From Nigeria to Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, and the United States, women are the guardians of the land and communal wealth. In this book, Silvia Federici offers a detailed history of the commons from a feminist perspective, within the framework of an analysis of the transformations of the global economy in recent decades. She studies the effect that neoliberal policies have on the conditions of reproduction of people's lives, and especially on women's. Faced with new forms of capitalist accumulation and new enclosures, they are resisting violent attacks, and at the same time, creating infrastructures of collective reproduction that question the separation between public and private.

Federici does not adopt a nostalgic or idealized perspective in this attempt to map experiences of the commons. There are no isolated, happy groups. There is a search for organizational power, non-capitalist ways of life: "the possibility of recovering the power to collectively decide our destiny on this earth." In times of catastrophe, war, and pandemic, this book is intended as a spell for the disenchantment of the world.