Silvia Federici

In Patriarchy of the Wage, Silvia Federici, best-selling author and the most important Marxist feminist of our time, asks why Marx and the Marxist tradition were so crucial in their denunciation of capitalism's exploitation of human labor and blind to women's work and struggle on the terrain of social reproduction. Why was Marx unable to anticipate the profound transformations in the proletarian family that took place at the turn of the nineteenth century creating a new patriarchal regime? In this fiery collection of penetrating essays published here for the first time, Federici carefully examines these questions and in the process has provided an expansive redefinition of work, class, and class-gender relations. Seeking to delineate the specific character of capitalist "patriarchalism," this magnificently original approach also highlights Marx's and the Marxist tradition's problematic view of industrial production and the State in the struggle for human liberation. Federici's lucid argument that most reproductive work is irreducible to automation is a powerful reminder of the poverty of the revolutionary imagination that consigns to the world of machines the creation of the material conditions for a communist society.

A handbook for achieving social change through collective action based on lessons from a revolutionary movement’s struggle for housing justice in Spain. Founded in Spain in 2009 as an immediate response to the devastating effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca – PAH) has since grown into a nationwide movement with over two hundred local chapters. Together, they have stopped thousands of evictions, negotiated with banks, forced legislative change, occupied fifty buildings, and, most importantly, rescued thousands of people from the edge of the abyss. It achieved all of this without backing from any party, union, or major NGO, and without full-time staff or external funding. As the PAH faced off some of the country’s most powerful institutions, its members learned how to organize themselves, how to look after one another, how to do politics from the street, and how to bring about legislative reform. They managed to change the dominant narrative that blamed the victims of speculation on the housing market, they’ve won broad popular support, and through civil disobedience, they forced political parties to pass laws and pressured wealthy property owners and international corporations to negotiate and accept their demands. How did they do this? This handbook collects and curates more than a decade-and-a-half worth of experience in social movement and community organizing. The lessons offered here, ranging from how to run a citizens’ assembly and manage conflicts to reflections on negotiation tactics, street-level organizing, and collective care, are drawn from the PAH’s struggle for housing justice, but can be useful for groups of citizens fighting collectively anywhere in the world. The PAH’s message to the world? “Only by organizing in the streets can we force legislative change, and only through legislative change can we gain more rights.”

In the years since #MeToo, misogyny, sexism and gender based violence have flooded the news and our social media timelines. Anti-privilege politics and intersectionality have entered the mainstream—systematically trolled on one end of the spectrum; embraced, to questionable ends, on the other. But what has this increased visibility entailed, other than the marketisation of the feminist struggle? Feminism for the World argues that we have been witnessing an erasure of feminism as a long-term tradition, with its many conflicting histories and geographies of struggle elided and forgotten. In this ground-breaking collection, eight leading international figures of contemporary feminism highlight feminist struggles and traditions from the Global South, presenting feminism as a project that is impossible without international solidarity from the West. In doing so they revive an authentic internationalism and propose paths for present and future generations.

A groundbreaking feminist text that frames our obsession with true crime as a form of sexual terror. In 1992, three teenage girls went missing from the small town of Alc sser in Valencia, Spain while on their way to a nightclub, in a case whose strangeness and brutality continues to draw popular speculation decades later. Feminist theorist Nerea Barjola retraces the high-profile search to find them and the media frenzy of the ensuing trial to explore our cultural fascination with the harm done to women's bodies. The graphic rehearsal of the details in news and media fuels cautionary tales of sexual danger that induce in women a mental map of places they can and cannot go, the activities they dare not do. Rape is not an individual crime but the expropriation of the female body, a threat leveled against a class of potential victims that shifts the burden of staying safe onto their own internalized policing. This, Barjola argues, is the frontline for female transgression, freedom, and resistance. Offering a feminist take on Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life, this riveting case study identifies spaces where women cross beyond social limits--a house, a party, a car--into a place where danger is all but inevitable, where the state of exception turns into the scene of the crime. The Sexist Microphysics of Power builds on Judith Butler's work on performativity, Michel Foucault's thinking on the day-to-day operations of power, and Silvia Federici's analysis of the witch hunt to propose a paradigm shift in our understanding of the systemic impact of gender violence and of a culture the relishes in its lurid repetition. In 2021, the Spanish government awarded the book a national distinction for the significance of its research for social transformation.

