On October 23, 2012, the Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies was pleased to host a talk by Silvia Federici on "Witch-hunting past and present in the global
political economy.” The following is an excerpt from an interview with Prof. Federici with Matthew Carlin. Prof. Carlin is an Assistant Professor in our department and one of the organizers of the Speakers Series.
A. By “reproduction” or better by reproductive
work I refer to the complex of activities, relations, and
institutions that in capitalism produce and reproduce labor-power,
that is people capacity to work, and in particular procreation,
domestic work, and sex work. However, labor power does not have an
independent existence. It subsists in living individuals. Therefore
reproductive work has a double character; it is at the same time the
reproduction of the individual and the reproduction of labor-power
and this duality is often the site of a conflict, which has been very
important for women to recognize. As I have often pointed out, it was
important to recognize that in capitalism the reproduction of
individuals has been subsumed (though never completely) to the
production of workers for the labor market. This has enable us to
disentangle activities that are necessary for the development of our
capacities from activities that are instrumental to the preparation
of workers for exploitation. This distinction, this disentanglement
has allowed women to see that they can refuse “housework” without
necessarily undermining the well-being of the people they care for,
because much domestic work is the work of being a disciplinarian, the
work of reducing expectations. From this point of view the challenge
is to transform reproductive work, from work that reproduces people
for the market to work that reproduces them for the struggle.
Silvia Federici is a long time
feminist activist, teacher and writer.
In 1972s she was a co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for wages for housework in the United States and Internationally. In 1990 she was a co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and from 1991 to 2003 she was one of the editors of the CAFA newsletter. In 1995 she helped found the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project.
She has taught at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria) and she is now Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York).
Federici has authored many essays on feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy and education. Her published books include: Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle; Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation; Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its Others (editor); Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (co-editor).
Interview
with Silvia Federici
January,
2013
Matthew Carlin and
Silvia Federici
Q1.
Much of your work has centered around clarifying the link between the
establishment and subsequent expansion of capitalism, and the
degradation of women-specifically how the reproduction of labor
inherently depends on the exploitation of women's bodies. In spite of
your work on this topic in the books Caliban and the Witch, as well
as your collection of essays in Revolution at Point Zero, the issue
pertaining to the relationship between capitalism and the
exploitation of women has (at best) remained ancillary, and (at
worst) been completely neglected within the vast majority of
contemporary analyses of global capitalism.
First,
how might you explain this omission? Secondly, why do you think it is
imperative for any effective resistance to global capitalism to
understand the gendered dynamics of the accumulation of capital and
the reproduction of labor today?
A.
There are several feminists writers who have analyzed the
relationship between capitalism and the exploitation of women. Think
of Maria Mies, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Ariel Salleh, and many others
including many eco-feminists who have shown that there is a
connection between the way women has freely appropriated women’s
labor and the way in which it has appropriated the wealth of nature,
lands, seas, forests==all treated as free resources to be used,
destroyed, even exhausted without any thought of the social and
ecological cost involved.
It
is important to bring special attention to the exploitation of women
in capitalism because women still are the main subjects of the
reproduction of the work-force. This means that by analyzing how
capitalism exploits women we gain insights concerning the changes in
the reproduction of the work-force, the needs of the labor market,
the models of family and femininity this (re)production requires, and
the struggles that women are making on this terrain. Looking at
capitalism from the viewpoint of ‘women’ we can see the profound
crisis of social reproduction which is confronting us, in every part
of the world, how important it still is for capital and the state to
control women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity; why the state
needs to regulate women’s bodies. We also understand the relation
between women’s resistance to procreation (in some countries) and
the politics of immigration. Most important, perhaps, is that by
looking at the exploitation of women we can see (a) the political
meaning of the neo-liberal program—its destruction of the means of
livelihood of millions which is immediately reflected in the
pauperization of women, especially in Third World countries, its
attempt to create populations without rights providing labor-power at
a minimal cost, its relentless destruction of people’s lives and
the environment, the sense of hopeless and rage these politics
generates—hopelessness and rage that translate into more violence
against women and against children. (for example The second cause of
death for unborn children is violence against their mothers). (b) by
the same token, it is women today who are best responding to these
new forms of primitive accumulation.
Precisely
because their means of reproduction are being destroyed and because
they are those most responsible for the reproduction of their
communities women are leading in the effort to create new communal
form of life. Cooperative forms of reproduction, enabling them to
survive despite their very limited access to monetary income. I am
not alone recognizing that women are leading the way in the
construction of the commons and the transformation of daily life
starting from the terrain of reproduction.
Q2: In your answer you
refer to reproduction. In fact, reproduction is a theme that runs
throughout your work, and serves as the point around which you
analyze both the history of capitalism and its current neo-liberal
form. In your answer above you seem to pose two forms of
reproduction against one another: the capitalist reproduction of the
workforce and the concomitant exploitation of women's bodies, and
women's reproduction in terms of the workforce and communal forms of
socio-cultural life.
Can you explain exactly
what you mean by "reproduction" and how it relates to
capitalism and the exploitation of women?
Recognizing that
reproductive work in capitalism is work that reproduces labor-power
also enables us to see that domestic/ family/sexual/ relations are
‘relations of production.’ That is, they are shaped by the logic
of capitalist production, which means that a particular type of
worker requires a particular type of family etc. This recognition too
has had a liberatory effect, as it has enabled us to understand that
much of the misery of family life is generated by the constraints
under which it operates, its function in the social assembly line.
*The complete interview
will be published in the coming months and made available to Critical
and Visual Studies students upon its completion.
Silvia Federici
Professor
Emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University
In 1972s she was a co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for wages for housework in the United States and Internationally. In 1990 she was a co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and from 1991 to 2003 she was one of the editors of the CAFA newsletter. In 1995 she helped found the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project.
She has taught at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria) and she is now Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York).
Federici has authored many essays on feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy and education. Her published books include: Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle; Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation; Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its Others (editor); Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (co-editor).
