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Review

Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch is one of those rare books that, once absorbed, permanently reorganizes the furniture of your mind. Published in 2004 but gestating across three decades of militant feminist organizing, the book makes a claim so sweeping it risks sounding hyperbolic: that the European witch-hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a bizarre medieval hangover but a constitutive moment of capitalist development, as structurally necessary as the enclosure of common lands or the Atlantic slave trade. The tens of thousands of women burned, hanged, and tortured were not victims of superstition run amok but targets of a calculated terror campaign designed to break resistance to the new discipline of wage labor by seizing control of the one "means of production" every human society depends on — the female body and its reproductive capacities. Federici's argument, developed with fierce erudition across two hundred pages of densely documented history, does not merely add women to the story of primitive accumulation; it demonstrates that the story makes no sense without them.

The book's intellectual ambitions are explicitly stated in its architecture. Federici opens by situating herself within the Italian feminist tradition of the 1970s — the Wages for Housework movement of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, the reproductive-labor analysis of Leopoldina Fortunati — and then pivots to a direct confrontation with Marx. The Introduction's opening salvo is characteristic in its bluntness: "I should add that Marx could never have presumed that capitalism paves the way to human liberation had he looked at its history from the viewpoint of women." This is not rhetorical posturing; it is a methodological declaration. Federici is not "applying" Marxism to gender or "supplementing" historical materialism with feminist insights. She is arguing that the Marxian account of how capitalism came into the world — the expropriation of the peasantry from the land, the bloody legislation that forced the dispossessed into wage labor, the creation of a "free" proletariat — is structurally incomplete because it treats the reproduction of labor power as a natural given rather than as a site of violent social struggle. What capitalism had to do to women's bodies is not a footnote to primitive accumulation; it is primitive accumulation's other half.

This thesis opens onto a historical narrative of extraordinary sweep. Chapter 1 traces the medieval world that capitalism destroyed, and it is here that Federici's gifts as a synthesizer of social history shine. Drawing on the Marxist medievalists — Rodney Hilton, Maurice Dobb, and the wider tradition of English social history — she reconstructs a feudal Europe in crisis after the Black Death, when labor scarcity briefly empowered peasants and women to extract unprecedented concessions. The commons, she insists, were not merely an economic resource but the material basis of a distinct form of social life, one in which women enjoyed relative autonomy precisely because production and reproduction were not yet spatially separated. The heretic movements that convulsed medieval Christendom — Cathars, Waldenses, the Beguines — gave women unprecedented religious authority, and the millenarian revolts that climaxed in the German Peasant War of 1525 represented a genuine alternative path out of feudalism. Federici's evocative opening thesis captures the stakes: "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." This is history written from the standpoint of the defeated, and it gives the book its characteristic emotional charge — a grief for lost possibilities that never tips into nostalgia.

Having established what was lost, Chapter 2 details the mechanisms by which women were subordinated within the emerging capitalist order. The argument is dense and multi-layered. The enclosure of common lands separated production from reproduction, forcing men into waged work while leaving women responsible for the unwaged labor of child-rearing, cooking, and care. The Price Revolution of the sixteenth century was not the work of an invisible hand but "a deliberate state policy" that collapsed real wages and pauperized the peasantry. The new poor laws criminalized the dispossessed while the craft guilds systematically expelled women from skilled trades. Out of this convergence Federici coins the book's most influential concept: "the patriarchy of the wage." By excluding women from monetary compensation, capitalism gave working-class men a power over women structurally analogous to the property-power capital exercised over workers. Proletarian women became, in effect, a substitute for the lost commons — a natural resource men could appropriate. The formulation is deliberately provocative, and Federici does not flinch from its implications: gender, she argues, is "a specification of class relations," not a transhistorical cultural structure that capitalism inherited and adapted. This is the core of her break with radical feminism, which she faults in the Preface for explaining women's subordination through "transhistorical cultural structures, presumably operating independently of relations of production and class." Patriarchy under capitalism, she insists, is a new thing — more systematic, more legally enforced, and more intimately tied to the extraction of surplus value than any previous form of male dominance.

