Fear Needn’t Paralyse You

Interview with Silvia Federici

 

The writings of the renowned feminist theorist, political philosopher, and activist Silvia Federici continue to shape generations of theorists and activists today. In her Zurich lecture on 26 August 2023, she will explore the resistive and creative potential of bodies and describe how they can become starting points for political action. In this conversation with the communication scientist and author Fiona Jeffries, Federici interweaves reflections on growing up in the shadow of fascism in Italy and on the significance of early modern witch hunts for the contemporary social and economic order, among other things, into a feminist critique of existing labor and reproduction relations.

 

 

Fiona Jeffries: First, will you tell me about your background? How do you think the question of the politics of fear matters to your work and thought?

Silvia Federici: I was a small child growing up in Italy during the Second World War. Movements in World War II against fascism, racism, and Nazism were formative to my understanding of politics, movement building, and solidarity. Whatever the movement was, the question of organisation, the question of building networks, was central. Ultimately the power of movements allowed people in them to overcome their fear of being part of a struggle. They formed a collective identity, a history that went beyond them. This meant that the always-looming possibility of their destruction was not devastating or paralysing in the way that one may think it would be. In a sense, even the sacrifice of life would not be the end of their individual history, either, because in that struggle against fascism people were part of a collective self. They were part of something that transcended the temporal limits of their lives and that made death, the ever-present possibility of death, bearable. You know those slogans that sound rather rhetorical, like «You can kill me but you won’t destroy the struggle»? They actually have a very profound meaning. In the dangerous and scary struggle against fascism and Nazism, people became part of a broader body. When you join such a struggle, you become part of something that projects you way beyond your own lifespan. The destruction of your own individual body means something different then. You build for the future. You identify with the destiny of the new generation. And that is what gives people strength. Ultimately it makes you overcome the fear of pain or dying, and gives you the confidence that your death is not going to be in vain. […]


Individualising or privatising people’s fears —fears of economic ruin, social irrelevance, or what have you —seems to be an effective strategy for making people feel alone and helpless

In the 1940s, those in the resistance against the fascists or the Nazis had a very strong moment of collective identification and organisation. The difference today is, perhaps, that what people are up against is more blurred. What is also more blurred, what is harder to identify, is what constitutes the community of resistance. In today’s social struggles against our world’s manifold injustices, who is there with you? It is hard to know. Who can you really count on? 
This is happening for a broad variety of reasons, but I think it is helpful to look at the kind of community that existed up until the 1940s and 1950s, when people shared a long history together. You studied together. You went to the same elementary school. You knew each other’s parents, brothers, and sisters. You shared so many moments of your life. You knew what kind of people they were. There was a kind of trust or mistrust that you could have that was based on life experiences shared together. You grew up together. Whereas today, think of a place like New York City. You meet people about whose life you know nothing. You may meet them in a meeting or at a demonstration. But in a profound sense, in many cases they are strangers to you. You don’t know what you can count upon.
That type of very tightly knit community, where people identify on the basis of their class history, is less and less available today. […]

And today, political repression is articulated on so many different levels that it is far more difficult to know what you are up against. 
There is a science of repression that has been developed, particularly in the US, devoted to figuring out how to disaggregate people as a way to control them. So you have to divide people up: you have those who are going to be shot, and those who are going to get a visit from the FBI and be given a warning, maybe a few days in jail. Or you have those whose phones will be tapped. So there is a great diversification of the means of repression. And this makes it far more difficult to see the face of what you’re up against — to measure the actual danger you face.
Let’s return to Italy in the 1940s for a moment and the example of the partisans. I use this example because I come from a part of Italy that was heavily partisan, and I grew up hearing their stories. Some of the partisans were fifteen, sixteen years old. They were running all over the hills, keeping the different commandants of the different partisan groups in contact. They were kids! And they knew very well that if they were captured by the fascists, or by the Nazis once Italy was occupied, not only would they be killed, but most likely they would die under torture. They had a pretty clear idea of what the relations of forces were, what their chances were, and what would happen to them if they were caught. There are still many places in the world where the lines are very clear, where in a very real sense you know what awaits you if you engage in political struggle. But the situation today in places like the US and Europe is far more blurred, because the confrontation is not as sharp and the means of repression are much more indirect. That doesn’t mean repression no longer exists. It is articulated in different ways for different groups: if you’re an immigrant, a black adult, a black youth, or a white middle-class person, the experience is sharply different. […]

