Silvia Federici

Born in Parma (Italy) and based in Brooklyn (NYC), Silvia Federici is a feminist researcher, philosopher, historian, writer, and activist, with a decades-long contribution to the theory and practice of struggles over social reproduction, gender, labour, and the commons.

In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, which launched the Wages for Housework campaign, questioning the status and remuneration of domestic work. She has been a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. In 1990, their publication The New Enclosures raised the question of a new wave of capitalist accumulation taking place at a planetary scale. After witnessing in Nigeria the effects of globalisation, she co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA) with George Caffentzis in 1991, to support struggles within African universities.

In her most influential work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004, translated into more than 15 languages), she sheds light on a key process overlooked by both Marx’s account of primitive accumulation and Foucault’s analysis of biopower. Caliban presents witch-hunting as a mechanism of coercion over women’s autonomy and as an ongoing aspect of capitalist enclosure over the capacity for social reproduction, still present today.

At the 1st International Feminist Gathering on Witch-Hunts, held in Madrid in 2022, Silvia stated: “The witch hunts did not end in the 18th and 19th centuries; they have continued in all countries through colonisation.”