Happy October, my creepy comrades. This month's homework dispatch is coming to you a little early, for a few reasons:
- Because this month's reading is a tiny bit longer than usual (fear not the page count; a lot of it is pictures, and it's absolutely worth it)
- Because I will be out of the country during the time when I'd normally upload the homework
- Because, thanks to the overwhelming results of a popular vote, we are definitely having Halloween Club and you might want a little extra time to work up a costume
For Spooky Marxist Knitting Club, we are doing actual bonafide Spooky Marxism, with a selection from Silvia Federici's groundbreaking work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. This book aims to explain the complicated history of witch hunts and witch hunting once and for all, by analysing the medieval transition from feudalism to capitalism (after all, before the invention of money, there was value in physical labor, which required bodies, which required making more humans - you see where this is going).
This was, and honestly still is, an absolutely radical theory that flies in the face of most ideas people have about why witch trials were so prevalent – we've heard them all, from the sanctioned persecution of women under Christianity, to ergot poisoning and mass hysteria - every answer in the world except the obvious ones, money and power!
Being extra cautious, I want to note here that media about historical witch hunts contains direct and indirect references to various types of violence. While I don't find this text to be unnecessarily gory or purposefully upsetting, I want to make sure people who may be sensitive to this topic know the following reading contains such themes.
Here is a link to the PDF: Silvia Federici, a selection from Caliban and the Witch
Supplementary media this month is totally optional (I mean, it literally always is, but I'd be remiss not to mention it since it's an hour long), but very good: the legendary professor Dr. Ronald Hutton, an expert on the history of European paganism and modern witchcraft, in a lecture from Gresham College on the history of witch hunting.
See you on October 28th at 6:00 PM. I'm thinking I'll be a Sandwitch - a bikini over my clothes, a pointy hat, and a footlong Italian sub - so nobody copy my idea.
Blessed Be,
Meredith