Witches

“Ms. Albanese, you are a witch!” shouted Israel’s representative to the United Nations, Danny Danon, a few weeks ago. Why did he say so? What did he mean? Lets get to that later in the story and in its proper context.

The narrative here is based on the “Rebel Body”. Expanding on the “single logic” that governs the development of capitalism and the “structural character” of the atrocities perpetrated on women over time. A story underpinned by the figure of the “Witch”. The transcending role, women have played in the making of world history — not just as warriors, queens, saints, or later as scientists, feminists, and writers but as the “Witches”. Women who can cause “Trouble” with a capital T.

Stir up the entire village or the nation or the world if be. A word so interesting, derived from vulgar Latin (12th century French verb) “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” or plain disrupt a situation. No doubt, all of us on the “Terra” are living in truly disturbing times, as mixed-up, troubling and torrid — as individuals or collectively as a globally webbed society.

Silvia Federici, Donna Haraway and Francesca Albanese are three distinct figures in our world, who provide new and true stories of emancipation, scope of trouble making and determination that is based on justice and the continuity of life. What professor emerita Donna Haraway frames as “ learning to be truly present… the unthinkable ways of tentacular logic” to author and teacher, Silvia Federici on “capital and its power to destroy women’s freedom and autonomy is a historic process” and underpinned recently by U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese saying “If I am a Witch, and had the powers to cast a spell, I would do so by all means, to end the genocide in Gaza, and for the return of international law in our much troubled world”.

Outstanding is the will and “worlding” of these three women, and millions of others who are literally overflowing with both pain and joy. Uncovering the “vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy” (Haraway) while destroying the myths, the false narratives that have sustained the “Earth eating empire in deep trouble” (Federici).

The Witch. An older woman, perhaps a “hag”. She probably lives alone to give herself the privacy she needs, to “practice her dark arts”. Such proverbial narratives based around the European “Witch” that are part of popular imagination and entertainment, end up converting the character (and the myth) into a commodity. Yet the image and culture has been fostered for a long while, going back to the Elizabethan times (1560 - 1610). The “Witch” and her innate “magic” and power to invoke “Trouble” persists till today, via utterly stupid Walt Disney movies or say “The Penguin Book Of Witches” or Ronald Suttons’ “The Witch”. The commodification is not only misleading but inept, to understand the evolution of the “Witch”.

The prevalence and dialectics of “magic” had to be destroyed, punished or banished, in order to subvert women as well as the “commons”. In other words, the autonomy of women was a fundamental barrier for the Catholic Church and its episcopal laws, to reign over existing social structures, profits of labor and distributed power.

Tolerance of the Church, toward mag­ical beliefs and autonomous practices of women was short, as found in the first Canon Episcopi (1012 CE). Worth noting the laws which followed the abolition of the Canon Episcopi (1136 CE) included the Law Of Matrimoni, “Supreme authority” of particular churches, Jurisprudence, “Temporal Goods and Property” — followed by the “Law of persons” and several other “Canonical decrees”. According to Silvia Federici, these impositions frame the “Holy Rules” (1140CE) and much later as the “Seven Sacraments” (1445CE) would tie up with the question of the “commons”. Land, pastures, rivers, even forests, animals and many natural systems, were steadily confiscated from millions of “serfs” based in Europe. Their modes of production viz-a-viz modes of survival would be replaced by a new “constructed character” of work, wages and indentured labor.

“Magic” of that era, can also be understood as the innate knowledge and practices, based around healing, childbirth, hospice, medicine and all such common needs — made of thousands of distinct oral traditions. Certain practices dating back to the Paleolithic times. The Catholic church attacked key aspects of social power (of the working class) as well as demonized mystics, healers, druids, midwives, shamans, caregivers and medicine men as an extension of “evil will” and “evil doing”. What appears as law can also be understood as systematic terror and persecution. “A man or a woman who is a medium, or who has familiar spirits, shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:27). Within the same Leviticus are verses that speak of “the presence of the devil or the cursed unholy medium… kill your children, those born of sin”. The “Witches” and the “Heretics” appear from the above episcopal sociology and into the “Trial By Fire” persecutions. Thousands of ghastly public spectacles, burning, torture, humiliation and imprisonment, which lasted well over 300 years (1350 - 1700).

