If I had to describe three central characteristics of the Indian economy鈥攊ts three defining features in the neoliberal period鈥攖hey鈥檇 be i) , ii) growth in the absence of formal job-creation, and instead an , and iii) the in value added even as its share in employment remains sizeable. In June-July 2019, I did intensive fieldwork in Sangli, a village in in southern Haryana, to make sense of the ways in which these processes interact with agrarian change and play out for agrarian households, i.e. the contemporary Agrarian Question [1]. 

Sangli is in Haryana, where Green Revolution techniques (high yielding seed varieties, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and agricultural machinery like tractors and threshers) were adopted early on. It also happens to be close to the industrial belt that extends from the to its surrounding districts, where in the neoliberal era. This makes it an interesting place to study processes of generation and re-investment of agrarian surpluses, and to peer into the relationship between 鈥渕odernized鈥� agriculture and neoliberal industrial and urban growth that has dwarfed the rural economy.

Agriculture after Green Revolution

Agricultural production, embedded in Green Revolution techniques, is oriented towards the market. While the bulk of cultivated land is inherited through kinship relations, cultivators buy seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides from local shops, and sell their produce either in government procurement centers (mandis) or to local private traders [2]. Some parts of the cultivation process, such as land preparation, sowing, harvesting, and threshing, are wholly mechanized. State support plays a critical role through the provision of subsidized electricity (which allows for the use of motorized pump-sets for irrigation), lower prices for some fertilizers, and in the setting of the minimum support prices for key crops like wheat, mustard, pearl millet, etc. 

Labor Processes in Agriculture 

The institution of caste has historically shaped the rural economy and Sangli is no exception. For centuries, caste-based servitude (the jajmani system) tied individual landless avarna households (formerly untouchables) with savarna landowners or zamindars into relations of forced dependence. Though jajmani ties have broken down, agricultural labor hiring out continues to be the domain of avarna landless households. Apart from local avarna labor, landowning households also hire (and certainly prefer) migrant labor groups for harvesting and threshing operations on piece-rated contracts. Migrants come from nearby states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Bihar, and often comprise whole families (including children) who work together in large groups, are paid by the acre, and therefore finish operations more quickly鈥攑recisely why landlords prefer them to local avarna laborers.

Despite the adoption of modernized techniques and the , high input costs and small farm sizes exert pressure on surplus margins in agriculture. The vast majority of cultivators combine unpaid household labor with hired labor on the farm to mitigate this pressure and boost cash surpluses. Using or E-Ratio, I find that half of the landowners in my sample rely primarily on unpaid family labor. Reliance on family labor further inhibits scale, especially if some household members are diversified in other lines of work. 

Pathways out of Agriculture

Virtually all landowners I spoke with were dissatisfied with returns from agriculture, especially given the dependence of surplus margins on intensive physical labor, and instead sought pathways into 鈥渟ervice鈥� (i.e. formal, often office-based) employment. This is noteworthy because Haryana is frequently presented as a with widespread adoption of modernized techniques and relatively well-functioning public procurement systems for several key crops. 

What I observed instead is that agricultural surpluses paved the way for diversification into non-agricultural activities for savarna landowning households. A large number of savarna landowners, 70% of my sample, earned the majority of their household incomes from non-agricultural sources鈥攆rom wage employment, petty businesses, or transfers. Indeed, the average per capita income for diversified landowning households was twice that of primarily agricultural households. 

Some better-off savarna landowners, particularly banias (or merchant castes), are able to deploy surpluses towards setting up local petty businesses/merchant capital ventures like grain trading, fertilizer and seed shops, kirana (or grocery) stores etc. These households are likely to withdraw from the use of family labor on the farm, and are among the most well-off in the village. Others, predominantly ahirs and brahmins, are able to secure coveted jobs in the public sector, whether in the army, the electricity department, the police, etc., while continuing to cultivate the family farm through a combination of family and hired labor. Once diversified, landowners cease consistent investments in agriculture. 

Using agricultural surpluses to 鈥榠nvest鈥� in education, from local private schools to postgraduate programs in nearby cities, as well as knowledge and social connections cemented over generations of access to public sector employment, savarna landowners dominate the pathways into secure, non-agricultural livelihoods, though not all make the shift successfully. Many are not able to land formal wage employment in the public sector or in offices and factories of the nearby industrial belt. Some respondents revealed that they tried their hand at the work in factories but returned to cultivation because it offered a better livelihood. Land ownership therefore serves as a failsafe against the most precarious and low-paid wage work.