Intimate Resistance
 

If we can go back again to the first question, one thing that stands out in your thinking, writing, and political activism has been your deep understanding of the intimate dimensions of resistance. What is it in your own history that shaped your particular approach to thinking and acting in the world?

So many things! As for many of my generation, I think the most fundamental influence was World War II. I was born in the last year of the war, but it was always present in my life. It was a central theme in my family and in my community. The war communicated a number of messages. The first was a message about politics, about history. It forced fundamental questions about what a political life is. It made clear that there are enormous injustices and divisions in the world, which in turn brought the importance of resistance and sacrifice to the forefront, and the idea that certain atrocities should never happen again. So very early on, the question of injustice and struggling against injustice was central and continuously repeated. In a way, I grew up with a double message: that the world had gone terribly wrong and that this was not a world of happiness and ease, but at the same time, it was a world in which it was possible to resist, and many people did. So it was a world where you were expected to struggle against injustice. And of course, at the same time, there was a great suspicion of authority and the state. The experience of fascism showed that you couldn’t trust the state, you couldn’t trust the authorities. So that was definitely an important influence. The war affected everyone I knew. 
A second influence, less directly present, was the anti-colonial movement. It was not a direct, immediate presence when I was growing up — it came to us in school, through adults, and in newspapers — but there was a sense that out there was a world in revolt, a world on the move, in a process of broad change. There was a sense that this was not a world that was settled, by any measure. My youth was filled with news of change in Kenya, France, or Algeria.
Another major factor was coming to the US in the 1960s, and my experience of the student movement and the women’s movement. The women’s movement was the culmination of a whole set of questions that had been building in my personal life and in the world. My sense of unease with the world found a name in the women’s movement. I recognised right away that the women’s movement gave a name to many of the questions and problems that I felt in my life. It became a politics and an analysis. It enabled me to grasp the narrow-mindedness of my father or my teachers, for example. This was a turning point that expanded my consciousness.
Each of these influences raised different problems and possibilities. But fundamentally, they showed that this world was changing. And I’ve seen tremendous change in my own lifetime that I never would have thought possible – the kind of transformations I see now in women’s lives, even though they are a far cry from liberation: the kind of life that many women can have, where they have a certain amount of control to decide about the children they have, or marriage, or their sexual life. It is really fantastic. I never, never imagined this would be possible during my lifetime. To be able to have a life with a certain degree of autonomy was certainly not the situation of our mothers. And this is certainly not the situation of women on a broad, world level. But the number of women that can actually have that experience has increased. And that was certainly not the case in the world in which I came of age, and not for my mother or the other women around me. Because I was an early feminist, the circumstances of women were a battle when I was a teenager. My father used to laugh at the idea of women bus drivers. Every time I see a woman bus driver now, it seems almost incredible that he could be so narrow-minded. And he was an intellectual, he was a philosopher! Even though my father encouraged me to read, to write, to discuss politics, the idea that a woman’s role was domestic was firmly entrenched. This was the context of the Italy in which I grew up. […]

Terrorising Women
 

Let’s turn to a major theme running through your work and political practice: the story of the witch hunts. You have written extensively about how the misogynist violence behind the witch hunts was a form of political violence. In our own period of capitalist expansion, we have witnessed a surge in extreme violence against women. This violence is global in scope, but it is concentrated in specific sites that are also places of intense capitalist exploitation, such as Ciudad Juarez and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While this violence is typically explained in decontextualised cultural terms, your work lays out instead a political critique of it. What does the story of the early modern witch hunts tell us about the political nature of violence against women?

