Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation

Surplus Population, Social Reproduction, and the Problem of Class Formation

Today, few uphold the old belief that wage labor will gradually expand to cover the majority of the worlds’ population. Once, this was the condition of the historical belief that capitalism would create the conditions under which wage labor could be organized as a global power to match capital. Instead another teleology has appeared, claiming that capitalist development entails working class disorganization. Rather than a narrative of progress, this is a narrative of decline, of precarity, informalization, and immiseration.

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Precarious Intimacies: The European Border Regime and Migrant Sex Work

Precarious Intimacies: The European Border Regime and Migrant Sex Work

This focus on the border regime allows for an understanding of how it produces people residing within a nation-state with differential rights, differential access to the labor market, and variable access to the services of the state. These differential rights have a structural role in the differentiation of the commercial sex sector, as well as in determining how migrants use intimacy in their migration processes. However, through another optic, intimacy and intimate relations can be viewed as resources – as workable and effective strategies – in these women’s aspirations to create more satisfactory and independent lives from their position of structural disadvantage.

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Introduction to the Archive of Feminist Struggle for Wages for Housework. Donation by Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Introduction to the Archive of Feminist Struggle for Wages for Housework. Donation by Mariarosa Dalla Costa

This text introduces the Archivio di Lotta Femminista per il salario al lavoro domestico, which contains a wealth of material collected from the 1970s to the present, all graciously donated by Mariarosa Dalla Costa after years of work as a militant in the Feminist Movement and as a scholar of the condition of women. The archive, based in Padua, Italy, collects a broad range of inventoried material from a strand of the Feminist Movement which, in Italy, first called itself Movimento di Lotta Femminile (Women’s Struggle Movement), then later Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) and finally Movimento dei Gruppi e Comitati per il Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Movement of Groups and Committees for Wages for Housework).

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Reproducing the Struggle: A New Feminist Perspective on the Concept of Social Reproduction

Reproducing the Struggle: A New Feminist Perspective on the Concept of Social Reproduction

I believe that intimacy, together with other social and intellectual practices that are necessary for the reproduction of our collectivity, is being appropriated today by the capitalist machine and, in the same movement, transferred from the collective sphere to that of the nuclear unit and from the sphere of reproduction to that of the market economy.

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The Social Reproduction of Sexuality: An Interview

The Social Reproduction of Sexuality: An Interview

For me, the usefulness of the social reproduction frame to understanding sexuality grows out of the current situation of queer politics. On the one hand, we have won rights that I never could have imagined when I first came out in the 1970s. Yet, we have fallen far short of the vision of sexual liberation.

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How Not To Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class

How Not To Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class

The key to developing a sufficiently dynamic understanding of the working class, I will argue, is the framework of social reproduction. In thinking about the working class, it is essential to recognize that workers have an existence beyond the workplace. The theoretical challenge therefore lies in understanding the relationship between this existence and that of their productive lives under the direct domination of the capitalist. The relationship between these spheres will in turn help us consider strategic directions for class struggle.

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Social Reproduction, But Not As We Know It

Social Reproduction, But Not As We Know It

How should we look at social reproduction? It has been about 35 years since the publication of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital, and the world has radically changed since then. 1 Society has changed faster than our capacity to re-forge the theoretical and methodological toolbox at our disposal. It is time to ask: what is happening… Read more → 

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Sex Work Against Work

Sex Work Against Work

Although the Wages for Housework campaign was launched at the very beginning of the 1970s, it was not until 1978 that Carol Leigh, an American sex worker and feminist activist, coined the term “sex work.” And if the claim for “Wages for Housework” might not have the same relevance today now that a large part of domestic work has been commodified – former housewives who have entered the labor market have partly delegated this work to poorer women, especially migrant women – the claim that “sex work is work,” considering the active and often heated discussions it generates, seems more important than ever in our contemporary moment.

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Radical Archives and the New Cycles of Contention

Radical Archives and the New Cycles of Contention

Vint Cerf, co-designer of the internet’s basic architecture and a vice president for research with Google, recently sounded the alarm about “bit rot” or the degradation of data files. He warns that we’re facing a “forgotten century” of historical documentation because we lack the computer software and hardware necessary to read obsolete computer files. 1 Reflect on what this means… Read more → 

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