Gene Ray: Your work has been a key reference in the continuing reflection on commons and commoning in this new century. You have both contributed to our understanding of historical commons (in Caliban and the Witch[note]Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004.[/note]) and helped us to recognize contemporary commons targeted by neoliberal processes of "new enclosures" (in your work with George Caffentzis and Midnight Notes collective[note]Midnight Notes, “The New Enclosures,” in Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1992. See also Camille Barbagallo, Nicholas Beuret and David Harvie (eds.), Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, London: Pluto Press, 2019.[/note]). Certainly, there are older forms of commoning that have resisted integration into globalized capitalism, especially in the Global South. But do you see promise, as many do, in the organization of new commons as a political strategy today?

Silvia Federici: Yes. The globalization of capitalist relations has destroyed many communal forms of life, but it has also made us conscious of the importance of cooperation and sharing for our reproduction and our very survival, in a world that more and more produces scarcity and pauperization. In my activism, I have been more influenced by the new commons than by the old, which are also going through many transformations, to survive despite the constant war waged against them. But a world of new commons is developing, giving us a vision of what a non-exploitative society could be like. These are also places of training and experimentation. A “commoning” society will not develop except through a process of learning – how to be capable of self-government and how to organize our lives on the basis of mutual relations. The construction of commoning practices is also a condition of struggle. It is a condition for building struggles that are not episodic, that grow and connect, to create new common ground.

My political work during the last twenty years has been inspired, first of all, by the Zapatistas, who are an example of a society that, despite being constantly under attack, is always reinventing new forms of communalism. This is a society that is organizing itself on the basis of communal relations and without the state. The Zapatistas are proving that,  even in today’s world, in which capitalism has become a planetary system, it is possible to organize a society that is not statist. This is why their struggle has been such a pivotal moment in the anti-globalization movement and has generated a great international solidarity, with activists in many countries organizing to provide material support to the Zapatistas communities and ensure that they will not be defeated. The Zapatistas have given birth to a new kind of commoning that is not just a continuation of the old but something new.

I’ve also been very inspired by what I’ve seen in the villas of Latin America, particularly in Argentina, what they call the villas miserias. These are the big communities that have developed, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and other cities, built by people who were expelled from the rural areas, from their old commons, by processes of enclosure. They were forced to urbanize and realized that they had no alternative to total defeat but to put their lives together. So they took over land, built houses and roads, the women being extremely important in this process.

In these new commons I saw the development of new forms of social reproduction. An example were the communal kitchens where many women and some young men all cooked together, no longer in the isolation of their homes, helping each other and sharing news, knowledges, ideas. And then there are the neighborhood assemblies and the communal gardens, which now have spread, often created by immigrants, also in many towns of Europe and the U.S. In these villas, like Villa 21-24, I saw whole areas where there was no presence of the state, except for the police station on every corner. But otherwise, no services whatsoever, a tabula rasa. So, it was the women who came out and organized the most basic forms of reproduction.

In the United States, when I speak of these new commons, I often hear this objection – oh, you are going to replace the state and this is no good. But, in reality, these women had an understanding of what was necessary for the reproduction of their community. They were taking kids to school because there were no street crossing lights and a few kids had been run over by cars. They were picking up garbage because people would get sick otherwise. They would check on families who may have no food to ensure they would not starve. But they did not let the state off the hook, because in doing this, they developed the strength that allowed them then to go to the municipal government and say “we want water in this street, we want electricity.” They could show me that they had even gotten connected to the Internet. And they got all that because of their collective strength.

So, there I saw a moment of self-government. In the villas, I saw women who were learning in a very concrete way about what the needs of their communities were. That for me is a requirement for the capacity for self-government. I saw hundreds of women who had gained an understanding of their territory and the needs of their community. A society based not on the privatization of wealth, nor on competition and social isolation - which is, in itself, a defeat– will not grow except through such practices.

G. R.: This was outside Buenos Aires?

S. F.: Yes, I visited two villas. One was Villa 31, where I saw the communal kitchens and where women were telling me, “look at these streets, we did all of this.” And the other was Villa 21-24. I went there with Verónica Gago and several other women. It was amazing. After the visit we had a big meeting, with dozens of women who were telling us what they were doing in the community, about their healing practices, about childcare, about making music and other cultural activities. There I saw another world, a new common.

Two more examples. What happened in Chile after the coup of 1973, when everyone was paralyzed with fear. The trucks would come, every night, in the proletarian communities like La Victoria and the megaphones would tell all the men to line up in front of their doors where they would be picked up. An incredible terror. And the first counter-move was made by the women, who realized that many people had no food. So, they went into the streets, bringing their ollas, their big cooking pots, to cook and feed people in the streets. It is now understood that this was one of the first moments of resistance. This was possible because the police, with their patriarchal biases, did not see women with children as an immediate danger. So the women were able to communicate with each other and connect people. 

