Social Reproduction Theory and Racial Capitalism

Mary-Jo Nadeau's scholarship and politics deepened our understanding of the ways in which capitalism is built on social oppression. That insight is also at the heart of two renewed and burgeoning intellectual traditions: social reproduction theory (SRT) and abolition feminism. This article reads two powerful analyses of racial capitalism, Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) and Reckoning with Slavery by Jennifer Morgan (2021), through an SRT lens. It stresses that these books document, on the one hand, the modern and colonial states' organization of Black peoples' life-making labours and, on the other hand, forms of resistance involving Black women's individual and collective control over the conditions of social reproduction. In centring social reproduction in the analysis of the integral relation between class and race, and in strategizing resistance to capitalism, these accounts help to refine and concretize social reproduction feminist thinking about the state, alienation, and anti-oppression, anti-capitalist politics. Les recherches et la politique de Mary-Jo Nadeau ont permis de mieux comprendre comment le capitalisme repose sur l'oppression sociale. On retrouve la meme clairvoyance au c oe ur de deux traditions intellectuelles renouvelees et en plein essor : la theorie de la reproduction sociale (TRS) et le feminisme abolitionniste. Cet article presente deux solides analyses du capitalisme racial vu sous l'angle de la TRS : Golden Gulag de Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) et Reckoning with Slavery de Jennifer Morgan (2021). Ces livres, soutient-il, exposent, d'une part, l'organisation par les etats modernes et coloniaux du labeur des Noirs, et, d'autre part, les formes de resistance impliquant la mainmise individuelle et collective des femmes noires sur les conditions de la reproduction sociale. En centrant la reproduction sociale sur l'analyse de la relation integrale entre classe et race, et en elaborant des strategies de resistance au capitalisme, ces vues d'ensemble permettent d'affiner et de concretiser la pensee feministe en matiere de reproduction sociale qui porte sur l'etat, l'alienation et les politiques anti-oppression et anticapitalistes.