A materialist analysis of contemporary feminist movements

Introduction

The International Women’s Strike on 8 March 2017 was a grass-roots movement in more than 50 countries that united various feminist groups, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, and, in some cases, even indigenous people, people of color, and migrants. Beginning in Argentina, it evolved more generally from the South American experience of mobilization against violence towards women, and spread worldwide. The 8 March feminist strike was characterized by the willingness to emphasize and render visible the strict link between masculinist violence towards women, a sort of “pedagogy of cruelty” perpetrated on women’s bodies—as Rita Laura Segato (2016) puts it—and the dynamics of precarization, impoverishment, and exclusion caused by neoliberal capitalism—dynamics that are rendering ever-wider strata of the population vulnerable to poverty and insecurity. As in the 1970s feminist movement, the contemporary feminist movement has gone back to interrogate the relationship between capitalism and the gendered nature of economic exploitation, examining the intersection of capitalism and sexism or pointing to the foundational role the production of gender differences has played in capitalism. As in political theory and the social sciences in general, and in line with the research agenda of this issue’s introduction, there is a renewed interest in studying capitalism and its long-term transformations to explain “the spreading of cleavages outside of the factories, the forging of new identities, the resistance to the hierarchical work of society and market” (della Porta, 2017). Contemporary feminist political studies increasingly focus on the influence of neoliberal capitalism and economic and social transformations on mobilization within women’s social movements. As a result, and in reaction to the cultural and “discursive turn,” both feminism (Hennessy and Ingraham, 1997; Mojab, 2015) and LGBT literature (Drucker, 2016; Floyd, 2009) are experiencing a “Marxist turn” and a revival of materialist feminism, particularly with regard to the theoretical and political debate around women’s labor, violence towards women and sexual minorities, precarity, the criminalization and imprisonment of migrants, black people, indigenous people, and ethnic minorities (migrant, black, indigenous, ethnic, and poor women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population, see Roberts, 2017; Sudbury, 2005).

Social movements on the left, such as the 2017 women’s strike, are characterized by the willingness to expose and highlight the link between masculinist violence, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and the dynamics of dispossession, privatization of common resources, and environmental destruction caused by neoliberal capitalism. They see in the present moment of the global reorganization of capital accumulation the centrality of the genderization, racialization, and ethnicization of the labor force and processes of dispossession and environmental destruction. In light of this, drawing on an analysis of the contribution that approaches such as social reproduction theory and the feminist reinterpretation of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought on primitive accumulation may make to understanding the present historical moment, this study interrogates the nature of contemporary feminist social movements’ struggles, the role contemporary women’s movements seem called to take on, and the nature of activists’ struggles under conditions of changing capitalist dynamics. We cannot fully understand the present moment and feminist social movement mobilization without taking into account that the attacks on public schools, on the welfare state, on abortion and reproductive rights, immigration, and policing are all reproductive politics issues. These are attacks by neoliberalism capitalism launched against social reproduction, against the very conditions, not only social and economic but also environmental conditions, that make life possible in terms of resources to take care of themselves and others, that give women a central role in contemporary social struggles because of the central role they still play in the household.

For many feminists, authors and activists, the present moment represents, in a certain sense, a return to the debates of the second-wave feminist movements. Old debates have returned, such as those of the 1970s and 1980s on domestic work (for example, Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Delphy, 1998; Vogel, 2013; for a recent recounting of this debate, see, among others, Ferguson and McNally, 2013; Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Toupin, 2014), on women’s roles in the international division of labor, women domestic workers, women in the global assembly line, and the consequences of structural adjustment on women’s lives (for example, Chaney and Castro, 1989; Harrison, 1988; Nash and Fernández-Kelly, 1984). In most cases, they have also been significantly updated and restated in contemporary feminist literature, such as the transformation of the domestic labor debate within the much broader approach to social reproduction (Arruzza, 2016; Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Ferguson, 2008; Gill and Bakker, 2003; Ferguson et al., 2016), or the revival of the so-called Bielefeld approach and its reappraisal of the idea of primitive accumulation (Federici, 2004, 2012, 2014; Soiland, 2016). Updating the contemporary debate in terms of these last two approaches and their dialogue seems particularly effective in critiquing neoliberal capitalism. As I will show here, the perspective of social reproduction, as developed within feminist political economy (Bakker and Silvey, 2008; Camfield, 2002; Gill and Bakker, 2003), helps us to delineate the continuously changing character of capitalism and its relationship with the present “stratified system of reproduction” (Colen, 1986, 1995), in which some lives are worth living and reproducing, and some are not, according to present notions of race, gender, and class (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995). Similarly, the restatement of Marx’s idea of primitive accumulation on the basis of Luxemburg’s (1951) critique gives us instruments and categories to see how this very stratification of the system of social reproduction, with its control over women’s bodies, households, and reproduction, and its preservation through reinvention and transformation (Cooper, 2017), has always been and still remains the external/internal space on which capitalism’s survival rests. The war on the so-called “ideology of gender” occurring in Europe and America today, as well as the persistent violence towards women and sexual minorities in the forms of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, may be considered a further proof—as Rita Laura Segato (2016) suggests—of the centrality of gender and social reproduction for a form of capital accumulation that needs fear and violence in all shades, from “euphemized violence” (Bourdieu, 1990: 126) to brutal material violence, which can sometimes act through the law with the complicity of the state (Roberts, 2017; Segato, 2016).

