NANCY FRASER: A crisi of care? On the social contradictions of contemporary capitalism

does teamahma teams is Nancy phrase / - aunt / fast a crisis of care on the social contradictions of contemporary capitalism this is T margot UNS alle an egg Arvest VI my internal doggish proportional Vivian Liam then the anna liam fun on tuba Neiman care are those Arabs za gallant disorder Oh Mandarin they'll even for diesel on V / name zo nice Nora can mention on McNish nian Joaquin de Conqueror Alta niched owners augur care Laden from Vacaville Ovid craft of mark Gansu Shuang Afghans gesellschaft mean missin dick Austin Davis amazing era reproduction externally Zeeland and uh Nora want avocados personal in under Leonin underslung vanish Malaysian Baba technolog in these are genomic within a greater portion of in a feminist issue which left a fortune like yet seen in this could hear and be forced dark eras of reproductions or gaffers Agra India Madonna this team artists fav I bleached water onward yet his auger informed the metallic I'd at work ice guards who not really sure a sense 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media care problematic as Cleese enough to dynamic in being vetted in capitalist must be fast if they'll indeed the forgotten guns could fall down here and we are also looking for clock by bhima's it is inform our Tripoli kind of discuss yonder like an untrue skip above avail Messiah to come finish Australasia Alice discutir Nancy Fraser aside Mountain who not nor anoint see Henry al Lewis loop professor of philosophy and politics under New School for Social Research in New York City Ziva and is sodium entirely unfortunate ion electron as gust for children or professor when Teddy Darwin Tania Vienna vocational iong ago the center for gender research under University of Oslo University of Cambridge de o fo baleen you go to only was it a tranquil a mind university damn saddam on uncollected manga in police vitae hindi outside and they only hesitate yena ordered em institute for OCR for chemin frankfurt mine I'm visiting shaft colleague in Berlin ordered him EVM in veal what is Lee sensation of melanin Nancy Fraser is stirred my toes and they stand zips and fits a president in the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Nancy Fraser go-gurt sue Ellen's favorite owner poof elitist not for one and embellish political telugu shot eolian mid I'm sure happened in a collision gesellschaft POV Matt Poisson Durham al Mac of habla media Anarchy no or garage ticket for the International effeminacy theory is his idea team and I know their product even rich Dixon on tight passing orthogonal in Dodge parking easier discussion with Judith Butler Drusilla Cornell on Shayla benebabe ligand they are not releasing in bondage heightened difference northern Ohio noises official photographer Finland twetos dev hnoms Wacom falaka sprite with sepia to buca di Bao Galactic I'd an intensive as an analyst on with F on Fraser it easier and gigging desert zone for an economy in azides on unfertile under laws IDEs that since visor and a feminist cash left at you later in for me to critique and England where's your deck literally orientation and in order not to let these of hog memories and all candor Smith axle Hornet photos and rhymes or come falafel in buca's own fat along Ora Anarchy know an apology sure philosopher sure controversy controversy Vernon who Merkley his name doc unofficially often are formed and also own even Nancy Fraser if one on Xia does he doesn't on the floor [Applause] [Music] thank you very very much for that very generous introduction it's a great pleasure to be here apologies for being unable to speak to you in German my German is really very poor unfortunately well we do here at least in the Anglophone world a great deal of talk today about the so called crisis of care that expression is often linked to phrases such as time poverty family work balance and social depletion what these expressions signify is the sense of that there are tremendous pressures coming from several directions at once that are currently squeezing a key set of social capacities these are the capacities available for birthing and raising children for caring for friends and family members for maintaining households and broader communities and for sustaining connections more generally historically this work of social reproduction as I will call it has been cast as women's work although men have always done some of it too it comprises both effective and material labor and is often performed without pay and yet it's indispensable to society no society that systematically undermines social reproduction can endure for long today however a new form of capitalist society is doing just that the result as I'll try to explain is a major crisis not simply of care but of social reproduction in this broader sense now I understand this crisis as one strand of a general crisis which also encompasses other strands economic ecological and political all of which intersect and exacerbate one another the social reproduction strand forms an important dimension of this general crisis but it's often neglected in current discussions which focus chiefly on the economic or the ecological strands this is a kind of critical separatism which is deeply problematic the social strand is so central to the broader crisis that none of the others can be properly understood in abstraction from it however the converse is also true the crisis of social reproduction is not freestanding and cannot be grasped on its own how then should it be understood my claim is that what some called the crisis of care is best interpreted as a more or less acute expression of the social reproductive contradictions of financialized capitalism this formulation suggests two main ideas first that the present strains on care are not accidental but have deep systemic roots in the structure of our social order which I am characterizing here as financialized