Silvia Federici
1942–
Federici’s central argument: you can’t understand the history of capitalism without understanding what happened to reproductive labor. Land wasn’t the only commons that got enclosed.
The Double Enclosure
The standard account of primitive accumulation focuses on the enclosure of land — the English commons that fed peasant communities, broken up and converted to private property between the 15th and 18th centuries. Federici accepts this history but insists it’s incomplete.
At the same moment that land was being enclosed, another enclosure was happening: the systematic destruction of women’s communal knowledge — healing practices, midwifery, the management of village relationships — and the disciplining of reproductive labor into privatized, unwaged household work. These weren’t separate processes. They were the same process, requiring each other.
Caliban and the Witch (2004) reads the European witch trials of the 15th–17th centuries not as irrational hysteria but as a campaign against specific social practices. The women persecuted as witches were often healers, midwives, herbalists — people who held communal knowledge and stood at the center of community life. The trials destroyed that network of practice and knowledge, made women’s social authority illegible and dangerous, and forced reproductive work into the invisible domain of the private household.
Reproductive Labor
Federici’s analysis of reproductive labor is more precise than the everyday meaning. Reproductive labor isn’t just childcare — it’s all the work that reproduces labor power: cooking, cleaning, emotional support, community maintenance, care for the sick and old. Capitalism requires this work constantly. It doesn’t pay for it. It depends on its invisibility.
Shadow work — Ivan Illich’s term for the unpaid labor that industrial economies externalize — describes the same phenomenon. Federici’s contribution is the history of how this came to be: not natural, not inevitable, but a specific historical achievement requiring violence.
“The unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it.”
Re-enchanting the World
Federici’s later work — especially Re-enchanting the World (2019) — turns toward what commons can look like now. Urban gardens, care networks, mutual aid circles, community land trusts: these aren’t nostalgia for pre-capitalist life but prefigurative practice. They build the institutions through which different relationships with labor and land become possible.
The word “enchantment” is deliberate. What capitalism disenchanted was not just the commons as a resource — it was the web of relationships, obligations, and meanings that made commons livable. Re-enchanting means rebuilding that web.
Key Works
- “Wages Against Housework” (1975) — the manifesto
- Caliban and the Witch (2004) — the history
- Re-enchanting the World (2019) — commons and care
Connections
- enclosure — the full account includes reproductive labor
- commons — what was enclosed and what can be rebuilt
- shadow-work — Illich’s parallel analysis
- cooperative-movement — collective alternatives to privatized care
- gift-economy — caring relationships that aren’t market exchanges
- Elinor Ostrom — how commons actually govern themselves
The commons that were enclosed weren’t only land. They were ways of knowing, ways of caring for each other, ways of living that didn’t require anyone’s permission.