Social reproduction and pandemic neoliberalism: Planetary crises and the reorganisation of life, work and death

Mezzadri, Alessandra

doi:10.1177/13505084221074042

Cited by 49 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 86 publications

(112 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Early research confirms that the strain on employment and social reproduction has rapidly worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic (Mezzadri, 2020, 2022; Stevano et al, 2021). The aim of the present project was to examine the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the GPN’s disruption on the lives of Pakistan’s women homeworkers, when their work and incomes came to an abrupt halt, putting pressure on their social reproduction responsibilities.…”

Section: Context and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The gendered geographies of dispossession and social reproduction: Homeworkers in the Global South during the COVID-19 pandemic

Zulfiqar

2022

Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed global capitalism’s fault lines and the deep vulnerabilities built into its functionings. This article investigates how Pakistan’s informally employed women homeworkers, who labor at the bottom of global production networks (GPNs), fared during the first year of the pandemic. It empirically demonstrates how the GPN’s disruption wiped out the limited livelihoods of women homeworkers, which significantly jeopardized the social reproduction of their households, devastating entire communities. Through all of this, women homeworkers’ agency was evident in the everyday practices of social reproduction. The pandemic also revealed a collective solidarity that had community and extended family dimensions. The struggles and solidarities should be viewed as agentic acts of survival, against the economic and socio-political conditions of dispossession that come out of laboring in the Global South, as informal workers.

show abstract

Section: Context and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The gendered geographies of dispossession and social reproduction: Homeworkers in the Global South during the COVID-19 pandemic

Zulfiqar

2022

Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus, wealthy countries shut their borders, hoarded protective equipment, lung respirators and, eventually, vaccines (Paiva and Miguel, 2022). Further, they offered economic support and recovery packages to established corporations while lockdowns impacted individuals disproportionately, allowing some to work comfortably from their homes whilst frontline staff and other so-called "essential workers" were incessantly placed at risk (Mezzadri, 2022). Pandemic policies, then, have neither relied on nor promoted solidarity as anything but a cover for measures that are based on and exacerbate long-standing trends that quantify the value of human beings on the basis of their ability to generate profit-the opposite of solidarity in difference.…”

Section: Abstract Solidarity Difference Critical Diversity Alternativ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This special issue explores how solidarity in difference can be organized as a mutual relation that is based on participation on equal footing, fostering bonds of heterogeneity beyond conceptualizations of solidarity that depend on homogeneity. In this editorial and the five articles comprising this special issue, not only are the challenges to such an endeavor explored, but also the achievements in the present and emerging imaginaries of organizing solidarity beyond an exploitative understanding of difference. The perspectives this special issue brings together include re-centering the Eurocentric concepts of organizing and solidarity, solidarity in research, solidarity as affective practice as well as the political and socio-economic relations that frame them. In addition to promoting an understanding of subjectivity shaped by power relations embedded in multiple social experiences, the articles in this special issue elaborate on solidarity in difference rather than a benevolent solidarity with difference and contribute, accordingly, to an understanding of organizing solidarity that starts from principles of radical interdependence, mutual recognition, and universal participation. Without neglecting the pitfalls and obstacles to organizing solidarity, this special issue hopefully sparks new debates on and informs new practices of solidarity in difference as there cannot be one single way to achieve this.

show abstract

“…Pandemic conditions also revealed the vital role in social reproduction, in Tithi Bhattacharya's (2020) words, of the "life-making activities" of women. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic should be understood, as Alessandra Mezzadri (2022) puts it, as a systemic crisis of social reproduction-a crisis of capitalist life.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Roots of Social Reproduction Theory in Marx and Engels: A Total Analysis of Society and Life

Yaman¹

2022

M&S

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The social reproduction theory aims to construct a total analysis of the production of things and the production and reproduction of people. Therefore, it broadens social production by including the care and reproduction work-by womenrather than just seeing it as capital accumulation/commodity production and reproduction of capital. Social reproduction theory is a materialist theory of (social) life and has its roots in Marxism. Historical materialist premises provide both a materialist explanation of social reproduction and women's role in it and a ground for the struggle with capitalism and patriarchy. In this paper, I will argue that the materialist conception of history and methodology that Marx and Engels developed in The German Ideology establishes the ground for social reproduction theory. For this, I will show that, first, their consideration of human-beings as the product of their own labor, second, their evaluation of the production and reproduction of the human being as one of the three moments of history, and third, their thinking of human relations in a broader sense-Verkehr-are significant contributions to social reproduction theory. I will also argue that social reproduction theory makes an essential contribution to rebuilding the Marxist conception of totality based on a materialist conception of history and materialist dialectics to encompass the entire life and society, by expanding the concept of labor, putting the production and reproduction of life at its center, and including reproduction work that is overwhelmingly performed by women.

show abstract

Social reproduction and pandemic neoliberalism: Planetary crises and the reorganisation of life, work and death

Cited by 49 publications

References 86 publications

The gendered geographies of dispossession and social reproduction: Homeworkers in the Global South during the COVID-19 pandemic

The gendered geographies of dispossession and social reproduction: Homeworkers in the Global South during the COVID-19 pandemic

Organizing solidarity in difference: Challenges, achievements, and emerging imaginaries

Roots of Social Reproduction Theory in Marx and Engels: A Total Analysis of Society and Life

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About