Silvia Federici

Silvia Federici is the economist of what the ledger refuses to count. In 1972, she helped found the International Feminist Collective in Padua and issued a demand that the entire left dismissed as absurd: wages for housework. The demand was designed to be rejected; its analytical power was in the rejection, which forced a confrontation with the oldest mystification in the history of capitalism—the transformation of labor into nature, of work into love, of a political economy of extraction into a personal story of devotion. The cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and emotional sustenance that reproduced the waged worker every day were not labor, capitalism's accounting systems insisted; they were the natural expression of femininity. Federici spent five decades demolishing this mystification. Her Caliban and the Witch (2004) traced the witch hunts of the early modern period as coordinated campaigns of social engineering that destroyed women's autonomy and enclosed their knowledge in service of the new capitalist order; Caliban and the Witch and