Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne
Silvia Federici is a scholar, author and activist whose pioneering feminist thought explores witches, women and labour in a capitalist world. She is the author of books including Wages Against Housework (1975), Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Kairos/PM Press, 2018) and perhaps mostly famously Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), which was reissued by Penguin Classics in 2021. In the latter title she argues that the witch hunt in Europe, far from the vestigial brutality of a superstitious and pre-rational society, was a politically motivated genocide against proletarian women, especially those who knew how to control fertility, and the ultraviolent culmination of the process by which women were socially degraded and their domestic labour rendered invisible as capitalism imposed itself. The women’s struggle, she argues, goes hand in hand with class struggle and anticolonial resistance; witch hunting is a practice that continues today, especially in a number of African countries, Indian states and Papua New Guinea.Born in Italy, Federici is based in New York, where she is a professor emerita at Hofstra University. She spoke with Amy Booth via Zoom in September 2022 about contemporary capitalism, witches and witch-hunting, and how magic and enchantment can be a subversive, anti-capitalist practice. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amy Booth Many people describe us as living in late stage capitalism today. Do you feel that term is a useful description of how we live and work?
Silvia Federici This is a very difficult question, because in a way, sure, it's late capitalism, because capitalism is five centuries old. But sometimes the notion of late capitalism also suggests that this is the last phase. And I don't think I'm ready to subscribe to that view, because capitalism is very dominant, very strong, despite having shown its constant propensity to create crises, and to be extremely destructive for the reproduction of billions on the planet.
Nevertheless, I'm not prepared to say that this is late, in the sense that it's near to its end. But I would say that, yes, we are living in a capitalist society, that I think it is useful, because it's important not to look at the different crises that we are living through–climate, growing mass impoverishment, the growing fascistization and militarization of life–as separate events, but to see that there is a logic, a system.
And I think this has been one of the great contributions that Marx’s work, for all its limits, has given us, to understand that there is something of a social system, and that we should understand the connection between, for example, the crisis in healthcare across the world–so many people have died not because of disease, but because of the dismantling of the sanitary system–and the crisis for example of the climate, desertification, deforestation, the fires that are now burning an entire region, and that those are not unrelated. And homelessness, and violence against women.
AB You describe various characteristics that made women more vulnerable to being labelled as witches during the witchhunt: poor women, older women, women who knew how to control reproduction and pregnancy, and women whose sexuality was seen as non-conforming. Who are today's witches? And how are they hunted?
SF I think it depends on the region and the place. Many of those categories still apply. For example, I know in Latin America a number of women who have been very involved in recuperating traditional remedies and herbs have been blamed. Curanderas [traditional healers] have been accused of using witchcraft. But also today, the attack on women as witches is very much tied to macro processes of destruction of communal relations, and particularly communal land tenure, and forms of land expropriation.
In Africa, for instance, in several countries, a woman becomes liable to be accused of being a witch when she begins to have access to land of her own. So these huge processes that have been taking place in the aftermath of the World Bank, the IMF, mining companies, international capital, expanded massively and violently throughout the former colonised world, disrupting communal relations, and what remained of communitarianism. [People] often select the woman, the witch, in a way to amplify the conflicts, the division, the suspicion that is already generated every time a society falls apart.
AB Would it be possible to give an example of how organisations like the World Bank shape these processes in Africa?
SF What we have seen, for example, in Africa, in Papua and in other places, is that the structural adjustment programme has been a massive programme of recolonization. It has devalued the currency, reorganised the economy undermining all forms of local production, opened the door to imports, which of course only a limited sector of the population can afford, and has set forth a process that changes the law on land tenure. It basically pushes for a massive process of privatisation, on the one hand, and on selling the titles, individual titling, turning what was communal into individual, which is a very, very violent process.
And on the other, you know, promoting massive forms of clearance, expulsion, organised by the state and condoned by the World Bank, to basically open the door to mining companies, petroleum, agribusiness, under the name of development, with the idea of paying the debt. So, we have seen society whose basic condition of social production, the material condition, has been completely disrupted.
Then, in the middle of that, you have the arrival of these Pentecostal sects, evangelical, etcetera, who bring a very fierce Christian ideology, fundamentalist, which basically argues that there is witchcraft, there is Satan, that there are people in the community who are demonic, and are fueling the whole process of division that goes hand in hand with the economic disruption of communitarian relation, right? So all of this is creating a very explosive mixture where old forms of patriarchalism are revived, men pushing women out. In their original village, everybody born into it has access to the land, but in the moment of crisis when the land is becoming more scarce, and when land has to be subdivided, then who has the right to the land?
