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Alan Sears

“Sears takes social reproduction feminism and queer Marxism in exciting new directions as he historicizes penetration and orgasms. He expands the concept of alienated labor to all life-making and founds a queer ecology, foregrounding colonized, racialized, and disabled voices” Peter Drucker, author of Warped

“Meticulously outlines how capitalism shapes human intimacy. ... A sweeping, original analysis that challenges how we think about sexuality, life-making, and building a better world” Holly Lewis, author of The Politics of Everybody

“A compelling argument on the pervasive alienation of capitalist society that truncates and distorts our capacities for creative expression, love, and human flourishing” M. E. O’Brien, author of Family Abolition

Our deeply human drive to shape the world around us and fulfill ourselves through labor is subverted by capitalist alienation, leaving us to find fulfillment elsewhere.

As a result, our erotic drives become the central focus for transformation and life-making, but are themselves restricted and fueled by whatever energy is left after completing the monetized or social reproductive work required to survive. This alienation encounters ongoing resistance, as life-making activity can never be fully separated from the person who labors.

Eros and Alienation delves into the underexplored relationship between alienated labor and sexuality. Alan Sears explores the ways this alienation frames the processes of gender and sexual formation, showing how the organization of work contributes to the development of a dominant regime of gendered sexualities, defined by a binary gender mapping of desire as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.

Alan Sears is Professor of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is an activist and author of several books including The Next New Left.

Pluto Press

Mapping Social Reproduction Theory

Eros and Alienation: Capitalism and the Making of Gendered Sexualities

Anna Fielder

‘This insightful, thoughtful work needs to be read by all of us ... Fielder brings together the two concepts of labour – work and giving birth – and shows us how both are subsumed under capitalism’ Barbara Katz Rothman, author of In Labor

‘Entirely original and a fascinating read’ Robbie Davis-Floyd, cultural, medical and reproductive anthropologist

‘Fielder’s nuanced analysis demonstrates the contradictory features of obstetrics in capitalist society. A pivotal addition to Marxist understandings of pregnancy and childbirth’ Kirstin Munro, Assistant Professor, The New School for Social Research

Childbirth is often described as a natural process, and yet the choices we make around birth, the risks we face, and the care available to us, are tightly bound up in the dynamics of the capitalist system in which we live. Capitalist relations shape childbirth in largely unacknowledged ways but with intensely inequitable, often traumatic, effects. 

Going into Labour is a Marxist analysis of the labor of childbirth and of birth care. Through the chapters, former midwife Anna Fielder interrogates key features of contemporary childbearing, situating birth as a crucial site of struggle against capitalism. 

Fielder writes about productivity drives, insurance companies, risk formulations and calls for scientific evidence. She emphasizes the pay of birth workers, such as midwives and nurses, and their working conditions. She also signals the importance of political struggles in birthing arenas against forces including racism, colonialism, misogyny, and cisheteronormativity. As capitalism draws on these forces, shaping contemporary inequities and oppressions, activists work to gestate futures that aspire beyond the present constraints.

Anna Fielder is a sociologist in the Midwifery Department, Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

Going Into Labour: Childbirth In Capitalism

Aaron Jaffe

How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism?

Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this book, Aaron Jaffe extracts SRT's radical potential, relying on recent struggles, including the International Women's Strike and the teachers' strikes, showing how we can use SRT to motivate socialist politics and strategy.

Using Social Reproduction Theory to appreciate distinct forms of social domination, this unique and necessary book will have vital strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists.

Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon: Work, Power and Political Strategy

Peer Illner

Many communities in the United States have been abandoned by the state. What happens when natural disasters add to their misery? This book looks at the broken relationship between the federal government and civil society in times of crises.

Mutual aid has gained renewed importance in providing relief when hurricanes, floods and pandemics hit, as cuts to state spending put significant strain on communities struggling to survive. Harking back to the self-organised welfare programmes of the Black Panther Party, radical social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter are building autonomous aid networks within and against the state. However, as the federal responsibility for relief is lifted, mutual aid faces a profound dilemma: do ordinary people become complicit in their own exploitation?

Reframing disaster relief through the lens of social reproduction, Peer Illner tracks the shifts in American emergency aid, from the economic crises of the 1970s to the Covid-19 pandemic, raising difficult questions about mutual aid's double-edged role in cuts to social spending. As sea levels rise, climate change worsens and new pandemics sweep the globe, Illner's analysis of the interrelations between the state, the market and grassroots initiatives will prove indispensable.

Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response between the State and Community

This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.

In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation. 

Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.

Mapping Social Reproduction Theory - The book series

Mapping Social Reproduction Theory - The book series

Mapping Social Reproduction Theory books in order

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