Capital vs. the Commons: The War on Women, Land, and the World Proletariat

When the World Was Ready to Turn, Capital Came With Fire

Federici opens Caliban and the Witch with a simple but explosive demand: stop treating capitalism like it was born from progress. Stop telling the nursery tale that markets matured, trade expanded, reason advanced, and humanity naturally walked out of feudal darkness into the bright little shop window of bourgeois modernity. That story is history written by the winners, with the blood wiped off the floor. Federici begins elsewhere—with revolt, refusal, women’s bodies, peasant commons, heresy, hunger, sexuality, land, and the organized violence required to turn living people into labor-power.

Her introduction makes clear that the “transition to capitalism” is not a dusty academic question. Every revolutionary generation returns to it because the origin of capitalism reveals its structure. If the system was born through theft, terror, enclosure, misogyny, slavery, colonization, and the destruction of communal life, then exploitation is not an accident inside capitalism. It is the machine working properly. Federici writes from that necessity. She wants to rethink primitive accumulation from the standpoint of women, the body, and reproduction—not as a side room attached to Marx, but as one of the main chambers of the whole bloody house.

This is where her intervention matters most. Marx gave us primitive accumulation as the violent foundation of capitalist society, but Federici argues that his account remains too centered on the waged male worker and commodity production. She brings forward what that frame leaves underdeveloped: the creation of a new sexual division of labor, the degradation of women’s social position, the exclusion of women from waged work, and the transformation of the female body into a machine for producing workers. In her hands, the witch-hunt is not folklore. It is not superstition. It is not some embarrassing medieval hangover that modern Europe politely outgrew. It is one of the central mechanisms through which capitalism reorganized reproduction and broke women’s power.

Federici also breaks with the old progressive reading of capitalist development. Marx knew the birth of capitalism was written in “fire and blood,” but he still saw primitive accumulation as part of a historical process that created the material basis for human liberation. Federici refuses that comfort. From the standpoint of women, colonized peoples, and the dispossessed, capitalism does not appear as a necessary road to freedom. It appears as a system that repeatedly returns to its original crimes whenever accumulation requires it. Enclosure is not over. Criminalization is not over. Mass displacement is not over. Violence against women is not over. The conquistador has changed uniforms; now he arrives with development loans, police databases, IMF memoranda, border regimes, and reproductive technologies. Same appetite. Better paperwork.

Still, this is where the review must struggle with Federici as well as learn from her. She gives us the tools to see capitalism as a global system of violence, but the colonial contradiction does not always command the analysis as forcefully as it should. She names Caliban as the colonized rebel and later connects witch-hunting in Europe to conquest in the Americas, but the structure of the book still begins from Europe and moves outward. From a Weaponized Information standpoint, that must be sharpened. Capitalism was not formed in Europe and then exported to the world. Capitalism was forged through the simultaneous enclosure of European peasants, colonization of Indigenous lands, enslavement of Africans, and subordination of women’s reproductive labor. The world market was not an afterthought. It was the furnace.

Chapter 1 begins where any serious materialist history must begin: with struggle. Federici refuses the frozen picture of medieval Europe as a static world where everyone accepted their ordained place. The feudal manor was not peace with bad plumbing. It was a battlefield. Serfs resisted labor services, challenged rents and tithes, fought over access to woods and pastures, fled to towns, sabotaged work, attacked castles, and dragged their lords into endless conflict over the terms of survival. The poor were not waiting for capitalism to liberate them. They were already trying to liberate themselves.

Federici’s account of serfdom is dialectical because she does not romanticize it. Serfdom was exploitation. The lord claimed rights over the peasant’s labor, movement, marriage, inheritance, and body. But unlike the later proletarian thrown naked onto the labor market, the serf often retained access to land and commons. That access mattered. A person with land, tools, animals, forests, waters, and communal obligations has a material basis for resistance. A person separated from all means of subsistence must sell labor or starve. That is why the commons sit at the center of this history. They were not sentimental village scenery. They were the material trench line of class struggle.

Women’s position inside this world was contradictory. They lived under patriarchal relations, and Federici does not pretend otherwise. Land usually moved through male lines, Church doctrine preached female submission, and male authority remained real. But women’s labor had not yet been degraded into the capitalist form of invisible “non-work.” Women worked in fields, gardens, animal care, spinning, washing, healing, childcare, and food production. Production and reproduction had not yet been violently split into “real labor” and “natural duty.” Much of women’s work was collective, embedded in the village economy, and tied to other women. That collective life gave women a social force capitalism would later have to smash.

The heretic movements reveal how far the revolt went. Federici calls heresy the medieval proletariat’s equivalent of liberation theology, and the phrase is well chosen. These movements were not merely religious deviations. They attacked Church wealth, clerical corruption, hierarchy, private property, sexual repression, and the sanctity of obedience. They built networks across regions, offered refuge, circulated ideas, and created communities that challenged feudal authority at its ideological root. The Church understood the danger. That is why it answered with crusades, executions, and the Holy Inquisition—that holy bureaucracy of torture, that little preview of modern state security with incense.

Women were not marginal to these movements. Federici shows that women preached, baptized, traveled, organized, lived in female communities such as the Beguines, and participated in heretical networks with a degree of autonomy almost unimaginable inside official Church structures. This matters because the witch was not invented from nothing. She was assembled from the memory of real women who healed, refused, organized, spoke, moved, and lived outside the sanctioned discipline of priest, husband, landlord, and market. Before the witch was burned, she had to be politically constructed as a danger.

Federici’s discussion of sexuality is especially important. The Church’s obsession with sexual regulation was not just theological neurosis. It was social control. By turning marriage, contraception, abortion, pleasure, confession, and reproduction into matters of discipline, the Church helped create a system in which bodies could be supervised for class rule. Heresy challenged this supervision. Its alternative sexual and communal practices frightened the authorities because they pointed toward a world where reproduction did not belong to Church, lord, or state. That is why, after the Black Death, when labor became scarce and population became a ruling-class obsession, sexual nonconformity was increasingly treated as a political crime.

The Black Death then changes the whole balance of forces. With a massive portion of Europe’s population dead, labor became scarce, land became more available, and workers gained leverage. Peasants refused rents and services. Villages ignored manorial obligations. Artisans and laborers demanded higher wages. The lower classes moved with new confidence because the old threats no longer worked the same way. If a lord expelled a peasant when labor was scarce and land was available, the peasant could leave. The whip still existed, but its magic was weakening.

This is the moment Federici identifies as decisive. The oppressed were not only resisting exploitation; they were beginning to imagine and practice alternatives. Peasant revolts, urban worker uprisings, heretical communities, demands for equality, refusal of forced labor, and challenges to clerical authority all placed feudal power into crisis. The ruling classes saw the ground moving under their feet. They did not respond by accepting history’s democratic promise. They organized a counterrevolution.

That counterrevolution began to take shape through wage controls, anti-vagrancy laws, repression, state centralization, and the tightening supervision of labor. But Federici also shows something more brutal: the ruling classes used sexual politics to divide the oppressed. Municipal authorities decriminalized rape against poor women, tolerated gang rape as a pressure valve for proletarian men, and institutionalized prostitution through public brothels. This was not “sexual freedom.” It was class management through misogyny. The exploited man was offered access to the body of the exploited woman, so he might forget who owned the land, the mill, the court, and the gallows.

Here Federici gives us one of the sharpest weapons in the book: capitalism required the fragmentation of the oppressed before it could fully discipline them. The commons had to be broken. Heresy had to be crushed. Women’s autonomy had to be destroyed. Sexuality had to be policed. Workers had to be separated from land. Men had to be turned against women. The state had to rise as supervisor of labor and reproduction. Capitalism did not arrive as freedom. It arrived as organized revenge against the possibilities opened by struggle from below.

