Several years ago I took part in a debate regarding all-women shortlists at my local Labour party branch. I argued that all-women shortlists will not tackle the root causes of women’s unequal representation in politics and that they also favour primarily middle class, white women. It wasn’t a popular opinion at the time, but it is great to see this type of perspective regarding the need for a radical approach to intersectional inequality gaining in popularity as typified by the development of the ‘red feminist horizon’. It links into the criticism found in the ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’ regarding what they term liberal feminism, which Hillary Clinton and her advocates have been a great example of, as women reaching and holding corporate roles and being in positions of power is said to be a victory for women’s rights and equality. This involves a complete disregard for the negative effects the decisions and actions these women have on others, especially other women. Like my argument against all-women shortlists at the time, liberal feminism is about tokenism and it will not address the real cause of inequality and oppression: capitalism.

This is why neoliberalism and liberal feminism can work so closely together. Neoliberalism is aided by liberal feminism legitimacy and liberal feminism is aided by political and economic corporate and capital acceptance. Except, this is increasingly being challenged by people not content to just tinker with the system and are instead calling for an interconnection of anti-capitalist movements and struggles. As outlined in ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’, “liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women…By definition, the principal beneficiaries are those who already possess considerable social, cultural and economic advantages.” (p.11)

Central to this exciting intersectional, anti-capitalist feminist movement is the importance of something called social reproduction theory and its links with the labour movement and related actions/strategies, with these feminists reinventing the concept of striking itself. Women’s Strike is a radical new project led by feminists, as outlined in the ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’:

“What had been a series of nationally based actions became a transnational movement on March 8, 2017, when organizers around the globe decided to strike together. With this bold stroke, they re-politicized International Women’s Day…the strikes demonstrate the enormous political potential of women’s power: the power of those whose paid and unpaid work sustains the world.” (p.7)

This relates to the role of social reproduction theory at the centre of this movement, which the Women’s Strike UK calls “the conflicts and struggles over what it means to produce and reproduce not only labour power (and the wage relation) but life itself.” Adding, “without a doubt we have witnessed a ‘turn’ to the question of social reproduction across significant swathes of the radical left. However, despite this much needed shift in analysis – it is sobering that actually not that much has changed – or perhaps more correctly not nearly enough has changed…”

As Tithi Bhattacharya outlines in her article about social reproduction theory, central to Karl Marx’s work was the importance of labour for reproducing the capitalist system. However, there are limitations to this analysis:

“…Marx is frustratingly silent on the rest of the story. If labor power produces value, how is labor power itself produced? Surely workers do not spring from the ground to arrive at the marketplace, fresh and ready to sell their labor power to the capitalist.”

This is the crux of social reproduction theory. Labour power is produced and reproduced outside of the formal capitalist economy. Bhattacharya states that there are three key interconnected processes that reproduce labour power:

“1. By activities that regenerate the worker outside the production process and allow her to return to it. These include, among a host of others, food, a bed to sleep in, but also care in psychical ways that keep a person whole.
2. By activities that maintain and regenerate non-workers outside the production process–i.e. those who are future or past workers, such as children, adults out of the workforce for whatever reason, be it old age, disability or unemployment.
3. By reproducing fresh workers, meaning childbirth.”

This is done for no cost, primarily by women, and is central to reproducing and sustaining capitalism by reproducing labour. It is important to see production and social reproduction as interconnected; for instance, job cuts, wage reductions and service closures has an effect on the ability to socially reproduce labour. This critically takes apart the traditional view of labour and the worker and considers the wider aspects to this alongside also showing the need to be an anti-capitalist when advocating for feminism.

Furthermore, the traditional view of a worker doesn’t reflect labour patterns either, as “the employment rate among women of ‘prime working age’ (aged 25-54) is up from 57% in 1975 to a record high of 78% in 2017” with high numbers of “working-age mothers in paid work: up from 50% in 1975 to 72% in 2015. The rise has been particularly large among lone mothers and mothers of pre-school- and primary-school-age children.” This links into the dual role many women now have in terms of production and social reproduction.

Related to this, Carers UK provide some valuable statistics that makes the point regarding the centrality of women in non-paid carer roles and how key this is for reproduction and production and thus sustaining capitalism, as “women are more likely to take on caring roles than men. Of the 6.5 million unpaid carers in the UK 58% – 3.34 million – are women…[and] the economic value of the unpaid care provided by women in the UK is estimated to be a massive £77 bn per year.” Crucially, this has an impact on women’s ability to work: “women are more likely to have given up work or reduced working hours to care, particularly in their 40s-60s. Women aged 45-54 are more than twice as likely than men to have given up work to care and over four times more likely to have reduced working hours due to caring responsibilities.”

