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Repression and Resistance on the Terrain of Social Reproduction: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Openings

Repression and Resistance on the Terrain of Social Reproduction: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Openings

While the idea of social reproduction is most often associated with Marxist feminist literature from the 1970s, considerable work was done around that concept in a wide range of rather disparate bodies of work throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to Marxist feminism, social reproduction became a main focus for Italian autonomists, anti-Stalinist socialist humanists in post-Stalinist Eastern Europe, “anti-humanist” critics of orthodox Marxism such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, in studies on slavery, race, and urban development, and by postcolonial and Third-World feminists.

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Social Reproduction, Neoliberal Crisis, and the Problem with Work: A Conversation with Kathi Weeks

Social Reproduction, Neoliberal Crisis, and the Problem with Work: A Conversation with Kathi Weeks

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Even some feminist discourses have fallen into this contradiction and reproduced the work ethic and family values discourse, neglecting the fact that both domestic and waged work dominate our life and that both must be fought. However, although it is more or less clear what is meant by the refusal of wage labor, what it means to refuse housework is considerably more difficult to understand. Would it mean abandoning people and our obligations to care? I believe it is rather a question of understanding how to reorganize care and to redistribute it in a way that does not completely occupy our lives.

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Domestic Workers’ Rights, the Politics of Social Reproduction, and New Models of Labor Organizing

Domestic Workers’ Rights, the Politics of Social Reproduction, and New Models of Labor Organizing

In the 1970s, a powerful movement for domestic workers’ rights emerged on the national political stage. Through their organizing, African American household workers argued for the inclusion of housework and social reproduction in the larger politics of wage labor and made a case for the centrality of this occupation to capitalism.

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Production, Reproduction, and the Problem of Home for Work

Production, Reproduction, and the Problem of Home for Work

The ideological split between home and work in the industrialized West has obscured the ways that each realm shapes the other. It also shaped social policy toward “women in developing countries.” Contemporary political debate maintains an opposition between “mother” and “worker” as well as “work” and “care.” This division reflects a pervasive intellectual and political impasse pervading the organization of knowledge – our scholarship – as well as legal rules, government regulations, and union organizing. 

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The Role of the Housewife in Social Production (1940)

The Role of the Housewife in Social Production (1940)

The labor of a woman, who cooks for her husband, who is making tires in the Firestone plant in Southgate, California, is essentially as much a part of the production of automobile tires as the cooks and waitresses in the cafes where Firestone workers eat. And all the wives of all the Firestone workers, by the necessary social labor they perform in the home, have a part in the production of Firestone Tires, and their labor is as inseparably knit into those tires as is the labor of their husbands.

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The Bronx Slave Market (1950)

The Bronx Slave Market (1950)

I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day. That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. 

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Le operaie della casa (1977)

Le operaie della casa (1977)

That the state is the boss of women and the controller-guarantor of the reproduction of labor-power can be seen directly in the fact that: a) it is the state that controls the family, the birth rate, immigration, emigration etc. through the promulgation of pertinent laws; b) it is always the state that intervenes to stand in for women every time the refusal of housework deepens. Indeed, the struggle of women against housework is the fundamental factor behind certain transformations in the state.

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Insurgent Practice and the Black Panther Party: an Interview with Joshua Bloom

Insurgent Practice and the Black Panther Party: an Interview with Joshua Bloom

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The Black Panther Party was able to sustain disruption because the character of the practices that they had developed, that cultural technology of armed self-defense coupled with this anti-imperialism. It meant that the more authorities repressed them, the more they were able to gather broad allies, who otherwise wouldn’t have supported the party in the first place, but also had their own reasons to really feel threatened by the status quo.

Beyond Parliamentarism: Historical Bases and Prospects for Corbynism

Beyond Parliamentarism: Historical Bases and Prospects for Corbynism

Very few anticipated anything approaching Corbyn’s victory at the beginning of the race, not least Corbyn himself. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to identify the confluence of tendencies that led to this perfect storm in the summer of 2015 – and an analysis of the history of the Labour Party can illuminate situations and strategies for the British left in the coming years.