The book's bravura middle section — Chapter 3, "The Great Caliban" — makes an argument original enough that it deserves to be quoted at length: "We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism." Federici reads Descartes' mind/body dualism and Hobbes' mechanical account of the body politic as the conceptual counterpart of the enclosures — a philosophical program for turning the human body into a predictable, controllable instrument of labor, stripped of magic, passion, and autonomous desire. The attack on popular magic, prophecy, and folk healing was not a byproduct of scientific progress but its precondition; before the body could be made to work regularly, its older knowledges had to be delegitimated and destroyed. This reading of early modern philosophy as an apparatus of capitalist discipline is not unprecedented — Foucault's shadow falls heavily over these pages — but Federici's insistence that the campaign against magic was inseparable from the campaign against women gives it a specificity Foucault never achieved. He omitted the witch-hunt from his history of the disciplined body, she charges, and by doing so rendered invisible the gendered character of the transition. The body that Descartes and Hobbes theorized as a machine was, first and foremost, a female body — a body that had to be seized from women themselves and subordinated to the demands of population and production.

Chapter 4 moves from theory to terror. Federici's treatment of the European witch-hunt is the argumentative center of the book, and it marshals an extraordinary range of evidence: inquisitorial trial transcripts, demonological treatises, manorial court records, and the visual testimony of Dürer, Baldung, and Bruegel. Her central analogy has become justly famous: "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. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women's bodies than were ever erected by the fencing off of the commons." The timing, geography, and target selection of the persecution all support this reading. The hunt's peak (1580–1630) coincided precisely with the Price Revolution, the acceleration of enclosures, and the wave of "bloody laws" against vagabondage. Trials clustered in regions where land had been privatized — as in Essex, where Alan Macfarlane first proposed and then abandoned the enclosure hypothesis — and were virtually absent where collective tenure persisted, such as Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. The victims were overwhelmingly poor peasant women, and the charges against them centered relentlessly on reproductive crimes: infanticide, contraception, the causing of sterility and miscarriage. Federici quotes the Malleus Maleficarum's chilling catalog of female sexual "crimes" — "by obstructing their generative force; by removing the member accommodated to that act; by procuring abortion; by offering children to the devil" — and shows how each maps directly onto the capacities capitalism needed to control.

The witch-hunt, Federici argues, was also a deliberate strategy of class fragmentation. Jean Bodin, the French political theorist and demonologist, supplied the operational doctrine: "spread terror among some by punishing many." The trials functioned as public theater — forced denunciations, torture, mandatory-attendance executions — that manufactured what Federici calls a "mass psychosis" through "multi-media propaganda," from printed pamphlets to Hans Baldung's pornographic engravings of female covens. And they worked: they turned neighbor against neighbor, husband against wife, instigating expropriated men to blame the "castrating witch" rather than their dispossessors. The near-total absence of organized male resistance to the persecution is, for Federici, the strongest evidence of its success. The Basque fishermen of St.-Jean-de-Luz, who in 1609 collectively intervened to halt Pierre Lancre's mass burnings, are "the sole recorded exception" — a datum so anomalous it proves the rule. The hunt's conclusion, she insists in a pointed challenge to Enlightenment self-congratulation, had nothing to do with the triumph of scientific reason. Judges like Newton accepted the reality of witchcraft long after they stopped prosecuting it. The persecution ended because capital had consolidated the social discipline it needed; once the ruling class felt secure, and once the flames began to menace the powerful themselves, the machinery was quietly wound down. "Once the subversive potential of witchcraft was destroyed," Federici writes, "the practice of magic could even be allowed to continue... But now the authorities were no longer interested in prosecuting these practices, being inclined, instead, to view witchcraft as a product of ignorance or a disorder of the imagination." The cynicism of this reading is bracing, and it draws a direct line from the stake to the workhouse and the factory floor.