The second example was in 2000, with the piqueteras movement in Argentina, during the big economic crisis the country went through at the time. The banks were closed, there was no money, and the people went into in the streets. And there too the women came out, bringing the big ollas communas and began cooking. To me that was more than symbolic. This was a concrete example of a collective organization of social reproduction, and the collective reproduction of a struggle. Not only everyday life, the struggle itself needs to be reproduced. Historically we have seen it over and over, for example during the big strikes that lasted months in the U.S. The first response has always been the breakdown of “privacy,” the breakdown of the walls that separate people in capitalism. People begin to share when they understand their survival depends on their relations with others. When people’s lives are threatened they organize their lives in common. A powerful example is here, now, in Athens, where we are having this conversation. It is Prosfygika, a community of four hundred people from different countries, some refugees, who for sixteen years have been organizing communally, giving themselves the structures needed for social reproduction and the practice of a direct democracy. They are now threatened with displacement, but I hope the social movements will not allow this to happen.

G. R.: For you, commoning is a mode of production and also social reproduction.

S. F.: Yes, production and social reproduction, commoning brings these together. That is important because capitalism has organized social reproduction in a totally privatized way. It is the most privatized area of capitalist life – the nuclear family is based on the idea/l and the defense of “privacy,” which has served to isolate us, separate us from each other, and force us to face our problems and crises alone.  

In earlier times, reproduction was communal. In some European cities (like Italy and Spain, for instance) one can still see, in the squares, the stone tubs where women used to go to wash their clothes collectively. Capitalism has realized the importance of social reproduction for people’s resistance to exploitation. So, it has concentrated people in the process of production and separated them in the process of social reproduction. But even this is no longer true. Now many are working alone even in waged work.

G. R.: A related question. In Caliban and the Witch, you note that the old Medieval commons in Europe and associated communal forms of agricultural land tenure offered some important advantages: they made growing food and social reproduction in general more varied and resilient and encouraged a democratic way of life. You also note that while not perfect, commoning also tended to benefit women by increasing their autonomy and sociability. You’ve just highlighted the importance of social reproduction. But how far are feminism and commoning intrinsically and not just contingently aligned? Is there a case for arguing that women and feminists today should support a politics of commoning?

S. F.: Absolutely. Not only should women support “commoning” – they do it. The struggle for commons today is led by women. Even the theorization about the importance of commons came first from feminist theorists like Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies.[note]Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism [1993], London: Zed Books, 2014; Vandana Shiva, Reclaiming the Commons : Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge and the Rights of Mother Earth, Santa Fe, NM : Synergetic Press, 2020 ; and Maria Mies, « No Commons without a Community, » Community Development Journal, vol. 49, No. 1, January 2014, pp. 106-117.[/note] Particularly in the Global South, it is women who are leading the struggle against the enclosures, organizing seed banks, fighting against de-forestation. Think of Wangari Mathai and other women planting thousands of trees in Kenya, or the women in the Amazon fighting to leave the petroleum in the ground.

This is because women are the ones who are paying the greatest price for land privatization and the destruction of the ecological environment. They are the one responsible for the reproduction of their families and know the cost of the poisoning of water by mining and petroleum drilling and the cost of logging and deforestation. They also know that there is no separation between the violence against the ecological environment and the violence against their bodies. Over and over, every time a petroleum company or mining company comes to town, women cannot go out safely into the streets, even during the day. Because the men, who usually come from other areas, work hard, get drunk and then feel entitled to abuse them.

It is important to add that the work of taking care of life – social reproduction – requires collaboration. Social reproduction is an extensive and complex activity, that shows the interdependence and interconnectedness of people. Life cannot be reproduced without extensive collaboration. Not just in terms of the material activities involved but also the affectivity and the continuous transmission of knowledge. All this makes coming together a necessity. This collaboration was practiced for centuries, before capitalism separated women, locking them away in the prisons of their homes. For example, until the sixteenth century, women never gave birth alone. Giving birth was always a communal affair. Women gathered together, giving advice, bringing food, counsel, affection. Today women are giving birth alone, in a hospital, with no familiar faces around them. 

 

G. R.: In Reenchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, you push back against the modernist bias against “enchantment” and argue for a deep affective solidarity with both people and more-than-human nature.[note]Silvia Federici, Reenchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Ithaca, NY: PM Press, 2018.[/note] I guess capitalist modernity has always invested its own favored myths and technologies with a form of enchantment - just think of the dreamworld that surrounds artificial intelligence and all its largely fraudulent promises. Given the dangerous techno-acceleration of contemporary life, is commoning for you also a needed vector of slowing down, of deceleration and re-grounding?

