Witch Hunts and Tribunals

Caliban and the Witch, Women The Body and Primitive Accumulation, by Silvia Federici

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that capitalism did not simply emerge as an economic system—it required the deliberate remaking of the human being. Central to this transformation was the invention of the “body as machine”: a disciplined, regulated, and productive entity shaped to meet the demands of wage labor.

Federici links this shift to the rise of Cartesian dualism, which separated mind from body and allowed institutions to treat the body as an object—something to control, extract from, and optimize. What had once been understood as a living, relational, and even “magical” body was recast as inert and mechanical.

This transformation was enforced through violence and systemic repression. The witch hunts, in Federici’s analysis, were not isolated hysteria but a coordinated campaign to destroy women’s autonomy—especially knowledge of reproduction, healing, and communal life. At the same time, activities deemed “unproductive” were criminalized, imposing a rigid discipline aligned with emerging capitalist norms.

For women in particular, this restructuring meant their bodies were reduced to instruments for reproducing labor power. Through what Federici calls the “patriarchy of the wage,” reproductive labor was made invisible and unpaid, creating dependency while sustaining the system itself.

Federici ultimately contends that this “mechanization of the body” was foundational to capitalism—no less essential than colonial conquest or the slave trade—marking a profound reorganization of life, labor, and human possibility.

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Framework Integration: Body, Land, and the Tribunal of Life

Within the Tribunal Rising Fellowship, we understand that systems of power do not begin with law—they begin with control over the body, and from there extend to land, labor, and memory.

Drawing from Caliban and the Witch, Fellows are introduced to the concept that capitalism required the remaking of the human being into a “body-machine”—a form disciplined for labor, stripped of autonomy, and separated from spirit, land, and collective life. This transformation was not natural; it was enforced through coordinated violence, including the destruction of communal knowledge systems and the targeting of women’s autonomy through the witch hunts.

This framework aligns directly with the historical realities examined in Tribunal work:

The enclosure of land and the enclosure of the body are one and the same process.

The criminalization of Indigenous lifeways, ceremony, and subsistence practices reflects the same logic that criminalized “non-productive” life in early Europe.

The control of reproduction—whether through forced sterilization, family separation, or economic coercion—remains a central mechanism of governance.

Fellows are asked to recognize that what Federici identifies as the “mechanization of the body” continues today through carceral systems, labor exploitation, environmental contamination, and the ongoing regulation of Indigenous and marginalized communities.

Application to Tribunal Practice

The Tribunal Rising Fellowship positions emerging leaders to intervene in this historical continuum—not only through analysis, but through cultural production, documentation, and public testimony.

Fellows will:

1/ Investigate how systems of control over the body are embedded in local and global struggles (e.g., environmental justice, land dispossession, labor conditions, reproductive rights).

2/ Produce media, oral histories, and public-facing work that restores the body as relational, sovereign, and inseparable from land and community.

3/ Engage People’s Tribunal frameworks as instruments to expose how these systems operate across time—from the witch hunts to colonial conquest to present-day policy.