Social reproduction and its present configurations

In critiquing classical political economy and Marxism, the old domestic labor debates as well as the more recent social reproduction approach criticize a conception of labor power that makes that factor a given in capitalist production, at best, one that is derived from natural processes (Ferguson and McNally, 2015). Both the domestic labor debate and the social reproduction approach see the cost of the reproduction of workers and communities as mostly hidden, invisible, underpaid, and unrecognized as work. It falls on women’s shoulders outside of the productive sphere and, among women, it is unequally distributed: poorer and racialized women pay the highest price in social reproduction, doing the greater part of the work necessary to meet people’s fundamental needs on a daily and generational basis. Nevertheless, according to the social reproduction perspective, we cannot limit our analysis of the complex set of activities or work necessary to reproduce labor power to domestic space and unpaid domestic labor; rather, we must tackle at least three major, wider problems that have found varied solutions in different societies at different times: the reproduction of the species, that is, what influences decisions to have children and how children are conceived (through natural processes or by assisted technologies), as well as the social construction of motherhood and gender; the reproduction of the labor force (the subsistence, socialization, and training of workers); and the reproduction of social and communitarian boundaries and provision of care (Bakker, 2007; Gill and Bakker, 2003). In the social reproduction approach, the economy is constituted both by the mode and the relationship of production and exchange and by the way people cooperate daily to meet their basic material, affective, and emotional needs; by the way in which these needs are seen when they are associated with different (racialized, sexualized, or other oppressed) bodies; and by the way in which care (for children, for the elderly, etc.) is conceived and sexuality is constructed. Thus, the reproduction of capitalism has to do not only with productive and exchange activities, but also with the way in which social reproduction is organized; for example, how motherhood is socially constructed, how care work is socially distributed, how gender is produced, how sexuality is disciplined, and how different bodies are represented and taken care of (Bakker, 2007; Bezanson and Luxton, 2006; Gill and Bakker, 2003; Roberts, 2012).

The three aforementioned problems, on which the social reproduction approach is focused, show how “social reproduction entails much more than literal procreation” (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995: 2). The naturalization of gender, sexuality, and reproduction has tended to obscure the fact that these areas of life are not reducible to the mechanistic production and effect of natural drives, but are facilitated or inhibited by social norms and laws (family law, health, and school legislation, reproduction technique and legislation, and so on). The solutions to the aforementioned problems of social reproduction have, in fact, undergone profound transformations with the advent of different phases of capitalism that facilitate “processes of capital dispossession and accumulation” (Ferguson and McNally, 2015). Social reproduction, in particular, has been organized in various ways according to how its burden and responsibility has been divided within the state through welfare, market, community, or households over time (Bakker, 2007; Gill and Bakker, 2003).

Even if we cannot speak of a “radical break” with Fordism in so far as the creation of value outside the factory is taken into consideration (Alessandrini, 2012), the issue of social reproduction has changed significantly in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Dismantling the welfare state went hand in hand with the tendency of neoliberal states to re-privatize social reproduction, that is, to externalize the costs of social reproduction to the “private sphere” and, thus, drain household resources. For example, in Europe (Charbonnier and Morel, 2015) the commodification of care has been stimulated by state intervention (giving cash payments to buy in home care) in the framework of a new global division of care labor and the transnational political economy of care (Williams, 2011).