S. F.: Yes, we need to slow down our daily lives. Our life is losing its pleasure not only because we are obsessed with the questions of survival and often the fear of repression but because we are not present to our experiences. We know that much physical and emotional illness comes from the state of constant tension in which we live and the impoverishment of our lives, because of the speed at which we must move through a day, that does not allow us to be aware of our environment and our feelings and desires.

 

G. R.: So, for you enchantment and re-enchantment includes a kind of skepticism of capitalist technologies?

S. F.: Yes. I know the Internet is celebrated as a new common, but I am skeptical about digital commons. I use a computer and there are practices, like open source and Wikipedia that can connect us and expand our knowledge. But we are now locked in our homes, tied to our smartphones and computers, and don’t even know the persons living in the same building. Moreover, we should not look only at what can be done with these technologies. We should ask how they are produced. And if we do that, we see they are built on the destruction of much water and land. Computers and smartphones are ecological disasters. There is also a lot to be said about the quality of the connections these technologies provide. What kind of knowledge do we gain through them? What do we really learn through this apparent expansion of our connection with the world?  And, again, what is the real cost of it? How many people have been killed, how many communities have been destroyed to produce the minerals necessary to build computers? In Africa now they speak of “blood computers” as once they spoke of “blood diamonds.” So, to me, there is no enchantment there.  Commoning is not only deceleration but recuperation of our contact with the natural world and with others. Computers and smartphones produce very abstract relations, stripped of everything corporeal, lacking the real enchantment produced by being together, bodies and minds, with other people and by our relation with the natural world.

I wrote Beyond the Periphery of the Skin to show that we are not, as Leibniz put it, “monads without windows or doors.”[note]Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism, Ithaca, NY: PM Press, 2020.[/note] Our bodies are extensive, continuously constituted and reconstituted through our relationship to the natural world and other people. Our experience of the creative power of nature and our encounters with others is what I call enchantment.

Enchantment comes from awareness of the creativity of the world, which is magical. We think AI is a marvel, but I go around New York in the Spring and see all these purple flowers coming out of the brown dry, seemingly dead earth. All of a sudden you have this explosion of flowers and forms and beauty. Where have they come from? If that is not magic, what is magic? This is something that is still not understood. It is the same with the production of feelings. How to explain that, reading a poem, we can be moved to tears? How to explain that looking at another person, we can fall in love? If we are really these separate beings, these “monads” Leibniz speaks about, how would falling in love be possible? So, there is a creativity that is not acknowledged and is increasingly destroyed, so that it appears that machines are the only creative things.

 

G. R.: Yes, it makes a kind of tricky dilemma, how far commoners should involve themselves in the use of these digital technologies, given how destructive their material infrastructures are.

S. F.: It is difficult to avoid them, but at the same time we should develop alternative forms of communication and we should also be aware of the problems involved in their use. I am surprised, for example, by the popularity, also among the left, of Facebook. What is gained and what are the risks involved in the daily dishing out of dozens of micro personal and political news?

 

G. R.: What gives commoning the special political pertinence, efficacy and appeal it seems to have acquired in the 21st century? Do the dire socio-ecological challenges and naked climate imperialism that we face today somehow make commoning a more urgent social and political framework? Does commoning now emerge as a more effective practical response to business-as-usual than the traditional political forms and practices of the Left?

S. F.: I will try to reframe what I said earlier.  The interest in the commons is a response to the degree to which our most vital commons – the land, the seas, the forests, and even our daily water – are being destroyed, poisoned, taken out of the common domain, privatized. Our planet is facing desertification and we fear the day is coming when we can no longer breathe. These are crucial concerns. There is also a growing awareness that our lives are undergoing a process of privatization, that we need to recuperate our sense of solidarity with other people if we are to be able to build a different world. The “Commons,” then, in my understanding at least, stands both for the society to be fought for and for the social relations we need to develop to carry on this struggle.

 

G. R.: Let’s turn to that. Given the catastrophic turn late capitalist modernity has taken in the 21st century, it seems more urgent than ever to find pathways to disarm, power down and abolish business-as-usual. While the old party landscape of the Left is much weakened after the defeats of the 20th century, the need for a politics of solidarity persists, as you’ve noted. And the notion of solidarity itself is being expanded to include the world of more-than-human life. Could you let us know how you view the project of what people call eco-socialism? What for you is the relation between eco-socialism and commoning?

