Social reproduction and politics: Overcoming the separation

Abstract

From Tahrir Square and Puerta del Sol to Zuccotti Park and Taksim Square, the protest camps of 2011–2013 were a physical manifestation of a wide range of political objectives, including the extinguishment of autocratic regimes, the end of capitalism, and the abolishment of student loan debts. Yet their public re-creation, day after day, revealed a world of activity that is indispensable to the daily re-making of life itself but that is typically consigned to the backstage of political life. While the encampments are today remembered mostly for their evident failures, they remain significant for showing, in the most public way, that no politics is possible without that vital labour. In this material sense, they represented an important step toward the development and scaling up of modes of organizing that refuse to separate social reproduction from politics.

Racial Capitalism, Political Reproduction, and the Commons: Insights from Migrant Solidarity Politics in Glasgow

“…Indeed, across my interviews with people with migrant and refugee background, empowerment was often linked to ideas such as collective self‐care, healing, community, or capacity building; all of them aspects that point to different dimensions of reproductive labour and forms of commoning. They evidence the claim that “if we cannot reproduce ourselves and each other, we cannot produce the conditions of possibility for emancipation” (Jeffries 2018:589). Yet, critical of the term “empowerment”, Delyse argued that we should better speak about “re‐empowerment”, since people's journeys to Britain and the trajectories of struggle behind their mobilities were the clearest evidence of people's actual power.…”

“…Consequently, migrant activism often adopted a strong focus on service provision, adopting case‐working humanitarian dynamics covering such absence in a very critical conjuncture (Fieldwork Diary). At stake here is the way feminist scholars have signalled the “double character of social reproduction” within capitalist societies, and how it is inscribed in a dialectical relation where domination and refusal are indivisible (Jeffries 2018). This leads to a situation where migrant reproductive work was at the same time filling the institutional gap and building the means for community survival (Katz 2008).…”

The caring city? A critical reflection on Barcelona’s municipal experiments in care and the commons

“…While the feminist analysis of social reproduction in the 1980s focused on unpaid domestic work, recent interest has shifted focus to include both waged and unwaged daily activities of social reproduction (Bakker, 2007). Feminist scholars and activists argue that care should be central to an analysis of society and economy, but that it is also important to recognise social reproduction as the foundation for the anti-capitalist struggle (Jeffries, 2018). Activism against manifestations of the crisis of care can be seen around the world.…”

Situating class in workplace and community environmentalism: Working-class environmentalism and deindustrialisation in Porto Marghera, Venice

“…Different approaches to reproductive work have been elaborated recently (e.g. Bhattacharya, 2018; Ferguson, 2019; Gonzalez & Neton, 2013; Jeffries, 2018; Mezzadri, 2020). The relationship between reproductive workers and capital, as understood here, is indirect because it is mediated by the waged household member – as in housework – or by the state – as in the provision of non-commodified welfare services.…”