As a result, the role assumed by the market in social reproduction has eroded, and at the same intensified gender differences in terms of class, citizenship, race, and age. To talk only of the decision to have babies, for example, upper-middle-class (mostly white) women in many Western societies today can enter the labor market and attempt to “have it all,” that is, to have both a career and a family. This is possible because migrant women care workers can help them in their homes, taking care of children, the elderly, and the disabled. Thus, younger women, especially middle-class Western women, experience some sort of gender erosion or gender redefinition thanks to a neoliberal post-feminist vision in which feminism is something that belongs to the past, which women no longer need because they have achieved gender parity. As Angela McRobbie (2007, 2009) explains, in the West we are witnessing, or have witnessed until very recently, the affirmation of “a post-feminist form of bio-politics, a style of governmentality of the female population which is predicated less on motherhood and on reproduction but on unleashing productive capacities” (McRobbie, 2007: 720). A “new sexual contract” encourages young Western women to control their fertility, to explore their sexuality, to participate fully in the culture of consumerism, and to make constant headway in their careers and qualifications. In addition, it promises radically differentiated forms of citizenship for young and older women, white and black women, middle-class and poorer women, migrant women, and Western and non-Western women. In what we can today refer to as a post-feminist culture, there has been an attempt to undo feminism and incorporate it into a neoliberal culture in which it seems that every woman can obtain what she wants more easily simply by buying and outsourcing power (Hochschild, 2013). The contemporaneity of white women’s exit from the household with the transformation of the welfare state into a workfare state has contributed to a market restructuring around the low-wage service sector. This market restructuring has been ongoing since the 1980s, producing the commodification, privatization and individualization not only of care labor but also of reproductive labor. In fact, there is not only an unequal global system in the circulation of children through international adoption, but also a completely new market of assisted reproduction and surrogate motherhood. Middle- or upper-middle-class women are encouraged to postpone their reproductive choices in favor of their professional careers, and Apple and Facebook have even announced that they will cover the costs for female employees who opt to freeze their eggs for non-medical reasons (Walden, 2014). The “cyborgfare” (Balzano, 2015) of assisted reproduction and surrogate motherhood enables a small portion of the female population to pursue careers with long daily work schedules by postponing childbearing.

On a global scale, we are entering in “a brave new world in reproduction” (Marre and Briggs, 2009: 1). On the one hand, there is a redistribution of care and reproductive labor, the most extreme form of which is the outsourcing of surrogate mothers provided by fertility clinics in India (only in 2016 did commercial surrogacy become strictly regulated and restricted by the Indian government), South Africa, or Ukraine, and on the other, a “stratified conception of motherhood” (Colen, 1995). In fact, in those countries where fertility clinics prosper, women’s reproductive rights are often denied. In India, for example, there is widespread national anti-natalist propaganda to convince women to have sterilization operations or to use long-term contraceptives such as Depoprovera (Pande, 2014). If it is true that a long tradition of class and cast-based sterilization in India started with Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, today we see an important rhetorical change in the way in which “the fertility of poor Indian women is portrayed as hampering their family’s happiness. Their choice to participate in surrogate motherhood enables them to “turn the tables” and get their families out of poverty” (Pande, 2014: 54). This “stratified reproduction,” according to which “some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered,” and some lives are worth living and reproducing through international adoption and some are not (Marre and Briggs, 2009), is also visible in the so-called “global care chain”, that is, in the restructuring of care services between sending and receiving countries or in the total negation of women’s reproductive rights in the maquiladoras where women’s reproductive rights are often negated (Swedish, 2005).

This complex picture, here substantially limited to reproductive rights and procreation (living out other conditions for the social reproduction of the labor force and the reproduction of community life), already tells us that disciplining women, women’s bodies, and their social reproductive labor is still occurring worldwide in forms characterized by what Ann Anagnost (1995), following Bourdieu, calls “euphemized violence,” a violence inscribed, for example, in laws that are justified for the sake of controlling women’s reproduction (for example, the use of contraceptives such as Depoprovera in Third World countries, and among black women and disabled women dependent on welfare in the US, see Roberts, 1998) or the general welfare (for example, the one-child restriction in China, see Anagnost, 1995), and sometimes even by more explicit masculinist and patriarchal material violence. At its base, this form of exploitation cannot be fully comprehended looking only at the wage–labor system.

