witchy resistance

quotes from caliban & the witch by silvia federici

"the figure of the witch, who in the tempest is confined to a remote background, in this volume is placed at the center-stage, as the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the womyn who dared to live alone, the obeha womyn who poisoned the master's food and inspired the slaves to revolt."

"a return of the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of womyn are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times."

"it is generally agreed that the witch-hunt aimed at destroying the control that womyn had exercised over their reproductive function and served to pave the way for the development of a more oppressive patriarchal regime."

"feminists have uncovered and denounced the strategies and the violence by means of which male-centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the female body, demonstrating that womyn's bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power techniques and power-relations. . . [including] the policing of womyn's reproductive function, the effects on womyn of rape, battering, and the imposition upon them of beauty as a condition for social acceptability."

"the body has been for womyn in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance, as the female body has been appropriated by the state and men and forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor."

"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 - by denigrating the 'nature' of those it exploits: womyn, colonial subjects, the descendants of african slaves, the immigrants displaced by globalization."

"marx did not see that the development of workers' industrial powers was at the cost of the underdevelopment of their powers as social individuals, although he recognized that workers in capitalist society become so alienated from their labor, from their relations with others, and the products of their work as to become dominated by them as if by an alien force."