witch puns are good
a fictocritical reading of caliban and the witch: women, the body, and primitive accumulation by silvia federici
TW: rape, murder
all italics are direct quotations from federici’s text
I.
in a system where life is subordinated to the production of profit, the accumulation of labor-power can only be achieved with the maximum of violence
in Maria Mies’ words, violence itself becomes the most productive force
sometimes it’s remarkable that we keep having to fight the same shit. but it’s oddly comforting that for more than five hundred years we’ve never stopped fighting this shit. people have always been against a tax on life. whether under feudalism or capitalism there is rarely a shortage of those who assert themselves against injustices of the like. before hospital bills that tacked on as many charges as they could to see if you contest them, serflords would issue tallages, a sum of money arbitrarily decided, that the lords could exact at will. akin to spending hours on the phone with a goddamn insurance company to dispute a bill, in 1299 the monks of dunstable asserted that “they would rather go down to hell than be beaten in this matter of tallage”
everyone knows vaguely of the heretics. some know they existed in their variety. people who were essentially against the presiding Church. but hersey was so much more than that. the heretic movement was a conscious attempt to create a new society. the heresy was in refusing to sit back and accept the imposition as it came. in the 830s Սմբատ Զարեհավանցի [Smbat Zarehavantsi] began his preachings, his followers later to be known as the Tondrakians [Թոնդրակեաններ]. their call for property rights for peasants was blasphemy their proclamation of gender equality a dangerous dissension. as with all dissidence they suffered their defeat when the authorities joined forces; feudal lords spiritual and secular joined forces with emirs and byzantines in their persecution.
the advent of capitalism was a similar persecution. against the church of capitalism heresies were drawn and defined. capitalism has created more brutal and insidious forms of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. it is in great part because of these imposed divisions--especially those between women and men--that capitalism accumulation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet. capitalism demanded the loss of the body and the loss of land. it’s amazing what can be accomplished with stolen goods.[1] it’s amazing what will be touted out as ‘progress’. experiments and trials were carried out in europe and shipped around the world reworked and exported back. informing on one another like their witch hunting participants justifying one with the other. Anna Eriksdotter gets decapitated while Maria da Conceição burns while Agnes Sampson is garroted.
acknowledge, collage by marina manoukian
some people say it’s easy to point a finger at capitalism. they insist upon metrics and grimace at conjecture. well, wouldn’t you know that between 1350 and 1500 the real wage increased by 100%, prices declined by 33%, rents also declined, the length of the working-day decreased, and a tendency appeared towards local self-sufficiency. even during the Black Death starvation wasn’t as rampant as it was during the inauguration of capitalism. we know this because “had the production of grain dropped as sharply as the population, its price would have remained high." as soon as land began to be privatized, the prices of foodstuffs, which for two centuries had stagnated, began to rise and instead initiated two centuries of starvation. [2]
in september 1565 in antwerp ‘while the poor were literally starving in the streets,’ a warehouse collapsed under the weight of the grain packed in it
II.
with land privatization came a destruction of the commons, a space which had not only hosted survival but life for generations. as enclosures came up one of the most popular forms of social protest was ripping them down. it was not the workers--women or men--who were liberated by land privatization. what was ‘liberated’ was capital, as the land was now ‘free’ to function as a means of accumulation and exploitation, rather than as a means of subsistence. liberated were the landlords, who now could unload onto the workers most of the cost of their reproduction, giving them access to some means of subsistence only when directly employed. when work would not be available or would not be sufficiently profitable, as in times of commercial or agricultural crisis, workers, instead, could be laid off and left to starve.
besides encouraging collective decision-making and work cooperation, the commons were the material foundation upon which peasant solidarity and sociality could thrive [...] the social function of the commons was especially important for women, who, having less title to land and less social power, were more dependent on them for their subsistence, autonomy, and sociality.
it is significant that, in England, most of the witch trials occured in Essex, where by the 16th century the bulk of the land had been enclosed, while in those regions of the british isles where land privatization had neither occurred nor was on the agenda we have no record of witch-hunting
though the Enclosures continued into the 18th century, even before the Reformation more than two thousand rural communities were destroyed in this way. so severe was the extinction of rural villages that in 1518 and again in 1548 the Crown called for an investigation. but despite the appointment of several royal commissions, little was done to stop the trend. can you believe that? but there were several commissions. what began, instead, was an intense struggle, climaxing in numerous uprisings, accompanied by a long debate on the merits and demerits of land privatization which is still continuing today, revitalized by the World Bank’s assault on the last planetary commons.
in pre-capitalist europe women’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations
III.