In her work, Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici argues that this disciplining of women’s bodies and reproductive power, which started with the beginning of capitalism, should be seen in the broader context of “primitive accumulation.” Marx (1967) used this concept to explain the transition from feudalism to capitalism and to demonstrate how this transition would not have been possible without violence and the transformation of the peasantry into “free” workers who, with their lands expropriated, had “nothing left to sell but their skins.” According to Federici (who follows and develops Mies’s (2014b) insights in her work), part of primitive accumulation was the “Great Witch Hunt” of the 16th and 17th centuries. More generally, this profound transformation of the social position of women led to the entrapment of female bodies and the destruction of their social power, which “was achieved through the extermination of the witches” and the rise of modern science—in particular, modern medicine (Federici, 2004: 63). Thus, the accumulation of capital and the creation of a population of free laborers was only one facet of the process of primitive accumulation. From a gender perspective, according to Federici, no less important was the “accumulation of differences and division within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat” (Federici, 2004: 63–64). According to Federici, and to the social reproduction approach, as Roberts (2017, Kindle edition) puts it, “there is a structural relationship between the reproduction of capital and the household,” between capitalism and patriarchy. The production and reproduction of gender (and race), that is, the biologization and naturalization of differences, have been used to justify a system of domination and the extraction of value not recognized and not fully remunerated in the present system of a genderized (and racialized) labor force.

On the basis of this interpretation, one old feminist school of thought that has gained new life in recent leftist feminist literature is the Bielefeld School: Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and von Werlhof’s theory of housewifization and their view of woman as “the last colony” resonates with the contemporary debate. As we shall soon see, their work puts forward a feminist interpretation of Rosa Luxemburg’s elaboration of the Marxist theory of primitive accumulation that seems to anticipate David Harvey’s idea of “accumulation by dispossession” and, at the same time, underlines the non-gender-neutral character of this form of exploitation—as other contemporary feminist authors such as Silvia Federici (2004, 2012), Nancy Hartsock (2006) and Nancy Fraser (2013a, 2014a, 2014b, 2016) have tried to do more recently.

The present “feminization” of labor, of the economy, and of the so-called “survival circuits” (Sassen, 2000) is an expression of the gendered character of the present moment of capital accumulation. This “feminization” has not so much to do (or has not only to do) with the putting to work and extraction of value from “emotional labor” (Hochschild, 2003) or “affective labor” as part of “immaterial labor”—as, for example, Hardt and Negri (2000) put it—but with the extraction of value from the production and reproduction of gender (and the household) (for a critique of Hardt and Negri, see Federici, 2011; McDowell and Dyson, 2011; McRobbie, 2011). The knowledge intensive sector of the present cognitive capitalism, on which Hardt and Negri (2000) focused their analysis, as Caffentzis noted in 1992, needs the parallel growth of a labor-intensive world, and the manufacture of components for high-tech electronic products to occur in factories often located in the developing world where low-wage work is completed predominantly by very young women. In “supply chain capitalism” (Tsing, 2009), where work is outsourced and shifted to third parties in different countries, women are often represented as docile, dexterous, and cheap. Indeed, in these export-processing plants, workers’ “femininity” is produced to render feminized work (not only women’s work) easier to control and exploit. Non-economic factors, such as gender, sexuality, and race, determine the effective ability of workers to negotiate their wages and exploitation (Tsing, 2009).

To understand the role of the so-called “feminization of labor” in the present economy, I return to a reconstruction of the Bielefeld School’s contribution to examine how it can be reintroduced and updated. With Guy Standing (1989, 1999), the authors of this school were the first to show that this phenomenon was not linked simply to the growing presence of women in labor markets, but to a redefinition of the laws, rules, and relationships with the welfare state on the one hand and with capital on the other. In my opinion, they were the first to see how capitalism always tries to find new sources of profits not only by changing conditions in the labor market, but also by changing the terms of “social reproduction.”

