[Lead bloggers: Erin, Megan, Austin]
Cindi Katz’s second presentation continued to address a significant lacuna in Marx´s work; that of the unwaged labor of social reproduction, which she introduced in the first presentation. She has also called this the “hidden abode of capitalism” and as in the preceding presentation, considered the centrality of this unwaged, so-called non-productive sphere to the functioning of capitalism and called on us to think about its potential as a center for oppositional practice.
In this week’s presentation Katz discussed what she calls “crisis of social reproduction” to express the expulsion of more and more people from employment and conditions of work and survival made increasingly precarious in recent decades. Katz encouraged us to consider how this has affected the practices and promises of social reproduction. With global capitalism, laborers have been vacated from the traditional workplace on a mass scale. The disintegration of certain markets and sites of production in global capitalism produces insecurity and competition, in turn producing migration on a national and international scale. Migration, where workers are reproduced in one territory and then produce in another, enables uneven capitalist accumulation and development to occur. This process also cheapens migrant labor as the labor is reproduced elsewhere with less regulation.
This week, Katz again facilitated questions from the audience to guide the lecture. One question was on workplaces that are sites where social reproduction has been commodified. Restaurants, babysitting, transportation, and education are all sites that straddle production and reproduction, making resistance in those locations especially multivalent. An example given by an audience member was fast food workers striking for better pay, or thinking about what kind of food they would like to feed their community. Katz pointed to Dalla Costa and James´ critique of traditional Marxism which has always imagined social reproduction as contained in the home.
The “crises of social reproduction” Katz invokes also involve the idea of disposability. In the “spatial fix” of global capitalism, extensively theorized by David Harvey, whole populations are increasingly expelled from employment, thus devalued, and deemed disposable. Katz discussed how the production of disposable populations involves dispossession, including the imposition of food insecurity on communities that had previously achieved food sovereignty though subsistence farming, with the new condition of food insecurity introduces competition among laboring populations and labor migration on a vast scale.
Katz posed the critical questions: how are these processes of expelling and making populations disposable invisibilized? As such, we would like to extend this question as to how regimes of visibility and invisibility serve to further disempower and enclose expelled populations.
As these processes of dispossession and expulsion become greater than the industrial reserve labor, such processes cut across classes and populations (while, as Katz discussed, also producing and naturalizing difference to make alliances unimaginable). Katz considered how the widening of the precarious expelled populations introduces the technocratic need to “manage” these populations. State strategies of managing the expelled populations approximates realms of “slow death” and “necropolitics” written about by other social theorists such as Achille Mbembe. Katz addressed a number of techniques used to manage crises in social reproduction:
- Increased investment in prisons and carceral institutions — state money spent on policing and incarcerating expelled populations; involves the further militarization of public spaces, neighborhoods, schools, etc. and administration of social death
- Increased investment in the military — increased investment in the military in order to absorb excess populations and to secure borders
- Migration — strategy for imbalances in labor populations; Katz discussed the role of gang labor in migration and what it means when viable labor is not found in the new site
- Space-time expansion and excessive commutes — globalization has produced a “space-time expansion” in which the working day and week is extended; one way people managed to be employed is by making excessive commutes, which Katz discussed as taking more time on a certain kind of social reproduction.
- Working multiple contingent jobs — people manage to be employed in precarious conditions by working multiple contingent jobs; the cutting of benefits and the general movement of laborers from the formal wage economy to the informal economy decreases the social wage; the general shift to informal economies as jobs and wage labor becomes a less secure source of income.
- The dual spectrum of managing how children grow up as managing security within precarity — on one hand, the packing of resources into time (e.g. piano lessons, sports) with hopes of increasing life chances as life’s work value decreases; happens along a class spectrum; while on the other hand the carceral state’s criminalization of youth and children from expelled populations as “waste” thus prematurely dimming their future possibilities through unequal access to education, health care, and jobs, often tragically resulting in premature death or imprisonment, due to the policing and militarization of such communities.
- Managing who gets access to resources through borders and bureaucracy — producing and denying ‘illegal alien,’ undocumented populations. The sinister allegiance of detention centers with the carceral state to detain undocumented migrants; often resulting in extreme human rights violations such as sexual abuse, violence and torture occurring within the actual detention centers. The lack of access to the judicial system to review migrant cases; wherein they seek asylum from persecution from war, religious discrimination, extreme forms of gender and sexuality discrimination involving violence and community expulsion, dispossession, human trafficking, and indentured servitude in the form of sex work.
Katz asked us how we can think dialectically about questions of social reproduction so that we are not managing conditions of social death but instead mobilizing resources to prefigure a world we want to live in by engaging the sphere of social reproduction as a generative source of practical and pedagogical alternatives to ¨capitalism´s¨ exclusions and violences. We would like to raise this question again here.
Finally, Katz discussed the environmental aspect of social reproduction and social reproduction as a materialist question. This entails thinking about the environment not as “free gifts of nature” but as resources mobilized and the physical setting for social reproduction. Katz discussed the degradation of the built environment as capital moves from one site of production to another (Katz described this as “vagabond capitalism”) and things like overfishing, water crises, and climate change as crises in social reproduction. We can think about how this degradation relates to the process of dispossession we discussed. Katz mentioned, for example, the appropriation of land from subsistence farmers and indigenous farmers that forces them into the cash economy. The arenas of social reproduction also include disinvestment in the environment and the mobility of labor.
Discussion questions:
- How is the theme of invisible labor in what Katz calls the hidden abode of capitalism, a source of convergence or divergence between feminist and Marxist concepts of space?
- How can we think dialectically about questions of social reproduction rather than “managing” excess populations? What are ways of making the expelling and disposal of excess populations visible?
- As Katz mentioned, Dalla Costa and James state that “Capitalism is the only system where the children of the working class are educated with the interest of the ruling class in mind.” How can we think of social reproduction (or Marx’s superstructure) as a site for the staging of subversions of the social order of capital?
- As our construction as “neoliberal” subjects occurs in the realm of social reproduction, how can the realm of social reproduction be used to dismantle and reimagine alternate possibilities for the political economy? As the realm of social reproduction includes the affective and pedagogical labor to make all the normative codes of society sensible, how can this realm be reappropriated to make these norms insensible?
- How does thinking about social reproduction as a materialist question help to join together feminist, Marxist, and environmental justice politics? What are some examples of this kind of political action and what can they tell us about the challenges and potential of organizing around social reproduction?
