Silvia Federici’s feminist writing and activism have inspired generations of thinkers and organizers. Perhaps most inspiring is how she has always—whether writing groundbreaking historical analysis, lecturing about primitive accumulation and the commons, or organizing internationalist feminist networks—made worker’s struggle primary, as an analytic of capitalist development and a political imperative. (In this way she adopted the best quality of Italian operaismo, or “workerism.”) Though Silvia is rightfully known as a key thinker of postwar Italian feminist theory, she left Italy for the US in 1967. Participating in struggles in North America and Africa, she thus developed a broad sense of anti-capitalist and feminist movements as well as of the machinations of neoliberal counterinsurgency. In recent months, we met several times at her home in Brooklyn to discuss her childhood and radicalization, her arrival in the US and first forays into feminist organizing, and her perspectives on Italian history. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
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Andreas Petrossiants (AP): Silvia, you were born during World War II, right?
Silvia Federici (SF): Yes, in 1942.
AP: I’ve been reading Paul Ginsborg’s A History of Contemporary Italy.1 The relationship between the partisans and the Allies was even more tenuous and difficult than I had previously appreciated. You must have grown up with a very specific reception of the Resistance, and I imagine it was a quite pacified version.
SF: I did not learn about the Resistance until I was twelve or thirteen, when I began to understand something about the political situation in the country. But I was born in Parma, which was one of the centers of the Resistance.
AP: The city of barricades, as it’s often called.
SF: Yes, but even before WWII, the city had an anti-fascist tradition. In August 1922, in response to a national strike called by a workers’ organization against fascist violence, the town was put under siege by thousands of fascists. While in other towns the strike was defeated, in Parma workers responded with strong resistance. For five days, in the proletarian areas, everybody went into the streets, building barricades and forcing the fascists to retreat. It is known as the Siege of Parma. After 1943, when the Italian government broke its alliance with Germany and Italy was occupied by the Nazis, the hills around the town offered protection to partisan commandos who also operated in the town, supported by the people in the proletarian parts of the city. The town was not unified, but the proletarian neighborhoods were sites of strong anti-fascist resistance. And at the end of the war Parma had a communist municipality. Emilia-Romagna, Toscana, and Umbria were the only three regions in Italy that had left governments after the war. In the rest of the country, the Christian Democrats (DC) ruled, which was a conservative party.
AP: A lot of fascists and fascist sympathizers joined the DC after the war.
SF: More importantly, the DC was the product of the alliance between the Americans and the Vatican. During the war, because Parma was being bombarded all the time, my parents moved us to a little village on the other side of the Po River in Lombardy. We stayed there until 1945. After the war, we tried to go back to Parma, but we couldn’t because many apartments had been confiscated for refugees. Instead, we moved to a small town called Casalmaggiore, where we lived until I was thirteen. When we went back to Parma, I was actually very upset because I wanted to stay in Casalmaggiore, which I loved. That’s where I spent the most beautiful years of my childhood. But when I was thirteen, we went back to Parma because my father was teaching there.
AP: What did he teach?
SF: Philosophy. He was teaching in liceo [high school], and so we moved back. That’s when I started to become more politically aware. Partly it was because my parents constantly talked about the war and fascism, but also it was because at the time Parma was a communist town. On May Day, they would have parades with the red flags and would sing “Bella Ciao” [celebrating partisan resistance]. And there was the Festa de l’Unità [the annual festival originally organized by the Communist Party to fund its newspaper]. My family were not communists; my father was a liberal and my mother basically followed what my father said. But the whole atmosphere of the town was anti-fascist. So that’s how I began to learn about the Resistance in Parma. As I said, after 1943, the Italian government and the king broke the alliance with Germany and effectively Italy became an occupied country. Mussolini and the fascists retreated to the Republic of Salò, which continued its alliance with the Germans, lasting until 1945, when the war ended. Parma was at the center of the struggle against the fascists and to liberate Italy. So, when I started going to school, many of my schoolmates came from families that had been involved in partisan struggle. And later on, I had a teacher in liceo who was a communist and talked a lot about the Resistance. But I think that the source of my radicalization was the stories told in my family. Even though we weren’t a leftist family, hearing all their stories was nonetheless radicalizing. My parents talked a lot about the war and about fascism. My father was a classical liberal, but he hated the fascists. So even as a child, I could tell that something was wrong in the world. My mother would recount all the times that we could have been killed, that my father could have been killed.
AP: Was there a sense for you already, at that age, of how the Resistance was enlisted by the Allies in their fight against the Germans, but also purposefully stunted? I like how Ginsborg summarized it: “Allied strategy with regard to the Resistance was … to minimize its role as far as possible, and on no account to allow partisan action to lead to unpredictable political consequences”—to proletarian power, in other words.2 This culminates of course with the agreement that the partisans will have to give up their arms after the country is liberated.