Feminization of labor and accumulation by dispossession: Women and colonies as “neglected spheres”

In the literature that examines the relationship between feminism and neoliberal capitalism we often find these transformations described with the phrase “feminization of labor” (a real “sociological catch phrase,” Oksala, 2016a: 281). This concept has come to summarize the consequences for women of capitalism’s interest in employees’ lives, of cuts in public spending, of the “casualization” of labor, of the ascendancy of subcontracting, of the rewriting of social reproduction labor in a context of globalization and, more generally, of “financialization.” This expression has multiple interpretations, not all of them useful to describe the reasons that have led to the recent mobilization of the feminist movement. Guy Standing, one of the first authors to use the term in 1989, explains that “feminization”

was intentionally ambiguous […] It was intended, however, to capture the double meaning and the sense of irony that, after generations of efforts to integrate women into regular wage labor as equals, the convergence […] has been toward the type of employment and labor force participation patterns associated with women. The era of flexibility is also an era of more generalized insecurity and precariousness, in which many more men as well as women have been pushed into precarious forms of labor. (Standing, 1999: 583)

The consequences and implications of the current feminization of labor are described in similar terms in Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen and von Werlhof’s theory of housewifization. Indeed, one of the first feminist articles in which the feminization of labor thesis was presented is “The proletarian is dead: Long live the housewife!” published by Claudia von Werlhof in Women: The Last Colony (1988), a book she co-edited with Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen. von Werlhof spoke about a “femalized economy,” tracing a clear continuity between what she and her colleagues at the Bielefeld school concluded regarding women’s conditions in the Third World and what was also going on in the 1980s in the West. She wrote:

The Third World is coming to us. It reveals to us the “vision of the future” and the real character of our mode of production. More explicitly: the West’s economy will become “femalized,” “marginalized,” “naturalized,” or “housewifized”—but never proletarianized. (von Werlhof, 1988: 174)

Claudia von Werholf, Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen shared similar experiences in Third World countries: Maria in India, and Claudia and Veronika in South America. They also shared a common interest in re-reading Marx from a feminist perspective. Their critique of Marx reflected on the role of domestic and reproductive labor—a reflection widespread at that time in the international Marxist–Feminist movement. Nevertheless, something very original to the Bielefeld School arose from its acquaintance not only with Marx’s political philosophy but also with the theoretical writings of Rosa Luxemburg and her understanding of colonialism and imperialism. According to Mies, Luxemburg, who did not adopt a feminist perspective, accused Marx of ignoring the fact that capitalism needs “non-capitalist milieux and strata” to survive: “Without the ongoing exploitation of non-wage earners and natural resources, and a perpetual extension of markets, capitalism would not be able to continue its process of permanent ‘primitive accumulation’ (Luxemburg 1923)” (Mies, 2014b: kindle). For Luxemburg, capitalism is the first economic system that needs other non-capitalist forms of production to survive, and colonialism is one of the exterior geographical spaces necessary for its survival.

Following Luxemburg, the Bielefeld school underlined some fundamental limitations of Marx and the Marxian tradition, which privileged a certain segment of the global working class and offered a Eurocentric view of capitalism’s origins and developments. For them, other actors beside wage laborers and capitalists should be considered. From this point of view, Marx’s model of capital accumulation was limited. Although a feminist sensibility was absent in Luxemburg, ¹ these women observed that colonies and nature, and with them, colonized people and peasants, were not the only exterior spaces that capitalism has exploited historically and continues to exploit. Therefore, they put forward the hypothesis that a particular field of capitalist exploitation was represented by “unpaid housework,” thus far neglected by economic theory (Soiland, 2016: 190). For them, the household was/is a space simultaneously internal and external to capitalism, a sort of “internal colony” whose boundaries may be continuously drawn and redrawn, always opening new forms of exploitation (Soiland, 2016: 194).

In her well-known work on the lacemakers of Narsapur, Maria Mies illustrated how women still living in a predominantly rural tribal reality could be “integrated” into the global division of labor and the system of capitalist accumulation in ways that facilitated their exploitation. The ideology of domesticity, which defines the position of women in relation to the family, marriage, and heterosexuality, and the fact that the work of lacemaking occurred in the home, made women’s productive activities invisible, reducing them to leisure activities, which justified low wages and maintained the fiction of the male breadwinner. In practice, however, the lacemakers worked between 13 and 16 hours a day with no leisure time whatsoever and were involved in both use-value and exchange-value production. The case of the lacemakers of Narsapur and later studies, such as those of women home workers in Silicon Valley employed in the electronics industry—analyzed by Chandra Talpade Mohanty in her essay “Women workers and the politics of solidarity” (Mohanty, 2003: chapter VI)—usefully illustrate the new forms of patriarchalism exploited by global corporate capitalism. Maria Mies herself writes:

