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 worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Federici's most recent work, Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati.

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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 worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Federici's most recent work, Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati. In it, she argues against 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 labor both connected to reproduction and otherwise, 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 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 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. This is then tied 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 held in common from water to seeds, to our genetic code become privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.
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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 worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Federici's most recent work, Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation expands on the work of Leopoldina Fortunati.
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  • Silvia Federici
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