Silvia Federici papers (Ms.2017.023)

Biographical / Historical

Silvia Federici is an Italian feminist theorist, activist, and scholar. Born in Parma, Italy in 1942, Federici came to the United States in 1967 to study philosophy at the University of Buffalo. She has held teaching positions at several universities worldwide, including as Professor Emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University and at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. Oriented around a Marxist feminist critique of capitalism, her scholarship develops from the 1960s anti-colonial movement, the civil rights movement, the student movement, and the autonomist Marxist movement. Federici is best known for developing a new political subjectivity and strategy that works to make visible women's domestic and reproductive labor as the foundation of capitalism.

Federici's prolific work and profound activism is global by nature and design. Publishing and organizing around questions of colonialism, capital punishment, immigration and emigration, globalization and global market inequality, food politics, elder care and capitalism, and academic freedom in Africa, Federici always engages her inquiry alongside and through an international politics of race, gender, and class.

In 1972, Federici co-founded the International Feminist Collective as a global organization based in a commitment to a new Marxist feminist ideology that politicized around wages for housework. Growing into an eponymously named movement, the Wages for Housework movement launched campaigns across Europe and the United States that based a critique of capitalism in women's invisibility as workers in the Marxist imaginary. Arguing that capitalism rests on unpaid domestic labor for the reproduction of the workforce as well as the devaluation of these reproductive activities to cut the cost of labor power, the grassroots movement made it possible to understand that capitalist production relies on the production of a particular type of worker, and therefore a particular type of family, sexuality, and procreation. In protesting in the streets and demanding wages for their labor, women ignited debates in their cities surrounding the sexual division of labor, economic dependence on men, and "women's work."

In 1973, Silvia Federici met her partner, American political philosopher and Marxist George Caffentzis. Caffentzis, who held a professorship in philosophy at the University of Southern Maine prior to his retirement, is an activist and scholar with roots in the American civil rights and student anti-war movements. In 1974, Caffentzis was a founder of Zerowork, a journal and collective of political activists focused on addressing the crisis of capitalism in the international working class struggle post WWII. Caffentzis brought Wages for Housework's feminist critique of unwaged work to an analysis of class history, engaging with questions of work and refusal to mobilize the political concept of zerowork. Following the theoretical split of Zerowork in the late 1970s, Caffentzis founded the Midnight Notes Collective as part of the anti-nuclear movement in New York City. Connecting the energy crisis to class struggle, Midnight Notes expands on critiques of Zerowork and the accumulation process in relation to technology, unwaged labor, and slavery.

Collaborators as well as partners, Caffentzis and Federici co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom of Africa in the late 1980s to confront issues of global education and support students and teachers against structural adjustment. Always pairing theory and activism in her diverse interests and academic career, in the 1990s Federici founded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project as an arm of her feminist critique of capital punishment. She is also a member of Midnight Notes Collective.

Federici's most well-known work, her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, has been translated into several languages. Analyzing the development of "witch" against the rise of capitalism, Federici investigates patriarchy, colonialism, and violence by foregrounding the woman's body as disappeared by Marxist theories of capital accumulation and the development of capitalism and the modern state. Her 2012 book, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, collects essays and writings growing from the Wages for Housework movement and subsequent theories of social reproduction. Critiquing "immaterial labor" and "affective labor," she argues that the fight against reproductive work is "ground zero" because it is the work in which the contradictions inherent in "alienated labor" are most exclusive. With topics including the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, and the crisis of elder care, the essays argue against dehumanization and towards learning to reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care.

Silvia Federici lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent book, Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, Documents, was published in 2017.