What we wrote on the relationship between the exploitation of ‘housewifed’ female labor-power and capital-accumulation 30 years ago is revealing its full pertinence today, in the age of so-called economic globalisation. One could even say that in the globalised economy, this form of exploitation has become the model for the exploitation of labor in general. Today, the ‘standard employment-relationship’ is no longer a relationship between capital and a (male) ‘free wage-worker’ but one that involves ‘flexible’, ‘atypical’, ‘Third World-ified’ and ‘un-protected’ – in brief: ‘housewifed’ – male and female workers. (Mies, 2014: 221)

Today, the analysis of the Bielefeld sociologists may be extended and refined—as Hartsock (2006), in particular, has done in part²—in an attempt to show the gendered consequences of primitive accumulation. Following Mies, and distancing herself from David Harvey, Hartsock stresses that, rather than new mechanisms of primitive accumulation, she sees most of the same mechanisms at work with consequences that can be clearly distinguished as far as men or women are concerned. For example, just as in the past there was a great pressure to disconnect people from their own land, there is now pressure on women, particularly on women from countries of the global South, to migrate and send home remittances to maintain their families. Alternately, to take another of Hartsock’s examples, contemporary human trafficking that affects mostly women and children and represents the second major source of profit globally can be seen as a resurgence of the old slave trade. For some of the mechanisms by which contemporary dispossession operates, Hartsock suggests “that the fundamentals are being reprised in remarkably similar ways” (Hartsock, 2006: 180). Nevertheless, it seems also important to look at the way in which old mechanisms (for example, the conversion of the commons into exclusive property rights; the commodification of nature; the eradication of indigenous forms of production and consumption; the displacement of peasant populations; the commodification of labor; the credit system and the national debt) “have been fine-tuned to play an even stronger role now than in the past”—as Harvey argues. It also seems important to be attentive to the possibility of new forms in which they can operate, such as the new intellectual property rights established by the so-called “TRIPS agreements,” which are the basis of the new bio-economy.

Both old and new processes of primitive accumulation contain important gender dimensions. Indeed, even the changes in financial markets and capitalism on which Harvey (2003: 146) concentrates his attention, underlining how sub-prime lending and other forms of financial debt may be understood as a form of accumulation by dispossession, have special gendered effects. The recent inclusion of women in the privatized debt economy (in the US, the UK, and Australia, women were excluded from the credit system until the 1970s, see Allon, 2014: 21) had negative consequences on their lives and on their role in social reproduction. There seems to be a clear link between the long hours worked by many women, their disempowered conditions as workers and the debt that many of them have incurred in the multiple and various forms it can assume today, especially as breadwinners in single-parent households: student loans, credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, and micro-credit (Allon, 2014; Roberts, 2013).

The reprivatization of social reproduction in the US and in many other Western countries has also meant the privatization of risk, education, healthcare, and care work (cf. Roberts, 2013: 22). In this sense, debt has been a privatized form of welfare. Colin Crouch (2009) calls it “privatised Keynesianism.” Mortgage loans, credit cards, and other such financial products have become “a debt-financed model of privatised welfare” (Allon, 2014: 19), an important privatized means of meeting daily and long-term needs no longer met by public services. All this has intensified gender-based inequalities. Recent research has shown that, “women, and in particular, women of color, were overrepresented in the ranks of ‘the wretched and reckless’ (The Economist 2007) affected by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and its knock-on effects in Anglo-American and European countries” (Allon, 2014: 14).

If primitive accumulation can no longer be confined to the origins of capitalism—as these examples suggest—in line with Harvey, it would be better to see it as “accumulation by dispossession.” Primitive accumulation had a positive side for Marx, because its abhorrent class violence was necessary “to obliterate feudal relations,” to introduce important progressive changes and open new territories to accumulation through expanded reproduction (Harvey, 2003: 163). Processes of dispossession today are not confined to the Third World, but continue to manifest themselves in the developed world through legal and illegal violent processes of dispossession, ranging from the exploitation of migrant labor to the mortgage foreclosure of private property.