The limitation is already visible, and it must be named clearly. Federici’s first chapter gives us a powerful map of Europe’s internal class war, but the colonial contradiction remains mostly on the horizon. Yet the crisis she describes cannot be sealed inside Europe. The same ruling classes that attacked peasants, heretics, women, and vagabonds would soon move across the Atlantic, carrying the same appetite sharpened into conquest. The enclosure of the commons and the colonization of the Americas were not separate stories. They were different fronts in the same emerging world system. Europe’s rulers solved their internal crisis partly by making the world pay for it.

That is why this opening section is so valuable and why it must be pushed beyond its own limits. Federici tears down the myth of capitalist progress and shows us capitalism as counterrevolution. But Weaponized Information must drive the point deeper: the counterrevolution was not only European. It became planetary. The witch, the serf, the vagabond, the colonized Indigenous rebel, and the enslaved African were all forced into the same world-historical furnace, though not in the same position and not under the same conditions.

So the real lesson of Part I is not simply that capitalism was violent. That is too easy. The deeper lesson is that capitalism was born because the oppressed had already begun to threaten another future. The masters did not build the modern world out of genius. They built it by burying possibilities they could not tolerate. They fenced the commons, hunted the heretic, disciplined the body, violated poor women, criminalized the landless, and prepared the colonial nightmare that would soon engulf the Americas and Africa.

Capitalism did not rise from the ashes of feudalism like some phoenix of progress. It crawled out of a ruling-class panic, clutching a deed, a Bible, a whip, and a torch. Federici makes that visible. Our task is to make it impossible to unsee.

Enclosure Was the First Hunger: How Capital Built Difference Into the Working Class

Federici begins this chapter by refusing the lie that capitalism was the only possible answer to the crisis of feudalism. There were other roads open. Peasants, artisans, day laborers, heretics, and women had already produced powerful communal movements that pointed toward a world built on shared land, social equality, and cooperation. The German Peasant War, which Peter Blickle called the “revolution of the common man,” was not a tantrum of hungry villagers. It was the most developed expression of a continental struggle against feudal domination. Its defeat, with roughly one hundred thousand rebels massacred, was not the failure of a dream too beautiful for earth. It was the victory of armed reaction.

This matters because Federici is making a direct attack on the polite language of “transition.” She says the word itself is misleading. “Transition” sounds gradual, almost peaceful, like one season turning into another. But the period she is describing was not a bridge from feudal backwardness to capitalist modernity. It was an age of plunder, whip, war, enclosure, enslavement, forced labor, witch-hunting, mass poverty, and state terror. Capitalism did not inherit the future because it was more efficient. It seized the future because the ruling classes—lords, merchants, princes, bishops, financiers—organized a global offensive to defeat the revolutionary possibilities opened by anti-feudal struggle.

Federici’s central correction to Marx is sharp. Marx understood primitive accumulation as the violent separation of workers from the means of production. He named the conquest of the Americas, the enslavement of Africans, and the looting of the East Indies as “chief moments” of that process. But Federici argues that Marx did not fully theorize the transformation of reproduction, the degradation of women, and the witch-hunt as central to the making of capitalism. She does not discard Marx. She forces Marxism to look where too many Marxists preferred not to look: at the kitchen, the womb, the village healer, the midwife, the prostitute, the widow, the woman pushed out of the guild, the mother watched by the state, the female body turned into machinery for producing labor-power.

That is why her phrase “the accumulation of differences” is so important. Primitive accumulation was not only the accumulation of land, gold, silver, plantations, ships, and workers. It was the accumulation of divisions inside the working class. Gender, race, age, legality, marital status, and colonial position became weapons of class rule. Capital did not simply gather workers into one exploited mass. It divided them, ranked them, branded them, sexualized them, racialized them, and taught one section to police another. The wage became not only a payment for labor but a political instrument—a little throne from which the male worker could be made to rule over the unpaid labor of women while still crawling under the boot of capital.

Federici places this whole process inside a world system already soaked in blood. In the Americas, Indigenous peoples were consumed in the mita and other forced-labor regimes to extract silver and mercury from mines like Potosí and Huancavelica. In Africa, the slave trade began tearing human beings from their communities and converting them into captive labor for plantations. In Eastern Europe, a “second serfdom” chained peasants to the land. In Western Europe, enclosures, workhouses, whipping, branding, incarceration, and witch-hunting disciplined the poor. If one stands back from the map, the picture is clear: capitalism begins as an immense concentration camp, spread unevenly across the globe, with different fences for different peoples.

This is where Weaponized Information must press the colonial contradiction harder than Federici sometimes does. She gives us the pieces: Europe, the Americas, Africa, plantations, mines, enclosures, witch-hunts. But the revolutionary lesson is that these are not parallel crimes. They are one historical system. The ruling class answered the crisis of European feudalism by reorganizing the planet. The enclosure of the commons in England, the enslavement of Africans, the extermination of Indigenous peoples, and the disciplining of women’s reproductive labor were all part of the same counterrevolutionary solution: expand the command of capital over land, bodies, labor, and life itself.

Land privatization is where Federici drives the knife in. She refuses the modernizer’s fairy tale that enclosure made agriculture more efficient and therefore helped everybody in the long run. That argument has always been the landlord’s bedtime story. In reality, enclosure destroyed the material basis of working-class independence. The commons were not empty land waiting for improvement. They were the poor people’s pantry, pharmacy, pasture, school, meeting ground, social center, and survival system. They provided wood, water, grazing, herbs, food, gathering places, and collective decision-making. To fence the commons was to fence people out of life.

Federici is especially strong in showing what the commons meant for women. Because women generally had less formal title to land and less recognized power in the village, they depended heavily on common lands for subsistence, autonomy, and social life. The commons were where women gathered, exchanged news, shared knowledge, advised one another, and formed a viewpoint not entirely governed by husbands, priests, landlords, or market discipline. When the commons were destroyed, women lost more than access to resources. They lost a material base for solidarity. The fence cut through the village, but it also cut through the social power of women.

This is why enclosure created not only poverty but isolation. The destruction of communal land broke cooperative labor, deepened economic inequality, drove young people into vagabondage, abandoned the elderly, and left older women especially vulnerable. Federici links this directly to the witch-hunt. Many accusations arose out of quarrels over unpaid debts, requests for help, animals trespassing, small thefts, and neighborly resentments. Capitalism first destroyed the conditions of mutual aid, then criminalized the desperation that followed. A poor old woman asks for bread, is refused, curses the neighbor, and when misfortune strikes, the village calls her a witch. The landlord’s fence becomes the devil’s rumor.

Federici’s account of wage labor is equally important. In the Middle Ages, wages could sometimes appear as a path away from direct feudal obligation. But after enclosure, the wage changed meaning. Once workers had been separated from land, wages became the leash. Gerrard Winstanley understood this clearly when he argued that it made little difference whether one worked under an enemy or under one’s brother if one still worked for a wage. That is proletarian clarity. The wage without land, commons, tools, or subsistence is not freedom. It is hunger managed through money.

The Price Revolution sharpened the knife. Federici shows how rising prices and collapsing real wages devastated workers across Europe. Food prices rose far faster than wages. Meat disappeared from workers’ tables. Beer, wine, salt, and oil became scarce. Bread became the center of survival. The European working class, which had fought in the previous period for liberty and less work, now fought increasingly over hunger. This is a major historical reversal. Capitalism did not first offer abundance. It produced scarcity for the many and opportunity for the few. The rich discovered markets; the poor discovered empty stomachs.

The gendered impact was catastrophic. Women’s wages collapsed even more sharply than men’s. Federici notes that where women had once earned roughly half a man’s pay for the same task, by the mid-16th century they were earning closer to one-third of an already reduced male wage. Women could no longer reliably support themselves through wage work. This pushed many into domestic service, petty trade, begging, or prostitution. And then, with the clean moral logic of the ruling class, prostitution itself was criminalized. First capitalism strips women of land and work, then it punishes them for surviving by whatever means remain. The bourgeoisie calls this civilization because thieves always prefer elegant vocabulary.

