Silvia Federici (born 1942) is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York.[1] She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor.[2] She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria from 1984 to 1986.[3] In 1972, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework. In 1990, Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), and, with Ousseina Alidou, was the editor of the CAFA bulletin for over a decade.[4] She was also a member of the Academic Association of Africa Scholars (ACAS) and among the voices generating support for the struggles of students across the African continent and in the United States.[citation needed] In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition.[citation needed] From 1979 to 2003, she was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.[citation needed]
For several decades, Federici has been working in a variety of projects with feminist organizations across the world like Women in Nigeria (WIN), Ni Una Menos, the Argentinian feminist organization, and Feminist research on violence in New York.[citation needed] For the last five years,[when?] she has been organizing a project with feminist collectives in Spain to reconstruct the history of the women, who were persecuted as witches in early modern Europe, and raise consciousness about the contemporary witch-hunts that are taking place across the world.[citation needed]
She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, and an organizer with the wages for housework campaign. In 1973, she helped start Wages for Housework groups in the US. In 1975 she published Wages Against Housework, the book most commonly associated with the wages for housework movement.[7]
She also co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), and was involved with the Midnight Notes Collective. In 1995, she co-founded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project.
In March 2022, Federici was amongst 151 international feminists signing Feminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto, in solidarity with the Feminist Anti-War Resistance initiated by Russian feminists after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[8]
Federici connects this expropriation to women's unpaid labour, both connected to 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 struggle for the commons and the struggle 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 methodical subjugation 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.
(1975) Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Published jointly by the Power of Women Collective and the Falling Wall Press. Link goes to full text of the book.
(1984, with Leopoldina Fortunati) Il Grande Calibano: Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale. Milan: Franco Angeli
(2004) "Il Femminismo e il Movimento contro la guerra USA", in DeriveApprodi #24
(2021) Patriarchy of The Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
As editor
(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.
(2000) (eds.) African Visions: Literary Images, Political Change, and Social Struggle in Contemporary Africa. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger.
^Federici, Silvia (2021). Caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. Penguin modern classics. London: Penguin Book. p. x. ISBN978-0-241-53253-9.
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