SF: The important thing, I think, is that when Palmiro Togliatti [secretary of the Italian Communist Party, or PCI] came back to Italy from Russia in 1944, he gave a famous speech in Salerno, in which he announced that the party would join what at the time was called a government of “national unity,” mostly concerned with the struggle against Nazi fascism.
AP: Right, and then in May 1945, when the workers councils in the North that had struggled on the front lines agitated for revolution, Togliatti and the PCI expressly told them to stand down.
SF: Togliatti was following the position of the Soviet Union: that the road to a communist society should go through the ballot box. This is what leads some to argue, from today’s vantage point, that the Soviet Union actually saved capitalism at the end of the war. As I was growing up I learned that many partisans were against this decision and many buried their arms rather than give them up.
AP: Apparently the Allies collected 215,000 rifles, twelve thousand submachine guns, 760 anti-tank weapons, 217 cannons, and twelve armored cars, but only five thousand pistols, as Ginsborg recounts. This makes it pretty clear that they at least kept their pistols. Another historian, John Foot, argues that this was the first of three major betrayals suffered by organized workers after the end of the war—the third being in 1948 when Togliatti was shot and wounded, which did not stop him from promptly putting down budding insurrections.
SF: I think the turning point really was Togliatti’s speech in Salerno, the “Svolta di Salerno” (Salerno turning point). Many people who participated in the Resistance believed that the struggle against fascism was part of a larger movement for broad social change. They believed it would turn into a struggle against capitalism. The fascist regime had had the support of the big agriculturalists, the big industrialists. The whole apparatus of capitalist production was behind the fascists. It wasn’t until the United States entered the war that the Italian capitalists realized that they were on the wrong side. And that’s when they began this negotiation—which became obvious only much later—with the Americans through the Vatican. Already, before the end of the war, the big Italian industrialists, like Valletta, the head of Fiat, realized the war was lost if they stayed on the side of the Germans. Through the Vatican they made an agreement with the United States. From that moment, everything that took place in Fiat was engineered to undermine German production. In some instances, they even pushed workers to strike. And the Allies only bombed those areas of the Fiat industrial complex that were producing for the Wehrmacht. I remember a book published by people on the left around 1968 which debunked the myth propagated by the PCI after World War II that Italy had come out of the war with its major industries intact because of the glorious defense organized by the working class.
AP: There were instances when partisan-aligned workers occupied factories in fascist-controlled areas, not to agitate for higher wages but to keep industrial machinery in Italy.
SF: Many workers and partisans experienced the new policy of the PCI as a betrayal. Already during the war they realized that the Allies were not interested in real social change. When the partisans would liberate a zone, they would call British command and say, “Do not bomb this area, because we just liberated it.” But they would be bombed nonetheless. So, it became clear that the Liberation had serious limits.
AP: So the Liberation was celebrated specifically to exclude the struggles of the partisans?
SF: In official discourse, “the Liberation” refers to the entrance of the American troops into the cities, but does not include the Resistance. For example, the partisans were not allowed to join Liberation Day celebrations, especially if they were suspected of being communists. It has been argued that the Allies decided to land in the South rather than the North (as the Resistance wanted) because there was a total mistrust of the Resistance. This was also the case in Greece. In Greece, the resistance movement, which was mostly a peasant movement called the EAM-ELAS, was targeted by both Stalin and by the British and the Americans.
AP: Right. In Italy, the British wanted to avoid the situations that developed in Greece and Yugoslavia. In Greece, the British backed the monarchists after the partisans had liberated Athens, while in Yugoslavia they allied with Tito but lost control of the area to the communists. So, Churchill’s anti-communist policy in Italy was supposed to be a middle ground, because he knew he needed the partisans …
SF: To fight the Germans, right. The need to prevent a left-wing turn deeply affected the postwar politics of the Italian government. In the immediate postwar years, apparently the police were present on the shopfloors in Fiat, on the lookout for worker organizing. And in the early fifties there was an anti-communist crusade. Peasant struggles in Sicily and Puglia to reclaim land were defeated. In one case a peasant demonstration at Portello Delle Ginestre ended in a bloodbath. You can say that in the fifties there was a war of counterinsurgency in the South. Nineteen forty-eight, the year of the national elections, saw an immense mobilization by the church and capital to ensure a DC victory. This was the historic defeat of the PCI strategy of gaining power through the ballot box. In fact, while the Communist Party had a strong presence in parliament throughout the postwar years, it was never was part of government. Then when Aldo Moro proposed an alliance …
AP: With the “historic compromise”?
