This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.
In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation.
Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.
'This book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the world in order to change it. Theoretically robust and empirically grounded chapters demonstrate the enduring value of a Marxist feminist approach... A welcome collection!' --Rosemary Hennessy, L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and Professor of English, Rice University, and author of Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism
Tithi Bhattacharya is a Professor of South Asian History at Purdue University and the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005). She is also a long-time activist for Palestinian justice and is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review. Besides her academic scholarship, her writing has appeared in Electronic Intifada, Salon.com, Huffington Post, New Left Review, Mondoweiss, Jacobin, Jadaliyya and other publications.