Witchcraft, Gender, & Marxism | Philosophy Tube

when I was about 19 I was a hardline new atheist I read Richard Dawkins The God Delusion multiple times I consumed hours an hour as of Christopher Hitchens debates online I watched youtubers like thunder foot and sargon of akkad take on creationists and wipe the floor with her I felt clever enlightened modern and then I read a book by Sam Harris called the end of faith I was expecting it to be another weapon in my arsenal of non-belief but as I got further into it to the parts where he talks about racial profiling about Islam about torture and foreign policy I realized that I was being so learned and something more I was being asked not just to reject the subpoena but to take up a particular view of the natural I am in control full of back don't adders fork and blind-worms sting lizards leg and owlets wing double double toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble by the pricking of my thumb's Something Wicked [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'd heard of the European witch hunts but I kind of wrote them off a long time ago a lot of people were dumb and stupid and they believed in magic and they thought women were bringing bad luck on the village or something so they burned a lot of them but then everybody realized there's no such thing as magic and they stopped and nowadays it's basically fine and for this stunningly comprehensive analysis I was named male historian of the year but the actual history and philosophy of the witch hunts is far more fascinating and disturbingly relevant today for a period of roughly 300 years from the 15th century until 1730 an unknown number of women were executed for witchcraft I say unknown because that's the first problem we don't know how many were killed often records just weren't kept and it's tough to account for things like women not being executed but driven out of their homes and dying later or dying as a result of the social changes that the witch hunts helped usher in most of the estimates I've read are somewhere around the 60 thousand to a hundred thousand mark but for our philosophical purposes the answer to the question how many people died is enough to change how we think about gender and economics ever since in her book Caliban and the witch philosopher Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts played a huge role in shaping the world today that for a long time we've ignored especially those of us who are politically left-wing particularly Marxists have ignored it so at the risk of attracting the wrong kind of Internet audience I gotta say Karl Marx was not a hundred percent right you want to donate how much to my patreon when we talk about the transition from feudalism to capitalism it sounds like a very smooth and civil process but actually it was an incredibly bloody trip in Europe the Black Death killed about one in three people and those are the bottom of society who survived suddenly found that they were pretty indispensable and could start making demands of the people of the top and so feudalism started to quack there was a lot of resistance to both it and the early nascent forms of capitalism that were slouching towards Europe to be born and a lot of these early anti feudal and anti capitalist resistance movements were led by women meanwhile in the colonies indigenous resistance to European invasion like the Tachyon coin movement in Peru offered prominent roles to rebellious women as well it's may be tempting to think that these struggles could never have succeeded because they were too primitive or basically because the poor's were too stupid but a lot of these early anti feudal and anti-capitalist resistance movements were pretty philosophically sophisticated like the diggers in England for instance and they were succeeding fine until they were brutalized it might be an interesting parallel there to how we talk about some anti-capitalist countries today in addition to wielding increasing amounts of disruptive political power though women in medieval Europe already held a lot of social power and that's because of there are still many people today who believe in wicker or paganism and ritual magic can be an important part of that spiritual practice but undeniably belief in magic used to be a lot more widespread than it is now and magic was an arena in which women dominated if you had a problem you would go and see a wise woman if you wanted her to cure your toothache or tell you your future or talk to the dead for you you would seek out a witch she would know about herbes and healing and not all of it was nonsense some of it was just pre scientific medicine she might also be the village Midwife for instance someone who believes in magic will behave differently from someone who doesn't if you want to use the postmodern jargon magical thinking is a technology of the self as Foucault might put it it creates a certain kind of person if you'd rather explain in terms of behavior than power creating cells I won't hold it against you because at the risk of attracting the wrong kind of Internet audience in fairness post modernists aren't always 100% right about everything hello dr. Peterson yeah what are you cooking back when a lot of people believed in magic establishing capitalism Federici says was difficult because what is magic at the end of the day it's the promise of getting something of a world without work and without strict rules or boundaries in the way that science strives for or capitalism requires to organize later Federici says that magic and the practice of magic is the fusel of work in action there's a popular idea that our ancestors used magic to explain things because they just didn't have modern science and in my view that can be a little bit patronizing rather like the idea that the early anti-capitalist and anti feudal rebellions could never have succeeded it's sort of portrays the people involved being daft and yes a lot of people in history just like now we're pretty daft but magic isn't meant to explain things like a lot of spiritual practices it can be about community and solidarity but it's also the refusal of an explanation put the right ingredients together and you can make someone fall in line confound your enemies turn invisible fly how exactly does it work yeah you're asking the wrong question there are some days that are just bad for working don't plant crops on those days never mind why it's just bad luck don't do it got a rest it's a world of the qualitative not the quantitative which incidentally is why Harry Potter is a bit of a bourgeois fantasy the whole idea that magic might have set rules that could be learned like a science taught in a school a private school no less to be brought under a capitalist social system is a bit of a perversion or modernization depending on how you look at it of what magic was originally all about but medieval Europe you've got a lot of rebellious women running around and a lot of people who believe in magic neither of which is particularly conducive for bringing everybody into a new economic order but they have to work for somebody else or staff the goal of capitalist society is to transform life into the capacity to work says Federici so how do you build capitalism in those conditions you have to break the power what is the role of cysts women under capitalism in the years since