieval peasant struggles and heretical movements where women held significant social power, participated in egalitarian religious communities, and exercised control over reproduction and healing. Federici shows how the commons — shared lands, resources, and social practices — were the material basis of women's relative autonomy. When those commons were destroyed through enclosure and privatization, women bore the heaviest cost. They could not easily become migrant laborers or soldiers; they were increasingly confined to unwaged reproductive work; and their traditional knowledge of healing and midwifery was criminalized.

The chapter on "The Great Caliban" is a brilliant meditation on how the body itself became a terrain of class struggle. Federici traces how Mechanical Philosophy — Descartes, Hobbes — provided the intellectual framework for transforming the human body into a work-machine, stripping it of the "magical" powers that pre-capitalist cultures had attributed to it. The body had to die, she writes, so that labor-power could live. This insight connects the philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century directly to the disciplinary apparatus of workhouses, vagrancy laws, and bodily punishment.

The witch-hunt chapters are the book's devastating core. Federici demonstrates that the persecution was a state-directed campaign, not a spontaneous popular panic. It was funded and organized by both Catholic and Protestant authorities, documented through bureaucratic legal machinery, and carried out with the intellectual support of figures like Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. The accused were overwhelmingly poor peasant women — cottagers, beggars, healers, midwives — whose "crimes" amounted to nothing more than class conflict at the village level: cursing a neighbor who refused charity, maintaining herbal knowledge, or failing to submit to the new patriarchal order. The sexual sadism of the persecution — the stripping, shaving, pricking, and torture of women's bodies — was programmatic, designed to establish state control over the female body as a means of reproducing the labor force.

Federici extends her analysis to the colonization of the Americas, showing how witch-hunting was exported to the New World as a tool of subjugation. The anti-idolatry campaigns against indigenous populations followed the same template: the destruction of communal spiritual practices, the criminalization of traditional knowledge, the targeting of women who maintained connections to ancestral ways of life.

If the book has a weakness, it is that its enormous scope sometimes outpaces its evidence. Federici is building a structural argument across centuries and continents, and some of the connections — between the German Peasant Wars and the witch trials that followed decades later in the same regions — remain suggestive rather than conclusive. The writing can also be dense in places, circling back to theoretical points. But these are minor complaints against a work of such ambition and moral clarity.

What makes Caliban and the Witch essential reading is not only its historical argument but its insistence on present relevance. Federici wrote this book in the shadow of structural adjustment programs in Africa, and she draws explicit parallels between the enclosures of the sixteenth century and the World Bank's campaigns against communal land tenure in the twentieth. The book reminds us that "primitive accumulation" is not a finished historical episode but a continuous process — that the mechanisms of dispossession, bodily discipline, and the devaluation of women's labor are renewed in every phase of capitalist expansion. For anyone seeking to understand why capitalism and patriarchy remain so deeply entangled, this is an indispensable text.

Reviewed 2026-03-28

Notable Quotes

The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance, as the female body has been appropriated by the state and men and forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor.

Introduction, stating the book's central analogy between the female body and the factory as sites of capitalist exploitation — body politics, women's labor, primitive accumulation

The witch-hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat.

Chapter 4, the witch-hunt chapter's thesis statement, arguing that the persecution of witches was not a relic but a foundational event of capitalist modernity — witch-hunt, capitalism, proletariat

The witch-hunt destroyed the methods that women had used to control procreation, by indicting them as diabolical devices, and institutionalized the state's control over the female body, the precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labor-power.

Chapter 4, on how the witch-hunt's targeting of midwives and contraceptive knowledge served the mercantilist state's demand for population growth — reproduction, state control, witch-hunt

Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus 'liberated' from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor.

Chapter 4, drawing the structural parallel between land enclosure and the enclosure of the female body — enclosure, body politics, primitive accumulation

Primitive accumulation was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as 'race' and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.

Chapter 2, arguing that the creation of internal divisions — especially between men and women — was as essential to capitalism as the accumulation of wealth — class division, gender, race, primitive accumulation

The stake was a means to spread terror, to break down the resistance of entire communities, to destroy an entire world of female practices, beliefs, and subjects.

Chapter 4, on the witch-hunt as a systematic campaign of terror rather than a spontaneous popular panic — state terror, witch-hunt, women's resistance

We are made in the image of God, but we are treated like beasts... Nothing will go well in England... as long as there will be gentlemen and villeins.

