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Accepted Paper:
Social reproduction revisited: On how ecological transition forces us to rethink human labour
Ieva Snikersproge
(University of Neuchâtel)
Ecofeminists, such as Maria Mies, have drawn on Marx's concept "social reproduction" to analyze the appropriation of work done by women, nature, and colonies. Drawing on fieldwork among back-to-the-landers, this paper explores the analytical usefulness of the concept to understand ecological crisis
Paper Abstract:
In the 1970s and the 1980s, Marx’s term “social reproduction” was picked up by materialist feminists to think through the role of unpaid, invisibilised domestic labour in capitalist societies. It has further inspired the work of some ecofeminists -best represented by Maria Mies and her Subsistance Perspective - as well as Jason W Moore, a historian of the World-Ecology, to analyze how capitalism appropriates and essentially wastes the work of nature. This paper, drawing on fieldwork among back-to-the-landers in France, will analyze ecological labour, i.e., human work with nature for crafting ecologically sustainable livelihoods. It argues that “social reproduction” and “reproductive work” provide a useful framework for analyzing how human labour in capitalist societies is organized to systematically undermine the life-generating powers of humans and ecosystems.