Seeing with the Pandemic

Social Reproduction in the Spotlight

Bibliographic Data

ID4957020
AuthorsLeslie Salzinger (corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume47
Issue3
Pages492-502
Publication date2021-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0046-3663 • E-ISSN: 2153-3873
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/fem.2021.0038
OpenAlexW3136149568
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited7

492 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. (c) 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Leslie Salzinger Seeing with the Pandemic: Social Reproduction in the Spotlight The COVID-19 pandemic has inverted capitalism’s normal visibilities, bringing what were negative spaces to the fore and throwing the work of social reproduction into stark relief. Decades of neoliberal governance have scrapped state support for care and increased the pressures on families where every adult is working for pay. In response, reproductive labor has been commodified and racialized at scale, and those who care for and nourish others, whether unwaged or waged, have been left holding the bag for society as a whole. The virus’s incursion has thrown a harsh light on this non-system. From the New York Times to Twitter to grocery lines, both pundits and private citizens have begun to take note of the labor it takes to make and sustain human life as well as the unfreedom of those who perform that labor. But even as appreciation washes through, reproductive care workers are increasingly stepping out to say that garlands are not enough.1 This emergent public reckoning comes on the heels of an extended scholarly rethinking of capitalism, as a growing group of scholars argue that capitalism is always already embedded in gendered and racialized 1. Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, “Calling Me a Hero Only Makes You Feel Better,” The Atlantic, April 18, 2020. Leslie Salzinger 493 relations of extraction and expropriation.2 Especially generative has been Karl Marx’s remarkable historical account of capitalism’s origins in a process he dubbed “primitive accumulation.”3 Intent on forestalling moralistic justifications for the system’s origins, Marx argued that elites used a combination of land expropriation and violent vagrancy policing to produce both the starter capital and the “free labor” needed to bring that capital to life. Since Rosa Luxemburg, scholars have expanded that account to challenge the more abstract and teleological formulations contained in other parts of Marx’s larger oeuvre.4 Rather than see primitive accumulation as focused exclusively on domestic processes and ownership relations , subsequent theorists have pointed to the transnational, racialized , colonial, and gendered processes that characterized its emergence, along with the persistence of these putatively time-limited processes throughout capitalism’s existence.5 Prompted by the deep inequities of neoliberalism, David Harvey has argued that the present, in fact, is best understood as a new episode of primitive accumulation, which he names “accumulation by dispossession.”6 These historical rereadings suggest that national ownership relations have never exhausted the range of power relations under capitalism and that the relationships between capital and other structures of power are historically contingent . Marx’s more elegant formulations notwithstanding, exploitation operated from the outset on a bed of racialized, colonial, and gendered 2. See especially Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed Books, 1986); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Social Text 34, no. 3 (September 2016): 27-50. 3. Karl Marx, “Primitive Accumulation” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol. 1 of 8 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1867; New York: Vintage, 1977). 4. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (1913; New York: Routledge, 2003). 5. For an illuminating reanalysis of primitive accumulation, see Robert Nichols , Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 6. David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (March 2007): 22-44. 494 Leslie Salzinger relations, which were themselves reconfigured, solidified, and sustained by those interactions. This distinct understanding of capitalism as a system throws new light on the present. I will argue here that constitutively gendered and racialized social reproduction is one arena where primitive accumulation continues to operate within capitalism as a fundamental structural element of the system itself. The production of people is an arena of vital unpaid, underpaid, and formally unrecognized work that makes all the rest possible. It

Capitalism · Commodification · Economics · Economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reproduction · Social reproduction · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Gender Studies · Law · Reproductive Health and Technologies

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