as people began to congeal united against the gentry the state the church, their community required dissection. the witch-hunt deepened the divisions between women and men, teaching men to fear the power of women, and destroyed a universe of practices, believes, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalists work discipline. for the mass people to be divided required the most principle division of all. it was a strategy of enclosure which, depending on the context, could be enclosure of land, bodies, or social relation. it was one of many divisions to come. bacon’s rebellion would later become a warning call to the ruling classes as they watched African men, free man and enslaved man, join with white indentured servants. it was this that led to the creation of the virginia slave laws of 1705. once enshrined into law differences are hard to overcome. two hundred years later this distinction of whiteness would be upheld in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, assuring its citizens that “‘free white persons,’ as used in that section [of the constitution], are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man” rather than the scientifically charged ‘caucasian’.
the differences should not be underestimated [...] but the similarities in the treatments to which the populations of Europe and the Americas were subjected are sufficient to demonstrate the existence of one single logic governing the development of capitalism and the structural character of the atrocities perpetrated in this process
women were well interlaced with social protest. “it would appear that the most direct expressions of popular discontent were often associated with women, who clearly spoke with special force when community values or basic self-defence were threatened." coupled with this is the fact that at the very moment when population was declining, and an ideology was forming that stressed the centrality of labor in economic life, severe penalties were introduced in the legal codes on Europe to punish women guilty of reproductive crimes.“infanticide was the major cause, after witchcraft, for the execution of women during the Renaissance.”
it was necessary to execute them for crimes of infanticide and abortion because bodies were needed for scientific research. remember anne greene? hung 1650 died 1655. after being raped by her master’s grandson she gave birth to a child that was stillborn. the line on wikipedia goes “which, as she alleged, and according to medical evidence, was stillborn”. i suppose even wikipedia can be pleasantly surprised by the validity of a woman’s words. regardless, she was sentenced to death and hung. at her own request her friends tug and twisted the hanging body to ensure her demise. a day later when her dissection was about to start it was discovered that she still had a pulse. thankfully they decided to revive her and she was granted a full pardon. in a world of witches they called it a miracle.
it was also in this period that the word ‘gossip,’ which in the Middle Ages had meant ‘friend,’ changed its meaning, acquiring a derogatory connotation, a further sign of the degree to which the power of women and communal ties were undermined
one way to find a witch was through pricking, for all witches supposedly bore a spot where they felt no pain. this was the mark of the devil. only one way to find a needle in a haystack is to stab through every hay. funny how while descartes was filling up echo chambers in jars his words of self-actualization were ringing true in trial rooms and torture chambers. we are what we make of the world. white men accused women of being branded by the devil while they went on to brand women they had enslaved. it goes beyond being an ironic juxtaposition into the humorless grotesque.
every incident is just a trial run for the next one. the trial of dorothy good is still happening over and over again. she was a four years old when her spectre was accused of having bitten some other girls, she was jailed and on her finger was found a red spot. dorothy good was a four year old when under fierce questioning she said she had been suckling a snake. dorothy good was a four year old when she was asked if the snake had come from a dark demon. dorothy good was a four year old when she didn’t understand and called out for her mother. her mother sarah would be hung four months later. dorothy good was a four year old kept in jail for seven months. dorothy good “would emerge so mentally damaged that she needed a carer for the rest of her life” [1]
this story is not new. this story never ended. we know this continues by the thousands. these aren’t flukes. these aren’t mass panics. it’s always a systematic destruction. with the persecution of the folk healer, women were expropriated from a patrimony of empirical knowledge, regarding herbs and healing remedies, that they had accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation, its loss paving the way for a new form of enclosure. by destroying the keepers and purveyors of a knowledge that exists outside the established power structure, the knowledge will be assessed and recreated by those who seek to control its proliferation. within a handful of centuries thousands of years of reproductive knowledge was burned at the stake, its ashes swept up and disposed. with the marginalization of the midwife, the process began by which women lost the control they had exercised over procreation. midwives were pushed out and called incompetant while male doctors would go on to invent the prototype for a chainsaw as a tool for assisting childbirth. totally normal. the midwife not only reminded them of their ignorance of reproduction but she propagated the power to withhold it.“church court records featured women accused of using certain plants or 'physicks,' which might also be obtained from apothecaries or 'cunning' women." while in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation
the witch-hunt destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the production of women’s power in pre-capitalist europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism. knowledge that had been passed down for millenias was criminalized and privatized.