Chapter 5 extends the argument across the Atlantic, and it is here that Federici's ambition is most fully realized — and most vulnerable to critique. She argues that the European witch-hunt, the genocide of indigenous Americans, and the African slave trade formed a single integrated logic. The charge of devil-worship functioned as "a license to kill" in the New World just as it had in the Old; the Franciscan Diego de Landa's 1562 anti-idolatry campaign in the Yucatan, which tortured over 4,500 people and systematically destroyed Maya religion, reproduced the techniques of the Inquisition while targeting indigenous women as the primary resisters — the staunchest defenders of the huacas, the communal religious sites that anchored Andean social reproduction. The Taki Onqoy movement of the 1560s, an Andean millenarian revival preaching pan-indigenous unity against the Spanish, had women as its backbone, and when colonial authorities crushed it, 28 of the 32 convicted in the 1660 Huarochiri campaign were women. Federici reads these campaigns not as religious persecution in a narrow sense but as a "strategy of enclosure" — the violent privatization not just of land but of bodies, beliefs, and social relations. The parallel extends to the plantation system, which she describes as prefiguring the factory and establishing the template for capitalist labor management and the international division of labor. Slavery and the wage were not opposed but integrated: the metropolitan wage "realized the value" of slave-produced sugar, cotton, and tobacco.

The book closes by turning to Shakespeare's The Tempest, the source of its title, and proposing a provocative substitution. The Cuban writer Roberto Fernandez Retamar famously claimed Caliban as the symbol of Latin American revolutionary consciousness — the colonized subject who learns the master's language and uses it to curse him. Federici does not dismiss this reading but displaces it. Caliban, she notes, can only speak Prospero's tongue; his very rebellion is framed within the colonizer's terms. The true figure of resistance, she argues, is Sycorax — Caliban's mother, the Algerian witch who is dead before the play begins, who appears only through Prospero's defamation, and who embodies the pre-colonial ties to "land, water, trees, and communal life" that the witch-hunt and colonization together attempted to annihilate. The move is characteristically Federician: it recovers a figure rendered invisible by the archive, it insists on the priority of female resistance to colonization, and it aligns the book's political hopes with the knowledge that Sycorax's world — like the world of the medieval commons — was destroyed. The gesture is elegiac and defiant at once.

Caliban and the Witch occupies a distinctive position within the feminist, Marxist, and decolonial traditions that the library's canonical map identifies as its intellectual homes. It belongs to the materialist feminism that emerged from the Italian operaismo of the 1970s — a tradition that insists on analyzing reproductive labor not as a cultural role but as a form of value-producing work integral to capitalist accumulation. It extends the anti-imperialist historiography that Eric Williams inaugurated with Capitalism and Slavery, demonstrating that the exploitation of enslaved labor in the colonies was not external to European capitalism but constitutive of it. And it participates in the critical-theoretical project of reading early modern philosophy — Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon — not as the birth of disinterested reason but as an ideological apparatus for the disciplining of bodies and the delegitimation of subaltern knowledges. Maria Mies's Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra are the book's closest kin; together they form a counter-canon that reads the rise of capitalism from the perspective of those it expropriated, enslaved, and burned.

The book is not, however, without significant weaknesses, and Federici's intellectual honesty in acknowledging the contested status of her claims does not fully inoculate her against the most serious objections. The Parinetto "boomerang" thesis — the claim that colonial violence in the Americas intensified and shaped the European witch-hunt — is presented as established fact when it remains, by Federici's own admission, a speculative hypothesis among historians. The global generalization from European cases to contemporary Africa and India is analytically suggestive but empirically thin; Federici treats the structural adjustment programs of the IMF and World Bank as a "new round of primitive accumulation" with such confidence that the reader occasionally wonders whether analogy has hardened into identity. And the insistence that all patriarchal relations under capitalism are "specifications of class relations" can flatten the very historical texture Federici otherwise treats with such care. The medieval counter-revolution she documents did not create misogyny; it weaponized and transformed something much older, and the book's polemical register sometimes occludes the autonomy — and the longue-durée persistence — of the sexual order it anatomizes.

