Silvia Federici

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Federici during an interview (2014)

Silvia Federici (* 1942 in Parma , Italy) is an Italian-American former university professor, political philosopher and activist . She has published numerous books and essays on Marxist and feminist theory, criticism of globalization and the concept of the “ commons ”.

Life

Federici grew up in Italy and came to the United States in 1967, where she received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Buffalo in the United States. She later taught at Port Harcourt University in Nigeria and was Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at the New College of Hofstra University in New York until her retirement . She lives in New York City .

In 1972 she co-founded the International Feminist Collective , which launched the international "Housework Wages" campaign. This was intended to demonstrate that the unpaid activities in household, care and family ( care work ), mostly carried out by women, are constitutive for the capitalist mode of production. In 1990 Federici and others founded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and in 1995 a Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) project against the death penalty.

In 2018 she received an honorary doctorate from the Leuphana University of Lüneburg .

Positions

Federici's best-known book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Original Accumulation (published in 2004) deals with the dispossession and exploitation of female and colonized bodies throughout history. Federici's concept of reproductive work includes not only traditional housework, but also subsistence farming , health care, education, but also sex work and other forms of paid reproductive work. With Caliban and the Witch, Federici also made a key contribution to the history of the witch hunt by merging the systematic persecution of people who were defamed as witches with the emergence of capitalism.

She argues against Marx 's thesis of original accumulation as a “natural” precondition for the development of capitalism and counteracts this by stating that the division between commodity production and labor was essential: “Only the production of commodities was recognized as labor, while the Production of labor, especially the part that takes place at home, usually called housework, has been defined as personal service that was not worth paying for. This dichotomy is an immense source of economic accumulation. It has eased the heavy shoulders of the working class, mostly at the expense of the women who reproduced labor. "

Federici draws on theories of Italian operaism of the 1960s, anti-colonial struggles and the civil rights movement in the USA. She sympathized with the Occupy movement in the USA and advocates the Commons, i.e. collective property organized by a community that makes decisions and benefits on an equal basis. For Federici, for example, community gardens or communal kitchens tie in with the medieval commons tradition. She sees the reproductive work done in the Commons as an alternative to the reproductive work under capitalism.

Publications (selection)

  • Il Femminismo e il Movimento contro la guerra USA , in: DeriveApprodi # 24, 2004
  • Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation . Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004.
    • Caliban and the witch. Women, the body and the primordial accumulation . From the Engl. Max Henninger. Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2012.
  • Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle . Articles from 1975 to 2010. Brooklyn / Oakland: Common Notions / PM Press, 2012.
    • Revolt from the Kitchen - Reproductive Work in Global Capitalism and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution . Translated from the English by Max Henninger, Series: Kitchen Politics, Volume 1, Edition Assambleage, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-942885-32-4 .
  • Re-enchanting the World. Feminism and the Politics of the Commons , Kairos / PM Press, Okland 2018.
    • Enchant the world again. Feminism, Marxism & Commons , Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2020, ISBN 978-3-85476-693-3 .
  • Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women , PM Press, Oakland 2018.
  • Beyond the Periphery of the Skin , PM Press, Oakland 2020.
    • Beyond our skin. Body as a competitive place in capitalism , Unrast Verlag, Münster 2020, ISBN 978-3-89771-329-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Short biography. perlentaucher.de, accessed on August 14, 2017 .
  2. ↑ "Your Crisis and Ours," Jungle World article, June 28, 2012, accessed March 8, 2014
  3. ^ "The witch hunt has returned" , taz interview of October 10, 2012, accessed on March 8, 2014
  4. ^ The Housewife in Research , "Friday" article, February 6, 2013, accessed March 8, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Federici, Silvia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-American scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Parma , Italy