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The present COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated conditions for continued survival, and community-based mutual aid networks have appeared seemingly organically to address such conditions. I argue these networks often fail to recognize capitalism’s mediation of caring labor, namely, the processes of survival and reproduction which are consistently undermined and demanded by capital’s accumulation. Instead, I propose a politics of care built on insights from the Black Panther Party’s and the Wages for Housework campaign’s respective responses to a lack of reproductive resources, which emphasize the position of survival struggles as a primary site of anti-capitalist political agitation and mobilization.

The present COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated conditions for continued survival, and community-based mutual aid networks have appeared seemingly organically to address such conditions. I argue these networks often fail to recognize capitalism's mediation of caring labor, namely, the processes of survival and reproduction which are consistently undermined and demanded by capital's accumulation. Instead, I propose a politics of care built on insights from the Black Panther Party's and the Wages for Housework campaign's respective responses to a lack of reproductive resources, which emphasize the position of survival struggles as a primary site of anti-capitalist political agitation and mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the emergence of a politico-economic project of “transnational business feminism” (TBF) over the past decade. This project – which is being developed by a coalition of states, financial institutions, the UN, corporations, NGOs and others – stresses the “business case” for gender equality by arguing that investments made in women can (and should) be measured in terms of the cost savings to families and communities, as well as in terms of boosting corporate profitability and national competitiveness. This article uses a feminist historical materialist framework to argue that TBF is facilitating the further entrenchment of the power of corporations to create “expert” knowledges about both “gender” and “development.” Using the Nike-led “Girl Effect” campaign as an example, it is argued that TBF is promoting a naturalized and essentialized view of women and gender relations that ignores the historical and structural causes of poverty and gender-based inequality. It is also helping to reproduce the same neoliberal macroeconomic framework that has created and sustained gender-based and other forms of oppression via the global feminization of labor, the erosion of support for social reproduction and the splintering of feminist critiques of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper documents the rise of a politico-economic project of what I have termed 'transnational business feminism', focused on the need to promote women's empowerment, particularly in the wake of the most recent global financial crisis. Here, liberal feminists have joined with states, funding institutions, NGOs and MNCs in constructing women as 'untapped resources' capable of delivering a high return on (Western) investment. This project has also generated new knowledges regarding both gender and finance, as the 'excesses' that led to the 2008 crisis have been linked to an errant masculinity that can be adjusted by incorporating women (and feminine values) into the finance realm. However, a feminist historical materialist reading of this project reveals that gender is used as part of a narrative that seeks to naturalize and depoliticize capitalist crises. Gender also becomes the basis for the re-embedding of capitalist relations that reproduce the exploitation of men and women while creating new markets and sources of profit for capital. While transnational business feminism is rooted in a particular version of Western liberal feminism that seeks empowerment via integration into the market economy, this paper argues that the contemporary moment offers an opportunity for a renewed emphasis on feminist scholarship that is firmly wedded to anti-capitalism, as well as a Marxism that takes gender seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewed interest in the concept of “uneven and combined development” has led some to argue for an international historical sociology that transcends the binary between a societal and international reality. This paper suggests in its place an alternative reading of Marx's materialist conception of history and ultimately argues that a feminist historical materialism is a sociologically more promising framework from which an international historical sociology can arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]