Yes, it is political violence. Unfortunately the witch hunts have returned in parts of the world. That violence against women is political, because it is always perpetrated in relation to the kind of functions or roles that women are expected to play. The violence is instrumental to enforcing those functions. Even today, one of the main reasons women are subjected to violence by men has to do with questions of housework, being available for sex, or the whole issue of dependency of the woman on the man. The violence is political because it is a violence that men have been allowed to carry out and it has been somewhat legitimised, even if there are more laws against it now. 
But in the history of capitalism, violence against women has been legitimised because, in a way, it has been a central part of the regulation of women’s labour, a way of forcing women to perform in a certain way, to provide a certain type of work, particularly because this work is unpaid. The less money-wages men have had available to mediate the exchange with women, the wages in exchange for her work, the more they resorted to violence. In fact, you can look at rape that way, the kind of violence that forces women to provide sexual services without giving any payment to her. It is political because this violence has been condoned by the state, it has a legitimacy, and it has been part of the sexual and social division of labour, of unpaid services provided to men in exchange for economic support. Violence has been the mechanism that has ensured the functioning of that relation.

When you see this kind of violence returning and spiking in certain places, what do you think? Today, patterns of misogynist, murderous violence are often referred to as a femicide, or gendered genocide. Is there a way of thinking about the innumerable cases of femicide in a way that could help explain the phenomenon? Can we analyse it in general political terms?

I think it’s true that this violence has taken on new dimensions over the last twenty years. What I’m presenting now is the general setup in terms of the functioning of gender relationships to the organisation of work and accumulation. But I think in recent years there has been an enormous escalation of violence. Not only quantitatively, but I do think there is evidence that there is more violence against women. Violence has been growing in the last two or three decades. And I think there are several causes for this. One is that more and more women have been resisting the mandate to provide free services for men. Women have been resisting dependency on men by expanding their areas of autonomy, of independence. If you take a second job, you reduce the work you do in the home. You decide not to marry. You have only temporary relationships with men, have a child alone, have relationships with other women. Certainly the emotional investment that women have put into men and into housework has diminished incredibly. And this has been a source of tremendous anger. And of course, another dimension is male fear of competition with women for jobs, because women are paid less. But fundamentally, men see women escaping their control.
I think there is another dimension to this violence, which is very important. It can be understood as a response to structural adjustment, the economic attack on the male wage that has taken place internationally over the last three decades, and capital’s attack on people’s access to the means of subsistence. One of the responses has been to use not only women’s labour but also women’s bodies as a means of exchange, so that men who do not have a wage are not able to set up a family. But what they do is use women’s labour, women’s bodies, as means of exchange. We can see this, for example, in some of the different forms of prostitution that have emerged in this context. But that creates a whole level of violence on its own. It is an extension of that violence that men used to engage in by forcing women to do the housework. […]

I see two fundamental motives at work in this violence against women. They are tightly related, and whichever is predominant depends very much on the context. One is the devaluation of women’s lives, labour, and bodies in capitalism. This devaluation is functional to the fact that women are destined to become unpaid workers. Second is the need to force women to perform certain types of work. So the question turns on the labour that women are expected to perform and the low value that is placed on that labour, and on their lives in general. I think violence against women is political because fundamentally there has been a struggle around it, and in a sense, the state has been forced to change its relationship with women. The women’s movement has forced this change, which has led to new legislation. The whole campaign by the United Nations on behalf of women is an example of that. […]

The Divisions Among Us
 

Like many people, I read «Caliban and the Witch» with a group of feminist activists immersed in different struggles. One of the things that really struck us was the point you make in the book about how the European witch hunt was a catalyst in a larger process of the accumulation of divisions—among women and men, children and adults, animals and humans, and so on. The painful divisions that often erupt between us often appear shocking and new, somehow, as though we are inventing new divisions as we go along. But the point that was politically important for us was the recognition that the apparent inability of movements to get beyond our divisions is not a magic product of troubled consciousness, but an unequivocally historical process.

