Is it still possible to be a bad witch? In our popular imagination, the witch has abandoned her edge, warts and all, for something much far more chic. From “The Craft” to “American Horror Story: Coven,” witches have been made into something palatable and unthreatening to audiences. What ever happened to the witches who truly contested the social order?
During the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the image of the witch, a woman whose dissident beliefs in healing and mutual aid posed a threat to the emerging power of capitalism with its gendered divisions of labor, had to be constructed in order to allow the ascent of the bourgeois class.
In the wake of the Black Death, as the working population dwindled, feudal lords struggled to discipline their workers who often outright refused work or let crops rot, halting the subsistence economy of feudalism. As workers abandoned their station, they survived by building an economy based on communal ownership and mutual care.
As feminist theorist Silvia Federici reports in her book “Caliban and the Witch,” this system emancipated women by allowing them to work the fields alongside men and carving out vital social roles as healers and midwives.
For capitalism to work, the solidarity economy that stood directly in opposition to the emerging monetary economy had to be destroyed. The agentic women at its helm had to be demonized and placed in the subservient roles of wife and child bearer in order to produce the next generation of laborers. The targets of the witch hunts of the early modern period were mostly poor women whose sense of agency and communalist values posed a threat to the emerging bourgeois class.
At the height of the colonial period, the magical beliefs and communalist practices of indigenous people had to be destroyed to prevent uprisings against the capitalist colonial order. Indigenous religious practices were routinely demonized, allowed only when they could be closely checked by white, colonial religious authority.
Now that capitalism has become the dominant economic and cultural system throughout most of the world, witchcraft does not pose as meaningful of a threat.
Silvia Federici writes, “The revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that, at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior.”
In fact, witchcraft can now be safely appropriated by capitalism to maintain cultural reproduction, offering the illusion of transgression through consumer choices.
Feel out of place in the largely misogynistic and homophobic Judeo-Christian orthodoxy? No worries, you can buy a “witch kit” on Etsy for $45, a black flat-brimmed hat at Forever21 for $20, and a Stevie Nicks prayer candle on Amazon for $16 (full disclosure: the last item has been in my cart for at least three months).
The modern witch may still be the woman who longs to reject cultural hegemony and the discipline of the dominant social order, but her liberation has been thwarted by capitalism.
We should all be witches, not the kind that can be purchased in a bag at Party City or in the crystal section of EarthBound, but the kind whose practices of solidarity and communal sharing of knowledge and power pose a real threat to the destructive forces of hierarchical power. Witches should be heroes, not by virtue of their aesthetic, but their deep commitment to empowering marginalized people through their communal values. The real monster was really capitalism all along.