Federici’s treatment of food riots brings the chapter down to earth. Women were often the first into the streets because they were responsible for feeding families and were hit hardest by rising prices. They besieged bakeries, stopped grain carts, attacked granaries, and accused merchants of hoarding. These were not irrational mobs. They were political actions against the emerging capitalist food regime. Women understood perfectly well that hunger was being organized. Grain was being stored, exported, speculated on, and priced beyond reach while children died. When women seized grain in their skirts, they were not stealing. They were interrupting primitive accumulation at the point of social reproduction.

The state understood this too. That is why it answered with poor laws, workhouses, anti-vagrancy statutes, censuses, surveillance, and public discipline. Federici shows that public assistance was never simply charity. It was a technology of class control. The state began to sort the poor into categories: deserving and undeserving, able-bodied and dependent, honest poor and criminal vagabond. Aid came with humiliation, badges of shame, forced labor, confinement, and surveillance. The workhouse was not born as compassion. It was born as a cage for labor.

This is one of the chapter’s most important insights: the capitalist state emerges as supervisor of reproduction. It does not merely defend property after the fact. It actively manages the production of workers. It counts births, deaths, marriages, the poor, the hungry, the wandering, the unmarried, the pregnant, the idle, the criminalized. It learns to see the population as labor-power in motion. This is where Federici’s critique of Foucault matters. “Biopower” does not float down from some mysterious cloud of modern governance. It rises from the material need to reproduce labor for accumulation.

The population crisis made this brutally clear. Colonization had produced demographic catastrophe in the Americas. Europe also experienced population decline in the 16th and 17th centuries. Markets contracted, labor became unstable, and ruling classes began to obsess over population growth. Mercantilist thinkers declared that the strength of a state lay in the number of its people. Luther praised women because they had wombs. The state began to treat reproduction as policy. Women’s bodies became public territory.

This is where Federici’s argument reaches its most devastating force. The war against women was not accidental. It was a labor policy. Contraception, abortion, and infanticide were punished with new severity. Pregnancies had to be registered. Midwives were placed under surveillance. Neighbors were turned into informants. Unmarried pregnant women were watched, isolated, and criminalized. Women were executed in large numbers for reproductive crimes. The female body, once carrying forms of knowledge transmitted through generations—herbs, pessaries, abortifacients, birthing practices—was seized by church, state, and male medicine. The womb became a workplace under state command.

Federici makes a profound comparison here between European proletarian women and enslaved African women in the plantations. The situations were not identical, and she is careful about that. European women were not sold on auction blocks in the same manner. Their children were not generally seized and sold as chattel. But in both cases the female body was forced into the production of labor-power. In both cases reproduction became accumulation. The enslaved woman reveals the truth most nakedly, but the logic also operated in Europe: women were made into breeders for capital, their autonomy broken in the name of population, labor supply, and order.

The degradation of women’s labor completed the process. Federici shows how women were pushed out of crafts, excluded from guilds, denied independent work, and redefined as “helpers” to men. Even when women produced goods for the market, their work was classified as domestic and therefore worthless. A man sewing was productive. A woman sewing was housekeeping. Here we see ideology doing the landlord’s laundry: the same labor changes value depending on whose body performs it. This was not confusion. It was theft.

Male workers were not innocent in this defeat. Federici is honest about that, and the point must be retained. Craftsmen and journeymen often fought to exclude women from workshops, fearing competition from lower-paid female labor. But this was a trap. By helping drive women from recognized work, male workers strengthened the wage hierarchy that capital used against the whole class. They gained a small patriarchal privilege and lost a world. The ruling class must have laughed into its ledgers. What better bargain than getting exploited men to help discipline unpaid women, then using that unpaid labor to cheapen the reproduction of the entire workforce?

This is what Federici calls the “patriarchy of the wage.” It is one of the strongest concepts in the chapter. The male wage became a command over women’s labor. Married women’s earnings could be legally claimed by husbands. Women working beside men in cottage industry disappeared behind the male wage. The household became a site where capital appropriated unpaid reproductive labor while pretending it had nothing to do with production. The family became a little workshop of labor-power, with the man as foreman, the woman as unpaid worker, and capital as absentee owner.

But Federici is careful not to impose the later 19th-century housewife backward onto the 16th and 17th centuries. Proletarian women still worked constantly, often outside the home, in domestic service, spinning, petty trade, field labor, wet nursing, prostitution, and market activity. The full-time housewife was not yet generalized among the working class. But the direction had been set: women’s labor was being devalued, privatized, feminized, and subordinated. The modern family was being built as a disciplinary institution, not as a natural refuge.

The ideological campaign followed the material defeat. Literature, sermons, law, theater, and popular satire produced the new woman as scold, shrew, whore, witch, gossip, and disobedient wife. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew did not fall from the sky as harmless entertainment. It belonged to an age obsessed with breaking women’s tongues, bodies, friendships, mobility, and independence. Women accused of being “scolds” were muzzled and paraded like animals. Prostitutes were whipped, caged, and subjected to mock drownings. Adulterous women faced capital punishment. The so-called Age of Reason was very reasonable indeed: first steal women’s power, then call their resistance madness.

Federici makes the colonial parallel explicit. The denigration of European women resembled the demonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In both cases, cultural degradation served expropriation. Colonized peoples were called savages to justify land theft, enslavement, and genocide. Women were called irrational, lustful, demonic, and disorderly to justify the appropriation of their labor and the criminalization of their control over reproduction. The same ideological machine produced “the savage” and “the witch.” One justified empire abroad; the other justified patriarchy at home. Both served capital.

The chapter’s colonial sections are essential because they show that primitive accumulation was global from the beginning. The slave plantation did not merely enrich Europe. It helped create the modern capitalist division of labor. Sugar, tobacco, cotton, rum, and tea entered the reproduction of the European working class while enslaved African labor remained hidden behind the metropolitan wage. Here Federici gives us a crucial insight: the wage mobilized not only the labor of the person paid by it, but also the unwaged labor concealed behind it—women’s domestic labor in Europe and enslaved labor in the colonies.

This is where WI theory must sharpen Federici’s analysis into a more explicit anti-imperialist weapon. The European worker’s wage, the enslaved African’s forced labor, the Indigenous worker’s coerced labor in the mines, and the woman’s unpaid reproductive labor were not separate economies. They were linked moments in the same world system. The plantation was not outside capitalism. It was one of capitalism’s laboratories. The colony was not backward. It was the cutting edge of capitalist brutality.

Federici also refuses the easy lie that European workers simply benefited from colonial plunder as a unified bloc. She points to indentured servants, transported convicts, vagabonds, and poor Europeans who worked alongside Africans and sometimes allied with them. The ruling class feared such alliances. That fear helped produce racial hierarchy in the colonies. Laws separated Africans from Europeans, made slavery hereditary, banned interracial marriage, restricted Black rights, and turned “white” into a badge of privilege. Race, like gender, was not an ancient prejudice floating outside political economy. It was organized as a technology of labor control.

The section on women in the colonies is especially important. Federici asks us to imagine not only Caliban, but Sycorax—the powerful witch pushed into the background. Across the colonies, European, Indigenous, African, and mixed-race women sometimes exchanged knowledge about healing, sexuality, reproduction, love remedies, and survival. These were fragile, contradictory alliances, marked by hierarchy and conflict, but they reveal something important: women’s struggles over reproduction and survival could cross colonial lines, even when colonial society tried to keep them apart.

Federici’s discussion of enslaved African women in the Caribbean deepens this point. Plantation owners exploited women brutally in the fields and sexually in the quarters. After the abolition of the slave trade, they tried to impose “breeding” policies, treating women as producers of future laborers. Yet enslaved women resisted. They cultivated provision grounds, sold produce in markets, built networks of exchange, preserved African cultural practices, and became central to the survival of slave communities. Against a system built to reduce them to bodies for labor and reproduction, they carved out spaces of autonomy. That is not romance. That is war by other means.

Federici’s final synthesis is one of the strongest in the book: capitalism’s sexual division of labor was not simply a division of tasks. It was a power relation. It created differences, hierarchies, dependencies, and antagonisms inside the working class. It hid women’s labor under nature. It hid enslaved labor behind commodities. It hid colonial plunder behind European wages. It made exploitation appear as family duty, racial destiny, feminine virtue, savage inferiority, or moral order.

