»Feminist movement cannot put forward a perspective of social change without addressing the question of class«. Wages for Housework Campaign, witch-hunting today and feminist politics of the commons

Silvia Federici is a seminal scholar, feminist theorist, and activist whose contributions to the study of class, gender, and social reproduction have significantly influenced contemporary feminist thinking. A central figure in the Wages for Housework Campaign of the late 1970s, Federici advocated for the recognition and remuneration of unpaid domestic and care work – essential yet historically undervalued work that underpins capitalist economies. Until 2005, Federici taught international studies, gender studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.

From her influential book »Caliban and the Witch« to her extensive writings on social reproduction, labor, and the commons, Federici has critically examined the interconnections between gender, class, and capitalist accumulation. In this interview, she reflects on the enduring relevance of her analysis in the context of today’s global inequalities – ranging from the devaluation of care and housework and the ongoing struggle and broader challenges posed by neoliberalism and ecological crisis. Federici’s reflections engage both the historical foundations of women’s oppression and the contemporary possibilities for feminist resistance and transnational solidarity. Her recent publications include »Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women« (2018), »Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons« (2018), and »Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle« (2020).

Mona Motakef: In 2025, the focus of feministische studien is on the interplay between class and gender. Both issues are informed by a contradiction: On the one hand, there has been a renewed interest in class analysis after decades in which it was largely dismissed as reductionist or outdated. At the same time, however, the trade unions and democratic organizations that once channeled »class conflicts« have lost much of their appeal and the idea of a unified »working class« seems to be declining. From your perspective: Do you also observe this simultaneous resurgence of interest in class discourse alongside the erosion of »class consciousness«?

Silvia Federici: For a long time, at the beginning of the feminist movement, it appeared that class and gender were two different realities. Often the question was how to reconcile them, but there’s actually no conflict and no distance between them. Since the earliest phases of its development capitalism has associated gender with particular forms of exploitation. As we know, women have been excluded from many forms of employment and increasingly confined to domestic work. It has taken a long struggle for women to be able to enter male dominated jobs. Certainly, not all women have been housewives, just as not all men have been wage workers. But ›woman‹ has meant a reproductive worker, it has meant unpaid labor, in the same way as ›black‹ means super exploitation, slavery. Thus, the feminist movement cannot struggle for social change without addressing the question of class, without envisioning the construction of a non-exploitative society.

In the United States there has been a revival of interest in labor struggle and the question of class. It’s has been largely a consequence of the large number of migrants who have come into the United States, especially from Latin America over the last 30 years due to the devastating economic policies that have been imposed on them by the US and the European Union – through the debt crisis, the politics of structural adjustment, NAFTA and so forth. There’s been a massive displacement of people who then have come to the United States bringing with them a class consciousness that was dying in the US, and an organizational experience sustained by an understanding of the history, past and present of the capitalist system and imperialism. This explains why the United States government is waging a war against migrants. Migrants were supposed to come to the US to cheapen labor, to counter the struggle of local workers, but they have done the opposite. The great migration of the 1990s and after have revived and revitalized a labor movement that was dying, but now all this is in crisis.

Today, there is a growing consciousness of class and class struggle. But of course, now everybody is scared, since we are presently experiencing something like a coup, that undoubtedly will deeply affect the feminist movement and the labor movement. Trump has declared a war on migrants, since his election thousands have been deported, places of work have been raided and those deported have been sent not back to their countries of origin but to faraway places, like Rwanda, from which they cannot return. In recent years there has been a resurgence of union struggles, but it is hard now to predict if the growth of the labor movement will continue given the present all-out attack on so many workers.

MM: Back in the early 1970s, you were part of the International Feminist Collective. Together with other feminist activists, you launched the Wages for Housework Campaign in several countries. The campaign began with the recognition of the central role of housework in capitalist accumulation – a role that was overlooked in Marx’s work. Housework is socially necessary and is largely carried out by women, yet it is neither paid nor acknowledged. However, in later interviews, you pointed out that, by that time, feminist movements offered little support for the campaign. Could you explain why? What were the reasons for this lack of support, and how did questions of class and gender intersect in these reactions?

