Crisis Of Social Reproduction Research Articles

Life After Plastic-Wrapped Bodies: COVID, the State and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Rural South Africa

ABSTRACT: This article explores the impact and implications of the South African state’s adoption of a tough militarized, bio-medical, and essentially neo-colonial approach to the management of the COVID pandemic in the rural former Bantustans (“native reserves”) of the country. It argues that, while the “war on COVID” produced new national legislation for all citizens, those living “with custom” in former homelands were said to possess cultural attributes that amplified the risk of infection and death. The paper focuses on how the state constructed measures for these spaces and managed social interaction and burials in the migrant heartlands. The paper suggests that families “living with custom” in the former homelands were treated differently from other citizens, existing in what Giorgio Agamben (2004) might call a “state of (greater) exception.” Villagers used the metaphor of the gate closing on them (ukuvala isango) to describe their experience and exclusion during lockdown as customary practices were banned, local health facilities closed for deep cleaning, and bodies sealed in plastic at state hospitals and mortuaries. The latter measures disturbed rural families much more than police violence or the closure of government clinics because it presented a serious threat to social reproduction. The paper provides evidence of how families fought to restore conviviality by exhuming the bodies wrapped in plastic to allow them to communicate with kin and ancestors. It also shows how, after lockdown, vaccination was often treated as a family matter not an individual choice, and how families moved quickly to fix the spiritual insecurities wrought by COVID. The paper concludes with a harrowing account of the new epidemic of hunger and malnutrition that is stalking these landscapes as conviviality is not enough to secure survival. The paper highlights the limits of narrow bio-medical and individual rights-based approaches in dealing with health, livelihoods, and well-being in communities devastated by COVID in rural southern Africa.

New entrant farming policy as predatory inclusion: (Re)production of the farm through generational renewal policy programs in Scotland

AbstractNew entrant policy, literature, and research offers an important angle for exploring where dominant agrarianism is reproduced and contested. As new entrants seek access to land, finance, and expertise, their credibility is filtered through a cultural and policy environment that favors some farming models over others. Thus, seemingly apolitical policy tools geared at getting new people into farming may carry implicit norms of who these individuals should be, how they should farm, and what their values should entail. A normative gaze of farming often masks the financial, cultural, labor relation, and land tenure dimensions that are the underlying drivers of agrarian change. This paper applies social reproduction theory to explore a diversity of social labor processes that new entrant farmers practice to arrive at the point of agricultural production. Interviews with new entrant and successor farmers in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) are presented first, followed by an analysis of new entrant policy instruments over the last two decades in Scotland. We find that new entrant policy fails to engage with a crisis of social reproduction in the food system because of a commitment to agrarian ideals of the self-sufficient and entrepreneurial farmer. By inviting newcomers into a dynamic of increasing precarious and uncompensated labor, very often by way of family relations, new entrant policy may act as a form of “predatory inclusion.” We argue that to be successful in reproducing the agricultural sector, new entrant farmer policy must be first a policy at attending to relations in the social sphere. Recognizing and supporting the diversified strategies farmers take on to assemble land for production would not only drive more just policy, but set the conditions for a more adaptive food system.

Lived experiences of utilities‐based indebtedness in Greece: Tracing the afterlives of austerity

AbstractDuring the past decade, Greece has been a hotbed of crisis and austerity. Unsurprisingly, austerity and counter‐austerity politics captured academic and public attention. This paper seeks to contribute to discussions on the articulations and legacies of austerity in Greece, and beyond, by emphasising questions of reproduction. The paper centres on utilities‐based indebtedness (UI) to explore the legacies of austerity. It understands UI and experiences with it as tethered to the enduring financial vulnerability and precarity that austerity politics inscribed in life and work during the early 2010s. Drawing on feminist writings, the paper mobilises social reproduction as a lens to explore the legacies of austerity in the encounters and entanglements between the monetary and the mundane. It draws on interviews with households conducted in 2019 in Thessaloniki to show how UI is a legacy of austerity and to trace austerity's afterlives in the visceral realties of living with UI. The paper argues that life with UI was a manifestation of a crisis in social reproduction, whereby households could not meet all their basic needs without falling into UI. It then zooms in on family and personal relations to trace the afterlives of austerity in the everyday. It explores the impact of UI and the uncertainties of reproduction on these relations and how decisions on debt and bill payments as well as reproductive practices became enmeshed in them. Overall, the paper demonstrates that, besides enduring landscapes of hardship, austerity left behind a heightened tension between the necessity for, and unsustainability of, relationships of solidarity as care, which became a key form of support because of austerity.