SF: Yes. Moro was sequestered by the Red Brigades but it is notorious that the Cossiga government at the time did little to guarantee his liberation and safety.
AP: What was your perspective on these years?
SF: After growing up in Parma I was surprised when I came to the US and realized that communists were considered a great danger, because in my town, working-class people—fruit sellers, people on the street—were all communists.
AP: When did you come to the US?
SF: 1967.
AP: Before you left, were you involved in any political organizations?
SF: No.
AP: So what were you doing in the sixties before you moved?
SF: I was going to university. I was studying at the University of Bologna, taking first a degree in foreign languages and culture. Later I enrolled in philosophy. I came to the US with a scholarship to write my dissertation.
AP: Was there already a student movement to speak of in Italy?
SF: That came later. All the organizing in Italy before the late sixties was in the big towns, in Milano, Torino, Genova. The smaller communist towns were the last to join the movements. The first turning point was in Torino, at Piazza Statuto, in 1962 when, during a strike called by the unions, the workers, mostly immigrants from the South, engaged in fierce street battles with police. It was the beginning of a new phase of Italian working-class rebellion.
AP: It was the emergence of “mass workers,” as the theorists of operaismo would call them.3
SF: Yes, they had come from the South and were thrown into the factories, where the conditions of work must have felt like a form of imprisonment. And they faced unspeakable racism. The labor unrest of the period had a big impact on the political theory of dissident communist and socialist intellectuals, like [Raniero] Panzieri, [Mario] Tronti, [Romano] Alquati … But I was in another world. I was busy with my studies and with falling in love.
AP: That’s radical too!
SF: I mean, I had a sense of social justice and social injustice, especially because of the war. So I was not “apolitical” in that sense.
AP: But it is interesting that Tronti was already writing essays criticizing the PCI’s hagiography of Gramsci in the late fifties.4 And then you have people like Danilo Montaldi …
SF: Yes, by the fifties it was clear, most of all to the communist intellectuals, that the PCI had no interest in immediate social change. Even the red flags became scarce. People like Tronti were critical of the party long before they broke with it. Up to ’68 or ’69 there was a dynamic whereby, in moments of struggle, when the masses mobilized, many militants, including the intellectuals, would leave the party. But in times of defeat, they would all go back to it. The Communist Party was like a big womb that would always take them back.
AP: It’s like the university following New Left defeats in a way.
SF: Then in 1969 you have Hot Autumn [mass worker uprisings across Italy], and soon after, the emergence of the major extra-parliamentary groups like Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio. I didn’t know about any of this at the time. I discovered those groups and movements while I was in the US. I was at SUNY Buffalo, where some philosophy students published a journal called Telos …
AP: Did you get involved in it right away?
SF: Practically from the first day, because they wanted to translate articles from Italian. So they recruited me to do translations.
AP: Do you think you got even more radicalized by doing those translations?
SF: Not necessarily, but I learned about what was happening in Italy. When I arrived on campus, it was practically on fire. Students were organizing in support of Martin Sostre, a Black activist who had a radical bookstore and had been arrested under the pretext that he was selling drugs. There were also draft dodgers trying to cross into Canada. There was a lot of mobilization for the Buffalo Nine [nine Vietnam War protestors who were arrested in the city]. For me, coming from a small, sleepy communist Italian town, it was an incredible experience. And then, in the fall of 1971, Telos organized a conference that invited radical intellectuals from the US and Europe. It was held in Waterloo, Canada [the “First International Telos Conference,” which led to the publication of Toward a New Marxism]. Many people came to it, among them [Herbert] Marcuse, [André] Gorz, [Luciana] Castellina, and members of Lotta Continua. At that time, I was married to Michael Kosok and already lived in New York City. We had a car, and so we drove back to New York City and [Italian Marxist] Lucio Colletti came with us and stayed at our house for about a week. He wanted to see Harlem and so Michael and I took him there. At the conference the people from Lotta Continua kept asking, “You don't know what’s going on in Italy?” That’s when I caught up with the new movements. Somebody gave me a copy of [Tronti’s] Operaie e capitale (Workers and Capital).
AP: But your PhD at the time was about Lukács, right?
SF: Yes. Originally, I was going to write a dissertation on T. S. Eliot, and I actually wrote a first chapter in Italy, but my advisor there made it impossible for me to continue to work with him because of his sexual harassment. Every time we met, he tried to put his hands on me, which led me to interrupt the work. As a result, I never got a philosophy degree in Italy. I finished all my exams, and all that remained was my dissertation, but I decided I could not continue with this person. When I closed the door on Bologna, I enrolled for a PhD at the University of Buffalo and graduated there. His behavior was the main factor in my decision to remain in the US. If I had the prospect of a job teaching philosophy in Italy I probably would have gone back.