Essentially, “any issue to do with the workplace is actually also about women and gender. Policies that govern workplaces have the power to affect women both at work and at home” and importantly “the major functions of reproducing the working class take place outside the workplace.”

And there we have the bread (production) and roses (reproduction). Anti-capitalist movements have to be based on bread and roses to succeed. This influences the way we approach political strategies:

“An understanding of capitalism as an integrated system, where production is scaffolded by social reproduction, can help fighters understand the significance of political struggles in either sphere and the necessity of uniting them…This is why in the organizations where we fight for wages (e.g., our labor unions), we need to raise the question of reproductive justice; and in our organizations where we fight against sexism and racism, we need to raise the question of wages.”

A more specific example of the importance of social reproduction theory is the gendered nature of food bank use. Obviously we need to eat to be able to live and thus work. Eating is becoming increasingly difficult however, given politically motivated austerity from the Conservatives over the last 10 years. Three of the biggest causes of food bank use are low income; income shocks (such as rising food and housing costs) and benefit delays. Importantly:

“A recent study from the government’s Money Advice Service concluded that two-thirds of those in debt are women. Whilst 2.2 million women are now classified as ‘breadwinners’, this is generally in low-income households. Research from the Resolution Foundation found that most low paid workers are women, and another study by the Trades Union Council concluded that the number of young women in low paid jobs had tripled in the past 20 years.”

There is also the rise in period poverty, with campaigns interconnecting this with other issues; for instance, Bloody Good Period provide period supplies to asylum seekers and refugees.

Food bank use is only increasing, for instance “The Trussell Trust’s food bank network provided 658,048 emergency supplies to people in crisis between April and September 2018, a 13% increase on the same period in 2017.” These kind of statistics should make us worry about the increasing normalisation of food bank use in society and its acceptance by more people as being part of the welfare system. It is another way that capitalism and capital is reproducing itself by ensuring that the social reproduction essential to production and thus labour value continues to take place, even if it demoralises and depresses people in the process. This is why we have to fight until every single last food bank is gone and no longer needed. For that, we need to overcome capitalism. Reformism isn’t enough.

Crucially, it is not about “women’s issues” – it is about showing the interconnection of different struggles and how this relates to the capitalist system and the importance of feminism leading the way. As argued in ‘Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto’, feminism for the 99% needs “to join with every movement that fights for the 99 percent, whether by struggling for environmental justice, free high-quality education, generous public services, low-cost housing, labor rights, free universal health care, or a world without racism or war.” (p.15)

As well as gender, social reproductive theory “is shot through at every point by the fault lines of class, race, sexuality, and nation.” (p.22) The intersectional aspect is so important if we are to challenge capitalism through a networked counter-power movement. Joining up against capitalism can help unite these different but related struggles.

“The true aim of social reproduction struggles is to establish the primacy of people-making over profit-making. They are never about bread alone. For this reason, a feminism for the 99 percent incarnates and fosters the struggle for bread and roses.” (p.72)

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

There is no such thing as a good and emancipatory technology that cannot be co-opted and perverted into a power of capital. – David Harvey

Working for a technology organisation, Libre Digital, which SilenceBreaker Media is part of, you might think that it’s strange I have included the quote above, especially given the important work The FreeTech Project has done in reducing social isolation and loneliness via technology – with technology a means to an end, rather than the end itself. However, importantly, what David Harvey is referring to is the power of capital, as a process, to adapt and co-opt, with this process central to our current political economy. We can only realise the true emancipatory power of technology once we overcome the contradictions of capitalism and the power of capital. Importantly, by capital, we are referring to the following David Harvey Marxist definition:

For Harvey capital is a process in which money is employed to make more money usually through the exploitation of labor power. Harvey claims that money, land, real estate, or plant and equipment that are not being used productively are not capital.

It was recently announced that Amazon, one of the wealthiest technology companies in the world, with their CEO and founder the richest man in the world, pulled out of their second headquarters deal in New York City. I discussed this proposed deal in a previous SilenceBreaker Media article:

You only have to look at how much state money has been thrown at Amazon in the US as they searched for their second headquarters to see how important the state has been for supporting capital, financial interests and the market. Richard Wolff discusses this in detail, referring to how Amazon invited all US States to bid and ‘compete’ to be the location. Key to Amazon splitting its second headquarters was the overwhelming response and attractive bids from the States, with Amazon deciding to have their headquarters in New York City, New York and Crystal City, Virginia with the total estimated cost for the headquarters standing at $10.5 billion and crucially subsidies given by the two states and cities amounting to an estimated $5.5 billion.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or ‘AOC’), a Democratic (Socialist) U.S Representative for the 14th Congressional District of New York, inspiring people across the World with her dynamic and principled approach to politics, was central to leading the revolt against Amazon coming to Long Island City, with her tweeting for instance:

