Nihilist Optimism

For Heritage Open Days 2026 , Colchester Castle opened its doors free of charge for one day. We took along a copy of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch and read several passages from it inside the Castle. The audio from this is available as Season 2, Episode 12, of the Minor Compositions podcast . Colchester Castle is usually remembered through much longer histories: Roman Camulodunum beneath it, the Norman keep built above, siege and civil war, and eventually its transformation into a museum. But for centuries the Castle was also a prison. In 1645 it became one of the sites of the East Anglian witch persecutions. Matthew Hopkins used the Castle as a base for interrogating women accused of witchcraft; Colchester Museums records that thirty-five women from north-east Essex were brought there and questioned as part of the persecutions commonly associated with the “Manningtree witches.” Some of those imprisoned in the Castle never survived confinement. Hopkins himself does not appea...

These sections (223-262) push the inversion already underway in the earlier parts of Workers and Capital much further. What begins as the methodological priority of working-class struggle over capitalist development becomes something stranger and more demanding: an attempt to think knowledge, history, technology, organisation, even capitalism itself, from the standpoint of the force capable of abolishing it. The working-class point of view is not another interpretation of the same world. It changes what counts as knowing the world in the first place .   There is something wonderfully improper in Tronti’s demand for the “right to be despised as scholars” (224). Research conducted from the working-class point of view has no particular interest in proving that it can play by the rules of recognised knowledge. It takes on instead what he calls the “honour of isolation”: working clandestinely, underground, refusing the fantasy that knowledge becomes more truthful the further it wi...