A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time. Группа авторов

of the social wage constitute a drain on the production of surplus value (especially shareholder profits). Capital’s retreat from the social wage has resulted in the increasing financialization and marketization of social reproduction, assigning it a market value (Bryan and Rafferty 2014). This embodied labour moreover can now be acquired flexibly for select slivers of time, on zero-hour contracts at minimum wages and below. Moreover, artificial intelligence (via various platforms that simulate social interaction) and automation are increasingly supplanting embodied labour. Being stripped of waged employment, the body can be ‘employed’ as an encasement of desirable parts and organs – such as hair, blood, kidneys – whereby ‘biotechnologically isolated, manipulated, and disseminated life is absorbed by capitalist processes’ (Floyd 2016, p. 61). For example, biotechnological developments in biological reproduction has led women from being a source of labour–power to becoming a source of living raw material through surrogacy. We understand this multifaceted process of eliminating labouring bodies broadly as a continuation of processes of enclosure.

As the conditions in which social reproduction takes place have become more precarious and attacks upon it have accelerated, its analysis (having fallen into a lull during the 1990s and 2000s) has once again risen to the top of many feminist agendas. With no room for race or other relations of oppression beyond those of class and gender in the early social reproduction analyses, there had been a theoretical divestment, until the most recent revival of social reproduction theory, which brings a rigor to hitherto unaddressed questions (Ferguson et al. 2016; Bhattacharya 2017). In the last decade, social reproduction theory has emerged as an attempt to offer a unitary theory of women’s oppression. Social reproduction feminists have critiqued earlier feminist political economy analyses for not focusing on ‘the multi-faceted complexity of real-world relations and political struggles, as well as the ways in which racial oppression intersects with gendered forms of domination and class exploitation’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 28). In order to avoid such theoretical fallacies, contemporary social reproduction feminists have reconceptualized their ontological presuppositions in regard to the nature of the social. They argue that relations of oppression that are racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized, ‘are not additional systems that just happen to coincide. Rather, they are concrete relations comprising a wider sociality, integral to the very existence and operation of capitalism and class’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 32). We further add that, to examine the constitutive role of racial difference as a historically sedimented formation, the conceptualization of social reproduction could usefully be brought into conversation with postcolonial urban theory. This is central not only to ensuring that our conceptualization of social reproduction is historicized but, as Ananya Roy (2016a) would argue, is also attentive to historical difference as constitutive of the urban.

      Notwithstanding its intimate political and theoretical relations with earlier debates, and sometimes because of this, social reproduction theory is often mistaken as a mere synonym of either domestic labour debates or socialist feminism. And yet it is premised upon distinctive ontological and epistemological propositions in that it foregrounds the internal relationship between capitalist value-producing labour and its often omitted predicate, that is non-capitalistically produced social reproductive labour, by focusing on the latter’s necessary but contradictory relation to the capitalist pursuit of surplus value. Through shifting the analytical focus onto this internal relationship, social reproduction theory is able to: historicize the notion of patriarchy vis-à-vis specific modes of production and their attendant social formations; demonstrate that women’s oppression is not a pre-capitalist residue that capitalism merely picks up, but is integral to the very logic of capitalism as a system, and is necessarily reinvented as regimes of capital accumulation change; and argue that historically specific forms of patriarchy and capitalism are not external to one another, but, rather, are co-constitutive of each other.

Our understanding of social reproduction builds upon those of social reproduction theorists in that we do not consider it as a coherent stable construct over time and place, but as an historicized and spatialized construct, speaking to multiple layerings, subject to its own internal dynamics as it is buffeted between the use of labour and resources needed to live everyday life. It includes the embodied labour (paid and unpaid) in conjunction with the resources, such as those of land, ‘nature’, time, technology, and increasingly capital, that enable human and non-human life to occur, the emotional and material needs of everyday life to be met, as well as hopes and dreams for the future, and the material social practices that constitute the organization of daily life and life over generations to take place.⁷ It is about the process of the production of value – both use and exchange value – moulded through the spatialities and temporalities of the everyday and determined through differentiation and struggle.

      Social Reproduction and the Urban

      The feminist political economy analyses of social reproduction discussed above, and their recognition of the need to situate processes of social reproduction – in bodies, households, institutions, and processes of globalization – has yet to extend to the urban. Reorienting social reproduction from the household to the global capitalist system at large, not least because ‘the renewal of labour-power occurs in, and through, the policing of borders, flows of migrants and the remittances many send to their countries of origin, army camps, refugee camps, and other processes and institutions of a global imperialist order’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 31), social reproduction theory has tended to treat the urban merely as a spatial and empirical accoutrement. In this way, the question of space, spatiality, and spatial forms in contemporary social reproduction theory become naturalized to the phenomena under consideration. In other words, it is not that an urban spatial-blindness marks these theories; rather, urban space does not figure as an analytic category in the making of these theories.

Feminist political economy has yet to rethink social reproduction as a feminist urban problematic, namely that the urban is increasingly the site and urbanization is increasingly the process through which social reproduction takes place. Why do we argue this? Certainly we cannot ignore that the world’s population is now predominantly living in places called urban (such as towns, suburbs, cities, megalopolises, and so on). And we cannot overlook that, within the next few decades, it will be approximately two-thirds of the world’s population living in urban places, owing not only to rising rates of urbanization in Southern cities (through natural increase and the movement of the world’s rural population into urban places), but also to the reclassification of rural areas into urban ones.⁸ Our argument is driven primarily, however, by the realization that it is now urbanization, the engine of this growth and movement, that increasingly drives capitalism. Harvey’s voluminous work on the urban process under capitalism and the ‘secondary circuit’ of capital, has shown how surplus capital is turned into fixed assets of land and real estate (i.e. the built environment). Others have pointed to the increased embedding of the state into urbanization processes. Especially in Southern cities, urban land development – through infrastructure projects, real estate for local elites, and mega projects – are often now prioritized over the provision of jobs and industrial development (Schindler 2017; Goodfellow and Owen 2018). But it is arguably Lefebvre’s (2003 [1970]) thesis on urban modernity in crisis in The Urban Revolution, in which he theorized a trajectory of the replacement of the industrial city through a process of ‘complete urbanization’, that has best understood the role of the urban beyond capital accumulation and class-based struggle.

      As we wrote previously (Ruddick et al. 2018), from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, Lefebvre followed the transformation of everyday life, to formulate a concept of the urban revolution, which he invested with two meanings. In the first, the urban revolution inverts relationships between the pre-capitalist rural and the ‘urban’ and subsequently the relation between capitalist industrialization and capitalist urbanization: ‘The “rural” no longer produces the “urban”, but the reverse. Moreover, the urban is no longer merely an effect of capitalist industrialization. Once produced, the urban does not depend on industrialization for its own continuity; it becomes capitalism’s opening to different labour processes through a reorganization of socio-spatial relations’ (Ruddick et al. 2018, p. 394). Lefebvre referred to urban society’s transcendence of industrial society as the engine of capitalism, as processes of ‘implosion and explosion’