Rev Left Radio - Caliban and the Witch: An Interview with Silvia Federici

Episode Date: December 21, 2017

Silvia Federici is one of the most important political theorists alive today. Her landmark book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation demonstrated the inextricable link between anti-capitalism and radical feminist politics by digging deep into the actual history of capital’s centuries-long attack on women and the body. She is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition. She is a professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor. She worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.  Silvia joins Brett to discuss the main ideas of her very important and well known book, Caliban and the Witch. Topics include: Marxism, Primitive Accumulation, Feminism, Witch Hunts, Patriarchy of the Wage, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Wiccans, contemporary witch culture, and much more! Intro and Outro music by church fire, off the album "Pussy Blood". You can listen to, and support, their music here: https://churchfire.bandcamp.com Support Rev Left Radio on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio/posts This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition and the Omaha GDC.   

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade Brett O'Shea. Today we have on the wonderful Sylvia Federer Ricci, author of the monumental work, Caliban and the Witch, to have a discussion about that book. But before we get into the interview, I wanted to give a really quick shout out to Rachel and Joe Lee from the Feminist Killjoys Ph.D.

podcast and my good friend Brendan Leahy, both of whom helped me edit and prepare the outline for this interview. And I also want to give a shout out to Churchfire, a band out of Denver who provided the intro and outro music for this program. So thanks to all of them. Now let's get to the interview. I'm a little nervous to talk to you. I'm a big fan of your work and so it's kind of nerve-wracking, but I'm super excited. So, no, please go on to Dundee. Okay. We have a very millennial oriented audience and so I'm extremely excited for some for some people in our audience it'll be the first time they ever hear about you or get to engage with this work this wonderful book so uh-huh tell me again where are you calling from um we actually live in

Omaha Nebraska in the middle of nowhere Nebraska yeah hey I've never been there yeah there's not much here but it must be very beautiful it actually is you know I think we live in on the great plains on the banks of the Missouri River so there's a lot of beauty here. Yes. All right. Well, I'm ready to jump into the interview if you are. Okay. Yes, I am. All right, so let's just go ahead and dive in. So to begin, I'd like to start with some basic ideas for people that might not know. So can you please summarize Karl Marx's, his basic ideas about primitive accumulation, like what it is and what role it plays in Orthodox Marxist theory? Well, as you know, Caliban and the West, in its general framework, it's very critical of basically Marx interpretation of the origin and development of capitalism.

And in a way, the book was inspired by the desire to write the account of the development of capitalism that cannot be found in Marx. For Marx, the concept of primity or actually original accumulation, you know, it's a concept he uses to describe that the processes that led to the formation of a capitalist society. In other words, you know, Marx reasons that in order for a whole system like capitalism to take off, there had to be preliminary stages. which the elements, the means of production in a way were put into place. And he describes it in a very famous chapter of Volume 1 of Capital. You know, he describes what his processes were.

And at the center of it, he places the separation of the peasantry from the land in Europe, know, the expropriation of the peasantry. I think it's important to understand that most peasants of what we call agricultural work in the late Middle Ages did not own land, but they work the land of the aristocratic landowners. But this land, a certain amount of land was given to them to reproduce themselves. In other words, half of the week they will work on the land of the Lord's, and the other half they work on their own land. And often the land that they used, which was not theirs, but they could use it for their reproduction, they worked it collectively.

And they also had the collective use of what we call the common. For example, places for animals to graze, ponds, to do some fishing, some wood. woods where they could access some fuel, you know, to warm themselves, et cetera. You know, so basically they had access to the means of reproduction. And what Marx points out is that capitalism begins in Europe with the violent expropriation of the peasantry from the land, from the woods, from the commons, the destruction of the commons, so that, you had the formation of a proletariat that has nothing.

