'Community has to be intended, not as a gated reality, a grouping of people joined by exclusive interests, and separating them from others, but rather as a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility, to each other and the health of the forests, the seas, the animals.' So writes [feminist] Silvia Federici. But how can we get there from here? The practice of commoning, and the idea that we might hold and manage land and assets together in common, holds a lot of appeal these days. To help us think forward as we do on this show, we have two world-renowned experts on commoning in the house. Federici's latest book is Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Its foreword is written by historian and 'Laura Flanders Show' regular, Peter Linebaugh, who is the author of, among other classics, The Magna Carta Manifesto. In this interview, Federici and Linebaugh discuss the history of the commons and how we might apply some of the ideas central to commoning to rebuilding our communities. --
"For more than four decades now, Federici's scholarship and activism have been central to this work. Her writing offers a foundational account of the demand for the wage as a revolutionary act. Her influential pamphlet, Wages Against Housework (1975), opens with a provocative rebuttal: 'They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.' In this document and others, Federici argues that demand for a wage is a critical political nexus for organizing women around a shared condition of alienated labor. The demand for the wage is impossible for capitalism to meet, and that is the point; success would entail a wholescale reconfiguration of the distribution of social wealth." --Interview, Boston Review
"Silvia Federici's work embodies an energy that urges us to rejuvenate struggles against all types of exploitation and, precisely for that reason, her work produces a common: a common sense of the dissidence that creates a community in struggle." --Maria Mies, coauthor of Ecofeminism
"Silvia Federici's theoretical capacity to articulate the plurality that fuels the contemporary movement of women in struggle provides a true toolbox for building bridges between different features and different people." --Massimo De Angelis, professor of political economy, University of East London