Concerns regarding gentrification and people being unable to afford housing were key to people’s worries about the move. This is based on what has happened in Seattle, the main headquarters of Amazon:

In Seattle, rents have risen 39.8 percent in the past five years (in New York, rents had started to level off in many areas, and even decrease in some last year). In Seattle, as in New York, people of color have been threatened: the black population in Seattle’s historically black neighborhood Central District has shrunk, and some highly-skilled workers from countries like India who were once courted by tech companies were stuck in a visa backlog…Long Island City in particular was already undergoing rapid development and gentrification—it was dubbed the fastest-growing neighborhood in the country—and the Amazon deal immediately had an impact: Interest in local real estate spiked in the first couple of weeks in November, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon employees were laying claim to condos prior to the official announcement. Some reports suggested housing prices jumped before the move was public, too.

Land, wealth, power and property rights are all important when considering technology and its co-option by capital. Laurie Macfarlane wrote a great article looking at the “discrepancy between high levels of wealth and low levels of productivity” with this discussion relating to the importance of property rights:

The measure of wealth used by the OECD is ‘mean net wealth per household’. This is the value of all of the assets in a country, minus all debts. Assets can be physical, such as buildings and machinery, financial, such as shares and bonds, or intangible, such as intellectual property rights. But something can only become an asset once it has become property – something that can be alienated, priced, bought and sold. What is considered as property has varied across different jurisdictions and time periods, and is intimately bound up with the evolution of power and class relations…The lesson here is that aggregate wealth is not simply a reflection of the process of accumulation, as theory tends to imply. It is also a reflection of the boundaries of what can and cannot be alienated, priced, bought and sold, and the power dynamics that underpin them.

Importantly, Macfarlane, citing healthcare and pensions as examples, shows that a country that removes the profit motive and commodification of key services – which access to technology (especially the internet) should be considered as being – and therefore socialises these services, such as health care, education and energy, would look less wealthy according to this definition:

Because these benefits are non-monetary and accrue to everyone, they are not reflected in any asset prices and are not recorded as “wealth” in the national accounts… The way that we measure national wealth is therefore skewed towards commodification and privatisation, and against socialisation and universal provision.

Value is central to the concept of wealth:

The amount of wealth does not just depend on the number of assets that are accumulated – it also depends on the value of these assets. The value of assets can go up and down over time, otherwise known as capital gains and losses.

It is important to consider the structural and ideological power central to value and wealth, with ownership central to this and productive capacity not having any central influence:

For example, rules that favour capitalists and landlords over workers and tenants, such as repressive trade union legislation and weak tenants’ rights, increase returns on capital and land. All else being equal, this will translate into higher stock and property prices, which will increase measured wealth. In contrast, rules that favour workers and tenants, such as minimum wage laws and rent controls, reduce returns on capital and land. This in turn will translate into lower stock and property prices, and lower paper wealth. Importantly, in both scenarios the productive capacity of the economy is unchanged…..While future returns to capital and land get capitalised into stock and property prices, future returns to labour – wages – do not get capitalised into asset prices. This is because unlike physical and financial assets, people do not have an “asset price”. They cannot become property.

Intellectual property rights have been central to the success of ‘Silicon Valley’, a technology hub in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California, as technology has “facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power.” As brilliantly explained by Wendy Liu, Silicon Valley needs to be replaced, not reformed, with democratic ownership and the role of capital central to this:

The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation. Consequently, fixing the problems with the tech industry requires revisiting the economic assumptions that underpin it.

Despite laissez-faire liberal state theory, David Harvey argues that the state has a central role in neoliberal systems:

In neo-liberalism it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of neoliberal freedoms.

This is clear to see with the Amazon deal, where states were keen to throw money at one of the richest companies in the world to attract jobs without any clear conditions and through a lack of accountability, with this reflecting a general pattern of state aid for corporations:

According to The New York Times, American cities and states spend roughly $90 billion a year in cash and tax incentives to attract companies like Amazon. Because Amazon required each city to sign a nondisclosure agreement, citizens may never know what their elected officials offered the company.

Furthermore, AOC’s and others’ concerns related to Amazon as an organisation, given that it isn’t exactly a company with a very good track record when it comes to respecting rights of people that structurally have less power:

The company itself is rife with dubious practices. Its structure is set up such that other businesses are made to become dependent on its operations, feeding a litany of antitrust concerns and erecting a quiet monopoly. And it has been accused many times of bad labor practices, undermining unionizing efforts, and even participating with ICE to deport undocumented workers.

