In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji interview renown scholar, activist, and writer Silvia Federici about her powerful and inspiring collection of essays, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. These essays, written over the span of several decades, display her abilities to diagnose and indeed predict the most important issues facing us today.

Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective. In 1995, in the course of the campaign to demand the liberation of Mumia Abu-Jamal, she cofounded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project, an organization intended to help educators become a driving force towards its abolition.

For several decades, Federici has been working in a variety of projects with feminist organizations across the world like Women in Nigeria (WIN), Ni Una Menos, the Argentinian feminist organization; she alsohas been organizing a project with feminist collectives in Spain to reconstruct the history of the women who were persecuted as witches in early modern Europe, and raise consciousness about the contemporary witch-hunts that are taking place across the world.

Federici is considered one of the leading feminist theoreticians in Marxist feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy, and the history and theory of the commons. Her most famous book, Caliban and the Witch, has been translated in more than 20 foreign languages, and adopted in courses across the U.S. and many other countries. Often described as a counterpoint to Marx’s and Foucault’s account of “primitive accumulation,” Caliban reconstructs the history of capitalism, highlighting the continuity between the capitalist subjugation of women, the slave trade, and the colonization of the Americas. It has been described as the first history of capitalism with women at the center.
"To me, the struggle should not ever be purely an oppositional action but should actually be something constructive. Struggle is also a moment in which you raise your consciousness. You take your consciousness, you express a vision of the world that you want to construct what is being denied. The struggle is at the same time negation and also affirmation of the possibility of another world, another vision. And because of it, the struggle is also transformative. It's not only a wall against your enemies. It is also reshaping the relationship with other people. It's a moment of collective reconstruction. It's a moment of collective solidarity. This, to me, has become a very important element. This is what I've learned from the women's movement. That there's so much of our comfort, when we left the male-dominated organization, had to do not only with the program but also the forms of organizing, the kind of relation that you have with people. It became very, very important to think of the struggle as something much different and far more creative, far more constructive, and this vision of the struggle is also what should attract people to look at the struggle as something in which they want to be, not as another burden, not as another piece of work added to the day-to-day misery and the day in day workload. But actually, something that you look forward to. Going to a meeting has to be something that you look forward to as you go to a party, in the sense that here are the people that you feel connected with. You're building something. You are discovering something."

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