Abstract

Through a reinterpretation of the dynamics that led to witch-hunts between the 16th and 17th centuries, Silvia Federici draws a parallel between the enclosures that capitalism makes to privatize the land and the imprisonment of women’s bodies. Silvia Federici and Rita Laura Segato’s analysis of a “new war against womenµ highlights how, even today, the criminal alliance between capitalism and patriarchy is still taking place, especially in those countries subjected to a process of re-colonization. Violence against women plays a key role in this new global war, since it is women who have the ability to defend a noncommercial conception of security and wealth. The analysis of specific popular economies, with particular attention to Latin America and the case of NiUnaMenos, shows how Federici’s inquiry looks at witches as the guardians of those feminine relations that constitute the new commons, analyzed from a feminist perspective. The present paper suggests a return of the subversive power that witches represent, which goes through the creation of feminist commons to contrast the deadly competitiveness of capitalism with the evidence that an alternative is still possible.