Social Reproduction, Gender, and Racism

What is it about?

Recent years have seen countless struggles in the realm of social reproduction, including cleaners' strikes, teachers' strikes or transnational women's/feminist strikes. This article outlines the potential of social reproduction theory for analysing capitalist societies and, in particular, their social relations of gender and race. We discuss how systems of exploitation and oppression work together and cannot be understood in isolation. Against reductive feminist or anti-racist theories, we show how questions of gender and the organisation of life-sustaining work must be central to analyses of racism. The article includes a brief overview of the origins of this Marxist-(feminist) tradition, before delving into the social reproduction of racial relations throughout history and today, with an excursus into the German context from which we write.

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Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash