Who cares for the carers? Patriarchal contradictions and the reinvention of the global economy

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At the height of the global Covid-19 pandemic, health workers and women’s rights service providers worldwide experienced severe depletion and mortality. Feminist political economy scholarship has framed this paradox in relation to the intensification of a longstanding ‘crisis of social reproduction’ – a contradiction endogenous to capitalist global economy. Recent analyses, however, have yet to adequately theorise this neoliberal contradiction in relation to changing forms of state involvement to manage social reproductive crises for the preservation of power, and for the continuation of capital accumulation across different contexts especially in the Global South. This article draws on the pandemic experiences of paid carers in the Philippines from 2020 to 2022 to show how social reproductive crises in the country are structurally rooted in state-level mitigation strategies in the Global North. Moreover, their experiences highlight how the state reconfigures economic, cultural and security boundaries to compel the elasticity of social reproduction via increasingly globalised authoritarian forms of crisis management. Making visible how the unfolding of social reproductive crises manifest in uneven, differentiated and interrelated ways is central to understanding the crisis-driven, patriarchal re-invention of the global economy.