hand off, collage by marina manoukian
many witches were midwives or ‘wise women,’ traditionally the depository of women’s reproductive knowledge and control. The Malleu dedicated an entire chapter to them, arguing that they were worse than any other women. across oceans women’s knowledge was documented in detail decorated and defended in the name of scientific exploration. but the purveyors of knowledge were left as inconsequential footnotes beside intricate illustrations. look at how pretty the peacock flower is. learn how it’s used as an abortifacient. maria sibylla merian eagerly followed in the footsteps of her colonial fathers to acquire appropriate assume anything that may be deemed valuable. maria sibylla merian chose not to visually represent “the Indians who are not treated well when in service with the Dutch, us[ing the peacock flower] to abort their children, not wanting their children to be slaves, like them. The black female slaves from Guinea and Angola have to be treated very kindly. Otherwise they do not want children in their state of slavery and will not have any. Indeed, they sometimes even kill them because of the harsh treatment commonly inflicted on them, because they feel that they will be reborn in a free state in the country of their friends, as I heard from their own lips." after this brief diversion it’s back to her forte of caterpillars. it is the condition of the enslaved woman that most explicitly reveals the truth and the logic of capitalist accumulation
Liz Polcha writes;“scholars have suggested that her citation points to an inclusivity or mutuality among women, as if merian shared a commonality with the women she enslaved. what the peacock flower passage ultimately shows is the unnamed enslaved women’s complex understanding of the relations between herbalism, sexual oppression, and juridical notions of slave status—a complex understanding that merian lacked.” i’m inclined to agree with her. it’s hard to believe that merian, born just fifteen years after the würzburg witch trial, living at the time of the salam witch trials, was unaware of the connotations of abortifacients.
the suspicion under which midwives came in this period--leading to the entrance of the male doctor into the delivery room--stemmed more from the authorities’ fears of infanticide than from any concern with the midwives’ alleged medical incompetence. a fear not unfounded due to the midwife’s knowledge of abortives to avoid and thus could incidentally prescribe. while white europeans were leveling accusations of cannibalism, back within their local colonies they were simultaneously licking sniffing and smoking every morsel of the body. under the guise of medical practice blood would be sipped human hearts would be dried and marrow would be ground while accusations of cannibalism would ring till high heaven on the other side of the atlantic.
with their handy little medical degrees, that women obviously weren’t allowed to get, doctors also expelled women from their own bodies under the guise of objectivity and scientific research. the banner of scientific research owes a debt of gratitude to the witch hunts. it is not a coincidence that the progress of anatomy depended on the ability of the surgeons to snatch the bodies of the hanged and after being found to be foolproof the custom would continue well into the 19th century. in 1788 columbia college’s school of medicine caused an uproar when it was discovered that they were graverobbing at a nearby cemetery of Black men, most of whom had been slaves. while this led to statute criminalizing the improper treatment of dead bodies, it permitted the use of people executed as criminals “in order that science [might not] be injured by preventing the dissection of proper subjects.” after 38 Sioux were hung on December 26, 1862 their bodies were plundered by surgeons of the day. the body of Maȟpiya Akan Nažiŋ was pillaged by the founder of the Mayo clinic.
witch-hunting did not destroy the resistance of the colonized. due primarily to the struggle of women, the connection of the American [Indigenous] with the land, the local religions and nature survived beyond the persecution providing, for more than five hundred years, a source of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. this is extremely important for us, at a time when a renewed assault is being made on the resources and more of existence of indigenous populations across the planet; for we need to rethink how the conquistadors strove to subdue those whom the colonized, and what enabled the latter to subvert this plan and, against the destruction of their social and physical universe, create a new historical reality.
the global expansion of capitalism through colonialism and Christianization ensured that this persecution would be planted in the body of colonized societies, and, in time, would be carried out by the subjugated communities in their own names and against their own members
in the 1840s, for instance, a wave of witch-burnings occured in Western India. more women in this period were burned as witches than in the practice of sati. meanwhile today accusations of sorcery are used to oust women from valuable land that men covet just as every witch-hunt prior has come with the appropriation of the land of accused.
there is no evidence of men rising up to protest this assault. either no records exist because there were none; one of this first roles of the printing press was to populate pamphlets with the propaganda against witches. why have countless propaganda from one side and not a shred of rebuttal. why instead did countless clamor at the chance to be self-assigned hunters. is there a chance they existed their records were destroyed to wipe any trace of male betrayal off the face of the planet.
the hunt isn’t over. Ama Hemmah was burned alive in 2010. Noxhamla Landa was burned to death in 2018. Fabiane Maria de Jesus was lynched in 2014.
nothing may ever be undone.
but for us to do more, we must know what has been done. as with most things that involve women the witch hunts have often been written off as hysterical. but when we look back we see something systematic and sinister. we like to think we wouldn’t let something like this keep happening.
[1] The Trial by Sadakat Kadri
[2] The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fisher
marina manoukian is a reader and writer and collage artist. she currently resides in berlin while she studies and works. she likes honey and she loves bees. you can find more of her words and images at marinamanoukian.com or twitter/instagram at @crimeiscommon.