The strength of this chapter is enormous. It gives us capitalism not as a factory system alone, but as a world regime of reproduction, enclosure, colonial extraction, gender discipline, and racial division. Its limitation is that even here, where Federici’s global analysis is strongest, the colonial contradiction still competes with the gendered frame rather than fully commanding the structure. From the standpoint of Weaponized Information, we have to insist that gendered degradation and colonial domination are not parallel violences. They are internally connected through the capitalist world system, but colonial conquest is not merely one example among others. It is the condition that allowed European capital to reorganize the globe.

Still, this chapter is a weapon. It teaches us that capitalism does not merely exploit workers after they enter the workplace. It manufactures the worker by destroying land-based independence, criminalizing survival, controlling reproduction, degrading women, racializing labor, and dividing the oppressed against themselves. The wage, the fence, the plantation, the workhouse, the brothel, the marriage contract, and the witch-trial all belong to the same arsenal.

Capital did not only accumulate wealth. It accumulated wounds. It accumulated hunger. It accumulated dead children, raped women, branded Africans, dispossessed peasants, broken commons, and workers taught to mistake their chains for privileges. Federici shows us how those differences were built. Our task is to show how they can be broken.

The Great Caliban: How Capital Broke the Rebel Body Into a Work-Machine

Federici’s third chapter moves from land to flesh. After the commons are enclosed, after wages are imposed, after women’s labor is degraded, capitalism still faces one stubborn problem: the human body does not naturally obey capital. It gets tired. It wants pleasure. It remembers feast days, wandering, sex, rest, magic, riot, song, and refusal. It does not wake up by nature ready to sell itself by the hour. So the rising bourgeois order had to do more than take land. It had to remake the person. It had to turn the body into a work-machine.

This is what Federici means by the “disciplining of the body.” She takes Michel Foucault’s phrase and drags it back down from the clouds of discourse into class struggle. The disciplining of the body was not some mysterious modern technique floating above history. It was a ruling-class project carried out by church, state, philosophers, police, judges, anatomists, employers, and executioners. Its purpose was to transform the individual’s powers into labor-power—to make human energy predictable, measurable, obedient, and profitable.

The problem was concrete. The expropriated peasants and artisans did not peacefully become wage workers. Federici reminds us that many became beggars, vagabonds, thieves, rebels, deserters, and fugitives. The hatred of wage labor was so intense that many preferred the road, the gallows, or the risks of crime to the new discipline of work. Bourgeois economists later called this “free labor.” Federici shows us the truth: the free worker had to be hunted into existence.

The ruling class answered with terror. England alone hanged tens of thousands under Henry VIII, and hundreds more were executed year after year as “rogues.” Anti-vagrancy laws bound workers to imposed jobs just as serfdom had bound peasants to land. Games were banned. Taverns were shut down. Public baths were closed. Nakedness, swearing, gambling, drunkenness, wandering, festivity, and “unproductive” sexuality were criminalized or morally attacked. The message was simple: life must no longer overflow the workday. The body must no longer belong to itself.

Federici is strongest when she shows that philosophy did not stand outside this process. Hobbes and Descartes were not simply thinking deep thoughts in clean rooms while history happened somewhere else. Their mechanical conception of the body gave intellectual form to the needs of a new ruling order. Hobbes reduces the heart to a spring, the nerves to strings, the joints to wheels. Descartes treats the body as an automaton. The human being is broken into parts, examined, classified, and made available for command. Here the philosopher joins the overseer. He may not carry the whip, but he helps design the grammar of obedience.

This mechanical body was not neutral science. It was class ideology with a polished vocabulary. If the body is a machine, then it can be managed like a machine. If desire is disorder, it must be governed. If pleasure interrupts productivity, it must be disciplined. If the poor refuse work, they are not resisting exploitation; they are irrational bodies in need of correction. This is how ruling-class violence becomes “reason.” First they steal the land. Then they call the landless lazy. Then they hang them for not working.

Federici’s reading of Prospero and Caliban is crucial here. Prospero represents the new master who combines command, calculation, and spiritual authority. Caliban represents the rebel body—the colonized, proletarian, unruly body that still curses, desires, remembers, and refuses. When Prospero says of Caliban, “this thing of darkness is mine,” Federici hears more than Shakespearean drama. She hears the confession of the bourgeois order. Capital must dominate Caliban because Caliban is both its servant and its nightmare: the laboring body it needs, fears, degrades, and cannot fully control.

This is where we must sharpen the point. Caliban is not only the European proletarian body. He is also the colonized body. He is the Indigenous worker in the mine, the enslaved African on the plantation, the vagabond whipped through the roads of Europe, the woman criminalized for controlling reproduction, the prisoner handed to surgeons after execution. The body under capitalism is never just biological. It is political territory. Capital marks it differently by race, gender, colonial status, and class position, but the objective remains the same: make it useful, make it obedient, make it produce.

Federici also shows why magic had to be destroyed. This is one of the most important parts of the chapter. Magic was not simply a set of false beliefs waiting to be corrected by science. For the poor, magical practices preserved a view of the world in which nature was alive, the body held powers, time had qualities, and people could imagine results outside disciplined labor. Healing, charms, prophecy, divination, love magic, lucky days, unlucky days, hidden treasures, and occult powers all represented a world not yet fully subordinated to the clock, the wage, and the employer’s command.

Francis Bacon complained that magic “kills industry,” and Federici understands exactly what that means. Magic was dangerous because it suggested one might obtain something without work—or more precisely, without labor disciplined by capital. It kept alive a sense that the world contained powers not owned by church, state, landlord, or merchant. That was intolerable. The capitalist work regime required a universe stripped of enchantment, a body stripped of mystery, and time stripped of sacred interruption. The worker had to learn that nothing moves unless labor moves it—and that labor must move only under command.

That is why the attack on magic became inseparable from the witch-hunt. The so-called Age of Reason did not replace terror. It organized terror more efficiently. Federici names the supporters of witch persecution among the champions of rational thought—Bodin, Mersenne, Boyle, Barrow, Hobbes. Hobbes did not even need to believe witches had real power to justify punishing them. It was enough that they believed they had power and might act on that belief. There it is, naked as a jail cell: repression not only for what people do, but for what they believe they might be able to do.

The torture chamber and the anatomy theater belong to the same world. Federici makes that connection plain. Torture produced confession, discipline, knowledge, and fear. Anatomy produced a dissected body, stripped of sacred power and opened to the authority of science. The executed poor became raw material for surgeons. The condemned begged their families to save their bodies from dissection because they understood what was at stake. To be cut open after death was not simply medical procedure. It was a second punishment, a final seizure of the body by the state.

Peter Linebaugh’s account of the Tyburn riots against surgeons becomes, in Federici’s hands, a window into class struggle over the dead body itself. Families fought to recover the corpses of the hanged, not because they were ignorant fools, but because they refused to let the ruling class turn their loved ones into specimens. The poor defended the body as still belonging to kin, community, memory, and dignity. The state and surgeons treated it as material. This is the birth of capitalist science with blood under its fingernails.

Federici’s most powerful formulation is that the human body—not the steam engine, not the clock—was the first machine developed by capitalism. That line should stop the reader cold. Before the factory could run on machinery, capital had to run on disciplined flesh. It had to produce the punctual worker, the obedient soldier, the reproductive woman, the colonized laborer, the criminalized vagabond, the self-monitoring subject. The machine age begins not with metal, but with the political re-engineering of muscle, nerve, womb, appetite, memory, and fear.

Descartes gives this project its inner architecture. By separating mind from body, he creates a model of self-management useful to bourgeois rule. The mind becomes sovereign; the body becomes servant. The person becomes a little state, with reason as ruler and the passions as rebellious subjects. This is not just metaphysics. It is the birth of capitalist subjectivity: self-command, self-surveillance, self-discipline, self-ownership. The worker must learn to become both master and slave inside the same skin.