Avarna households on the other hand, who have neither the investible surpluses from cultivation nor the social networks of upper-castes, are precluded from access to formal employment. Engaged primarily in precarious daily wage work in agriculture and construction, the few instances of self-employment are confined to petty commodity production with very small asset bases (as street hawkers, seamstresses, etc.). The limits to formal job creation are more tangible for avarna households. 

Summing Up

The , which engaged with the role of agrarian surpluses in a country鈥檚 trajectory of industrial development, may have been , but agrarian surpluses play a critical role in the realization of pathways out of agriculture. Caste relations, which have historically shaped access to resources and divisions of labor in the rural economy, also shape these trajectories, such that the extent of jobless growth is experienced differently by different caste groups. Savarna landowners seek livelihoods that offer an improvement over cultivation by deploying agrarian surpluses towards education or petty businesses. Landless avarna households are also compelled to diversify out of agricultural laboring but, in the absence of the support of generationally forged social networks or higher education credentials, are rarely able to secure formal employment as savarna landowners do. 

This overlap between segmentations along lines of caste, land ownership, and type of employment, or the 鈥渃o-constitution of caste and class relations鈥� is understood as Alpa Shah and Jens Lerche鈥檚 . Conjugated oppression expresses the ways in which caste, tribe, region, and gender shape how sections of the working class ally with dominant classes and castes to preserve their pre-existing privileges from those below them in the social hierarchy. These complex hierarchies, entailing chains and gradations of inequality and oppression, fragment the overall power of labor and rupture class solidarities.   

Srishti Yadav is an Instructor at the Department of Economics, University of Manitoba. She holds a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research. She tweets at .

This article draws from the author鈥檚 dissertation research conducted at The New School for Social Research, New York. The findings and argument presented here are a modified version of a journal article published online in the Journal of Agrarian Change: .

Endnotes

[1] Name changed to protect the anonymity of respondents.

[2] This is the general trend, though households continue to retain part of the crop (especially food grains such as wheat and pearl millet, as well as crop by-product) to meet domestic consumption requirements and for the upkeep of milch animals (which the majority of landowners keep).

Photo:  / Unsplash

Informal savings group in Tarime district, Tanzania. Photo: Daivi Rodima-Taylor

Self-help groups can be found in many areas of Africa鈥攊ncluding the chama groups of Kenya, isusu of Nigeria, and stokvels of South Africa (Ardener and Burman 1995). Their customary rotating credit arrangement is also popular among African diaspora communities (Hossein 2018; Ardener 2010). A significant rise has occurred in these groups at the wake of the neoliberal restructuring reforms of the 1980s-90s, with a decline in formal sector employment and state-funded producer cooperatives. At present, these mutual support groups are targeted by FinTech platforms as well as conventional banks with various financial products and software apps. My recent research explores of the contentious interplay between the formal and informal finance in these emerging digital interfaces in Africa. It studies the intersection of FinTech with the social economies of African mutual help groups in Kenya and South Africa, situating this dynamic in longer-term colonial legacies and present-day policies of extractive financialization (Rodima-Taylor 2022).

Informal mutual support groups with their saving-credit patterns have long served as an inspiration for the development industry. The initially successful micro-finance model drew on pre-existing reciprocities and mutually negotiated liability in largely informal contexts. However, as the microfinance formula shifted from socially situated lending towards 鈥榝ast-scaling鈥� and universalizing group lending in an expanding range of localities, the industry was faced with repayment crisis (see Haldar and Stiglitz 2016). The recent conceptual shift from microfinance to digital financial inclusion foregrounds mobile payments and fee-based service delivery, with payment industry also experimenting with new sources of value such as customer data (Maurer 2015). Microloans have remained an important part of the digital financial inclusion enterprise, with poorly regulated lending apps fueling over-indebtedness. As informal savings groups and mutual support associations have become central in the livelihoods in many low-income communities, I suggest that more attention is needed to the intersection between the self-help groups and FinTech initiatives in the global South.

Local Economies of Self-help

I suggest that these networks of mutuality should be explored as situated in local economic histories and social structures, but also as embedded in broader political economies. As my earlier three-year ethnographic fieldwork in northeast Tanzania revealed, a variety of self-help groups have become widespread among the Kuria people (Rodima-Taylor 2014, 2013). These built on the norms of cooperation that had emerged in the distant past for sharing agricultural labor, but were also active in non-agricultural ventures such as carpentry, brick-making or tailoring, managed a farm plot or retail kiosk, and frequently had a rotating savings arrangement. The groups provided new opportunities for women and young people marginalized from the traditional men鈥檚 sphere of cattle wealth. Group contributions also mediated transactional cycles relevant to social reproduction, such as bridewealth contributions, and marriage and funeral ceremonies.