capitalism nevertheless second the present crisis of social reproduction indicates something rotten not only in capitalism's current financial eyes form but in capitalist society per se these are the theses I want to elaborate here and my claim to begin with that last point is that every form of capitalist society harbors a deep-seated social reproductive crisis tendency or contradiction on the one hand social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation yet on the other hand capitalism's orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies this social reproductive contradiction is a sorry this social reproductive contradiction lies at the root I am claiming of our present so-called crisis of care although it is inherent in capitalism as such this contradiction assumes a different and distinctive guys in every historically specific form of capitalist society whether we are talking about the liberal competitive capitalism of the 19th century of the state-managed Social Democratic monopoly capitalism of the post-war era or the financialized neoliberal globalizing capitalism of the present the care deficits we experienced today are the form this contradiction takes in that third most recent phase of capitalist development to develop this thesis I'm going to first propose an account of this social contradiction of capitalism as such without reference to any specific historical form then second I'm going to sketch an account of the unfolding of the contradiction in the two earlier phases of development that I just mentioned finally I'll propose a reading of today's care deficits as expressions of capitalism's social contradiction in its current financial eyes days so social contradictions of capitalism as such most analysts of contemporary crisis focus on contradictions internal to the capitalist economy at its heart they claim lies a built-in tendency to self destabilization which expresses itself periodically in economic crises this view is right I think as far as it goes but it fails to provide a full picture of capitalism's inherent crisis tendencies adopting an economists ik perspective it understands capitalism too narrow as an economic system simpliciter in contrast I'm going to assume an expanded understanding of capitalism encompassing both its official economy and the latter's non economic background conditions this sort of view will permit us to conceptualize and indeed to criticize capitalism full range of crisis tendencies including those centered on social reproduction now my argument is that capitalism's economic system depends on social reproductive activities external to it which form one of its background conditions of possibility the capitalist economy relies on you might say free rides on activities of provisioning caregiving and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds although it accords them no monetized value and treats them as if they were free variously called care effective labor or subjective ation this activity forms capitalism's human subjects sustaining them as embodied beings while also constituting them as social beings forming their habitus and the cultural ethos in which they move the work of birthing and socializing the young is central here as is caring for the old maintaining households building communities and sustaining the shared meanings that underpin social cooperation now in capitalist societies much though not all of this activity goes on outside the market in households in neighborhoods in civil society associations in informal networks and in public institutions such as schools and relatively little of it takes the form of wage labor non wage social reproductive activity is absolutely necessary to the exist of wage work however as well as to the accumulation of surplus value and the functioning of capitalism as such social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society from at least the industrial era however capitalist societies have separated the work of social reproduction from that of economic production associating the first with women and the second with men they have remunerated reproductive activities in the coin of love and virtue while compensating so-called productive work in that of money in this way capitalist societies created an institutional basis for new modern forms of women's subordination splitting off reproductive labor from the larger universe of human activities in which women's work previously held a recognized place these societies relegated it to a newly institutionalized domestic sphere where its social importance was obscured and in this new world where money became a primary medium of power the fact that it was unpaid sealed the matter those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages even as their work supplies a necessary precondition for wage labor in general then I'm suggesting that capitalist societies separate social reproduction from economic production associating the first with women and obscuring its importance and value paradoxically however these societies make their official economies dependent on the very same processes of social reproduction whose value they disavow this peculiar relation I do think it's quite peculiar of separation from dependence come disavowal is a built-in source of in stability on the one hand as I said capitalist economic production is not self-sustaining but relies on social reproduction on the other hand its drive to unlimited accumulation threatens to destabilize the very reproductive processes and capacities that capital and indeed the rest of us need the effect over time as we shall see can be to jeopardize the necessary social conditions of the capitalist economy well here in effect I have sketched a social contradiction inherent in the deep structure of capitalist society like the economic contradictions that Marxists have stressed this one two grounds a crisis tendency in this case however the contradiction is not located