Silvia Federici
Italian-American scholar, teacher, and feminist activist (born 1942)
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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. 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.
Early life and education
Federici was born in Parma, Italy, in 1942. With the aid of a Fulbright scholarship, she moved to the United States in 1967 to study for a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University at Buffalo. She completed her doctorate in 1980 with a dissertation entitled The Development of Lukács' Realism, an examination of the philosophical and aesthetic development of György Lukács. The dissertation challenges interpretations that divide Lukács's intellectual development into sharply separated pre-Marxist, Marxist-Hegelian and later aesthetic periods, instead emphasizing continuities in his attempts to reconcile idealism, Marxism and a realist conception of an objective world. During the period in which she was developing this work, Federici published "Notes on Lukács' Aesthetics" in Telos in 1972.
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Academic career
After earning her doctorate, Federici taught for several years at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. She then became Associate Professor and later Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University in New York. She holds the title of Professor Emerita at Hofstra.
Activism
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.
In the 1980s and '90s, Federici was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. 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. Her involvement with CAFA led to her serving for several years as an Executive member of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS).
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.
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.
Scholarly contributions
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, 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.
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".
Personal life
Federici lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her partner George Caffentzis.