Contemporary social movements’ struggles develop and follow from how capitalism acts in an exploitative way not only on the cycle of production but also on that of circulation, consumption and reproduction (Cini et al., 2017). If, for Harvey, accumulation by dispossession is the “fulcrum” around which capitalism moves and should move contemporary social movements, the gendered nature of these processes of dispossession help us understand why women today, who are subject both to old and new forms of violence and exploitation, are also agents of change and actors in new forms of mobilization. The very nature of the present neoliberal capitalism attack on social reproduction that I have described above pushes them in the forefront of today’s social struggles. In her argument, parallel to, yet at the same time different from Harvey’s, Hartsock makes exactly these points:

First, contemporary processes of capital accumulation are not gender neutral but are built importantly on the backs of women—in terms of exploitation of women, harm done to women, and possibilities opened to women; second, it is important that women, historically, have been more theoretically alert to many of these processes; and third, the gender and indeed “feminized” dimensions of contemporary capital accumulation may, as Harvey himself very interestingly notes, allow for the development of different agents of political transformation. (Hartsock, 2006: 170)

Nancy Fraser and the necessity of a “triple movement”

In her recent analysis of neoliberal capitalism, Nancy Fraser (2014a) also returns to Luxemburg. Instead of speaking of an outside and an inside of capitalism, however, Fraser prefers to use the metaphor of the foreground and the background. Capitalism has an official history, which is the exploitation of wage labor, and a history that has remained largely untold, which refers to those background elements that made and continue to make the economic system possible, and which take form in the exploitation of natural resources and the work of social reproduction. With an analysis reminiscent of both Mies and Hartsock, Fraser argues that accumulation by dispossession should not be considered as gender-neutral: women are affected by this process much more substantially than men, as is evident in the contemporary processes of the feminization of labor and migration (2014a, 2014b). This is, to some extent, also inevitable as long as women are involved more than men in the non-economic relationships of consumption and social reproduction. These elements show that women’s exploitation has been implicit from the outset in the very conditions that have led to the birth of capitalism.

Fraser chooses to abandon the lexical choice of Luxemburg, Mies, Harvey and Hartsock: she does not talk of “internal and external spaces.” The spaces that are depredated through processes of primitive accumulation are not inside or outside of capitalism, according to Fraser, but are the background conditions at the very origins of the birth of the modern capitalist system. ³ At the origins of modernity, capitalism sought to raise barriers between productive and reproductive work, between the human and non-human, between politics and economics (Fraser, 2014a, 2014b). The background spaces have been subservient to the capitalist system, according to Fraser, but they work along a non-economic normativity that has nothing to do with the individualistic, meritocratic, and competitive logic of the market. In times of crisis, these background spaces become subjects of an intensified exploitation and depredation.

Contemporary political struggles, then, grow out of the need to redefine and re-establish the boundaries between the respective human/non-human, productive/reproductive, economic/political, and private/public domains. These political struggles are taken up, for instance, by today’s environmental and anti-capitalist movements, which want to return to the commons or to an economy of solidarity and de-growth. In these movements, as Adrienne Roberts underlines, “women and others marginalized by the old social movements, which were primarily labor-based organizations,” often play a crucial role (think, for example, of the role of women in opposing the privatization of water services in Cochabamba, see Roberts, 2008: 550). These same political struggles were at the center of the recent 8 March 2017 international women’s strike of the Ni una menos, or A Day Without Women international movement. Its broad and inclusive manifesto, in which violence against women is seen as the tip of the iceberg of wider social and economic injustices, demands a complete reinvention of culture, education, life, care, work, and the economy in society. As Lea Melandri, a key figure in the Italian women’s movement, wrote on the occasion of the Italian participation in the international women’s strike:

Today’s international women’s strike seems to have recombined the spirit of the movement in a vision that encompasses everything: sexual and reproductive self-determination, job insecurity, migration, femicide and male violence, sexism, racism and homophobia. It’s investigating the links between sexuality and politics, between patriarchy and capitalism, which already appeared in the pamphlets of the ‘70s but which then seemed abstract. (Melandri, 2017)

According to Fraser, however, these movements risk going in the wrong direction if, in their fight against the contemporary neoliberal capitalist system, they idealize nature, unremunerated care work, and self-government, as if nature and care represented an eternal utopian good outside the system. An effective critique of the capitalist system should not go in the direction of the “double movement” that is the protective and defensive reaction to capitalism suggested by Polanyi in his work The Great Transformation (1944). Instead, according to Fraser, what is needed is a “triple movement” that takes into account the individual’s desire for freedom and emancipation, which led to individual acceptance of the dissolving of social bonds by radical market forces (Fraser, 2013a, 2013b).

