Silvia Federici

Federici moved to the United States in 1967 to study philosophy at the University at Buffalo and joined the wages for housework movement while there. In 1972 she co-founded, with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, the International Feminist Collective, the organisation that launched the Wages for Housework campaign. From 1973 she helped start Wages for Housework groups in the United States, and in 1975 she founded the New York Wages for Housework Committee, with an office in Brooklyn. The committee's flyers called on all women to join regardless of marital status, nationality, sexual orientation, number of children or employment.

In 1975 she published the eight-page pamphlet Wages Against Housework, the document most associated with the movement. The point lies in the title: wages against housework, not for it. Housework, she argued, is presented to women as an act of love for their families rather than as work. Unwaged and unrecognised, women have less freedom to pursue other activities, are forced to depend on their husbands and often do not see themselves as workers, so they cannot organise for better conditions. Demanding a wage was a political strategy for showing that this work was labour, not a natural part of women's lives.

So, she held, the demand was not only about being paid or about women's financial independence. It was a political perspective and a revolutionary strategy: to make invisible work visible, to disrupt capitalism's structural reliance on the unpaid work of mostly women, and to subvert the role of "housewife" that capital had invented for women. Leaving relationships with men, or entering the workplace and fighting for equal pay, would not be enough; as long as reproductive work was organised in a capitalist system, women could not take part in society without being exploited. Her writings of these years were collected in Revolution at Point Zero (2012). The New York group dissolved in 1977.

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004) is where Federici's teaching in Nigeria in the 1980s met the concerns of the wages for housework movement. Its starting point is Marx's concept of primitive accumulation. For capitalism to run there must be, on one side, capitalists holding money and the means of production and, on the other, workers with nothing to sell but their labour power. Marx called the historical process that created this starting condition by force, such as the enclosures that drove peasants off the land by fencing in common fields, primitive accumulation. It is usually understood as a stage that happened once, before capitalism, and was over.

Federici argues against this reading. Primitive accumulation, she holds, is a fundamental characteristic of capitalism itself: to perpetuate itself the system needs a constant infusion of expropriated capital. She ties this expropriation to women's unpaid labour, above all reproductive labour. The heresy trials and witch hunts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, together with the institutionalisation of rape and prostitution, stood at the centre of a systematic suppression of women and the appropriation of their labour. The book builds on the work of the Italian scholar Leopoldina Fortunati, with whom she had written Il Grande Calibano in 1984.

She reads this alongside colonial plunder: the subjugation of women, the transatlantic slave trade and the colonisation of the Americas are continuous parts of one process. And she interprets the rise of capitalism not as a liberating defeat of feudalism but as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism. Seen this way, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and similar institutions are carrying out a renewed round of primitive accumulation, new enclosures that privatise everything once held in common, from water and seeds to the genetic code. Hence the struggle to defend and reclaim the commons runs through her history, and the book has been described as "a retelling of the birth of capitalism that places women at the center of the story".