Feminism

Neoliberalism enforces family responsibility with a cruel logic: a couple who can’t afford rent without both their incomes are a couple who stick together. A young adult who can’t afford college without student loans is a child who remains bound to her parent. Lack of public spending on public goods forces poor and working-class people into economic dependence on their relatives. Meanwhile, for the rich, the private family is reinforced as a main conduit for wealth transmission.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022, as well as both national and international policies to deal with the impact of the war, have surely influenced the spaces and networks of social reproduction, both in Ukraine and in refuge. The destruction and resulting displacement, neoliberal austerity, unprecedented border regulations, and refugee policies, have all led to a reconfiguration of social reproduction in Ukrainian society.

“Changes in public opinion have not yet brought changes to Republican-dominated state legislatures, not surprising when we consider their lop-sided gerrymandered character. Yet Republicans are now on notice, even in very, very red states.”

Capitalists and Marxists both have long studied how capitalism imposes a time-work discipline on waged workers. And some Marxists—most famously perhaps Henri Lefebvre— have suggested that time structures social life more generally. In what follows, I think about this question from the more specific perspective of social reproductive labor time. That is, what can be said about the temporalities of life-making in capitalist societies? How might an analytic focus on time and temporalities help us better understand how capitalism concretely conditions the work of life-making? And how might social reproductive labor time, despite being conditioned by capitalist productive relations, contradict and be deployed to resist capitalism?

“Riots, boycotts and looting in the face of famines are part of the genealogy of the labour movement and of the feminism that we must put at the service of inspiring struggles against present-day famines.”

TWENTIETH-CENTURY PRE-ROE America was a scary world for women. Pregnancy and childbirth were destiny.

“No cultural revolution, no return to the sources or ethnic, religious or national authenticity, claimed by the groups that demand them, can legitimize the persistence, imbued with idealization, of so-called traditional or ancestral values, which involve serious discrimination and inequality.”

The Bolshevik diplomat and Marxist feminist thinker Alexandra Kollontai, whose pioneering writings explored the prospects for women’s emancipation under socialism, was born on 31 March 1872.

From its beginings in the 1800s, modern socialism has embraced equality and liberation for women. The socialist movement has made a major contribution to political, cultural, and intellectual changes challenging women’s second-class status. For many women, joining a socialist movement opened the road to developing their talents, achieving social influence, and contributing to social change.

“We must stay in solidarity with Chinese women who risk their safety and their lives. Support for a new wave of feminist struggles on the call of the progressive forces in the countries around China is necessary.”