Southeast Asian Anti-Imperialist Feminism(s): Labor Movements

"Rebecca Tarlau’s seminal research on the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) gave way to a new vantage point in social movement pedagogy and the role of education in the grassroots movements. The MST’s educational initiatives are expressed through three forms: land reform, agrarian reform and social transformation (2). The book explores questions of how MST’s 30-year relationship with the state in contentious co-governance generated alternative practices of socio-political, economic and educational changes. Specifically, the question of how pedagogical struggles of the MST elucidate the trajectory of the social movement in disrupting, negotiating and transforming institutional developments and social movement infrastructure. How do engagements with the state and institutions affect grassroots social movements and revolutionary struggles? What are the promises and perils of implementing radical pedagogies in tandem with institutional and governmental involvement? Incorporating Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and an overall Gramscian perspective on MST’s pedagogical experiments, Tarlau offers new perspectives on everyday mobilizations, state-civil society collaboration and prefigurative models of social change in educational activism."

"The principle of the commons is the thread running through Federici’s analytical and theoretical contributions in approaching ecological devastations, economic exploitation and imperial warfare. The collection of essays delineate the crisis of reproduction, the struggles of the commons and the possibilities of “re-enchanting” as an alternative expression to capitalist enclosures. Federici connects the major theme of the commons to land struggles and movements in Africa and Latin America: the history of class struggle being intimately tied with resistance against colonialism and land expropriation (116). The continuum of social reproduction highlights the ruse of the private-public divide that obscures and exploits women’s unpaid work as “love.” Here, Federici argues for the revalorization of reproductive work as critical to our collective survival. The construction of the commons relies upon communalizing reproduction and with women leading the way, the transformation of everyday life beckons a “whole new world of social relations” (88)."

"SRT, although originating from “bourgeois” economics, takes a critical feminist standpoint in this theorization: SRT shows “how the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process” (Meg Luxton). Tithi Bhattacharya expounds on the interconnected processes of production and reproduction; questions of whom labor is produced for and by who are further invoked in analyzing labor power. As Bhattacharya outlines, labor power is reproduced by the following processes: 1) activities, such as carework, that regenerate the worker outside the production sphere, 2) activities that maintain and regenerate non-workers outside the production sphere, 3) the reproduction of new workers (e.g. childbirth). Social reproduction theory offers a renewed understanding of the interactions between the spheres of production and reproduction - thus, enabling a more integrated approach towards undoing capitalism and its alienating forms of oppression."
"What is Social Reproduction Theory" by Tithi Bhattacharya