Notwithstanding the closeness of her critical analysis to those of feminist authors such as Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, or Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser’s “triple movement” seems more open to a critique and a reform of capitalism in the name of human rights and a social democratic perspective than the pursuit of an open and radical anti-capitalist strategy (for a critique of Fraser from Federici’s perspective, see Federici, 2013; for a critique of Federici from Fraser’s perspective, see Fraser, 2016). Arguing against neoliberalism, Fraser represents leftist political thinkers who would like to strengthen public powers and link capitalism to social justice and the respect for human rights. Other contemporary leftist feminist authors such as Shiva, Mies, Federici, and Segato focus on the possibility of reinventing the commons in order to find an alternative to the market and the state—a state that is seen as guilty of violence perpetrated by legal means or simply by means of inaction or passivity. All these authors look forward to a new and necessary “caring community” in which the costs of social reproduction are redistributed fairly, and its fundamental value clearly and publicly recognized. While for Federici, the reinstatement of care is part and parcel of the search for new spontaneous ways of common living outside of the privatization and marketization of care, for Fraser, on the other hand—and I agree with her—this may just be a “romantic escape” (a similar position seems to be taken by McRobbie (2016) in her discussion of Isabell Lorey’s (2015) book, State of Insecurity). Indeed, the creation of a new caring society should have more to do with a re-politicization of needs and of social and collective responsibility. How the state can be reinvented so that it stops pandering to the interests of global corporations and being complicit in violent processes of accumulation by dispossession through legal intervention must be addressed before we can move forward.

Conclusion

The aim of this article was to highlight the necessity of bringing capitalism back into feminist theory to understand the mobilization of the contemporary global feminist movement. This is necessary today because contemporary neoliberal capitalist accumulation is destroying the very conditions of life and its social reproduction. Old debates, such as those on domestic work, deserve to be updated and restated, as has been undertaken in contemporary feminist political economy, taking into account the profound and widespread socio-economic changes that have shaped not only women’s lives and family life, but life in general over the past few decades in the aftermath of the intensification of forms of capitalist exploitation outside the cycle of production. From this perspective, it is interesting to note that the important alliance between the feminist and the environmentalist movements, which has taken place in numerous countries, starting with action to create a coalition policy, revolves around “needs linked to the support of everyday life” (De Chiro, 2008). This is, indeed, what contemporary Marxist feminism defines as “social reproduction.”

In resisting the neoliberal trend to a widespread commodification of life, however, it is my contention that feminist theory and feminist social movements must develop new solutions and more convincing political objectives. Some contemporary Marxist feminists (Morini, 2010; Weeks, 2011) look at basic income as a universal and gender-neutral instrument to empower civil society and create new spontaneous forms of solidarity, as does the recent global feminist movement Ni una menos/A Day Without Women in its political manifesto. I believe this is necessary and welcome, but insufficient, particularly as far as care labor is concerned. It is impossible to avoid, on the one hand, the issue of the quality and equity of care offered to all those who need it, which must be guaranteed in accordance with the right to give and receive care. On the other hand, there is the issue of overcoming the present sexual division of labor, which a universal basic income would probably only confirm and strengthen.

The global feminist movement Ni una menos/A Day Without Women also constantly refers to second-wave feminist movement experiences of women’s self-managed clinics from the 1970s, and expresses fears about the institutionalization of anti-violence centers. The new global feminist movement asks for new places and cultural centers where women can meet, and where women with different experiences, coming from different classes, ethnicities, with different interpretations of sexuality, gender identity, and sexual orientation, can freely express themselves. These are certainly very important claims. Nevertheless, a major design effort still seems necessary to create new, more democratic public services, and a state whose aim is not to maximize material welfare but to safeguard the well-being of citizens and protect their fundamental human rights, which are threatened by contemporary processes of accumulation by dispossession, by environmental degradation, indebtedness, and the dismantling of social infrastructures. If welfare presupposes economic growth and economic growth means accepting the rigid laws of the market, then the solution is not a simple return to the welfare state (see Oksala, 2016b). The very concepts of welfare, growth, and economy need to be questioned and divested of their alleged neutrality.