Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici (Chapter I - All the World Needs a Jolt)

Women, the body and 'primitive accumulation'. In just the first chapter of this essential work, Silvia Federici wrestles with these topics, and many more. Join us in the first of our readings on 'Caliban and the Witch', a groundbreaking book which tells the hidden history of the role of women in relation to the birth of capitalism, augments Marx's theory of primitive accumulation and teaches us to look afresh at both colonisation and the witch trials. In this first episode we will be looking at heretic movements, the very real class struggles waged by the peasants during capital's violent reaction against feudalism, the effect of the black death upon power relations and how the ruling class began trying to reduce women to nothing more than the reproducers of the labour force. This episode is part of our series on Marxist feminists. As Thomas Sankara said, “Women hold up the other half of the sky.” Red Book Club recognizes that including the voices of nonmen in our studies is not a niche activity, but is in fact an essential step in gaining the most comprehensive view of the material conditions of the past and present as we possibly can; so we’ve planned this series to amplify the ideas that nonmen have been bringing to the conversation for centuries. From Federici’s analysis of women as a means of primitive accumulation to Luxemburg’s essay of the benefits of revolution vs the impossibility of reform, each of these works confronts history and the movement for social change through the lens of the experiences of nonmen in society.

You can listen to Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici (Chapter I - All the World Needs a Jolt) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici (Chapter I - All the World Needs a Jolt) is an episode from Red Book Club by RBC.

This episode is 01:26:54 long.

This episode was published on Feb 23, 2020.

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