SF: Most feminists really misunderstood us. I think because the feminist movement to a great extent, at least in the United States, was still captive to a bourgeois conception of life. They criticized our perspective because they thought that we were glorifying housework, that we were asking for women to become housewives, that by asking for wages for housework, we were saying, »Okay, we’ll get the money and be happy.« They didn’t understand that for us, Wages for Housework – I stressed it over and over again – was not only a demand for money that women could use, women that had no money, but also a political strategy. It was not an end point; it was never conceived as the revolution, and it was never conceived as the horizon of women’s struggle. It was conceived as a strategy adopted at the particular historical moment to change the power relation between women and capital, women and men, and to give women more options – wages for housework, in our perspective, would give women the possibility to choose whether to stay with a man only because they depended on his money or leave him, whether or not to take a job outside the home, no matter how bad the job was, in order to have some independence. But most important of all, demanding wages for housework was a tool for us, to show that this is work. It was a tool to show that domestic work is work, that it is part of the capitalist work production machine. It is not a natural thing, there is nothing natural in domestic work. This work is part of the economy.

To us, Wages for Housework was a complex strategy. It’s not just a struggle for some money, it was something supposed to change our relationship to the system and give us some autonomy. For much of the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the great alternative was a job outside the home, was being like a man. I’ve never been interested in equality with men, to tell you the truth. Not, of course, because I want or accept to be unequal, but because I don’t think that the male state is an ideal. By the way, which men are we talking about? Black men or the men on Wall Street? Men are exploited, too. For me, the feminist movement struggle was never really centered on the struggle for equality with men. Equality with other people who are exploited? Obviously if we work in a factory or in a university, we want the same wages as men’s. But when we talk about the strategy, we need to adopt in order to change our lives and to create a different society, we must expand our political horizon, we must talk about something broader. In essence Wages for Housework was a denunciation of unpaid labor, it exposed how capitalism draws its wealth and power from a huge amount of work that has been made invisible, has been naturalized.

MM: Your opening statement at the Wages for Housework Campaign was highly influential and is still widely quoted today. »They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.« Compared to the 1970s, housework is more visible today. However, as you have emphasized, it is still not equally shared between men and women, but rather redistributed among women, often deepening inequalities along class and racial lines. From your perspective today, where do we stand in terms of the visibility and recognition of housework? And how would you assess the success of the campaign in retrospect?

SF: Today housework is more visible thanks, in great part, to the struggle of domestic workers, who have created powerful movements that, over the years, have been able to gain certain rights. I am thinking here, for instance, of Territorio Doméstico, a domestic workers’ organization in Spain, made mostly of immigrant women, that was instrumental in demanding the ratification of ILO Convention 189. It establishes that domestic work is entitled to all the benefits recognized for every other type of work. Their slogan: »Sin nosotras nada se mueve« (Without us nothing moves) is fully in the spirit of Wages for Housework.

At the same time, today we are a long way from where we started. Not because fighting for Wages for Housework was wrong. But because with time – partially because of our own growing up, because of our own struggle and partially because of the changes in the capitalist organizational work – we have begun to see that reproduction is broader than housework. This has also been the lesson of the eco-feminist movement. I’m thinking here of the work of feminists like Maria Mies, that has been very inspiring. Eco-feminists and then the movements of ›popular feminism‹ in Latin America have taught us that reproductive work continues outside the home, in the field, the schools and in the hospitals. This is true also in Germany, in Italy, in the United States.

When we look at Africa or Latin America, we see that the issue of land, the issues of agriculture, of agricultural food production all are central to the question of reproductive labor. Today there is a worldwide feminist struggle for food sovereignty. All this is part of reproduction. The political horizon of the struggle over reproduction is today much broader. When we talk about the ›commons‹, for instance, we are talking about the fact that the our struggle is not only for access to wage payment but is also directed to reclaiming the land, reclaiming our control over all the most basic resources, like water and land, and all the assets that are now taken away from us. So, I would say that the struggle for wages for housework has broadened to include the struggle for other forms of wealth and against the exploitation of labor, which can be achieved only when we share equally the wealth we produce and the wealth nature provides.

MM: You argue, that demanding wages for housework is not enough. In recent years, you have developed a feminist politics of the commons. I know this is a bit of a difficult question because you wrote books on the topic, but could you briefly explain the core ideas of the concept of the feminist politics of the commons?

SF: Yes! One of the powers of capitalism has been that of separating, isolating people. Marx has written that capitalism concentrates people in factories and in doing so creates the basis for workers’ struggles. But when it comes to reproduction, everything is done to separate us. The United States is a good example. Think of the creation of suburbia, with all its separate houses. There was a deliberate effort at the end of World War II to separate the factory, the office from the place where workers would live and to create individual dwellings where reproduction would be completely privatized. There has been a deliberate effort to ensure that once we stop working and we go home, we don’t live together but organize our reproduction in separate, individual households. This has weakened workers’ social power. The cult of the ›privacy‹ has actually disempowered us, it has weakened our capacity for solidarity. It has prevented from socializing our daily crises and problems, forcing us to confront them alone.

