Margaret Thatcher died today, and celebration is the order of the day. She was a monster: a partner in crime of Augusto Pinochet and Ronald Reagan; she joined Reagan in calling Nelson Mandela a "terrorist." This is setting aside all the horrible things she did to working people in the U.K. Amid the celebration, I did notice something, and this article by Bay Area revolutionaries Advance the Struggle really caught my eye, so I'm reblogging it here. While I'm still working out my opinion on the works of Marxist-Feminist Sylvia Federici (author of Caliban and the Witch), I know quite a bit about witches and this article gets it exactly right. —ISH
Witch Side Are You On?
I dont intend to attack anyone for their word choice, but would like
to raise a little bit of consciousness on this word choice of calling
Thatcher a “witch” as a form of insult.
Margaret thatcher was the opposite of a witch. By referring to
thatcher as a witch, one denigrates the real witches of the late middle
ages (and other women whose independence was
slandered
by patriarchy as witchcraft) whose genocide (witch hunts) was
intimately bound up with the subjugation of the new proletariat and
colonizing missions.
The witch hunts culminated in a triumph for the bourgeoisie, in the
form of a division of labor at the heart of which was a stark divide
between productive labor and reproductive (domestic) labor. Workers
outside of the home (predominantly men, but women too) were waged slaves
whose productivity was under-valued through the fetishism of
commodities (money hiding the unequal exchange of equivalents). Workers
inside the home (exclusively women) were not paid at all, the most
extreme fetish (illusion) this new capitalist order would produce. At
the heart of this illusion that women’s domestic/reproductive work did
not merit a wage, was the false belief that women are genetically prone
to do this work for free as loving mothers and loyal wives. Male wage
earners were given a position, imposed on them and enforced by law, of
domestic overseer with all the tools of coercion they might need, from
the right to rape to the right to beat “their” wives who regarded as
dependents on the man. Thus the male proletariat was coopted by the
bourgeoisie in a scheme to keep the total wage bill of that class half
of what it should have been. In this sense, all of us male proletarians
have a duty to honor our sisters as pillars of the class at every
available opportunity. Part of that is learning the history of women as
workers inside and outside the home. That history includes the heroic
chapter of witches’ resistance to capitalism at the very dawn of its
existence. [the book Caliban and the Witch is a good place to start]
Margaret thatcher was a traitor to her gender. Witches were the most
loyal members not only of their gender but also of a far reaching
pan-european anti-capitalist/anti-patriarchy movement from the
1300s-1700s, that is, during the period of capitalism’s maturation as a
world system.
Death to Thatcherism!
Long live women’s liberation and proletarian revolution!