You know, they cannot reproduce themselves, and they have to accept to work for a wage, you know, which was very low, which was given under very coercive conditions, so much so that wage labor, up to the 17th century, was even seen as a form of slavery. Now, that description is very important, is very powerful, but what I came to understand is that it's not sufficient. It's only part of the story. And I came to understand it basically trying to learn, to investigate, you know, what happens to women,

what happens to the whole issue of reproduction, to reproductive activity, you know, Relative procreation, sexuality, family relations. What happens to them, you know, in the transition from a pseudo society to a capitalist society? And in the process of doing that, I also encountered this amazing phenomenon that was the great witchand of the 16th and 17th century, which was a massive persecution of women accused of being witches, and that, for the great part, they were arrested, torture, killed in the most brutal way. They were often burnt their lives on the square of the village. So when I encountered this history, which you don't find in Marx, I began to question, because

I realized very soon that these witch hunts were contemporary when with the expulsion of the peasantry from the land. And they were also contemporary with the onset of the slave trade, which is also recognized. It's recognized by Marx and by many historians. It's recognized as being one of the factors that led to the development of capitalism. So realizing that the returns were really chronologically in the same period, you know, in a period where I'm in feudal society was already coming to an end.

You know, I began to understand, to ask myself, what was the function of this persecution, you know, in capitalist development? And so that began a whole analysis, which is basically the substance of the book. And I came to the conclusion that, in fact, the witcheruns were an important part, you know, were part of the processes that led to the development of capitalist society because through the witch hand

in a way a whole set of norms were established, you know, has to the condition of women in the developing capitalist society,

the reorganization of reproduction, sexuality, and And so this basically is my critique of Marx. My critique of Marx is that you only see a part of this process and does not see that expelling people from the land and properizing them to the point that they have nothing to support themselves is not sufficient to create a type of worker that the developing capitalist society

required. Absolutely. And it was a monumental contribution to Marxist theory, and we're going to get a little bit into the witch hunts later on in this interview, but still kind of fleshing out some of the history. You know, Karl Marx argued, and many Marxists still argue that capitalism evolved out of feudalism and was a progressive force at that time. In this view, capitalism is under.

understood as a positive transcendence of feudalism. Why is this view of capitalism wrong? Yeah, I'm very, I'm very opposed to that, and I'm very opposed to that, and I'm very opposed also to, you know, one of the tenets of markets. I've learned a lot from Marx, and I think the Marx remains imposed and in many ways to understand capitalist society, but there are certain key elements that I really reject, and one key elements is that capitalism was progressive and two, which is very connected with it, that in a way, capitalism was necessary. Capitalism was a, yes, a violent, exploitative system,

but somehow, according to Marx, it was necessary in order to set the condition for the communist society. And from Marx is necessary because it is necessary because it is a destroys small-scale property, and it creates, it concentrates lens and concentrates the means of production, and in that way, it enables, it sets the material condition for large-scale industry, for large-scale production, and Marks, it was always convenient as the large-scale production was a necessary element of a future. of a future liberated communist society because it would be able to overcome the danger of scarcity

and provide the material condition for, I guess, the general prosperity. And part of that is to, it looks at capitalism as, in a sense, a step above, you know, future society. In other words, for Marx, the capitalist system is exploitative, but has one great virtue, or two great virtues. One, it concentrates the means of production, and two, it develops the productivity of labor.

It immensely increases the productivity of labor. And in that way, it's fundamental to set, to provide, you know, for a society capable of overcoming scarcity and capable of providing prosperity for all. It's a nice picture. I'm against it because, number one, you know, to me, when you look at the history of the environment of capitalism, you see that in a way it was the counter-revolution.

