Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical 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.

Federici's most recent work, Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati. In it, she argues against Marx's claim that primitive accumulation is a necessary precursor for capitalism. Instead, she posits that primitive accumulation is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism itself - that capitalism, in order to perpetuate itself, requires a constant infusion of expropriated capital.

Federici connects this expropriation to women’s unpaid labor both connected to reproduction and otherwise, which she frames as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labor. In association with this, she outlines the historical fight for the commons and the struggle for communalism. Instead of seeing capitalism as being 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 places 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 then tied into colonial expropriation and provides a framework for understanding the work of the IMF, World Bank and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in [[The commons |common]] from water to seeds, to our genetic code become privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.

Selected Works

Articles

• Silvia Federici, recorded live at Fusion Arts, NYC. (11.30.04)
• Theses on Mass Worker and Social Capital (1972, with Mario Montano)
• War, Globalization and Reproduction
• Mormons in space (with George Caffentzis)
• A brief history of resistance to structural adjustment (with George Caffentzis)
• Donne, Globalizzazione e Movimento Internazionale delle Donne
• Genoa and the antiglobalization movement (with George Caffentzis)
• The great Caliban:The struggle against the rebel body, from Caliban & the Witch
• All the World Needs a Jolt: Social Movements and Political Crisis in Medieval Europe, from Caliban & the Witch
• The Debt Crisis, Africa and the New Enclosures
• The War in Jugoslavia. On Whom the Bombs are Falling? (1999, with Massimo De Angelis)
• "Viet Cong Philosophy: Tran Duc Thao". TELOS 06 (Fall 1970). New York: Telos Press
• Development and Underdevelopment in Nigeria (1985)

Sources

• “Silvia Federici, associate professor in Political Philosophy at Hofstra University, and coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She is the editor of several books including Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its Others”
• http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/14/2234245

• “Silvia Federici, a long time feminist activist and teacher, is co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and the RPA (Radical Philosophy Association) Anti-Death Penalty Project. She teaches International Studies and Political Philosophy at Hofstra University. Federici’s published work includes: “Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its ‘Others’” (editor) and “A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities" (co-editor).”
• http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/11/28/0813249&mode=nocomment&tid=9

• “Autonomist Marxist feminists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici argued that women doing domestic labour were not only labouring for individual men but also for capital and were participating in producing labour power as a commodity used by capitalists.”
• http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/10/06/1324235&mode=nested&tid=9

External links

• Audio from a talk entitled The Body, Capitalist Accumulation And The Accumulation Of Labour Power by Silvia Federici for Bristol Radical History Group