Challenging conventional Marxism Federici argued that before there was the expropriation of the land there was the expropriation of the female body. This was a definition of the revolutionary subject that was bound to piss off standard Marxism as well as orthodox labor history.Ĭaliban and the Witch was conceived as an active intervention in the major post-war scholarly debate in Marxism, “the transition debate” about the movement from feudalism to capitalism. The wageless, she and others argued, were radical agents of world history. The debate of the mid-1970s concerned wagelessness- people outside the collective bargaining matrix who nevertheless contributed to surplus value, yet whose valorization was near nil. She was not in thrall to positivist interpretations of Marx nor to empiricist reductions of history.

It owes much to the feminist movement (the Italian divorce referendum of 1974) and the world-wide struggle for reproductive rights and freedom.Ĭoming from Italy, Silvia Federici was steeped in theoretical breaks from traditional Marxism. I think it was conceived in the early seventies: Attica (1971) -Wounded Knee (1973)-Roe V.

It has bridged the divides between the generations. This October, Verso is hosting a roundtable on Silvia Federici’s incantatory and incendiary Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004), inviting reflections from activists, writers, and scholars to discuss the provocations of Federici’s arguments on capitalism and colonialism, bodies and reproduction, race and slavery-and the powerful figure of the witch.Ĭaliban and the Witch became a movement meme.

Caliban and the witch federici