Hobbes gives the other side of the same project. Where Descartes imagines internal command through reason, Hobbes demands external command through the state. If human beings are driven by appetite, fear, and competition, then only sovereign power can keep them in line. Federici shows that the capitalist order needed both models: the internal cop and the external cop, the guilty conscience and the gallows, the self-disciplined worker and the state ready to crush those who refuse discipline. Neither pure consent nor pure terror was enough. Capital needed a marriage of both, and like most marriages under class society, it was arranged by property.

The bourgeoisie did not imagine this discipline for everyone equally. Federici is clear that the rational “man” of philosophy meant a narrow class subject: white, male, propertied, adult. The lower classes were imagined as a “great beast,” a many-headed monster, lusty, disorderly, idle, drunken, rude, and dangerous. Women, Africans, colonized peoples, vagabonds, and the poor were pushed closer to the body, farther from reason, and therefore nearer to discipline, punishment, and command. This is where the mechanical philosophy meets the colonial imagination. The body becomes the name for everything the ruling class wants to dominate.

This matters because the proletariat did not only suffer exploitation. It was ideologically constructed as body: appetite without reason, labor without mind, danger without discipline. And the body itself was proletarianized: treated as raw material to be managed, improved, corrected, punished, and put to work. Federici’s analysis here gives us a materialist bridge between class domination, misogyny, racism, and colonialism. The woman is body. The African is body. The Indigenous “savage” is body. The vagabond is body. The worker is body. The ruling class, naturally, appoints itself mind. Convenient arrangement. The parasite becomes reason; the producer becomes flesh.

Federici also reads the changing manners of the period as part of this transformation. The use of cutlery, shame around nakedness, regulation of laughter, sneezing, eating, singing, joking, and bodily functions all point to a new regime of self-policing. The body became something to observe as if it were an enemy. Puritan disgust toward excrement and bodily needs was not just religious repression. It reflected the bourgeois desire to cleanse the body-machine of interruptions, waste, and “dead time.” Even urination became an occasion for Cotton Mather to discipline his thoughts. Imagine a ruling class so committed to domination that even pissing against a wall becomes a sermon.

But we should not mistake this for mere cultural change. Federici’s point is that these intimate disciplines were tied to the wider transformation of labor. Capital needed bodies that could work beyond older rhythms of sun, season, festival, hunger, and communal obligation. It needed bodies that could obey abstract time. It needed bodies that could subordinate pleasure to accumulation. It needed bodies that would treat exhaustion as weakness, idleness as sin, refusal as crime, and survival outside work as moral failure. That project began in the period of primitive accumulation and still sits inside every alarm clock, every warehouse scanner, every prison schedule, every welfare office, every border checkpoint, every productivity app pretending to be your friend.

This is where we extend Federici into the present. The disciplining of the body has not disappeared; it has been upgraded. The old gallows and workhouses have not vanished so much as multiplied into prisons, detention centers, deportation regimes, biometric databases, algorithmic management, workplace surveillance, reproductive policing, psychiatric discipline, and debt enforcement. Technofascism does not abandon the old war on the body. It digitizes it. It turns the worker’s motion, attention, fertility, risk profile, location, and social ties into data for command. Prospero has a dashboard now.

The strength of Federici’s chapter is that it shows primitive accumulation as a war against embodied resistance. Capitalism had to destroy the magical body, the festive body, the erotic body, the wandering body, the communal body, the reproductive body outside state control, the dead body defended by kin, and the rebel body that refused the wage. Its limitation is that the colonial body still needs to be pushed even more forcefully into the center of the analysis. Caliban cannot remain mostly metaphor. He must be returned to the plantation, the mine, the ship, the reservation, the prison, and the border.

Still, the weapon here is sharp. Federici shows that capitalism did not merely command labor from the outside. It invaded the person. It reorganized the senses, habits, desires, fears, beliefs, gestures, and relations through which people lived in their own bodies. It turned the body against itself and called that civilization. It taught workers to police their own flesh and then praised them for discipline.

The Great Caliban, then, is not defeated once and for all. He survives wherever the body refuses to become a machine. He survives in the strike, the riot, the refusal of forced birth, the defense of land, the healing practice kept alive under repression, the prisoner’s hunger strike, the worker slowing the line, the colonized people defending their world against development’s bulldozer. Federici gives us the history of how capital tried to break the rebel body. Our task is to remember that what had to be broken once can rise again.

The Witch-Hunt Was Not Madness: It Was Class War Against Women

The fourth chapter of Caliban and the Witch is where Federici tears the veil off one of the greatest crimes buried beneath the marble floor of European “civilization.” The witch-hunt, she argues, was not a panic, not a craze, not a medieval superstition surviving into modernity. It was a political operation. It was a campaign of terror against women, especially poor peasant women, carried out at the very moment when capitalism was forcing the European working class into a new order of landlessness, wage dependence, reproductive discipline, and state control. The stake was not a relic of the Dark Ages. It was one of the birthplaces of the modern world. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

Federici begins by attacking the silence itself. The witch-hunt, she says, rarely appears in histories of the proletariat, even though hundreds of thousands of women were tortured, burned, hanged, and terrorized across Europe in less than two centuries. That absence is not innocent. Marxist historians studied enclosure, wage labor, the rise of the state, and the transition to capitalism, but too often treated the extermination of women as folklore, religious madness, or a tragic side issue. Federici’s correction is devastating: if the victims had been mostly male artisans, soldiers, or rebels, the massacre would sit at the center of every history of class struggle. Because they were mostly peasant women, the academy turned the fire into footnote.

This is why Federici refuses the language of “panic” and “epidemic.” Those words clean the hands of the persecutors. They make organized violence look like collective confusion. But the witch-hunt did not rise spontaneously from ignorant villagers. Federici shows that it required law, administration, propaganda, church authority, secular courts, learned jurists, demonologists, traveling investigators, public sermons, pamphlets, and printing presses. The ruling order had to teach people how to see witches. Ministers asked parishioners under oath to denounce suspects. Anonymous boxes were placed in churches. Authorities traveled village to village with lists of women already suspected. Before neighbor turned against neighbor, the state and church had already poisoned the well.

That is why the timing matters. The mass witch-hunt reached its peak between roughly 1580 and 1630, not in the so-called “superstitious” Middle Ages, but in the age of mercantile capitalism, colonial conquest, scientific rationalism, state formation, and Protestant-Catholic conflict. This was the century of Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Shakespeare, Descartes, and the Copernican Revolution—and also the century of torture chambers and burning women alive. So much for the little fairy tale that “reason” simply marched forward and chased away darkness. Reason came with a torch in one hand and a legal code in the other.

Federici is especially sharp in showing that the witch-hunt became a unifying project of the new European order. Catholic and Protestant authorities, at war over doctrine, could still agree on burning women. The Imperial Carolina code made witchcraft punishable by death. England passed witchcraft acts in 1542, 1563, and 1604, with the last law extending the death penalty even where no injury had been proved. Scotland, Switzerland, France, and the Spanish Netherlands passed similar laws. This was not medieval backwardness. This was modern statecraft learning to govern through terror.

The question, then, is not whether witches existed. That is the wrong question, the question of the inquisitor and the liberal skeptic alike. The real question is: what social power had to be destroyed by calling women witches? Federici answers clearly. The witch-hunt attacked women’s resistance to capitalist relations, women’s control over reproduction, women’s healing knowledge, women’s sexuality, women’s place in communal life, and women’s ability to survive outside full dependence on husbands, employers, priests, and the state. Witchcraft became a flexible charge, like “terrorism” in our own time: vague enough to attach to almost anything, terrifying enough to justify almost everything.

This is one of Federici’s most powerful insights. The charge of witchcraft did not punish a stable crime; it created a category of enemies. A poor woman who begged and cursed when refused food could be a witch. A midwife who knew herbs could be a witch. A woman who avoided pregnancy could be a witch. A prostitute, adulteress, widow, healer, scold, old woman, unmarried woman, or woman who simply talked back could be a witch. The accusation gathered every form of female autonomy and made it demonic. The ruling class did not need the witch to be real. It needed the category to be useful.