inside the capitalist economy but rather at the border that simultaneously separates and connects production and reproduction neither intra economic nor inter domestic it is a contradiction between those two constitutive elements of a capitalist society now often of course this contradiction is muted and the associate crisis tendencies remains obscure it becomes acute however when capitals drive to expand it accumulation becomes unmoored from its social basis and turns against them in that case the logic of economic production overrides that of social reproduction destabilizing the very processes on which capital depends compromising the social capacities both domestic and public that are needed to sustain accumulation over the long term destroying its own conditions of possibility capitals accumulation dynamic in this case effectively eats its own tail okay well this is the general social crisis tendency of capitalism as such however capitalist society does not exist as such but only in historically specific forms or regimes of accumulation in fact the capitalist organization of social reproduction has undergone some major historical shifts often as a result of political contestation especially in periods of crisis social actors struggle over the boundaries demarcating economy from society production from reproduction work from family and sometimes they succeed in redrawing those boundaries such boundaries struggles as I have called them are as central to capitalist societies as are the class struggles analyzed by Marx and the shifts they produce mark apical transformations if we adopt a perspective that foregrounds these ships we can distinguish at least three regimes of social reproduction Combe economic production in capitalism's history the first is the nineteenth-century regime of liberal competitive capitalism combining industrial exploitation in the european core with colonial expropriation in the periphery this regime tended to leave workers to reproduce themselves autonomously outside the circuits of monetized value as states looked on from the sidelines but it also created a new bourgeois imaginary of domesticity casting social reproduction as the province of women within the private family this regime elaborated the ideal of separate spheres even as it deprived most people of the conditions needed to realize that ideal the second regime is the state managed capitalism of the 20th century premise on large-scale industrial production and domestic consumerism in the core underpinned of course by ongoing colonial and postcolonial expropriation in the periphery this regime internalized so reproduction through state and corporate provision of social welfare modifying the Victorian ideal of separate spheres it promoted the seemingly more modern norm of the family wage even though once again relatively few families were permitted to achieve it the third regime is the globalizing financialized capitalism of the present era this regime has relocated manufacturing to low-wage regions recruited women massively into the paid workforce and promoted state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare externalizing care work onto families and communities it has simultaneously diminished their capacities to perform it the result amid rising inequality is a due alized organization of social reproduction commodified for those who can pay for it privatized for those who cannot all-glass glossed by the even more modern norm of the to earner family in each regime therefore the social reproduction conditions for capitalist production have assumed a different institutional form and embodied a different normative order first separate spheres then the family wage now the two earner family in each case to the social contradiction of capitalist society has assumed a different guise and found expression in a different set of crisis phenomena in each regime finally capitalism social contradiction has incited different forms of social struggle class struggles to be sure but also boundary struggles both of which were entwined not only with one another but also with still other struggles which aimed at emancipating women slaves and colonized peoples let's consider first the liberal competitive capitalism of the 19th century in this era the imperatives of production and reproduction appear to stand in direct contradiction to each other surely that was the case in the early manufacturing centers of the capitalist core where industrialist Dragoon women and children into factories and mines eager for their cheap labor and reputed facility paying them a pittance and working them long hours in famously notoriously unhealthy conditions these workers became icons of capital's disregard for the social relations and social capacities that underpinned its productivity the result was a crisis on two levels first a crisis of social reproduction among the poor and working classes whose capacities for sustenance and replenishment or stretched to the breaking point and second a moral panic among the middle classes who were scandalized by what they understood as the destruction of the family and the desexing of proletarian women so dire was this situation that even such astute critics as Marx and Engels mistook this early head-on conflict between economic production and social reproduction for the final word imagining that capitalism had entered its terminal crisis they believed that as it eviscerated the working-class family the system was also eradicating the basis of women's oppression but what actually happened was just the reverse overtime capitalist societies found resources for managing this contradiction in part by creating the family in its modern restricted form by inventing new intensified meanings of gender difference and by modernizing male domination the process began in the European core with protective legislation which aimed to stabilize social reproduction by limiting the exploitation of women and children