Thank you very much Erin, Megan and Austin for the excellent summary and for the questions. I would like to try to answer question 2, but by paying special attention to women’s migrations for domestic service in Western European countries. I’m going to talk not only of invisible reproductive work, but of reproductive work that is paid in working conditions not regularized by a labor contract.
Reproductive work has traditionally been carried out by women of the family unit in Western Societies under capitalism. However, in recent decades women in these societies have been inserted into the formal labor market occupying positions in the productive sector that a few decades ago were mainly occupied by men. At the same time, there has been an aging of the population, a transformation in the domestic units, a diversification of family forms and a new conception and appreciation of time. These transformations have brought new forms of management of the domestic space in a context in which care work has been expanded. One of its manifestations is the purchase of reproductive work.
There is no doubt that this way of narrating transformations has to be nuanced in many aspects. It is a generalization, and as such, does not agree with many experiences. It is a generalization about professional middle classes predominantly in European and North American countries, thus, it does not fit with the experiences in other territories or other social classes (lower or upper). But, in cases where work and domestic care is purchased, the work is mainly performed by women from lower classes, racialized groups or by immigrants, the work is mainly paid with the salary obtained by the women of the family unit, and many times workers do not have a legal contract that guarantees their rights. That means, the reproduction of the domestic unit in these middle classes continues being a task that mainly involves women and continues to entail exploitation.
If we pay attention to the conditions of the women who do the reproductive work, what was supposed to be the professionalization of a task, has resulted in precarization and exploitation of their labor. The job security that domestic employees have is usually very fragile, thus often dragging a servility that, from the political correctness of public opinion, is often not recognized. Many jobs in the productive sector are subject to the logic of precarization, however, the commodified social reproduction is normally even worse paid and has a lesser status.
Therefore, to talk of reproductive work is still now a days to talk about women, in the same way, to talk about the relationship between reproductive work and productive work is to discern the mechanisms of primitive accumulation. After this, coordinating the production, reproduction and cultural stereotypes of racialized groups (mainly for the US) and migrants (for European countries) in search of work can only mean mechanisms of obtaining benefit through essentializing worker’s skin color or origin, a way of underestimating (as does the relationship between productive and reproductive work) a segment of the population to obtain more work from them at a lower cost.
The surplus working population and the reproduction of the labor force
The existence of a working overpopulation is a condition sine qua non for capitalism. What Marx defined as “the industrial reserve army” or a surplus labor population is necessary for creating a dependency in the salary for survival, for lowering salaries, and ultimately, a requirement for the accumulation of capital. Migrations are a mechanism to control this relationship because when there is an excess of the surplus population the spark for social revolt could be inflamed, thus emigration is encouraged. Conversely, when there is capacity to “stack” more reserves, immigration is stimulated to lower labor costs.
In European countries, immigration plays an important role to create redundant workers and to lower the salaries of both immigrants and locals. In the same way, ethnic differences are attributed among immigrant groups, to obtain moral arguments again to lower contracting costs and to ensure subordination. Hence, there exists a relationship between cultural or racial stereotypes and productive work.
At the same time, the reproduction of the labor force has been a governmental issue since the end of the 19th century, and a whole statistical science and programs for fertility and birth have been developed and deployed since the national (and capitalist) power wanted to control and direct the workforce. However, this control and planning has been more than complicated in many cases. In turn, the progressive emancipation of women in European countries, as well as the control of their bodies and of procreation, has led to a vast decrease in the birth rate in the continent. It is a fact that to maintain their economies European countries need labor, and hence, immigration. However, the entire media and ideological apparatus that criminalizes migrants can only be explained as a device for domination of a new class of workers.
We must add that in recent decades this process has been accentuated because the “human-faced capitalism” that promoted a Welfare State has been transformed into a “predator” one under neoliberal hegemony. In this context, female immigrant population has been preferred because it was considered that they would fight less for their rights and they would be more submissive.
Immigrant women
Migration, if consider from a feminine point of view, must be rethought since they have motivations, functions, opportunities, responsibilities, social networks, behaviors and sufferings different from those of men. For many nations, the contributions in the form of remittances made by women are every day more fundamental, thus the main source of family income and motor of regional development. For their families and places of origin, theses women perform the role of productive work that was once entrusted to men, now, in the destination often perform remunerative reproductive work.
As already mentioned, domestic work many times is under conditions of legal precariousness, weak recruitment patterns, seasonality and precariousness in terms of access to their fundamental rights as workers. If we add the legal obstacles that immigrants face in order to obtain residence and work permits, we see how domination practices are encouraged and supported both during the attempt to access the labor market and during the establishment of labor relations. That is why power relations that exist between gender, class and migration, forces that create an international division of reproductive work, are so determinant to enrich some sectors and impoverish others.
The difficulties that immigrant women face in order to get into the same social and professional spaces as “local” women, despite having the same training, constrains their freedom of movement. Both the legal requirements and social stereotypes that hinder their jump into better socio-economic positions cause not being able to perform or afford reproductive work in their family units. The new ethnicified proletarians take care of and favor the reproduction of the “local” high and middle classes by neglecting theirs.
Ethnicity and work
The ethnicization of the workers is a strategy to make them vulnerable, thus, to legitimize that they get more precarious economic and social conditions by doing the same work. A series of prejudices against the whole social group to which they belong are established so that individuals have to deny them personally. For example, if a worker belongs to a group that is recognized as lazy, he/she has to work more intensively to be recognized as an exception. At the same time, there are many stereotypes that seek to assess their capacities and behavioral patterns to develop the reproductive activity based on their culture, nationality, race or ethnicity. In Spain there is an extensive bibliography that shows how Latina women are seen as docile and affectionate but slow, Moroccans as fast and strong but culturally distant, etc. Those are racist prejudices that only seek to legitimize inequality, cheapen reproductive work, and improve the conditions of the productive local middle classes at the expense of stigmatizing other social groups that perform their reproductive work.
Thank you all for the insightful questions. I will be attempting to discuss questions 2 and 4 based on an ethnography we had to read for class recently.
In her ethnography Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, Aimee Cox describes a scene where her interlocutors, Black girls living in a homeless shelter in Detroit, retell a story of a field trip gone awry. The girls animatedly recount the story of their assigned ‘fun’ task at a dude ranch — to make a horse out of bits of wood, yarn, glue and nails — while Randy, the director of the ranch and the rest of his (white) family watched. When it came time to present the horse, the girls were instructed to tell the horse’s story, and, aware of the racialized implications of Randy and his family gawking at them — “…we didn’t appreciate being looked at like we were in a zoo… you know, the way they played us, it was like they thought we were crazy or stupid. So we just made up a story on the spot like, ‘Okay… this is probably what you want to hear’” (pg 132).
