Witches of the First International

international | anti-capitalism | other press Saturday December 04, 2004 22:18 by pinko

Audio recording of Silvia Federici.

Silvia Federici is author of "Caliban And The Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation" and this presentation about the book was recorded in NYC at the end of November.

Silvia Federici is author of "Caliban And The Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation" and this presentation about the book was recorded in NYC at the end of November.


"During the 16th and 17th century, hundreds of thousands of women were burned as witches across Europe. This holocaust, unprecedented in the history of any society before or since, is at the center of this brilliant new book by Silvia Federici, an early opponent of the IMF's role in Third World countries and veteran feminist theorist. This book is the most important new work on the origins of capitalism to appear in thirty years, since Immanual Wallerstein's The Modern World System. For activists today, Caliban and the Witch is more relevant and useful to our anticapitalist struggles and movements. For the inspiration for the book came from the author's years in Nigeria where she witnessed and participated in struggles against IMF and World Bank structural adjustment and privatization of land and resources. The book is part and parcel of the anticapitalist globalization movement (or global justice movement) and links the struggles at the dawn of the capitalist era with those in Chiapas, in Bolivia, in the oil fields of southern Nigeria, in the forests of Indonesia, against privatization of communally owned land and wealth"

Steven Colatrella