Michael’s Reviews > Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation > Status Update

"That the transition to capitalism inaugurated along period of starvation for worts ers in Europe which plausibly ended because of the economic expansion produced by colonization - is also demonstrated by the fact that, while in the 14th and 15th cen- turies, the proletarian struggle had centered around the demand for "liberty" and less work, by the 16th and 17t, it was mostly spurred by hunger... "

"It is difficult to retrospectively tell how far playing the "sex card" helped the state to discipline and divide the medieval proletariat. What is certain is that this ... was part of a broader process which, in response to the intensification of social conflict, led to the centralization of the state, as the only agent capable of confronting the generalization of the struggle and safeguarding the class relation."

"Thus, between 1350-1450, publicly managed, tax-financed brothels were opened in every town and village in Italy and France, in numbers far superior to those reached in the 19th century. "

"The medieval servile community fell short of these goals, and should not be idealized as an example of communalism. In fact, its example reminds us that neither "communalism"' nor "localism" can be a guarantee of egalitarian relations unless the community controls its means of subsistence and all its members have equal access to them."

"With the use of land also came the use of the "commons'- meadows, forests, lakes, wild pastures - that provided crucial resources for the peasant economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and fostered community cohesion and cooperation. In Northern Italy, control over these resources even provided the basis for the development of communal self-administrations."

"... by denigrating the "nature' of those it exploits: vs. the reality of widespread penury women, colonial subjects, the descendants of African slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization."

"Indeed, the political lesson that we can learn...is that capitalism, as a social-economic system, is necessarily committed to racism and sexism. For capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social relations - the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, and the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury."

"It is not surprising, then, if large-scale violence and enslavement have been on the agenda, as they were in the period of the "transition," with the difference that today the conquistadors are the officers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who are still preaching the worth of a penny to the same populations which the dominant world powers have for centuries robbed and pauperized."

"This is what occurred in the 19th century, when the responses to the rise of socialism, the Paris Commune, and the accumulation crisis of 1873 were the "Scramble for Africa" and the simultaneous creation in Europe of the nuclear family, centered on the economic dependence of women to men - following the expulsion of women from the waged work-place. This is also what is happening today..."

"...Primitive accumulation has been a universal process in every phase of capitalist development, Not accidentally, its original historical exemplar has sedimented strategies that, in different ways, have been re-launched in the face of every major capitalist crisis, serving to cheapen the cost of labor and to hide the exploitation of women and colonial subjects."