in factory labor spearheaded by middle-class reformers this solution did a complex amalgam of different motives one aim famously characterized by Karl Polanyi was to defend society against economy a second was to allay anxiety over gender leveling but these motives were also entwined with something else an insistence on masculine authority over women and children especially within the family as a result the struggle to ensure the integrity of social reproduction became entangled with the defense of male domination the intended effect however was to soften the social contradiction in the capitalist core even as slavery and colonialism raised it to an extreme pitch in the periphery creating what Maria mise has called how housewife ization as the flipside of colonization liberal competitive capitalism elaborated new gender imaginary centered on separate spheres figuring woman as the angel in the home its proponents sought to create some stabilizing ballast for the volatility of the economy the cutthroat world of production was to be flanked by a haven in a heartless world as long as each side kept to its own designated sphere and served as the others complement the potential conflict between them would remain under wraps well that was the theory at least in reality this solution proved rather shaky protective legislation could not ensure Labor's reproduction when wages remain below the level needed to support a family nor did such arrangements satisfy workers agitating for higher wages and better conditions they formed trade unions went out on strike and joined labour and socialist parties riven by increasingly sharp broad-based class conflict capitalism's future seemed anything but assured separate spheres proved equally problematic poor racial and working-class women were in no position to satisfy Victorian ideals of domesticity if protective legislation mitigated their direct exploitation it provided no material support or compensation for lost wages nor were those middle-class women who could conform to Victorian ideals always content with their situation which combined material comfort and moral prestige with legal minority and institutionalized dependency for both groups the separate sphere solution came largely at women's expense but it also pitted them against one another as we saw in 19th century struggles over prostitution which align the philanthropic concerns of Victorian middle-class women against the material interests of their so-called fallen sisters a different dynamic unfolded in the periphery there as extractive colonialism ravaged subjugated populations neither separate spheres and/or social protection had any currency far from seeking to protect indigenous relations of social reproduction metropolitan powers actively promoted their destruction peasant trees were looted their communities were wrecked to supply the cheap food textiles mineral or and energy without which the exploitation of metropolitan industrial workers would not have been profitable in the Americas meanwhile enslaved women's reproductive capacities were instrumentalized to the profit calculations of planters who routinely tore apart slave families by selling off their members separately to different owners native children too were ripped from their communities conscripted into missionary schools and subjected to coercive disciplines of assimilation in both settings periphery and core feminist movements found themselves negotiating a political minefield rejecting culture and separate spheres while demanding the right to vote refuse sex owned property enter into contracts practice professions and control their own wages liberal feminists as we now call them appeared to valorize the masculine aspiration to autonomy over feminine ideals of nurture and in this point if not on much else their socialist feminist counterparts effectively agreed conceiving women's entry into wage labor as the royal road to emancipation they too preferred the male values associated with production to those associated with reproduction now these associations were ideological to be sure but behind them lay a deep intuition despite the new forms of domination it brought capitalism's erosion of traditional kinship relations contained an emancipatory moment caught in a double bind you might say many feminists found little comfort on either side of polanyi's double movement neither on the side of social protection with its attachment to male domination nor on the side of marketization which with its disregard of social reproduction able neither simply to reject nor embrace the liberal order they needed a third alternative which they called emancipation to the extent that feminists were able to credibly embody that term they exploded the dualistic Palani in figure of the double movement and replaced it in effect with what I would call a triple movement in this three-sided conflict scenario proponents of marketization and protection collided not only with one another but also with partisans of emancipation with feminists to be sure but also with socialists abolitionists and anti colonialists all of whom endeavored to play the to Palani enforces off against each other even as they also in he said clashed among themselves however promising in theory such a strategy was very hard to implement as long as efforts to protect society from economy were identified with the defense of gender hierarchy feminist opposition to male domination could easily be read as endorsing the economic forces that were ravishing working-class and peripheral communities these associations would prove surprisingly durable long after liberal competitive capitalism collapsed under the weight of its multiple contradictions in the throes of inter imperialist wars economic depressions and international financial chaos giving way as we know in the mid 20th century finally to a new regime that of state-managed capitalism emerging from the ashes of the Great Depression in the