Part I. Capitalist Patriarchy and The Womb
Capitalism has a complicated relationship with women. Capitalism- the system in which 72 million American women aged 16 years and over are active labor force participants, the system in which those women still make (on average) only three quarters of the salary their male peers do- is the mechanism by which we have come into our current milieu of fifth wave feminism, a milieu that is rightly criticised for its’ consumer culture and lack of intersectionality. These conditions are all products of the economic system within which we are living, and these conditions all rely upon the pillars on which capitalism is supported. There are many social structures that support capitalism, both hidden and overt, but among the most critical and least understood is patriarchy.
Women have been oppressed by patriarchy since long before capitalism ever came into fruition which begins to explain why it is critical to a deep understanding of women's’ role in society today. Patriarchy is a system of society in which men hold primary powers that women are excluded from. Radical-libertarian feminist Shulamith Firestone proposes in her book The Creation of Patriarchy that patriarchy is a result of our biological inequalities. Most critically, that cisgender women bear children, while cisgender men do not. It is worth noting that the patriarchy does not operate on this basis alone – infecund women, transgender women and voluntarily childless women still face the challenges of patriarchal oppression every day- but that the womb is the primary genesis of patriarchy as a system. This jumping off point is where patriarchy and capitalism combine to create the system of despotism women have faced since the enforcement of both in ‘modern’ society. Iris Marion Young, an interactive systems theorist, has used the term capitalist patriarchy to describe both this process and the reality of cyclical dehumanization which has targeted women for centuries.
Capitalist patriarchy is particularly tied to the womb because reproduction is the most essential part of ensuring a future labor force; without women to reproduce, the entire economic system fails because labourers age out of productivity and are not replaced with young people entering the workforce. We see this mechanic system at work in places like Japan where the labor force is aging more rapidly than it is being replenished, resulting in a severe cut in productivity as the aging population dies off. This phenomenon is one of the fundamental premises of Margaret Atwood’s bestselling book The Handmaid’s Tale published in 1985. The novel details the lives of women inhabiting a disturbingly realistic dystopian society ruled by theonomic military dictatorship where plummeting birth rates have led to reproductive coercion and forced pregnancy among all fertile women in the society. It is important to point out that in both this fiction and our reality modern capitalism still functions on a mostly patrilineal means of accumulating real and fictitious capital, therefore, women function as the surrogates for the business cycle because they produce every character in the capital caste system from the proletariat to the bourgeois hegemon.
This unequivocal tie between capital accumulation and the necessity of the womb has been theorized for decades. Many proponents of critical feminism and marxist feminism focus on the concept that this connection serves as the only ‘real’ role for women within the capitalist system because it is the only uniqueness women can claim that gives them any real power in the means of production. The connection between womb and reinforcement of capital, while giving women a critical role in the system, also serves to reinforce patriarchy, since it ensures that women are seen for their reproductive biology first and their personal contributions to the system second. This hierarchy of productivity becomes a cyclical reinvention of the system as a whole because capitalism imposes a strategy of “divide and rule” on the ground of race or sex to reinforce caste order.
