The question of organising reproduction in a cooperative way is especially important, because we cannot industrialise reproductive work, not at least the most laborious aspects of it, those related to childcare. This is my critiques of Marx and the Left when they dream of a society where the machines will do all the work. Machines cannot do child-care. Thus, there is a huge amount of work that cannot be technologised. The only way to organise it, then, is to make it more cooperative. The individualized, isolated way in which much reproductive work is organised is killing us. So the idea of care-communities has many dimensions. There is the dimension of survival, but there is also the prefiguration of a new society. There is also a dimension of resistance and there is the reconstruction of the social fabric.
Silvia Federici was born in Parma, Italy, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is Emerita Professor at Hofstra University and has worked as a teacher in Nigeria. Federici is co-founder of the International Feminist Collective (1972), and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (1990).