Yes, that process begins but is not exhausted in the period of the witch hunts. When you look at the witch hunts, you find that new social legislation that inflamed divisions among people emerged in that period. It also appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At each point, you have a move towards the recreation of a new type of femininity, a new type of masculinity, and the creation of new differences between women and men. Of course, division is a process that is adjusted depending on the context. It is one thing in Europe and another in Mexico, for example, because the work and forms of exploitation are different. If you look at changes in criminal laws, at the witch hunt campaigns, at changes in the official and high cultures, you find tremendous transformation in the way women and men are seen. What you find in these laws and the circulating imagery of women and men is really a proscriptive transformation about how women and men should behave, because they were accompanied by a series of designated punishments. Forms of social behaviour that had prevailed on a mass level were criminalised. I think that’s what I try to show in the story I tell of the witch hunts: that there is a process of mass criminalisation of very widespread, popular behaviour.

What kinds of behaviour?

In relation to sexuality, for example. The control that women had over procreation. Or, for example, folk healing. This is the general context, but within it you also find a whole set of laws that deepened the division between women and men. And you begin to see two very separate spheres emerge. What Caliban and the Witch tries to point out is that the creation of divisions cements a certain kind of hierarchy, one that is first of all constructed by socio-economic and political means. It is constructed on the basis of a major transformation of the relationship that women and men have to capital. In other words, the fundamental terrain of all the differences in identity, behaviour, and practices — the root cause — is the change that begins to take place in how women and men relate to the means of subsistence, to capital, to the state. In that process, more and more women are being confined to the sphere of unpaid labour. They are not seen as workers, and so they are confined to forms of work that do not guarantee their capacity for subsistence. The kind of erosion that, even if they have jobs outside the home, even at the lowest echelon, there is no guarantee of survival.
This difference, which is built more and more over time, culminates in the nineteenth century with the rise of the nuclear family, where you have the man working for a wage and the woman doing unpaid labour. That is the material terrain on which the other differences, hierarchies, and power relationships are built. So, for example, it is the man who makes decisions about the sexuality of the woman. Obviously there is always a struggle. You never have a situation that is unilateral, where force only runs in one direction. But nevertheless, within the proletariat, the power is in a man’s hands — power over a woman’s body — as is the power to ruin a woman by saying, for example, that she is a slut, she is a prostitute, she’s promiscuous.
In the book, I wrote about how these changes brought radical cultural transformations. The entire cultural view of women and men became steeped in an image of woman as pure passivity, with all the characteristics that come with it: docility, silence, obedience. This was a reversal of the image of women in the Middle Ages, when women were supposed to be more violent, more sexual, even sexually insatiable, and so on. The legacy of the witch hunts era brings a characterisation of women that becomes functional to the fact that they have to become fundamentally subordinate to and dependent on men. […]

How do you think such world-changing ideas become absorbed to the extent that they appear to be eternal and natural, even though such rankings and degradations face constant challenges when you look closely?

I think they become absorbed because it’s a process of continuous interaction between the economic and the cultural, the economic and the social. As people become increasingly dependent economically, they lose ground. And they have to renegotiate the relationship and the rules that go along with it.

At the same time, paradoxically, these stories do show how long and unstable the process of absorption of these hierarchies, ideas, and practices actually was. It shows how much violence is behind what we see to be normal modes of behaviour and social organisation.

Yes, how long the resistance has been! People cannot live out of fixed cultural forms. Culture is always changing, and resistance has also changed; it’s still there. In Caliban I document some parts of this resistance when I speak of the women in Peru who carried the struggle against the colonisers — who also brought persecution of women as witches — underground. They fled to the mountains and recreated autonomous communities of women there. In some cases these communities still exist today, despite the hellbent means by which the colonisers tried to destroy them. The colonisers were never successful, and they still have to fight the communities today. […]

 

Credits

This is an abridged version of an interview originally published in «Nothing to Lose but Our Fear: Resistance in Dangerous Times» by Fiona Jeffries (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015). Published with permission of Between the Lines.