Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici
Federici being interviewed in 2014
Born	1942 (age 82–83) Parma, Italy
Partner	George Caffentzis
Education
Education	University at Buffalo (PhD)
Philosophical work
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Autonomism[1] Marxist feminism
Institutions	University of Port Harcourt Hofstra University
Notable works	Wages Against Housework (1975) Caliban and the Witch (2004)

Silvia Federici (Italian pronunciation: [ˈsilvja fedeˈriːtʃi]; born 1942) is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and Marxist feminist activist based in New York.^[2] She is considered one of the leading theoreticians in Marxist feminist theory, women's history, political philosophy, and the history and theory of the commons. Her most famous book, Caliban and the Witch (2004), has been translated into numerous languages and adopted in college courses.^[3][4][5]

For several decades, she has worked with a variety of international feminist organizations, such as Women in Nigeria (WIN) and the Latin American-based Ni una menos, to combat gender-based violence.^[6] In the 2010s, she organized a project with feminist collectives in Spain to reconstruct the history of women persecuted as witches in early modern Europe, and to raise awareness about what she believes are contemporary witch-hunts still taking place around the world.^[7]

Federici was born in Parma, Italy, in 1942.^[8] With the aid of a Fulbright scholarship,^[8] she moved to the United States in 1967 to study for a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University at Buffalo.^[9]

After earning her doctorate, Federici taught for several years at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria.^[10] She then became Associate Professor and later Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University in New York.^[11] She holds the title of Professor Emerita at Hofstra.^[12]

In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, Federici co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1973, she helped start "Wages for Housework" groups in the U.S. In 1975, she published the pamphlet Wages Against Housework, the document most associated with the Wages for Housework movement.^[13]

In the 1980s and '90s, Federici was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.^[14] In 1990, she co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA) and, with Ousseina Alidou, edited the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.^[9] Her involvement with CAFA led to her serving for several years as an Executive member of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS).^[15]

In 1995, during the campaign to free African-American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal from death row, Federici helped launch the Anti-Death Penalty Project (ADPP) within the Radical Philosophy Association. Along with ADPP co-leaders George Caffentzis and Everet Green, Federici encouraged the global academic community to agitate against the death penalty.^[16]

In March 2022, Federici was among the 151 feminists worldwide who signed Feminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto, in solidarity with the Russian Feminist Anti-War Resistance.^{[17][n. 1]}

Federici's best-known book, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati to investigate the reasons for the witch hunts that occurred in the early modern period,^{[21][22][23][24]} but Federici puts greater emphasis on a feminist interpretation. In the book, she argues against the traditional understanding of Karl Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, which is viewed as a necessary precursor for capitalism. Instead, she posits that primitive accumulation is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism itself—that the economic system, in order to perpetuate itself, requires a constant infusion of expropriated capital. She connects this expropriation to women's unpaid labour, via reproduction and otherwise, which she frames as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labor. Related to this, she outlines the historical struggles for the commons and for communalism. Instead of seeing capitalism as a liberatory defeat of feudalism, Federici interprets the ascent of capitalism as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism and to retain the basic social contract.

She situates the institutionalization of rape and prostitution—as well as the heretic and witch-hunt trials, burnings and torture—at the center of a systematic suppression of women and appropriation of their labor. This is tied into colonial expropriation and provides a framework for understanding the work of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common—from water, to seeds, to our genetic code—becomes privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.^[25]

Often described as a counterpoint to Marx's account of "primitive accumulation", Caliban reconstructs the history of capitalism, highlighting the continuity between the capitalist subjugation of women, the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization of the Americas. The book has been described as "a retelling of the birth of capitalism that places women at the center of the story".^[26]

Federici lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her partner George Caffentzis.^[8]

• Wages Against Housework (PDF). Bristol: Power of Women Collective; Falling Wall Press. 1975. ISBN 978-0950270296. 8-page pamphlet.
• Il Grande Calibano: Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale (in Italian). Milan: Franco Angeli. 1984. OCLC 20376620. Co-written with Leopoldina Fortunati.
• "Il Femminismo e il Movimento contro la guerra USA". DeriveApprodi (in Italian). No. 24. 2004.
• Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. 2004. ISBN 978-1570270598 – via Internet Archive.
• Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PDF). PM Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1604863338 – via Midnight Notes Collective.
• Emre, Merve, ed. (2018). "Every Woman Is a Working Woman". Once and Future Feminist. Cambridge, MA: Boston Review. ISBN 978-1946511102.
• Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. Oakland, CA: PM Press. 2018. ISBN 978-1629635682.
• Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland, CA: PM Press. 2018. ISBN 978-1629635699.^[27]
• Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. 2020. ISBN 978-1629637068.
• Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. 2021. ISBN 978-1629638584.

• (1995) (ed.) Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its "Others". Westport, CT, and London: Praeger.
• (2000) (ed.) A Thousand Flowers: Structural Adjustment and the Struggle for Education in Africa. Africa World Press. Co-edited with George Caffentzis and Ousseina Alidou.
• (2000) (ed.) African Visions: Literary Images, Political Change, and Social Struggle in Contemporary Africa. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger. Co-edited with Joseph McLaren and Cheryl Mwaria.
• (2021) (ed.) Feminicide and Global Accumulation: Frontline Struggles to Resist the Violence of Patriarchy and Capitalism. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions. Co-edited with Susana Draper and Liz Mason-Deese.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Silvia Federici.

• Silvia Federici page at Generation Online
• Silvia Federici page at LibCom
• Midnight Notes Collective – Table of Contents
• Silvia Federici Papers - Pembroke Center Archives, Brown University
• Tribute to Silvia Federici in The Commoner
• Audio from a talk entitled "The Body, Capitalist Accumulation And The Accumulation Of Labour Power" by Silvia Federici for Bristol Radical History Group
• "Academic Freedom and the Enclosure of Knowledge in the Global University" by Silvia Federici at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. 19 September 2013.