S. F.: Socialism historically has been a statist model. It has recognized workers’ rights and invested in social reproduction. But it has been a form of state capitalism. Adding “ecological” does not change that.

 

G. R.: Some people try to think about the commons as a transitional form (I have probably done this), but maybe eco-socialism is the transitional form that moves toward the generalization of commoning. Maybe that is needed because how can we just leap out of the state and the nation-state? They exist and are powerful, maybe it will take a long process of learning and growing powerful from below, as maybe Marx imagined, to finally get rid of the state.

S. F.: Yes, eco-socialism can be a transitional form, but what we have seen so far is that center-Left governments have not been able to improve our living conditions. They have made deals with corporations that devastate the environment and in the end have led to a backlash that has brough the Right back to power.

 

G. R.: Given that, as you note, Marx and others have seen commoning as a kind of “primitive communism,” would you agree that the commons and commoning are a kind of placeholder for a project of communism that was historically blocked?

S. F.: The question is how to define communism. I prefer commoning because communism historically has been associated with the state form, and despite what Marx has told us and the example of the Paris Commune, how a communist society would be organized has never been clarified. For instance, I cannot imagine that we can have a democratic, self-governing, non-exploitative society unless there is a major transformation in the organization of the territory. If self-government has any meaning, we must have smaller territorial units. This is one reason why the example of the Zapatistas is so important. Because it showed the capacity of how self-government can operate in a small territory.

G. R.: But the tensions remain…

S. F.: Yes, the tensions remain, because they are surrounded by wolves.

G. R.: And because it was not possible in this context to make a revolutionary challenge to the Mexican state. That’s also a lesson for us to wrestle with.

S. F.: Yes, the construction of commons must come with a counter-hegemonic program aiming to dismantle the armed power of the state and subvert the present international division of labor that is built on the turning of the Global South into a sacrifice zone. NAFTA has destroyed the livelihood of millions of Mexicans, it has destroyed the milpa, the small family farm, dumping genetically modified corn on the Mexican market. The present division of labor is in itself a form of war. 

 

G. R.: Let’s shift now to the threats of the current social and political conjuncture. Looking at all the aspects of the current poly/crisis, from planetary heating and species extinction to resurgent fascism and the corruption of democracy and on to war, disruptive technologies and the new climate imperialism, what for you looks like the most direct threat today? Where should our main energy and focus go and how to prioritize among these threats?

S. F.: Well, our first task must be to mobilize to put an end to war and genocide and to fight against the sense of disempowerment that so many people now feel. On one side, we face the destructive power of capitalism, which needs to appropriate more lands and to displace and kill more and more people, in order to reproduce itself. On the other hand, capitalism has destroyed so much creative energy in people and our sense of connectedness with others that we suffer now from an internalized desperation. The fact that what is happening in Gaza and Lebanon is there for all to see and yet it continues is very demoralizing. There are demonstrations, but the bombing and the butchery continue.  However, we cannot despair, we should see, instead, what processes can strengthen our refusal to capitulate and our struggle for self-determination. How we conceive of change at home directly affects our capacity to develop an internationalist perspective.

I walk the streets of Athens and the streets of New York and every few hundred meters I see a homeless person looking half dead sleeping on the streets like a pile of trash. People go by, pay no attention. They have become used to accepting the deaths of their fellow beings. This is why we do not see a mass revolt against what is happening in Gaza. This is how we can have a genocide, not hidden in concentration camps, as in Nazi Germany, but openly unfolding under our eyes. Commoning is recuperating our sense of solidarity with others.

 

G. R.: Do we need a process of strategic collective thinking, an assembly or other process dedicated to strategic thinking and priorities?

S. F.: Yes. I saw this happening in the anti-globalization movement. That was a moment when people came together from different movements and countries. There was an internationalism and a sense that change could take place. I remember Prague, Seattle and Quebec – these were demonstrations that brought people together and were preceded by days of meetings in which different perspectives and proposals on how to bring about change were confronted. Transnational organizations were formed like the “50 Years Is Enough” network for global economic justice, that organized against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Then came the attacks on the Twin Towers and later the election of [U.S. president Barack] Obama, and the movement dissipated.

The anti-globalization movement made us understand what was happening internationally. It led to a massive education about what globalization meant. People began to talk about the return of primitive accumulation. We knew about Africa, about the Philippines. I think some of that has been lost. But there are now new possibilities, despite the horror, because the masks are falling. We are experiencing a moment of truth, despite the lies of the media.  The “Humanitarian militarism” that allowed the United Nations and NATO to support the bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq is gone. Now imperialism asserts its right to conquest without any cover. Gaza and Lebanon are happening under everybody’s eyes. And in the US the incredible police violence now displayed against immigrants and those who help them, is mobilizing people. But, yes, we need a broader vision, a “collective strategic thinking.”

