How do child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality affect our lives under capitalism?

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression. Ιn this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation. Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.

London book launch on 10 November 2017, in the context of the Historical Materialism 14th London Conference, SOAS (9-12 Nov 2017). Panel with Angela Dimitrakaki, Hester Eisenstein, Colin Barker, Tithi Bhattacharya, Chair: Sara Farris.

 

CONTENTS

Foreword – Lise Vogel
1. Introduction: Producing and Socially Reproducing Capital – Tithi Bhattacharya
2. Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism – Nancy Fraser
3. Children, Childhood and Capitalism: a Social Reproduction Perspective – Susan Ferguson
4. Body Politics: The Social Reproduction of Sexualities – Alan Sears
5. Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory – David McNally
6. Without Reserves – Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman
7. Pensions and Social Reproduction – Serap Saritas Oran
8. Mostly Work, Little Play: Social Reproduction, Migration and Paid Domestic Work in Montreal – Carmen Teeple Hopkinƒs