While reappropriation can make its topic insensible, it also necessitates a working knowledge of the norm it seeks to appropriate. While the girls reappropriate the stereotypes brought onto them via Randy’s gaze, they both continue and subvert this narrative — renegotiating the narrative, therefore letting Randy and his family know that they had beat them to the punch. In this spontaneous yet choreographed performance, the normative boundaries that Randy’s gaze set become blurred and even weaponized through the affective realm of humor.
Clearly it is not only Randy’s individual gaze that is implicated in this; Cox outlines the narrative surrounding Detroit: “…the predominantly Black and low-income populace is often constructed as an undifferentiated mass with little or no productive agency” (pg 27) — “excess” populations. Describing her interlocutors as “shapeshifters”, Cox presents the survival tactics of Black, low-income girls as “…compelling us to move from where we are and how we see and talk about our globalized neocolonial realities to ‘a society whose outcome cannot be fully known’” (pg 28).
Cox, Aimee. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Duke University Press: Durham and London. 2015
Great summary of the conversation Katz led as well as questions for further thought. As someone studying composition and rhetoric at CUNY, I actually think a lot about how university functions to reproduce the neoliberal subjects necessary for the maintenance of capitalism in its latter stages of development as well as how we, as educators, might intervene.
There is, in fact, an entire body of literature dedicated to pedagogical interventions in this vein (i.e. the theory and practice of radical teaching) called critical pedagogy. One of it’s founders is a Brazilian educator named Paulo Freire, who wrote the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it as a starting point to get a good sense of the theory undergirding this field. For more practical concerns, you might turn to Ira Shor’s Critical Teaching and Everyday Life and When Students Have Power for concrete applications. Shor is currently a faculty member at the GC. Would have been great to see his name on the list of speakers this semester, particularly with regard to this subject.
That said, critical pedagogy is principally concerned with disrupting cultural hegemony and promoting the transformation of students from passive subjects into political actors. For Freire, all students enter into the classroom possessing dual, competing consciousnesses: a “qua” (or being for itself) and an oppressor (similar to what Marx called false consciousness in The German Ideology.) A critical teacher facilitates the deconstruction of the latter while simultaneously fostering the former. While critical pedagogues sometimes throw language around about the construction of “autonomous” thinking subjects, I don’t believe Freire ever employs this very undialectical description of the goals or expectations of critical pedagogy. Freire was pretty clear about the development of revolutionary subjects, at least in his early work, and Marx—and Marxists—have said plenty about the relationships between material reality, human activity, and consciousness. Therefore, students can never become free thinking autonomous individuals fully outside of the scope of capitalist ideology, but they can learn to struggle against bourgeois aspects of their cultural conditioning through the process and practice of questioning, criticism, and self-criticism. In other words, students must learn how to question previously held beliefs, to test their knowledge against material reality via reflection and critique, and consistently reevaluate their thinking, avoiding the reification of any epistemologies that stand in contrast to the ever-changing material conditions of the world.
Critical pedagogy also asks students to reflect on and question the sponsors of the education they’re receiving, pulling back the veil of the liberal institution to expose how this institution functions in its various forms within the political economies of the cities and states where they are housed—interrupting their (re)production as students/workers and creating space for new understandings of the world to emerge and develop.
If, as Katz suggests, social reproduction is an apt space for intervention (reformist or revolutionary), then it behooves us to educate ourselves on the best methods to perform these interventions. But we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Critical pedagogy has already provided us a framework for thinking about this and a body of scholarship to get us on our way.
I’m very interested in this line of thought. I was surprised that no one raised the question of education during Katz’s lectures, since this is the mode of social reproduction we’re all most likely to engage in. I think acknowledging our complicity in social reproduction and asking our students to reflexively think about ours and their positions in the classroom is a potentially transformative political project.
The comment about ‘pulling back the veil of the liberal institution to expose how the institution functions’ is quite accurately how I’ve come to understand the Graduate Center. I’m stunned by how antithetical the administrative decisions are compared to the extremely liberal rhetoric used in the classrooms. As Graduate Center students are struggling to keep up with coursework and research initiatives while trying to live in New York City with low stipends, taking on additional jobs, teaching requirements, poor health insurance and other obstacles, the GC administration and our NYS government keep raising tuition while stagnating stipend and internship opportunities and payouts. In an academic institution where I’m learning how about important social reproduction is, in addition to how often it is unrecognized, and then being asked to think dialectically about questions of social reproduction rather than how to manage excess populations, I can’t help but focus on my own social reproduction and how much of myself I’m expected to give this institution for a degree that will quite possibly do nothing but push me farther into an excess population that society is unequipped to manage.
Thank you for your excellent Summary and thought-provoking questions.
I would like to briefly refer to questions 1, 2 and 4.
For Marx, there is an Inherent contradiction between deteriorating conditions of social reproduction and capitalists´ need to perpetually expand the market (a process explored in Harvey’s first lecture and in Harvey, 2018). This predatory and crisis-prone nature would be responsible for Capitalism’s constant need to expand beyond its own limits, colonizing new territories under the logic of capital, in a process that has been accounted by David Harvey (2005) and Della Porta (2017) as “exploitation by dispossession”. Unlike the moments of expanding production, capitalism´s dispossession dynamics concern directly the sites of social reproduction, primarily in the global south, and allow the expulsion of peasant populations from their land, the withdrawal of the state from its social obligations, and the destruction of the cultural and natural indigenous universes (della Porta, 2017:465)
In her lectures, Cindy Katz has gone over the importance of these global sites of social reproduction as places that more directly than indirectly contribute to the production of value beyond labor, and are therefore also possible sites for political action not taken into account by classical Marxism. This, however, has been a concern that has arisen also from the (neo)liberal agenda and that has been strategically appropriated by it as a way to increase capitalisms efficiency.
As it has been discussed by many scholars in the Foucauldian tradition (Brockling, Kraussman, & Lemke, 1998; Foucault, 2004), neoliberalism makes economic concerns with efficiency and productivity the driving principles of other spheres of life, such as education, belief, culture, acknowledging them as potential places for the production of value and “human capital”. This process takes place through governmental techniques of branding, meritocracy, information technologies, surveying, etc; but also through other techniques of population “management” as the ones mentioned by Cindy Katz in her lecture. Neoliberalism, in this sense, unlike other moments of capitalist development, draws its strength from its efficiency in “managing” the private spheres of social and cultural reproduction, as suggested in question four.
