via MR Online and Believer (June 1, 2019)
by
“Like the welfare women said: every woman, every mother, is a working mother.”
What memory can do:
Re-signify the earth
Re-signify the local
Make the struggle visible
Read Silvia Federici and she will revolutionize the way you understand the world. She will turn it upside down and radicalize it. Part of a group of feminist thinkers who have reinvented and expanded Marxism, Federici has helped put women’s work, long banished to the margins of anti-capitalist analysis, at the center. Reproduction, the typically unpaid work of caring for others and sustaining common life, is as important as production, the waged work left-wing political economists have traditionally emphasized.
Federici argues that the fixation on waged work obscures a more complex and multifaceted reality. What we call the economic, or public, sphere cannot be separated from the domestic, or private, one. The family—a social formation shot through with domination and exploitation under conditions of patriarchal capitalism—precedes the factory. There would be no employees to hire or profits to extract if a massive, unremunerated, overwhelmingly female labor force didn’t create and care for their fellow human beings.
Beginning in 1972, Federici was part of a remarkable effort to operationalize this analysis and push for a revaluation of labor. The ensuing Wages for Housework campaign was boldly internationalist in its assessment—women the world over had nothing to lose but their uncompensated chains—yet decidedly local. The New York branch was based in Brooklyn and had a storefront in south Park Slope, only a fifteen-minute walk from where, in August 2018, Silvia and I met to catch up.
Today, Wages for Housework is being rediscovered by a generation of young people who see uncompensated labor not just in the home but all around them—the requisite unpaid internships after college, the shifting of work to consumers (we bag our own groceries and tag our own luggage), and the extraction of personal data in exchange for “free” online services. Capitalism, by design, perpetually seeks to pay as little as possible—ideally nothing—for people’s energy and time.
Federici’s best-known book, the groundbreaking Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, puts this tendency in historical context, going all the way back to the Middle Ages. The text lays out themes—exploitation, resistance, and the centrality of the commons—that her latest publications, including Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, return to and deepen.
In the spring of 2016, I asked Federici, whom I knew socially through activist circles in New York City, to participate in what would become my 2019 documentary film, What Is Democracy? I invited Federici because I knew she would speak as both a theorist and a practitioner, a historian and a rebel—and thus embody the essence of the film and its companion book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, which both insist that democracy is inherently paradoxical. Democracy requires reflection and action. It is a noun and a verb—a beautiful ideal and a messy reality.
On a whim, in March 2016, I suggested she fly to Italy, where she was born, and join me in Siena for an on-camera conversation in front of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s proto-Renaissance fresco The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. Painted between 1338 and 1339, the strange and evocative triptych is widely regarded as the first secular fresco, conjuring, as it does, the impact of a political system’s character on the broader society. Federici immediately agreed—it turned out she has a print of the painting hanging in her living room.
Two years later, the film was complete and I was finishing the companion book. My time with Federici in Italy had a profound impact on both projects and how I understand politics, economics, and feminism. But I still had more questions to ask her.
—Astra Taylor
I. “THE LITTLE HONEY OF HEALTH CARE”
ASTRA TAYLOR: Walking over, I couldn’t help but think back to our trip to Siena. So much has changed since then. The right wing is gaining ground worldwide, Donald Trump is in the White House, #MeToo has burst onto the scene. When I began plotting my movie, in 2014, I had no idea what was in store.
Today, everyone agrees democracy is in “crisis”—and it’s a crisis that feels unprecedented in a lot of ways. And yet our conversation from 2016 is still relevant. During the talk, we were looking at and being inspired by an Italian fresco painted in the 1330s, and the imagery—which warns against the vices of avarice, vanity, and violence—still resonates.
My general instinct is that we need to emphasize the continuity of events and not get too dazzled by the idea that there has been a radical rupture. At least that’s what I hoped to do with the film: to put the current crisis of democracy against a more expansive historical and philosophical backdrop. But what do you think? How much has changed? Have we entered a wholly new era?
SILVIA FEDERICI: I think exactly these moments are the moments when, in fact, more than ever, you need to go back to history. You need a broad scope. Because when you put Trump against the backdrop of the unfolding of American history, then the continuity stands out. And also what you begin to see is that even in those moments that appear less dramatic or less violent, there was lots of violence unleashed and organized by the U.S. in other parts of the world.
So I think it’s really important to build a broad canvas. And then you begin to see the continuity. And you also begin to see the rupture. And you can ask: why in this moment are there certain particular forms of expressing violence, this return of a blatant, fascist style?
AT: Right: when you look back on American history, there is so much violence. So we need to be more precise if we want to recognize what has changed.
SF: If we look at the post–World War II regime, when you had the state still working out a sort of mediation, they are still giving the impression, with the New Deal, that there is a social contract. If workers have high levels of productivity, then you’ll have certain levels of material comfort, et cetera. In the ’70s this contract breaks down. It breaks down in the United States and internationally. Then you have the big world-restructuring. So I think that now you have to think of these three moments. First, the end of what people call Fordism, or Keynesianism. Then you have the moment of the world agencies, you know, where the state is represented by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, which impose policies of globalization.
We’re entering a third phase. I think that Trump represents, in a way, a further step, where international agencies are now more and more actually replaced by the great corporation directly. I think, if anything, what has been taking place—and this, in a sense, is the novelty, although this has been the trajectory of capitalist development all along, right?—is more and more capitalism confronting labor or workers directly. You see the state receding, and there is no mediation. The confrontation is more brutal, more direct, and the veils are dropping.
This is a capitalism that is becoming more and more pure. I think the phase we’re entering now is one where the kind of resistances that were effective in previous times have been so destroyed that now capitalists don’t need the mediation of the state. You don’t have to give workers social security. You don’t have to give people the little honey of health care.