I have been inspired by the struggle of women and feminist movements in Latin America who have been strongly affected by the communalism of the indigenous people. This is where their communitarian spirit and creation of more cooperative, more collective forms of reproduction come from. It is thanks to these movements and movements like the Zapatistas that the idea of the ›commons‹ has also returned in the discourse of radical movements in the US and Europe.

The commons are not just material goods to be are shared. The commons are a way of organizing society, of creating a society where people collaborate not only in the waged workplace but also in the work of reproducing our everyday life.

Unfortunately, the feminist movement in the US has not been able to transform the way we organize our reproduction, concentrating its efforts on ensuring that women enter male-dominated jobs and gain wage equality. Except for the struggle over abortion and reproductive rights, there has not been a serious struggle over reproduction. As a result, we have lost the welfare payments women had access to when they were sole supported mothers. And we have not even been able to get good social services from the state. And the social services that we have are constantly being reduced. Today, if you have to care for a child or a person who is sick you have no help. You depend on paid people or on friends, but the majority of women are still individually responsible for care-work. The welfare system is being dismantled. This is what Trump is doing, but he is completing the work of previous administrations. There is an urgent need to have more cooperative forms of reproduction and also have access to basic resources: housing, money, social services. However, we need social services that we control because over and over we have seen that state provided services most often do not meet our needs. For this we need a communal organization of reproduction. Without communal control state provided services only strive to save money rather than provide the care that is needed. In the meantime, a huge care industry has developed. These are companies that provide aid workers but their services are expensive, while their workers, who are mostly migrant women, are underpaid.

Like the struggle for wages for housework that for reproductive commons is a struggle to obtain much needed resources: cheap housing, free medical care, free social services. Commons are material goods, but also a way of organizing everyday life so that no woman has to bear alone the burden of reproducing the life of her family by herself. Now many women have to care for children and parents at the same time, so they are in prison in their homes. It is important to see these two aspects of the commons: the commons as a communal organization of reproduction, as a social relation and the commons as the sharing of the material wealth of the world, the wealth that we produce and the wealth of nature. Both are necessary as ›commoning‹ without access to living material resources can only lead to redistribution of our poverty.

MM: I am wondering how your understanding of class and gender has shifted from Wages for Housework to the politics of the commons?

SF: The development of my politics from the 1970s on has been profoundly impacted by the massive transformations that have taken place in the organization of work and the organization of the political economy. Since at least the mid-1970s, we have seen a systematic attack on the gains made by the struggle of the 1960s. This has been capital’s response to the anti-colonial movement, the Black Power movement, the feminist and student movements. Combined, the movements of the 1960s have shaken up the foundation of the capitalist system. Thus, since the mid-1970s – starting with the oil embargo in 1974, the politics of austerity of 1975, structural adjustment, the debt crisis – the capitalist response has been a major restructuring of the world political economy at all levels. We have seen a dismantling of the so-called ›welfare state‹, the privatization and commercialization of basic services and resources, the commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and a constant, growing attempt by energy companies to appropriate the land and the waters of indigenous people in the Amazons, Africa, India, indeed across the world. As a result there’s been massive displacement of people. The huge migratory movements that we are presently witnessing are a direct consequence of the massive expansion of capitalist relations worldwide. This is also the cause of the constant escalation of violence, of the many wars now being fought, across the world, now especially intense in the middle east, the proliferation everywhere in the ›global south‹ of paramilitaries and narcotraffickers, the forms of violence changing depending on the localities. All these forms of warfare serve to terrorize people, forcing them to leave their ancestral lands. And then, when migrants come to the US or Europe, they are persecuted, by the very same countries that are responsible for their diaspora. Now, in the US, they are not only deported to the country they come from, but they are deported to Uganda and South Sudan, to countries, that is, from which they cannot return. We are witnessing a total collapse of constitutional guarantees and the politics of human rights.

MM: In »Caliban and the Witch« (2004), you have demonstrated that violence against women played a central role in the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism. You returned to this theme in »Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women« (2018), linking contemporary witch-hunts – such as in India, Kenya, Zambia, or Mexico – to local and global inequalities and neoliberal and neocolonial dynamics. Across many countries we currently see the rise of misogynist and anti-LGBTQ politics, alongside harsher migration regimes – even to the point of criminalizing migrants and queer people, as is happening now in the United States or Hungary. Do you see parallels here with the witch-hunts you describe?

