Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

The increasingly obvious unsustainability of neoliberal capitalism creates an urgent need to understand how societies can meet their needs in a just and sustainable fashion. The new theoretical framework of the “Foundational Economy” may provide answers, as it explores a holistic transformation of essential reliance systems, such as food provision, energy, care, and housing. However, its conceptualization of democratic agency needs to be strengthened.

This article addresses this need by expanding the Foundational Economy framework with insights from the literature on social reproduction theory (SRT) and the solidarity economy (SE). SRT highlights the gendered and racialized hierarchies of essential reliance systems as key targets for transformation, while the SE encompasses participatory and non-capitalist practices that can democratize those systems. This expanded framework is applied to the UK agroecology movement, which aims to build democratic, sustainable, and non-capitalist alternatives to the food system, while subverting its classed, gendered, and racialized inequalities.

This issue of Democratic Theory aims to contribute to critical social science by bridging the gap between democratic theory and critical political economy (CPE). Despite a common grounding in a normative commitment to emancipation, these fields have lately spoken past each other. Democratic theory is relatively voluntarist, focusing on the realization of normative principles through institutional design. However, it has often overlooked capitalism's influence on democracy, and accepted the artificial separation of the political and economic realms in ways that constrain the possibilities for democratic expansion. CPE, on the other hand, has developed realist and historical analyses of capitalist constraint and dynamism. It can offer a structural compass for democratic theories’ interventionist energies, while also being moved beyond pure critique by them. The central theme of this issue, “democratizing the economy,” shifts the focus toward a deeper exploration of the potential for democratic designs to transform economic structures.

European studies have traditionally relied on the power of broad concepts to account for the experience of the European Union: be it integration, governance, market, or legal order. Many of these concepts originated in social sciences. Yet, one concept is conspicuously absent from this list: ‘society’ was seen as ill-suited for picturing European integration. This background makes the recent and pervasive return of the term ‘society’ in the EU institutional discourse even more apparent. The paper attempts to propose a framework within which to think of the EU and its law in terms of European society makes sense. First, it argues that this turn to society is a response to challenges posed to the core assumptions upon which EU law has been predicated. Secondly, it inquiries about the sort of society produced by the law of European society. Thirdly, it suggests a new development for EU law and EU legal studies, integrating in their technical and conceptual appartuses additional resources and critical knowledge drawon from social sciences and social theory.

The word taʿawuniyya (“cooperative”) in Palestine today can mean multiple things. It can mean a registered cooperative, or can loosely refer to any initiative based on collective labor and possession, geared toward a collective societal benefit—a communal garden, for example. This vernacular usage of the term, close to the concept of the commons, is borne out of Palestinian history and is an invitation to go beyond the formal definition of a cooperative when searching for a Palestinian “cooperative movement.” Registered cooperatives in Palestine have historically played a role that ranged from subordination and placation by ruling authorities to reformist and survival mechanisms for a colonized population. Informal cooperatives, on the other hand, played roles that surpassed survival and attempted to upend the basis of colonial control. Apart from structure and labor relations, what unites both senses of the term “cooperative” is the political role they have played, as well as their tendency to focus on basic necessities such as food and housing. The history of the cooperative movement in Palestine tells a story of social production and reproduction as an arena of struggle, particularly against Zionist colonization. This essay will give an overview of this history, focusing mainly on the areas of Palestine occupied in 1967.

Social reproduction offers a critical lens through which to analyse how labour law creates and constructs labour/ers. Socially reproductive work, traditionally ignored in waged labour markets, has been omitted from legal categories that protect workers. Yet these same legal categories that create and construct labour/ers are themselves socially reproduced. In Sicilian agricultural work, social reproduction happens in the extra care that is needed in labour carried out by migrantised workers, as well as the silence that is reproduced by markets that overlook the exploitation buttressing a local economy. The lens of social reproduction connects the work behind the scenes that depends on the complicity, whether wilful or ignorant, of consumers who do not ‘care’ that the labour producing Sicilian Denominazione di Origine Protetta (Protected Designation of Origin, DOP) and Indicazione Geografica Protetta (Protected Geographical Denomination, IGP) products is legally irregular. Contributing to discussions of labour law’s limits, this article addresses how labour exploitation is socially reproduced through the invisibilisation of labour involved in cultivating and harvesting Sicilian DOP olives and IGP tomatoes.

