Read Silvia Federici and she will revolutionize the way you understand the world. She will turn it upside down and radicalize it. Part of a group of feminist thinkers who have reinvented and expanded Marxism, Federici has helped put women’s work, long banished to the margins of anti-capitalist analysis, at the center. Reproduction, the typically unpaid work of caring for others and sustaining common life, is as important as production, the waged work left-wing political economists have traditionally emphasized. 

Federici argues that the fixation on waged work obscures a more complex and multifaceted reality. What we call the economic, or public, sphere cannot be separated from the domestic, or private, one. The family—a social formation shot through with domination and exploitation under conditions of patriarchal capitalism—precedes the factory. There would be no employees to hire or profits to extract if a massive, unremunerated, overwhelmingly female labor force didn’t create and care for their fellow human beings. 

Beginning in 1972, Federici was part of a remarkable effort to operationalize this analysis and push for a revaluation of labor. The ensuing Wages for Housework campaign was boldly internationalist in its assessment—women the world over had nothing to lose but their uncompensated chains—yet decidedly local. The New York branch was based in Brooklyn and had a storefront in south Park Slope, only a fifteen-minute walk from where, in August 2018, Silvia and I met to catch up. 

Today, Wages for Housework is being rediscovered by a generation of young people who see uncompensated labor not just in the home but all around them—the requisite unpaid internships after college, the shifting of work to consumers (we bag our own groceries and tag our own luggage), and the extraction of personal data in exchange for “free” online services. Capitalism, by design, perpetually seeks to pay as little as possible—ideally nothing—for people’s energy and time. 

Federici’s best-known book, the groundbreaking Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, puts this tendency in historical context, going all the way back to the Middle Ages. The text lays out themes—exploitation, resistance, and the centrality of the commons—that her latest publications, including Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, return to and deepen.

In the spring of 2016, I asked Federici, whom I knew socially through activist circles in New York City, to participate in what would become my 2019 documentary film, What Is Democracy? I invited Federici because I knew she would speak as both a theorist and a practitioner, a historian and a rebel—and thus embody the essence of...