Similar self-help groups (locally called chama) are proliferating in neighboring Kenya. The savings groups are widespread among both genders and many of them also manage joint business projects (Mwangi and Kimani 2015; Nyataya 2016). It is estimated that one in three Kenyans belongs to a chama, and many are members of several (Gichuru 2014). Such groups are also widespread in South Africa, where informal savings groups (called ) emerged in the era of colonial displacement. In 2019, 10 million people saved through stokvel groups and 45% of the population belonged to an informal burial society (Shipalana 2019). It is that there are over 800,000 active stokvel groups in South Africa.

I suggest that the evolution of informal savings groups should be seen in the light of the legacies of colonial extraction in these historically 鈥榳hite settler鈥� societies. Stokvels emerged with the labor migration of many Black South Africans to the country鈥檚 gold and diamond mines in the early 1900s, then spreading with the urban migration of Black women as domestic and industrial workers. The groups provided economic security and quasi-kin networks for the labor migrants. The proliferation of informal saving groups in Kenya can similarly be viewed as embedded in the colonial legacies, such as appropriating land and labor by the British East Africa Protectorate. The legacies of labor appropriation did not disappear with the end of the colonial rule: traditional forms of harambee self-help were politicized and scaled up for large public works. In the aftermath of the neoliberal restructuring reforms of the 1980s-90s and with a decline in formal sector employment and marketing, people increasingly sought to regroup into small, informal collectivities鈥�chamas (Kithinji 2019; Ngau 1987).

Plural Infrastructures of Digital Finance

Informal means of financial access continue to flourish in the economies of both countries. Mobile money鈥攁 mode of formal financial inclusion鈥攆eatures as a central means of mediating payments in informal social networks in Kenya, helping people to deal with financial needs and emergencies. While there exist some banking products oriented towards savings groups, these often encourage substantial group deposits with a goal to apply for formal bank loans, and appear in tension with the nature of chama groups where loans are seen as flexible and interwoven with diverse livelihood domains and activities. The mismatch between the practices of these informal groups and formal banking has not disappeared with the digital advent. An increasing number of FinTech firms, sometimes in partnership with Kenyan banks, are working on digital solutions for chama groups. At the same time, there is evidence of a continued importance of offline activities and social networks in the new digital finance space in Kenya. FinTech initiatives such as digital crowdfunding rely on multiple channels and diverse modes of communication, combining in-person funds mobilization, bank-based and mobile payment, social media, and instant messaging (Chao et al. 2020).

In Kenya, FinTech has brought along an overabundance of poorly regulated digital credit and resulted in extensive blacklisting of defaulting borrowers. Digital loans are based on automated eligibility decisions, frequently relying on data scraped from borrowers鈥� phones and social media. Digital credit uptake has been higher among casual workers in the informal sector (Gubbins and Totolo 2018). Digital solutions for chama groups could easily become another step in that progression.

It is significant that many of the digital solutions in the country leverage mobile money, largely supplied by the leading mobile telecommunications provider, Safaricom. While mobile money and its providers are central to Kenya鈥檚 FinTech platform economy, mobile money itself is heavily dependent on cash and on institutions mediating it, such as informal savings groups as well as mobile money agents who often work part-time and underpaid. FinTech platforms in such markets thus depend on diverse peopled infrastructures, leveraging and possibly expanding economic informality and underpaid labor.

This calls into question the assumption that FinTech in Africa advances inclusion in formal market spaces. Instead it could be seen as producing new hybridizations of informal and formal, and inclusion and exclusion, in local financial practices. New financial technology companies build on consolidating and transforming existing market structures due to rapid scaling and network effects, with developing oligopolies changing the competitive basis of retail finance (see Langley and Leyshon 2020). FinTech initiatives in Kenya build on the mobile money platform M-Pesa, often exposing savings groups to poorly regulated digital loans. In South Africa where mobile money platforms play a significantly smaller role, formal inclusion is mostly bank-based, while also utilizing retail stores and funeral insurance companies as points of contact with low-income consumers. Many formal sector initiatives seek to offer various loan and investment products to the groups. As stokvels have emerged as a means to juggle economic insecurity, attempts to adjust them to investment purposes have seen limited success. The platformed economy of FinTech in South Africa that increasingly seeks to connect stokvels with diverse private-sector lenders and investment funds may potentially expand over-indebtedness in the communities long disadvantaged by apartheid-era inequalities.

