Women, Witchunts, and the Reproduction of the Capitalist World

This zine is an interview with author Silvia Federici who is well-known for her book “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.” The interview—which was conducted when her book was released in German in 2012—explores Federici’s work and both introduces and expands on the concepts she presents in “Caliban and the Witch.” The interview is a good introduction to her ideas and the relationship between the development of capitalism, patriarchy, the enclosure of the commons, and the witchhunts in Europe and North America.

Excerpt

I was concerned with demystifying & rejecting the assumption that capitalism was a kind of evolution out of economic structures that had developed in the middle ages, and showing that capitalism was a counterrevolution, that capitalism was the response to a whole set of social movements of struggle.... It gave me an insight into the struggle that women had been waging against feudal power...and why the development of capitalism had to start with this massive attack on women.

PDFs

Note: Zine PDFs are hosted on Archive.org, a service that does not log IP addresses.