Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation, and the Law, Routledge, 2017, hbk £120; ebook £37.79; 2019 pbk £36.99.
|
RATING: 80
|
Buy this book?
|
Yes
|
Note: This review first appeared as 'Towards a new global gender order? Reflecting on Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare, Capital & Class, 42, 3, 2018, pp. 537-42.
Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare, first published in 2017, and now available in paperback, is a book in transition. It has outgrown but not discarded a framework of Coxian ‘critical’ IPE with a twist (power, production and social reproduction), law as an aspect of the social ontology of capitalism, and patterns of incarceration in the US, UK and Canada. Within it, a powerful and potentially path-breaking gendered historical materialist perspective is struggling to be born. But it is not taken far enough, and one of its strengths – a focus on the connection between the law and primitive accumulation – becomes a weakness in relation to the present era of global competitiveness arising from the completion of the world market. As recent revolutions in production and concomitant global social and institutional change are under-explored, it is weak on the ‘post-male-breadwinner’ gender order, and it is this that I address.
First, though, I touch on the prominence accorded to rates of incarceration in the US, the UK and Canada. Although these are described ‘not as a reaction to neoliberalism but rather as constitutive of this particular configuration of capitalist social relations’ (4), they are a small, heavily overdetermined and relatively minor aspect of this, and the claim that these countries have ‘some of the highest rates of imprisonment and oppressive policing practices’ (3) is contrived. The US ranks first, in a league of its own, among leading states; England and Wales ranks 103rd, with Scotland and Northern Ireland lower, and Canada 140th (World Prison Brief, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Birkbeck, at prisonstudies.org, accessed 1 March 2017). What is more, the rising trend dates from the 1970s in the US, but the early 1940s in the UK (Allen & Dempsey, 2016: 4), suggesting different logics at play. Recent studies make it clear that the US ‘carceral state’ is highly specific in its structure (federal, state and local) and social and racial dynamics (Gottschalk, 2015; Camp, 2016). And Roberts herself shows that current female prison populations are also highly specific (and differently racialised) in the US and Canada, making any direct association with neoliberalism problematic. I focus away from this material, and also set aside the Coxian ‘neo-Gramscian’ ideas-institutions-material capabilities approach, and concentrate on the gendered historical materialist perspective which is the book’s signal contribution.
Roberts sees the ‘production of gender difference’ as ‘foundational to the emergence of capitalism and its reproduction over time’, and argues that conceptions of capitalism must therefore be widened ‘to include the social relations of gender and the feminized relations of social reproduction, which are integral to capitalist reproduction yet rendered invisible in most literature in the social sciences’ (4-5). She approaches this by associating successive phases of capitalist development with related (and to an extent mutually constitutive) gender orders. A three-century long transitional phase in which women and households retain some (diminishing) role in production gives way to a male breadwinner model which emerges as a predominant tendency and an idealised norm during the nineteenth century with industrial capitalism; this in turn begins to erode in the mid-to-late twentieth century, giving way to a ‘dual-earner’ model in which women still bear primary responsibility for domestic and ‘reproductive’ labour. These gender orders are integral parts of successive institutional and ideological forms of the ‘gendered social ontology’ of capitalism, in which liberal political economy gives way to penal-welfare paternalism (with the male breadwinner model emergent in the first, and solidified in the second), and then to neoliberalism in the current period. Although the liberal and neoliberal periods are characterized by reliance on markets, the state actively shapes social relations throughout, and the law is ‘productive’ in the way that it ‘creates the social relations of private property and wage labour, as well as the ways in which it creates and reproduces gender relations over time’ (35).