What is happening in Gaza now is a total displacement of any form of normality. This displacement of the normal has been effected by a population-wide project of social reproduction. Every Gazan, including children, is solicited to reproduce life, to survive. At the same time, social reproduction in Palestine has always also entailed insurgent possibilities, where this form of labour has indeed sustained and reproduced Palestinian revolutionary action. From collective kitchens to local initiatives of care for children, to using drones as musical instruments to distract children from the deafening violence of its soundscape, social reproduction is iterated as both survival and insurgency. This short intervention tries to think through the question of how to make sense of social reproduction as capitalist oppression through the unwaged housework, and as colonial violence through the mass extermination of a population, without leaving behind its potential for insurgency?

Este artículo analiza los impactos de la expansión de grandes empresas forestales en el Alto Paraná, área central de esta producción en Argentina. Desde fines del siglo XX, el ingreso de capitales concentrados transformó la actividad, aumentando la integración vertical, desplazando productores y reorganizando regímenes laborales. El foco está en las condiciones de reproducción social de trabajadores sin tierra y pequeños productores con acceso limitado a medios de producción. En base a un estudio de caso en Puerto Piray (Misiones), se exploran sus estrategias laborales desde la categoría de “clases de trabajo”. Se argumenta que la diversidad de formas de trabajo y de actividades desplegadas para la reproducción de estas clases l encuentra un eje estructurador en la explotación del trabajo de las mujeres, en tanto son ellas quienes abarcan el continuo entre el trabajo reproductivo y el productivo.

This article considers how the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a remarkable social experiment in the market for migrant ‘au pair’ labour in Australia. As has been illustrated in broader accounts of the pandemic’s ‘care crisis’, the global health emergency cracked open underlying fault lines, as capacities for social reproduction were stretched to breaking point. At the same time, the pandemic deepened the precarity of temporary migrants as they lost jobs and incomes, experienced housing insecurity, and were excluded from state emergency relief measures. Building on interdisciplinary feminist literatures on gender, work, migration, and social reproduction, this article adds to emerging scholarship on the growing phenomenon of au pairing in Australia to examine drivers of demand, migrant mobilities in and out of au pair labour, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the market. While au pairing emerged during the pandemic as a form of survival work where migrants had little negotiating power, the market ultimately shifted when emergency childcare measures were withdrawn, migrant labour became scarce, and visa restrictions on working hours were relaxed. In addition to providing new empirical insights into au pairing in Australia, the findings underscore the constitutive role of law and policy settings in shaping the distributions and divisions of reproductive labour, which can both consolidate and also challenge broader gendered care norms and distributions and the social reproduction bargain.

The gated community is a unique site of social reproduction which has proliferated across India. Elite families are reproduced at the individual, household level but also at the communal level in service-rich private enclaves. These households rely heavily on specialised reproductive labourers who are deprived of worker status because they work in the private domain. Homeowners’ associations or resident welfare associations (RWAs) meanwhile regulate reproductive labour through surveillance and wage fixing and by regulating entry and exit. Despite their public function, RWAs claim no responsibility for worker welfare due to privity of contract and the exclusion of ‘domestic service’ from labour laws. We examine India’s new labour codes, establishment laws and constitutional law to pin responsibility on RWAs as public bodies for ensuring the fundamental rights and welfare of these workers.

Across the twentieth century, hundreds of women worked as nurses, cooks, cleaners, and teachers on Mexico’s railroads. They have been overlooked in histories of the railroads and Mexican industrialization more broadly, their limited number perhaps suggesting that their work is not of analytical importance in understanding processes of economic development and class formation. On the contrary, these women’s work constituted many of the most coveted labor rights of the postrevolutionary railroad workforce, itself a symbolic vanguard of Mexico’s working class and one of the most important beneficiaries of the expansion of social and economic rights ushered in by the Mexican Revolution. The gendered division of labor characteristic of the railroads was neither accidental nor insignificant. Railroads used the feminization of the work of social reproduction to write off structural failures and predictable shortcomings in welfare provision as failures of femininity. Women became scapegoats for the consistent violation of workers’ rights through underfunding and understaffing. In tracing this process, the article models a historiographical and methodological intervention with broader relevance. It suggests that the social and labor rights that expanded around the world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries must be studied not only from the vantage of legal or political history, but as themselves questions of social and labor history. Making these rights real depended on socially reproductive work that has often been marginal in accounts of industrialization and economic development. It is impossible to understand the political economy of social and economic rights without understanding women’s work.