I find this apparent coincidence of Katz’s concern over social reproduction and that of neoliberal capitalism intriguing. It would seem like acknowledging the role of social reproduction in the creation of value might coincide with informational and financial capitalisms intention to commodify every area of existence. In these circumstances, is acknowledging and monetizing the value of social reproduction and of the natural environment an anticapitalist move? Or only liberal solutions that don’t represent a threat for global capitalism?
In the light of this apparent contradictions, some specialists have argued that the really anti-capitalist move should be to do away with the concepts of labor and value creation as our main frameworks to analyze and act upon reality. As Mary Ouellet puts it: “Rather, a truly emancipated society would break free of the Weberian iron cage with its capitalist categories of labor commodity and value which consist of alienated mediations assuming the form of real abstractions. It is thus these very categories that constitute the unfree conditions prevailing in modern capitalist societies. Doing away with the content that such categories express is the sine qua non of any sociohistorically sound prospect of freedom. (Ouellet:26). Harvey also agrees with this approach when mentioning in his second lecture that “integrating social reproduction in the general theory of value would be a misfortune rather than an advantage for thinking anticapitalist strategies”.
I agree with both conclusions but acknowledge the immense challenge they represent particularly for us as academics, theorists and activists. How can we, in our intent to overthrow capitalism, create frameworks of analysis that challenge rather than reproduce these analytical structures? I am glad Karen brings up Aimee Cox’s work because it is an example of how the politics of emotional and physical self-care can be also sites of revolutionary action, but I’m also aware of the limitations of an excessive focus on people’s agency and intimacy when we try to visualize structures of power. How can we politicize the intimate spheres of social reproduction without reinforcing the neoliberal commodification and celebration of these same spheres as sources of immaterial capital?
How does thinking about social reproduction as a materialist question help to join together feminist, Marxist, and environmental justice politics? What are some examples of this kind of political action and what can they tell us about the challenges and potential of organizing around social reproduction?
I’m going to respond to a combination of questions 2 and 5 below. Specifically, I wish to propose an alternative dialectical and materialist agenda that encompasses the aforementioned subsets of politics (feminist, Marxist, environmentalist) and acts dialectically with capitalism and the state to reimagine social reproductive responsibilities and capacities.
In “Rethinking Repair,” Steven Jackson, a historian of science and technology, outlines an ethical framework of breakdown, repair, maintenance to reimagine how researchers approach innovation. Although this may seem superficially tangential to our conversation here, I think that it actually offers a very valuable perspective on how technology is conceived, produced, and eventually, discarded and what that cycle signifies about social reproduction today. At its least abstract level, the ethics of repair demands preservation. Just consider the lightened load of garbage trucks if we weren’t prompted to get a new iPhone every 2 or 3 years! It is not just a question of building products to last; it is a question of learning how to make them last.
In terms of infrastructure, the only-recently-modish idea of maintenance is self-evident. And yet, our physical infrastructure crumbles around us. This is another (albeit facile) example of an ethical obligation that can transform both our relationship to the world and others, but also our subjectivity. Repair, or care, engages our creative faculties, grounds us in the world, and is distinct from capitalist relations.
As Jackson posits,
Innovation rarely if ever inheres in moments of origination, passing unproblematically into the bodies of the objects and practices such work informs. For this reason, the efficacy of innovation in the world is limited–until extended, sustained, and completed in repair. The remarkable qualities and energies that innovation names and unleashes–creativity, invention, imagination, and artfulness–are therefore distributed more broadly in the technology landscape than our dominant discourses of innovation and the systems of economic, professional, and social value built around them are keen to acknowledge (227).
Repair completely engages our senses and captivates our imaginations. It forces us to consider alternatives, adaptations, and how our material world can fit with our subjective world. It also centers each individual as an actor in every act of repair and modification. So is engaging in repair and maintenance a dialectical action?
If we shift this framework away from products and objects and into the social sphere, the ethics of repair becomes viable as a means of care, of transformation of potentialities. Repair and care root us to our world and our communities and are inherently political. Because acts of repair provide actors with the agency to re-envision their subjectivity, an opportunity to stake a claim, they are radical. More pragmatically, acts of repair are conservative (in the non-partisan sense). They open up new avenues of innovation and creativity. Jackson strategically limits his argument to the context of broadening access to science and technology education and employment but alludes that it could be applied broadly as a democratic, humanistic, and radical ethos.
Jackson, S., 2014. “Rethinking Repair” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, eds. T. Gillespie, Boczkowski, P., and Foot, K. MIT Press.
What does it look like to refuse the labor of social reproduction?
I want to consider this question in relation to Enric Duran, who Pere mentioned in a previous post. Duran basically took out a series of fraudulent loans in order to highlight the fact that the money created by extending loans is done so in accordance not with the possibility of repayment but according to strict ideological requirements for what that money will be used for (i.e. it cannot be used for leftist social purposes, but only for making more money or owning more property). To relate a hypothetical situation closer to home to Duran: if, say, a professor of anthropology at a US institution were to pull the same stunt, what are the potential consequences? Duran got all his fraudulent loans under his own name, which would be a necessity for this hypothetical professor also if they wanted to avoid charges of identity theft. So, to take out fraudulent loans with the goal of pointing out the specific way the financial system values certain goals of debts over others (that is, they will loan to a person who wants to purchase certain forms of property or use the loan to accumulate more capital), one would be refusing to socially reproduce one’s own identity in a way that’s commensurate with certain social expectations (e.g. that professors are expected not to be on the run fleeing debt collectors, or to not purposefully take out fraudulent loans). My understanding of social reproduction is that this purposeful fraudulent loan creation is an example of a refusal of a particular kind of social labor. But that refusal always has implications, and some of those implications, while in this case actually rather minimal, are, I would guess, not consequences that many of us would be particularly happy to live with.
