CAPPE
CRITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL POLITICS
University of Brighton
On the Reproduction of Capitalist Society
WEDNESDAY 29thMay
2pm – 5.30pm, Edward Street 102
Two talks on critical theory and social reproduction by Kirstin Munro and Chris O’Kane
“Social Reproduction Theory”, Social Reproduction, and Household Production
Kirstin Munro (Department of Economics and Finance, St. John’s University)
Abstract:
In redefining social reproduction to mean only the reproduction of labour-power, Social Reproduction Theory has deemphasized a central insight of Marxist feminism– the necessary role that household production plays in the reproduction of capitalist society. A model of production in capitalism — in which households, capitalist firms, and the state rely on inputs from the other sectors in their production process to perpetuate their own existences and in turn that of capitalist society as a whole — shows that it is necessary to tie the household and household production to the dynamics of production and reproduction in capitalist society. There is no social reproduction without “societal reproduction,” as all production and reproduction in capitalist society is shaped by accumulation. Thus, promoting human and environmental well-being requires fundamentally changing the production processes that take place in households and elsewhere, not merely redistributing the costs and benefits of that production.
Critical Theory and the Critique of Reified Society
Chris O’Kane (Department of Economics, John Jay College, City University of New York)
Abstract:
This talk concerns the role reification plays in the contemporary critical theory of society. It develops an interpretation of reification that provides a critical social theory of the crisis-ridden objective-subjective reproduction of the negative totality of capitalist society. It argues that such a notion of reification is more suitable for a critique of contemporary society than Habermas’s and Honneth’s reformulations of reification that shape much of contemporary critical theory, by showing how, on the basis of traditional theoretical presuppositions, these approaches have eschewed such a systematic critique of social reproduction in order to conceive of reification and crises as pathologies of miscoordination within society.
If you would like to attend, please contact Tom Bunyard at t.bunyard@brighton.ac.uk
