By Lyn Ossome and Rama Salla Dieng
In this interview, Rama Salla Dieng shares her thoughts on methods, feminist political economy, land questions in the Global South, radically reclaiming parenting as a political terrain of subversion and resistance, commitments to decolonisation while located in the western academy, radical acts of self-care, and African feminism.
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“Where do people not say, “I want to do X, but the circumstances of my life don’t give me a chance”? To this sort of common discontent, the [capabilities] approach responds by saying, “Yes indeed, in some very important areas you ought to be able to do what you have in mind, and if you aren’t able, that is a failure of basic justice.”
Martha Nussbaum, 2011
The Triple Day Thesis: Describing the Triple Day Problem
The triple day thesis presents a theoretical analysis of motherhood from a capability perspective as a path to resolving maternal capability failures within the triple day – the triple day problem. The triple day thesis of motherhood is conceptualized as a mother who engages in the reproductive work of childbearing and childrearing (the single day), in addition to waged work (the double day) and self-reproductive work (the triple day).
In my article “The Triple Day Thesis” (2021), I formally define self-reproduction as involving tasks or activities that a person, in this case a mother, undertakes to replenish herself physically, medically, emotionally, intellectually, socially, psychologically, or other forms of replenishment that is primarily beneficial to her non-economic well-being. Self-reproductive activities could involve having time for recreation; time for healthy living practices; time for friendships and joining associations, awareness groups etc., within the community; the “me-time” for basic personal hygienic practices, to pray, reflect on and plan one’s life; and time to engage in academic work which is the more intellectual form of self-reproduction. A combination of one or more of these self-reproducing or self-realizing activities within a twenty-four-hour day including sleep hours would make up what I call the triple day.
According to the triple day thesis, it is within the triple day that several of the central capabilities Martha Nussbaum (2011) proposes in her capability theory of social justice take place. Nussbaum’s central capabilities for women’s human flourishing include life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses, imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, concern for other species, play, and control over one’s material and political environment.
The absence of self-reproduction in women’s lives due to the pursuit of motherhood, entails the absence of human flourishing, and therefore constitute social (gender) injustice. It is this which describes the problem of the triple day.
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In the classical works of dependency theory, such as the Dialectics of Dependency (Marini 2011 [1973]); Socialism or Fascism (Dos Santos 2018 [1978]); Dependency and Development in Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto 1979) and Latin American Dependent Capitalism (Bambirra 2012 [1978]), race and gender are absent. This absence is at odds with both the evident reality of racial and patriarchal oppression in Latin America and the concomitant rise of feminist and anti-colonial literature in the social sciences. In fact, in the exciting intellectual and political environment of the 1960s and 1970s, it would not be difficult to imagine productive dialogues between Ruy Mauro Marini and Margaret Benston, and Vânia Bambirra and Amilcar Cabral. Sadly, these dialogues never took place. Instead, the first generation of dependency scholarship privileged debates with white, male scholars engaged in modernisation sociology, structuralist economics and Marxist orthodoxy. With the sole exception of Vânia Bambirra’s forgotten writings about peripheral women’s liberation, gender and race remain to this day ignored by the dependency tradition.
Although the absence of race and gender does indeed represent a major blind spot in the work of dependency writers, the most seminal concepts coined by some of the early dependency writers such as Ruy Mauro Marini and Vânia Bambirra have ‘intersectional’ (Crenshaw 1989; 1991) potential. By that, I mean that they can be understood as referring to more than simply class-based dynamics of domination. Let us consider two examples: Marini’s concept of the ‘super-exploitation’ of labour and Bambirra’s definition of Latin American ruling classes as ‘dominated–dominant’.
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In the last year, the rise and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the fictitious nature of some of the categories we deploy to conceptualise the world of labour. Indeed, it has revealed the contingent nature of the separation between productive and reproductive spaces, times and realms when it comes to labour processes.
According to estimates produced by Janine Berg, Florence Bonnet, and Sergei Soares, when the crisis hit, around 30% of North American and Western European workers were in occupations that could allow home-based work, as opposed to only 6% of sub-Saharan African and 8% of South Asian workers. This is to say that in the Global North, the pandemic could de facto manufacture million homeworkers overnight, following national lockdowns. In many cases, these would still be contributing to formal sectors of the economy.
It is rather unsurprising that this shift to homeworking could not materialise in the Global South. Labour relations here are largely characterised by informal employment, in its double character – namely, employment in the informal economy and informalised employment in otherwise formal settings. While homeworking represents one segment of informal employment, its major share is composed instead of precarious forms of casual employment, far more difficult to immediately insource in home-settings. By the time the crisis hit, according to the ILO, informal employment constituted 69.6 percent of employment in the Global South and, given the share of working people it hosts, it constituted over 60 percent of total employment on our planet.
One of the key characteristics of informal employment is the interpenetration between productive and reproductive dynamics, activities and realms. The ever-growing reality of informal employment forces us to reflect and revise theories of value generation and extraction, and ultimately the basis of exploitation worldwide. That is, they force us to re-engage in the study of key Marxian categories of analysis, in ways that may account for how the majority on earth labours. These ways must necessarily account for the centrality of social reproduction in the working of labour processes and relations worldwide.