This conception of the law rests on three premises: that it ‘operates as a mechanism of the primitive accumulation of capital in different points in history’; that ‘primitive accumulation is a highly gendered process’; and that ‘these manifestations of state power should be viewed not simply as repressive instruments of the ruling class but rather as part of the social ontology of capitalism’ (5). Legal and disciplinary regimes ‘have not simply been used to discipline wage labour, but also to create and reproduce women’s subordinate position in households and communities’ (11; cf. 21-38). The central chapters, then, explore the constitution and reproduction of the gendered social relations of capitalism, with primitive accumulation as a guiding thread. In the transition to capitalism, proletarianization was accompanied and furthered by the separation of social reproduction from production, or a process of ‘housewifization’, and in the process women’s bodies were ‘enclosed’, and ‘controlled by men and the state and regulated in the interest of capitalist production’ (33-34). The pre-industrial transition phase in which ‘there were still some spaces available for women to participate in the family, economy and society’ gave way to ‘a specifically capitalist form of gender differentiation, which associates women/femininity with the “private sphere” of the household and domestic labour and men/masculinity with the “public sphere” of work and reward’ (46; cf. 59-60).
These ideas are not new, but the strength of the account comes from its systematic development, its integration of gender and the law into its foundations, and the detailed analysis of changing patterns of and orientations towards welfare, criminality and punishment. Roberts shows how successive Poor Laws, laws against infanticide, the regulation and formalization of marriage and the doctrine of couverture created an early capitalist gender order aimed at both producing an exploitable labour force and breaking women’s control over reproduction. Hence ‘the creation of a fully commodified labour market and the formal separation of the public (i.e. productive) and private (i.e. reproductive) spheres’ (71) go together. So ‘in the nineteenth century, social reproduction was increasingly separated from relations of production, relegated to the so-called private sphere and associated with women. In this process, the risks and insecurities generated by economic dependence on the free market were individualized and privatized, becoming the responsibility of individuals and families rather than the local community’; and the family was ‘reconstituted’, and came to play ‘a certain policing function’ (80-81). New laws on divorce, custody and adoption recognized and reinforced these changes, and the regime of poor laws, prisons and police was further reformed in the period 1829-34. The subsequent shift to ‘penal-welfare paternalism’ rested on a gender order ‘more firmly shaped along the lines of the male-breadwinner model’ (108), while the advent of neoliberalism went along with its ‘erosion’ (128) as labour became more precarious for all workers, state support for social reproduction was stripped away, and new laws sought to make survival outside the labour market impossible. Now, Roberts claims, disciplinary neoliberalism ‘helps to divide the labour force in ways that undermine solidarity and ensure the continual availability of cheap labour while also performing the integrally related function of reproducing gender norms that assign women primary responsibility for low-paid and unpaid care work and domestic labour’ (141). The paradox of the constitution of neoliberal capitalism is that ‘while the gradual erosion of the male-breadwinner model has increased the autonomy of many women in particular spheres of life …, more and more of the responsibilities associated with social reproduction have also been shifted onto families and particularly onto women’ (160-61). Hence the ‘dual earner model’, and presumably global capitalism writ large, still depend upon the segmentation of the labour market and the separation of production and social reproduction. I take issue with this.
An historical materialist analysis of the contemporary period must be grounded in the completion of the world market and the advent of global competitiveness, alert to successive revolutions in production and the ‘speeding up’ of commodification, cognizant of changes in social structure that have made the nuclear family and the ‘dual earner’ model questionable points of reference, and crucially appreciative of the law not only as a driving force behind primitive accumulation, but also as regulating capitalist social relations once established. Here Pashukanis, who sees the law as constituting the subject as a bearer of rights over commodities and reaching full fruition only with the conditions of developed commodity production, is fundamental (Pashukanis, 2002: 60; Miéville, 2006: Chs. 3-4). The focus on primitive accumulation and ‘marginal’ populations not fully subsumed to capital deflects attention from the regulation of conflictive relations between owners of commodities, and between workers and capitalists over the sale of labour power.
