Silvia FedericiEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

If you want to understand how witch-hunting and patriarchy contribute to the stratification and repression of the working class, listen to this interview where we speak with feminist historian and philosopher, Silvia Federici, focusing on her book, Caliban and The Witch. Her work focuses on witch-hunting and primitive accumulation as processes that are integral to Capitalism’s historical and continued reproduction. In the interview, we speak about the political and economic significance of the persecutory institution of witch-hunting. We lay out the connection between racial, colonial oppression, and patriarchal oppression and highlight the ways in which witch-hunting traverses political contexts and histories. She goes on to describe the contemporary political stakes of witch-hunting, highlighting the roles that the IMF, World Bank, and NATO play in reproducing the conditions of primitive accumulation, privatization and the degradation of the commons. Federici explains how witch-hunting and the far-right are on the rise across the globe, especially in Africa and South America.

Today we are speak with 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, demanding a collective struggle for a new social world. 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. [2] 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 also has 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.

Silvia Federici is one of the most important political theorists alive today. Her landmark book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation demonstrated the inextricable link between anti-capitalism and radical feminist politics by digging deep into the actual history of capital's centuries-long attack on women and the body. She is an Italian-American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition. She is a professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University , where she was a social science professor. She worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa . Silvia joins Brett to discuss the main ideas of her very important and well known book, Caliban and the Witch . Topics include: Marxism, Primitive Accumulation, Feminism, Witch Hunts, Patriarchy of the Wage, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Wiccans, contemporary witch culture, and much more! Intro and Outro music by church fire, off the album "Pussy Blood". You can listen to, and support, their music here: https://churchfire.bandcamp.com Support Rev Left Radio on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio/posts This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition and the Omaha GDC.