The so called “evil” that was actually symbolic of the Catholic church, was instead directed upon hundreds of thousands of women and men, by a range of millenarian figures, during the so called “Dark Ages” of Europe. “Women and men who are not embarrassed, nor are they afraid, to tell us that they are mages and magicians… and their oddness, special skills, the art of deception, healing power, even their folly, fakery, absence of decorum is not demonic nor is it a curse, nor a malady.” Johannes Wier, medical expert and author of Illusions of the Demons, Spells and Poisons (1563 CE).

Caliban And The Witch. What is the “Rebel Body”? What Marx and a whole bunch of Marxists omitted or worse did not have the capacity, was to understand (and map) the question of exploitation, from the women’s point of view. A key missing historic insight. In her book, Caliban And The Witch, Silvia Federici uncovers the torrid historic process, in light of “the exploitation of women in capitalist society in the sexual division of labor and women’s unpaid work.” Simply put, as a deep dive into social evolution, Federici transcended the dichotomy between patriarchy and class, reorienting us to the “Rebel Body” — past and present roles of women within world history. From where came the “Witch” and all the consequent “Trouble”.

As a scholar and teacher, Federici gives us a “reinterpretation of the history of capitalism and class struggle from a feminist stage”. The book and the consequent unraveling, is a great departure from the 2nd-Wave Feminist Movement in the United States (1960s) concerning the roots of women’s “oppression”. According to Federici, the earlier discourse and movement was “not sufficient in terms of being inclusive… in need of broader definitions … feminist theory merits the global emancipation of women, and not just those situated in a particular class or in the West” (Federici). Is prescient to mention that Federici draws a whole lot of inspiration and feminist ties with lesser known figures, such as German Marxist and Sociologist Maria Mies — Italian feminist and writer Leopoldina Fortunati — Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James (The Power Of Women And The Subversion Of Community).

The “Rebel Body” is a powerful representation of resistance, not just specific to the Middle Ages of Europe but extending way beyond, as women’s liberation and struggle for autonomy during the 19th and 20th century. Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” was a test-case for early feminists. Marx altogether missed the fact, that “the rise of capitalism was coeval with a war against Women” (Caliban And The Witch). A “war” which consequently proliferated across the world, via colonization, via indoctrination and the foundations of capitalism, followed by the appearance of nations states. The persecution and subjugation of women and their reproductive power continued through this period, as did the growth and proliferation of the “Rebel Body” into thousands of resistance groups, discourses and disruptive acts.

Is utmost to understand, the destruction of the old viz-a-viz creation of the new. As “productive and reproductive tasks” and “male-female relations” was fundamental for “primitive capitalism” (post Feudalism) to rise in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland and England. Further, this period (1350 to early 1700) that embodies the birth of “primitive nationalism” and the victory of “primitive capitalism” were both achieved with maximum violence, religious doctrines, disastrous crusades, widespread heresy, royal interventions and later via several frameworks of the so called “Enlightenment” — leaves no doubt concerning the “constructed character” of sexual roles in capitalist society. What followed was a period of “massive withdrawal and eventual displacement of labour” (Federici) from outright refusal to work, to evading new taxes, fleeing into the wilderness, resist the selling of land, attack the privatization of commons. The “world system” emerging from western Europe, eventually webbed the entire world like a tentacular multi-verse network.

Roles of subjugation that exist even today, albeit way more developed as per current norms, prevailing technologies and the existing social order. Why does the “Witch” or even working class women perform such “roles” needs clarification. Roman Catholic outreach, followed by the “Enlightenment” period, placed women as an “identity” with Nature, with matter, and what Federici calls “corporeality” — the power of Catholic and later Puritan discourse and fundamentalism, directed at the female body, managed to destroy the pre-existing “autonomy and control of our corporeal reality… conditions and norms that have so far only suffocated and exploited our bodies and our regenerative power”.

