In January 2020, acclaimed scholar
Silvia Federici visited Vienna following
a WU invitation to speak about
feminist perspectives on economy and
housework. Progress seized the opportunity
and met the renowned feminist
economist to discuss student activism
in a global context.
progress: You have been involved
in student movements across the
world, namely the USA, Nigeria and
Italy. What were major similarities
between movements that you came
across in your work?
Silvia Federici: For one thing, the
situation I encountered in Nigeria
and later in the United States was a
peculiar one because it was generated
by major transformations that took
place in the universities. Starting in
the 1980s, at different times and at
different levels of intensity, but all across
the world nonetheless, we began
to see a disinvestment in education
by the state. The increasing dependency
of universities on business, the
university becoming an enterprise,
knowledge becoming a commodity,
all of that consequently came to be at
the centre of the student movement
struggle. The idea of a free university,
of free education, of resisting the
commercializing of education. So that
was certainly a common denominator
in student movements, and I believe
it’s a common denominator now of
struggles across the world.
The connection with the struggle of
the 1970s hinges around the issue of
the student as a worker. We can see a
revival of this question in some places
today. In Canada, especially in Montreal,
there is a big movement demanding
fair wages for students, who are
often forced into unpaid labour that
comes in the form of unpaid internships.
The whole idea of the student as
a worker is founded upon one belief:
We are not here for our pleasure;
we are not here for our benefit. We
are here because you are forcing us
to train ourselves so we can become
more productive. We are here for your
benefit and for your interest, so you
need to pay us.
Inspired by your campaign „Wages
for Housework“, the project „Wages
for Students“ took off in the 1970s.
Do you think the demand is still
justified?
I think the question of wages for students
is very important. It’s a scandal
to me that now students have to pay
for their education. I agree completely
with the students in Canada. In fact,
they often invite me to talk about
the issue of reproductive work. They
see a continuity between the critical
perspectives we develop on education
and on reproductive work. In the end,
the state’s organization of education,
much like the state’s organization of
reproduction, is not done with the
benefit of individuals and communities
in mind. Both systems are organized
for the benefit of capital, chasing an
ever more productive society.
What is it like to introduce these
ideas to people who see students as
part of the ruling class, i.e. their
future oppressors?
This of course is a battle and it really
depends on different political traditions.
I think that for instance in
Italy for a certain time in the late
1960s, there was a moment of coming
together. For the students to say “We
are workers!” was a sign of solidarity
with the workers’ movement. It was an
assertion of the continuity of the students’
struggle with the struggle that
was taking place in the workplace,
in the offices, in the factories. At the
same time, the student activists would
often have come from those same
working-class families.
Forcing students to pay to go to school
puts another burden on working class
families. It’s an instrument of social
selection. Saying „Students are workers!“
is a challenge to the way our
society is stratified.
You were one of the founding members
of CAFA, the Committee for
Academic Freedom in Africa – how
did that come about?
It began in Nigeria in the 1980s. There
had been massive mobilization of
mostly students and some teachers.
There was a strong students’ organization
at the time, the National Union
of Nigerian students (NUNS), that was
crucial. They were basically the centre
of the opposition to the politics and
structural readjustment of the International
Monetary Fund. The IMF had
proposed an austerity programme that
was eventually embraced by the Nigerian
government as well as many other
African governments, which meant
massive disinvestment in education.
NUNS created the manuals for the
struggle on campus. There were even
massacres in the north of the country,
but NUNS stayed close to the people
on the ground. Students were being
arrested, students were being beaten
up, even at the university where I was
at the time in Port Harcourt. There
were three or four days where the police
came in a veritable rampage. They
invaded the dorms, even the women’s
dorms, they beat up women, the police
did lots and lots of terrible things. One
of them even launched a gas canister
against me, which was amazing
because I had thought that as a white
woman and as a teacher, I would
be less vulnerable. I would take my
bicycle through the smoke of tear gas
to see what was happening. It was very
brutal. When I left – which was also
related to the structural readjustment,
because the state’s disinvestment meant
that faculty were no longer being
paid – I decided I had to do something.
I couldn’t just go on and forget all of
this. Nigerian faculty also had to leave
the country so we decided to form an
organization with the goal of exposing
the objectives behind the defunding of
universities. We wanted to demonstrate
how it fit in with the restructuring
of the global economy and the new international
division of labour that was
emerging. Our bulletin from back then
is still online. We published a book in
2000 called „A Thousand Flowers“ and
then we began to organize. We went
specifically to departments of African
Studies and to various universities in
general. We weren’t able to raise the
mass support on American campuses
that we were hoping for, but I still
think our work was very important.