Another possible example of refusing the labor of social reproduction seems equally implausible or at least equally uncomfortable. If part of social reproduction is household work, what does the refusal to do that work look like? Would any of us who have children really refuse to feed them or get them ready for school by clothing them in clean clothes, or refuse to send them to school period? Certainly we all have the option not to invest in ourselves or our children as the notion of “human capital” would dictate, but refusing to invest has consequences. Not arranging for one’s children to take piano lessons and play a sport and do extracurricular activities and so on is a refusal that, as we discussed in class, has real and increasingly unpredictable consequences for the increasingly uncertain future. So while the refusal of certain labor in certain modes of social reproduction is, I think, an increasingly important undertaking, I still wonder how committed we can realistically consider ourselves to be to such a refusal.
That being said, doing the labor of social reproduction differently seems like it could be a potentially effective site of intervention. Yet, from the position of what sometimes feels like an inescapable neoliberal subjectivity it’s often difficult to imagine what kinds of difference are both feasible and incisive. As Erik mentioned in class, cooperatives are institutions that seem to enact and enable different relations, and I would extend that by saying that, because they’re spaces where differing modes of social reproduction are sometimes realized, they’re also spaces that might allow for newly different socially reproductive practices to emerge. In other words, because they can be spaces that allow for very minor modifications in the way we relate to one another, they are potentially also sites where those minor differences can potentially open up new imaginaries that would point to new modes of sociality that go beyond those minor modifications to capitalist social reproduction.
The final question, and some debates signalled in class over both of Katz’s lectures and on the blog, lead me to think about how different materialist approaches to workplace struggles and struggles over social reproduction understand their final horizons. I appreciated the comment on last week’s blog about thinking workplace struggle and social reproductive struggle as potentially mutually reinforcing components of an overall, integrated working-class strategy, and want to expand on how we think of their interrelation.
In class discussion, the poor-people’s-movements strategies of Frances Fox Piven were framed as primarily reformist, limited to a horizon within capitalism and the welfare state. Unemployed people and welfare recipients, who have no remunerated labor to withdraw, were able to lay a claim on parts of the social wage (bureaucratically rationed welfare payments) by withdrawing their contributions to the maintenance of social peace and disrupting the smooth operation of the offices and the city’s streets. Scrimping and behaving yourself instead of revolting, when one is facing increasing immiseration, is in this view itself a particular kind of reproductive labor, which could be better spent.
Katz importantly, however, responded that securing a basic level of subsistence is a key prerequisite to mounting any broader political organizing, and indeed social reproductive work is necessary to sustaining even the most radical periods of revolutionary activity. But how do we think strategically and dialectically about winning such social-wage supports for subsistence by forcing their provision by a capitalist state? Can these gains constitute non-reformist reforms that expand the possible scope of Left activity, or are they simply delusional palliatives given a radical gloss by social democratic hucksters? Without such reforms, in all their flaws, how do anticapitalists see themselves building a social force capable of amassing the power necessary to create a world beyond capitalism? Silvia Federici herself, whose autonomist vision is far from that of labor-movement democratic socialists, said at an event in Brooklyn early this year that many people drifted from the Wages for Housework campaign precisely because the social programs they stitched together to support themselves while organizing were cut.
It’s in this context that the characterization of McAlevey in class was extremely questionable, as she has made her name as an organizer denouncing UNITE HERE’s and SEIU’s labor-movement strategy of haphazardly targeting shops for unionization simply to expand paper membership (and thus dues), and of winning contracts or campaigns that are solely about wage concessions. To say that McAlevey, along with Labor Notes and the (yes, largely garbage) AFT, swooped in to “domesticate” the struggle of the wildcat teachers this past year is an especially tendentious claim, when the rank-and-file socialist teachers who overpowered the union leadership and successfully launched and won the wildcat, like Emily Comer and Jay O’Neal, developed their “militant minority” exactly by creating a study group to look at McAlevey’s work, along with that of Labor Notes’ Kim Moody (Blanc, forthcoming 2019).
McAlevey’s vision is about building class power by targeting key nodal industries of social reproduction (healthcare and education) which have the power to shut down large sectors of society with a strike, build class solidarity through direct contact with service recipients and their families, and win increasing control over the work process to defend the social wage more broadly—all from the location of these women-dominated shop floors. In environmental terms, one could imagine how increasing worker power (with an ecosocialist consciousness, which would definitely have to be built), there is the possibility—though no guarantee—that the vast sunk resources of the fossil fuel industry could be restructured, along with fossil fuel employment, toward renewable and no-emissions energy. Any environmental movement in civil society, at least, would benefit from an ally in an organized shop floor.
One can argue that McAlevey’s is not necessarily a socialist strategy, as much as it can be pushed in that direction, but the strategic chain of cause and effect it proposes is clear. One can disagree with her for a whole host of reasons, but one should make the case for how fighting in whatever arena an anticapitalist chooses, however legitimate and awful the grievances people face, enables the working class (broadly understood as including all dispossessed and exploited people) ready to scale up struggle to another stage. This doesn’t mean that the shop floor is the only lever—far from it, as the Piven example shows—but it does mean that thinking with the creative breadth that social reproduction theory allows should also be coupled with serious strategizing about how to win the transformation of that entire terrain, step by exponential step.
Blanc, Eric. Forthcoming 2019. Red State Revolt: What the Teachers’ Strike Wave Means for Workers and Politics. New York: Verso.
McAlevey, Jane. 2016. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. New York: Oxford University Press.
Moody, Kim. 2000. “The Rank and File Strategy: Building a Socialist Movement in the U.S.” New York: Solidarity.
Piven, Frances Fox, and Cloward, Richard A. 1979. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books.
In her lectures, Prof. Katz defined social reproduction as the daily and long-term reproduction of the means of production, the labor power to make them work, and the myriad cultural forms that make this social relation common sense (Katz 2017). In this sense, Katz pointed out, social reproduction is, almost by definition, not revolutionary. The capitalist social formation is sustained across time and space because of the labor performed by people, households, and communities to reproduce themselves daily and generationally as workers adequately prepared to sell their labor power. The household is a crucial site of social reproduction. It was historically and largely continues to be a site of gendered exploitation. Making and minding children, caring for households, preparing meals, and so on, has historically been “women’s work” – unwaged (offloaded by capital) and performed on an individual basis within households by people understood to be women (Dalla Costa & James 1972). This labor was not always done by women, not only within the context of a (heterosexual, private) household. But, broadly speaking, social reproduction depends on “decommodified relations,” whether dispensed by the family, the state, or other organizations (Bhattacharya 2017). In addition to daily replenishment, social reproduction encompasses the creation of a workforce differentiated by education, skill, gender, race, and national origin. Workers’ capacity to labor and their division from one another by mutable differences cast as gender, race, etc. make possible their exploitation by capital at the workplace.