Capitalism does not come out simply in an evolutionary way, from feudal society, it's a response to a large process of anti-fudal struggle. It's a response to an anti-fudor struggle, so it's not emerging naturally out of feudalism or in response to feudalism. In fact, capitalism comes out from the heart of feudal society. In England, you see it very well. It's the landlord who becomes a capitalist landowner. You know, it's the very landlord, it's the very aristocracy

who within a century transform itself into a land ownership and basically the one who commercializes agriculture and sets off a land market and basically turns agriculture on a commercial basis. But what Marx does not see or does not appreciate Angus writes about it, and I think Angus too did not appreciate it, is the tremendous struggle that at the end in the late feudal period by the 15th century across Europe were taking place in England, in France, in Spain, you know, by peasants,

by artisan in the city which had very, very I'll say revolutionary character which were struggles against the feudal system they were struggled against the church which was very much part of feudal power

the church, the bishop and the lords were the two and they were struggle against the merchants the rich urban merchants who often had made their wealth through international international imports, you know, they'll go to China and so on, and they'll bring back lectures for the nobility.

But by the 15th century, they were also setting up, you know, forms of manufacture, I mean, at least were setting up workshops in the urban centers. So the development of capitalism is built. upon the destruction of these struggles, upon the destruction of these movements. And in their way, it is a counter-revolution. I see. So, number one, number two, in terms of capitalism creating the material foundation, you know, for the future, we can see now.

We can see now. Now we have 500 years of capitalist rule. And we have seen that actually not only poverty, if any, has continued to increase, today the level of impoverishment, after you have a capitalist class that has accumulated trillion, I do know what is accumulated, you know, over centuries of exploitation, and most brutal of expectation, because most of it has been under semi-inslaving, you know, forms in slavery or semi-slavery, colonialism, conquest, wars, is a history of destruction. Nevertheless, for most of the world, still, most of most people in the world do not have

the condition that enable them to survive, enable them to even have, you know, two males a day. I remember Aristide that was saying in Haiti at the time, you know, when you first was elected president, then most of people in the world are still making a fight to be able to have a plate of being twice a day, and that's still not guaranteed to so many people across the world. So, and more than that, you know, we see now that through, you know, all the nuclear waste, the nuclear experimentation, all the chemical poison that have poured into the earth, we now have not only

not an increase of wealth but we have tremendous destruction of the natural wealth and the wealth produced so that Marx's idea is that capitalism affects the condition and all that a revolution has to do

and all the proletariat has to do is now to a, you know, to replace, in a way, to replace the capitalists and steer the boat in a different direction. Use the industry that the capitalist class has built and steer it to benevolent, to benign objectives, right, to make it produce, you know, for the well-being of people and not for their exploitation. That is a dream. That is an illusion. For example, you cannot recover the nuclear industry and make it

produce. You cannot take over that in fact the kind of industrial wealth that capitalized has produced is so destructive of the environment

that it will take centuries to in fact make this planet fully habitable again. Absolutely. Moving on to the actual witch hunts, because I know that's a big part of the book, can you please explain what role the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries

played in the development of capitalism and why it was so essential? Yeah, you know, I propose a theory and, you know, my, my, well, as I often have said, it is extremely difficult to, when you begin to look at the witch hunt, you know, to at first it seems almost impossible to explain it because you know you have women persecuted and accused of such absurd crimes that you feel you are in a in a man met people that the accusers were just mad people you know they were accused of copulating with the devil flying at night to places where thousands and thousands

who congregate to have this horrendous orgies killing the children of their neighbors and making soap making all kinds of unguins with them etc and so

at first you're very discouraged if you're an historian too but what I began to do was to look at who were these women and look at the crimes that they were accused of and then try to connect them to what was taking place in the same years, in the same spaces, in the same time, you know, and what kind of social changes were taking place. I came to the

conclusion that the witch hand actually was instrumental. First of all, to destroy a whole set of practices and social subjects that were antagonistic basically to the kind of values, to the kind of work discipline that the capitalist class was trying to impose. And in particular, that the witch hunt were instrumental to Basically, create the new task the women who dare to accomplish in the new society. And, for example, instrumental, to place procreation women's reproductive capacity under the control of the state and make sure the women will not be able to control

