Silvia Federici revisits the birth of capitalism through a feminist Marxist lens, arguing that the violence inflicted on women’s bodies—especially through witch hunts, reproductive control, and domestic exploitation—was not peripheral but foundational to the formation of capitalist society. In Caliban and the Witch, she challenges Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation as a pre-capitalist event, reframing it instead as an ongoing process of accumulation by dispossession that targets the commons, women's labor, and reproductive capacities. Federici insists that unpaid reproductive labor—the daily work of sustaining life, raising children, and maintaining households—is not external to capitalism but its hidden engine, enabling the wage labor system to function without compensating the reproductive base it depends on. The historical witch hunts, she argues, were not remnants of feudal superstition but state-organized strategies to suppress female autonomy, herbal knowledge, and communal resistance, clearing the way for a compliant labor force and patriarchal social order. In later works like Revolution at Point Zero and The Patriarchy of the Wage, Federici connects this expropriation to contemporary struggles over the privatization of basic resources, showing how institutions like the IMF and World Bank continue colonial logics by enclosing land, water, and even genetic material. Her advocacy for reclaiming the commons as spaces of collective reproduction positions feminist resistance not only as critique but as world-making praxis, rooted in care, cooperation, and the refusal of capitalist logic. By centering women’s labor and bodies in the history of capital, Federici demands we rethink exploitation from the kitchen to the plantation, and organize accordingly.
reproductive labor, primitive accumulation, capitalism, witch hunts, feminist marxism, commons, body politics, unpaid labor, colonialism, global expropriation, gendered violence, accumulation by dispossession, neoliberalism, Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch
