Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight: What the COVID-19 Pandemic has revealed and why we need to put Social Reproduction at the centre of a more just post-Covid world

March 23, 2021March 25, 2021 sarastevanoLeave a comment

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.

Struggles Over Value: Suppression of locally-led capital accumulation in the Congo

March 21, 2021March 10, 2021 Ben RadleyLeave a comment

By Ben Radley and Sara Geenen

Over the last few decades, African governments have liberalised and privatised their mining industries, attracting significant foreign direct investment. Transnational corporations (TNCs) have become the dominant forces. Their en masse arrival across the continent has been accompanied by the displacement and marginalisation of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). This has been a political process not just to create value, but to transfer value to foreign firms. In this same process, particular production modes are devalued. According to Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner (2011), this is a deliberate process linked to ‘everyday practices and struggles over value’, whereby certain forms and logics of value creation are prioritised and asserted over others.

Yet a consideration or even acknowledgement of these everyday practices and struggles is generally absent from the Global Value Chain (GVC) analysis which dominates the African mining literature (especially the more influential policy papers and flagship development agency reports). This literature is mainly preoccupied with how African firms can integrate into and ‘upgrade’ within TNC-led industrial mining GVCs. It remains largely blind to a consideration of how and from whom value is transferred when recently established TNC-led mines interact with pre-existing and more locally-anchored ASM economies.

Locally driven mechanisation and capital accumulation in the Congo (Sara Geenen).

In our recently published research in ROAPE’s journal looking at the case of South Kivu Province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), we redress this imbalance by documenting precisely these ‘everyday practices and struggles over value’. We demonstrate how a coalition between foreign corporate capital and the Congolese state has marginalised and held back locally-led processes of technological assimilation, capital formation and mechanisation in ASM. By so doing, we direct attention towards the developmental potential of domestically embedded networks of African mining production, and how these networks are disrupted by incoming TNCs.

Monetary policy is ultimately based on a theory of money: A Marxist critique of MMT

March 17, 2021March 12, 2021 nicolasaaguila5 Comments

By Costas Lapavitsas and Nicolás Aguila

During the last two decades, Modern Monetary Theory (henceforth MMT) has won wide academic recognition and public influence. Its most prominent achievements include shifting the public debate on the conduct of economic policy and reviving interest in the theory of money. The former tends to attract most of the attention of both advocates and critics of MMT, but this is unjustified. MMT policy conclusions result from its underlying understanding of money, as some of the more illuminating MMT thinkers make abundantly clear (Bell, 2001; Tcherneva, 2006; Wray, 2010, 2014). A far richer assessment of MMT economic policy proposals would result by first considering the foundations of its theory of money, that is, neo-Chartalism.

In a recent article, we contrasted MMT with the Marxist theory of money. We showed that there were four important points of disagreement between these two schools of thought, namely on: (i) the ontology of money, (ii) the state and money, (iii) state economic policy, and (iv) world money and monetary sovereignty. We supported our argument with historical examples that we omit here for reasons of space.

Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo

March 14, 2021March 14, 2021 parisyeros2 Comments

By Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros and Walter Chambati

This book is a tribute to Sam Moyo. Apart from the great mind and big heart that he was, Moyo was also one of a few in our age to distinguish himself in setting new standards for knowledge production in the social sciences. Some might expect such a feat to require the approval of established centers of learning in the North. But his litmus test was relevance to the tectonic shifts underway in Africa and the South since decolonization. Moyo became a leading light in the quest for epistemic sovereignty at a crucial juncture, when Africa and the South as a whole were succumbing to neoliberal adjustment, and when his own country, Zimbabwe, was gaining independence.

Who was Sam Moyo?

Moyo belonged to the generation of Pan-Africanist intellectuals responsible for defending the gains of liberation and devising strategies of epistemic survival in the midst of structural adjustment. Their epicenter was the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), of which Sam eventually became president. He distinguished himself by his relentless drive to build and defend research capacities in Africa, refusing the lure of professional stability and fame abroad. Those who had the good fortune to meet him would affirm that he pursued this mission with flair, generosity, and a ‘charming inflexibility’ on matters of ideology. In 2002, he founded the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS), in Harare, Zimbabwe, against all odds, in the midst of radical land reform and Western sanctions.

Moyo also forged ahead with the building of new solidarities across the South to recuperate a common front. This he did via CODESRIA, as well the Third World Forum (TWF) and World Forum for Alternatives (WFA) led by Samir Amin, in which he participated over many years. In the 2000s, he also spearheaded the Agrarian South Network (ASN), a new tri-continental initiative with its own research agenda, regular activities, and publishing outlet, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. Those of us who were closest to him knew that the whole of this work of art was much larger than the sum of its parts: new epistemic standards were being set for generations to come.

We locate Moyo’s trajectory in the Pan-Africanist tradition of political economy, where we made significant contributions to the evolving land, agrarian and national questions at continental level and in his home country. In the introductory chapter of the book, we trace his overall contribution to tri-continental solidarity in the social sciences and the development of a global research agenda. We bring to light Moyo’s leading role in the frontlines of the struggle for epistemic sovereignty in Africa and the South at a time when neoliberal restructuring set its sights on autonomous knowledge production and when epistemological questions succumbed to a potent ‘cultural turn’. Moyo fought with great perseverance for autonomous institutions in Africa and the South and for the integrity of the intellectual traditions produced in the struggles for liberation. He defended an approach to political economy which was homegrown in Africa and fundamentally anti-imperialist, against Western intellectual trends, whether materialist or culturalist. This was the vision and mission that defined his Pan-Africanism, tri-continental solidarity, and cosmopolitanism.

Less flow, more pressure: accessing water in N’Djamena in times of Covid-19

March 5, 2021February 22, 2021 ismaelmaazazLeave a comment

“You need pressure to make water flow” Nikhil Anand

Pressure is not always a metaphor for “constraints” or “burden”; it is also a concrete and basic requirement for municipal water supply. Across many cities of the Global South, end-users, city officials, development NGO professionals or agents of the water business (street porters, water fountain managers or public water tap owners) struggle to provide and access water services – a process often characterized by negotiation and contestation. In N’Djamena, Chad, hardships linked to everyday water access fuel two distinct paradoxes. First, maintaining water pressure is a constant source of economic pressure. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, end-users were already compelled to adapt their “hydraulic habits” to their needs and financial resources. Evidence on the ground indicates that the pandemic has introduced a second paradox: the Chadian state has taken official steps to mitigate economic pressure in the daily life of inhabitants in Chad funding a 6 month free water policy, but this has done little in practice beyond decreasing the water pressure (the necessary force that pushes water through pipe, makes it flow and available to end-users) for N’Djamenois who need it most. As such, this blog post argues that economic pressure for the poor has increased while water pressure has dropped as a result of the pandemic and a government intervention that explicitly aimed at addressing the issue Quite predictably, the pandemic has generated additional economic constraints on informal businesses and might have complicated an already knotty landscape in addition to tremendous climate-related problems, foremost among them flooding. However, available evidence suggests that the policy designed to alleviate the burden of bills on those in need failed. Instead of increasing water availability, it reduced and in some cases even cut the water flow. The limited extension of the water supply network also made the policy pointless to many, while wealthier end-users connected to the water supply network enjoyed the policy as a bonanza. This demonstrates that infrastructural expansion, not just emergency funding, is critical to any meaningful water and sanitation improvements.

Economics Through the Lens of Women – A Review of Giandomenica Becchio’s A History of Feminist and Gender Economics

March 1, 2021February 1, 2021 ritwikapatgiriLeave a comment

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’.

Developing Economics

A Critical Perspective On Development Economics