The old quest for utopia, as framed by the Church and later by “the worldview created by European Enlightenment” also reveals the process of dis-empowerment — of women as much as the agrarian class of medieval Europe. Ironic, that instead of some heavenly kingdom, the millenarian movements (late 1200 to early 1600) marked the end of feudalism — the new age which emerged from plague, war, famine and mass death. The dark and hideous “coming” of some fundamental transformation in society is always so contrary to utopia. Akin to the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” as represented in Albrecht Dürer’s famous print - “true harbingers of the new capitalist era” (Federici).

Thus, the “Witches” and the “Heretics” must be remembered as part or pioneers of Federici’s “Rebel Body” because “the rebellious, egalitarian social order, based upon the sharing of wealth and the refusal of hierarchies and authoritarian rule lasting three hundred years… they wrote a new chapter in the history of liberation” (Federici). Such bodies of resistance and rebellion, however small, illiterate and primitive, were centuries ahead of Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” or Andre Bakunin’s and Proudhon’s “Anarchism” or Hobbes and Kant’s discourses on “Social Contract”. Silvia Federici reminds us, that class struggle, of back then and today is underpinned by the same big factors — of land, of servitude and limitless exploitation. And also of liberation and the violent struggle to achieve the “common good”.

Hence, the “Witch” is not some hag, nor she any evil. On the contrary, more like a pioneer anarchist or better as the “Rebel Body” that has always been aligned with Nature, and ready for a new type of struggle and the power to make “Trouble”.

Professor emerita, Eco-feminist and writer Donna J. Haraway is best known for “Worlding” and making new “Trouble”. A string of concepts centered around kinship. Stepping away from “human exceptionalism and bounded individualism”. Stepping away from the hubris of current technological society, which is clearly collapsing on several fronts. New relationships that debunk the myths of Anthropocene (our current age). The missing kinship we need, to face the perilous state of a species in great “Trouble” upon a destroyed planet. She has been at it for decades now! Her landmark 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto” was a bit of an “earthquake” within prevailing feminist theory. In 2003, “The Companion Species Manifesto” examined our innate connection to dogs as well as other non-human “critters” (a favorite Haraway word). By early 2000, Donna Haraway was an emerging figure in animal studies, ecology and the “post Capital”.

Haraway’s imagination and her books are promiscuous, layered, and hot. “Cooking over many years, the compost pile of colleagues, students, and friends who have made this fabulation of our troubled times possible” (Haraway). As “Worlding” the author creates the “Holobiome” — to describe the interconnected community of a host organism and its associated microbes, emphasizing “that humans are part of this larger ecological unit, not separate from”. According to Haraway, because current techno-industrial civilization is clearly responsible for irreversible changes, warming and biosphere collapse, hence the forthcoming age is “unthinkable” for the best science or the best politics. This calls for “Symbiotic Assemblage” between human and non-human entities. “The river has me, as I have the river… The dog has me as I have the dog”. The “Interconnectedness” that has been felt by human and non-humans for hundreds of thousands of years, is at the heart of Haraway’s discourse. “Collectively-producing and caring for systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries.

Is it not obvious? that within Nature, the human and nonhuman, us and the critters, think and feel, grow and die, within the “Web Of Life” or the “Interconnectedness” of the entire biosphere. Is clearly a feminine capacity, the objective discourses, to address “generational trauma” and “roots of trauma” that has been part of world history, women’s and indigenous struggles. “What we see is this steady march of human rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights over time… the very human rights era, is now failing to reconcile with trauma, in various allover the world yet again…” (Dian Million: “Indigenous Feminisms’)

“Cthulucene …post Anthropocene, post Capitalocene”. Take cell biology, chemistry, geology, geography, fiction, fabulation and “string figures” as much as a love for languages, arts, stories, systems that together make “Trouble”. Haraway’s path “is full of alarmingly generative critters”. Haraway has been influenced by the flowering of feminist sci-fi of the ’70s and 80s. Books like Marge Piercy’s ‘Woman on the Edge of Time, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Left Hand of Darkness, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, and the ‘Tales of Nevèrÿon to name a few. Breaking off with the exclusive, for the inclusive and entangled — “little ‘skein’ of fibers based on science fiction, like ‘string figures, speculative fabulation, science fact, speculative feminism, and even so far”.

