During the ‘80s she lived and taught in Nigeria, where she also worked with women’s organizations and against the politics of structural adjustment that were then being tested throughout Africa. She was a founder of the International Network for Wages for Housework. It was in the US that her feminist militancy and collaboration with the black movement developed. Silvia Federici was born in Italy, but she has lived in the United States since the ‘60s. In Caliban and the Witch Federici asks fundamental questions about this emblematic figure of the female: why does capitalism, since its beginning, need to wage war against these women? Why is the witch-hunt one of the most brutal and least recorded massacres of history? What is supposed to be eliminated when these women are condemned to the stake? Why is it possible to draw a parallel between them and the black slaves of the plantations in America? Capitalism, from its origins, persists and combats these women with fury and terror. Witches expand into other female and closely related characters: the heretic, the healer, the midwife, the disobedient wife, the woman who dares to live alone, the obeah woman (a practitioner of secret magic) who poisoned the food of the master and inspired slaves to rebel. This is not a fairytale, nor is it simply about witches. It is in the mode of development of this reproductive work that Federici locates a central terrain of struggle for the women’s movement. In her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), the Italian feminist Silvia Federici considers the killing of witches as foundational of a capitalist system that domesticates women, imposing on them the reproduction of the workforce as forced labor without any remuneration. This interview was first published in Lobo Suelto! on April 10, 2015. Agostino Veneziano, The Witches’ Rout, c. 1520.
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