Yet these are the tensions of a book that refuses to play it safe. Federici's willingness to push her arguments beyond where the evidence can securely follow is inseparable from her project's ambitions. She is not writing dispassionate social history; she is engaged in what the book itself calls "saving the historical memory" of resistance, constructing a usable past for movements that need to know that the commons were once real, that women once controlled the means of reproduction, that the world capitalism built was not inevitable but was fought for — and can be fought again. The contemporary witch-hunts the book documents in South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon, and Brazil are not mere footnotes to a completed history; they are evidence, Federici argues, that primitive accumulation is an ongoing process, re-launched whenever capital faces crisis. Whether one accepts this framing or finds it reductive, the book's analytical power is undeniable. It permanently disables any account of modernity that treats the witch-hunt as an embarrassing anomaly and any Marxism that treats reproduction as a "fact of nature" rather than a contested terrain of labor, discipline, and resistance.

The book is for anyone who needs to understand that capitalism was not born from the peaceful expansion of trade or the gradual refinement of productive techniques but from a counter-revolution — a centuries-long campaign of terror, enclosure, and discipline that broke the power of the commons, seized control of the female body, and burned alive those who refused to submit. It will infuriate readers committed to the Enlightenment narrative of progress, to the Marxian narrative of capitalism as a necessary stage in human liberation, or to any feminism that treats patriarchy as a transhistorical constant rather than a structure capitalism remade for its own purposes. It will energize readers who recognize, in the contemporary "feminization of poverty" and the assault on reproductive rights, the familiar lineaments of an old war. The book's most haunting line is also its most political: "Saving the historical memory" of those who resisted — the Beguines, the Diggers, the Andean women of Taki Onqoy, the Basque fishermen who faced down the inquisitor Pierre Lancre — is not an academic exercise. It is a precondition for imagining that another world was possible, and might yet be.

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

Primitive accumulation, then, 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.

Federici's thesis statement in Chapter 2, redefining Marx's concept of primitive accumulation to include the construction of social hierarchies — class-and-inequality, gender, capitalism

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. Thus, the importance which the body in all its aspects — maternity, childbirth, sexuality — has acquired in feminist theory and women's history has not been misplaced.

From the Introduction, arguing that the body has been for women what the factory has been for male waged workers — gender, state-power, labor-and-unions

By rooting the exploitation of women in capitalist society in the sexual division of labor and women's unpaid work, Dalla Costa and James showed the possibility of transcending the dichotomy between patriarchy and class, and gave patriarchy a specific historical content.

Federici credits Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James with the theoretical breakthrough that inspired her research — feminism, class-and-inequality, labor-and-unions

What this meant for the European proletariat was not only the achievement of a standard of living that remained unparalleled until the 19th century, but the demise of serfdom. By the end of the 14th century land bondage had practically disappeared.

Describing the aftermath of the Black Death, when labor scarcity gave workers unprecedented power — labor-and-unions, class-and-inequality

Nothing will go well in England... as long as there will be gentlemen and villeins.

John Ball's words during the English Peasant Rising of 1381, illustrating the egalitarian aspirations of the medieval proletariat — class-and-inequality, revolution

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. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women's bodies than were ever erected by the fencing off of the commons.

Chapter 4, drawing the parallel between land enclosure and the enclosure of women's bodies through the witch-hunt — gender, capitalism, state-power

Women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.

Federici's argument that proletarian women replaced the lost commons as a 'natural resource' available to all men — gender, capitalism, land-and-enclosure

The witch-hunt was also the first persecution in Europe that made use of a multi-media propaganda to generate a mass psychosis among the population.

