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.

Early modern land privatization, such as the enclosures in England, and “commodification of social relations” changed the roles of proletarian women by dividing the labor force and creating a demand for “new sources of labor” (66). Most privatization of land in the Americas happened with colonization, but this phenomenon also occurred within Europe starting in the 15th century. Privatization happened through different methods of “land expropriation,” such as increased rents and evictions as well as warfare and the Reformation. War transformed Europe’s agricultural sector while the Protestant Reformation resulted in elite seizure of land from the Catholic Church.

English elites confiscated former communal lands, such as hay meadows or forest lands, for private use. They “fenced off” this land from the proletariat and thus “enclosed” it, obliterating villages and working-class homes. Prior to the Reformation, “more than two thousand rural communities were destroyed in this way” (70). Communal lands had fostered solidarity among the lower classes and allowed women to socialize outside the home. Enclosure thus caused this “social cohesion” to disintegrate and created a mass of itinerant workers and “vagabonds.” This social breakdown allowed elites to exploit cheap labor, impoverishing artisans and effectively destroying their once-powerful guilds. Labor expectations increased for workers, whose days became longer, while wages fell. Workers grew resentful of wage labor, and the peasantry responded to enclosure with violence. Women were often active in these movements because they were hardest hit by the changes, and because the rise in male vagabonds and itinerant laborers exposed them to greater misogynistic violence. As money became the wage, women became less likely to earn an income, and were “confined to reproductive labor at the very time when this work was being completely devalued” (74). Only labor that supplied the public market was valuable in this emerging economy. Proletarian women had limited access to wages, unlike their male counterparts, so they were even more vulnerable to impoverishment.

Inflation caused by merchant greed and the development of a global “market-system” negatively affected the European proletariat. The influx of precious metals from the Americas worsened his trend, called the Price Revolution. “Real wages” plummeted by two-thirds during this time, while the cost of food rose over the course of the 17th century:

This was not the work of the invisible hand of the market, but the product of state policy that prevented laborers from organizing, while giving merchants the maximum freedom with the pricing and movement of goods (76).

This development was catastrophic for women, who now netted one-third of what men did under these same circumstances. The degradation of the working-class diet and the increase in sex work speak to declining standards of living. Malnutrition was widespread, and women often participated in food riots. Evidence of prosecution for “food crimes” appears frequently in historical records from the early modern period. Because witches were said to feast with the devil, consuming “roasted mutton white bread […] and wine was now considered a diabolical act in the case of the ‘common people’” (81).

Europe’s proletarians violently resisted their circumstances. This upheaval inspired “state initiatives” that had three goals: creating “a more disciplined workforce,” preventing resistance, and imposing jobs on workers (83). States practiced “social enclosure” by enacting restrictions on leisure time and activities that previously bonded the proletariat, forcing them into longer working hours. States henceforth made social assistance available under this weak system, making them “the guarantor of the class relation and the chief supervisor of the reproduction and disciplining of the work-force” (84). These actions prefigured the modern welfare state and further divided the poor into those deemed worthy of help and those not. Moreover, legislations criminalized the proletariat by, for example, making aid dependent on the recipients’ confinement to the English workhouses.

European nations and their colonies experienced a “General Crisis” in the 1620s and 1630s. During this time the economy contracted, leading to concerns about population decline. According to mercantilist economic theory, demographic growth was crucial for economic development and thus political power. Therefore states began to transport convicts to colonies, establish workhouses, and use enslavement to supplement their workforces. Likewise, women’s bodies were now a public concern, and in response to concerns about declining populations and labor shortages, “procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation” (89). Women’s work thus became primarily reproductive, which capitalism treats as unproductive and thus valueless.

At the same time, capitalist states waged “war” on women in the form of witch hunts to control their bodies. States “demonized any form of birth-control and non-procreative sexuality” (88), and women suffered more severe punishments for these “reproductive crimes.” The number of women convicted of infanticide soared. Meanwhile, midwives were expected to report women for reproductive crimes and work under a male physician’s supervision. Outside the home, male artisans, in conjunction with government officials, drove women away from their occupations by paying them less, and sex work—now criminalized—proliferated because of women’s exclusion from paid labor. Women who acted outside of social norms were deemed whores, witches, and scolds; early modern literature revels in punishing these women.

These developments gave rise to the “housewife and the reconstruction of the family as the locus for the production of labor-power” (95). Families began to operate as microcosms of the state, with proletarian men governing female relations via wage deprivation. Wages belonged to husbands even if their wives had to work to generate needed income, often outside of the home as servants. This phenomenon is what Federici terms the “patriarchy of the wage” (98). Women lost economic independence and “social power” due to the wage system and the pressure to procreate.

Enslavement was essential to ensuring productivity in European colonies and established a template for Europe’s Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism:

The plantation system was crucial for capitalist development not only because of the immense amount of surplus labor that was accumulated from it, but because it set a model of labor management, export-oriented production, economic integration and international division of labor that have since became paradigmatic for capitalist class relations (104).

Enslavement negatively affected Europe’s working class by driving down wages. Colonization occurred in tandem with the suppression and exploitation of the European proletariat. Enslaved people and indentured servants in the Americas sometimes united, eventually causing elites to impose divisive racial hierarchies. Legislation “demonized” interaction between white women and Black men, much like the demonized women’s sexuality, imposing a “segregated, racist society” (108).

Enslaved women’s reproduction became more heavily regulated after the abolition of the trade of enslaved people in 1807. Enslavers encouraged reproduction through force and enslaved women were subjected to sexual violence. Women of all races were subordinate to male workers, dividing the working class and thus empowering capitalists.