Continuity or change? Platforms and the hybridization of neoliberal institutional contexts

In recent years, a wide range of contributions have sought to conceptualize the emergent effects of platforms on contemporary capitalism(s). One strand of literature has emphasized the novelty of platforms, stressing their disruptive features and proclaiming the rise of a new era – platform/digital capitalism. Another strand has tended to position platforms within the longue durée of capitalist transformation, focusing on the continuities and historical recurrences of platform-led transformations. In contrast to both strands of literature, this paper argues that platforms should be understood as reworking existing, neoliberal institutions from within, engendering a process of hybridization. It builds on the French Régulation approach to trace platform-led transformations in the wage relation and social reproduction. It argues that platforms have consolidated their dominance in the post-2008 financial crisis period by, on the one hand, inserting themselves into neoliberal ‘innovations’ in labor markets, benefitting from a flexibilized, precaritized and casualized workforce and, on the other, by responding to the neoliberal crisis in social reproduction, and the decades-long privatization, marketization and individualization of reproductive tasks. It explores these dynamics in the context of Amsterdam and Berlin, tracing the hybridization of the neoliberal wage-labor nexus in the context of food delivery, cleaning and care platforms.

From the Welfare State to the Carceral State: Whither Social Reproduction?

Historical, feminist scholarship demonstrates that the welfare state underwrote the work of social reproduction, enabling procreation, socialization, sexuality, nurturance, and family maintenance. Carried out by families and other public and private social institutions, social reproduction includes making food, clothing, and shelter available for immediate consumption; ensuring the health and productivity of the current and future labor force; providing for people too old, too young, or too sick to care for themselves; and socializing family members. Historically, social reproduction includes both women's unpaid labor in the home and low-paid labor in the market and converts the wages of paid workers into the means of subsistence for the entire household. The economic crisis of the mid-1970s marked the end of the “golden age” of capitalism, and yielded neoliberal politics that sought to undo the redistributive elements of the New Deal and the Great Society. It called for a smaller state, greater reliance on market forces, and reduced expenditure on family maintenance. This article, a reprint of a 2017 book chapter, explores the crisis in social reproduction in the United States that surfaced with the rise of neoliberalism and the “carceral state.”

독일에서의 탈성장 운동과돌보는 남성성 논의

Today, the ‘degrowth movement’ is actively developing in Germany. This movement aims to overcome the ‘imperial mode of living’ based on unlimited growth and to shift to the ‘solidary mode of living’ which is socially and ecologically just. In order to reach this goal, it is essential above all to consider what has driven the capitalist growth society in the direction where it is now. This involves the acknowledgement that the emergence of the capitalist growth society is closely related to a specific masculine subjectifying mode. While the ideal of an autonomous masculine subject characterized by the orientation towards growth and achievement dominates, the importance of many activities concerning those in need of care and nature is ignored or hidden from view. It is not unrelated to the fact that in Germany today, a “transnational care extractivism” is spreading as care responsibilities are increasingly taken on by migrant women rather than being distributed between men and women. While the crisis of social reproduction caused by the care deficit is leading to a new hierarchical gender relationship at the global level, not the democratization of gender relations through male participation in care, the discussion of ‘caring masculinities’ tries to explore new alternative masculinities that can overcome the existing masculine subjectifying mode by including care in the construction of masculinities. Thus, in the context of the degrowth movement, the discussion of caring masculinities could be a starting point for enabling forms of social, ecological and gender reproduction that are completely different from the imperial mode of living by placing care for humans and nature at the center.

Replication and Reproduction: Crises in Psychology and Academic Labour

Discussions of the replication crisis in psychology require more substantive analysis of the crisis of academic labour and of social reproduction in the university. Both the replication crisis and the crisis of social reproduction in the university describe a failure in processes of reproducing something. The financial crisis of 2007–8 shortly preceded the emergence of the replication crisis, as well as exacerbated ongoing tendencies in the organisation and practices of university research (particularly the use of precarious contracts and the adjunctification of research). These provide two reasons to address these two named crises together. But many analyses of and responses to the replication crisis turn to research culture, often at the expense of adequate investigations of research labour. Today’s psychological sciences are made through multiple forms of labour: these include researchers, who range from senior principal investigators to sub-contracted, and exploited, research assistants; research participants/subjects, who include those providing labour for experiments via exploitative platforms including Amazon Mechanical Turk; and workers providing heterogeneous technical and administrative labour. Through understanding what is at stake for these multiple forms of labour, psychology might better analyse problems besetting psychology today, as well as develop different imaginaries and practices for how to address them.

