Silvia Federici

In her videoconference at the Italian Institute of Culture in Mexico City, Silvia Federici will reflect on the concept of commons and the neoliberal attempt to subordinate nature to the logic of the market. The "new precincts" have made visible a world of property and community relations that many believed to be extinct or had not valued until threatened by privatization. The idea of ​​the commons offered a logical and historical alternative to both the state and private property, allowing us to reject the fiction that they are mutually exclusive and exhaust our political possibilities.

Silvia Federici is a writer, professor, feminist activist of Italian origin. In her work, she concludes that the reproductive and care work that women do for free is the basis on which capitalism is sustained. In the 1970s, she was one of the promoters of the campaigns that began to claim a salary for domestic work carried out by women without any compensation or recognition as a demand of feminist economics. In the 1980s she worked for several years as a teacher in Nigeria. Both trajectories converge in two of her best-known works: Caliban and the witch: women, body and original accumulation (2004) and Revolution at point zero: domestic work, reproduction and feminist struggles (2013).

She is Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University (Long Island, New York).

— Instituto Italiano de Cultura