It is relevant here to recall Jane Lewis’s point, made in an analysis of the decline of the male breadwinner model, that modern welfare systems ‘have always been constructed around the relationship between social provision and paid work; it is this that has in large measure distinguished them from needs-based and universal, but punitively deterrent, poor law systems’ (Lewis, 2001: 152, emphasis mine). Roberts takes no account of the manner in which the law produced and disciplined the gendered waged worker, from the Factory Acts of the nineteenth century (she skips over without mention the initial reliance of industry on women and children as ‘hands’ that prompted them), via the evolution of labour law in England and North America out of the Masters and Servants Act (Deakin & Wilkinson, 2005: 61-74), to the huge changes to labour contracts and their legal regulation over recent years, and the parallel punitive approach to labour organization, of which UK legislation commencing under Thatcher and culminating in the Trade Union Act of 2010 is emblematic (Deakin, Lele, & Siems, 2007; Adams, Freedland, & Prassl, 2014; Bruun, Lörcher, & Schömann, 2014) (McCann & Murray, 2014; Fredman & Fudge, 2016; Freedland, 2016). Freedland argues that even where the increasingly marginal ‘standard contract of employment’ still exists, it has become one ‘in which the employer enjoys a full liberal freedom to transfer a whole panoply of risks and uncertainties to the employee’ (ibid: 9), and Deakin observes, in relation to the EU’s ‘new economic governance’, that ‘the idea that social policy should in various ways either compensate for, or more broadly legitimate, the construction of the internal market has given way to a new emphasis on its role in promoting competitiveness and addressing economic imbalances in the single currency area’ (Deakin, 2014: 83). These comments pinpoint the individualization of risk across the labour market as a whole and for men and women alike in the context of the ‘descent into precarity’ arising from the all but universal embrace of a politics of global competitiveness (ibid: 2). One side of this is indisputably a leveling down that can be seen as ‘feminization’ or the erosion of male privilege. But another side is reflected not only in the Equal Pay Act (1970), the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), and subsequent reforms up to the Equality Act (2010), which Roberts does not consider, but also in the energetic promotion of women as entrepreneurs by corporations, governments and international organizations – on which she has herself written incisively elsewhere (Roberts, 2015).
A second set of issues concerns the changing character of relations between motherhood, families and households in the context of revolutions in production and global competitiveness. First, childbearing from conception onwards is as subject to technological revolution, commodification, and the global fragmentation of production as anything else. Second, illustrating from the UK case, a significant minority of women now choose not to have children, and for those that do, the average age of birth of first child is approaching thirty; in 2008-09 there were more households with a single adult worker (20%) than with two (or more) adults and only one worker (17%), and 47% of households had two or more workers (Brewer & Wren-Lewis, 2012: 7); fewer than a third of households consisted of a married or cohabiting couple with dependent children – the traditional ‘nuclear family’ (ONS, 2015: 5), and 69.8% of women between 16 and 64 were in work at the last count (January 2017), with a substantial and rising majority in full time work (ONS, 2017: 8, and Table 3). Third, the revolution in provisioning – the ready meal and microwave/telephone and takeaway – and access for a growing affluent minority to transnational domestic service reflect a massive commodification of ‘social reproduction’.
These considerations point towards developing a gendered historical materialism and identifying an emergent gender order on the terrain of the world market as a whole, and questioning the idea that capitalism requires that social reproduction must take place outside the market. In the context of the rampant commodification of everything, driven by incessant technological revolution arising from worldwide competition between capitals, governments and international organizations alike call for every adult to be developed as a worker in the world market. This ‘universal adult worker’ is the basis for the new global gender order consistent with a politics of global competitiveness. Some outstanding recent contributions to the journal Social Politics help to flesh it out. The commitment of developed-country governments (in particular in the EU) to a policy frame of ‘social investment’ – in which the main focus is on ‘how to support women to enter and remain in the labour market’, and the citizen envisaged is ‘first and foremost a paid worker, either in actuality or (when a child) in the making’ (Saraceno, 2015: 257) – intensifies a care deficit which is to be met through the outsourcing of domestic labour to poor women and particularly legal and illegal migrants (Estevez-Abe, 2015) (Hellgren, 2015; Morel, 2015) (Shire, 2015). A gendered approach is indispensable, and the global legal and institutional framework is of fundamental importance. But it suggests a turn away from incarceration in the UK, US and Canada towards a focus on global pressures from the ILO and elsewhere for the formalization of labour markets, the subordination of family policy in developed economies to the demands of the labour market (Ferragina & Seeleib-Kaiser, 2015), and the regimes of discipline and punishment (including the deliberate cultivation of both legal and illegal channels) of predominantly female migrant workers in both Europe (Leerkes, 2016) and North America. All this vindicates and extends Roberts’ gendered historical materialist framework. But it also suggests strongly that the relative confinement of women to the domestic sphere and their marginal or subordinate position in the labour force is not a necessary condition for capitalism, but an indication of its incomplete development. If this is so, the task of ‘primitive accumulation’ is not complete until all workers are really subsumed to capital, and both domestic labour and biological reproduction are fully commodified.