Crisis of capitalist patriarchy: renegotiating masculinity and the heteronormative family in Kumbalangi Nights

ABSTRACT The Malayalam language film Kumbalangi Nights was released in 2019 and narrated the story of working-class people negotiating structures of capitalist patriarchy, encountered at moments of its crisis, which are also moments that indicate possibilities for social transformation. The trajectory of its narrative, the characters, and the tropes addressed in the film offer a new synthesis—both, of hegemonic masculinity and the kinship structure of the heteronormative family. Here, working-class lives are foregrounded in the contemporary crisis of patriarchy, accelerated by the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. Central to this crisis of masculinity and the bourgeois family form depicted in the film is the “crisis of care” that has been explained in recent scholarship on social reproduction. Nancy Fraser uses the expression to analyse the contradictory capitalist tendency to strain the conditions of social reproduction necessary for its own reproduction and stability. Through an analysis of the film, and the social realities of contemporary Kerala, this paper identifies the contours of this new synthesis. The film imagines a new mode of existence for subordinate masculinities, and challenges some of the ideologies of capitalist patriarchy, while continuing to valorise romantic love and its relationship to work.

Towards alternative platform futures in post-pandemic cities? A case study on platformization and changing socio-spatial relations in on-demand food delivery

Digital platforms have become an increasingly central concept for reflecting societal processes, but the historical and spatial embeddedness of platformization is often neglected as dystopian warnings and promises of efficiency take center stage. The Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified discussion and speculation regarding the future of digital platforms and changing everyday routines in (post-)pandemic cities. Drawing on the case study of Graz (Austria), this paper expands generalized speculation by a concrete exploration of what alternative platform futures in (post-)pandemic cities might hold. The underlying aims are to identify case-specific socio-spatial dynamics with respect to the platformization of on-demand food delivery in Graz and to explore in what ways these dynamics were influenced by the pandemic.The article contextualizes the development of food delivery platforms in Europe, taking into consideration long-term enabling conditions such as neoliberal restructuring, financialization and the crisis of social reproduction, but also the boom of delivery platforms during the ‘lockdowns’ related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The case study draws on qualitative interviews with company officials, delivery workers, union representatives and restaurant owners to investigate the platforms' disruptive and unequal effects. Through this storying of the development of the platform economy for food deliveries in Graz from various perspectives in the pandemic city of the year 2020, the study challenges the narrative of a capital-driven and pervasive platformization. At the same time, the findings point out limitations of the local alternative platform model and contribute to the critical discourse on urban platforms.

Dead Ends and Blind Spots in the European Semester: The Epistemological Foundation of the Crisis in Social Reproduction.

This article provides new perspectives on the persistent hierarchy between ‘social’ and ‘economic’ goals in European Union's (EU) economic governance. We operationalize insights from feminist economics and political economy to analyse the agenda‐setting documents of the European Semester – the Annual Growth Surveys (AGS) – showing how the much‐debated integration of social goals into the European Semester is fundamentally constrained by mainstream economic epistemologies. These epistemologies misrepresent interrelationships between the productive economy and the reproductive labour needed to maintain it. Using interpretive policy analysis, we show how multiple concepts and measurements used to conceptualize policy goals and impacts within the AGSs, coalesce to systematically misrepresent reproductive labour as a ‘social’ activity, an irrelevance, or a cost, rather than a macroeconomic input. This restricts the possibilities of enhancing the social dimension of the European Semester, in ways conspicuously ignored by the existing literature, which are of heightened salience in the wake of Covid‐19.

Back to Basics with Labor-Power

Ted Striphas recently called for a return to the “problem of culture” within cultural studies. This is a political as much as a methodological provocation: “culture” became an object of analysis among mid-twentieth century scholars in dialogue with Marxist accounts of ongoing political crises. Taking a cue from this past, this essay rethinks culture in relation to the ongoing crisis in social reproduction via Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). Within some Marxist feminist currents, “social reproduction” refers to the reproduction of labor-power, Marx’s term for the capacity to work sold on the market in exchange for wages. Marxist feminists have theorized such matters at length via their analyses of the practices undergirding the reproduction of labor-power. SRT is not unfamiliar to cultural studies scholars, but those engaged with it tend to explore the representation of socially reproductive practices within culture rather than the ways culture itself contributes to labor-power’s reproduction. This is unsurprising. Historically, the field has discussed labor-power in terms of its circulation rather than its reproduction, detailing culture’s role in reproducing social systems. Drawing upon Michael Denning’s “labor theory of culture,” recent work in SRT, and Marx, I argue that culture functions in a socially reproductive capacity within the logic of capitalism. In doing so, it casts cultural struggle as a form of social reproduction struggle at the intersection of labor-power’s reproduction and that of the society that requires it. This essay constructs a systematic account of culture’s socially reproductive before using it to consider its historical expression in the current moment.

