Schedule of Readings

Summer, 2021: Social Reproduction Theory

Recorded sessions (password protected)

We meet over Zoom on Wednesdays from 3:00pm-5:00pm CST, unless otherwise noted.

01

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Reproduction and Ideology (June 2)

Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 25, sections 1 & 3 (762-772, 781-794)

Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (232-272)

02

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Communism and the Commons (June 16)

Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons in an Era of Primitive Accumulation” (102-115) and “From Crisis to Commons” (175-188)

Mario Miele, Homosexuality and Liberation, “Towards a Gay Communism” (193-230)

Optional: Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork, “Introduction: Socially Engaged Art and Decommodified Labor” (1-34)

03

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De-Industrialization and Automation (June 30)

Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift, “Introduction”

James Lee Boggs, The American Revolution, “The Rise and Fall of the Union” and “The Challenge of Automation”

Optional: Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work, “The Servant Economy”

04

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Black Radicalism and the Carceral State (July 14)

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free, “Introduction” and “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1-27)

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, “Prologue” and “Introduction” (1-29)

Optional 1: Audre Lorde ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007.

Optional 2: Jack Norton and David Stein, “Materializing Race: On Capitalism and Mass Incarceration,” Specter (Oct 22, 2020)

05

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Social Reproduction Theory (July 28)

Tithi Bhattacharya, “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory” (1-20)

Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism” (21-36)

Cinzia Arruzza, “From Social Reproduction Feminism to the Women’s Strike” (192-196)

Optional: TBD

06

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Counter-currents (Aug 11)

“The Logic of Gender” Endnotes 3

ME O’Brien, “Communizing Care” Pinko (Oct 15, 2019)

Optional: Chris O’Kane, “Critical Theory and the Critique of Capitalism: An Immanent Critique of Nancy Fraser’s ‘Systematic’ ‘Crisis-Critique’ of Capitalism as an ‘Institutionalized Social Order.’” Science & Society, vol. 85, no. 2, 2021

Courbet, Les Cribleuses de blé (1854)