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The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour

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Labour Questions in the Global South

Abstract

This chapter focuses on labour processes associated with rural and agrarian economies through a theoretical exploration of reproductive labour as an agrarian question. We argue that under the global neoliberal economic regime and the resulting labour fragmentation, capitalist markets increasingly rely on such reproductive labours which are gendered. The labour required to ensure the survival of the labouring population (workers and relative surplus population), which includes care labour as well as various forms of subsistence production of goods and services has been relegated to being invisible and ‘feminised.’ Beyond denoting women’s historical burden of reproduction, we apply the notion of feminisation to mean that every productive activity now becomes a mere act of survival and therefore assumes less importance to both national and global concerns. We suggest that reproduction constitutes the core of the agrarian question of labour and may have implications for the politics of societal transformation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kautsky argued that what [this] means for the ‘national’ political economy is a flow of extra surplus-value extracted from impoverished peasants unable to resist the forces that dominate them. The peasant sector of the capitalist political economy is therefore a source of continuous ‘primitive accumulation’ (1988: xvi).

  2. 2.

    The unity between production of the products which constitute the family’s means of subsistence and the reproduction and maintenance of labour power makes the division of labour by sex secondary as mechanisms of surplus extraction.

  3. 3.

    Once the capitalist mode of production is dominant within a social formation, if the articulation between modes of production is to affect capital accumulation, it must do so by increasing the mass of surplus value. For capital accumulation is predicated on the extraction of surplus labour hours from workers which, within capitalist relations of production, takes the form of the mass of surplus value (equivalent to the rate of surplus value times the employment base (Deere 1976: 11).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

    Lyn Ossome

  2. University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO, USA

    Sirisha Naidu

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  1. Lyn Ossome
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  2. Sirisha Naidu
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Economic Studies and Planning School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Praveen Jha

  2. Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS), Harare, Zimbabwe

    Walter Chambati

  3. Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

    Lyn Ossome

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Ossome, L., Naidu, S. (2021). The Agrarian Question of Gendered Labour. In: Jha, P., Chambati, W., Ossome, L. (eds) Labour Questions in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4635-2_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4635-2_4

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