Part II. Capitalist Ideology and Witchcraft
For a period of roughly 300 years from the 14th Century until 1730 a still unknown number of women were executed for witchcraft. Numbers are hard to estimate because these crimes often went unreported and executions were more of a “kill on site” policy rather than formal accusal of a crime. The first instances of legislating witchcraft came in Henry VIII's Witchcraft Act of 1542. The act set precedent for witchcraft to be treated as a felony punishable by execution and forfeiture of goods to the state. The best estimates from the time put the number of women killed for witchcraft in this period at about 120,000 people who were burned at the stake, hanged, stoned and mutilated for their practices of:
…practise or exercise, or cause to be devised practised or exercised, any Invovacons or cojuracons of Sprites witchcraft enchantments or sorceries to thentent to fynde money or treasure or to waste consume or destroy any persone in his bodie membres, or to pvoke [provoke] any persone to unlawfull love, or for any other unlawfull intente or purpose … or for dispite of Cryste, or for lucre of money, dygge up or pull downe any Crosse or Crosses or by such Invovacons or cojuracons of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntementes or sorceries or any of them take upon them to tell or declare where goodes stollen or lost shall become…
Witchcraft was a major part of life in this period, it was a system of knowledge and belief that transcended caste in ways that many other systems of belief could not, this made witchcraft both extremely accessible and still undisclosed enough to intrigue. In The Hebrew Bible, which was popular amongst some of the upper working class jews in europe at the time, witches are mentioned approximately five times and penalties for practices of witchcraft are outlined. The most famous passage of these is the passage in Exodus (22:18) “thou shall not suffer a witch to live”. This mention of witchcraft in the 8th-9th century writings was significant in the outline of modern legislature during the late middle ages and in the Protestant Reformation but witchcraft, and the punishment of witchcraft, go back to the origins of social development. The Roman 12 Tables (500 BC) also mention witchcraft. Table number VII-Concerning Crimes-law III states anyone who by spell or magic harms the crops of another shall be put to death. Both of these documents help display what is so challenging about the history of witchcraft, it is still unclear what exactly witchcraft is, why it is, what forms are considered felonies, who the witches were, how many witches died or even what kind of witchcraft these women died for. We are left looking back on a history that is largely undocumented and misunderstood and yet undoubtedly important. In her book Caliban and the Witch philosopher Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts play a huge role in shaping the world that we live in today. A role that has long been ignored. She emphasizes that the left wing is particularly bad at recognizing the witch hunts’ influence on politics and social norms now, taking it further she specifies that Marxists are the worst offenders when it comes to acknowledging our past seeped in magic and sorcery.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism is depicted in most history textbooks as a smooth change in the wider economic system that was the end conclusion of a natural slow progression from noble land ownership. However, the reality of this shift is much darker. In Europe during this transition The Black Death killed one in three people, most of whom were of lower economic classes with less access to medical treatment and clean living conditions. The lower class survivors became crucial members of the economic system became of their relative scarcity following The Black Death, they realized this undiscovered capital and began to make demands to the lordship that ruled over them. This is when feudalism began to crumble. Class consciousness among the peasants led to demands for the end of indentured servitude and slavery, freedom from the property hoarding that had overtaken the upper ruling classes and rioting for laborers rights as working economic contributors. Feudalism could not answer for these many harms and thus early capitalism made its way into Europe.
During this anti-feudal period protests and riots were par for the course of peasant lives. Many of these early resistance movements were led entirely by women and were succeeding amongst the people before being brutalized by the ruling class. In addition to wielding increasing disruptive political power, women in medieval Europe already held a lot of social power because of magic. Thus, we begin to be able to answer the many unanswered questions regarding witchcraft, beginning with who witches are and were.
Magical thinking is a technology of the self. This is a Foucauldian way of essentially saying that the practice and belief of witchcraft and magic changes the subjective beliefs and practices of those who actively engage with these systems of production. Magic is a state of mind, akin to religious belief, scientific belief, etc…Federici argues that capitalism was very difficult to establish in the medieval period, less because of the overwhelming social issues of the time, more because of magic. During this period belief in magic was commonplace, this made the social implementation of capitalism very difficult because capitalism functions as the antithesis of magical belief systems. Magic is, in essence, the promise of getting something from nothing. It is production in a world without strict rules of engagement with work or with the supernatural. Federici says the practice of magic is, “The refusal of work in action.”
We must reconsider what we think capitalism is before we are able to understand what it is not. Capitalism is more than just a system of economics, economics are an incredibly important part of capitalism but they are only part. The system is as much a social organization as it is any kind of economic organization. The kind of capitalism we live with today is the product of systemic social and economic function. These are the preconditions that did not exist in feudal European society, while the end of The Black Death and the reformation meant peasants and middle classes demanded economic capitalism, social systems of knowledge production and belief in magic remained steadfastly defiant to the system of capital exchange.
Capitalism as a social system of knowledge and belief depends on the idea of a product. Brazilian professor of communications and consumption Rose de Melo Rocha calls this concept the paradox of dispossession. The paradox of dispossession is the mindset of capitalism, it is total renouncement of magic in the traditional sense in favor of the magical dimensions of consumption. This is the magic at play in contemporary advertisement, the ideology of products for mass consumption. The promise of magic through purchase, exchange and monetary gain.