the reproductive capacity, they will not be able to abort. you have not be able in any way to interfere, you know, with the procreation process. And the witches, for example, were accused of being basically baby killers. It's very interesting today when I hear the right-to-life people saying baby-killers, baby-killers to women who want to abort, and I really feel it's the new witch hunt, because this is exactly what these women were accused. stuff. They were accused of killing children and of being an infanticide sect. You know, the witches were basically the enemy of the young life. And I've been trying to understand, okay, what was taking place in that period? So some historians say, well, a lot of children were dying

because of, you know, epidemics, et cetera, et cetera. Infamortality was very high. But I think there was something more, because in the same period, you see that in many parts of Europe, the same parts of Europe where you have a return, you see they were introducing legislations, basically criminalizing any form of contraception. And they were introducing also legislation. There was immensely increasing the penalties for women abortions, or for infanticide. In fact, witchcraft and infanticide, which was a very, very broad category,

were the two crimes for which most women were executed, you know, in the 16th and 17th century. And I basically realized that here begins the compulsion for women to give birth, the compulsion for women to procreate. And this was part of a whole obsession that you have in this period. You know, that the economists in this period have the politician with the population growth, with, you know, having as many people at their disposal as possible. You know, there's a whole theory, the theory of mercantilism that basically says that a nation

that it's particularly rich if it has a large number of poor people you can exploit this is really the substance of wealth and so one theory that I propose is that this obsession with natality that begins in this period and you know also that scientifically is the beginning of demography they begin to count people etc that this obsession you know is very much connected with the fact that, you know, unlike other system of exploitation, the capitalist system sees labor as the substance of wealth. It's not how much land you have, but how many laborers, and how much you can make them work. And there's a whole new interest in natality, in procreation. Procreation begins to be seen as a productive force, as

an economic power. So the uterus of women now begins to be connected with the labor market. And so this is the interpretation that I give because, in fact, you begin to see that in this period, in a way, into the present, the state has continuously been sensual,

you know, has maintained his role in supervising, you know, women's reproductive capacity and establishing rules and regulations and penalties it has taken a huge struggle of women

to be able to have their right for example to control to some extent their bodies also the issue of sexuality sexuality plays a big role in the work discipline so to create a disciplined

workforce you also have to discipline men's sexuality and women's sexuality before. So, you know, there's a whole attack through the retent against women's sexuality. The whole attack on witches or women accused of being witches of being, you know, sexual servant of the devil, of being excessively lasted,

all of this. You know, it's really a way of demonizing. Basically demonizing female sexuality. if it is exercise for anything but procreation. And so there's so many of the accusation that were moved against women accused related to sexual issue. And the other side is also the witch hunt was used

to basically as a tool in the class struggle. Many witches, as I've written in Caliban and the witch, were poor women who clearly women were being popularized clearly women were being you know victim of processes of expropriation and particularly the older one would not be able to survive except by begging by relying on their neighbors and when when their demands for some wine, for something, were not met. They would be cursing people.

And then, of course, they'll be accused of everything that happened to them. So it's also an attack on the dispossessed and the anger of the dispossessed and the attempt of the dispossessed to basically recuperate and fear, obviously, that the battle off had of these older women who had nothing, moved around the village, asked them for things, cursed them if they didn't provide them. And so the witch hunt has many sides. You know, I made a parallel with the war on terror that can be used to attack a whole range of rebel subjects. But when you look at it as a whole, it's instrumental to create a new disciplinary regime.