women have joined the general workforce the official answer that question has been while they work same as men not always paid the same and subject to various fudges but that's what it's supposed to be anyway but wasn't always so for most of capitalist history the official job of women in society was to make babies to reproduce the labor force and the witch hunts were keen to cementing that role obviously people were having babies before capitalism and women weren't completely equal to men under feudalism either but as a result of the witch hunts women's options in society would massively curtailed even from what they've been before rather than a steady progress of women's rights throughout history things actually got worse in general this period was characterized by a massive rollback of women's rights not just the rights to work in a quiet profits but abortion and contraception such as there were were criminalized sex work was subjected to harsher and harsher restrictions or else outright criminalized any kind of sex that wasn't procreative including homosexuality some gay men were burned as well was frowned upon midwifery and medicine generally was taken away from women and given to men as many midwives found themselves on the wrong end of a pitchfork all of which combined to tie women to the domestic sphere even more so than before only this time with a twist whereas on the feudalism you might have kids and they could help you on your land or with your trade and a capitalism your kids go and work for somebody else to put money in their pocket women were expected to unpaid reproduce and rear the next generation of workers who would work to put profit in somebody else's pocket and indeed they're basically still are in the 70s second wave feminists used to talk about the second shift the burden of having to go home after work and then on top of work maintain the home and kids and the pyres and fires of the witch hunts are what forged that model of the ideal woman chaste quiet at home working to support the husband who home the bacon and through it all the figure of the witch was used to bring women to heal and encourage men to hold the leash the link between witchcraft charges and tying women only to a reproductive role in society is evidenced in a specific nature of witchcraft charges witches were often accused of sacrificing children of sexually cavorting with the devil by moonlight of causing impotence or stealing your penis keep an eye on a girl fellas or Satan will cut you yet the perversion of the natural order that witches were supposed to represent presupposed a natural order in which women were subservient and made for making babies and Federici says it's a shame that marks ignored all of this in the Marxist jargon she says the witch hunts were form of primitive accumulation the violent grabbing of resources that was key to starting capital of them off just as important she says as slavery and colonialism work she writes the outcome of these policies that lasted for two centuries was the enslavement of women to procreation defining women in terms of mothers wives daughters widows that hid their status as workers [Music] before we get into the really off-the-wall stuff we should take stock and also consider an important 21st century health warning we've talked about how the witch hunts were key to eliminating magical thinking and reducing women to a reproductive role and how both those things were important to establishing capitalism but something worth bearing in mind is that although value systems like sexism and racism can have their roots in economic and social stuff they can also take on a life of their own a lot of sexism against women has been bound up in reducing them to objects for sex and reproduction but it's pretty obvious that assists woman who for medical reasons can't have sex all babies isn't immune to sex it unfortunately though I've seen Federici arguments used on transphobic message boards to say that trans women can't be oppressed if they don't have wounds and therefore shouldn't be included in the category of woman which is a pretty short-sighted analysis to put it mildly Marxist feminists argue that womanhood can be a kind of socio-economic class forged at least in part through biologically based reproductive oppression and that can be very illuminating but some will go on to say that this analysis excludes trans women which is bollocks because the value system that has its roots in reproductive oppression can flower in unexpected and different ways our modern ideas of race and racism were invented in large part to justify the slave trade but obviously racism is curable and flexible enough to have outlived it Marxism has historically downplayed things like race and gender but how they can't always be reduced just to class relations and if we're not careful modern sophisticated discussions about womanhood as a socio-economic class can get pretty barbaric pretty fast so at the risk of attracting the wrong kind of Internet audience I gotta say Marxist feminists aren't always a hundred percent right about everything [Music] [Music] so warning number one was don't use this as an excuse to be transphobic warning number two is Federici is not saying for the witch-hunts were a deliberate plot by men to establish capitalism she's just saying that they greatly changed the way women was seen and that benefited a particular social and economic order that we might want to get curious about and I think one of the best ways of seeing this is to compare the witch hunts to another famous set of mass killings and here I'm actually quite excited because I don't know if any was actually made this comparison before there are a lot of parallels between the witch hunts and the lynching of black Americans for those who aren't up on their American history because the show is watched all over the world when the slave-owning states lost the American Civil War at the end of 1865 and slavery in the United States was not quite abolished Ford abolished for everybody except prisoners a bunch of Confederate soldiers responded by starting the Ku Klux Klan and over the next several decades with a lot of encouragement from local police government media and ordinary white Americans they publicly killed tens of thousands of black people the victims were typically accused of some crime often a sexual one not unlike witches that was made up to provide a thin justification and there was no due process for trials when the killings themselves were pretty horrific victims were hanged shot burned alive tortured mutilated sometimes all of those things and often in front of the cheering crowd one of the last lynchings by fire was that of Zachariah Walker who was burned alive in front of a crowd of several thousand people including the local Chief of Police in Pennsylvania the local newspaper described it like this everything was quiet and orderly around the fire if such a thing can be said of a lynching there was no loud talking no profanity and the utmost deference shown to the hundreds of women who came to the scene men stepped back as the women came forward and led them to the points of Vantage where they could obtain the best view of the burning that's not medieval Europe as the USA in 1911 modernity and savagery not so far apart as we might like to think historians tend to focus on the Klan lynchings