Prof. Katz discussed the many aspects of social reproduction that have been thrown into crisis in recent decades. As wages fell and un/underemployment grew, households were often forced to have two (or more) wage earners rather than one in order to sustain themselves (however meagerly and insecurely). This represented an extension of the working day for millions of workers, and, consequently, a reduction of the time allotted for social reproduction. Globalization integrated markets globally and disintegrated countless local relations of social reproduction. Millions of workers were forced to migrate to seek adequate livelihoods (often, but not exclusively, from the Global South to the Global North). This wholesale cheapening of labor has meant declining standards of living and the diminishing chance of a steady job, income, and survival for countless people.
And yet, Katz argued (borrowing from Lefebvre ([1991] 2014)), social reproduction is a “cricial practice” with the capacity to unmake old social relations and create new ones. Social reproduction is a capacity shot through with constraint and possibility. Time and space allotted for social reproduction may be used to study and organize, as well as feed, clothe, and reproduce workers and their communities. It may be possible to transform the capacities of the household/community from structures of gendered domination to mutual aid (e.g. collective kitchens, child care, etc.). Strikes and other workplace and community actions may be sustained by robust local organizations that dispense food, shelter, child care, political education, and so on. The growing surplus labor population, who Prof. Katz referred to as “managed populations” (e.g. imprisoned people, labor migrants, contingent workers, etc.) might develop common cause with each other, insofar as they are all (despite their mutable differences of gender, race, citizenship, etc.) working class people whose standard of living is in decline. This global supermajority might, theoretically at least, organize to build and demand structures (whether a social wage, collective kitchen, or community land trust) that would sustain organizing in sectors and industries (such as nursing, logistics, and education) capable of producing widespread social disruption (cf. McAlevey 2016; Moody 2017).
Bhattacharya, T. (2017) Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory. In ed. Tithi Bhattacharya. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press.
Katz, C. (2017) Social Reproduction. In eds. Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston. The International Encyclopedia of Geography. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Dalla Costa, M. & James, S. (1972) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.
Lefebvre, H. (2014) The Critique of Everday Life.. New York: Verso.
McAlevey, J. (2016). No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. New York: Oxford University Press.
Moody, K. (2017) On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
I would like to discuss a few things that speak to question 2.
Thanks again for such a concise and through accounting of both Katz’s second lecture, and the vibrant discussion which she sparked during the ample Q&A Katz cultivated. What I found quite productive was the framing device Katz opened her second lecture with; that is, the “crisis of social reproduction,” mentioned in this week’s summary, which she connected to the social processes increasing amounts of “disposable labor” and “excessed populations” associated with the maddening race of capital accumulation. Katz was quick to remind us that she in no way means to reify the Malthusian principle. Here it might be useful to go off on a historical tangent for a moment before returning to Katz’s lecture.
On Malthus, Engels was especially critical of his want to naturalize overpopulation and conflate population growth with poverty. Engels wrote, “we may sum up its final result in these few words, that the earth is perennially over-populated, whence poverty, misery, distress, and immorality must prevail; that it is the lot, the eternal destiny of mankind” (1975, p. 570). Malthus’ biopolitical concept, as Engels argued, displaces a discussion of how the conditions of poverty and fashion were conterminously produced, as further explained,
“Malthus declares in plain English that the right to live, a right previously asserted in favour of every man in the world, is nonsense… This is now the pet theory of all genuine English bourgeois, and very naturally, since it is the most specious excuse for them, and has, moreover, a good deal of truth in it under existing conditions. If, then, the problem is not to make the “surplus population” useful, to transform it into available population, but merely to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way and to prevent its having too many children, this, of course, is simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation. There is, however, in spite of the violent exertions of the humane bourgeoisie, no immediate prospect of its succeeding in bringing about such a disposition among the workers. [However] the workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population… Convinced with Malthus and the rest of the adherents of free competition that it is best to let each one take care of himself, they would have preferred to abolish the Poor Laws altogether. Since, however, they had neither the courage nor the authority to do this, they proposed a Poor Law constructed as far as possible in harmony with the doctrine of Malthus, which is yet more barbarous than that of laissez-faire… We have seen how Malthus characterises poverty, or rather the want of employment, as a crime under the title “superfluity”, and recommends for it punishment by starvation. The commissioners were not quite so barbarous; death outright by starvation was something too terrible even for a Poor Law Commissioner. “Good,” said they, “we grant you poor a right to exist, but only to exist; the right to multiply you have not, nor the right to exist as befits human beings. You are a pest, and if we cannot get rid of you as we do of other pests, you shall feel, at least, that you are a pest, and you shall at least be held in check, kept from bringing into the world other surplus, either directly or through inducing in others laziness and want of employment. Live you shall, but live as an awful warning to all those who might have inducements to become superfluous” (1975, p. 572).
I came to first read this passage while conducting a brief history on cash bail, last semester, and found myself tracing the confluence of English poor laws and chain-gang labor wardens in the Jim Crow US south. What I noticed, then, were the legal juridical structures for managing poverty had much to do with how populations deemed “unfit” for capitalist work, or who refused the wage relationship, were managed by threats of physical violence – embodied and enacted by police – and demonizations by ascendant petty-bourgoisie of mid-19th century England while pauperized white workers and plantation owners were using similar strategies in mid-19th century US.