Ambiguous Formalizations

Efforts to formalize these groups in both countries have largely been limited to group bank accounts, geared to mobilize savings to apply for bank loans oriented towards 鈥榩roductive鈥� investment. Informal savings groups that functioned as important collective risk management devices have therefore been increasingly subjected to indebtedness to formal finance. In both countries, people perceived debt from mutual help groups differently from formal sector debt. While the latter was viewed as an indicator of poverty, the same amount of debt from a savings group was often seen as social investment. All the while, savings groups in both countries were shaped by colonial legacies and enduring racial and economic inequalities that forced people to turn to these local inventions to balance their meager and irregular income.

In both cases, FinTech has not eliminated reliance on cash. In Kenya, the network of agents and cash-out points is likely to grow with the scaling of mobile money as it is integral to emerging FinTech initiatives. In South Africa, cash remains important in low-income communities as stokvels operate heavily in cash. Similarly, the virtual medium is unlikely to completely replace in-person meetings as oral negotiation of group affairs remains an important feature. The FinTech platform economy in such contexts builds on existing infrastructural elements such as mobile phones and local retail outlets, but is also dependent on diverse peopled infrastructures, such as informal savings groups, and mobile money agents with their support networks (see also Rodima-Taylor and Grimes 2019).

With the rise of FinTech platforms that leverage universalizing group templates, an increasing standardization of the ties of mutuality in savings groups may occur. The informal groups could become more vulnerable to expensive credit offerings by 鈥榲irtualizing鈥� their group management. Digital group management systems could facilitate the access to these institutions by ill-regulated lending apps, further commercializing their social purpose. The peculiar constellation of private capital and financial technology around digital platforms may facilitate the appropriation of these social networks for private profit, with local cosmologies of mutuality recruited for another round of instrumentalization for governance.

All the while, the resilience and adaptability of the informal savings groups may also offer hope for positive solutions. Inventively adapting traditional forms of labor cooperation to changing circumstances, the groups could be viewed as another expression of African technology innovation and creative resilience. While Africa鈥檚 FinTech enterprises face numerous challenges in the global marketplace dominated by the ideals and norms of the Silicon Valley, more attention is needed to local innovative start-ups and locally inspired solutions at the burgeoning technology hubs across the continent. And more context-specific analysis of the local informal economies would help us avoid the reification of 鈥榮elf-help groups鈥� as a novel development tool of the digital era, and as a panacea for the widespread exclusion low-income communities from salaried employment and fair financial access.

References

Ardener, S. 2010. Microcredit, money transfers, women, and the Cameroon diaspora. Afrika Focus 23(2), 11-24.

Ardener, S. and Burman, S. (eds). 1995. Money-Go-Rounds. Oxford and Washington DC: Berg Publishers.

Chao, E. et al. 2020. Crowdfunding in Africa: Opportunities and Challenges. In Shneor, Zhao and Flaten (eds.) Advances in Crowdfunding. Palgrave MacMillan.

Gichuru, M. 2014. Strategic planning in investment groups (chama) in Nairobi county. MBA thesis, University of Nairobi.

Gubbins, P., and Totolo, E. 2018. Digital credit in Kenya: Evidence from demand-side surveys. FSD Kenya.

Haldar, A., and Stiglitz, J. 2016. Group lending, joint liability, and social capital: Insights from the Indian microfinance crisis. Politics & Society 44(4), 459-497.

Hossein, C. 2017. Fringe banking in Canada: The collective economies of Toronto鈥檚 鈥楤anker Ladies鈥�. ANSERJ 8(1), 5-19.

Kithinji, K. 2019. Revitalizing the promise of Harambee. ASC-TUFS Working Paper, Hosei University.

Langley, P., and Leyshon, A., 2020. The platform political economy of FinTech: Reintermediation, consolidation and capitalisation. New Polit. Econ., 26(3), 376-388.

Maurer, B. 2015. Data mining for development? Poverty, payment, and platform. In Roy, A. (Ed.) Territories of Poverty. University of Georgia Press.

Mwangi, J. and Kimani, E. 2015. Factors influencing participation of men and women in informal finance groups. Int Journ Hum Soc Stud. 3(1), 42-48.