Chapter 1, quoting John Ball, the intellectual leader of the English Peasant Rising of 1381, whose egalitarian preaching became a rallying cry for the medieval proletariat — peasant revolt, equality, feudalism

The commons were the material foundation upon which peasant solidarity and sociality could thrive. All the festivals, games, and gatherings of the peasant community were held on the commons.

Chapter 2, on how communal land was not merely an economic resource but the basis for collective social life, especially important for women — commons, community, social reproduction

Capital comes on the face of the earth dripping blood and dirt from head to toe.

Chapter 2, quoting Marx's Capital to introduce the argument that capitalism was born not through gradual evolution but through organized violence — Marx, primitive accumulation, violence

The body had to die so that labor-power could live.

Chapter 3, on how the pre-capitalist body — animated, magical, resistant — had to be destroyed and rebuilt as a work-machine — body politics, labor discipline, mechanical philosophy

Life is but a motion of limbs.... For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.

Chapter 3, quoting Hobbes' Leviathan as the paradigmatic expression of Mechanical Philosophy's reduction of the body to a machine — Hobbes, mechanical philosophy, body

The social function of the commons was especially important for women, who, having less title to land and less social power, were more dependent on them for their subsistence, autonomy, and sociality.

Chapter 2, on why the enclosure of the commons was disproportionately devastating for women — commons, women's autonomy, enclosure

Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle — possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide.

Chapter 1, rejecting the teleological view that capitalism was a progressive evolution from feudalism, presenting it instead as a violent response to popular revolt — counter-revolution, feudalism, capitalism

The witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states, the first example, after the schism brought about by the Reformation, of a European unification.

Chapter 4, noting that Catholic and Protestant states, at war over everything else, cooperated in the persecution of witches — witch-hunt, state formation, European politics

The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism, to this very day. Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things.

Chapter 4, on why magic was incompatible with the capitalist rationalization of work and had to be eradicated — magic, disenchantment, capitalism

With the demise of the subsistence economy that had prevailed in pre-capitalist Europe, the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to an end, as these activities became the carriers of different social relations and were sexually differentiated.

Chapter 2, on how capitalism created the fundamental split between waged production and unwaged reproductive work that still defines women's economic position — production vs. reproduction, sexual division of labor, capitalism

In the feudal village no social separation existed between the production of goods and the reproduction of the work-force; all work contributed to the family's sustenance. Women worked in the fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden; their domestic activities were not devalued.

Chapter 1, on how the medieval subsistence economy, despite its hierarchies, did not devalue women's work in the way capitalism would — medieval women, subsistence economy, reproductive labor

At the core of capitalism there is not only the symbiotic relation between waged-contractual labor and enslavement but, together with it, the dialectics of accumulation and destruction of labor-power, for which women have paid the highest cost, with their bodies, their work, their lives.

Introduction, summarizing the book's argument that women's bodies have been the central terrain on which capitalist accumulation has been built — capitalism, women's bodies, accumulation

The witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline.

Chapter 4, on the dual function of the witch-hunt: to divide the working class along gender lines and to destroy pre-capitalist forms of life — gender division, witch-hunt, work discipline

The word 'gossip,' which in the Middle Ages had meant 'friend,' changed its meaning, acquiring a derogatory connotation, a further sign of the degree to which the power of women and communal ties were undermined.

Chapter 4, tracing the linguistic evidence of the destruction of female solidarity that accompanied the witch-hunt — language, female solidarity, social control

The nobles have beautiful houses, we have only work and hardships, but it is from our work that everything comes.

Chapter 1, quoting the Lollards' valorization of manual labor against the parasitism of the feudal aristocracy — labor, class consciousness, heresy

The witch-hunt, then, was a war against women; it was a concerted attempt to degrade them, demonize them, and destroy their social power. At the same time, it was in the torture chambers and on the stakes on which the witches perished that the bourgeois ideals of womanhood and domesticity were forged.

Chapter 4, on how the terror of the witch-hunt created the conditions for the new patriarchal order and the subordinate domestic role assigned to women — witch-hunt, patriarchy, domesticity

If capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat, and because of its capacity to globalize exploitation.

Introduction, arguing that capitalism's longevity depends not on satisfying human needs but on maintaining internal divisions within the working class — capitalism, inequality, global exploitation

I demand whether all wars, bloodshed and misery came not upon the creation when one man endeavoured to be a lord over another? And whether this misery shall not remove... when all the branches of mankind shall look upon the earth as one common treasury to all.

Chapter 2 epigraph, quoting Gerrard Winstanley's The New Law of Righteousness (1649), the Digger leader's vision of the earth as a shared commons — commons, equality, Diggers