Social Reproduction Theory as Diagnostic, Abolition as Politics: Reimagining Anticapitalism

The Centre for Comparative Literature presents a public lecture by our 2024 Northrop Frye Professor

Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University

“Social Reproduction Theory as Diagnostic, Abolition as Politics: Reimagining Anticapitalism”

5-7 pm, Thursday, September 26, 2024

Victoria University, Room VC 323, 91 Charles St W, Toronto, ON

Abstract: Since the welcome renewal of scholarly and political attention on care and social reproduction, there has also been an unspoken ahistoricization of care as a beautiful, even virtuous, expression of human labor. Care, as practiced within capitalism, however, is a dialectical unity of opposites.  On the one hand it constitutes a stubborn, intractable aspect of humanity that refuses capitalist modifications. On the other, as an act inserted into capitalist social relations, and part of it, it can be limited in its welfare functions. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) that studies the social relations through which human beings create (birth), maintain, and generate labor power is concerned with both these dimensions for labor power for under capitalism, labor power is both inseparable from a living, breathing human being, as well as an exploitable commodity. But while SRT can be a diagnostic of capitalist social relations that has the unique potential to reveal both the stable procedures of capital as well as its fault lines, abolition, as learnt from the Black radical tradition, must be its politics. SRT, in itself, does not point towards a solution, merely outlines the problem; it is abolition that creates that horizon of liberation giving us a futural glimpse when care can transcend need and become a principal.

Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History and the Director of Global Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and a long-time activist for Palestinian justice. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Electronic Intifada, Jacobin, Salon.com and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of Studies on Asia and the International Socialist Review. Tithi is a longstanding social justice activist.  She is active in her local community as well as in struggles nationally and internationally.