Federici roots this in the village economy produced by enclosure and rural capitalism. As common lands disappeared, poor women became more vulnerable. Old women who once survived through customary rights, mutual aid, gathering, gleaning, and neighborly obligation were now forced to beg for milk, yeast, bread, wood, butter, or small coins. When they were refused and anger followed, misfortune could be blamed on their curse. Federici’s examples from England are painfully concrete: women accused after quarrels over pears, yeast, cheese, horses, meat, wood, or unpaid assistance. These were not fairy tales. They were class relations at the village level, translated into demonology.

Here the Weaponized Information line is clear: the witch-hunt was counterinsurgency against the social reproduction of the poor. Capital first destroyed the material conditions of communal survival, then criminalized the social tensions produced by that destruction. It turned hunger into suspicion, poverty into evil, women’s anger into devilry, and neighborly breakdown into proof of satanic conspiracy. The landlord fenced the commons; the pastor named the witch; the court lit the fire. That is capitalism’s holy trinity.

Federici also shows that the attack on magic was inseparable from the rationalization of labor. Magic preserved a world in which nature was alive, power was diffused, time was qualitative, healing belonged to women, and the poor could imagine forces outside property and wage discipline. To the new capitalist class, this was intolerable. The world had to be disenchanted so it could be dominated. Bacon complained that magic “kills industry,” and he was right from the standpoint of capital. Magic suggested that life contained powers not governed by the employer’s clock. It implied that people might seek help, healing, protection, justice, or revenge outside the institutions of the ruling class.

This does not mean we have to romanticize every magical practice. Federici’s point is material, not sentimental. The ruling class attacked magic because it represented a form of popular power, especially in the hands of women. The healer, the midwife, the charm-maker, the diviner, the woman who knew herbs and births and illnesses and family secrets—these figures held authority inside the community. They were not licensed by the state. They did not need university medicine. They carried a practical knowledge accumulated through generations. Capitalism could not tolerate that kind of power among poor women. It needed experts above and obedient bodies below.

The witch-hunt also emerged from the fear of revolt. Federici draws the line between witch-burning and the wave of peasant uprisings against enclosure, taxation, tithes, and hunger. Women often initiated or led food riots because they were responsible for feeding households and saw the violence of price speculation first. They stopped grain carts, attacked hoarders, and defended children against starvation. After revolts were crushed and men were imprisoned, executed, or driven away, women remained as carriers of memory, bitterness, and underground resistance. The authorities knew this. They feared the old women who remembered.

This is why Federici’s discussion of the Sabbat is so important. The ruling class imagined the Sabbat as a night gathering where witches feasted, danced, copulated, plotted, worshipped the devil, and received instructions to rebel. Strip away the demonological costume and what appears? Secret meetings. Night assemblies. Communal eating. Sexual disorder. Refusal of work discipline. The possibility of conspiracy among the poor. The authorities projected onto the Sabbat the same fears they had of peasant gatherings, heretical networks, rebel camps, and women’s circles. The witch was accused of going to the devil’s meeting because the poor had, in fact, been meeting against their masters.

Federici’s move from heresy to witchcraft is also crucial. Earlier anti-feudal movements had attacked church wealth, hierarchy, property, and sexual discipline. Heretics had been accused of many of the same crimes later attached to witches: sodomy, infanticide, animal worship, nocturnal gatherings, and devilish inversion. But by the 16th and 17th centuries, the target shifted decisively toward women. Witchcraft became a female crime. At the peak of the persecution, more than eighty percent of those tried and executed were women. This was not accidental. The ruling class was now reorganizing reproduction itself.

The charges reveal the political content. Witches were accused of preventing conception, causing impotence, procuring abortions, killing infants, offering children to the devil, and destroying generative power in humans and animals. Federici reads these accusations through the demographic crisis of early capitalism. European states and mercantilist thinkers increasingly treated population as wealth. More people meant more labor, more soldiers, more taxpayers, more bodies for accumulation. In that context, women’s control over contraception, abortion, childbirth, and infant care became a direct threat to state policy. The uterus became an object of government.

This is one of the strongest passages in the whole book: just as enclosure expropriated peasants from common land, the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies. That sentence deserves to be carved into the door of every bourgeois history department. The fence seized land; the stake seized reproduction. The commons were enclosed by hedges and laws. Women’s bodies were enclosed by terror, surveillance, torture, and the destruction of midwives. Capital needed labor-power, and women’s bodies were forced into the service of producing it.

Midwives became central targets because they stood at the gate of life. They knew how to assist birth, but also how to prevent it. They held the knowledge of herbs, pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions, and women’s hidden suffering. The Malleus Maleficarum singled them out as especially dangerous. Over time, midwives were either recruited into policing other women or displaced by male doctors and state-regulated obstetrics. This was not simply professionalization. It was the theft of reproductive knowledge from women and its transfer to male authority, church discipline, and state medicine.

Federici’s critique of Foucault lands hard here. Foucault wrote about the history of sexuality and the production of sexual discourse, but largely ignored the witch-hunt—the greatest forced discourse on sex in early modern Europe. In the torture chamber, old women were made to describe sexual acts with the devil, youthful desires, penetrations, pleasures, abortions, pregnancies, and fantasies under unbearable pain. This was not confession as mutual production of truth. This was sexualized state violence. It was psychological rape with a legal transcript. Foucault’s abstract, gender-neutral subject cannot explain that. Federici can.

The witch-hunt did not liberate sexuality into discourse. It disciplined sexuality into labor. Federici’s formulation is sharp: the transformation of female sexuality into work. Sex had to be contained within marriage, procreation, inheritance, and male authority. Non-procreative sexuality—old women’s sexuality, prostitution, adultery, homosexuality, anal sex, collective festivals, dances, nudity, sex across class lines—was demonized or criminalized. The witch flying on a broom, the old woman lusting after sex, the woman copulating with animals or the devil: these images were not random obscenities. They were propaganda for a new sexual order.

The ruling class needed women sexually available to husbands, reproductively useful to the state, and socially confined to the household. It needed women’s pleasure separated from women’s autonomy. It needed the old woman stripped of authority and turned into a symbol of sterility, envy, and death. It needed female friendship broken and redefined as gossip. Federici notes that “gossip” once meant friend; during this period it took on a degraded meaning. Even women’s speech had to be disciplined. The tongue, like the womb, had to be brought under command.

The sexual sadism of the trials exposes the real nature of the operation. Women were stripped naked, shaved, searched for the devil’s mark, pierced with needles, raped, tortured, stretched, burned, and forced to confess. Their daughters could be whipped before the stake while watching their mothers die. This was not justice. This was theater. It was pedagogy. It taught every woman watching what would happen if she lived outside the lines drawn by husband, priest, employer, and state.

Federici also shows how the witch-hunt sanctified male supremacy. The devil became the witch’s master, husband, pimp, and owner. Even in rebellion, women were imagined as subordinate to a man. The pact with the devil became a perverted marriage contract. This is the bourgeois patriarchal imagination at work: it could not even picture female rebellion without placing a male authority behind it. The witch was dangerous because she was disobedient; but the demonologists still had to make her somebody’s servant. Even their nightmares needed a husband.

This propaganda divided men from women inside the oppressed classes. Men were taught to see women as castrators, seducers, poisoners, child-killers, and servants of the devil. Women’s power—especially their sexual power, healing power, and reproductive knowledge—was turned into a threat against men rather than a resource against the ruling class. Federici shows that, except for rare cases like Basque fishermen physically intervening to save accused women, there was no broad male defense of women against the terror. The witch-hunt broke class solidarity by offering men a poisoned bargain: accept your own exploitation, and you may help police women beneath you.

This is the “patriarchy of the wage” at the level of terror. Capital did not simply impose patriarchy from above. It reorganized male insecurity into a weapon against women. The dispossessed man, robbed by landlord and merchant, was encouraged to blame the old woman, the healer, the prostitute, the wife, the widow, the woman who said no, the woman who knew too much. It was class rule by sexual counterinsurgency. Divide the poor, burn the women, discipline the men, and call the ashes order.

