Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition.[1] She is a professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor.[2] She worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years, is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.[3]

Federici’s best known work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati. In it, she argues against Karl Marx’s claim that primitive accumulation is a necessary precursor for capitalism. Instead, she posits that primitive accumulation is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism itself—that capitalism, in order to perpetuate itself, requires a constant infusion of expropriated capital.

Federici connects this expropriation to women’s unpaid labour, both connected to reproduction and otherwise, which she frames as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labor. Related to this, she outlines the historical struggle for the commons and the struggle for communalism. Instead of seeing capitalism as a liberatory defeat of feudalism, Federici interprets the ascent of capitalism as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism and to retain the basic social contract.

She situates 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. This is tied into colonial expropriation and provides a framework for understanding the work of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common—from water, to seeds, to our genetic code—becomes privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.

(Source: Wikipedia)

[Nina] Power repeats Badiou’s argument that such “liberation” of women is better understood as “a generalized imperative that all femininity be translatable into the logic of the market.” Laws banning the wearing of the hijab in public demand that women’s bodies visibly circulate in society, a demand Power later returns to when discussing pornography. Perhaps the most groundbreaking section of Power’s book focuses on women and work. Power admits, “Of course, women have always worked, that is to say, raised children, tended to the home, grown crops, etc.” As they have moved into the workforce in greater numbers, women have undeniably succeeded on a number of levels. But Power argues, “The job market continues to differentiate between men and women – the most blatant is the surprisingly resilient pay differential for the same jobs, and the predominance of women in part-time and badly-paid work.” Women have especially found themselves forced into post-Fordist forms of work that rely on flexible, precarious, and ultimately disposable sources of labor. In fact, temp agencies depend on the supply of women workers, and the “feminization of labor” is progressively making these work conditions general for both women and men. Despite the harsh realities of most work in the post-Fordist era, “images of a certain kind of successful woman proliferate – the city worker in heels, the flexible agency employee, the hard-working hedonist who can afford to spend her income on vibrators and wine – and would have us believe that – yes – capitalism is a girl’s best friend.
— The Voice Imitator: Nina Power: One-Dimensional Woman (2009)