 

G. R.: You are speaking about the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis and other cities, operating in masks and unmarked cars, kidnapping and deporting immigrants and shooting citizen observers. Citizens there mobilized to protect their terrorized neighbors. They built a network of observers to follow and video ICE agents and organized mutual aid to deliver food and groceries to immigrants who had become afraid to leave their homes.

S. F.: Yes. ICE is actually drawing people out into the streets in a way we have not seen in a long time. Minneapolis has been amazing. Everybody with the whistles, actually being able to surround ICE agents and sometimes prevent people from being arrested. This has been impressive.

 

G. R.: Do you think that some of what had been achieved by the anti-globalization movement survives now through the new attempts to re-establish some kind of International? I’m thinking of the Progressive International, associated with Yanis Varoufakis and others, or the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research around Vijay Prashad. Do you follow or see promise in any of that?

S. F.: Vijay Prashad is a statist. If I understand it correctly, his position sees an alternative in the power of the BRICS, China above all. But the BRICS fully support the international capitalist system.  I have learned from my sisters in Argentina that when China signs a deal with a state or company in the country, they make sure first it is in full compliance with the dictates of the IMF. As for Varoufakis, he was in the Greek government when, in July 2015, it ignored the results of the referendum it had called and accepted the harsh austerity measures the European Central Bank and the IMF had demanded.

G. R.: For you, are all attempts to revive the model of the International doomed to be statist projects?

S. F.: No, on the contrary. The anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and 2000s was not statist. But Prashad is a statist. I heard him in Paris, talking to students from Bolivia and Brazil. The student from Bolivia was critical of Evo Morales for making alliances with lithium companies. Prashad criticized him, saying the problem with the left is that they don’t want to dirty their hands...

G. R.: I think he identifies very much with the radical Third Worldism of the late 1960s and 1970s. The old Havana Tricontinental…

S. F.: Yes, with the progressive Third World bourgeoisie that was supposed to be revolutionary – but this has always been a myth. They have all made deals with foreign companies and governments, even when it has meant turning against their own people.  For instance, the attempt made by Thomas Sankara to create a cartel of debtor nations, capable of refusing collectively the debt imposed on them by the IMF, never materialized. Third world nations preferred bilateral agreements and Sankara was assassinated. Even Lula [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, currently the president of Brazil] has been recently criticized by indigenous communities for allowing the state oil company to drill at the mouth of the Amazon River, and for other deals with foreign companies that threaten ancestral territories and lead to deforestation.

 

G. R.: All the postcolonial Third World countries were put in the neoliberal debtors’ prison. So, you don’t look for anything from that direction?

S. F.: I don’t. I don’t see a country that is capable of providing an alternative. I don’t even think most Third World countries have achieved a true post-colonial state. As you said, most are under the control of the IMF, yearly transferring a great amount of wealth the people in their countries have produced to international capital in the name of the debt crisis. Today countries in Africa and beyond spend more in interest payment on the foreign debt than for investment in education, healthcare and other basic necessities combined. It is a hemorrhage of local resources that should go to the people. That’s colonialism, there is nothing post-colonial about it.

 

G. R.: This brings us back to those tensions we noted. We are in the grip of states and nation-states, which we need to get beyond. But do we try to defend the remnants of liberal democracy and international law that are now under attack, or should commoners refuse all of that and let them go?

S. F.: Of course, we defend them, while exposing their fundamentally repressive function and hypocrisy, pushing them to comply with their stated purpose.  

We have to push the state to expand our entitlements. But one thing is pushing them from outside, and another is being in there. It’s one thing to maintain your outsider-ness, and another to be an insider. Because when you push from outside you always know where you are going. If you become part of it, you don’t know any longer – and the next thing you are shooting down people.

We also must be aware that international law is and has from the start been a fig leaf. At the end of World War II, the United Nations adopted a charter that committed international law to defend the sovereignty of nations, but when the U.S. attacked Vietnam the charter was forgotten. To allow the U.S. and NATO to intervene militarily in Yugoslavia the UN changed the charter and introduced the principle that war is legitimate when waged in defense of human rights. So, they bend international law according to the needs of the dominant capitalist nations, beginning with the U.S., which has veto power. 

So, we must denounce their violations of the law they have themselves established, all the time aware of its duplicity. The denunciations are purely for educational purposes, as many people want to believe in these institutions and delegate to them the task of fighting against injustice.

 

This interview took place in Athens, Greece, on 12 May 2026. It was edited for clarity.