Sycorax, Lucifer, Marx, and other important parents

Back when we read Silvia Federici's Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women for the political book club, we also determined that for October, it being the spooky month, we were going to read Caliban and the Witch. And then we did!

 

Caliban and the Witch is not real long, but it is real dense. Not necessarily linguistically dense, although it is an academic work so it tends to do stuff like use "misogynous" instead of "misogynistic," which probably has some theoretical distinction that I'm not really aware of, but which does tend to mark the book as Doin A Srs Bsns in a way that I'm not always super fond of. But it's not hard to read. It's just hard to read fast, because there is a lot of very chewy material that really needs some time to be absorbed.

 

Once it's absorbed, though, it's the kind of stuff that reorients your entire understanding of the relationship between gender and capitalism. There's a whole bunch of stuff in the book that I sort of knew, whether from hearing other people discuss Caliban and the Witch or because Federici has been very influential over the past few decades, but having it all laid out instead of filtered in secondhand in bits and pieces makes a real difference.

 

We had a pretty meaty, packed discussion, and I feel like I already said most of what I have to say about it and now my brain is too tired to write all my thoughts out again. Or possibly I feel like I am too dumb to risk committing analysis about Federici to writing? No, I'm pretty sure that if I'd read this on my own and sat down to write a review in a timely manner, I'd have rambled out like a dozen pages.

 

Anyway, my favorite line in the whole book was when she pointed out that magic has been sort of "allowed" to return now that the project of imposing capitalist work-discipline on the populace has been so thoroughly completed, and mentioned that "even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work." I have little interest in astrology but as a tarot dork I must reluctantly admit that I will never skip work due to a bad Golden Thread draw (it would be awesome if I could, though, since Golden Thread is the world's crankiest and most negative tarot program). And the word "consumer" in there also hints towards a whole other discussion about the commodification of the witch figure and commodified resistance generally, which I think is especially pertinent in our current age of "witchcraft as self-care" combined with the coopting of self-care by the wellness industry. It is also pertinent to me personally as someone who lives within going-broke distance of Salem and is a huge sucker for its whole general Goth Disneyland tourist-trappy New Age scene (seriously, don't ask me how much money I spent in Salem this fall). There are also a lot of implications here for how we write magic in fiction, trying to make it fit modern ideas about what makes "sense" and is logically consistent, and how that doesn't tend to look much like precapitalist magic "traditions" at all.

 

The second half of the book focuses more on the "Caliban" part of "Caliban and the witch," tying the land enclosures and other early capitalist happenings in Europe to the colonization of the New World and the genocidally massive labor needs of that project. There's some real fascinating stuff in there about the ways in which European settlers engineered the imposition of their (awful) ideas about family, gender, childhood, etc. onto indigenous peoples as part and parcel of breaking their solidarity and their resistance to colonial rule.

 

I really can't recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in feminism and capitalism and witchy shit, not because it is perfect (it's not; there's some goofy historical "details" in there of questionable sourcing), but because it provides some important grounding for understanding a lot of modern socialist feminist thought and it will influence how you think about subjects of accumulation, reproductive labor, scientific progress, work-discipline, and a host of other issues.