Permanent Reproductive Crisis: An Interview with Silvia Federici

by Marina Vishmidt, Mute Magazine, 7 March 2013

On the occasion of the publication of an anthology of her writing and the accession of a  Wages for Housework NY archive at Mayday Rooms in London, Marina Vishmidt interviewed Silvia Federici on her extensive contribution to feminist thought and recent work on debt activism (with contributions by Mute, Mayday Rooms and George Caffentzis)

‘We no go sit down’: CAFA and the Struggle Against Structurally Adjusted Education in Africa

by Ousseina Alidou, George Caffentzis & Silvia Federici, 2008

This paper is a short history of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA) since its founding in 1991 to the present. It describes CAFA documentation of the formation of an Africa-wide student movement against the structural adjustment of African universities. It also details some of CAFA’s campaigns in defence of student struggles against both the World Bank’s role in propagating the introduction of tuition fees and the cutting of housing and food subsidies to students and the repressive action of the African governments against protesting students. We argue that academic freedom also includes the right to be involved in the production of knowledge and hence to have access to the means of its production. To deny Africans such a right in this period in history is to condemn them to the fate of being the damned of the earth once more and to put the ability of Africans to manage their own resources in peril.

A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles against Structural Adjustment in African Universities

A Review by Refilwe Senatla and Fazel Khan

‘A Thousand Flowers’ is a project of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and is published by African World Press and edited by Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis and Ousseina Alidou.

The book is a collection of articles that chronicles the social struggles against Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) in African universities from the 1980’s into the 90’s. It deals with experiences that are central to the lived experience on many African campuses but which almost never appear in donor funded ‘research’.

Mutabaruka - Life And Debt

The debt crisis, Africa and the new enclosures

by Silvia Frederici, 1990, Libcom

In that brief moment the world seemed to stand still, waiting. There was utter silence. The men of Umuofia were merged into the mute backcloth of trees and giant creepers, waiting. The spell was broken by the head messenger. "Let me pass!" he ordered. "What do you want here?" "The white man whose power you know too well has ordered this meeting to stop."
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Hoisting the “Knowledge Bank” on Its Own Petard: The World Bank and the “Double Crisis” of African Universities

by George Caffentzis, Presented at the Faculty of Humanities Seminar, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, Feb. 16, 2010, Libcom

Struggle is like education and it just keeps going on.

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard, an't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon.