In 2009, as I was finishing my PhD on the formation of collective imagination within autonomist thought, I found myself growing increasingly disillusioned with the academic rituals that marked the work’s conclusion. The UK viva process—solitary, closed, opaque—felt antithetical to everything that had inspired my work. Over the years, I had gained so much from conversations with comrades. It seemed only right that the conclusion of my doctoral research should also take a collective form. That desire to refuse the privatized rituals of academic legitimacy was deeply informed by a broader ethos of mutual contribution and communal learning. So, in addition to the usual closed-door defense, I organized a public event at 16 Beaver in New York City: a kind of counter-viva.
It was a warm, spirited evening, held in that unique art space which had long served as a site for cross-pollination between artistic and political experimentation. Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis joined me in conversation. I’d long admired both their work and ideas and continue to. And I don’t mean admire in that nice way in which you’re supposed to say kind things about thinkers you respect, but something more substantial: truly working with others’ ideas in a way that is to be present with them even when they are not there—the very form of collective imagination I had been studying. At one point in the conversation, Silvia turned to me and said, “Did you know I wrote my PhD on art?” I didn’t and was curious to learn how it was related to her better-known work.
That’s a question that has stayed with me since then, which is evident in The Wages of Dreamwork: Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor, my recent book cowritten Joanna Figiel.1 Later on, I tracked down Silvia’s dissertation, titled “The Development of Lukács’ Realism,” and wrote a short piece on it for Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici.2 For years, I kept thinking about the work in fragments. It was in the back of my mind when I participated in a reading group on Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1916) a decade ago. I raised the idea of reading Silvia’s dissertation together in conversations with comrades, but it seemed that life kept getting in the way. Sadly, it was the passing of our dear comrade Marina Vishmidt that pushed me to return more intentionally to the document: a strange and mournful motivation, yet somehow fitting.3 Marina would have appreciated the irony of finally sitting down to engage this neglected, difficult, and rich text through the aching absence of a comrade who had wanted to read it with us. This present reflection is motivated by the desire to be present with Marina through the work we share with her, all the more so because she can no longer be present with us.4
Most readers are likely familiar with Silvia’s influential work on gender, social reproduction, and the function of witch hunts for the emergence of the capitalist mode of production and enclosure.5 Her writing and organizing has been influential in autonomist feminist circles and beyond for many years, cementing her as one of the most vital feminist-Marxist thinkers of the last half century.6 But few know her work on aesthetics and philosophy, which remains unpublished, or scattered in publications that are hard to find. Over recent years more of her work from the 1970s, particularly from the Wages for Housework campaigns, has become available again.7 Perhaps it will be possible to make her other writing available as well.8
Silvia began her PhD in the early 1970s and completed it in 1980. My understanding is that she had initially intended to write about phenomenology and the aesthetics of T. S. Eliot, but like many dissertation projects, her focus shifted. The completed text is a deep, often biting critique of Lukács’s work and its place in Marxist aesthetics. What makes this even more intriguing is the historical context in which she was writing. Silvia was actively involved in the international Wages for Housework campaign, embedded in autonomist currents pushing for radical reconfigurations of labor, value, and gender. Yet, on the surface, that political intensity seems largely absent from the dissertation. The work seems more focused on intervening into the reception of Lukács in the English-speaking world following the translation of History and Class Consciousness (1923). Silvia’s reading is deeply skeptical about the influence of Lukács’s work on aesthetics and politics at the time, offering a sustained confrontation with Lukács’s theory of realism. But what can we make of the nonappearance of Silvia’s organizing work in her academic writing? That absence is telling and compels readers to trace submerged political arguments: the ghostly presence of her activism in a work that presents itself as literary theory and philosophical critique. (It is a type of reading that resonates with the theme of this issue.) It’s a challenge that invites us to read not just for content but for resonance, tone, and subterranean alignment with the wider currents of revolutionary thought at the time.
