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The Covid-19 pandemic threw into stark relief the multi-dimensional threats created by neoliberal capitalism. Government measures to alleviate the crisis were largely inadequate, leaving women – in particular working-class women – to carry the increased burden of care work while at the same time placing themselves in direct risk as frontline workers. Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19, the seventh volume in the Democratic Marxism series, explores how many subaltern women – working class, peasant and indigenous – challenge hegemonic neoliberal feminism through their resistance to ordinary capitalist practices and ecological extractivism. Contributors cover women’s responses in a wide range of contexts: from women leading the defence of Rojava – the Kurdish region of Syria, to approaches to anti-capitalist ecology and building food secure pathways in communities across Africa, to championing climate justice in mining affected communities and transforming gender divisions in mining labour practices in South Africa, to contesting macro-economic policies affecting the working conditions of nurses. Their practices demonstrate a feminist understanding of the current systemic crises of capitalism and patriarchal oppression. What is offered in this collection is a subaltern women’s grassroots resistance focused on advancing and enabling solidarity-based political projects, deepening democracy, building capacities and alliances to advance new feminist alternatives.

Coined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867), the “metabolic rift” or “ecological rift” model describes the cycle of extraction, exportation and exhaustion present in agricultural production and, in particular, highlights the unsustainability of this ecologically-unequal exchange. This article integrates world-literary theory, Social Reproduction Theory, and the model of the metabolic rift to explore how Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (1977) illuminates the peripheralization of women within the capitalist mode of production. The increasing pressure on women to be producers causes contradictions in the protagonist’s materiality and exposes the pressures placed on writing—especially women's writing—to meet the expectations of literary production. The novel’s commodity consumption, crisis of social reproduction, and meta-narrational features become windows to view the women’s work and women’s narratives which simultaneously sustain and are exploited by the capitalist mode of production. By connecting these various threads, I suggest the ignored labor of social reproduction under capitalism signals a crisis of consumption and a loss of capitalistic futurity, alerting readers to the unsustainable nature of the current capitalist mode of production.

With growing awareness of a crisis in pollinator health, the practice of urban hobbyist beekeeping has grown in Canada with practitioners arguing that this activity can help to foster healthier honey bees and more mindful beekeeping practices. However, urban hobbyist beekeepers have been critiqued for encouraging improper beekeeping practices and over-saturation of honey bees in cities. Drawing on a multispecies ethnography based in London, Ontario and Toronto, including participant observation with the Toronto Beekeeping Collective and the London Urban Beekeeping Collective and interviews with 26 urban beekeepers, I argue that urban hobbyist beekeepers develop a sensuous and embodied relationship with honey bees that typifies playful work. By integrating participant perspectives with social reproduction theory, I demonstrate that the playful work of urban hobbyist beekeeping allows practitioners to engage with non-human nature outside of the constraints of capitalist labour regimes, enabling the expression of delight, enchantment, and curiosity. This relationship between beekeepers and honey bees encourages the development of bee-centred practices in which the preferences and physiological needs of the bees are consciously put ahead of the needs of the beekeeper. The possibility for honey bee flourishing is increased significantly when bee-centred beekeeping is coupled with integrated pest management.

The 2023 New Zealand general election was marked by media narratives about a youth crime crisis, with special emphasis placed on ram raids and the Māori children and young people blamed for perpetrating them. We show that empirical data do not support the claim that youth crime is surging, and argue that fears of ram raids tap into longstanding beliefs about Māori. Using archival sources from the era of early European settlement in Aotearoa, we show that Pākehā settlers constructed Māori children and young people as uniquely dangerous delinquents. Using Louis Althusser's theory of ideology and subjectivation, we argue that this delinquentisation played a key role in constituting a colonial ideology that would justify primitive accumulation, colonisation, and the imposition of the capitalist mode of production in Aotearoa. Looking to the contemporary neoliberal era, we argue that moral panics about ram raids continue this colonial ideology of delinquentisation. By subjectivating children and young people as delinquents, the capitalist class is able to use the criminal justice system to displace responsibility for the crisis of social reproduction precipitated by neoliberal economic policy. We conclude by showing the limitations of this strategy and arguing for intensified struggle against the ideology of delinquentisation.

This article shows how the Eastern and Central European export footwear sector has experienced economic and social downgrading and immiserating growth over the last three decades. Based on interviews with 209 workers from 12 factories across six countries, it analyses how intense gender-based labor exploitation-entailing dangerous working conditions and poverty pay-underpins the sector's expansion and extra-regional integration. It draws upon and contributes to the global poverty chain (GPC) approach by (1) showing how the concept is relevant beyond the global south, and (2) providing a gendered political economy perspective from which to conduct GPC analysis. It concludes by suggesting that GPC's are quite common throughout the world economy, and that their existence requires a more critical approach to much global value chain analysis.