Federici’s colonial comparison sharpens the whole argument. The witch-hunt in Europe developed alongside the conquest of the Americas and the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Missionaries and conquistadors carried the accusation of devil worship into the New World to destroy Indigenous religion, leadership, and resistance. In Mexico and Peru, trials against “idolatry” and witchcraft targeted Indigenous political and spiritual authorities. In the colonies, as in Europe, women were especially vulnerable because they became defenders of communal memory and anti-colonial survival.

The traffic went both ways. The demonology used against European women was exported to colonized peoples, while colonial conquest helped train Europe to imagine entire populations as demonic, bestial, lustful, irrational, and fit for extermination or enslavement. The devil became Black. Africans, Indigenous peoples, and women were all pushed into the same ideological pit: closer to nature, closer to body, closer to animality, farther from reason, therefore fit for domination. Here the witch and the “savage” are born from the same factory of bourgeois lies.

From a WI standpoint, this is the colonial contradiction entering the body. The same system that made European women into reproductive machines made African bodies into plantation machines and Indigenous bodies into mining machines. The same demonology that burned the witch justified conquest, slavery, and missionization. The witch-hunt was not a European side story. It was part of the ideological architecture of the capitalist world system.

Federici’s section on the healer and the birth of modern science gives the final twist of the knife. The persecution of the “good witch”—the healer, midwife, soothsayer, charm-maker—cleared the ground for professional medicine. Women lost a patrimony of empirical knowledge about herbs, healing, childbirth, contraception, and community care. Male doctors and state-regulated medical institutions rose over the ruins. The poor were separated from their own knowledge and made dependent on experts they could not afford and did not control. This was another enclosure: not of land, but of knowledge.

Federici does not reduce the witch-hunt to science, and that matters. She rejects the simple Enlightenment story that science ended witch-burning, but she also refuses the idea that science alone caused it. Many founders of modern rationalism did not defend accused women. Some supported persecution. The witch-hunt ended not because the ruling class became enlightened, but because the work had been done. The world of the witches had been shattered. Social discipline had advanced. Women’s bodies had been subordinated. Popular magic had been weakened. The state no longer needed the devil in the same way. Once the weapon had served its purpose, the respectable classes could laugh at it as superstition.

That is one of Federici’s most devastating conclusions. Capitalism can go “backward” in order to move forward. It can summon devils, revive archaic myths, invent monstrous enemies, and stage medieval-looking rituals if those tools help create modern conditions of accumulation. The witch-hunt was not irrational in relation to capitalism. It was irrational only if one believes capitalism is reason. Once we understand capitalism as organized domination, the witch-hunt makes perfect ruling-class sense.

And the ghost did not disappear. Federici ends by showing how the image of the witch returned against the women of the Paris Commune, the pétroleuses, accused of roaming Paris with fire to destroy civilization. Poor women carrying baskets or bottles became suspects. Hundreds were executed, demonized as savage, wild, old, dirty, incendiary women. The ruling class knew the old script by instinct. When proletarian women rise, call them witches. When colonized women resist, call them demons. When poor women defend life, call them threats to order.

This is why Chapter 4 is so central to the review. Federici gives us the witch-hunt as a method of rule: identify women as dangerous, sexualize their power, criminalize their knowledge, sever them from each other, turn men against them, transfer reproduction to state supervision, and use terror to reorganize the working class. This is not a chapter about superstition. It is a chapter about counterrevolution.

The limitation remains that Federici’s framework still sometimes allows gender and colonialism to stand beside each other rather than forcing the colonial contradiction to command the full structure. But the material is there, burning on the page. The witch, the enslaved African, the Indigenous “idolater,” the vagabond, the prostitute, the midwife, and the rebel peasant all belong to the same history of capitalist formation. They are not metaphors for one another. They are different positions inside the same war.

Federici’s great achievement in this chapter is to make the fire speak. The witch-hunt was not an excess of belief. It was a rational terror campaign by an irrational system. It helped produce the modern woman, the modern worker, the modern state, the modern doctor, the modern family, and the modern colonial subject. Capitalism did not only come with ships, banks, factories, and markets. It came with judges asking old women about sex with the devil while the flames were already being prepared outside.

That is the lesson revolutionaries must carry forward. Whenever capital enters a crisis, it looks for witches. It finds them among women, migrants, colonized peoples, the poor, the queer, the criminalized, the disabled, the old, the unruly, the ones who remember other ways to live. The names change. The function remains. Federici helps us see the pattern. Our task is to break it.

Caliban, Sycorax, and the Colonial Furnace of Capital

Federici’s final chapter drags the witch-hunt across the Atlantic and places it where it always belonged: inside the conquest of the world. The story does not end in the European village, with the old woman accused over bread, milk, herbs, or curses. It moves with the ship, the sword, the priest, the mine boss, the slave trader, and the missionary. Federici’s argument is clear: the subjugation of women in Europe and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples in the Americas were not separate dramas. They were connected fronts in the same capitalist offensive. Enclosure, Christianization, forced labor, demonology, and the destruction of communal life traveled together. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

This is where Caliban and the Witch becomes most dangerous to the liberal story of modernity. Europe did not enter the Americas as civilization confronting savagery. It arrived as hunger organized into empire. Girolamo Benzoni records the Indigenous judgment with devastating clarity: the Europeans “devour everything,” consume the earth, redirect rivers, seek gold and silver without satisfaction, gamble, make war, rob, swear, lie, and deprive people of their livelihood. That is not a misunderstanding between cultures. That is the colonized naming the colonizer correctly.

Federici begins with the invention of the “cannibal.” This invention was not innocent. It was a weapon. Before Europeans could steal land, enslave labor, burn temples, rape women, and destroy whole worlds, they first had to manufacture the colonized as less than human. “Cannibal,” “sodomite,” “barbarian,” “devil-worshipper,” “monstrous race”—these were not descriptions. They were permits. They allowed conquest to disguise itself as salvation. The thief did not say, “I came for your gold.” He said, “I came for your soul.” Same robbery, better costume.

Federici shows how quickly this ideological machine developed. At first, Europeans could imagine Indigenous peoples as innocent, generous, even living in something like a golden age. But once the demand for labor sharpened, innocence became politically useless. The colonized had to become demonic. By the mid-16th century, a negative view of Indigenous cultures descended “like a thick fog” over European accounts. That fog hid the mines, whips, tribute demands, forced relocations, and mass death. The conqueror always needs fog. It helps him avoid seeing himself.

The shift was tied to production. Federici makes clear that the Spanish Crown’s intensification of anti-idolatry campaigns coincided with the need to squeeze more labor from Indigenous populations for textile workshops, silver mines, mercury mines, and imperial wars. Potosí did not run on theology. It ran on coerced Indigenous labor. But theology helped break the people who had to be driven into the mountain. The attack on huacas, idols, ceremonies, sacred places, and local gods was therefore not merely religious persecution. It was labor discipline. Break the gods, break the community; break the community, seize the labor.

This is the colonial contradiction in its raw form. The colonizer must destroy the colonized people’s relation to land because that relation is the basis of their autonomy. The huacas were not decorative religious objects. They were mountains, springs, stones, animals, ancestors, and living links between people, territory, agriculture, memory, and collective reproduction. To destroy them was to cut the people away from the ground beneath their feet. Colonialism did not only steal land as property. It attacked the whole world through which land remained sacred, social, and alive.

The Taki Onqoy movement stands in Federici’s chapter as one of the clearest forms of anti-colonial refusal. It called on Andean peoples to reject Christianity, Spanish names, Spanish clothing, Spanish food, tribute, and forced labor. It preached a pan-Andean alliance of the huacas against the invader. That was not “superstition.” That was revolutionary consciousness speaking in the language available to the people. The movement understood that colonialism was not only foreign rule. It was a total reorganization of life. To reject the colonizer’s god, clothes, food, names, labor drafts, and tribute was to reject the whole colonial order.