Lukács argues that Marxist literature must represent social relations in their totality, capturing the interconnectedness of individual experiences within the broader socioeconomic system. He believes that only by depicting the totality of capitalist society can literature reveal the underlying class dynamics and historical development driving social change. Silvia approaches this critically on several levels. Firstly, she argues that Lukács’s theory of realism is not Marxist at all, but rather an extension of bourgeois idealism rooted in nineteenth-century German philosophy. For Silvia, Lukács somewhat bizarrely wants Marxism to act as a completion of German idealism (rather than the famous “turning on his head” that Marx invokes). Secondly, she contends that far from resolving the crisis of value that motivated Lukács’s early literary work, his later theory finds itself ensnared in it. Thirdly, and most significantly, she suggests that analyzing Lukács’s realism offers a privileged vantage point for understanding a deeper crisis within Marxist thought itself. Silvia identifies three main stages in Lukács’s intellectual development and insists on a continuity between them. His conversion to Marxism, in her reading, does not fundamentally shift the trajectory of his thought, but rather simply substitutes one theoretical apparatus for another while maintaining the same idealist commitments. “How this synthesis of idealistic theories could be accepted for decades as ‘Marxist theory’ and be so influential in twentieth century European culture is one of the questions this dissertation will address.”9
Her critique extends beyond Lukács as an individual thinker, touching a raw nerve in the broader project of Marxist aesthetics. As she puts it early on, any serious critique of Lukács’s realism forces us to confront the limits—and perhaps the impossibility—of a unified Marxist theory of aesthetics. By the end of the dissertation, Silvia seems to step back from the ambition of a Marxist aesthetics altogether. Instead, she gestures toward a different orientation: theory as a tool, more akin to literary criticism than ontological system-building. If anything, her affinities lie with Brecht: his suspicion of totality, his materialist dramaturgy, his commitment to breaking the illusion. As I return to the dissertation now, it’s not as an expert but more as a participant in a study group in its best form: a collective exploration among comrades. We’re not reading to assert authority over the material but to encounter it together, asking questions, making connections, speculating, and doubting.
From Pedestal to Platform, Working Women’s Labor Day Challenge, poster, 1972. MayDay Rooms, London.
The “Lukács revival” that was taking place during the time Silvia was writing her PhD focused on his revolutionary writing rather than his earlier work on aesthetics. Silvia is interested in the underlying conceptual continuity across the seemingly drastic breaks in Lukács’s oeuvre. She argues that themes such as the role of the artist in the world, the nature of the soul, and the search for form in artistic work become generalized. As his works develop, the position once occupied by the artist is taken up by the Communist Party. Against the backdrop of the autonomist movements of the time, this use of idealist bourgeois frameworks to argue for the correctness of the Communist Party is doubly troubling. Silvia contends that Lukács does not resolve the contradictions within his thought but rather expands them on a broader scale, universalizing both categories and contradictions. He adopts artistic production as a model for political action, yet paradoxically shows little engagement with contemporary art or with the actual conditions and processes of artistic labor.
One of Silvia’s central arguments is a critique of the concept of reification. She sees reification as a conceptual tool that gives the appearance of drawing from Marx, while in fact remaining within an idealist framework. As she slyly puts it, “Lukács goes to the factory with the eye of Bergson and in front of the assembly line discovers that the major attack done against man is that on the line there is no durée.”10 Silvia argues that the Hegelian-Marxist perspective distorts what she views as the most crucial aspects of Marxist analysis. Rather than serving as tools for struggle, these concepts become methods of interpreting the world in ways that ultimately justify its current state of things. As she writes, “The assumption of the Hegelian dialectics, which postulates an identity between the rational and the real, ultimately leads to a reconciliation with the given, beginning with the reality of capitalist relations.”11
The core issue Silvia identifies is a Marxism that prioritizes alienation and reification over exploitation. As she notes, “unlike exploitation, which in Marx implies a specific class relation and class antagonism, reification in Lukács affects everybody who lives in capitalist society, subjectively and objectively.”12 In this way Lukács abandons the specificity of the Marxist analysis of exploitation, reducing it to a generalized background condition that affects everyone. Here we can draw links to Silvia’s better-known writing, which is focused on understanding the specificity of gendered and social reproductive labor and its structural exploitation rather than on collapsing an analysis of it into a framework of alienation. What emerges in Silvia’s writing is a demonstration of how seemingly abstract philosophical and conceptual debates are, in fact, deeply connected to—and often serve as proxies for—political disputes within the realm of political organizing.
This orientation feels especially important because the questions Silvia raises remain unresolved. What is the relationship between aesthetics and political thought? Can there be a Marxist theory of art that does not fall into idealism? How do moments of crisis—political, philosophical, economic—shape and destabilize our understanding of the world? Just as I did not want the discussion of my own graduate work to be held behind closed doors but rather shared with friends and comrades, the same should go for these hitherto underappreciated aspects of Silvia’s dissertation, which sits squarely in the thick of debates on aesthetics. She is writing at a time when major shifts were underway in both political struggle and intellectual discourse. In Italy, autonomous movements were redefining class struggle, focusing on unwaged labor, gendered work, and everyday life. Simultaneously, debates within and outside of the Italian Communist Party and among New Left intellectuals wrestled with the legacy of Hegel, the uses and misuses of dialectics, and the future of Marxist theory itself, taking struggle outside of the classical sites of production and into the street, home, and university seminar.
