Silvia Federici

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Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical Feminist Marxist tradition. She is a professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor. She is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, after she worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years.

Federici's most recent work, Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati.

Within it she argues against Marx that primitive accumulation is a necessary precursor for capitalism but rather that primitive accumulation is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism itself. That capitalism, in order to perpetuate itself, requires a continuous transfusion of capital expropriation.

She connects this expropriation to women’s unpaid labor and reproduction, which she frames as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labor.

In association with this she outlines the historical fight for the commons and the struggle for communalism. Instead of seeing capitalism as being a libratory defeat of feudalism, Federici interprets the rise of capitalism as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism and to retain the basic social contract.

She places the institutionalization of rape and prostitution, as well as the heretic and witch hunt, trials, burnings and torture at the center of a methodical subjugation of women and appropriation of their labor.

She then ties this into colonial expropriation and provides a framework for understanding the work of the IMF, World Bank and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything from water to seeds, to our genetic code become privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.

[edit] Online texts

Essays by Federici

[edit] Sources

  • “Silvia Federici, associate professor in Political Philosophy at Hofstra University, and coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She is the editor of several books including Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its Others”
  • http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/14/2234245
  • “Silvia Federici, a long time feminist activist and teacher, is co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and the RPA (Radical Philosophy Association) Anti-Death Penalty Project. She teaches International Studies and Political Philosophy at Hofstra University. Federici’s published work includes: “Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its ‘Others’” (editor) and “A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities" (co-editor).”
  • http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/11/28/0813249&mode=nocomment&tid=9