References
Adams, Abi, Freedland, Mark, & Prassl, Jeremias. (2014). The ‘Zero-Hours Contract’: Regulating Casual Work, or Legitimating Precarity? labourlawresearch.net.
Allen, Grahame, & Dempsey, Noel. (2016). Prison Population Statistics. House of Commons Briefing Paper, SN/SG/04334, 4 July.
Brewer, Mike, & Wren-Lewis, Liam. (2012). Why did Britain’s households get richer? Decomposing UK household income growth between 1968 and 2008-09. Institute for Social & Economic Research Working Papers series, 2012-08.
Bruun, Niklas, Lörcher, Klaus, & Schömann, Isabelle (Eds.). (2014). The Economic and Financial Crisis and Collective Labour Law in Europe. Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart.
Camp, Jordan. (2016). Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deakin, Simon. (2014). Social Policy, Economic Governance and EMU: Alternatives to Austerity. In Niklas Bruun, Klaus Lörcher, & Isabelle Schömann (eds), The Economic and Financial Crisis and Collective Labour Law in Europe (pp. 83-106). Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart.
Deakin, Simon, Lele, Priya, & Siems, Mathias. (2007). The evolution of labour law: Calibrating and comparing regulatory regimes. International Labour Review, 146, (3-4), 133-162.
Deakin, Simon, & Wilkinson, Frank. (2005). The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialisation, Employment and Legal Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Estevez-Abe, Margarita. (2015). The Outsourcing of House Cleaning and Low Skill Immigrant Workers. Social Politics, 22, 2, 147-169.
Ferragina, Emanuele, & Seeleib-Kaiser, Martin. (2015). Determinants of a Silent (R)evolution: Understanding the Expansion of Family Policy in Rich OECD Countries. Social Politics, 22, 1, 1-37.
Fredman, Sandra, & Fudge, Judy. (2016). The Contract of Employment and Gendered Work. In Mark Freedland (ed), The Contract of Employment (pp. 231-252). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freedland, Mark. (2016). The Contract of Employment and the Paradoxes of Precarity. University of Oxford, Legal Research Paper Series, 37.
Gottschalk, Marie. (2015). Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hellgren, Zenia. (2015). Markets, Regimes, and the Role of Stakeholders: Explaining Precariousness of Migrant Domestic/Care Workers in Different Institutional Frameworks. Social Politics, 22, 2, pp. 220-241.
Leerkes, Arjen. (2016). Back to the poorhouse? Social protection and social control of unauthorised immigrants in the shadow of the welfare state. Journal of European Social Policy, 26, 2, pp. 140-154.
Lewis, Jane. (2001). The decline of the male breadwinner model: Implications for work and care. Social Politics, 8, 2, pp. 152-169.
McCann, Deidre, & Murray, Jill. (2014). Prompting Formalisation Through Labour Market Regulation: A ‘Framed Flexibility’Model for Domestic Work. Industrial Law Journal, 43, 3, pp. 319-348.
Miéville, China. (2006). Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. London: Pluto Press.
Morel, Nathalie. (2015). Servants for the Knowledge-Based Economy? The Political Economy of Domestic Services in Europe. Social Politics, 22, 2, 170-192.
ONS. (2015). Families and Households: 2015.
ONS. (2017). UK Labour Market: Mar 2017.
Pashukanis, Evgeny B. (2002). The General Theory of Law and Marxism. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
Roberts, Adrienne. (2015). The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17, 2, pp. 209-231.
Saraceno, Chiara. (2015). A Critical Look to the Social Investment Approach from a Gender Perspective. Social Politics, 22, 2, pp. 257-269.