Late stage capitalism as we know it today exploits the individual on multiple levels of possession and oppression intertwined with so many aspects of modern life that it is indistinguishable from existence itself. Consumerism and commodity fetishims have replaced the role that magic used to hold in society in favor of object oriented ontology that redirects the self away from mysticism towards products as a means to the same ends. Consumption seeks the same magical realities that occult practices of witchcraft used to provide but the belief system is not produced through witches knowledge systems but rather objects as an element of change. Marx explained commodity fetishism’s philosophic condition in Capital as:
The commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
Objectified values originate in the capacity for a person to consciously (subjectively) ascribe value to a commodity’s subjective ability to produce realities. In the process of economic transaction people ascribe subjective values to commodities which sellers interpret as objective values that are then assigned. Subjective value though, requires the consumer to believe in the commodity consumed. This is the logic behind why we so often find ourselves believing the power of commodity ownership goes beyond the realm of reality. When one walks into a store and sees an article of clothing, the commodity, and leaves the store with or without the product believing it will change some real aspect of their life, attractiveness, gender perception, social acceptance, inner happiness, etc.., this is everyday commodity fetishism in action. Late stage or advanced capitalism necessitates commodity fetishism because it is the system of knowledge and belief that allows consumers to delude themselves into thinking that the ownership of commodities has any tangible reality beyond the physical ownership of a thing. The domination of things has replaced the realm of witchcraft by maintaining magical realities through commodity ownership and fetishism instead of belief in the ability for supernatural figures, witches, producing magical realities.
Harry Potter, though mostly popular with primary school students and their parents, has been interrogated by professors and marxists alike for taking the practices of witchcraft and wizardry and placing them in a capitalist social system. Critically, these books read as an attempt at what is really merely a bourgeois perversion that magic could have concrete rules and science to be taught in a private school for wealthy individuals. Though some of the texts attempt to deal with their historical inaccuracies the conceptual basis of this kind of reality being possible only diminishes the most crucial aspects of magical belief. Oliver Thorn, a published philosopher and YouTube show host said it best, “Magic isn’t meant to explain things; like a lot of spiritual practices, it can be about community and solidarity, but it’s also the refusal of an explanation.”
Part III. Feminist Resistance and Suicidal Marxism
“The goal of capitalist society is to transform life into the capacity to work,” according to Federici. Given the conditions of Europe at the time and its’ regard for witchcraft under feudalism this goal was near impossible, however, one powerful method of the capitalists at this time was to deconstruct all female power and end belief in witchcraft for good.
Witch hunts in European history are not just relics of our beliefs and our power struggles but the keystone (or one of many) that cemented female oppression in favor of capitalism. The witch hunts are perhaps given too much credit when referred to as the end of witchcraft, but it may not be an exaggeration to call them the end of female power. Witch hunts and trials all throughout history served a much darker desire than destroying witchcraft because they destroyed the sovereign sanctity of women to hold power over anything other than reproduction. Many, if not most, of the women who were executed as a result of these hunts were not practitioners of witchcraft, they were simply rebellious women who refused the conditions in which they lived. Today we recognize that many of the women who were persecuted for crimes of sorcery were not actually engaged with the occult, yet we still fail to see that these women represented something to capitalists of yore, they represented dissent from constructed reality, discourse, resistance and suffrage. Marxism and Marxists have ignored witchcraft as the original tool of resistance because of a liberal unwillingness to place faith in systems not deemed objectively true (by the bourgeoisie) but witchcraft is inherently radical feminism and radical anti-capitalism. These ‘witches’ on trial often never engaged in magic but simply refused to relinquish their individual agency to the black magic of capitalism. Reductionist Marxism creates a suicidal element to their ideology and movement by rejecting the power of ideological shifts away from capital through magic. ‘Witches’ who practiced magic and witches who were just women expressing their sovereignty from the capitalist state made up the first apparatus of resistance.