Hvordan hænger uligheden mellem mænd og kvinder sammen med kapitalismen? Caliban & heksen er en historisk analyse af kapitalismens opkomst fra et feministisk perspektiv. Silvia Federicis kultklassiker bevæger sig fra middelalderens bondeoprør over heksejagterne til begyndelsen på den moderne filosofi og undersøger kapitalismens undertvingelse af kroppen. Silvia Federici (f. 1942) er italiensk-amerikansk feministisk aktivist, politisk teoretiker og professor emerita fra Hofstra University. I 1972 var hun med til at grundlægge det internationale feministiske kollektiv Wages for Housework. Caliban & heksen er hendes hovedværk, oversat til 19 sprog. Bogen er en del af serien Feministisk bibliotek, der samler fire af de mest markante feministiske stemmer fra de sidste 100 år, og introducerer de vigtigste diskussioner om forholdet mellem køn, magt og historie.

How does the criminal justice system affect women's lives? Do prisons keep women safe? Should feminists rely on policing and the law to achieve women's liberation? The mainstream feminist movement has proposed "locking up the bad men," and called on prisons, the legal system, and the state to protect women from misogynist violence. This carceral approach to feminism, activist and scholar Gwenola Ricordeau argues, does not make women safer: it harms women, including victims of violence, and in particular people of color, poor people, and LGBTQ people. In this scintillating, comprehensive study, Ricordeau draws from two decades as an abolitionist activist and scholar of the penal justice system to describe how the criminal justice system hurts women. Considering the position of survivors of violence, criminalized women, and women with criminalized relatives, Ricordeau charts a new path to emancipation without incarceration. With a new foreword by Silvia Federici.

Nesta primeira edi o da MATA, escolhemos apresentar uma intelectual ic nica - Silvia Federici - com duas entrevistas, um artigo de sua autoria in dito em portugu s, e o artigo "Semin rio da Fofoca" pela artista premiada Fabiana Faleiros. Edi o por Mirna Wabi-Sabi & Capa por Sara Kovač]____In this first edition of MATA, we chose to present an iconic intellectual - Silvia Federici - with two interviews, an article by her previously unpublished in Portuguese, and the article "Semin rio da Fofoca" by award-winning artist Fabiana Faleiros. Edited by Mirna Wabi-Sabi & Art by Sara Kovač]

'It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which "capitalist productive labour" can be built up and exploited.'First published in 1986, Maria Mies’s progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today. Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today. This new edition includes a substantial new introduction in which she both applies her theory to the new globalized world and answers her critics.

'A groundbreaking work . . . Federici has become a crucial figure for . . . a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars RoomA cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It Is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.'Rewarding . . . allows us to better understand the intimate relationship between modern patriarchy, the rise of the nation state and the transition from feudalism to capitalism' Guardian

As Federici reveals, behind the capitalist organization of work and the contradictions inherent in "alienated labor" is an explosive ground zero for revolutionary practice upon which are decided the daily realities of our collective reproduction. Beginning with Federici's organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the essays collected here unravel the power and politics of wide but related issues including the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, the development of affective labor, and the politics of the commons. This new and expanded edition contains two previously unpublished essays by the author.

More than ever, the "body" is today at the center of radical and institutional politics. Feminist, antiracist, trans, ecological movements: all look at the body, in its manifold manifestations, as a ground of confrontation with the state and a vehicle for transformative social practices. Concurrently, the body has become a signifier for the reproduction crisis the neoliberal turn in capitalist development has generated and for the international surge in institutional repression and public violence. In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, lifelong activist and best-selling author Silvia Federici examines these complex processes, placing them in the context of the history of the capitalist transformation of the body into a work-machine, expanding on one of the main subjects of her first book, Caliban and the Witch. Building on three groundbreaking lectures that she delivered in San Francisco in 2015, Federici surveys the new paradigms that today govern how the body is conceived in the collective radical imagination, as well as the new disciplinary regimes state and capital are deploying in response to mounting revolt against the daily attacks on our everyday reproduction. In this process she confronts some of the most important questions for contemporary radical political projects. What does "the body" mean, today, as a category of social/political action? What are the processes, institutional or anti-systemic, by which "the body" is constituted? How do we dismantle the tools by which our bodies have been "enclosed" and collectively reclaim our capacity to govern them?