I see many witch hunts have that motive, particularly directed against older women who live isolated, don't have people to defend them, yet have some land–they are the ones accused of being witches. Then in several African countries like Angola, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, we have seen, increasingly, children being accused of being demonic. I've heard interviews with children where they ask, "Why do they say you are demonic?" and they say, “Because I was getting up at night and eating the family’s food.”
So you begin to build the image of a population besieged, and instigators from outside. We have seen two figures in Africa developing over the last 20-25 years: the witchfinder and the exorcist. The exorcist goes around identifying children who are demonic, asking for some money from the family to liberate them from the devil, often with little forms of torture against these poor children. But many families throw the children out in the streets. There is the ideology that these children are demonic, but fundamentally it's a life that is unsustainable, and the elderly and the children become a burden in a way they've not been before.
There is, of course, also an intergenerational issue: younger people, mostly unemployed, with no future–the only road out is maybe to take a boat and drown in the Mediterranean, or hope to make it to Europe, or look at these elders who are holding on to older forms of life. They don't want to sell the cow. They don't want to sell the little piece of land. They have a conception of what wealth is. And the youth may want to get a taxi–they see the monetary economy as a guarantee of prosperity. So the witch hunt comes out in this combustion.
AB The term “witch hunt” is now used mostly as a metaphor in the western world, but the original witch hunts, as you show, were effectively a genocide against proletarian women. Is it appropriate for, say, the alt right to use this metaphor? Or for anyone to use it?
SF The witch hunt for example, during the McCarthy period in the United States, is that once you are indicted, once you’re fingered, you have no way out, it's not possible to prove or disprove, you are immediately considered guilty. Right? And it's basically a distortion of reality. So I cannot say that it's not appropriate to use the metaphor. I think what is not appropriate is to forget the history behind it. Many people use the word “witch hunt” without realising actually what took place.
I'm particularly concerned with the fashion that today is growing among the younger generation of women towards things relating to witchcraft, which is a kind of sexy thing, right? And not realising what the history is, that there’s nothing sexy, that women died screaming, under torture, “no, I'm not a witch”, knowing that the category “witch” was imposed on them by the state, and was a category that labelled them as the worst individual imaginable: enemy of the state, enemy of God, enemy of society, enemy of the people. So they died under torture, and they were burned, charged with witchcraft.
So I'm worried when the concept is recuperated without the history, because I think that history is crucial for women to know. And as we just said, it is not a thing of the past. It's happening today, women today are dying saying “no, I'm not a witch.” This is happening in several states of India, in a growing number of regions, East Timor, even in Saudi Arabia, women have been executed, decapitated, charged with witchcraft. So we have to be extremely careful.
AB You discuss how magic, magical beliefs and enchantment were a potent form of resistance to capitalism, and the very reason the witch hunt happened when it did was a form of stamping out these beliefs that were an impediment to capitalism. Is it possible today for us to use magical or spiritual practices as a way of rebelling against the capitalist system?
SF I think there is, for example, in the ecological movement, women in rural areas are preserving seeds, to fight deforestation, and to basically, revive a conception and relationship with the natural world that can be described as magical, because, at the centre of the magic I was describing was a sense of nature as a living organism.
Today we have movements who speak about nature having rights. In other words, not only human beings, we're moving away from an anthropocentric conception of life, that has justified the destruction of nature and killing animals and so on. And recuperating a view of the world that sees our body, our life, on a continuum, with the world of nature and animals. The animals are our companions on this earth, and we can communicate with them, as, for example, in the Middle Ages, it was believed that animals spoke, or that animals had feelings, were thinking even. As I mentioned in [Caliban and the Witch], animals were put on trial until the 17th century, because it was believed that they were not brutes, not insensitive. So I think that recuperating the relationship with the natural world, seeing the natural world as animated, living, capable of teaching us things, and capable of giving us wisdom, and giving us life, enhancing our life–I think that's magical.
And that's a very positive character, against all the destructive forces of capitalism, who are looking at nature as basically a supermarket of commodities to be used, destroyed, and thrown away.