First and foremost for African students
and universities, because for many years
we provided extensive analysis and
documentation. Teachers and students
gathered information that we published
in our periodicals. Activists tell us
that this work was vital. We stopped in
2003. By then we had lost contact with
the local student organizations. We
didn’t feel like we had the kind of understanding
anymore about what was
happening there for us to continue.
You’ve mentioned terms like „global
universities“ and „division of labor
in education“ – What do you mean
by that?
The terms are very connected. As
part of the neoliberal drive, which is
the expansion of capitalism, we find
ourselves in a new hegemonic system
dominated by American capital and
the multinational. An essential part of
this system is the restructuring of education
and international labour. What
I call the „global university“ is the fact
that now we have a system where a
select number of universities in educational
centres in the United States,
or in what they call the global North,
set the standard for the rest of the
world. Colombia, Harvard, the London
School of Economics, etc. This creates
an international education system that
is extremely hierarchical, where the
responsibility of decision-making lies
with a number of select organizations.
These influential few are the ones who
determine what education is, what
knowledge is, how to produce knowledge,
which knowledge is worthwhile
and which is not. According to this
system, for instance, knowledge is not
considered valuable unless it is published
in certain journals. In any part of
the world, you now have to publish in
certain journals to get a promotion or
to gain access to resources. That also
means that you have to mould your
research interest to the subjects, the
categories, the language, that these
journals promote. This means that less
and less local researchers can work on
local issues.
Connected to this is another perverse
development, which is online
education. Online education is very
widespread in the United States. There
are new private, for-profit universities
cropping up that provide most
of their courses online. That means
very low costs for the investment, as
these universities don’t need buildings
or infrastructure. This is a very
dissatisfying development, but online
accessibility is instrumental to global
education. Now the World Bank can
say to Nigeria: „You don’t need to build
your own university; the students can
take online classes from Harvard“. We
are witnessing a whole new structure
emerge that is recreating the colonial
system at an educational level.
In your work you write about commons
and their role in society and
capitalism. Do you think the neoliberalisation
of universities is an attack
on education as a common good?
Absolutely. Part of the struggle is the
creation of „knowledge commons“, as
they are known in the activist language
in the United States. People speak
of building commons of knowledge,
creating spaces where knowledge is
produced, distributed and circulated
collectively and outside of the logic of
the market.
You have written about how labour
under capitalism alienates workers
from their own body. With the
increasing indifference of the EU
to refugees dying at her border in
mind – how do you think capitalism
has changed how we relate to other
people’s bodies?
Capitalism has demonized certain
people so much that you become
numb to the suffering of others.
Oppressors have been able to convince
sectors of the working class
that their own well-being depends on
exclusionary policies. I think the left
carries the burden of responsibility
for not having been able to do the
kind of educational work that unites
the oppressed. If we don’t distinguish
between fact and fiction, we are
vulnerable to all the stupidities that
are being said about migration. It’s
not a matter of fighting immigrants
who are taking your job! It’s about
fighting the German government, the
EU, the US government, those who
are impoverishing, who are dispossessing
entire regions of the world
for their resources. They are the ones
we should point our finger at: „You,
who are letting people drown in the
Mediterranean, imposed the very policies
that caused them to leave their
countries. You are the ones who are
responsible.“
In your book „Caliban and the
Witch“ you expose how, when under
pressure, the ruling class has historically
resorted to institutionalizing
discrimination against a group
within the proletariat. Is this our
perpetual fate under capitalism or
do you see an end to this reaction in
sight?
This question is actually heavily debated
in some circles. People like David
Harvey, a more traditional Marxist,
came up with a statement upon being
asked if capitalism is necessarily
gender-biased. And he said: „Well,
that is what happened historically,
but logically you could think of a
capitalist-system without gender-bias.“
I disagree with him, with the whole
idea of logically separating capitalism
from history. Because capitalism has
only been able to build its expansion
on gender-based discrimination,
because the unpaid labour of women
has enabled the massive accumulation
of wealth. If the capitalist class had to
provide the infrastructure for reproductive
labour itself, certainly the
accumulation process would be much
more reduced. It doesn’t make sense to
analyse capitalism in an abstract way.
You don’t just wipe out history! It’s a
very non-materialist position. Materialism
is built on the recognition of
historical dimensions of social reality.
The moment you accept that historical
reality, you can’t deal in abstractions
anymore. Gender-discrimination,
like racism, is a structural element. I
always say that capitalism is not the
production of wealth, it’s the production
of scarcity.
The Interview was conducted by Perigan Eraslan. She studies Economics at the Vienna University of Business and Economics