the financial crisis, lecture 10: radical alternatives - feminist economics & the commons

The purpose of capitalism is self-expansion – capital begets capital – and it does so by monetizing social value and human labour.

This is a circuit of transformation.



Historical capitalism involved therefore the widespread commodification of processes – not merely exchange processes, but production processes, distribution processes, and investment processes – that had previously been conducted other than via a ‘market’.



Historical capitalism involved therefore the widespread commodification of processes – not merely exchange processes, but production processes, distribution processes, and investment processes – that had previously been conducted other than via a ‘market’.

And, in the course of seeking to accumulate more and more capital, capitalists have sought to commodify more and more of these social processes in all spheres of economic life.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 2011), 15.

the distinction of sectors between what I have called the ‘economy’ (or the market economy) and ‘capitalism’ does not seem to me to be anything new, but rather a constant in Europe since the Middle Ages.

There is another difference too: I would argue that a third sector should be added to the pre-industrial model – that the lowest stratum of the non-economy, the soil into which capitalism thrusts its roots but which it can never really penetrate.

This lowest layer remains an enormous one.

(Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century vol.II: The Wheels of Commerce, London: Collins, 1982, pp.229-30.).

Above it, comes the favoured terrain of the market economy, with its many horizontal communications between the different markets:

here a degree of automatic coordination usually links supply, demand and prices.


Then alongside, or rather above this layer, comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This – today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution – is the real home of capitalism.”


Going beyond Braudel’s original argument, household production can be considered as a case in point for such daily, unconscious routines. This then signals one trajectory for understanding aspects of social reproduction over time.

Indeed the politics of the everyday offers a current consideration of the separation of life purposes (such as working life, family life and sex life) and the social construction of such spaces.

It should be noted that, despite Braudel’s many valuable conceptual inroads, he does not apply gender to his analysis and does not explicitly consider the sexual division of labour in his trilogy.

However… his conceptualisations of material life can aid us in understanding the historical dynamics that underpin social reproduction.

Isabella Bakker (2007) ‘Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy’, New Political Economy 12:4.

Social Reproduction

Renewing life is a form of work, a kind of production, as fundamental to the perpetuation of society as the production of things.

Moreover, the social organization of that work, the set of social relationships through which people act to get it done, has varied widely and that variation has been central to the organization of gender relations and gender inequality.

From this point of view, societal reproduction includes not only the organization of production but the organization of social reproduction, and the perpetuation of gender as well as class relations.

Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, ’ Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,’ Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 15 (1989): 383

Conventional androcentric assumptions have not been critically examined in scientific and technological (S&T) culture; in the international, national and local mediating agencies that deliver S&T development; or in the communities that are the recipients of development.

However, because women are primary deliverers of community welfare on a daily basis to children, the sick and elderly, their households, and the larger social networks that maintain communities, the failure of development projects with respect to women is automatically felt by social groups who depend on their labour and social services.

Sandra Harding (1995) ‘Just add women and stir?’ Missing Links: Gender Equity in Science and Technology for Development.

Over the past thirty years, despite being essential to human life, neoliberal restructuring across the world has privatised, eroded and demolished our shared resources, and ushered in a ‘crisis of social reproduction.’

‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’, Soundings (Dec 2011), p.73.

As a concept social reproduction has been key to feminist social theory, because it challenges the usual distinctions that are made between productive and reproductive labour, or between the labour market and the home.

Feminist Fightback, Cuts are a Feminist Issue

Feminist Fightback, Cuts are a Feminist Issue

Labour in this sphere is often devalued and privatised, and is typically performed by women in their ‘double day’ or ‘second shift’, alongside paid wage labour.

But reproductive labour of this kind is just as central to capitalist accumulation as are other forms of labour, which means that struggles over its structure and distribution are fundamental to any understanding of issues of power and the relationships between labour and capital, as well as the potential for their transformation.

Gender and CaringNotes on Lynch and Lyons, ‘The Gendered Order of Caring’ in Ursula Barry (ed) Where Are

We Now? New Feminist Perspectives on Women in Contemporary Ireland (Dublin: Tasc, 2008)

There are deep gender inequalities in the doing of care and love work that operate to the advantage of men.

It is women’s unwaged labour and related domestic labour that frees men up to exercise control in the public sphere of politics, the economy and culture.

… there is a moral imperative on women to do care work that does not apply equally to men ; a highly gendered moral code impels women to do the greater part of primary caring, with most believing they have no choice in the matter.

The Irish government collects data on unpaid caring within households in

1. the Census

2. the Quarterly Household Survey (QNHS).

Within the Census, care is defined as being given by ‘persons aged 15yrs and over who provide regular unpaid help for a friend or family member with a long-term illness, health problem or disability (including problems due to age). P.167-8

The way care is defined in the Census excludes what constitutes a major category of care work, that of the ordinary, everyday care of children (unless the child has a recognised disability). Data on the care of children is compiled in the QNHS, however, and is also available through the European Community Household Panel (ECPH) survey. The focus in all three is on the hours of work involved in caring so we do not know the nature and scope of the caring involved. P.168

According to the [2006] Census there are less than 150,000 people, 5 per cent of the adult population in unpaid care work (mostly with adults) of whom 61 per cent are women and 39 per cent are men.

However, when we measure all types of caring activity, as has been done in the European Community household Panel (ECPH) we see that there are 1 million people who do caring who are not named in the census.

Even though it is no doubt unintentional, the failure to collect data on hours spent on child care work in the Census, means that child care, which is the major form of care work in Irish society, is no counted in terms of work hours.

… women are almost five times as likely to work long care hours than is the case for men.

Women spend much more time at care work than men, even when they are employed.

the financial crisis, lecture 10: radical alternatives - feminist economics & the commons

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