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This article re-claims and invigorates the debate on 'New Materialism' as it is unfolding within Marxist political economy specifically. We choose this site to make our intervention in the debate because, while Marxism claims to makes visible the poor, dispossessed and those 'left behind' in the contemporary global capitalist economy, we discern, in contributions made thus far, a marked tendency to sideline the rich tradition of feminist historical materialist scholarship. We contend that feminist analyses are vital in elucidating the 'gendered face' of global financial crisis and austerity. Accordingly, after first mapping the contours of current discussion, we briefly revisit feminist critiques of Marxism; interrogate the inter-relationship between neoliberal capitalism, the gendered nature of labour markets, the 'patriarchal' state and social reproduction and unpaid care work; and, finally, we further develop our argument through an analysis of the gendered impacts of current austerity measures in the United Kingdom. Keywords Social reproduction, New Materialism, gender, austerity, Marxism, Introduction As researchers with an interest in the gendered impacts of the 2007/8 financial crisis and intensifying austerity measures in the United Kingdom (UK), we welcome calls made in recent [...]

We contribute to the literature on social reproduction and the International Political Economy of the everyday. We focus on how the global economy rests on domestic foundations not just including state institutions but micro-social structures such as households and families. We employ data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study exploring the way different types of household (using proxies for social class) parent – as one aspect of their social reproduction strategies. We argue that under conditions of increased global competitiveness, the UK state has successfully embedded a politics of competitiveness at the household scale. Households of all types are aspirational for their children and invest parental time in helping their children with educational activities. However, parents in middle-class occupations, with higher levels of qualifications and higher income have advantageous informational, cultural and financial resources and use these in a variety of ways to support their social reproduction strategies. The result is that agential responses to competitiveness result in 'compound inequalities'. We theorise this by demonstrating variegation across different household social reproduction strategies and the violence of social reproduction, even where this is unintended. We speculate that compound inequality may be causing a breakdown in the stable reproduction of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the United Kingdom as a case study to explore the limits of financialisation. It makes visible the increasingly intimate relationship between financialisation, indebtedness and social reproduction under the conditions of neoliberal austerity (Fraser, 2014). It does so by unpacking how the everyday experiences of indebtedness materialise among individuals, households and communities. Specifically, we investigate debt’s significance within the household economy by analysing the everyday talk within ‘debt threads’ from leading peer-to-peer forums (Stanley, 2014, Stanley et al., 2016). The evidence reveals how debt interferes with and disrupts the intimacies of life, and in doing so erodes its own moral economic claim as a priority obligation within the household economy. These are the limits of financialisation because if debts are not ‘cared for’ they are non-performing. And, non-performing loans – as it turns out – cause catastrophic failures in financialised global markets. This alone makes understanding the household economy relevant to why neoliberalism is failing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the promise of the ‘New Middle Class’ (NMC) inherent in the neoliberal ideological ideal of individualising societal responsibility for well-being and success. The article points to how this promise enables a discourse and practice of welfare reform and a disciplining of life styles particularly targeting the very poor in society. Women and some ethnic minorities are particularly prone to poverty and then therefore also discipline. The article then provides a case study of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) and shows how the programme and the way it is constructed and managed partly undermines the provision of the material needs to alleviate people from poverty and re-produces discourses of poor lifestyle and parenting choices as sources of poverty, thereby undermining the ‘middle-class’ promise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]