Ngau, P. 1987. Tensions in empowerment: The experience of the “Harambee” (self-help) movement in Kenya. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 35(3), 523-538.

Nyataya, I. 2016. Women self-help groups enhancing women鈥檚 development processes in Kenya. IJRSA, 2(2), 18-25.

Rodima-Taylor, D. 2013. Gathering up mutual help: Relational freedoms of Tanzanian Marketwomen. Social Analysis, 57(3).

Rodima-Taylor, D. 2014. Passageways of cooperation: Mutuality in post-socialist Tanzania,

Africa, 84(4), 553鈥�575.

Rodima-Taylor, D. 2022. Platformizing Ubuntu? FinTech, Inclusion, and Mutual Help in Africa. Journal of Cultural Economy, DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2022.2040569

Rodima-Taylor, D., and Grimes, W. 2019. International remittance rails as infrastructures: Embeddedness, innovation and financial access in developing economies. Review of International Political Economy 26(5), 839鈥�862.

Shipalana, P. 2019. Digitising financial services: A tool for financial inclusion in South Africa? SAIIA Occasional paper 301.

聽is a social anthropologist, and researcher and lecturer at the African Studies Center of Boston University. Her research interests include financial inclusion, human economies, infrastructures, and land.聽 She tweets at聽.

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 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 鈥� 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, , 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.

Social reproduction is a to capture the organization of life-making activities under capitalism. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) focuses on the reproductive architecture of capitalism, emphasising the destructive nature of the neoliberal reproductive regime. It also explores the relation between class and social oppression, in critical conversation with some intersectionality theories.

However, the conceptualisation of value proposed by SRT is problematic as it remains anchored to productivist analyses, placing the source of value in production. This partially defuses the power of social reproduction as a subversive interpretative lens through which one can re-centre analyses of capitalism on processes making and supporting life. This has not merely theoretical shortcomings, but also political ones. Placing value only in production reduces the possibilities for a politics of solidarity, which may account for the distinct ways in which processes of labour surplus value extraction may systematically occur at the margin of the wage-relation. Productivist views are unable to capture the working of vast informal economies, particularly in the global South.

In order to overcome the limitations of productivist takes on value, I propose instead the elaboration of what I call a 鈥榲alue theory of inclusion鈥�, based on insights by Diane Elson, Jairus Banaji, and Early Social Reproduction Analyses (ESRA) and feminist geography insights. With Diane Elson, I re-centre labour as the main subject and object of Marx鈥檚 value theory. As argued by Elson, Marx was not after the development of a general theory of natural prices. His main aim was to show how labour was at the centre of processes of value generation and extraction.

In effect, Elson claims, rather than a labour theory of value, Marx elaborated a . Different aspects of the labour relation 鈥� like abstract and concrete labour or social and private labour 鈥� are not discrete, separate units of analysis but rather aspects of the same category. In a similar vein, the dual nature of commodities as use-value and exchange-value is not separable. Hence, attempts to distinguish between exchange-value and use-value producing circuits鈥� in production and reproduction, as operated by SRT analyses, drawing on the work of 鈥� cannot hold. Notably, such a rigid schema would also treat labour as any other commodity, as opposed to the 鈥榮pecial commodity鈥� setting the value of all others. In doing so, it would fall into neoclassical economics representations. This rejection of reified understandings of the exchange value/use value distinction sets the first building bloc of my value theory of inclusion.

The second bloc of this theory rests on the recognition of how exploitation can manifest in multiple forms. With Jairus Banaji, I stress that value should not be merely linked to wages, as exploitation should not be merely linked to wage-labour. Capitalism is not defined by wage-labour but by the extraction of labour-surplus, which can take place through multiple 鈥榝orms of exploitation鈥�, including various forms of . Crucially, this point allows us to recuperate not only a capitalist history of unpaid women鈥� s contributions, but also a broader capitalist history of the wageless across the colonial and postcolonial world, where non-wage and disguised-wage labour, including forms of slave, indentured, unfree and bonded labour are the norm. Brilliant feminist analyses of slavery and indenture by authors like , or also highlight the centrality of racialized, unfree labour to global capitalism鈥檚 value generation processes and its brutal reproductive features. 

The third bloc of my theory calls for a return to early social reproduction analyses (ESRA), of the kind elaborated by , , , and , to name a few, in dialogue with feminist geography insights, such as those provided by , , and . The ESRA analyses stress the dynamic interrelation between productive and reproductive work 鈥� domestic, home-based and sex work 鈥� and openly called for a recognition of the value-producing nature of social reproduction. Some of the scholars and activists at the basis of these analyses have been central to the development the political campaign calling for (WhH). The feminist geography analyses instead have painstakingly mapped the entangled nature of production and reproduction across a variety of informal and informalised labour processes and regimes across the world economy, in both colonial and postcolonial times.