This article examines the gendered and geopolitical dynamics of contemporary logistical capitalism through the experiences of Romanian women truck drivers. Drawing on Social Reproduction Theory, it theorises the ‘logistical colonisation of life,’ a process whereby social reproductive labour is absorbed and instrumentalised to sustain supply-chain fluidity. The truck cabin emerges as a ‘total space’ that blurs production and reproduction, a situation intensified by ‘crew’ employment, which commodifies intimacy and externalises reproductive costs. Furthermore, while social platforms enable new forms of solidarity, they simultaneously function as ‘affective tachographs’ that monitor and re-commodify resistance.

This article analyses the intersections of labour, social reproduction, and refugee politics through an ethnographic case study of Hungarian Romani families living in Canada. Building off of recent anthropological debates on surplus populations, the article frames the life activities of asylum-seekers as a form of labour, paying particular attention to gender and the dynamics of ‘women’s work.’ The main question explored is: what sort of life-sustaining strategies do refugees engage in when they are excluded from both wage labour and citizenship regimes? The key argument put forward is that Hungarian Romani asylum-seeking to Canada should be understood as a social reproduction strategy and a type of gendered work that has emerged in the contemporary conditions of global neoliberal capitalism. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how the asylum-seeking activities of Romani families are embedded in gendered divisions of work in which gaining access to refugee status and state social support in Canada is regarded as an extension of domestic labour and familial care work, typically done by the maternal figures of the family. Moreover, the ‘women’s work’ of securing refugee support is recognized by Romani families as a legitimate form of paid work, a kind of ‘bread winning’. Reflecting on these fieldwork findings, I propose an expanded approach to social reproduction theory that is attentive to the unwaged, informal, and life-making work of refugees and surplus populations, ultimately arguing for a breakdown of the dichotomy between the ‘economic migrant’ and the ‘political refugee’ in light of the social totality of capitalism.

Coined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867), the “metabolic rift” or “ecological rift” model describes the cycle of extraction, exportation and exhaustion present in agricultural production and, in particular, highlights the unsustainability of this ecologically-unequal exchange. This article integrates world-literary theory, Social Reproduction Theory, and the model of the metabolic rift to explore how Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (1977) illuminates the peripheralization of women within the capitalist mode of production. The increasing pressure on women to be producers causes contradictions in the protagonist’s materiality and exposes the pressures placed on writing—especially women's writing—to meet the expectations of literary production. The novel’s commodity consumption, crisis of social reproduction, and meta-narrational features become windows to view the women’s work and women’s narratives which simultaneously sustain and are exploited by the capitalist mode of production. By connecting these various threads, I suggest the ignored labor of social reproduction under capitalism signals a crisis of consumption and a loss of capitalistic futurity, alerting readers to the unsustainable nature of the current capitalist mode of production.

“Care robots” offer technological solutions to increasing needs for care just as economic imperatives increasingly regulate the care sector. Ethical critiques of this technology cannot succeed without situating themselves within the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. What, however, constitutes “care” and its status as a potential critical resource, and how might care robots damage this potential? Although robots might threaten norms of care, I argue that they are by no means necessarily damaging. Critiques of care robots must not entrench exclusionary images of the ideal carer. Instead, critical reflection on their use should trouble dominant paradigms of care.

Intersectionality is often understood to exist primarily as a corrective to other emancipatory theories rather than as a theory in its own right. Social reproduction theory (SRT), a strain of Marxist feminism exemplified in this article by contributors to the volume Social Reproduction Theory – Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression published in 2017, is characterized by a self-understanding that involves incorporating intersectional insights as a reaction to Black feminist interventions. In this narrative, intersectionality itself becomes obsolete, serving first and foremost as a step on SRT’s dialectical journey to becoming a better theory. Allegedly undertheorized intersectional frameworks constitute an ever-present foil for SRT’s self-image as an emancipatory theory of the capitalist social whole. This narrative is problematized on multiple levels in this article. SRT and its depiction of intersectionality are summarized in the first part of the paper. The second part demonstrates, on the one hand, that a historicization of intersectionality as ‘intervening’ into Marxist feminist theories, adding an intersectional perspective to feminist analysis of capitalism, ignores the formative role of analyses of Black women’s position as working subjects within overarching capitalist structures in intersectional thought. On the other hand, SRT's narrative occludes practical and theoretical implications of a framework that explicitly theorizes resistance from the margins. Building on this critique of SRT’s understanding of intersectionality, the third part develops an intersectional notion of solidarity, thus showing that the ostensibly seamless integration of intersectional insights into SRT obfuscates a potentially fruitful tension between the two frameworks pertaining to their respective understandings of solidarity and social transformation.