Shire, Karen. (2015). Family Supports and Insecure Work: The Politics of Household Service Employment in Conservative Welfare Regimes. Social Politics, 22, 2, pp. 193-219.
Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare, first published in 2017, and now available in paperback, is a book in transition. It has outgrown but not discarded a framework of Coxian ‘critical’ IPE with a twist (power, production and social reproduction), law as an aspect of the social ontology of capitalism, and patterns of incarceration in the US, UK and Canada. Within it, a powerful and potentially path-breaking gendered historical materialist perspective is struggling to be born. But it is not taken far enough, and one of its strengths – a focus on the connection between the law and primitive accumulation – becomes a weakness in relation to the present era of global competitiveness arising from the completion of the world market. As recent revolutions in production and concomitant global social and institutional change are under-explored, it is weak on the ‘post-male-breadwinner’ gender order, and it is this that I address.
First, though, I touch on the prominence accorded to rates of incarceration in the US, the UK and Canada. Although these are described ‘not as a reaction to neoliberalism but rather as constitutive of this particular configuration of capitalist social relations’ (4), they are a small, heavily overdetermined and relatively minor aspect of this, and the claim that these countries have ‘some of the highest rates of imprisonment and oppressive policing practices’ (3) is contrived. The US ranks first, in a league of its own, among leading states; England and Wales ranks 103rd, with Scotland and Northern Ireland lower, and Canada 140th (World Prison Brief, Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Birkbeck, at prisonstudies.org, accessed 1 March 2017). What is more, the rising trend dates from the 1970s in the US, but the early 1940s in the UK (Allen & Dempsey, 2016: 4), suggesting different logics at play. Recent studies make it clear that the US ‘carceral state’ is highly specific in its structure (federal, state and local) and social and racial dynamics (Gottschalk, 2015; Camp, 2016). And Roberts herself shows that current female prison populations are also highly specific (and differently racialised) in the US and Canada, making any direct association with neoliberalism problematic. I focus away from this material, and also set aside the Coxian ‘neo-Gramscian’ ideas-institutions-material capabilities approach, and concentrate on the gendered historical materialist perspective which is the book’s signal contribution.
Roberts sees the ‘production of gender difference’ as ‘foundational to the emergence of capitalism and its reproduction over time’, and argues that conceptions of capitalism must therefore be widened ‘to include the social relations of gender and the feminized relations of social reproduction, which are integral to capitalist reproduction yet rendered invisible in most literature in the social sciences’ (4-5). She approaches this by associating successive phases of capitalist development with related (and to an extent mutually constitutive) gender orders. A three-century long transitional phase in which women and households retain some (diminishing) role in production gives way to a male breadwinner model which emerges as a predominant tendency and an idealised norm during the nineteenth century with industrial capitalism; this in turn begins to erode in the mid-to-late twentieth century, giving way to a ‘dual-earner’ model in which women still bear primary responsibility for domestic and ‘reproductive’ labour. These gender orders are integral parts of successive institutional and ideological forms of the ‘gendered social ontology’ of capitalism, in which liberal political economy gives way to penal-welfare paternalism (with the male breadwinner model emergent in the first, and solidified in the second), and then to neoliberalism in the current period. Although the liberal and neoliberal periods are characterized by reliance on markets, the state actively shapes social relations throughout, and the law is ‘productive’ in the way that it ‘creates the social relations of private property and wage labour, as well as the ways in which it creates and reproduces gender relations over time’ (35).
This conception of the law rests on three premises: that it ‘operates as a mechanism of the primitive accumulation of capital in different points in history’; that ‘primitive accumulation is a highly gendered process’; and that ‘these manifestations of state power should be viewed not simply as repressive instruments of the ruling class but rather as part of the social ontology of capitalism’ (5). Legal and disciplinary regimes ‘have not simply been used to discipline wage labour, but also to create and reproduce women’s subordinate position in households and communities’ (11; cf. 21-38). The central chapters, then, explore the constitution and reproduction of the gendered social relations of capitalism, with primitive accumulation as a guiding thread. In the transition to capitalism, proletarianization was accompanied and furthered by the separation of social reproduction from production, or a process of ‘housewifization’, and in the process women’s bodies were ‘enclosed’, and ‘controlled by men and the state and regulated in the interest of capitalist production’ (33-34). The pre-industrial transition phase in which ‘there were still some spaces available for women to participate in the family, economy and society’ gave way to ‘a specifically capitalist form of gender differentiation, which associates women/femininity with the “private sphere” of the household and domestic labour and men/masculinity with the “public sphere” of work and reward’ (46; cf. 59-60).
