Silvia Federici

One of her most well known campaigns was the Wages For Housework campaign, later to be renamed Wages Against Housework, to highlight the amount of labour involved in domestic tasks. The campaign called for a general women's strike, for women to stop cleaning, cooking and caring until they were given a fair wage for their work. The logistics of this wage has been much debated; would it come from a partner/the partners' company, or from the government, but the widespread attention the campaign received meant it achieved its goal of making visible types of labour which for years had been hidden and devalued under the guise of gender norms and 'biological predispositions' to certain tasks.

Her other, perhaps even more influential work was her 2004 book 'Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation'. Within this book, Federici looked at Europe's history and transition through the industrial revolution to modern day capitalism. She sees capitalism not as an evolution of feudalism but as a suppression of increasing peasant revolts and communalistic movements. As women often tended the commons and had relative autonomy in this area, the peasant revolts were often headed by them.

Federici directly links the suppression of women's autonomy and participation in public life with the devaluation of women's contributions through extreme violence. Witch-hunting, the shift of midwifery to males, criminalisation of abortion and the threat of rape are, for Federici, all tools that subjugated women in order to expropriate large amounts of immaterial and material production from them, to build up capital reserves. She points out that many of the practices of heretical religious sects - particularly those whose ideology or doctrine emphasized collectivity or freer sexual practices - became associated with symbols of witchcraft. Many women who chose to live outside of society's prescribed gender roles, such as single women, especially older single women, traditional healers or midwives, and heretics were often targeted with accusations of witchcraft.

One of Federici's biggest criticisms of Marx's writing is that whilst he presents primitive accumulation as a precursor of capitalism, for Federici, it is one of the cornerstone foundations of capital; it requires a constant flow not merely an injection at the beginning. The larger, more broad critique that many Marxist-feminists have made is the absence of reproductive (in both a sociological and biological sense) work in Marx's writings. Most of Federici's writings return to the common theme that the devaluation of reproductive work, the appropriation of women's bodies and freedom and growth of capitalism are all intrinsically linked. She likens this process of division, devaluation and expropriation as similar to colonisation and expropriation and over extraction of the commons.

Federici has also written on care crises, pointing out instances of the high poverty levels elderly women face, where, especially those who devoted their life to caring for children and family members, are not able to access institutional support such as a pension schemes which often require a certain number of years contribution in the workforce and do not many any recognition of unpaid labour contributions. She explains when this happens and care is not able to be accessed or purchased, a member of the family may need to leave work to look after the eldery relative full-time. Often the decision as to who is to do this is based on gender roles or who has the lowest earnings - both of which make it more likely to be a female relative who will take over the caretaker role. This means in her old-age she too may not qualify for a pension and may not be able to access care she needs, which sets the cycle off again.


Further Reading

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004.
Federici, Silvia. ‘On Elder Care’. The Commoner 15 (2012): 235–261.
Federici, Silvia. Wages against Housework. Falling Wall Press Bristol, 1975.
Caffentzis, George, and Silvia Federici. ‘Commons against and beyond Capitalism’. Community Development Journal 49, no. suppl_1 (2014): i92–i105.

https://thecommoner.org/tribute/tribute-to-the-work-of-silvia-federici/
https://www.pmpress.org/blog/authors-artists-comrades/silvia-federici/