Second World War this regime diffused the contradiction between economic production and social reproduction in a different way namely by enlisting state power on the side of reproduction assuming some public responsibility for what was called social welfare the states of this era sought to counter the corrosive effects of social reproduction on social reproduction not only of exploitation but also of mass unemployment this aim was embraced by the Democratic welfare states of the capitalist corps and the newly independent developmental states of the periphery alike despite their vastly unequal capacities for realizing it once again the motives were mixed a stratum of enlightened elites had come to believe that capital's short term interest in squeezing out maximum profits needed to be subordinated to the longer term requirements for sustaining accumulation over time in their view productivity and profitability required what the fook old ian's would call a bio political cultivation of a healthy educated workforce with a stake in the system as opposed to a ragged revolutionary rabble like investment in healthcare schooling childcare old-age pensions supplemented by corporate provision was perceived as a necessity as an era it sorry in an era in which capitalist relations had penetrated social life to such an extent that the working classes no longer possessed the means to reproduce themselves on their own in this situation social reproduction became internalized brought within the officially managed domain of the capitalist order likewise economic reformers sought to ensure continuous growth by enabling workers in the capitalist core to do double duty as consumers accepting unionization which brought higher wages and public spender sector spending which created jobs these actors reinvented the household as a private space for the domestic consumption of mass-produced objects of daily use linking the assembly line with working-class familial consumerism on the one hand and with state supported reproduction on the other this so-called fordist model forged a novel synthesis of marketization and social protection projects you'll recall that Palani had considered inherently contradictory and antithetical but it was above all the working classes both women and men who spearheaded the struggle for public provision and they acted for reasons of their own for them the issue was full membership in society as Democratic citizens that is dignity rights respectability and material well-being all of which were understood to require a stable family life in embracing social democracy then the working classes were voting for family country and life world against factory system and machine unlike the protective legislation of the liberal regime the state capitalist settlement resulted from a class compromise and represented a real democratic advance but before we rush to proclaim a golden age we should register the constitutive exclusions that made those achievements possible the defense of social reproduction in the core was again entangled with neo imperialism fordist receives finance social entitlements in part by ongoing expropriation from the periphery including as in the US the periphery within the core which persisted in forms old and new even after decolonization meanwhile post-colonial states caught in the crosshairs of the Cold War directed the bulk of their resources which were already depleted by Imperial predation to large-scale development projects which often entailed expropriation of their own indigenous peoples social reproduction for the vast majority in the periphery remained external rural populations were left to fend for themselves and like its predecessor to the state-managed regime was entangled with racial hierarchy u.s. social insurance excluded domestic and agricultural workers thereby cutting off most African Americans from social entitlements and the racial division of reproductive labor begun during slavery assumed a new guise under Jim Crow as women of color found low-paid waged work raising the children and cleaning the homes of white families at the expense of their own nor was gender hierarchy absent from these arrangements as feminist voices were relatively muted throughout the process of their construction in a period running roughly from the 1930s through the 1950s when feminist movements did not enjoy much public visibility hardly anyone contested the view that working-class dignity required the family wage male Authority in the household and a robust sense gender difference as a result the broad tendency of state-managed capitalism in the countries of the core was to valorize the heteronormative male breadwinner female homemaker model of the gendered family in all these respects social democracy sacrificed emancipation to an alliance of social protection and marketization even as it also mitigated capitalism social contradiction for several decades but the state capitalist regime began unraveling first politically in the 1960s when the global New Left erupted to challenge its imperial gender and racial exclusions as well as its bureaucratic paternalism all in the name of emancipation and then economically in the 1970s when stagflation the productivity crisis and deflect declining profit rates in manufacturing galvanized efforts by this new band of guys who called themselves neoliberal z' efforts to unshackle marketization now what would be sacrificed were those two parties emancipation and marketization to join forces would be what social protection like the liberal regime before it the state-managed capitalist order dissolved in the course of a protracted crisis giving way to the financialized capitalism of the present era globalizing a neoliberal this new regime is promoting state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare while recruiting women massively into the paid workforce in other words it is externalizing care work on to families and communities while