This obviously helps when it comes to increasing the value of assets, as discussed above, linking in with the concept of structural and ideological power. No wonder rich people are chucking money towards billboards attacking AOC for the collapse of the Amazon deal.

Technology was championed as having the potential to create a decentralised, bottom up, empowered, community driven society, but we have instead seen the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few very rich people. That isn’t to say technology itself is a bad thing. Technology has the power to be revolutionary. But we have to challenge the social, political, economic and ideological power structures that make this difficult to break through, where a very few rich people control some of the most powerful communication mediums in the world: Twitter and Facebook are prime examples. That involves challenging the power and role of capital as a process, it means re-examining the concept of value, wealth, and also challenging the concept of private property that is so key to such inequality and power divides. Democratic ownership of technology is key for this, and needs to be part of our counter-power structures.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.

Britain’s household debt mountain has reached a new peak, with UK homes now owing an average of £15,385 to credit card firms, banks and other lenders, according to the TUC… The level of unsecured debt as a share of household income is now 30.4%, the highest level it has ever been at. It is well above the £286bn peak in 2008 before the financial crisis, the TUC said.

Related to 10 years of Conservative-led austerity, household debt has increased as a way to respond to the pressures of being able to afford basic necessities. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology & Geography at The Graduate Center, CUNY, discussed in his latest podcast the concept of necessities and its relation with the concept of freedom. It is often argued that freedom is an exclusive capitalist neoliberal offering, and that a socialist system would remove individual freedoms from people (this argument mostly relies upon comparisons with ‘communist’ regimes such as Soviet Russia, which are criticised by many socialists and would certainly have been criticised by Karl Marx). Whilst this may be true if your individual freedoms include being able to be very, very rich at the expense of the majority, socialism via the public domain, rather than the market, would provide more people more individual freedom by providing everyone with access to basic necessities. Harvey cites Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party policies as a good example of how this can work in practice.

The level of household debt reported by the TUC, which also as a note doesn’t include outstanding mortgage debts, also relates to the rise of insecure, low paid work. The household debt figure reported on included “the total amount lent in bank overdrafts, personal loans, store cards, payday loans and outstanding credit card debts. It also included student loans, which added a substantial amount to the figures.” The research also doesn’t include Christmas debts, which as I discussed in a previous article, takes on average 5 months to pay off!

The centrality of debt is not a surprise. David Harvey argues in his book Rebel Cities: From The Right to the City to the Urban Revolution that understanding the credit system needs to be central to a critical conception of how the system works and the increasing crises and instability it faces:

Internalizing the credit system and the relation between the rate of interest and the rate of profit within the general laws of production, circulation, and realization of capital is likewise a disruptive necessity if we are to bring Marx’s theoretical apparatus more acutely to bear on actual events.

The rise of fictitious capital has been central to sustaining the capitalist system but also creating pressures and demands upon it that resulted in the 2007/8 crisis (The Big Short is a fantastic film illustrating this very well). However, private debt was transferred into public debt, with well organised and designed campaigns blaming everyone and anyone, whether that be refugees, benefit claimants, ethnic minorities etc. to take attention away from the role of capital and especially fictitious capital in creating the crisis (it’s a lot harder to quickly explain what a Collateralized Debt Obligation is!). Related to this blame game is the political programme of austerity, which attracted condemnation from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, which I wrote about in a recent article, and has created an economy that the TUC report shows is more reliant on unsecure debt than ever before.

We have created a system where we ‘value’ the ‘rights’ of fictitious capital over ordinary people, where the failures of the market are protected by the state whilst the same state unleashes a political programme that creates record levels of household debt, insecurity and low wages, as local services are closed or cut. This relates to the contradictions of capitalism and neoliberalism, which David Harvey has written and spoke a lot about and which I touched on in my previous article regarding the contradictions created by demand side economics and supply side economics, with the former relating to Marx’s arguments in Volume 2 of Capital regarding the need for capitalism to be careful when depressing worker and labour power, as there is an awareness that workers need to be able to consume and spend to keep the system going and the latter relating to the issues Marx talks about in Volume 1 of Capital, especially regarding the need to destroy labour power in order to maximise the surplus value and profit relating to capital mobility and also the creation of fictitious capital.

These contradictions create instability and systemic problems, as shown by how there are concerns regarding another crisis happening in 2020 (see here and here for instance). The system isn’t sustainable nor does it work for the majority of people.

Jane Watkinson (she/her) is an anti-capitalist, intersectional feminist and vegan interested in Marxism, social ecology, sociology, revolutionary humanism, and studying radical social, economic, and political theory and how this can be applied in practice. She is a freelance researcher working in the community sector. Her LinkTree is here.