Cały świat potrzebuje wstrząsu. Ruchy społeczne i polityczny kryzys w średniowiecznej Europie
All the World Needs a Jolt. Social Movements and political Crisis in Medieval Europe

Summary/Abstract: The text is a part of the chapter from Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, in which the Italian philosopher describes the history of the rise of capitalism from the angle of social struggles, autonomist organizations created between the 12th and 17th centuries, and the vast contribution of women into the resistance in those days. Through polemicizing with the linear concept of history supported by many Marxists, Federici indicates that the capitalist revolution was indeed a counter-revolution, not only by causing more violence, repression and real subordination than feudalism, but also by cooperating with the forces of the old world in order to maintain the social and economic status quo. Such point of view allows Federici to see the Middle Ages very differently than the one we know from the textbooks. That is why the vision of the world that emerges from her work is free from the view that no alternative existed to Church domination, or from the view that social life was completely subordinated to feudal authority. Instead, Federici presents an era of real resistance, countless social movements and heresy as well as class struggles of the same intensity as the struggles of proletariat in 19th or 20th centuries.

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