Silvia positions herself against the ontologization of Marxism: the tendency to turn historical materialism into a closed system or philosophy of history, which at the time was still the dominant position of left-wing parties. “When we speak of Marxist philosophy,” she writes, “we do not include Marx in the picture, for Marx never attempted a philosophy of history and even less an ontology.”13 This is a powerful claim. It echoes similar critiques made by radical thinkers of the time—among them, the Situationist International—who viewed theory not as a blueprint but as a weapon, a means of intervention rather than interpretation. It shares something with Rancière’s critique of the exalted position of philosophy,14 and with his preference for a social-history approach to thinking with politically charged proletarian poets and artists.15
It’s striking to consider this dissertation alongside the kinds of radical political practice Silvia was engaged in at the time. Even if Wages for Housework is not explicitly named in the text, its fingerprints are everywhere: in the critique of naturalized labor categories, in the resistance to universalist claims about value, and in the suspicion toward abstraction that erases lived experience. The same feminist, anti-capitalist impulses that animate Silvia’s later writing can be seen in embryonic form here, struggling to find language within the frame of literary and Marxist theory. There are also intriguing connections to the aesthetics of Mario Tronti and others in the autonomist milieu. As Tronti writes:
The boys who stood outside the gates of the Mirafiori factory in Turin in the early morning went home at night to read the young Lukács’s Soul and Form. Strong thought requires strong writing. A sense of the grandeur of the conflict awoke in us a passion for the Nietzschean style: to speak in a noble register, in the name of those beneath.16
It’s hard to say how Silvia might have responded to this at the time of writing her PhD, but what is clear is that these tensions were in the air: between philosophy and struggle, between writing and revolution, between the grandeur of thought and the grit of daily life. Silvia had set aside her doctoral work for several years to focus on the labors of political organizing, only to return to it after the collapse of Wages for Housework. She returned to it at a moment when autonomous movements were suffering intense repression.17 It was a moment we can compare to today, when it seems that we are at the bottom of the revolutionary swing.
Reading Silvia’s dissertation now feels like recovering a buried thread in a larger tapestry. It reminds us that political thought is not only about content but about form, context, and method. It invites us to read not as authorities but as participants, as fellow travelers in a project that remains unfinished. In the end, she concludes her study of Marxist aesthetics by advocating a move away from universalizing, abstract positions and toward a theory of development as a more concrete and situated practice. Rather than pursuing a general Marxist aesthetics, she calls for the development of Marxist literary criticism, which, as she puts it, “must limit itself—but this is already a very important task—to study the products of art in view of deepening and enriching our knowledge of the social relations in which we operate.”18 There’s something beautiful, and maybe necessary, in returning to this early work with all its rough edges. It’s a reminder that theory is not born fully formed but forged in struggle, often against the disciplines it seeks to inhabit, and enclosures that it wants to put aside. And that sometimes the work we thought we left behind is still quietly shaping the questions we haven’t yet learned to ask.
Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel, The Wages of Dreamwork: Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor (Autonomedia, 2024).
Stevphen Shukaitis, “They Sing the Body Insurgent,” in Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, ed. Camille Barbagallo, Nicholas Barbagallo, and David Harvie (Pluto Press, 2019).
Special thanks to all the comrades who participated in the reading group this spring on Silvia’s dissertation, especially Stephen Dunne and Ravi Shankar Kuamar. Any sensible idea here was probably sparked by something they said.
There is a deep engagement with questions of aesthetics and social reproduction across almost all of Marina’s work, but specifically in her book cowritten with Kerstin Stakemeier, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (Mute Books, 2016).
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004).
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (Common Notions, 2012).
Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972–1977: History, Theory, Documents, ed. Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin (Autonomedia, 2019).
Silvia has now agreed to the publication of her dissertation as a book. For more information as this develops go to →.
Silvia Federici, “The Development of Lukács’ Realism” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1980), 6.
Federici, “The Development of Lukács’ Realism,” 103.
Federici, “The Development of Lukács’ Realism,” 128.
Federici, “The Development of Lukács’ Realism,” 131.
Federici, “The Development of Lukács’ Realism,” 7.
Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Duke University Press, 2004).
Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-century France (Temple University Press, 1994).
Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” New Left Review, no. 73 (January–February 2012): 120.
An interesting and perhaps instructive comparison here would be how Negri in this moment turns to a sustained engagement with Spinoza to work his way through the defeat of the autonomous movements in Italy.
Silvia Federici, “The Development of Lukács’ Realism,” 239.