diminishing their capacities to perform it and the result as I said before is a new do alized organization of social reproduction commodified for those who can pay for it and privatized for those who cannot indeed as some in the second category provide care work and return for low wages for those in the fur meanwhile the one-two punch of feminist critique and deindustrialization has definitively stripped the family wage of all credibility that idea has given way today to today's more modern norm of the so-called 2 earner family the major driver of these developments and the defining feature of this regime is the new centrality of debt debt is the instrument by which global financial institutions pressure states to slash social spending enforce austerity and generally collude with investors in extracting value from defenseless populations it is largely through debt to that peasants in the global south are dispossessed by a new round of corporate land grabs aimed at cornering supplies of energy water arable land and so-called carbon offsets it is increasingly via debt as well that accumulation proceeds in the historic core as low wage precarious service work replaces unionized industrial labour wages fall below the socially necessary costs of reproduction in this so-called gig economy continued consumer spending requires expanded consumer debt which grows exponentially it is increasingly through debt in other words that capital now cannibalizes labour disciplines States transfers wealth from periphery to core and sucks value from households families communities and nature now the effect is to intensify capitalism's inherent contradiction between economic production and social reproduction whereas the previous regime empowered States to subordinate the short-term interests of private firms to the long term objective a sustained accumulation in part by stabilizing reproduction through public provision this regime authorizes finance capital to discipline states and publics in the immediate interests of private investors not least by requiring public disinvestment from social reproduction and whereas the previous regime allied marketization with social protection against emancipation this one generates an even more perverse configuration in which emancipation joins marketization to undermine social protection let me explain the new regime emerged from the fateful intersection of two sets of struggles one set pitted an ascending party of free marketeers bent on liberalizing and globalizing the capitalist economy against declining labor movements in the countries of the core they were of course once the most powerful base of support for social democracy but were put on the defensive if not only defeated now the other set of struggles pitted progressive new social movements opposed to hierarchies of gender sex race as race ethnicity and religion against populations seeking to defend established life worlds and privileges now threatened by the seeming cosmopolitanism of the new economy it was out of the collision of these two sets of struggles that there emerged a rather surprising result namely a progressive neoliberalism which celebrates diversity meritocracy and emancipation while dismantling social protections and re externalizing social reproduction the result is not only to abandon defenseless populations to capitals predations but also to redefine emancipation in market-friendly terms like cracking the glass ceiling and leaning in emancipatory movements participated in this process all of them including anti racism multiculturalism LGBTQ liberation and ecology spawned market-friendly neoliberal currents but the feminist trajectory proved especially fateful given capitalism's long-standing entanglement of gender with social reproduction like each of its predecessor regime's financial eyes capitalism institutionalizes the production reproduction division on a gendered basis unlike its predecessors however its dominant imaginary is liberal individualist and gender egalitarian women are considered the equals of men in every sphere deserving of equal opportunities to realize their talents including and perhaps especially in the sphere of production reproduction by contrast appears as a kind of backward residue an obstacle to advancement that must be slough off in one way or another and route to liberation now despite or perhaps because of its feminist aura this conception epitomizes the current form of capitalism's social contradiction which as I say assumes a new intensity as well as diminishing public provision and recruiting women into waged work financialized capitalism has reduced real wages thereby raising the number of hours of paid work per household needed to support a family and prompting a desperate scramble to transfer care work to others to fill the care gap the regime imports migrant workers from poorer to richer countries typically it is racialized and/or rural women from poor regions who take on reproductive and caring labour previously performed by more privileged women but to do this the migrants must transfer their own familial and communal responsibilities to other still poor caregivers who must in turn do the same and on and on in ever larger longer global care chains far from filling the care gap the net effect is to displace it from richer to poorer families from the global north to the global south to recent developments in the United States epitomizes the severity of the situation the first is the rising popularity of egg freezing normally a $10,000 procedure but now offered free by IT firms as a fringe benefit to highly qualified female employees eager to attract and retain these workers firms like Apple and Facebook provide them a strong incentive to postpone childbearing saying in effect wait until sorry wait and have your kids in your 40s your 50s even your 60s devote your high energy productive years to us the second emblematic US development is the proliferation of expensive