And women stood at the center of that resistance. Federici is sharp here. Indigenous women were farmers, weavers, healers, herbalists, potters, priestesses, and guardians of household gods. They were not living in paradise, and Federici does not romanticize pre-conquest gender relations. But women held recognized social power. Colonization degraded that position. Women were pushed into domestic servitude, textile labor, sexual vulnerability, forced accompaniment to mines, and subordination under Spanish patriarchal law. Polygamous unions were dissolved. Children were reclassified under colonial legitimacy codes. Indigenous men were often co-opted into the colonial hierarchy. Women bore the weight of conquest in their bodies, homes, fields, and communities.

That is why women became what Federici calls the main enemies of colonial rule. They refused Mass. They resisted baptism. They fled to the punas, the high plains beyond easy Spanish control. They preserved old ceremonies, advised communities on what to reveal or conceal from priests, guarded the huacas, and sustained the old religion under new conditions. In Peru, women became leaders and ritual authorities in ways that colonial crisis itself helped produce. When the official structures cracked, women carried the memory of the people.

The witch-hunt in the Americas targeted precisely this power. Federici shows that the Christian concept of witchcraft was alien to Andean society. Yet under torture, persecution, and forced acculturation, Indigenous women began confessing to the same crimes European women were made to confess: pacts with the devil, flying, ointments, herbal remedies, worshipping stones and mountains, feeding huacas, and bewitching authorities. This was not the discovery of witches. It was the imposition of a European demonological script onto anti-colonial survival. Torture translated resistance into devil worship.

But the colonial witch-hunt did not fully succeed. This is one of Federici’s most important points. In Europe, many accused women were isolated from their communities. In the Andes, women accused as witches often remained respected and sought after as comadres, healers, ritual specialists, and carriers of ancestral knowledge. The colonizer could force confession, but he could not fully sever the people from the women who held the old ties together. The old religion was wounded, driven underground, and transformed—but not destroyed.

This is where Federici’s use of Shakespeare becomes politically rich. Latin American revolutionaries often took Caliban as the symbol of anti-colonial rebellion. That makes sense. Caliban curses Prospero in the master’s language. He embodies the colonized subject who learns the language of domination and turns it back against the master. But Federici asks us to look harder at Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, the witch pushed into the background. Sycorax represents the buried power of land, moon, water, memory, and local knowledge. Caliban rebels inside the language Prospero gave him. Sycorax points toward a world Prospero tried to erase.

From the standpoint of dialectical and historical materialism, this matters deeply. Anti-colonial struggle cannot only be the colonized mastering the colonizer’s tools. It must also recover, defend, and transform the communal powers that colonialism tried to bury. Land. Memory. Ceremony. Food. Healing. Kinship. Women’s knowledge. Collective reproduction. Sycorax is not folklore. She is the name of a suppressed revolutionary archive.

Federici then asks whether the witch-hunts in the Americas shaped the witch-hunts in Europe. She treats Luciano Parinetto’s argument seriously: that the American experience helped European authorities imagine entire populations as demonic and exterminable. Whether every detail of that argument holds or not, the broader point is undeniable. Empire circulates techniques. Demonology, torture, forced confession, public humiliation, mass propaganda, and extermination move back and forth between colony and metropole. The colony is always a laboratory. What is tested on the colonized returns home as policy.

This is why the connection between witches and “Indios” is not decorative. European demonologists drew on reports from the Americas. Images of cannibal feasts and witches’ Sabbats began to resemble one another. The Indigenous rebel, the African slave, and the European witch were folded into a shared grammar of bestiality, lust, irrationality, devilry, and danger. The ruling class produced a world map of monsters, and every monster just happened to be standing between capital and something it wanted.

Federici is especially useful when she tracks the Africanization of the witch. As plantation slavery expanded, the anxiety over devil worship moved toward enslaved Africans in Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. Obeah and other African-derived practices terrified planters because they carried healing, communication, collective power, and rebellion. The enslaved African healer occupied the same structural position as the European witch and the Indigenous priestess: a bearer of forbidden knowledge, a keeper of communal power, a threat to labor discipline.

Here the full capitalist world system comes into view. The European witch, the Andean priestess, the enslaved African ritual specialist, the Indigenous rebel, the African woman on the plantation, the colonized healer—all are attacked because they preserve forms of power not yet captured by capital. The details differ. The violence differs. The historical positions differ. But the logic is shared: demonize the people who hold communal knowledge, then destroy or subordinate them so land, labor, bodies, and reproduction can be absorbed into accumulation.

This is also where Federici’s own limitation must be named. She gives us the materials for centering the colonial contradiction, but the book still arrives there late. The colonial world is not simply an extension of primitive accumulation. It is one of its foundations. Europe did not first become capitalist at home and then export capitalism outward. Capitalism formed through the simultaneous internal colonization of the European poor and external colonization of the Americas, Africa, and eventually the globe. The witch-hunt, the mine, the plantation, the slave ship, and the enclosure fence are not separate chapters of history. They are one machinery.

Federici’s final pages show that witch-hunting did not disappear with early capitalism. It traveled with colonization and Christianization, and in later periods it reappeared under new conditions of crisis. In India, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, witch-hunts resurfaced where colonial disruption, land pressure, misogyny, resource scarcity, and capitalist restructuring tore communities apart. Federici connects contemporary witch-hunting to neoliberal structural adjustment, privatization, impoverishment, and new rounds of enclosure. That is the essential point: when capital destroys collective life, it often redirects social rage against the most vulnerable.

The old demon returns whenever the system needs a scapegoat. In Africa, old and poor women are accused. In Brazil and South Africa, women are murdered under charges of witchcraft. In contexts shaped by IMF and World Bank structural adjustment, disappearing land, collapsing support systems, and intensified competition for survival, witch-hunting becomes a weapon of social fragmentation. The real thieves arrive in suits with development plans, debt schedules, and privatization programs. The village is told to hunt the old woman.

That is why Federici’s chapter speaks directly to the present. Primitive accumulation is not over. It reappears wherever land is privatized, water is stolen, forests are cleared, public goods are dismantled, migrants are criminalized, women are disciplined, and communal survival is attacked. The conquistador has not vanished. Sometimes he wears a priest’s robe. Sometimes a plantation hat. Sometimes a World Bank credential. Sometimes a tech company hoodie. The function remains the same: break the people’s relation to land and life, then call the theft development.

The chapter’s strength is that it forces Marxists to treat colonization, Christianization, gender terror, and witch-hunting as structurally connected. Its weakness is that it does not fully reorganize the whole book around that truth. Federici tells us there was continuity between the subjugation of the New World and the subjugation of women and workers in Europe. Weaponized Information must push further: the capitalist world was born through that continuity. The colonial contradiction is not a theme added at the end. It is the ground beneath the entire process.

Still, this final section gives us a weapon with a long handle. Federici shows how conquest works at the level of land, labor, religion, gender, sexuality, memory, and knowledge. She shows how Christianity became an administrative weapon of empire. She shows how witchcraft accusations helped destroy resistance and reorganize communities for exploitation. She shows that women were not merely victims, but organizers, healers, priestesses, rebels, and guardians of collective survival.

And this is the lesson that must be carried forward: the colonized survived not because empire was merciful, but because people hid life inside the ruins. They hid gods in mountains, medicine in plants, rebellion in ceremony, memory in women’s hands, and freedom in languages the colonizer could not fully understand. Caliban matters. But Sycorax matters more than the old canon admitted. She is the witch, the mother, the healer, the anti-colonial archive, the one who knew the island before Prospero named it property.

Federici leaves us with a hard truth and a revolutionary possibility. Capitalism has always needed witches, savages, demons, criminals, terrorists, and backward peoples to justify its theft. It names the enemy before it commits the crime. But those names also reveal where the system is afraid. Wherever capital sees witches, we should look for women defending life. Wherever empire sees devils, we should look for people defending land. Wherever development sees backwardness, we should look for a world refusing to die.