Capitalism and the Rise of Witch Burning
How dare you not be a brood mare?
The Black Death of the fourteenth century didn’t just kill a lot of motherfuckers, it paved the way for capitalism, and capitalism opened the door to a dramatic expansion of witch hunts, because labor is a valuable commodity, and uteruses produce labor, and any woman who doesn’t accept her duty to pop out more and more workers must be a witch. Burn her!
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 5, 1484--
Between 1346 and 1353 was the deadliest pandemic in world history, wiping out about a third of Europe. I mean, they did do dumb shit like huddle together in churches to pray away the disease and instead spread it to each other. Some also thought cats were the problem as “consorts of Satan” and killed a bunch of their furry friends but then there were no cats to kill the rats that carried the fleas that spread the plague that killed the hole there’s a hole there’s a hole at the bottom of the where the fuck was I?
Because of all the death, there was suddenly more land than serfs to work them, and so there was a revolution of anti-feudalism by those who hadn’t died horribly who realized the landowners actually needed them and they had some negotiating power. Capitalism was the counter-revolution to that, putting control back into the hands of feudal lords, as well as wealthy merchants, and also the church.
As much as feudalism sucked, women had a lot more freedom under it. In the fourteenth century, women worked as smiths, brewers, butchers, bakers, physicians, and teachers. Much like how some incel gamer loses his fucking mind when a woman beats him to the finish in Gran Turismo, men misplaced their excrement over the growing women’s independence and competitiveness in the expanding paid labor market.
The Protestant Reformation had not yet begun, but there was still plenty o’ heretics around that the Catholic Church was fond of setting on fire, so they said no problem we can expand that shit to include witches. On December 5, 1484, the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus was issued by Pope Innocent VIII. Why are so many of these shitty things done by popes named Innocent?
Anyway, Pope Fuckface was pretty weak, and got coerced by a German douchenugget named Heinrich Kramer so he could go out and kill women who had “abandoned themselves to devils” by deciding not to be your fucking brood mare.
Witch hunts had been around in various forms since antiquity, but the papal bull opened the door to a new wave of women murder who didn’t behave as patriarchal society demanded. With the rise of capitalism, it came to be seen that the wealth of a nation was its population. Therefore, getting married and popping out babies was the only right and proper thing for anyone with a vagina to do. Women were newly infantilized, demonized, and made slaves to the new system of creating evermore product—meaning human labor—to feed the capitalist machine. And if you didn’t want to play that game, you must be a witch. Tens of thousands were murdered, creating a state of terror that reverberated across the centuries, lasting to this day.
You wonder where those modern-day fundamentalist fucknuts got their ideas about demonizing abortion and birth control? Well, there you go.
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So depressingly true.
My mum did her bit popping out ten kids but even she questioned my cousin for doing the same thing. She thought he and his wife were mad! Also she didn’t believe the oldest girl should be a faux mum. SHE was the mum, not She who we now call The Oracle (oldest sister being the all knowing, tell the rest of us what to do 🤣).