Based on Silvia Federici’s groundbreaking book Caliban and the Witch, this essay collage describes the economic shift from a peasant economy into capitalism. The most severe global pandemic in history led to a golden age of peasantry, filled with new freedoms, mobility, diet and rights. The reaction shot came from a ruling class – the church, the new traders, the old kings and queens – who created a system that would erase any trace of the new experiments in collective living, religious freedom and the rights of women. They called it capitalism.
“History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.” Hilary Mantel