And most clearly, a disciplinary regime with respect to women. And, you know, I make the point that you can really see a difference between the kind of woman as represented in the popular literature, as it was represented before the witchan and the kind of woman that is represented after, you know, who now has been subdued. She has to be silent. She has to be obedience. She can only, for example, represent herself in a court,

but has to be represented by a man, a husband, etc., etc. So you see there is the teeming of women. There is a identification process. they really passes through a whole level of terror because this was a terror campaign. You're talking about maybe 100,000 or 200,000 women, 100. It's difficult to put an exact number because many of the archives have been destroyed

and many of the trials have not been reported. But certainly a large number of women that it will be a large number even today who were atrociously, you know, killed and, you know, many more were terrorized. So it's a persecution that left very deep skull in the social body. Certainly weakened the resistance

that people could make to the expansion of capitalism. and it also had this long-term influence on the power of women. It was a major attack on the power of women. Yeah, that's fascinating and horrifying. You say in the book that these witch hunts did not take place strangely in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Why did those witch hunts not take place in those areas? And what does that say about those areas at that time? My sense is that, you know, for example, in the – yeah, there is a difference in the case of Scotland

where the witch hunt, you can see that the witch hunt take hold in that area. So, you know, there was a very, very strong – actually, the witch hunt in Scotland were extremely violent. but in that part of Scotland that is up close to the border with England and it was a part in which the commercialization of agriculture and so on had already proceeded by the 16th century and I'm saying that instead you hardly find

witch hunts in that area of Scotland, the highlands where you still had more commemoration where the land was still into the hands not for long but in the 16 and 17th century it has not been

it hasn't gone through the process of expropriation and commercialization as you know the area around Edinburgh for example had so I'm saying I do trace a connection between the witch hand

and the extent to which commercial relation had been able to take hold. I see. And processes of privatization of land. Yeah, moving on a little bit. In the book, you also bring forth this concept of patriarchy of the wage. I was hoping that you could explain what that meant for our listeners. All right, the patriarchy of the wage. And it's a concept I use also for the present.

Yeah, the Patriarchy of the wage. Basically, it comes from the need to find some of the specific forms of patriarchal rule. I mean, patriarchal rule is not new. You know, there's been other patriarchal society, and in history, there's been many patriarchal regimes. But I think what is important is not to flatten the differences. because, you know, the rule of the father or the rule of man has taken different forms on what it is based, you know, what has been the instruments with which it has been imposed have changed historically, and those are important.

And so what I'm trying to show is that with the event of capitalism, more and more, you know, the wage, the wage, the wage, relation is used in order to create and maintain gender differences, gender hierarchies, male control over women, male supremacy with regard to women. So that while with the advent of capitalism, the whole area of reproductive activity, you know, housework, procreation, et cetera, et cetera, is declared, you know, falls off the economic radar. In other words, this is one of the major transformation that takes place

in social relations. For example, in the feudal period, or in any society where production is for consumption you don't have a separation between production and reproduction right for example

if you have a community a village where those the peasantry produces for its fuse right you don't have a separation between production and reproduction

because what you produce it's also reproducing you. For example, today as well, in many parts of Africa, at least until recently, or in Latin America, you find that the process of reproduction of domestic work

begins by, you know, putting some seeds in land. Right? You grow some food, and you grow it not for the market, but you grow it for your family. It's what you eat. so that's production

so that that agricultural labor subsistence agriculture is production and reproduction at the same time you don't have a separation now with capitalism that changes drastically you begin to see a bifurcation

the two activity production and production begins to separate you know in all kinds of ways because production for the market begins to be more and more a male job and it's a wage job. It's a job that is recognized as work, more and more socially recognized as producing wealth,

and it's men's job. Whereas more and more reproductive work, raising of children, procreation, in fact, by the same, domestic work, the care for the elderly, for non-self, sufficient, except. It's women's work. So, reproduction becomes feminized and also at the same time completely

devalued. It's not recognized this work. It's out of the wage. It's not paid. And increasingly, it becomes so invisible this work that it's naturalized. It's considered

women's labor. Women's labor, you know, with the idea that somehow is something the women do because they are women. It's not a socially, historically, defined work. So this separation is very important. It's part of the reason why in capitalism you have a gender hierarchy. Men of power over women. Through the wage, for example, the men control women's reproductive labor.