because those were the ones that were the most spectacular but even before that America had been lynching black people for over a century way before the Civil War one of the likely candidates for the last witch to be executed in english-speaking territory was sally Bassett a slave who in 1730 was burned for attempting to poison the slave owners her indictment specifically included a clause saying she had been seduced by the devil devil worship at that time being an excuse to squash the spiritual practices of slaves in the West Indies one of the first recorded lynchings of a black man in North America took place just 11 years later lynchings were white Americans way of telling black Americans we're still in charge which might explain what I got so much worse in the south after the civil war was over in his book at the hands of persons unknown historian philip gray writes whites were determined to undermine black advances made during Reconstruction and maintain a strict racial caste system in the south at all costs there were some efforts by the federal government to limit lynchings and unlike the witch hunts there was a lot of organized resistance to them but one reason the Reconstruction era plan faded was the bid largely accomplished many of its goals it had initiated the process of making full black participation in politics and in the mainstream of southern life unattainable and had established that intimidation and terror could be used to accomplish this end so lynchings didn't end because America suddenly became not racist in fact if by lynching you mean the public killing of black people would be our best ambivalent response of the authorities the sometimes endorsement and sometimes participation of law enforcement the encouragement of the media thousands of people watching and doing nothing and the result being to create a climate in which black people feel like their lives don't matter then arguably the lynching of black Americans is in fact yet to end similarly the witch hunts didn't end because people stopped believing in witches they too ended because they'd fulfilled their purpose charges of witchcraft in court were gradually replaced with the more specific petty crimes that had always been there to disguise things like vagabondage cursing fornication being poor in public small-time assault being loud and a woman science prevailed over superstition but what's telling is that even when people stop believing in witches hardly anybody turned around and said oh god we executed tens of thousands of people for no reason how awful which suggests that these women had already become so devalued that their murder was largely acceptable even if everyone knew the official reason for it was rubbish the philosopher Thomas Hobbes actually explicitly said that he didn't believe in witches but that the murders were good anyway from the points of view of promoting social order witch hunters did use to believe in magic and witches just like lynch mobs used to probably believe at least some of the racist gibberish they said about black people but it wasn't just about that it wasn't even just about religion since the bulk of witch trials and executions were done by secular authorities it was a philosophical and political project aimed at defining women into a subservient role people rejected the supernatural sure but prior to that they accepted a certain view of the and that has consequences in her article reclaiming animism Belgian philosopher Isabelle stanga's argues that today some people are destroying the world in the name of profit she says that we've become divorced from the qualitative life from the connection to nature and the living Earth from the ability to be humble before mystery and from witnessing the world rather than trying to possess it and exactly how literally you interpret her words is up to you but I'm sure you can at least see why some people be very spiritual practitioners members of marginalized communities or political activists might be tempted to take up the mantle of the witch as one anti-fascist witch from a group called the Obama our collective said in 2017 which is our non-consumer category we live in a more enlightened age now so who cares hardly anybody believes in magic anymore and it's not like there are any unfortunate philosophical ideas left over from the witch hunts that are still hanging around everybody knows nowadays that women are completely equal and have full access to abortion and contraception and sex work isn't criminalized and homosexuality is totally fine and no woman has ever been killed or harmed just for being politically inconvenient okay maybe not but isn't it at least good that people aren't so superstitious anymore I mean modern medicine and science are both pretty cool I open this video talking about how I used to be a big new atheist edge Lord and even though I look back on that period of my life now and cringe I still don't believe in God or in magic or in astrology especially not in astrology do not me astrology Twitter this is the prettiest hill I will die on I don't believe in it and I'm okay with that so didn't my new atheist phase arguably do me a little bit of good and if the emergence of capitalism was characterized by an increase in productivity and a decrease in magical thinking isn't that ultimately a good thing - and while I can see where this ends justifies the means argument comes from the witch hunts weren't the only means of achieving those ends and the means were pretty mean capitalism did increase productivity sure but it also instituted a massive wage collapse of which women got the sharp end most people's access to food and the means of living actually got worse and they lost the common land and like I said before a lot of Rights got rolled back many are still restricted and let's not lose sight of the fact that tens of thousands of people were murdered for absolutely no reason saying the witch hunts were justified because people are less superstitious now is like saying slavery was justified because it helped us industrialize I mean slavery did help us industrialized that's true but that doesn't mean it was morally okay or that industrialization doesn't have downsides and also we can't say because we don't have another earth with which to compare histories that it was definitely necessary either so yes I don't believe in magic and I do also think that Sam Harris and the New Atheists were correct when they said that God doesn't exist either but we are the heirs of the witch hunters and if we reject the supernatural we will still have to decide through whose eyes we see happy Holi I have the dimmed the noontide sun called forth the mutinous winds and twixt the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war to the dread rattling Thunder have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak with his own bolt the strong based promontory have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up the pine and cedar graves at my command have waked their sleepers oped and led him forth by my so potent art [Music] but this rough magic right here of june and when i have required some heavenly music which even now i do to work mine end upon their senses that this air each arms for I'll break my staff very at certain fathoms in the earth and deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my [Music] [Music]