The crisis of social reproduction and 'Made-in-China' feminism

Crises of care and social reproduction have led to new debates and social movements around the world, but there has been little scholarly scrutiny in the global North on these issues as they are unfolding in China. Facing rapid population ageing and historically low birth rates, the Chinese government believes the country is suffering from a demographic crisis. Yet, the so-called population question is fundamentally a political one: who is bearing the brunt of biologically and socially reproducing the Chinese labour force who have fuelled the Chinese economy in the last four decades? As this essay unpacks, the country's long-existing urban-rural divide and the unchecked patriarchal-capitalist mode of accumulation have produced uneven consequences among different social groups, intersectionally defined by class, gender and urban/rural citizenship, and thus have exacerbated existing inequalities. Rural migrants and the urban poor, mostly women, have become domestic servants for urban middle-class families, at the cost of their own well-being and of their families and communities. Across social classes, Chinese women are making their voices heard and taking actions to protest against systemic appropriation and exploitation of their care and reproductive labour, in what is a hostile political environment. Ranging from organised protests to individuals' spontaneous complaints, 'made-in-China' feminism can shed new light on future feminist movements and solidarity building with feminists in the international community.

Trade, health and social reproduction in a COVID world

ABSTRACT Building on feminist International Political Economy scholarship, my paper traces the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the trade and health nexus, taking into account the global productive economy and the realm of social reproduction. I argue that COVID-19 has exacerbated the socio-economic inequalities, including the crisis in social reproduction, that characterised the trade and health nexus prior to COVID-19. However, no ideational shift has taken place during the pandemic whereby trade policy communities conceive of trade as a tool for equitable and sustainable forms of social reproduction, as advocated by feminists, environmentalists, and others. This leaves the exploitative nature of global trade relations and their ambivalent relationship with health and social reproduction intact. I conclude that building back better from COVID-19 requires an ambitious redrawing of global trade relations and discuss a number of reforms that could be applied by global trade institutions today.

Right to health, right to live: domestic workers facing the COVID-19 crisis in Latin America

ABSTRACT This article presents the results from a survey on the impact of COVID-19 on domestic workers in 14 Latin American countries. The data reveal a massive employment and social crisis, with about half of respondents having been dismissed or suspended while they had no access to social protection. We further demonstrate the harms on the health and safety of domestic workers, with evidence of pre-existing health conditions making them more vulnerable, lack of adequate protection at the workplace, and an increase in violations of rights. We argue that this situation of extreme vulnerability creates a crisis of social reproduction, making more acute the underlying contradiction between the necessity for domestic workers’ labour to sustain the economy and their precarious working and living conditions. This situation has been worsened by COVID-19 to the point that not only jobs, but also lives are being threatened, and with it, the provision of reproductive labour across Latin America.

Coronavirus: notes on crisis, borders and the future of neoliberalism

Abstract. Every crisis is a moment both of the intensification of borders (social, economic, geographical …) and of their potential breaking down – a moment of the reaffirmation of a certain social model and of its questioning. Borders have acquired centrality in the imaginary of the management of the pandemic. They are a constitutive part of the pandemic condition, endowed with a new symbolic and cognitive force. The new importance of borders in times of a pandemic also shows the complexity of the concept of border itself and accelerates the trends underway regarding borders' transformations. The pandemic draws a new strategic border space and accentuates the complexity of the relationship between sovereignty and territory inherent to the process of globalization. The massive interventions by states to shore up the economy and support businesses and workers have the goal of stabilizing the economy, without any intention of entering into a logic of redistribution and expansion of public services. These massive bailouts may simply be the prelude to a more virulent phase, where a crisis of legitimacy and a crisis of social reproduction and of the global forms of governance of neoliberalism are interwoven. The contradiction between the free movement of capital and goods and the limited movement of labor that characterizes globalization can be further intensified, while the rhetoric of borders and control takes on new relevance.

