Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici was born in Parma, Italy in 1942 and emigrated to the United States in the 1960s, where she became one of the most influential Marxist feminist theorists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She co-founded the International Feminist Collective in 1972 alongside Mariarosa Dalla Costa and others, launching the Wages for Housework campaign — a political intervention that forced reproductive labor onto the agenda of the broader left and challenged the assumption that unwaged domestic work was either natural or outside the scope of capitalist exploitation.

Her landmark book "Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation" (2004) reread the transition from feudalism to capitalism through the lens of the witch hunts, the enclosure of the commons, and the disciplining of women's bodies. Where Marx analyzed primitive accumulation as the dispossession of peasants from land, Federici argued this process was inseparable from the violent subordination of women and the construction of reproductive labor as a free resource for capital. The book reshaped how historians and theorists understand the origins of capitalism and has become a touchstone for contemporary commons movements, feminist economics, and anti-extractivist struggles worldwide.

Federici taught for many years at Hofstra University and spent time in Nigeria in the 1980s, an experience that deepened her analysis of how structural adjustment programs reproduced colonial logics by destroying communal land tenure and forcing women into subsistence labor. This comparative perspective runs through her later collection "Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle" (2012) and "Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons" (2019), where she develops the commons not merely as an economic arrangement but as a relational practice sustained primarily by women's organizing.

Her intellectual legacy bridges autonomist Marxism, feminism, and decolonial thought without fully belonging to any single tradition. She insists on the centrality of social reproduction to any serious anti-capitalist politics, and her work has animated a generation of care workers, land defenders, and feminist organizers who find in her frameworks tools for understanding their own exploitation and collective power.