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“Without community there is no liberation, no future, only the armistice most vulnerable and temporary between me and my oppression.” Audre Lorde to Tony Morrison
The Home
Toni Morrison is one of the writers who wrote the most about ‘the home and racial justice’. In her emblematic novel Beloved, set in the post-Civil War South, she tells the story of a young girl murdered by her formerly-enslaved mother, Sethe. Sethe is importantly surrounded by the unheimlich (Freud), the stranger, where the foundations of our ethical judgment on slavery are found. In the United States, in the period 1882 to 1895, approximately one-third to half of the average black mortality rate corresponded to children under the age of five (Bhabha, 2002). We face the dilemma of judging these acts.
Sethe, in an act of love, kills her daughter Beloved to avoid her master’s appropriation of her daughter. Sethe was a pariah in the post-slavery society of the United States. She knew from when she was a slave what it meant for a woman to have her children taken when her breasts were full of milk; that she would have been beaten to exhaustion for others to take her milk. She was raped by her master, as was the case for many of the slaves of Sweet Home; that name itself being a mockery of a plantation that was held under a system of slave laws that collaborated on that tragic fate. If a female slave escapes, there is a double loss; the capacity for reproduction and for manual labor. The slave society must permanently produce new slaves for reproduction (Bidaseca, 2010).
Sethe insistently repeats:”It wasn’t a story to share. They forgot it like a nightmare (…) What should be forgotten before it is shared; what should be hidden and silenced as to not interrupt our present?”. I wondered in my book Perturbando el texto colonial. Los estudios poscoloniales en América Latina (2010): “This is not an easy story to transmit” but it needs to, as says Bhabha (2002), so that it may be engraved in our subconscious.
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By Sara Stevano, Alessandra Mezzadri, Lorena Lombardozzi and Hannah Bargawi
After over a year of suffering, death and profound transformations of everyday life, it is time to take stock of the COVID-19 crisis so far and craft visions for a future centred on the value of social reproduction. In our article ‘Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight’ recently published in the special issue on Gendered Perspectives on COVID-19 in Feminist Economics, a social reproduction lens is used to analyse the COVID-19 crisis.
What is social reproduction? Social reproduction is ‘the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life’ as well as ‘a set of structured practices’, as vividly put by Cindi Katz, that are needed for the reproduction of both life and capitalist relations. In other words, it encompasses all the work, unpaid and paid, and the socio-cultural practices, institutions and sectors that are essential for the regeneration of our lives and society. As such, it speaks about the organisation of work both within and outside households. This is a key vantage point, we argue, to explore the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.
In fact, this crisis is fundamentally different from previous ones exactly because it shakes the foundational elements of our economies and societies: the organization of work, in its multiple forms. To fully analyse this process, we need to consider the interplay between reproductive and productive work, explore the effects of the crisis in the world of work, and map the interconnections with the reorganization of the role of the household within it. Notably, the tragic outcomes of the crisis should be understood as also dictated by the greatly damaging effects of decades of neoliberalization, austerity, and privatization of social reproduction, which as argued by Nancy Fraser, have produced a chronic crisis of care across the world economy. Households have been subject to a double squeeze. They have socialised this chronic crisis of care, while also being hit by declining income shares from paid employment. During the same period, in fact, labour markets experienced the feminization and informalisation of employment.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated an already critical situation in terms of socioeconomic inequality and the squeeze on social reproduction across the globe. However, the crisis may also lay the foundations for a rediscovered appreciation of the significance of social reproduction.
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There is a long-standing debate on how economics as a subject is gender blind giving rise to various branches within the subject that seek to address ‘the woman question’ (as early feminism has been labeled) within the discipline. Giandomenica Becchio’s book A History of Feminist and Gender Economics is not merely an attempt to understand the history of economics and how the various dimensions of ‘the woman question’ have entered the discipline of economics over the years. The book also explores the work of women economists who mostly remained unheard in the discipline, the women who struggled to enter into the academic realm and the debates within these economists about addressing ‘the woman question’.
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Although social reproductive work has historically been associated with women in different modes of production, with the spatial separation of reproduction from production in industrial capitalist society, women were further associated with the domestic sphere and reproductive work. The burden of reproductive work on women has increased even more in the last four decades as a result of neoliberal policies. Neoliberalism, which is characterised by the increasing privatisation of social reproduction and worsening labour conditions, has forced more women to accept low-paying, informal jobs while at the same time performing an increased amount of reproductive work in their families due to significant cuts in social welfare provisions.
Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has once again shown the great importance of social reproduction to international and national political economies, and the destructive effects of neoliberalism on lives on a global level. Thus, in both the academic and political arenas, we need once again to underline the centrality of social reproduction and women’s unpaid reproductive labour to society and capitalist production.
In my recently published article, I suggest a methodological-analytical approach to understand the relations of production and social reproduction: a comprehensive and relational approach that locates these social relations in their historical and geographical context and within the everyday.
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Developing Economics 