Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Capitalism was not destined to arise from the “feudal crisis”; the German Peasants’ War, for example, provides evidence that more egalitarian alternatives existed. However, proletarian efforts failed to create the “egalitarian” world for which they strove, and a new social order took shape starting in the 16th century (61). The privatization of land and the Price Revolution combined with rigid patriarchy to create European capitalism.

“Primitive accumulation,” Marx’s term for the process by which class differences and capitalism developed, arose in response to these lower-class movements but was born out of struggle and resistance. Any analysis of this development must include its impact on women because it “required the transformation of the body into a work machine, and the subjugation of women to the work-force” (63). Primitive accumulation relied on creating a segmented proletariat that included distinctions based on age, race, and gender—distinctions Marx ignored.

The driving “economic power” behind primitive accumulation was “force” in the form of enclosures, workhouses, witch-hunting, and other methods of exploitation and abuse. The labor crisis continued because it was impossible for elites to reimplement serfdom or enslavement within Europe. Meanwhile, elite insistence on exploiting the proletariat threatened the workforce’s reproduction.