Silvia Federici (born 1942) is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and activist whose work connects feminist theory, Marxism, autonomism, and the history of primitive accumulation. A co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, Federici has argued that the invisibility of social reproduction — the domestic, affective, and biological labor that produces and sustains human beings — is not a secondary oversight of capitalist analysis but a foundational mechanism of capitalist accumulation.
Core ideas
- Wages for housework: not primarily a demand for money but a political strategy to make visible the unwaged labor — cooking, cleaning, caring, emotional maintenance — on which waged labor depends. The “housewife” is not outside capitalism but is its unpaid foundation.
- Primitive accumulation as ongoing process: drawing on Marx’s concept but extending it historically and geographically, Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch (2004) that the European witch hunts were a campaign of primitive accumulation directed at women’s bodies, reproductive autonomy, and communal subsistence economies. The enclosures of land and the disciplining of women’s labor are two aspects of the same process.
- The body as terrain of accumulation: capitalism does not merely exploit labor-power; it produces the body that labors. The regulation of reproduction, sexuality, and care is a form of accumulation — the appropriation of the capacity to produce life.
Significance for this research
Federici’s work reveals that the relational structures constituting persons — care, feeding, shelter, teaching, emotional bonding — are themselves products of labor organized by political-economic forces. This makes social reproduction a question of relational ontology: who is constituted, by whose labor, under what conditions, and to whose benefit. Her historical analysis also connects to the decolonial framework: the witch hunts and the colonial enclosures were simultaneous processes that reorganized European and colonized peoples’ relationships to land, body, and community.
Notable works
- Wages Against Housework (1975, pamphlet)
- Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
- Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012)
- Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2019)
Related
- Autonomism — the political tradition she works within
- Social reproduction — the concept she theorizes
- Refusal of work — extended to reproductive labor
- Mario Tronti — fellow autonomist theorist
- Settler colonialism — the political structure her historical analysis connects to