Highlighting the calls for equality that, at times, even extended to radical ideas about gender relations, Federici argues that understanding these movements as political struggles is crucial to understanding that “Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle.” From there, Federici focuses the majority of the book on how reducing the social power of women served both to undermine solidarity amongst peasants and artisans and, moreover, provided the state with the control over reproductive labor necessary to capitalist production. The first chapter deals with the struggle against feudalism, from common, daily acts of resistance which made the medieval village, as Federici writes, a “theatre of daily warefare,” to the millenarian and heretic movements, phenomena which previously, had only been presented to me as specifically cultural and religious, rather than political or socio-economic, phenomena.

In danger indeed! Reading Federici’s book felt like getting the inside scoop on a thousand events, processes, and personalities I had only been taught to consider in dry, isolated details, if at all. In her preface, she recounts teaching in an interdisciplinary undergraduate program where she “confronted a different type of ‘enclosure’: the enclosure of knowledge, that is, the increasing loss, among the new generations, of the historical sense of our common past.” With Caliban and the Witch, then, Federici hoped to “revive among younger generations the memory of a long history of resistance that is in danger of being erased.” Of everything before these processes, however, I was ignorant.Īmazingly, Federici addressed this very ignorance in the opening pages of the book. As regular readers of the blog know, this book has no direction connection to my own research, and the extent of my knowledge about the lived experience of the resistance to and “transition” away from feudalism consisted merely of a basic awareness of peasant revolts and a decent understanding of enclosure in England. Unlike many a book, Caliban and the Witch had not long sat neglected on my “need to read” list – in fact I had never heard of it before a casual conversation on Facebook about feminism and capitalism resulted in an acquaintance recommending it and me purchasing it merely minutes later.

Caliban and the witch book