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 845,570

Rating: 4.9016523 out of 5

Keywords: witchcraft, gender, Karl Marx, Marxism, history, philosophy, capitalism, witches, Salem

Id: tmk47kh7fiE

Length: 27min 57sec (1677 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/sailorjupiter28titan]

If you are new to the sub and wondering "Can I be a witch if I don't actually believe in anything?", then feel free to browse our answers and comment on this latest iteration. Welcome!

[u/Lord_Juiblex]

Aw man, I love PhilosophyTube. All of his content is well made, and very thoughtful.

His recent video on queer theory helped me understand and come to terms with some personal shit, so it's good to see that he's popular with y'all

[u/maybenot9]

Ugh, that point about the KKK lynching was such a gut punch. It really shows that violence and oppression like that doesn't go away on it's own, it wins on it's own.

One of my fav youtubers definitely.

[u/BishmillahPlease]

So I'm currently working on a series based, in part, on my absolute loathing of the world of Harry Potter. This not only confirmed part of the reason why I dislike it, but also helped give me some further reading to do. Thank you!

[u/[deleted]]

Marxism AND Witchcraft?

This is the best sub, I love you all so much & am very proud to be a part of this community.

I never thought that, as a 32 year old cis white man, I'd ever find a community where I feel at home both materially and spiritually, and it turns out it is amongst wise and crazy women. I should have known!

[u/Fizzy_Fresh]

I fucking knew right away when I saw this sub's name that it was based on this. Love that guy and love you, ladies. You have my support <3

Also this video made me realize why I dislike Harry Potter so much.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/flower_milk]

This is my favorite video from Philosophytube, I've watched it so many times now.

[u/-clare]

Great informative video.