An Ode to Altruism: How Indian Courts Value Unpaid Domestic Work

Unpaid domestic and care work (UDCW) have long captured the imagination of feminist theorists. Marxist, socialist and autonomous feminists have debated domestic labor and wages for housework in the 1970s, chronicled the international sexual division of labour and housewifisation in the global south in the 1980s and studied global care chains with the advent of globalization in the 1990s. Poststructuralist feminists have rendered visible ‘life’s work’ while liberal feminists have grappled with workplace equality and the intractable messiness of the ‘work-life balance.’ Indian feminist economists have meanwhile recast the debates on women’s falling labour force participation rates in terms of a crisis in social reproduction while also demonstrating the need for better measurement of the high levels of both paid and unpaid work (including economic activity and domestic duties) that women are in fact doing. The original focus on UDCW performed at home has now received a new lease of life with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 5.4. In these discussions on social reproduction however, little attention has been paid to the role of the law in the recognition and redistribution of UDCW. Discussions of the law, where evident, are confined to the recognition of UDCW within family law through a community property regime at divorce. I examine the recognition of UDCW at another point of rupture, namely the death of a housewife through the lens of the laws of personal injury (or tort law). In particular, I focus on the amount of compensation awarded to the dependents of housewives in around 200 cases under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 between 1968 and 2019, tracing the growing recognition of women’s UDCW by Indian appellate courts culminating in an influential Supreme Court decision in 2010 which has been widely followed by Indian High Courts, underlining judicial willingness to recognise the range of UDCW performed by women within the home. I ask how the unpaid labour of housewives, homeworkers and mothers is recognised by tort law? What is the architecture of private law that allows for this? How can we understand the role of tort law in particular, in redistributing resources between men and women and amongst women themselves? Does tort law hold the potential for effecting egalitarian outcomes and if so, under what circumstances? Ultimately, can legal analysis inform the larger debate amongst feminists on social reproduction or does the law simply mirror, even produce iniquitous social realities? Engaging in the minutiae of how damages are valued and monetised I argue, also has normative and methodological pay-offs for feminists. Quantification goes to the very heart of feminist debates on UDCW, making visible the feasibility of recognition by the state, a task that the legal system already manages to do in the realm of tort law. Examining the archive of the law thus throws light on key concepts that feminists and social theorists have long worked with in attempting to have women’s UDCW recognized, to examine how recognition is made possible and at what cost.

Care Robots, Crises of Capitalism, and the Limits of Human Caring

“Care robots” offer technological solutions to increasing needs for care just as economic imperatives increasingly regulate the care sector. Ethical critiques of this technology cannot succeed without situating themselves within the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. What, however, constitutes “care” and its status as a potential critical resource, and how might care robots damage this potential? Although robots might threaten norms of care, I argue that they are by no means necessarily damaging. Critiques of care robots must not entrench exclusionary images of the ideal carer. Instead, critical reflection on their use should trouble dominant paradigms of care.

Covid-19 and feminism in the Global South: Challenges, initiatives and dilemmas

The article addresses the gendered implications of Covid-19 in the Global South by paying attention to the intersectional pre-existing inequalities that have given rise to specific risks and vulnerabilities. It explores various aspects of the pandemic-induced ‘crisis of social reproduction’ that affects women as the main caregivers as well as addressing the drastic increase of various forms of gender-based violence. Both, in addition to growing poverty and severely limited access to resources and health services, are particularly devastating in marginalized and vulnerable communities in the Global South. The article looks at specific regions and countries to illustrate wider challenges faced by LGBTQ populations, ethnic minorities, domestic workers, migrants and sex workers. Against the background of these gendered intersectional challenges, the article then moves to discuss feminist initiatives and mobilizations to deal with the crisis in specific local contexts as well as nationally, regionally and transnationally. It concludes by highlighting a number of visions, tensions and dilemmas faced by feminists in the Global South that will need to be taken into consideration in terms of transnational feminist solidarities.

Counterplanning in the Crisis of Social Reproduction

In this interview Silvia Federici discusses the prospects for counterplanning from below in the current crisis of social reproduction. The organization of care and social reproduction by capital, in alliance with governmental and non-governmental organizations, has created massive structural suffering and devalued vital social activities from which capital extracts value for which it pays nothing. As this crisis of social reproduction has developed internationally and taken on increasingly racialized forms, new and different forms of struggle over social reproduction have arisen. Starting from the Wages for Housework campaign and her 1975 call for “Counter-planning from the Kitchen,” Federici refines her thinking about the struggle over social reproduction and the reproductive commons today. She sketches the shifting grounds of the present crisis, and stresses what can be learned from current struggles over social reproduction in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, to organize and value social reproduction differently.

Mothers behaving badly: chaotic hedonism and the crisis of neoliberal social reproduction

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers ‘behaving badly’ in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom’s Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence; and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork; the continual if contested role of women as ‘foundation parents’; and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularized the idea of the ‘new lad’; and this article suggests that the new lad’s counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the ‘lad mom’. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB – by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how – and by considering the MBB’s limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasizing the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and ‘parents behaving politically’.