Based on the insights of these approaches along with my own extended fieldwork across 滨苍诲颈补鈥檚 , I identify three concrete mechanisms through which social reproduction contributes to value generation and labour-surplus extraction. The first reproductive mechanism of value generation is based on (migrant) workers鈥� living arrangements at their place of work. These arrangements vary across the world economy, ranging from to informal housing in slum-like industrial villages such as Kapashera, in the Delhi metropolitan region. In all cases such living arrangements 鈥� in proximity of factories and managed by various contractors connected to them – are central to employers鈥� ability to easily recall labour onto the global assembly line, and to manufacture compliant workers. This organization of daily social reproduction thus is central to the expansion of exploitation rates, and to the process of labour-surplus extraction and value generation.

The second channel through which social reproduction is generative of value is through the complex process of rural-urban migration and circulation of labour. This process involves millions of 鈥� estimated at almost 300 million in China and 100 million in India alone. It enables the externalisation of a significant portion of costs for the social reproduction of labour, which employers (and states) can dump onto workers鈥� families and villages of origins of migrant workers. Notably, in subsidizing capital by socialising reproductive costs, intergenerational reproductive realms de facto perform a function similar to that of domestic labour in relation to the 鈥榮ocial factory鈥� in ESRA 鈥� just on a massively magnified scale.

Finally, the third channel of the social reproduction of value is shaped by the resilience of processes of formal subsumption of labour across the Global South and – with the rise of platform capitalism and the reorganisation of work triggered by COVID-19 鈥� increasingly also in the Global North. Worldwide, homeworkers are still incorporated in a large number of global value chains.

In homework, which I studied in depth in rural Uttar Pradesh, productive and reproductive times and spaces overlap entirely, a process revealing the problematic nature of theories reifying distinctions between productive and reproductive work. In fact, the exclusion of homeworkers from processes of value generation may well be the result of statistical fiction, as shown in the case of India. Here, where labour markets are structured by embedded in patriarchal and caste norms, women鈥檚 contribution to value is entirely invisibilised. As explained by , the official estimates of the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) exclude a huge number of home-based activities performed by women – and far exceeding definitions of domestic work – from the employment count, de facto hiding women鈥檚 contribution to labour and the economy.

Inclusive understandings of value beyond productivist readings are not a merely theoretical exercise. They do matter politically, as they set the basis to forge horizontal solidarities based on the recognition of a common history of exploitation under global capitalism. The type of 鈥榠nclusion鈥� discussed here is a pernicious one 鈥� one of subalterneity and oppression to the laws of capital. Yet, it is only through the recognition of a common history of capitalist oppression – which allows the wageless to finally reclaim the recognition of their exploitation, past and present – that we can imagine a future of common struggles where the revolutionary subject is not decided a priori. In this future of common struggles, the fight will be fought across productive and reproductive sectors, circuits, realms, times and spaces, at once. As COVID-19 continues savaging our planet, it is only through this articulation of struggles that we can reclaim the products of our formal and informal, productive and reproductive labours.

is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS.

This blog was first published on . To read more, see: Alessandra Mezzadri, 鈥�, Antipode, 2020.

Image: Kapashera, National Capital Region, India. Source: Author, 2019.

Back to work!

As the COVID-19 health crisis deepens, it looks increasingly clear that the is likely to exceed that of any recession in the last 150 years – that is, in the entire history of capitalism. The ILO estimates that the crisis will lead to the . Hence, after discussing at length the epidemiology of the COVID-19 pandemic, media attention is now increasingly focused on how to restart the global economic engine. We may still be mourning our dead, but time seems to have come to discuss how we guarantee economic survival that, under capitalism, is based on production and work. Here in the UK, from where I am writing this piece, getting 鈥楤ritain back to work鈥� is becoming the new mantra for the government, even if its own leader is still recovering from the virus. Similar concerns are debated across the world, as the pandemic has by now clearly turned from a planetary health threat into a planetary economic threat. Yet, getting the world 鈥榖ack to work鈥� 补颈苍鈥檛 no easy endeavour, whilst maintaining social distancing. Global capitalism is based on social interactions. In fact, its global phase has aimed at erasing social distancing, not just between working people but also between countries, markets, commodities and consumers. But at present, the way in which we are used to regenerate life under capitalism would literally kill us, and this is no small print in explaining the impasse of the COVID-19 crisis. It should be the starting point to analyse it. Ultimately, before turning into a crisis of production, the current pandemic has created a systemic crisis of social reproduction. As argued by Tithi Bhattacharya, the pandemic has shown the for the working of capitalism. Moreover, it has also shown the , as well as the stark 鈥榗are inequalities鈥� experienced by different communities and individuals across the globe. By all means, this is a reproductive crisis like no other before.

