Our month-long unearthing of the most revolutionary and obscured works of Feminist Cinema and Art is underway, and June’s first entry into the ever-expanding WRITE BRAIN TV RADICAL LIBRARY is Italian-American scholar and writer Silvia Federici’s revelatory Marxist-Feminist classic Caliban and the Witch.

Examining the politicization of gender and family during various periods of history – most intriguingly as seen in the European witch hunts and the primitive accumulation process of the Early Modern period – Federici argues that the division of labor along the lines of sex was implemented by the clergy and aristocracy as a way to maintain order and quell rising proletariat unrest.

The reproductive labor of women thus became a necessity for Capitalism’s burgeoning dominance, vanquishing women to unpaid domestic labor roles and subjugating their role in society as ‘second-class’ in order to fuel the newly-oriented productive forces. Challenging Marx while simultaneously bolstering his theories of primitive accumulation’s primacy in the development of the Capitalist mode of production, Federici forges a groundbreaking new pathway to understanding the patriarchy’s stronghold on our world.

Born in Italy, Federici studied her Ph.D in Philosphy in the United States before taking a teaching position in Nigeria, later retiurning to New York to teach at Hofstra University, where she is currently Professor Emerita.

WRITE BRAIN TV is proud to present this paradigm-shattering historical work by Marxist-Feminism’s “Caretaker of the Commons”.