These ideas are not new, but the strength of the account comes from its systematic development, its integration of gender and the law into its foundations, and the detailed analysis of changing patterns of and orientations towards welfare, criminality and punishment. Roberts shows how successive Poor Laws, laws against infanticide, the regulation and formalization of marriage and the doctrine of couverture created an early capitalist gender order aimed at both producing an exploitable labour force and breaking women’s control over reproduction. Hence ‘the creation of a fully commodified labour market and the formal separation of the public (i.e. productive) and private (i.e. reproductive) spheres’ (71) go together. So ‘in the nineteenth century, social reproduction was increasingly separated from relations of production, relegated to the so-called private sphere and associated with women. In this process, the risks and insecurities generated by economic dependence on the free market were individualized and privatized, becoming the responsibility of individuals and families rather than the local community’; and the family was ‘reconstituted’, and came to play ‘a certain policing function’ (80-81). New laws on divorce, custody and adoption recognized and reinforced these changes, and the regime of poor laws, prisons and police was further reformed in the period 1829-34. The subsequent shift to ‘penal-welfare paternalism’ rested on a gender order ‘more firmly shaped along the lines of the male-breadwinner model’ (108), while the advent of neoliberalism went along with its ‘erosion’ (128) as labour became more precarious for all workers, state support for social reproduction was stripped away, and new laws sought to make survival outside the labour market impossible. Now, Roberts claims, disciplinary neoliberalism ‘helps to divide the labour force in ways that undermine solidarity and ensure the continual availability of cheap labour while also performing the integrally related function of reproducing gender norms that assign women primary responsibility for low-paid and unpaid care work and domestic labour’ (141). The paradox of the constitution of neoliberal capitalism is that ‘while the gradual erosion of the male-breadwinner model has increased the autonomy of many women in particular spheres of life …, more and more of the responsibilities associated with social reproduction have also been shifted onto families and particularly onto women’ (160-61). Hence the ‘dual earner model’, and presumably global capitalism writ large, still depend upon the segmentation of the labour market and the separation of production and social reproduction. I take issue with this.
An historical materialist analysis of the contemporary period must be grounded in the completion of the world market and the advent of global competitiveness, alert to successive revolutions in production and the ‘speeding up’ of commodification, cognizant of changes in social structure that have made the nuclear family and the ‘dual earner’ model questionable points of reference, and crucially appreciative of the law not only as a driving force behind primitive accumulation, but also as regulating capitalist social relations once established. Here Pashukanis, who sees the law as constituting the subject as a bearer of rights over commodities and reaching full fruition only with the conditions of developed commodity production, is fundamental (Pashukanis, 2002: 60; Miéville, 2006: Chs. 3-4). The focus on primitive accumulation and ‘marginal’ populations not fully subsumed to capital deflects attention from the regulation of conflictive relations between owners of commodities, and between workers and capitalists over the sale of labour power.