Chapter 4, noting the role of the printing press and artists like Hans Baldung in spreading witch-hunting ideology — propaganda, media-and-journalism, state-power

Magic kills industry.

Francis Bacon's complaint, cited by Federici to demonstrate why the capitalist class had to destroy magical worldviews — capitalism, labor-and-unions, epistemology

So far are procreation and population changes from being automatic or 'natural' that, in all phases of capitalist development, the state has had to resort to regulation and coercion to expand or reduce the work-force.

Federici's critique of Marx's treatment of population growth as a natural process rather than a politically contested terrain — state-power, gender, capitalism

We cannot, therefore, identify capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the worker, female or male, as many Marxists (among others) have done, or see the advent of capitalism as a moment of historical progress.

Federici's direct challenge to the progressive narrative of capitalist development found in orthodox Marxism — capitalism, class-and-inequality, feminism

The heart (is) but a spring... and the joints so many wheels.

Hobbes's words from Leviathan, cited by Federici as exemplifying the bourgeois reduction of the body to a work-machine — philosophy, capitalism, labor-and-unions

I told him it was not honorable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, 'Thou has no sense. You French people love only your children; but we love all the children of our tribe.' I began to laugh seeing that he philosophized in horse and mule fashion.

Jesuit Father Le Jeune's exchange with a Montagnais-Naskapi man, illustrating the colonial imposition of patriarchal family structures — colonialism, gender, family

The witch-hunt condemned female sexuality as the source of every evil, but it was also the main vehicle for a broad restructuring of sexual life that, conforming with the new capitalist work-discipline, criminalized any sexual activity that threatened procreation, the transmission of property within the family, or took time and energies away from work.

Chapter 4's summary of how the witch-hunt served as a mechanism for the capitalist rationalization of sexuality — gender, capitalism, sexuality

A return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times.

From the Introduction, arguing against Marx's assumption that capitalist violence would recede as the system matured — capitalism, trade-and-globalization, gender

Witch-hunting in America was a deliberate strategy used by the authorities to instill terror, destroy collective resistance, silence entire communities, and turn their members against each other. It was also a strategy of enclosure which, depending on the context, could be enclosure of land, bodies or social relations.

Chapter 5, arguing that colonial witch-hunting served the same structural function as European enclosures — colonialism, state-power, gender

The separation of production from reproduction created a class of proletarian women who were as dispossessed as men but, unlike their male relatives, in a society that was becoming increasingly monetarized, had almost no access to wages, thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers.

Chapter 2, describing how the devaluation of reproductive labor created a distinctly feminized form of poverty — gender, poverty, capitalism

While indigenous men often fled the oppression of the mita and tribute by abandoning their communities and going to work as yaconas in the merging haciendas, women fled to the punas, inaccessible and very distant from the reducciones of their native communities.

Irene Silverblatt quoted in Chapter 5, describing how Andean women became the primary preservers of indigenous religion and anti-colonial resistance — colonialism, gender, resistance

The power-difference between women and men and the concealment of women's unpaid-labor under the cover of natural inferiority, have enabled capitalism to immensely expand the 'unpaid part of the working day,' and use the (male) wage to accumulate women's labor.

Chapter 2, explaining the mechanism of the 'patriarchy of the wage' — gender, capitalism, labor-and-unions

The definition of women as demonic beings, and the atrocious and humiliating practices to which so many of them were subjected left indelible marks in the collective female psyche and in women's sense of possibilities.

Chapter 2, assessing the witch-hunt's lasting psychological impact as equivalent to Engels's 'world historic defeat of the female sex' — gender, state-power, trauma

Like the land, the body had to be cultivated and first of all broken up, so that it could relinquish its hidden treasures. For while the body is the condition of the existence of labor-power, it is also its limit, as the main element of resistance to its expenditure.

Chapter 3, describing how the same logic that turned land into capital also operated on the human body — capitalism, labor-and-unions, philosophy