in the family, you know, through the way the state delegates to the men the power to control women's work, make sure they perform. And that's why domestic violence has always been tolerated. It's understood that slapping your wife, if she doesn't cook, or if she doesn't cook, you know, properly, she doesn't keep the house clean, it's okay. It's okay that you just slept your wife. You know, it's part of the discipline. So there is a whole structure, patriarchal structure that is created in capitalism that is very functional to ensure that reproduction of the working class does not cost anything to the capitalism or that it costs very little.

because women do all the they provide, they do all the work that the capitalists to have to do to enable millions of people

to go to work every day so the all infrastructure that the capitalist class would have had to create to enable people to go to work every day women have really done an enormous amount of work

and for no pay for no recognition. So the fact that housework has been invisibilized and devalue is not accidental. It's nothing to do with women's bodies

and personality. It has to do that to achieve that, you know, it saves the capitalist class billion. Women have a big bill to present to the capitalist class. Absolutely. They have a very, very big bill.

if they were, you know, motivated to do it because they have provided an enormous amount of work that otherwise, you know, they would have to provide. So that's why I speak of the patriarchy of the wage, that the wage has been the instrument through which all this machine, this kind of family, the home at the center for the production of the working class, the relation between women and men, the matrimonial deal, what I call the matrimonial deal, right? You know, he brings home the weight if he's a good man, and then you do the housework, that kind of exchange.

That's the patriarchy of the wage. Through the patriarchy of the wage, the ruling class has been able to guarantee a steep reproduction of labor power. so not only is capitalism literally founded on the brutal oppression and dominance of women it's still maintained by it and it's still an ongoing process of domination oh yeah and racism the whole in fact the wage the fact wages and wage labor are also important you know in the construction of a racialized society you know for instance in fact you know it's looking at what happens you know, the use of the wage is also for me clarified the question

of racism, how they're able to create. But again, you have a society that prize itself on being egalitarian, democratic, built on a social contract,

build on the rule of law that throughout this system racism Jim Crow expropriation colonization and then

you know how they've been able to hide all of that how they've been able so they're the differential in the work regime

right the way they've been creating a high of work regimes and then created an ideology to justify looking at the way the wage has been used

to maintain sexism to build a new type of patriarchal rule has also shed for me some light on the question

of the material conditions and the reason for the the creation of a racialized society right and that basically you know

the material basis of racism like the material basis of sexism right lies in the construction of different work regime and different work relations

so that you know you have a russian of work that is unpaid, in the same way as you have a genderization of work that is unpaid. There is a deep connection there, and it's very instrumental for the capitalist class to maintain its claim and that they have a kind of egalitarian democratic society because, you know, they, they make it appear that this differential have nothing to do with the system itself. Exactly.

But they are inscribed in the personality of those who are exploited. Right. Yeah, absolutely. That's the way ideology functions, and that's what we hear when we turn on the TV. Constantly, that messaging is being programmed into us. I mean, like this capitalist society who presents itself as being democratic

to in fact, you know, exploit a tremendous amount of enslaved, colonized, coerced labor. Yeah, and that leads kind of nicely into this next question because in today's world, there seems to be a movement of millennial anti-capitalist women that are being drawn to which culture and spirituality. Do you think there's a connection between that phenomenon of more people picking up that mantle

and the current state of neoliberal late capitalism? How do you think about that? It seems to me, from what I know, that there are two different revivals of the interest in what we call wagecraft, particularly men, women.

You know, there's one that is very recent that I'm more familiar with, which has, It's the feminist revival, right, that already began in the 1970s with, you know, women, for example, in Italy, in Europe, beginning to learn about the witch hands, you know. I mean, I'm part of it. As we all learned, they started going back to study women's history. We learned about the witches, and for many women, the witches became a kind of a sort of. symbol of the rebel

woman, right? In other words, well, they were persecuted because they were rebel women because they were women who were in possession of special knowledge, they knew about plans.

You know, there is an element of truth in that, which is that many women accused were also what healers. They were midwives. They were healers.