It is relevant here to recall Jane Lewis’s point, made in an analysis of the decline of the male breadwinner model, that modern welfare systems ‘have always been constructed around the relationship between social provision and paid work; it is this that has in large measure distinguished them from needs-based and universal, but punitively deterrent, poor law systems’ (Lewis, 2001: 152, emphasis mine). Roberts takes no account of the manner in which the law produced and disciplined the gendered waged worker, from the Factory Acts of the nineteenth century (she skips over without mention the initial reliance of industry on women and children as ‘hands’ that prompted them), via the evolution of labour law in England and North America out of the Masters and Servants Act (Deakin & Wilkinson, 2005: 61-74), to the huge changes to labour contracts and their legal regulation over recent years, and the parallel punitive approach to labour organization, of which UK legislation commencing under Thatcher and culminating in the Trade Union Act of 2010 is emblematic (Deakin, Lele, & Siems, 2007; Adams, Freedland, & Prassl, 2014; Bruun, Lörcher, & Schömann, 2014) (McCann & Murray, 2014; Fredman & Fudge, 2016; Freedland, 2016). Freedland argues that even where the increasingly marginal ‘standard contract of employment’ still exists, it has become one ‘in which the employer enjoys a full liberal freedom to transfer a whole panoply of risks and uncertainties to the employee’ (ibid: 9), and Deakin observes, in relation to the EU’s ‘new economic governance’, that ‘the idea that social policy should in various ways either compensate for, or more broadly legitimate, the construction of the internal market has given way to a new emphasis on its role in promoting competitiveness and addressing economic imbalances in the single currency area’ (Deakin, 2014: 83). These comments pinpoint the individualization of risk across the labour market as a whole and for men and women alike in the context of the ‘descent into precarity’ arising from the all but universal embrace of a politics of global competitiveness (ibid: 2). One side of this is indisputably a leveling down that can be seen as ‘feminization’ or the erosion of male privilege. But another side is reflected not only in the Equal Pay Act (1970), the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), and subsequent reforms up to the Equality Act (2010), which Roberts does not consider, but also in the energetic promotion of women as entrepreneurs by corporations, governments and international organizations – on which she has herself written incisively elsewhere (Roberts, 2015).
A second set of issues concerns the changing character of relations between motherhood, families and households in the context of revolutions in production and global competitiveness. First, childbearing from conception onwards is as subject to technological revolution, commodification, and the global fragmentation of production as anything else. Second, illustrating from the UK case, a significant minority of women now choose not to have children, and for those that do, the average age of birth of first child is approaching thirty; in 2008-09 there were more households with a single adult worker (20%) than with two (or more) adults and only one worker (17%), and 47% of households had two or more workers (Brewer & Wren-Lewis, 2012: 7); fewer than a third of households consisted of a married or cohabiting couple with dependent children – the traditional ‘nuclear family’ (ONS, 2015: 5), and 69.8% of women between 16 and 64 were in work at the last count (January 2017), with a substantial and rising majority in full time work (ONS, 2017: 8, and Table 3). Third, the revolution in provisioning – the ready meal and microwave/telephone and takeaway – and access for a growing affluent minority to transnational domestic service reflect a massive commodification of ‘social reproduction’.
These considerations point towards developing a gendered historical materialism and identifying an emergent gender order on the terrain of the world market as a whole, and questioning the idea that capitalism requires that social reproduction must take place outside the market. In the context of the rampant commodification of everything, driven by incessant technological revolution arising from worldwide competition between capitals, governments and international organizations alike call for every adult to be developed as a worker in the world market. This ‘universal adult worker’ is the basis for the new global gender order consistent with a politics of global competitiveness. Some outstanding recent contributions to the journal Social Politics help to flesh it out. The commitment of developed-country governments (in particular in the EU) to a policy frame of ‘social investment’ – in which the main focus is on ‘how to support women to enter and remain in the labour market’, and the citizen envisaged is ‘first and foremost a paid worker, either in actuality or (when a child) in the making’ (Saraceno, 2015: 257) – intensifies a care deficit which is to be met through the outsourcing of domestic labour to poor women and particularly legal and illegal migrants (Estevez-Abe, 2015) (Hellgren, 2015; Morel, 2015) (Shire, 2015). A gendered approach is indispensable, and the global legal and institutional framework is of fundamental importance. But it suggests a turn away from incarceration in the UK, US and Canada towards a focus on global pressures from the ILO and elsewhere for the formalization of labour markets, the subordination of family policy in developed economies to the demands of the labour market (Ferragina & Seeleib-Kaiser, 2015), and the regimes of discipline and punishment (including the deliberate cultivation of both legal and illegal channels) of predominantly female migrant workers in both Europe (Leerkes, 2016) and North America. All this vindicates and extends Roberts’ gendered historical materialist framework. But it also suggests strongly that the relative confinement of women to the domestic sphere and their marginal or subordinate position in the labour force is not a necessary condition for capitalism, but an indication of its incomplete development. If this is so, the task of ‘primitive accumulation’ is not complete until all workers are really subsumed to capital, and both domestic labour and biological reproduction are fully commodified.
