Social Reproduction and Financial Extractivism

GAGO, VERÓNICA

feminists@law An open access journal of feminist legal scholarship

University of Kent

Lugar: Bristol; Año: 2023 vol. 12 p. 1 - 22

f we define neoliberalism as a form of intensified extractivism, we can see how feminist struggles are strategies against dispossession and against financial devices as a private solution to that dispossessions and as a new form of value extraction. Therefore, there is an urgent need to expand initiatives that materially confront the capacity to extract rents, and that incorporate the conditions of social reproduction— from health care to housing, to pensions and electricity and internet and phone bills— into the labor struggle. It is the conception of labor that is at stake here, of who produces value and what modes of life deserve to be assisted, cared, and paid for, and also where the resources will come from if we aim for a global reorganization of the world of work. But also to support the networks that produce a de-domestification of care. I think that there is a feminist pedagogy to do that consists in proposing analysis while also developing programmatic interventions. Explaining why there is a change in the relations of production that takes the sphere of reproduction (violently attacked and made “unsafe”) a privileged site becomes a central hypothesis for understanding the ways in which care and telework, the restriction of incomes and emergence of new debts, greater difficulties in formal and informal employment and the housing emergency become mixed together, along with the strengthening of platforms as service providers and the increase in internet and telephone rates.