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.