The effect [of contemporary neoliberal capitalism] is to intensify capitalism’s inherent contradiction between economic production and social reproduction. Whereas the previous regime [of post-45 state-managed capitalism] empowered states to subordinate the short-term interests of private firms to the long-term objective of sustained accumulation, in part by stabilizing reproduction through public provision, this one authorizes finance capital to discipline states and publics in the immediate interests of private investors, not least by demanding public disinvestment from social reproduction. And whereas the previous regime allied marketization with social protection against emancipation, this one generates an even more perverse configuration, in which emancipation joins with marketization to undermine social protection. The new regime emerged from the fateful intersection of two sets of struggles. One set pitted an ascending party of free-marketeers, bent on liberalizing and globalizing the capitalist economy, against declining labour movements in the countries of the core; once the most powerful base of support for social democracy, these are now on the defensive, if not wholly defeated. The other set of struggles pitted progressive ‘new social movements’, opposed to hierarchies of gender, sex, ‘race’, ethnicity and religion, against populations seeking to defend established lifeworlds and privileges, now threatened by the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the new economy. Out of the collision of these two sets of struggles there emerged a surprising result: a ‘progressive’ neoliberalism, which celebrates ‘diversity’, meritocracy and ‘emancipation’ while dismantling social protections and re-externalizing social reproduction. The result is not only to abandon defenceless populations to capital’s predations, but also to redefine emancipation in market terms. Emancipatory movements participated in this process. All of them—including anti- racism, multiculturalism, LGBT liberation, and ecology—spawned market-friendly neoliberal currents. But the feminist trajectory proved especially fateful, given capitalism’s longstanding entanglement of gender and social reproduction. Like each of its predecessor regimes, financialized capitalism institutionalizes the production–reproduction division on a gendered basis. Unlike its predecessors, however, its dominant imaginary is liberal-individualist and gender-egalitarian—women are considered the equals of men in every sphere, deserving of equal opportunities to realize their talents, including—perhaps especially—in the sphere of production. Reproduction, by contrast, appears as a backward residue, an obstacle to advancement that must be sloughed off, one way or another, en route to liberation. Despite, or perhaps because of, its feminist aura, this conception epitomizes the current form of capitalism’s social contradiction, which assumes a new intensity. As well as diminishing public provision and recruiting women into waged work, financialized capitalism has reduced real wages, thus raising the number of hours of paid work per household needed to support a family and prompting a desperate scramble to transfer carework to others. To fill the ‘care gap’, the regime imports migrant workers from poorer to richer countries. Typically, it is racialized, often rural women from poor regions who take on the reproductive and caring labour previously performed by more privileged women. But to do this, the migrants must transfer their own familial and community responsibilities to other, still poorer caregivers, who must in turn do the same—and on and on, in ever longer ‘global care chains’. Far from filling the care gap, the net effect is to displace it—from richer to poorer families, from the Global North to the Global South. This scenario fits the gendered strategies of cash-strapped, indebted postcolonial states subjected to IMF structural adjustment programmes. Desperate for hard currency, some of them have actively promoted women’s emigration to perform paid carework abroad for the sake of remittances, while others have courted foreign direct investment by creating export-processing zones, often in industries, such as textiles and electronics assembly, that prefer to employ women workers. In both cases, social-reproductive capacities are further squeezed.
Nancy Fraser, from “Contradictions of Capitalism and Care,” NLR 100 (July/August 2016)