AB Speaking of animals, in recent years veganism has seen massive growth. Do you think the animal rights movement is a natural partner of the feminist movement in the fight against capitalism?
SF Yes, I'm all for the animals. I mean, I'm not always able to not eat meat, but I do, yes. I think the animals liberation movement is definitely fighting for the same principles as the feminist movement. Absolutely: the animals are our companions.
AB When COVID vaccines came out, we saw the growth of the anti-vax movement, in some cases linked to discourses around herbal medicine and traditional medicine that I think are quite complex. We must be careful not to not to dismiss this valuable ancient knowledge, which has traditionally also been female knowledge. At the same time, there's a sense that it's being subverted in the name of libertarianism. What do you think?
SF Well, I think it's very complicated. The anti-vaccination movement, you know, has now acquired a negative association, because it's associated with Trump, fascism, libertarianism, etcetera. I'm not a medical expert but a part of me, certainly, when I began to hear all the insistence of vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, was a little bit hesitant at first, for the simple reason that we are being asked to trust pharmaceutical companies who do not have a clean background. Big Pharma has been involved in a tremendous speculation that has cost people's lives. And yet, they've never been held responsible. So, I want to say that perhaps not all vaccine hesitation is to be imputed to libertarian thinking, right?
And the other thing that I want to say is that there is some objection to the idea that vaccination is the solution, when the real roots of what is killing us is not being addressed: malnutrition, living conditions, and so on.
By the way, I'm vaccinated, I got a booster, because in the uncertainty, I decided that I didn’t want to risk my and other people's lives by not doing it. At the same time, I do have a lot of criticism about the way the whole campaign around vaccination is being presented by the institutions. Number one, because we are asked to trust pharmaceutical companies that in the past don't have a clean record. And number two, because no attention is being given to all the conditions that are causing mortality. Right now, as we're speaking, in the town of Jackson, Mississippi, 170,000 mostly Black people have been for days and days and days, without clean water, because there's been no investment and the water is completely polluted. In the United States, Flint, Michigan used to be one of the great industrial centres. People for years and children have been consciously exposed to heavily contaminated water contaminated by lead and by other metal poisons, metallic poisons and this was done with knowledge of the consequence, nobody has paid, nobody's gone to prison, and children are still suffering from the consequences of that. And we are not even talking about on a global level, all the policies that are really criminal and yet have now the day to day policy pipeline, one pipeline after another, this certification mining.
To give a small example from New York City, we have seen that many people have died, because as I was saying before the sanitary system was dismantled. We have seen that those who have died most were in the Bronx, which is a section of the CDC mostly inhabited by black people, and an area so contaminated that the children are born with asthma. So there is institutional hypocrisy in concentrating everything on the vaccine and ignoring the many, many policies that are actually destroying our life, but these are the policies that are making capitalism rich.
I also had to say that I think more than 4 million people have died of COVID. Nine million died of cancer in 2017, but nobody talks about cancer because that’s an environmental condition, nobody talks about the the epidemic of neurological conditions, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers, that we know are created by environmental situations, we don't talk about the increasing number of suicides in the United States, 40,000 people a year die now of suicide, and the figure is considered very conservative. And yet we only hear about vaccination and COVID the big threat, while all the rest is ignored.
AB Yes, I used to live in Bolivia, a country that has drawn attention because of the number of people who don't want to be vaccinated. Bolivia is also a country with a huge indigenous population, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. People buy food not in the supermarket, but in the market, where women sell Moringa, sell plants that in their knowledge system, they say will cure diabetes, and it seems like a lot of people there perhaps feel that the vaccine is a scientific rationalist solution, with all of the history of colonial oppression that comes with that.
SF Yeah, I think it’s also that a lot of people were afraid, like in the black population in the United States, where many people know about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. They deceived people, withholding treatment from syphilis sufferers who didn’t know they had the disease, instead giving them placebos, just to study them, and allowing them to die and suffer.
And we have learned recently that they did even worse in Guatemala, where they actually injected [thousands of] people with syphilis to study the course of the disease. So lots of communities that have been marginalised and discriminated against are very suspicious when they see the white men coming with a syringe, and you cannot blame them.
AB It's fairly often argued that financialized capitalism has rendered certain human bodies obsolete. What does that mean for the relationship between capitalism, bodies and the earth?