Haraway is critical of 19th and 20th century biology, biochemistry, genetics and what we know as “Modern Synthesis”. Rooted in units and relations, these sciences line up almost everything in competitive relations, in a hierarchy of functions, between living matter and the environment. For example, the sciences of genetics, immunology or population growth, remain divorced from the contradictions of Nature and the “collaborative entanglements” of the biosphere. She names the above phenomena as “holobionts” and “holobiomes” as the infinite “worldings” made of microbes to big complex creatures to even bigger ecosystems.

According to Haraway, “these exuberant set of relationships never stay the same, cannot be understood as binary functions or isolated phenomena… but think of an extended synthesis… transdiciplinary biologies and arts proposes as string figures… tying together human and nonhuman ecologies, plus history, affects, performances, impact of technologies and more.” The inspiration to reinterpret life on the planet reveals the “New New Synthesis”— Haraway knows well that mainstream science is not sufficient in terms of creating harmony with Nature, in conjunction with the coming end of the Capitalocene. The time has arrived, to make new “Trouble” or as Haraway encourages us to “fabulate with passion and action, joy and pain, detachment and attachment.”

A striking polarity appears between Donna Haraway’s “Worlding” of the ongoing biosphere collapse, when placed in front of the male predicament. Her argument to make new “Trouble” versus John Zerzan’s “much troubled civilization will end…”. The ecology of Trouble versus the Ecology Of Fear, reveals a dichotomy of female and male understanding of Nature and our corresponding place within. Eco-Anarchist, Anti-Civ, author of several books, John Zerzan rightly condemns the current world-system and the people devoted to it, as “the productivism is the religion… if you want to defend civilization you are also accepting every failing it has given us.. how libertarian is that? That progress itself is symbolic as a culture without ever actually achieving it?”.

The advocacy of Doom can also follow the advocacy of “Return To Nature”. There are thousands of folks like Zerzan “drawing upon the modes of life” of hunter-gatherers, nomads, stateless peoples and the tribal, as a model and as a point-of-inspiration. The motivation as to what a free society should be like. In contrast, Donna Haraway is willing to forgo the idea of a fixed species itself, knowing well that new conditions and new catastrophes are giving way to the coming of “multi-species”. The “Trouble” in terms of temporality, mutation and the loss of past richness, is the unavoidable part of the evolution of almost every species. “The resolution is in the outcome, and not in reform, nor millenarianism and capital”.

“Trouble” at a planetary scale cannot be solved by “millenarian movements” like depopulation, mass vaccination of bodies and crops, models that can predict climate change, energy transition or psycho-political rewiring of people. Organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness that the planet’s citizens were used to. Not like it was 10,000 years or even 150 years ago. Man conquered the planet alright, albeit those who form a part of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, have bankrupted the same host planet. The “male ecology made of doom, repression or outright violence” (Women Who Make a Fuss) versus the female ecology “of collective power, regeneration, escape or outright disruption” (Haraway). Both ends are radical — one proffers total collapse of current civilization, while the other creates spatial and temporal emancipation through collapse itself.

Ready or not, the end of the Capitalocene is part of the above evolution, if not ours but a range of organisms, intelligence and “Rebel Bodies” of women and men of the present and the future.

Francesca Albanese. The economy of occupation and the economy of Genocide. “Ms. Albanese, you are a witch!”. We are back to the beginning. “One woman against the Empire” (Electronic Intifada, October 2025). Francesca Albanese’s verdict, that destroyed a range of myths and exposed a range of new horrors / crimes not as a political move but as a Special Rapporteur for the U.N. The “Rebel Voice” which brings us back, as to why was she called a “Witch”. The entire class, made of economic, corporate, military and political interests, sees Albanese as “a clear threat that must be undermined”. Albanese’s verdict is made of five precise and undeniable points. What all ties up as “Colonial endeavors and their associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector” (United Nations, October 2025)

1. Commercial interests have contributed to the dispossession of Indigenous people and lands. As a historic process as well as settler-colonial expansion.