high-tech mechanical pumps for expressing breast milk this is the fix of choice in a country with a high rate of female labor force participation no mandated paid maternity or parental leave and a love affair with technology this is a country to in which breastfeeding is de rigueur but has changed beyond all recognition it's no longer a matter of suckling a child at one's breast one breast feeds today by expressing one's milk mechanically and storing it for feeding by bottle later by one's nanny in a context of severe time poverty double cup hands-free pumps are considered the most desirable as they permit one to express milk from both breasts at once while driving to work on the freeway and they are real and reports of this given pressures like these is it any wonder that struggles over social reproduction have exploded over recent years northern feminists often describe their focus as the balance between family and work but struggles over social reproduction encompass much more including grassroots community movements for housing health care food security and unconditional basic income struggles for the rights of migrants domestic workers and public employees campaigns to unionize those who perform service work for in for-profit nursing homes hospitals childcare centers struggles for public services such as day care and elder care for a shorter work week four generous paid maternity and parental leave take it together these claims are tantamount to the demand for a massive reorganization of the relation between production and reproduction boundary struggles over social reproduction are as central to the present conjuncture as our class struggles over economic production they respond above all to a crisis of care that is rooted in the structural dynamics of financialized capitalism globalizing and propelled by debt this capitalism is systematically expropriating the capacities available for sustaining social connections proclaiming the new more modern ideal of the to earner family it recuperates movements for emancipation who join with proponents of marketization to oppose the partisans of social protection now turned increasingly resentful and chauvinistic if you are following the u.s. presidential election this is it Clinton versus Trump it's this exact squaring off what might emerge from this crisis capitalist society has reinvented itself several times in the course of its history especially in moments of general crisis when multiple contradictions political economic ecological and social reproductive intertwine and exacerbate one another boundary struggles have erupted at sites of capitalism's constitutive institutional division where economy meets polity where society meets nature where production meets reproduction at those boundaries social actors have mobilized to redraw the institutional map of capitalist society their efforts propelled the shift first from the liberal competitive capitalism of the 19th century to the state-managed capitalism of the 20th and then to the financialized capitalism of the present era historically to capitalism social contradiction has formed an important strand of the precipitating crisis as the boundary dividing social reproduction from economic production has emerged as a major site and central stake of social struggle in each case the gender order of capitalist society has been contested and the outcome has depended on alliances forge among the principal poles of a tripl movement marketization social protection emancipation those dynamics propelled the shift first from separate spheres to the family wage and then to the to earner family what follows for the current conjunction are the present contradictions of financialized capitalism severe enough to qualify as a general crisis and should we anticipate another major mutation of capitalist society will the current crisis galvanize struggles of sufficient breath and vision to transform the present regime might a new form of socialist feminism succeed in breaking up the mainstream movements love affair with marketization while forging a new alliance between emancipation and social protection and if so to what end how might the reproduction production division be reinvented today and what can replace the two earner family nothing I have said here serves directly to answer these questions but in laying the groundwork that permits us to pose them I've tried to shed some light on the current sure I've suggested specifically that the roots of today's crisis of care lie in capitalism's inherent social contradictions ornate oh we need the mic wait yesterday we had the same problem but it's not again this is the last paragraph it rousing conclusion I'll just yell it out maybe 10 seconds we're coming wait wait wait last lesson in there you are goodness okay this is really the last sentence so you have to so I've suggested that the roots of today's crisis of care lie in capitalism capitalism inherent social contradiction or rather in the acute form that contradiction assumes today and financialized capitalism now if that is right then this crisis will not be resolved by tinkering with social policy the path to his resolution can only go through deep structural transformation of this social order what is required above all is to overcome financialized capitalism's rapacious subjugation of reproduction to production but this time without sacrificing either emancipation or social protection this in turn requires reinventing the production reproduction decision and reimagining the gender order whether the result will be compatible with capitalism at all remains to be seen thank [Applause] an ounce of flavor thank you so very much we have a little present for you and then we have to shift quickly thank you all for being here for listening [Applause] you

Channel: DGS-Kongress 2016

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Length: 56min 55sec (3415 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2016