Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici (b. 1942) is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and activist whose work integrates Marxist-feminist theory with movement-grounded political practice. A co-founder of the International Feminist Collective in 1972, she helped launch the Wages for Housework campaign — one of the most theoretically and politically generative feminist movements of the 1970s. She taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria from 1984-1986 and at Hofstra University from 1987 until her retirement.

¶Core ideas

• Reproductive labor as the unwaged condition of capitalism. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, sexual availability, emotional support — the labor that reproduces the workforce itself — is structurally unwaged under capitalism. The unwaged status is not incidental: capital depends on this labor remaining outside the wage economy.
• The witch hunt as primitive accumulation. Caliban and the Witch (2004) reads the early-modern European witch trials as a disciplinary apparatus of primitive accumulation — an apparatus that reorganized gender relations to produce the unwaged-reproductive-laboring household as the substrate of the emerging wage relation. The wage relation as we know it required this prior gendered violence.
• Wages for housework as analytical move. The political demand is not literally “pay us for housework” — it is the analytical move of refusing the gendered separation that exempts reproductive labor from the wage relation. The demand exposes what the separation does and forces the question of who benefits from its persistence.
• Commons and re-enchantment. Federici’s later work develops a constructive register: practices of commoning that reclaim collective control over the conditions of life-production, against the continuing enclosures (privatization, financialization, digital extraction). Re-enchanting the World (2018) develops the constructive politics.
• Continuing primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation is not a one-time founding moment but an ongoing process — visible in contemporary land grabs, structural adjustment, the transformation of public goods into commodities, the reproductive-rights rollbacks. Capital’s reproduction continually requires new enclosures.

¶Key works

• Counter-Planning from the Kitchen (with Nicole Cox, 1976)
• Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
• Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012)
• Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018)
• Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018)
• Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (2020)

¶Where her work figures in this library

Federici is foundational for social-reproduction, primitive-accumulation, and care-work. Her work is foundational for labor and the cybernetic-postliberal accounts of unpaid affective and reproductive work as the substrate of contemporary platform capitalism.