And you know, capitalism went on a rampage against all forms of popular powers. And also they were very hostile to midwives because they

were afraid the midwives would interfere with the process of reproduction. But I'm also a bit I'm not completely enthusiastic with the idea of the which is the special woman, the woman because many, many

were, you know, peasant women who were not part of any particular organization or group, but they were a rebel because they were attached to a form of life that

the capitalism had to destroy. Yeah? So, and more recently among younger feminists in Latin America but also in Europe you have again that

kind of interest, you know, the wage, the rebel women. For instance, in several demonstrations in Latin America women have marched with posters, some have written it on their own body

and now it's becoming a slogan in many demonstrations. They say we have the nieces, the granddaughters of all the witches you couldn't burn. Right. The witches have come back.

Okay, that's one story. There's another story that I'm familiar with a little bit which is the story of Wicca. And Wicca has a different derivation. It's also part of the feminist world, but it comes

from a very different angle. It comes more from an ecological angle. You know, from women were very interested in spirituality and, above all, in issues of ecology, right? And they are trying to recapture a certain type of spirituality connected with, you know, the natural world, the reclaiming the content with certain powers that are in the natural world. That's a different, it's a bit of a different angle. I don't know the more recent manifestation.

You know, I know about this too. And I think they precede both of them. Certainly, the Wikha too precedes neoliberalism. I don't think it has to do. It is more of a response to it rather than, I guess, a part of it. I see, absolutely. Yeah, it's like a continuation of that rebellion of feminist women against the domination of the capitalist system. Yeah, it's trying to recap, you know, I think it's, I would say that we don't see because of this concentration on the powers of technology and so on and so on,

that we don't see how much people are being published in the development of capitalized society. For example, we have really lost the connection with nature. You know, like nature is a postcard. I mean, people look at it from the outside. We have really lost the very profound relation that people had with all the experts of the natural world. They came from, you know, basically years and years, generation of agricultural life

where everything you did was passed you lived in a sort of co-evolution with the natural world and so you could read the waves of the ocean you could read the winds the way they were blowing you could come back and find your way in a forest by looking at the stars none of us can do that now

like this, not the majority of us. It's another form of alienation, alienation from nature. Absolutely, alienation from nature is one of the most powerful. And it's a tremendous impoverishment because feeling connected with something broader than you, with forces that are broader than you, it's a tremendous power. And so I think today, there's a day, there is an effort

to reclaim, recapture that connection in so many ways, whether it is also to food production, to struggle to maintain the last forest, et cetera, et cetera. But we are understanding now that that's where life is, that the moment the world is gone completely, we two are gone. Well, Sylvia, thank you so much for coming on. Before I let you go, though, I just like to ask you one more question, with all of your wisdom and all of your experience,

are you optimistic about the future? What gives you hope these days? Listen, what gives me hope is that I keep meeting beautiful people. And in this terrible, terrible world, whereas the world of politics and so on, the economics, it's worse and worse and worse. At the same time, as I go around, I meet so many beautiful, and that gives me a lot of,

a lot of strength and I say you cannot not afford to not to be you have to be optimistic you have to you know it's not

it doesn't mean that you delude yourself that everything is simple or that everything is easy right but is that you cannot accept you cannot live

in a situation of always feeling doomed if you feel don't, then you cannot make even the struggle you can make. And you have to struggle even without a guarantee. Right. If you're asking for the guarantee, then forget it. But you have to struggle because without struggling, your life right now would be far,

far, far worse. Right. Well, thank you so much, Sylvia, for coming on. It's been an honor. You're a huge inspiration to me and to millions of people out there. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for all the work. Thank you.

I wish you the best. You and your friends and your community. I really wish you the best. And I send you a big embrace. Okay? You too. Send you a big embrace as well. Have a good night.

Good night. Good night. I'm your life. Take this song like you take the sun like you take the sound like you take the Turned on the craze On the crash And lay the dust I don't know.

Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh . Thank you.