Race, Gender, and Social Reproduction

In the long crisis of global capitalism, the production and reproduction of life itself has become a central terrain of struggle. Across geographies and scales, processes of racialization, gendered labour, and the restructuring of social reproduction are deeply intertwined with the contradictions of capital accumulation. As the circuits of production and finance increasingly penetrate the sphere of everyday life, they redefine the boundaries between productive and reproductive work, waged and unwaged labour, human and non-human nature, and the social and the biological.

The Race, Gender, and Social Reproduction stream invites Marxist contributions that examine how the reproduction of labour power, social hierarchies, and ecological conditions are co-constituted through relations of race, gender, and class. We encourage interventions that analyze the political economy of care, migration, and domestic labour; the racialized and gendered organization of global value chains; and the colonial and imperial legacies that structure the distribution of life, death, and work in the present.

We welcome papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

·   Theorizing social reproduction and its crises in historical and contemporary capitalism.

·   Marxist Feminist debates on value, unwaged labor, and the production of life.

·   Extractivism, environmental degradation, and the gendered and racialized division of ecological labour.

·   Migration, care chains, and the transnational organization of reproductive labour.

·   Reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and the commodification of biological reproduction.

·   Authoritarian neoliberalism, welfare retrenchment, and the politics of everyday survival.

·   Collective resistance and the reimagination of social reproduction beyond markets.

This stream seeks to bring together scholars and activists who interrogate capitalism as a totality that reproduces not only commodities and profit but also hierarchies of race, gender, and empire. We invite work that advances the historical materialist method of understanding how the reproduction of life is subordinated to the reproduction of capital and how it can be reclaimed for emancipatory ends.