The foreward, by Alain Bihr, was taken from the abridged brochure, available at des éditions Smolny.Ĭritical analysis of Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch demonstrates her lack of seriousness in dealing with an important issue: why was the last phase (from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century) of the multi-secular transition from feudalism to capitalism accompanied in Western Europe by a deterioration of the situation of women, from the top to the bottom of the social ladder? In the course of their criticism, Yann Kindo and Christophe Darmangeat mention two important elements of an answer, moreover largely linked to each other: on the one hand, the reintroduction of Roman law during the Middle Ages, and, through it, that of the Roman conception of private property, both full (involving both the usus, the fructus and the abusus 1) and free (transmissible and alienable) and, on the other hand, the triumph of the nuclear family over other family structures (patriarchal family and family-stock)–both elements and conditions of the formation of capitalist relations of production–giving the woman a status of legal minor, excluding her (largely) from the transfer of property and placing it under the tutelage of husband after that of his father.

Federici deals with them (badly) the second tries to discuss the main theoretical understandings developed in the book. The first, for the most part, deals with the historical facts themselves and the method with which S. The following is a translation of a collaborative critique of Caliban and the Witch, written by Yann Kindo and Christophe Darmangeat in December 2017, and published in two separate essays on their respective blogs: La Faucille et le Labo, and La Hutte des Classes.

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