Silvia Federici

All meaning is necessarily teleological in character and historically rooted in the concrete operations of human subjects.

Silvia Federici (born 1942, Parma, Italy) is an Italian and American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition.

Quotes

"Viet Cong Philosophy: Tran Duc Thao" (1970)

Telos vol. 6, p. 104 (1970)

• Modern imperialism finds its ideological justification in the now fashionable linguistic philosophy which either regards all meanings as wholly arbitrary (e.g., Quine, White, Goodman, etc.), or reduces them to the facticity of everyday discourse (e.g., Wittgenstein, Austin, etc.). In this fashion, all meanings are either equally unfounded, or they can be founded only in the domain of the given. In either case, imperialism is implicitly justified, for, in the first case it is regarded as at least as rational a system as any other, thus neutralizing any possible rational arguments for its debunking, or else, in the second case, since all meanings reduce to the given and the given is, in fact, imperialist, imperialism itself becomes the criterion of all meaningfulness.

• All meaning is necessarily teleological in character and historically rooted in the concrete operations of human subjects.

• The abstract categories of imperialism are neither exempt from the need of a foundation, nor will the fact that they are coextensive with ordinary discourse provide them with the needed foundation.

"Wages against Housework" (1975)

• They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident.

• We struggle to break capital’s plan for women, which is an essential moment of that planned division of labour and social power within the working class, through which capital has been able to maintain its power. Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class.