2. A mode of domination known as “colonial racial capitalism”.

3. The same is true of Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands (1948 Nakba till now).

4. Israel’s expansion into the occupied Palestinian territory and its institutionalization of a regime of settler-colonial apartheid.

5. After denying Palestinian self-determination for decades, Israel is now destroying the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine.

What Albanese is pointing to is not the settler-project of Israel alone but the entire economy that has benefited billions of dollars from “Necro-Politics” (Achille Mbembe). Why did the world allow the Genocide in Gaza to happen? One way, as Albanese encapsulates the matter, “without too much political or historical baggage” is rather simple. “Had proper human rights, due diligence been undertaken, corporate entities would have long ago disengaged from Israeli occupation. Instead, post-October 2023, corporate actors have contributed to the acceleration of the displacement-replacement process throughout the military campaign that has pulverized Gaza and displaced the largest number of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967”.

What comes across clearly as Genocide, not just committed by the settler-project of Israel, but the larger “Genocidal Intent” of countries like the U.S. Germany, Canada, UK, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. This transition is clearly based on “racial tendency”. Laws governing “corporate responsibility” are directly related to the violent dispossession and private power, and “the legacy of corporate collusion with settler-colonialism and racial segregation” (Albanese). Its not just one vicious, medieval, moron like Danny Danon who called Albanese a “Witch” but a range of voices — out to castigate or literally “burn the Witch”. Special Rapporteur or “Witch” who smashed the status quo, by exposing “truly uncomfortable truths” about the involvement of Italian, French, American, British, Canadian, Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Indian and Saudi Arabian companies and politicians, all complicit in Gaza’s destruction. Every diplomat, political leader and media pundit who attacked Albanese is basically avoiding one thing — engaging with the facts and real substance of her accusations. We know well why that is the case.

“Cursed Israel with lies and hatred.” (Danny Danon). Such free-for-all attacks on Albanese, particularly from the utterly fundamentalist politicians and media-outlets in Israel and the U.S. are not based on any evidence. Indeed “Witch” and “Hamas Sympathizer” is way easier. What went almost unnoticed was the reaction to the report that came from Italy’s spokesperson at the UN, Maurizio Massari. Not having read a word of Albanese’s report and verdict, he declared that “the report presented today by S.R. Albanese is devoid of credibility and impartiality”. Regardless, her extensive report has effectively burned down the remaining veneer of liberal democracy and notions such as “rule of international law”. Laid bare, the hopeless status of the United Nations. That Zionists are a special class, exempt from all complicity, all limits of destruction, also itself contrary to humanity. Thus far, there is nothing to be hoped for, in terms of justice. Not until “responsibility entails criminal liability”.

Albanese, like hundreds of other experts, journalists, lawyers and investigative bodies have concluded, “the economy of occupation and the economy of Genocide” with mass evidence “regarding European complicity in the Genocide in Gaza and the systematic erasure of Palestinians”. (Middle East Eye).

🌺 “Rebel Body” of the world 🌺 Who wants to be a ⚡Witch⚡

The timeline reveals the evolution of resistance and that of “Witches”. What also comes across is the fear of truth. Fear of the apocalypse. Fear of the female capacity. Then only we blame the “Witch”. Hundreds of crude slogans that emerge from “a diminished state and Techno-Masculinity” (Haraway). And treachery to the “homeland” or “manifest destiny”? Then accuse, demonize, burn or deport the heretics, the aliens, the undocumented and the non-believers — of the “coming age” or “coming apocalypse”. A bunch of great abstractions or illusions, bound to collapse like the medieval laws, rules, decrees and regulations based around domination, of Nature, of gender, of life and death.

Silvia Federici outlines the “key signifier” to take back all “productive and reproductive activities that have been appropriated by men, capital and the state”. Hence, “Trouble” and Federici’s “Rebel Body” are more like twins or eventually about overcoming alienation — with the end of the work-discipline and the end of exploitation for profit, that defines and shackles the entire planet and life, as of now.

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