Silvia Federici
Based on Wikipedia: Silvia Federici
The Woman Who Rewrote the History of Capitalism
In 1975, a thirty-three-year-old Italian philosopher living in New York published an eight-page pamphlet with a title designed to provoke: Wages Against Housework. The argument was simple, radical, and infuriating to almost everyone who encountered it. Housework, Silvia Federici declared, was work. Real work. And women had been performing it, unpaid, for centuries—not out of love, not out of natural feminine instinct, but because capitalism required their labor without ever compensating them for it.
The pamphlet became one of the most influential feminist documents of the twentieth century. But Federici was just getting started.
From Parma to Brooklyn
Federici was born in Parma, Italy, in 1942, during the darkest years of World War Two. She grew up in a country rebuilding itself from fascism and occupation, surrounded by conversations about politics, power, and who controlled what. In 1967, she arrived in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at the University at Buffalo in New York.
The timing was auspicious. The late 1960s saw the emergence of second-wave feminism, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and a general questioning of established power structures. Federici threw herself into this intellectual ferment. But she noticed something that bothered her about the radical movements of the time. They talked endlessly about workers and wages and exploitation in factories. What they didn't talk about was the work happening in kitchens, nurseries, and bedrooms across the world.
Who cooked the meals that kept the factory workers fed? Who cleaned the houses they returned to? Who raised the next generation of laborers? Women did. And nobody called it work.
The Wages for Housework Campaign
In 1972, Federici joined forces with two other feminist thinkers—Mariarosa Dalla Costa from Italy and Selma James from Britain—to found the International Feminist Collective. Their mission was to launch what became known as the Wages for Housework campaign.
The idea was deliberately provocative. They weren't simply asking that housework be recognized as valuable. They were demanding that governments pay women actual wages for the domestic labor they performed. The proposal forced people to confront an uncomfortable question: if housework isn't real work, why does society fall apart when women stop doing it?
Critics came from all directions. Traditional conservatives thought the idea was absurd—housework was a wife's duty, not a job. Some feminists thought the campaign was counterproductive, arguing that it would trap women in domestic roles rather than liberating them to pursue careers. Economists wondered who would pay these wages and how.
But that was precisely the point. Federici and her colleagues weren't necessarily expecting governments to start writing checks to housewives. They wanted to expose the hidden infrastructure that made capitalism possible. Every time a man showed up at a factory ready to work, someone had made his breakfast, washed his clothes, and kept his household running. That someone was usually a woman. And capitalism had figured out a brilliant trick: it got all that labor for free by calling it love.
Teaching in Nigeria and the Discovery of the Commons
After completing her doctorate, Federici took a teaching position at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. This experience would prove transformative for her thinking. In Nigeria, she encountered communities that still maintained what scholars call "the commons"—shared resources managed collectively rather than owned privately.
She also witnessed firsthand the effects of structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These programs, which became common across Africa, Latin America, and Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, required developing countries to privatize public assets, cut social spending, and open their economies to foreign investment in exchange for loans.
Federici saw villages lose access to communal lands. She watched water sources that had been shared for generations suddenly become private property. She observed educational and healthcare systems stripped of funding. And she noticed who suffered most: women, who had traditionally relied on commons and social services to manage their households and raise their children.
In 1990, she co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa to document these changes and advocate for scholars and students caught in the crossfire. She edited the committee's bulletin for over a decade, tracking how economic restructuring was reshaping African societies.
Caliban and the Witch: A Feminist History of Capitalism
All of these threads—housework, colonialism, the commons, and economic exploitation—came together in Federici's masterwork, published in 2004 when she was sixty-two years old. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation is a dense, ambitious book that attempts nothing less than a feminist retelling of how capitalism came to dominate the world.
The title refers to two characters from Shakespeare's play The Tempest: Caliban, the enslaved native of the island, and Sycorax, his mother, who is described as a witch. Federici uses these figures to represent the two groups whose exploitation she sees as foundational to capitalism: colonized peoples and women accused of witchcraft.
The book begins with a startling reinterpretation of the witch trials that swept through Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Traditional historians have offered various explanations for these persecutions: religious hysteria, social tensions in rural communities, misogyny, the little ice age creating crop failures and scapegoating. Federici doesn't dismiss these factors, but she argues that something else was happening simultaneously.
The witch trials, she contends, were a deliberate campaign to break women's power and force them into submission to a new economic order.
What Were the Witch Trials Really About?
To understand Federici's argument, you need to understand what Europe looked like before capitalism emerged. In medieval society, peasants had access to common lands where they could graze animals, gather firewood, and forage for food. Women, in particular, relied on these commons. They also had considerable knowledge of herbs, healing, and midwifery. In many communities, they were the primary healthcare providers.
Then came the enclosures.
Starting in the fifteenth century and accelerating dramatically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wealthy landowners began fencing off common lands and claiming them as private property. Peasants who had sustained themselves on the commons were suddenly landless. They had no choice but to seek wage labor—to sell their time and bodies to whoever would pay.
This process, which Karl Marx called "primitive accumulation," is traditionally understood as a one-time historical event that created the conditions for capitalism. Peasants were separated from the land, and this separation created a working class that had to sell its labor to survive. Federici argues that this account, while accurate, is incomplete.
Marx focused on the dispossession of peasants from the land. Federici asks: what about the dispossession of women from their knowledge, their communities, and their reproductive autonomy?
