Enclosure & The Body: An Interview with Silvia Federici
This interview, in its original form, was published in my book We Live in the Orbit of Beings Greater Than Us through Gods&Radicals Press, which features segments of close to thirty interviews that originally aired on my podcast Last Born in the Wilderness, interlaced with commentary.
“Out of the witch hunts comes a whole new disciplinary regime that becomes the norm for women in capitalism.”
I’ve mentioned Silvia Federici’s work and perspective, in particular her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, numerous times in my podcast throughout the various interviews I conducted.
Her work has been deeply influential in furthering my understanding of how we have arrived at this point of converging crises in all realms. Silvia’s astounding work has provided a crucial analysis of the various historical processes and material conditions that have led us to our ecological crises, our political crises, and our crises of the self—our alienation from our bodies and from the land.
We often lack the necessary historical context to understand that these crises didn’t come about because human beings are naturally brutish and warlike, or that it was inevitable that we were going to despoil the entire planet in the name of economic growth.
For a long while I had this misanthropic perspective, that human beings themselves were the problem, a virus or disease on the body of the earth. But coming across Silvia’s expansive work and research into the witch hunts, colonization, the enclosure of the commons, and learning how these processes led to the violent birth of the global capitalist social order, I realized there were specific historical paths we took to get where we are now.
Silvia explains what function the witch hunts served in Europe during the medieval era, far beyond the superficial understandings we often have of it. This phenomenon in which primarily women—mostly poor women—were targeted, tortured, and publicly executed paved the way for the rise of the world-eating socioeconomic order. During the witch hunts, tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, of women were killed, and this event is rarely given the attention it really deserves.
Silvia, being an autonomous Marxist feminist, recognizes the value of digging into this history, examining how it ties into other trends that were happening simultaneously. We need to understand that it started with women, and that capitalism emerged from the subjugation of women and their central role in community and radical resistance to the feudal order that preceded the birth of capitalism.
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: What you’re explaining is that the wealthy—those that had the power in this feudal society—were seeing their power could very easily be taken away from them by the organization of large groups of peasants. Those peasants were willing to wage war against them in order to reclaim their freedoms and their liberty, and they understood very well what that meant.
Something that you go into in this book is how this affected women and women’s role in those societies. This transition was not an evolution, because like you state, it wasn’t like a natural evolution that capitalism evolved out of feudalism. It was a very calculated and thought out; the intention was to move in this direction, to put the power back in the hands of the lords, the people in charge of the land, in charge of the economic system. What happened to women in this process?
SILVIA FEDERICI: One connection that I’ve made is that capitalism is a system of power, it is a system that affects every form of life. So one of the things that I’ve been trying to look into, particularly in mind of what happens to women in capitalist society, is to understand: well, what’s the difference?
This previous system, the organization of material lives in feudalism, what was the position of women there? Certainly the position of women was not one of equality with men, but I found that the level of inequality in the servant, peasant class between women and men was much less pronounced than it is in capitalism.
A person that serves in the peasantry was referred to within the feudal system as bondsmen and bondswomen. The ultimate authority on the family, on marriage, and basically family life was in the hands of the landlords, the feudal lords. So you have less the kind of indirect rule over women than you have in capitalism. In capitalism there’s a very clear delegation of power that serves capitalism: you have the state and capital delegating power to men, power to the wage worker over the unwaged housewife.
In feudalism, you have a situation where both women and men have access to land, have access to means of reproduction, but where power relations, for example marriage, are very much in the hands of the lords. A landlord could oblige a woman who wished to remain a widow to marry again. So the difference in power between men and women was much more limited. And the fact that women did have access to land meant the women could participate in their own production.
In feudal society, the separation between production and reproduction is almost nonexistent. This separation comes into being in capitalism, where you have production for the market, production for the consumption of the family, for the consumption of the worker, and for the reproduction of the worker. It’s only in capitalism that you begin to have this separation of two spheres of life. And as we know, reproductive work almost disappears as work.
In the feudal system you don’t have this. In agricultural work, the family produced and cultivated on the plots of land that were allocated to them. When the community cultivated the land, there was production and reproduction at the same time. You do have a certain amount of produce that is sold on local markets, of course. But people are selling the excess, wherever they have excess, and often it is bartered. Nobody in that kind of society depends on money for their survival; in fact, money is much more limited, very limited: even the wages paid are limited in nature.
You begin to have a separation between production and reproduction at the moment when workers do not any longer have any access to the means to reproduce themselves. When they’ve lost their land, they depend on wages: whether they’re working for wages or not, everybody depends on money for the ability to reproduce themselves. That’s when you begin to have these two different spheres, production and reproduction. In the feudal period, you don’t have the separation between man being the wage earner and producer, the one who gets the wage, and the women depending on them for their sustenance because they don’t have access to it. You don’t have that. Everybody’s working with the land.
I’ve also shown that there is a strong presence of women in the social movements, and particularly the so-called heretic movements, which appear to us as religious movements because they used a religious language. Actually, these were social movements. They were movements for social justice, because they were protesting against inequality. They were protesting the exploitation by the church. The church basically tried to use its power to make money selling baptisms, selling indulgences, and basically using all the religious liturgies, services, as a way of making money.
So the heretic movements were in a way an “another world is possible” movement. They would say: “Christ was poor.” Christ did not have property, why should the church have property? Women were very central to this movement. And in the heretic movement, women were also allowed to participate, to administer the sacraments.
