Description
The aftershocks of the 2008 global financial crisis continue to ripple through the world economy. Much has been made of the breakdown of the neoliberal mythology of the self-regulating market, and of the collapse of centrist liberalism in the face of resurgent right-wing populisms. This paper analyses how the crisis and its aftershocks manifest unevenly in the politics of social reproduction on a global scale. In the advanced capitalist core, the market recession and the austerity policy response spurred a crisis of social reproduction. This was ameliorated, in part, by moderate (and largely ephemeral) corporate and state welfare reforms, as well as a brief fiscal stimulus, to alleviate the burden of care. However, in the export-driven periphery economies, the depletion of social reproduction reaches levels of total devastation that include but also transcend care. Drawing on the critical macro-finance literature and social reproduction theory, we highlight the imperial function of the international financial system, which triggers uneven crises of social reproduction across the boundary lines of postcolonial capitalism.