But now, I have find myself reflecting on currents within popular media in the US. The figure of the ‘zombie’ is everywhere. Entire young adult novels and movies, like Maze Runner (I am by far not an expert, so forgive my trite comments), are based on the struggle and sacrifice of the romantic white couple, supported by a multicultural cadre, against the efforts of the city, science, and cynicism to find a cure for the always-already coming apocalypse. And if I remember correctly, didn’t Brad Pitt also have a zombie apocalypse movie? These movies are produced largely for the US audience and an increasingly expanding mediascape of middle classes around the globe – China becoming a big player in the film industry. Thus, I wonder as to their popularity – not merely in absolute box office numbers but rather the proliferation of this trope as a profitable genre for the media conglomerates – speaks to a “structure of feeling”, a fear of some thing that is zombie-like: surplus, undead, ravenous, automatic, infectious, and strange yet familiar. Remember, zombies are, most often, figured as the outgrowth of natural process, which stem from a viral infection – a perversion of normative biological processes. Ok, so this shows the limits of my popular media theory. Nonetheless, I find it striking that at the time when zombie movies have been almost a decade long trend in “Hollywood”, and horror as a genre for social critique (Bankare 2017), there has been a return to realism in Latin America. At an event for the launching for the 96th volume of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Aníbal González uses the term nuevísimo to frame the emergence of themes around reality, authenticity, and truth through narrative modes of autoficción, radical self-reflection, and truth-telling. The novel, as he describes it, increasingly being employed to critique nationalism and new media, and has become a “space for truth” in imagining what to expect, thus prepare for, in the future. Similarly, in Puerto Rico, a event recently held at NYU highlighted the ways film-makers, from the island, are employing what can be called neorealismo: a return of the real, the creation of reality effects, and the dissonances of a new landscapes and realities. What is prominent, in these movies, and other Latin America cinema is the prominence of the rural. Of course, I am not saying it natural to juxtapose the profitability of zombies in the US film industry and the emergence of radical neorealismo/nuevísimo which not quite as marketable yet speak to anxieties among the literati of Latin America. Rather, I wanted to include this discussion because I believe it speaks to ways the current historical conjuncture is being framed in popular media that speak directly to what Cindi Katz (2001) has framed as “vagabond capitalism,” but adding that I it not be as happenstance that the central theme of one of the largest popcorn movies of the summer, Marvel’s Infinity War, had as its central villain whose mission was wholly Malthusian. Moreover, the figure of the zombie is about a dangerous and (biologically) excessed population, while the return to neorealismo, and the like, reconfigure questions about and sites of authenticity and truth from geographis in the wakes of capital accumulation.
But I would like to return to the discussion on the crisis of reproduction.
Katz provided a rather robust analysis of our current situation under capital. How we have more people who, on one hand, do not have disposable income or time and, on the other hand, how conditions of social reproduction have increasingly become one of survival. What is occurring, as Katz noted, is that globalization of production is not integrating people – or can we say, no longer is integrating workers? – into a “global workplace”, but rather these processes are dis-integrating people from global markets and workforces. What has been created are populations of people whose labor is no longer required. People are increasingly, as Katz suggested, being excessed from Capital. There are now vast populations of people who are, as Katz argued, not surplus labor armies – able willing and able to enter into the workforce – instead these populations are no longer needed. Furthermore, Katz’s research explains the messy, fleshy implications of these interlocking processes on young people who now “have a value analogous to an industrial reserve army. At the same time they are a social body that must be contained and managed, and waste management around people as around things is big business. The child as waste is a specter that haunts the figure of the child as accumulation strategy, and its management though relations and practices of social reproduction enables, maintains, and propels particular modes of capital accumulation” (2011, p. 51). The possibility of allowing disposable (play) time to be “wasted,” by not structuring a child’s play with productive activities (like piano lessons, tutoring, and the like): “meant to groom their competitive advantage, casting them as an accumulation strategy. But given the relentlessness of these practices as cultural forms, they also affect the child’s production of self and propel the erosion of one of the cherished hallmarks of childhood, the intrinsic nature of its pleasures. Many young people, for example, now appear to be increasingly strategic in the things they take on and do, making sure to do things for the sake of appearance as much as if not more than for the experience itself” (2008, p. 12). In recent Jacobin articles, there have been commentaries on the acceptance of anti-natalism, a choice to delay having children as a liberal economic strategy (Kilpatrick 2018), and the emergence of “an array of tools that promise to help mom and dad raise an intellectual, worldly child in the most efficient way possible” (Erickson 2015), as a means to prepare children to maintain their class privilege in a cutthroat world economy. Together, they speak to the ways childhood has transformed into a commodity, site of discipline, and class project. But more significantly, they, and Katz more so, speak to the contradictions “inside” this social form(ation), in which, childhood has become a crucial site of class formation. The fear of wasting those precious moments – of what might be the beginning of a 10,000 hour passion or, perhaps the opposite, shying from “bulldozer” parenting to let children learn (again) through failure – has emerged alongside the managing, as Katz brought us to think, of an excessed population, and their children. While Katz’s research has pointed to the prison to pipeline complex, child labor exploitation, and the militarization of childhood (outside the US), I find it necessary to think more about the decades long trends of poverty in the US, as well as what poverty looks like in the case of Puerto Rico where poverty rates are much higher and a significant population is underemployed or no longer in the labor market (see Cordero Guzman 2016).
And while writing this commentary: I’m reading news articles featuring the children walking in the caravan (Hecimovic 2018), or “exodus” (Grillo 2018), from Honduras which reminded me of the NYTimes’ sensational spread on starvation among children in Venezuela (Kohut and Herrera 2018); and of course Trump’s recent distraction politics in his talks about removing birthright citizenship.
Though I am not so certain we must bracket our discussion of social reproduction to sites of biological reproduction. If I remember correctly, a similar comment was raised during this lecture, in which it was questioned: what does delimiting social reproduction to biological or assertive reproduction, first, constrain what strategies we think about, and how do we get to other side? An emphasis on parsing differences between social and biological reproduction I believe are key since they speak to object of the child-rearing practices which have become popular among the middle to upper classes in the US, that is the increasing role higher education institutions are playing in the reproduction of a managerial and professional class of managers. As I had mentioned during our lecture, I find it necessary to think of social reproduction beyond childhood and into the early adulthood years, especially given that the object of the strategies outline above largely center around achieve higher education in elite institutions. And I provided a few comments on what I have noticed as the vast inequalities within the proliferation of graduate programs and the emergence of transnationalism within academia to both mark elite institutions as global sites of knowledge formation, while providing an education to ascendant classes willing to fund the institutions at three times the rates of in-state students. What I failed to mention was that this strategy, as I witnessed it unfold, was accompanied by the corporatization of the campus (of note was the removal of the campus mailroom, replaced by an online store), the removal of benefits like vacation time and sick leave from “invisible” staff who mostly lived outside campus in the community across the river, and the installing of a former governor to oversee the expansion of private/public investments in STEM programs and continued resort-ification of the campus. This is to say that I agree with the previous comment regarding, “how university functions to reproduce the neoliberal subjects necessary for the maintenance of capitalism in its latter stages of development as well as how we, as educators, might intervene.”