The third point is that the idea of the witch begins to develop out of the last phase of the struggle of the church against heretic movements. The idea of the witch begins to be forged in a religious environment. The witch hunts actually take place much later, when they become a mass phenomenon: mass persecution. It’s in a much later period, and it’s organized not by the religious authorities or the clergy, but mostly by magistrates, by the local political authorities.
I’m trying to show that there is very much an agenda here. It is very important to understand why in this period, particularly in the fifteenth century, around 1400, 1450, you begin to hear about witches. You hear about witches and people begin to write treatises on witchcraft. At first, it’s a very small phenomenon, then much later it becomes something much bigger, becomes a large persecution. This is the kind of context that I have tried to reconstruct, to understand, to have a much fuller idea of. What were the forces? What was the terrain in which capitalism took off?
PATRICK FARNSWORTH: So the witch hunts are a very dramatic phase, and it loses this dimension when it’s talked about in history textbooks—it loses its historical context. Also, the transition to capitalism is not discussed as the reason why the witch hunts occurred in the first place.
The people that were trying to capture these women accused of being witches, labeling a woman as a witch and then executing her publicly: what was the purpose of that? And what were the implications of the witch hunts on women and on the development of capitalism?
SILVIA FEDERICI: It’s like when you look at a landscape, and the farther up you go, the more you’ll get a comprehensive view. The moment you zero in or zoom in all you see is a street. But when you see the street in the context of everything else, you’ll have a much better view. I’m using this for the witch hunts, because it’s very easy to get lost in them, lost in particular accusations or in a particular sense of persecution. But then when you look at it as a whole, then you get it.
“As a whole” means both in time—over the period of two-and-a-half centuries in which these were particularly massive—and looking at all the countries involved. When you put it into history and what else was taking place at the same time (the conquest of America, the beginning of the slave trade, the expropriation of the peasantry, the beginning of a capitalist system), then it begins to speak to you in a different way.
I’ve been trying to stress that in every place across Europe, it begins with governments passing laws—a new crime: witchcraft—and new regulations, new acts of government. This is very important, because it is from above that people are told “watch out.” It’s not something that is coming from below.
There’s more that happened than what has gone into Caliban and the Witch: for example, one thing that I could have put into the book is that a poor person in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, going to a magistrate to accuse a woman, would not be necessarily listened to. Who is being listened to, whose accusations are heard and whose are not heard already tells us the class nature of the witch hunts. Also striking is the difference in class between the so-called witches and the accusers. There’s a class difference: those who are accusing them are usually the people of power in the community, people who have property. It’s a persecution of a very clear class character.
And there are different groups of women: there are differing groups of women who are vulnerable to the accusation. It’s not one group only, but there are common denominators. They are generally the poor. They come from the lower classes, and there are certain types of accusations that are very common and often piled up: a witch is accused of all of them at the same time. So I tried in Caliban and the Witch to give a typology, and that typology of the witch is also a typology of the changes to capitalism, particularly in the sphere of reproduction and in the sphere of relations between women and men.
The witch is often the beggar, the old woman not accepting that the people refuse to support them. There’s an attack on communal mutual aid, an attack on the idea that people have a right to support themselves. And there’s a fear by the better-off about the poor, the poor that have been impoverished. Because why should there be women who don’t have anything, who have to go around the neighborhoods asking for some wine, some oil, some butter, or who are living alone in poverty?
There’s also women who are exercising healing practices. Basically they’re midwives, or they’re curing people with herbs, sometimes with charms. Certainly many women had their own gardens, and they knew the properties of plants, they knew the properties of roots and flowers, and they were the doctor. So these are women who have a certain power. Often they predicted the future. So the figure of the healer represents something in the community. And so you have an attack on popular powers.
You have an attack on mutual aid, you have an attack on popular powers. Then there’s also the woman who is supposed to be promiscuous, right? There is a whole campaign on the question of sexuality and procreation. The witch hunts are also a way for the state and capital to begin to exert a new type of control over the body of women. They controlled procreation, to make sure that procreation is productive, to make women use their sexuality in a productive way, to give birth. Also, sexuality has to be controlled: sexuality is seen as something that subverts social order. It can subvert the people’s relation to work. It can subvert the class differences. So the body of women begins to be portrayed as something that is dangerous, a place of dangers that have to be neutralized.
Out of the witch hunts comes a whole new disciplinary regime that becomes the norm for women in capitalism. There is an important difference between the image of the woman before the witch hunt in the popular literature and the image of the woman as it appears in the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century after the witch hunt. The witch hunt is a defeat on the power of women, an attack on the social power of women. And it’s also a preparation for women to take on particular tasks. She becomes the unpaid worker, she becomes the one confined to the work of reproduction, and she is portrayed as not having much reason, being weaker without reasoning power and thus needing to be controlled by men. And so the witch hunt is really the condition or the step towards the creation of the new sexual division of labor.
Silvia Federici
is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition. She is the author of numerous books, including Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, an organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign, and was involved with the Midnight Notes Collective.
Patrick Farnsworth
is a long-form interviewer, occasional writer, and host of Last Born In The Wilderness, a podcast he's produced for the better part of five years. He is the author of We Live In The Orbit Of Beings Greater Than Us, published last year through Gods & Radicals Press.