The pandemic as a crisis of social reproduction

The feminist theorist Nancy Fraser has observed how capitalism, in its different phases, has always been sustained by distinct ; that is, a set of reproductive social relations and institutions able to regenerate capitalist life across its varied historical moment. For instance, across much of the western world, the neoliberal global phase has seen the rise of a commodified, market-based regime of social reproduction – although, as the pandemic is clearly showing, the threat to life this actually poses varies significantly with the actual national health system in place, with great differences between, say, privatised health system in the US and public provision- based systems in European countries like Italy, Germany, or France. The rise and establishment of the neoliberal reproductive regime has not only be instrumental to the development of the neoliberal production model 鈥� with the massive entry, for instance, of women into labour markets 鈥� rather, it has been co-constitutive of it. It follows that the present crisis is not 鈥榡ust鈥� a crisis of production; it is a far deeper crisis of social reproduction. Capitalist crises have always resulted in the emergence of new regimes of social reproduction. However, this is an extraordinary crisis, as in order to protect life we basically need to undermine its very economic base, with no alternative yet in sight. This is why calls for people to go 鈥榖ack to work鈥� fail to clarify how this would happen. This crisis is unique for at least three factors: namely, the inability to exploit, the conflation of paid-work and reproductive time, and the reality and politics of large-scale death.

Unexploitability

First, the present crisis precludes the possibility for capitalist exploitation on a large scale. The infamous motto that under capitalism, 鈥榠t is better being exploited than not鈥� has never made more sense than it does now. When the majority on earth secure their livelihood by selling their labour power, the impossibility to do so threatens life itself, even if spared by COVID-19. Moreover, crucially, during past crises, capital managed to socialise economic losses by dumping them onto workers, the state, or both. This is what has happened during the 2008 crisis, when western banks were de facto bailed out by national governments, whilst workers 鈥� across both the Global North and South – were left to bear the brunt of the economic downturn; the luckiest by paying higher taxes against lower real wages and facing deep cuts in public services, and the less lucky losing their jobs entirely and possibly their (sub-prime mortgaged) homes. In the present crisis, capital cannot yet turn its crisis into a crisis of labour. Thousands of factories are shut entirely, and the production of most non-essential goods and services has halted in many countries. Both employers and workers ought to withdraw simultaneously from the market and literally go back home. Never before in the history of capitalism did we have a crisis where no resources were originally destroyed, physically or financially 鈥� for instance, there was no war, nor initial market crush, although obviously markets are now reacting – yet the economic collapse felt so totalizing. This is what you get when you remove exploitation from a global system feeding on it to survive. The pandemic has irrefutably shown the centrality of human labour to the production of all value. As argued by , the human body and labour-power it contains is the greatest machine ever 鈥榠nvented鈥� by capitalism.

Ironically, in its inability to exploit and overcome its current crisis of reproduction, capital is turning social reproduction itself into a new commodity and political frontier, to find new sources of profit and electoral consensus. So, in the UK, by government鈥檚 attempts to pick and choose which producers should land procurement contracts. In the US, of hydroxychloroquine as an effective COVID-19 cure – despite thin scientific evidence – aims at quickly appeasing the public to open-up the economy again. Crucially, this economic and political game is played against the life-saving efforts of reproductive workers; particularly health workers who, worldwide, in the UK, the US, Italy, Iran, India, and elsewhere, lack much needed protective equipment.