But in this rather lengthy commentary, I have hope to convey that I am not so sure we understand what “excessed populations” or “disposable labor” is, or perhaps simply what its function may be. Karl Marx had a particular way of describing populations that exceeded his notion of a relative surplus “army”, he used the term lumpen-proletariat. In “Policing the Crisis,” Stuart Hall provides a rather illuminating processes of lumpen-ification, if you allow me one more neologism. He describes the situation, in England, during a period in which ‘mugging’ by black youth was spiraled into a moral panic as one determined economic, ideology and structures of dominance. One aspect of this process was the demonization of the lumpen:
“And, even closer to home, so far as the respectable poor are concerned, are always the very poor – the rough, the marginals, the lumpen- poor, the downwardly mobile, the disorganised outcaste and misfits. The lumpen-poor, being too close for the respectable working class to take much comfort from their suffering, have always been available as a negative reference point. Here, again, powered by pain and powerlessness, negative reference points become the source of an escalating sense of panic and social anxiety:” (Hall et. al. 1982, p. 160)
Hall also noticed a difficulty among materialist accounts of these panics, since those being demonized were, in orthodoxic accounts, “unproductive labor… underdeveloped, and often confined either to idlers, parasites on the labour of others, or to marginal producers” (Hall et. al. 1982, p. 367). However, drawn from a closer reading of Vol. 1, Hall argued,
“[Marx] stated directly that it is not only the sector of the class which directly produces surplus value which is exploited by capital; many other class sectors are exploited by capital, even if the form of that exploitation is not the direct extraction of surplus value. Thus, even if we need to retain the terms ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ for purposes of analysis, relating to the identification of the different strata of the working class, there is no warrant in Marx for treating the classes and strata exploited outside production proper as unnecessary or ‘superfluous’ classes” (Hall 1982, p. 368).
And then there was Marx and Engels tendency to conflate the lumpen with scum. Hall, further noted,
“Marx and Engels clearly regard the lumpenproletariat and the ‘dangerous classes’ as ‘scum’ – the depraved element of all classes. Parasitic in their modes of economic existence, they are also outside the framework of productive labour which alone could hone and temper them into a cohesive class capable of revolutionary struggle at a point of insertion in the productive system which could limit and roll back the sway of capital” (Hall et. al. 1982, p. 375).
And so, Hall came full round. While it is simplistic to conflate how Marx and Engels characterized the lumpen, in their 19th century analysis of political economy, with the newspaper editors, judges, and police who stoked fears that linked muggin, blacks, and moral panic into a “sensational form” in the 1970s – a form whose career went far beyond its humble beginnings in a few newspaper articles on a criminal act, statistics, and judicial decisions – Hall makes us consider the extent to which Marx and Engels were of their times. And thus, Hall’s lesson for us might be to consider carefully by what we mean when we say “excessed”, especially since our current historical conjucture is not defined by the same processes that dominated industrial Manchester.
With that said, I am not so certain that Hall sufficiently took into account how Marx connected the production of relative surplus to what he witnessed in the shift from handicraft to machinery. Rather than delve into another close-reading of Vol. 1, David Harvey recently made a comment about the role of new (media) technologies in the production of surpluses which is quite informative in our moment. Harvey stated, “technological change has been making labour less important in many spheres of economic activity (e.g. Google and Facebook). While new structures connecting the intellectual and organizational labour of the global north with the manual labour of the global south have by-passed traditional working-class power in the global north leaving behind a desolate landscape of deindustrialization and unemployment to be exploited by whatever other means possible” (Harvey 2018). I remember many articles published in online economic and political magazines about the changing nature of work in the wake of AI and automation:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/07/the-future-of-work-a-history-216244
https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-will-ai-change-work-here-are-5-schools-of-thought)
or what some would like to refer as the oncoming age of post-work
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/19/post-work-the-radical-idea-of-a-world-without-jobs
https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-automation-will-change-work-purpose-and-meaning
But, of course, these ways of imagining the coming of social changes in the wake of technological innovation desire to frame a new era, but fail to account for displacements already occurring and the processes by which people are rendered “deficient” and “excessive”. I began with a discussion of zombie movies, which have been often made in the horror and science fiction genres, if not both. And I made mention about the configuration of the rural and of a return to neorealism in contemporary Latin American film and literature. There seems a way to understand their connection if we bring in both Marx’s focus on the role of innovation and machinery, as well as Stuart Hall’s rigorous analysis on ideological practices, which might help us understand the presence of the past in our present.
And if I may end on a curious line, hidden in the volume “Policing the Crisis,” which I found rather provocative:
“In the colonial setting ‘wagelessness’ was one of its key strategies. It is not surprising that this wageless sector has reconstructed in the metropolitan ‘colony’ a supporting institutional network and culture” (Hall et. al. 1982, p. 371).
References
Bankare, Javare. 2017. “Get Out: the film that dares to reveal the horror of liberal racism in America” (The Guardian, February 28, 2017): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/28/get-out-box-office-jordan-peele.
Cordero-Guzman, Hector. 2016. Poverty in Puerto Rico: A socioeconomic and demographic analysis with data from the Puerto Rico community study (2014).
Erickson, Megan. 2015. “The Privitization of Childhood,” (Jacobin, September 3, 2015): https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/children-testing-schools-education-reform-inequality/
Grillo, Ioan. 2018. “’Its an Exodus’ What the people making their way to the United States tell us about the crises in Latin America,” (The New York Times, October 26, 2018): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/opinion/sunday/migrant-caravan-immigration-latin-america.html
Hall, Stuart, C. Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1982. Policing the crisis: mugging, the state and law and order.
Harvey, David. 2018. “Realities on the Ground: David Harvey replies to John Smith,” Review of African Political Economy: http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/
Hecimovic, Arnel. 2018. “Hondurans fleeing violence join migrant caravan – in pictures,” (The Guardian, October 16, 2018)
Katz, Cindi. 2001. “Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction.” Antipode 33(4): 709-728.
Katz, Cindi. 2008. “Cultural Geographies lecture: Childhood as spectacle: relays of anxiety and the reconfiguration of the child,” cultural geographies, 15(1): 5-17.
Katz, Cindi. 2011. “Accumulation, excess, childhood: Toward a countertopography of risk and waste,” Documents d’anàlisi geogràfica, 57(1): 47-60.
Kilpatrick, Connor. 2018. “It’s Okay to Have Children” (Jacobin, August 22, 2018): https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/its-okay-to-have-children/
Kohut, Meredith and Isayen Herrera. 2018. “As Venezuela Collapses, Children Are Dying of Hunger,” (The New York Times, December 17, 2017): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/world/americas/venezuela-children-starving.html
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1975. Collected works Vol. 4, Vol. 4. Collected Works. New York: International Publishers.