The Body as a Site of Accumulation
Here's where Federici's analysis becomes genuinely original. She argues that capitalism didn't just need to create a working class—it needed to control how that working class reproduced itself. Literally. If workers are going to show up at factories generation after generation, someone has to give birth to them, raise them, feed them, and care for them when they're sick. That work of reproduction is just as essential to capitalism as the work of production.
The witch trials, in Federici's reading, were partly about seizing control of reproduction. Women who knew how to prevent pregnancy, induce abortions, or assist in childbirth outside the control of church and state were dangerous. They gave other women options. They represented an alternative source of knowledge and power.
So the emerging capitalist order—working hand in hand with church and state—set out to destroy them.
Women accused of witchcraft were frequently midwives and healers. They were women who lived outside the control of men, whether as widows, spinsters, or simply independent spirits. The accusations often centered on reproductive matters: causing impotence, killing infants, consorting with demons. By burning these women, Federici argues, authorities eliminated alternative forms of knowledge and established control over women's bodies.
Primitive Accumulation Never Ended
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Federici's argument is her claim that primitive accumulation isn't a one-time historical event. It's an ongoing process that capitalism requires to sustain itself.
Think about it this way: capitalism needs to keep finding new things to turn into commodities. It needs new resources to exploit, new labor to extract, new markets to open. When it runs out of external territory to colonize, it turns inward, finding new ways to charge for things that were once free or communal.
Water that was once drawn from a village well is now sold in plastic bottles. Seeds that farmers saved from one harvest to the next are now patented by corporations. The genetic code in your cells is mapped and monetized. Care work that was once performed by extended families and communities is now contracted out to underpaid workers or simply dumped on women who are expected to do it for free alongside their paid employment.
Federici sees the structural adjustment programs she witnessed in Nigeria as a clear example of this ongoing process. International financial institutions forced countries to privatize commons, cut social services, and open their economies to exploitation. The result, she argues, was a new round of enclosures—not of English farmland, but of African water sources, educational systems, and healthcare.
Contemporary Witch Hunts
Federici's work has taken on new urgency in recent decades because, as she documents in her 2018 book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women, witch hunts never actually stopped. They continue today in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, where thousands of people—mostly women—are accused of witchcraft and subjected to violence, exile, or death.
These contemporary witch hunts often correlate with economic disruption. When communities face scarcity, tensions rise, and someone gets blamed. As in early modern Europe, the accused are frequently elderly women, healers, or others who don't fit neatly into the social order.
In the 2010s, Federici organized a project with feminist collectives in Spain to reconstruct the history of women persecuted as witches in early modern Europe and to draw connections with contemporary persecutions. The work is part memorial, part activism, part historical investigation.
The Politics of the Commons
If Federici's diagnosis is bleak, her prescription offers hope. Throughout her career, she has advocated for rebuilding the commons—not as a nostalgic return to some imagined pre-capitalist paradise, but as a practical political strategy for the present.
What would a politics of the commons look like? Federici points to movements around the world that are already building alternatives: community gardens that provide food outside the market system, cooperative childcare arrangements that socialize the work of reproduction, struggles against the privatization of water and other essential resources.
Her 2018 book Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons develops these ideas, arguing that feminism and commoning are natural allies. Both challenge the assumption that everything must be owned, controlled, and commodified. Both insist that care work has value even when it doesn't generate profit. Both imagine ways of living together that don't depend on endless accumulation and growth.
A Life of Radical Scholarship
Federici's activism has never been purely academic. In 1995, during the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, an African-American journalist sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer in a trial marked by serious irregularities, Federici helped launch the Anti-Death Penalty Project within the Radical Philosophy Association. She has worked with Women in Nigeria and the Latin American feminist movement Ni una menos, which translates to "not one less"—a reference to the ongoing epidemic of femicide across the region.
In March 2022, at eighty years old, she was among 151 feminists worldwide who signed a manifesto in solidarity with Russian feminists opposing their country's invasion of Ukraine.
She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her partner George Caffentzis, a philosopher with whom she has collaborated on numerous projects over the decades. She holds the title of Professor Emerita at Hofstra University, where she taught political philosophy and international studies for many years.
Why Her Work Matters Now
Caliban and the Witch has been translated into numerous languages and adopted in college courses around the world. It has influenced a generation of feminist scholars, activists, and organizers. Its argument—that capitalism depends on the exploitation of women's unpaid labor and the ongoing theft of common resources—resonates with contemporary debates about climate change, care work, and economic justice.
Consider the COVID-19 pandemic. When lockdowns began, the importance of care work suddenly became visible in a way it hadn't been before. Someone had to educate children at home, care for sick family members, and maintain households under unprecedented strain. That someone, overwhelmingly, was women. The "essential workers" who kept society functioning—nurses, grocery clerks, delivery drivers—were often the lowest paid and least protected.
Federici had been making this argument for fifty years. The pandemic simply made it impossible to ignore.
Her work also speaks to environmental concerns. If capitalism requires endless accumulation and the constant conversion of commons into commodities, then it is structurally incompatible with a finite planet. The same logic that enclosed English farmland in the sixteenth century now drives deforestation in the Amazon, water privatization in Bolivia, and the patenting of seeds and genetic material everywhere.
Federici offers no easy solutions. But she provides something equally valuable: a way of understanding how we got here that reveals possibilities for getting somewhere else. If the witch trials were part of a deliberate campaign to create capitalism, then capitalism is not inevitable. It was made. And what humans have made, humans can unmake.