When: Tuesday, 13 May at 5.30pm
Where: Peston Lecture Theatre, Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London, London, E1 4NS
Format: In-person
The Reproductive Laws of Capitalism in the Planetary Social Factory
Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS, Development Studies)
Keynote for QMUL Law and Marxism Speaker series
Feminist political economy approaches centred on social reproduction provide us with an alternative framework to read the features and processes shaping capitalism and the global development process. Drawing from Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), Early Social Reproduction Approaches (ESRA) and Raced Social Reproduction Accounts of Slavery and Indenture, this talk sketches the contours of a global feminist political economy framework able to capture various key features of contemporary capitalism, including its extractive reproductive architecture (Fraser, 2017), the centrality of reproductive work to all forms of exploitation (Mies, 1986; Federici, 2004), and the drive towards the regeneration of multiple surplus populations (Mezzadri, 2022). The talk reflects on some of the legal and/or policy implications of this framework, in the realms of social provisions, labour, and reparations.
