Dealing with the Devil: Silvia Federici in conversation with Simon R. Doubleday

Note: Prof. Silvia Federici was originally invited as a guest speaker at Hofstra University for a public lecture on April 26, 2020, co-sponsored by the Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice. The students in my course History 178C: “Sorcery and Witch Hunts in Europe and the Americas” were assigned to read her recent book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (PM Press, 2018). The closure of the Hofstra University campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that this class met synchronously via Zoom, but Prof. Federici was able to join us from her home to discuss a wide range of topics relating to gender, violence, and social injustices across the globe. Among these topics were the economic context of the pandemic, historical and contemporary violence against women, women’s solidarity and resistance movements, and the clash between modern ‘western’ knowledge systems and other forms of knowledge.

“We are still dealing with the devil”, affirms Silvia Federici over Zoom. Federici, a leading feminist Marxist thinker and professor emerita at Hofstra University, has long been a much-admired colleague, and her scholarly work—including Caliban and the Witch (2004)—has brought her international recognition. Together, twenty years ago, we helped to create the campus group Long Island Teachers for Human Rights. On this day of social distancing in late-April, she has generously offered to join our virtual, online class on the global history of sorcery and witch-hunting, and she is in full flow. Our class has suffered this semester; we have tragically lost a young woman. But for an hour and a half, she transports us, offering a far-reaching array of incisive commentary on the state of the world and its demons, real and imagined, and on the backstories of witch-hunting in Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

The devil she has in mind, at this particular juncture in the discussion, is the target of the annual exorcism courses organized by the Vatican—ultimately by Pope Francis, the Argentinian pontiff “whom everyone loves”, Federici observes with gentle irony. She turns to the way in which Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, mobilized against the perceived threat of liberation theology in Latin America, against its rejection of authority and its quest for Christian justice on this earth. Meanwhile, she explains, across the developing world and perhaps most notably in Africa, Protestant fundamentalist organizations continue to add fuel to the fire of a new witch craze that has been set in motion by the economic dislocations of neoliberalism—a theme she addresses at length in her most recent book, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (PM Press, 2018).

Federici’s engagement with these issues is impassioned and explicitly political. “Writing is always political”, she affirms: as scholars, as writers, she adds, we always hope to make an intervention, in politics or in culture. She was born in Parma, during the Second World War, and recalls how the conditions of postwar Italy forged her convictions. Her experience living in Nigeria in the 1960s accentuated her understanding of the particular impact of global economic change on women, in Africa and beyond. In the final chapter of her recent book, which offers a devastating insight into the contemporary rise of violence against women, she explains that she has little patience for western feminists who have “not always made an effort to ‘empower’ the women who have borne the brunt of economic globalization on the ground”.

Her prognosis for the world is, in many respects, bleak. The current COVID-19 pandemic is occurring, she observes, in the wake of years of neoliberal austerity measures that have brought many societies to the brink of catastrophe, and years of aggressive assaults by multinational corporations. It also offers an opportunity for another wave of disaster capitalism. As interest rates have sunk down towards 0%, and the price of oil below $0, the capitalist system is experiencing a crisis; she predicts that the response will be lethal. The effect of coronavirus has had a particularly appalling impact on vulnerable black, brown, and indigenous communities.

But those same communities, Federici tells us, can also provide answers. They can bring to bear forms of knowledge that have been suppressed in the past, crushed under the boot of ‘western’ knowledge systems, and forms of collective solidarity that have been systematically under attack, just as they were during the rise of capitalism in early modern Europe. In a number of resistance movements, women have taken the lead: she mentions seed banks, as a counter to the transgenic engineering spearheaded by Monsanto—in her view, a truly diabolical entity. 

Historically speaking, as well as in the present, women have had a central role in forms of ‘reproduction’, understood broadly to encompass the intergenerational transmission of communal modes of agriculture and traditional medical knowledge (herbal and botanical). The devaluation of women, and women’s forms of knowledge—Federici observes—is therefore associated with the ongoing attack on our environment, on the animal kingdom, and on our planet. On the day of this class, on the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day, we must completely recalibrate our position.

Can ‘sorcery’, and ‘witchcraft’ be vehicles for subaltern groups, students ask, as well as neurotic hallucinations on the part of religious authorities? Might they, in effect, be one configuration of traditional belief systems, or for women’s forms of knowledge and association? Federici insists on the need for a distinction. On the one hand, she says, the belief in supernatural forces and the aspiration to manipulate them are, perhaps, human universals—part of a worldview that we find in rural communities above all, including the rural Italy of her childhood. In the Iliad, she observes, even a river has agency, and is personified; the natural world is full of mysterious forces. The contemporary wicca movement speaks to the ways in which witchcraft and sorcery can be appropriated and used as a vehicle for women’s empowerment.

On the other hand, the construction of witchcraft as a demonic belief system by the religious authorities is far more aggressive: a means to domination and suppression. Might it sometimes be possible, we ask, for subordinate communities to invert this construction, to appropriate the diabolical as part of a culture of resistance? Federici reflects for a moment, and then animatedly remembers Michael Taussig’s classic work The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), in which the significance of the diabolical is in fact recast by the folklore of mining communities and plantation workers.

Silvia Federici’s energy is seemingly limitless. She leaps up from the chair, momentarily abandoning the Zoom screen, in search of a reference to Pope Francis. She reveals that she has recently traveled to Paraguay and Uruguay, finding new and inspiring models of women’s power and solidarity. Our class runs out of time; she would be happy, she says, to speak for fifteen minutes more…. We agree on five, since students must rush off to another screen, but we will need to invite her back—next time, for a broader audience on campus. As we face new waves of disease, new waves of austerity, new waves of diabolical neocolonialism, Federici’s voice is indispensable.    

Simon R. Doubleday is professor of History at Hofstra University.