References
Adams, Abi, Freedland, Mark, & Prassl, Jeremias. (2014). The ‘Zero-Hours Contract’: Regulating Casual Work, or Legitimating Precarity? labourlawresearch.net.
Allen, Grahame, & Dempsey, Noel. (2016). Prison Population Statistics. House of Commons Briefing Paper, SN/SG/04334, 4 July.
Brewer, Mike, & Wren-Lewis, Liam. (2012). Why did Britain’s households get richer? Decomposing UK household income growth between 1968 and 2008-09. Institute for Social & Economic Research Working Papers series, 2012-08.
Bruun, Niklas, Lörcher, Klaus, & Schömann, Isabelle (Eds.). (2014). The Economic and Financial Crisis and Collective Labour Law in Europe. Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart.
Camp, Jordan. (2016). Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deakin, Simon. (2014). Social Policy, Economic Governance and EMU: Alternatives to Austerity. In Niklas Bruun, Klaus Lörcher, & Isabelle Schömann (eds), The Economic and Financial Crisis and Collective Labour Law in Europe (pp. 83-106). Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart.
Deakin, Simon, Lele, Priya, & Siems, Mathias. (2007). The evolution of labour law: Calibrating and comparing regulatory regimes. International Labour Review, 146, (3-4), 133-162.
Deakin, Simon, & Wilkinson, Frank. (2005). The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialisation, Employment and Legal Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Estevez-Abe, Margarita. (2015). The Outsourcing of House Cleaning and Low Skill Immigrant Workers. Social Politics, 22, 2, 147-169.
Ferragina, Emanuele, & Seeleib-Kaiser, Martin. (2015). Determinants of a Silent (R)evolution: Understanding the Expansion of Family Policy in Rich OECD Countries. Social Politics, 22, 1, 1-37.
Fredman, Sandra, & Fudge, Judy. (2016). The Contract of Employment and Gendered Work. In Mark Freedland (ed), The Contract of Employment (pp. 231-252). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freedland, Mark. (2016). The Contract of Employment and the Paradoxes of Precarity. University of Oxford, Legal Research Paper Series, 37.
Gottschalk, Marie. (2015). Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hellgren, Zenia. (2015). Markets, Regimes, and the Role of Stakeholders: Explaining Precariousness of Migrant Domestic/Care Workers in Different Institutional Frameworks. Social Politics, 22, 2, pp. 220-241.
Leerkes, Arjen. (2016). Back to the poorhouse? Social protection and social control of unauthorised immigrants in the shadow of the welfare state. Journal of European Social Policy, 26, 2, pp. 140-154.
Lewis, Jane. (2001). The decline of the male breadwinner model: Implications for work and care. Social Politics, 8, 2, pp. 152-169.
McCann, Deidre, & Murray, Jill. (2014). Prompting Formalisation Through Labour Market Regulation: A ‘Framed Flexibility’Model for Domestic Work. Industrial Law Journal, 43, 3, pp. 319-348.
Miéville, China. (2006). Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. London: Pluto Press.
Morel, Nathalie. (2015). Servants for the Knowledge-Based Economy? The Political Economy of Domestic Services in Europe. Social Politics, 22, 2, 170-192.
ONS. (2015). Families and Households: 2015.
ONS. (2017). UK Labour Market: Mar 2017.
Pashukanis, Evgeny B. (2002). The General Theory of Law and Marxism. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers.
Roberts, Adrienne. (2015). The Political Economy of “Transnational Business Feminism”. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17, 2, pp. 209-231.
Saraceno, Chiara. (2015). A Critical Look to the Social Investment Approach from a Gender Perspective. Social Politics, 22, 2, pp. 257-269.
Shire, Karen. (2015). Family Supports and Insecure Work: The Politics of Household Service Employment in Conservative Welfare Regimes. Social Politics, 22, 2, pp. 193-219.