AP: Before we go on to autonomia and the seventies in Italy, I want to briefly pause on May 1968 in Paris.
SF: I was in Buffalo at the time.
AP: What was May ’68 like for you in Buffalo?
SF: I was getting an abortion during May ’68. I had what is called a therapeutic abortion, since Roe v. Wade hadn’t happened yet. My roommate was a social worker, and she was worried about me because I was so upset. She was able to contact doctors at the university hospital and they had me go through the three mandatory psychiatric visits that convinced them it was “okay” for me to have an abortion. But it was also mandated that I spend a week in the hospital to “think it over.” It was painful because I was there alone, worried, scared. This was precisely during May ’68 in Paris, and so my roommates would come and say, “Did you hear what’s happening in Paris?” I had no idea. Later on, I came to think of it as symbolic of the different path I took with respect to the politics of the left, a path that took me to the feminist movement.
AP: When did you start participating in feminist movements?
SF: I think I was a feminist at age five. I was what they used to call a “tomboy.”
AP: What about your first organized feminist political work?
SF: That was Wages for Housework. I was there at the birth of the group in Italy.
AP: That was 1972, right? How did you get in touch with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and the other feminist militants in Italy?
SF: Sometime earlier I was in Boston visiting my friend Mario [Montano] because he asked me to help with some translations. We also wrote an essay together.5 Before I left to return to New York, he said, “Take this article. It looks interesting!” It was “The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community.”6 I read it on the train and as soon as I arrived home, I wrote to Mariarosa to say that that I wanted to meet her.
She invited me to a meeting in Italy in July 1972 with Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, and others. At the end of that meeting, we launched the International Feminist Collective, which was comprised of four women from Italy, the US, England, and France. We agreed that each of us would try to organize a Wages for Housework campaign in our respective cities. So, when I came back to the US I started talking about the campaign with a lot of women. Then in March 1973, Mariarosa and Selma James came to the US for a speaking tour at several universities, and this is how I met other women interested in forming a Wages for Housework group.
At the time, most feminists didn’t want to hear about housework at all. They believed the struggle for women’s liberation would have to take place on the terrain of waged work, so that women could join the unions and “join the working class.” They feared that campaigning for wages for housework would confine women to the role of housewife.
AP: You know the adage that in Italy, May ’68 lasted for a decade? From your perspective going back and forth, what was your opinion of the expansiveness of autonomia?
SF: I can say confidently that in the feminist circles where I traveled, after 1972, there was very little interest in the male movements.7 This changed in 1977.
AP: During the movement of ’77?8
SF: After the student struggle in Bologna there was a euphoria in the left movements. But I was skeptical. Living in New York, I had more of an internationalist viewpoint. After living through the financial crisis in New York City in 1975, seeing how the US had decimated Black Power movements, I had a different perspective on capital’s ability to counter the gains made by workers. And I was right. Leopoldina’s husband was a journalist and had access to all kinds of documents, and so we asked him to get us a packet with all the relevant materials coming out by left groups in 1977. We studied it and wrote the special issue of Le operaie della casa titled “Mille Fiori Sbocciano Appassiti” (A thousand flowers bloom and wither). This was our studied critique of the movements. I think our analysis was pretty accurate. In fact, it was so pedagogically accurate that many groups started to read it to figure out what it was they were doing.
AP: It became like a technical inquiry.
SF: Yes it did.
AP: Having read the issue, it’s pretty striking how a lot of the critiques you put forward presage arguments that would be developed later as neoliberalism became dominant. Perhaps you and your comrades could see the pitfalls of lionizing a certain type of creative precarity?
SF: With some exceptions, the biggest problem with the movements is that they didn’t have any internationalist perspectives.
Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Ginsborg, History of Contemporary Italy, 42.
On the mass worker, see Steve Wright, “The Historiography of the Mass Worker,” in Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (Pluto Press, 2017).
See the dossier “The Young Mario Tronti,” ed. Andrew Anastasi, Viewpoint Magazine →.
Silvia Federici and Mario Montano, “Theses on the Mass Worker and Social Capital” (1972), libcom.org →.
See Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader (PM Press, 2019).
The feminist movement “directed its antagonistic critique beyond the role of the State to the male-dominated Italian left, including the radical workerist left … The most symbolic and public moment occurred in Rome on December 6th, 1977, when the male stewards of Lotta Continua and of the Comitato Autonomo di Centocelle attacked a feminist demonstration and its vindication of a woman’s right to separate from a man.” Enda Brophy, preface to Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, The Work of Love (Autonomedia, 2008), 8.
See “The Generation of Year Nine: Youth Revolt and the Movement of ’77,” libcom.org →.