SF: Yes, completely. In many parts of the world, we have seen a return of witch-hunting attacking primarily women as well as (in some countries) children. But we can also say that the migrant today is treated like the witch, the gay person is the witch, and the trans person is the witch. All accused of destroying society. We are witnessing a world-wide witch-hunt, at the service of capital’s expansion and the capitalist exploitation of the people and the wealth of the world.

MM: What has changed compared to earlier periods?

SF: A dominant theme in the attack on women who are accused of witchcraft in Africa, India and Papua today is the issue of land. The consequence of the expansion of the basic capitalist companies and corporations – the energy, the agribusiness, etc.– is that they are taking over more and more land. And international agencies, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are forcing governments to privatize land, to destroy the last elements of communal ownership of land. So, you have privatization, you have the expansion of extractivist companies and people are losing their land. The consequence on the ground are on one side migration, on another side there is the escalation of land conflicts. People are now killing each other for the land. All kinds of conflicts are reactivated and instigated because the land is becoming scarce. Those who benefit from them are the local authorities in complicity with foreign companies. This is the context of the new witch-hunts. A contributing factor has also been the activity of evangelical, Pentecostal sects that, since the 1980s have spread across the world, financed by conservative organizations in the United States. These are the new missionaries now active all over the world. And they are bringing a belligerent form of Christianity that says we have to fight the devil, and that there are witches among us. They have reactivated the whole vocabulary of the witch-hunts. In a context of ongoing land expropriation, the presence of these pastors preaching the existence of witches makes for an explosive situation creating witchcraft accusations. Often, those materially attacking the women accused are young men unemployed, exasperated because they don’t see any future for themselves, and can be easily manipulated to turn against women who have some land, especially older women. In Africa, in Angola, Nigeria and the Congo, for several years now, they’ve also been accusing children of being witches. Many children have been tortured, and many have been thrown into the streets. Parents who are impoverished and cannot support their children now have these pastors telling them that their children are demonic. Indeed, there is a war on children.

MM: Finally, let us return to the politics of the commons. You have criticized the way in which the concept has been overstretched or instrumentalized, for example, when universities charge high tuition fees yet brand their libraries as ›information commons‹.

At the same time, you mentioned positive examples of the commons in Latin America, that give you hope. How do class and gender play a role within them? What can we learn from these examples moving forward?

SF: Yes, there is an exploitative use of the concept of the commons. At the same time, especially in Latin America, we have seen the spreading of many forms of communal social reproduction. An example are the collective activities of many women in the so-called »villas miseria« that have developed in cities like Buenos Aires in Argentina. These are huge encampments that have grown at the periphery of cities built by people displaced from their lands or the collapse of the industries where they worked. Forced to go to the city, they have had to organize collectively, and they have built houses and streets. Women have been central to this process. They have created entire communities through collective labor. And they have created collective forms of reproduction, like the popular kitchens, the communal gardens, and the neighborhood assemblies where people make decisions collectively. Now, with the Milei government, they are under attack but continue to be a powerful alternative to total impoverishment and social defeat.

This is what happened in Chile in 1973 after the coup, when everybody was paralyzed by fear. Women would go out and begin to cook in the street to make sure that everybody had some food. But what they achieved was more than just food preparation. In the process they gained some strength, being with other women, circulating much needed information. The commons have many sides, many dimensions, there the commoning of the production of food, and also the communing of knowledge production. There is the building of common knowledge, and with that the development of a communal spirit. As I said earlier, the idea of the commons is not an alternative to Wages for Housework, but it’s a continuation, an expansion of it.

MM: Finally, how do you envisage the future development of feminist class theory?

SF: What we wish for is a feminist movement that recognizes that the struggle of women has been and is rooted in the organization of reproduction. This struggle is especially crucial, more than any other kind of struggle, because reproduction touches on the most important activities of life. Reproduction is land, water, food, care, health, education, child raising, ecology, the caring for plants and animals – all that is most important for the reproduction of life. The feminist movement has understood the power of reproduction as a terrain of struggle, a terrain of change, and a terrain of transformation. It has understood that reproduction is a terrain that can bring together many movements, it can create a common ground with ecologists, school educators, hospital and care workers. The terrain of reproduction is a much broader terrain than the factory. It’s a terrain that is shaped by the long experience that women have had as to what gives life, putting life at the center. That is what sustains me, what I hope that more feminists will embrace.