Beyond the Coronavirus: Understanding Crises of Social Reproduction

Abstract

From a feminist political economy perspective, the unfolding of the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritises profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritises life-making or social reproduction. This article argues for a more systematic understanding of crises of social reproduction under capitalism, stressing the difference between such crises for labour and those for capital. The coronavirus crisis represents an extraordinary example of a crisis of social reproduction for capital, but this article examines crises of social reproduction for capital and labour that arise from the more ordinary workings of capitalism. The focus is on unfolding such crises in the Global South, using the case of India to illustrate the usefulness of such an analysis. KEYWORDS: social reproduction; gender; labour; political economy; India

The impact of COVID-19 on labor migration and the roles of small-scale farming in the pandemic in Vietnam

“…While farming is a safety net for some of our respondents' survival, others who do not have sufficient land and/or labor are forced into labor migration. Thus, in the context of poverty-driven migration, the pandemic exacerbated vulnerable people's lives, and women bore the brunt of the consequences (Kabeer et al, 2021;Rao, 2021). The analysis of economic systems and livelihoods must therefore include reproduction and childcare as essential activities, as crises deeply affect these aspects of labor migration (Cohen, 2018;Mezzadri, 2019).…”

“…On the other hand, rural poor households' dependency on remittances in the global South is partly an outcome of neoliberal capitalism that marginalizes small-scale farmers in rural areas (Kandikuppa and Gupta, 2021). This pandemic has thus revealed the contradiction of global economic development and the fragility of current social and economic systems that exacerbate inequality based on gender, class, and race (Khanal and Todorova, 2021;Rao, 2021).…”

Feminist global political economies of work and social reproduction

“…The unravelling of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has forcefully remarked the relevance of social reproduction as a key analytical lens through which we can interrogate and analyse contemporary capitalist processes, their features, outcomes and crises (Mezzadri, 2020a;Prugl, 2020;Rao, 2021;Stevano et al, 2021). It is becoming a compelling prism in IPE studies, providing a fruitful avenue to gender the discipline whilst producing novel theoretical insights.…”

“…By the same token, the rampant processes of labour informalisation sustained throughout the neoliberal period have neutralised many states' effort to provide rescue packages to the most vulnerable communities (Ossome, 2020). Seen from the Global South, the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a crisis of social reproduction for both capital and labour (Rao, 2021).…”

The afterlife of industrial work: Urban-to-rural labour transitions from the factory to the informal economy

“…In doing so, the analysis is anchored to understandings of work and labour which are not confined to the narrowly defined social perimeters of labour processes or individual spaces of work but that stress the intersections between productive and reproductive dynamics and domains and embeddedness in different physical and social geographies. In this sense, we also propose a novel approach to the study of informal(ized) employment across varied spaces of work, informed by feminist political economy debates on labour and social reproduction (Mezzadri 2019(Mezzadri , 2020Naidu and Ossome 2016;Rao 2021) and attentive to different local socioeconomic ecologies. In fact, across the life cycle, the livelihood opportunities available to the rural working poor undergo a 'double movement' of sorts (Banerjee 2010), and employability may be coterminous with that movement.…”