Neoliberalization, social reproduction and the limits to labour in Jamaica

Abstract

Since the 1980s the Jamaican state has systematically withdrawn from investments geared towards enhancing the social and psychological welfare of its citizens, shifting the responsibility and cost for the education, health care and socialization of dependent members of the society to households and communities. This shift in responsibility for social reproduction disproportionately and negatively affected women, who have traditionally assumed primary responsibility for this necessary component of capitalist systems. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Jamaicans, primarily women, successfully rendered a spatial fix to the crisis by stretching the space and scale of their everyday means of existence beyond the nation's territorial boundaries. However, as this paper demonstrates, Jamaica is approaching the limits of its population's ability to reproduce the social structures and relations needed for social stability. This situation, that I describe as the 'limit to labour' is increasingly manifested in declining levels of social cohesion and heightened levels of violence in at all levels of Jamaican society. Although crisis has been a defining feature of social reproduction in Jamaica throughout its history, the emerging social crisis should be distinguished in its severity because it has begun to erode the social institutions and norms upon which Jamaica's social order has historically rested. It is the economic costs of this emerging limit to labour that ultimately pose the greatest threat to the sustainability of current neoliberalization processes.

Shifting conceptualizations of ethical consumption: Cause-related marketing in India and the USA

“…Her work is mirrored in the ideas of other feminist geographers who argue for an approach to globalization that is simultaneously global and intimate (rather than either global or intimate). They call for an examination of how global processes play out on and are practiced by individual bodies in particular places (e.g., Mullings, 2009;Nagar et al, 2002;Pratt and Rosner, 2006).…”

Criminal dons and extralegal security privatization in downtown Kingston, Jamaica

“…Kingston's deeply embedded socioeconomic inequalities have been exacerbated by neoliberal policies over the decades since the first structural adjustment programs were implemented in 1977, with continual and massive cuts to public spending on services and infrastructure in health, education and housing (LeFranc, 1994; Mullings, 2009). Informal sector employment increased as formal, specifically public sector employment contracted sharply, while the labour force participation rate, in particular of women, also dropped (Gordon et al ., 1997).…”

“…Mullings (2009) also analyzes the spatial implications of structural adjustment, tracing the connections between ‘the processes of neoliberalization taking place in the Jamaican economy, the spatial transformations in social reproduction and the rising levels of social disorder since the 1980s’. She argues that the crisis in social reproduction produced by the neoliberal retreat of the state in the 1980s and 1990s was alleviated by two spatial practices.…”

“…The second is ‘gang welfare’, in which investment in the basic elements of social reproduction is narrowed down to the scale of the don‐led community. Disorder and violence are amongst the ‘social repercussions of the increasing number of children being left behind without adequate supervision and care, and the replacement of state welfare with gang‐based ones’ (Mullings, 2009: 185).…”

“…While researchers such as Mullings (2009) have associated the steady increase in violent crime in Jamaica with structural adjustment and increasing inequality, it is more often explained through reference to the particular features of its political system. Downtown Kingston is divided by violence‐inflected party‐political fissures, often referred to as ‘political tribalism’.…”