Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

But for many people, and particularly for women and brown-skinned people who lived far away – the dawning of capitalism was to be plunged into utter darkness. The transition from feudalism to capitalism gets a pretty good rap as one of human progress – you know, the metaphors used are very much those of a new day dawning – we are moving from the ‘dark ages’ to the ‘enlightenment’. The point of this book is, in part anyway, to show that the primitive accumulation argument Marx uses ignores the part played both by women and the native populations in the new world in providing capitalism with this initial capital impetus along the road to full capitalist development.Īnd so this is the story of centuries of nightmares.

Marx does this to show there is no basis upon which capitalism can argue that a future working class revolution taking the means of production from capitalists is immoral, since capitalist wealth is, in all senses, stolen in the first place. So, he talks about what he calls the primitive accumulation of capital – this involves the early capitalists effectively stealing wealth from those around them so they have the initial capital they needed to begin the process of capitalist production and therefore further accumulation of wealth that surplus value brings into being. In Capital, Marx needs to explain how capitalism got started. This book is really something else – I can’t recommend it too highly.

Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici