this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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There's probably other authors here, but a dominant theme of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch was that capitalism was feudalism in decay. The enclosure of the commons and the switch to waged labor was a reaction of the ruling class to the threat of social mobility created by technological development.
It's been a few years, but I don't think Federici explicitly placed it as "feudalism in decay." I also don't agree with that take because capitalism is more progressive than feudalism in a Marxist sense.
I see the point you're making, how Federici characterizes the violence against women as a necessary bludgeon against the peasant class to proletarizse them, but it's not for the same materliast reasons that fascism utilizes violence.
If we were to continue with this line of thought, I could say that capitalism was born in the dying body of feudalism. However, I think the transformative nature of feudalism--> capitalism is much different than liberalism --> fascism. That's because fascism's goal is essentially to destroy proletarian power to bring capitalist order back. That is to say, fascist violence is to preserve capitalism while the violence in Caliban and the Witch is to part of the transformation into capitalism.
Federici is a great read, but I think she has her gaps for historical materialism.