Caliban and the Witch

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Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principal of modern social organization.

In the neoliberal era of postmodernism, the proletariat is whited-out from the pages of history. Silvia Federici recovers its historical substance by telling its story starting at the beginning, with the throes of its birth. This is a book of remembrance, of a trauma burned into the body of women, which left a scare on humanitys memory as deep and painful as those caused by famine, slaughter and enslavement.

Federici shows that the birth of the proletariat required a war against women, inaugurating a new sexual pact and as new patriarchal era: the patriarchy of the wage. Firmly rooted in the history of the persecution of the witches and the disciplining of the body, her arguments explain why the subjugation of women was as crucial for the formation of the world proletariat as the enclosures of the land, the conquest and colonization of the new world, and the slave trade.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972 she was one of the co-founders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for Wages For Housework (WFH). In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti-death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, womens history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.