SF Yeah, I don't believe that, I think we are continuously being told that now the machines will do everything. The machines will not do anything! Here I side with Marx, that the machines do not produce value. Actually, the amount of labour people are doing has tremendously increased. [For] most people, what has diminished is the remuneration.
And the women in particular, once you eliminate the whole sphere of reproductive labour and declare that that is not work, then you can think of technology. Well, I'm taking care of my partner now, and I work almost 15 hours a day with a few hours a night trying to, in between, do some of my own work. No machine replaces that. We can buy diapers, instead of washing them, as women used to do. But actually the work of taking care of a child cannot be mechanised.
Even in an optimal society, the idea that machines can take over everything, is really an illusion, because there are types of work that are so intensely interactive that replacing them with machines is an impoverishment in our reproductive life. Which doesn't mean [being] against technology, but it means that this idea, I think, is used to scare us, to say, “Accept any kind of wage, because now you are completely replaceable”. Well, if anything, COVID has shown what a lie that is.
AB COVID was a scary reminder that a lot of people, including powerful people, view older adults, especially women, as expendable. What do you think of that?
SF Well, you know, I’m eighty years old! *laughs* So you can imagine! Yeah, it’s a great disgrace, and a great crisis, and of course, they're finding every way to make us die younger. But in older societies, for example, in the indigenous societies of the Americas, the elderly were treasured, considered wise people, because over their lifetime, you begin to see the causes of things, you begin to see the patterns, you also interpret the forces operating in your own life and in society. And so there's a whole knowledge, and older people were treasured for their knowledge. So elderly people were the ones who made important decisions.
And I want to stress that they were seen as the memory bank of the community. Today, the image of the elderly is associated with Alzheimers. What kind of society has produced a generation of elderly people who are not capable of remembering any longer? What kind of destruction are we going through in this society, that we’re erasing the past in indigenous societies? We were the memory bank. Now, we are those without memory. And what does it mean not having that transmission? It's a big big crime, it’s a big, big loss, the same way as losing trees and forests.
I think that COVID, again, in this case, brought to the surface a crisis that was there. You know, families not having time to care for the elderly, most of the elderly now are poor, they have jobs that do not guarantee security for old age, and then they are dumped into a nursing home where often they are tied to a bed, particularly if they have Alzheimers. So they develop bedsores, they're left in their excrement, or they're given tranquillisers so they don't know what's happening to them. These are turning some nursing homes, really, into small concentration camps, and this is a disgrace. And I think it's a disgrace that social movements have not really fought to place the issue of elderly care at the centre of the political programme.
AB In the United States and some countries in Europe, we're seeing a crackdown on abortion rights, trans rights have become a target for the far right, and trans bodies are increasingly being increasingly legislated. Should feminists be gearing up for a fresh witch hunt now?
SF We have been the target of the right for a long time, I mean being deprived completely of the whole issue of abortion, control of our body, the fact that we have a right wing movement and evangelical movement, church and a great part of the institution. I think that's clearly the connection with the witch hunt. Women charged with interfering with reproduction, with conception, were often accused of being witches. We see the same processes now in the United States. Some doctors practising abortion have been murdered. In some states, governments have called for bills introducing capital punishment for abortion. There are actually parts of the right wing in this country who are ready to execute people. If they see an abortion, it's just murder, so I think that we have to be extremely, extremely worried.
And I understand that people like Bolsonaro in Brazil do have a lot of support from women as well. And even some black women, because he's presenting himself as a supporter of Christianity and the value of morality, the family. And so that, I think, is what we are up against. And this is the climate also in which new witch hunts are becoming possible. I think that the struggle to defend all forms of dissidents and defend the right to control our own body is very central to any social movement, not only women. I think it'd be time, if men also put this struggle on their own agenda. I think it is something really peculiar that they should see this only as a women's issue. Of course, it's a women's issue because it's our body. But why are men not also fighting? Why men are not supporting the struggle for abortion? Some are. But historically, it's always been a women's issue.
Amy Booth is a British journalist based in Argentina who covers human rights and politics in Latin America. She is the deputy director of the Buenos Aires Herald, and has produced written and audio work for the BBC, the Guardian, FP, and Thomson Reuters Foundation, among many others. When she's not at work she's probably marathon training or doing trapeze.
This interview was originally published in the Earth Issue of Cunning Folk, published in 2022.