Conflation between paid-work and reproductive time

The second factor that makes this crisis unique is the imposed conflation of paid-work and reproductive time. In effect, this is already a feature of , where people鈥檚 homes often host a huge variety of economic activities destined to domestic and even international markets. However, the ways in which this conflation has accelerated and scaled up for a massive percentage of the world鈥檚 population under COVID-19 lockdowns is unprecedented. Imposed lockdowns have further exposed the stark socio-economic inequalities of the capitalist world we live in. In fact, as we are all told again and again to stay at home, the first most conspicuous inequality emerging is that hitting those who do not have a home at all or not within easy reach. Dramatic images of spatially separated in parking lots or walking back to their villages due to the cancellation of public transport and the eviction from industrial hamlets show that the message 鈥榮tay at home鈥� hardly produces universal outcomes. And even those supposedly lucky enough to have a home to retreat to may face greatly different challenges. Whilst the western media over-reports middle class struggles of juggling paid-work and home-schooling the kids 鈥� I myself as a privileged academic fit the bill here 鈥� many have in fact already lost their jobs. Others may be stuck in dangerous domestic environments 鈥� have skyrocketed worldwide during the pandemic – or simply in inhospitably small where survival, rather than combining paid-work and housework is the real challenge. Unsurprisingly, lockdown experiences are highly classed, gendered and racialised, and testify to the fact that we are not in this together. We have hardly ever been under capitalism. The lockdown itself is only possible because it is exclusionary; confined indoors, but hardly growing our own food or self-satisfying our own necessities, we can only subsist thanks to warehouse, postal and delivery workers, farmers and food chain workers. Many of these key workers hardly make the minimum wage, yet they are ensuring our own reproduction during lockdowns.

The tragedy and politics of large-scale death

The third, yet perhaps most defining and terrible indicator of how this crisis differs from anything we have seen before is death, its rates and its politics. This is a unique crisis of social reproduction as it is 鈥� literally – to die for. True, global capitalism has always showed disregard for the life of the working majority. and and developed many illnesses. Yet, this is the first planetary pandemic we experienced in the age of globalized capitalism 鈥� despite the many similarities, the far deadlier Spanish flu of 1918 supposedly took place in a far less interconnected and – where large-scale annihilation seems to be hitting across classes. I mean, Boris Johnson got it, right? However, high death rates have not erased the ugliness of the class divide in access to health. Even more so than during business as usual, the establishes who lives and who dies. In the US, for instance, of COVID-19. They are poorer and sicker than the rest of the US population, more likely to have diabetes, hypertension, or heart-disease – all dangerous comorbidities – and to be turned away from hospitals for lacking private health insurance. The debate on pre-existing health conditions itself has been exclusionary, ableist and ageist. On the other hand, neoliberal care only interprets the right to live as the survival of the fittest and most 鈥榙eserving鈥�. High rates of death among older people were presented as unavoidable and due to pre-existing health conditions rather than the virus鈥� effects. But a senior citizen hit by a car whilst crossing the road does not die of old age, even if walking slowly. The thing is, the lack of life-saving ventilators and hospital beds in many countries has produced a number of Hobbesian policies. In the UK, some GP practices have gone as far as openly suggesting DNR (do not resuscitate) orders to or to . In the scramble for life, homo homini lupus. Across the world, this unevenness in access to healthcare is matched by an exacerbation of existential inequalities. Across the Global South, evidence suggests that hunger and hardship, rather than the pandemic itself, risk killing thousands. For , making a living during the pandemic will be impossible. The pandemic is also reinforcing caste discrimination, and for supposedly not following government advice over lockdown rules. In Kenya, the can result in large-scale poverty and food stock going to waste. Concerns over informal livelihoods are also raised in where, ironically, essential services in slums are presently guaranteed by local drug-lords and criminal gangs, who also to reduce death rates among 鈥榯heir鈥� poor.

A New World, or new nightmare?

Overall, unexploitability, the collapse of paid-work time as distinct from reproductive time and the tragedy and exclusionary politics of large-scale death have shaped a crisis of reproduction like no other in our recent capitalist history. There is no end in sight as yet; we can hardly imagine the grand finale. explains that pandemics force us to think the world anew; they are a portal between an old world and a next, new era. Will we learn, will we change? Will the next regime of social reproduction adopted by capitalism be more compatible with sustaining life even during crises? One may hope so. However, current debates on potential ways out of the lockdown 鈥� based on 鈥榟erd immunity鈥� and the issuing of immunity passports – seem to chillingly suggest a future yet again based on ever more aggressive frontiers of commodification of reproductive traits of individuals and societies, possibly triggering new socio-economic inequalities based on .

Alessandra Mezzadri聽is a feminist political economist based at SOAS, London, where she is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on global commodity chains; informal labour, global labour standards and modern-slavery; feminisms in development and social reproduction approaches; and the political economy of India. She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments ‘Made in India’聽(CUP, 2017), and聽Marx in the Field聽(ed.)(Anthem, forthcoming).

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