reproductive commons

The concept of social reproduction has been at the centre of materialist feminist debates and has helped to uncover the invisibilised tasks needed to maintain life, both daily and across generations, which are mostly performed by women and racial minorities (Federici 2020; Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004). Social reproduction scholarship has complemented Marxist theory by highlighting the crucial role of reproductive work in producing the most fundamental element in capitalist production, labour power, and disentangling the gendered division of labour (Dalla Costa and James 1975). The relation between capital and social reproduction, though, is far from being linear. Whereas the process of capital accumulation is sustained by the appropriation of reproductive work, capitalism also erodes the conditions of social reproduction, incurring in a contradiction that is at the root of periodical crises of care (Fraser 2017). Federici (2020) has framed this contradiction as a ‘double character’ of reproductive work, which in capitalism, simultaneously reproduces life and labour power. This reformulation has an important political connotation, since placed in a different context, social reproduction could potentially contribute to “reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care” (Federici 2020: xvii). Therefore, the struggle over reproductive work is crucial in creating the conditions for emancipatory forms of social organisation and advancing a post-capitalist transition. In this context, several authors have recently started speaking of reproductive (or reproduction) commons, which refer to the collectivisation of social reproduction, taking it away from the market and/or private spaces (Federici 2018). In the current situation, reproductive commons are easily co opted by capital and the state. Since the retreat of the welfare state in Western countries that brought about the neoliberal era (a process that has intensified after every economic crisis) many of the reproductive functions that the state covered have been transferred S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807 3 back to the private sphere, in what Ezquerra has characterised as a new enclosure of reproductive commons (2015). This housewifization process, as Mies (2014) has called it, is not the only possible outcome though. Occasionally, communities have come together and have been able to share the load of these reproductive tasks, reclaiming their own reproduction as a commons. In this way, reproductive commons have been able to undo three of the main impacts of enclosure: “the loss of community bonds, the separation of production and reproduction, and the invisibilisation … of reproductive work” (di Masso Tarditti et al. 2022: 12, own translation). However, reproductive commons do not aim to revert enclosure in order to recover a romanticised pre-capitalist past. As De Angelis (2017) has demonstrated, reproductive commons form the material basis that can make commoning a viable alternative to the market and the state. Therefore, reproductive commons play a key role in building commons autonomy and are central in igniting and sustaining a social revolution towards emancipatory post-capitalist futures. Whereas there is a growing interest in reproductive commons, the existing literature addresses them mostly from an abstract conceptual perspective. Among the scarce empirically based publications that we have been able to find, the topics of care work and food prevail (see for example the collection edited by Ezquerra et al. 2022). While these are certainly important, we situate our intervention as one connecting scholarship on social reproduction and housing commons to deepen understandings of reproductive commons. The role housing plays as a critical dimension of social reproduction has been explored from feminist perspectives underlining how mortgage debt under neoliberalism (re)privatises relations of social reproduction (Roberts 2013), or how debt more broadly intertwines the very infrastructure for life, labour, care and housing (Cavallero and Gago 2021). Marxist approaches emphasise tensions between housing as accumulation and housing as a form of social reproduction (Byrne 2020; Madden and Marcuse 2016). The role of social reproduction in housing struggles has more recently taken front and centre stage through analyses of rent strikes (Hughes and Wright 2018; Gonzalez-Guzm ´ an ´ and Ill-Raga 2023). Considering how housing arrangements affect our common senses and subjectivities, as evidenced by the close connection between the private household model and the hegemony of the nuclear family (Aramburu 2015; Lewis 2022), a growing literature on housing commons has generated very insightful debates. These include the role that squatting has played as a way to (re) appropriate urban space for decommodified social relations rather than speculation, a process embedded in practices of commoning (Di Feliciantonio 2017; García-Lamarca, 2015), and the contestation of migration governance and border policies (Montagna & Grazioli 2019). A range of publications have considered the production, management, financial and political mechanisms to remove and maintain housing outside market dynamics, as well as the challenges these noncommodified housing processes face (Huron 2015, 2018; Joubert and Hodkinson 2018; Larsen and Lund Hansen 2015; Miralles Buil 2020). Housing commons owned and operated by non-profit, independent housing associations in Denmark, for example, endure due to their engagement with, against and beyond the state (Vidal 2019). Ferreri and Vidal (2021) detail how public-cooperative policy mechanisms for housing commons have unfolded through collaboration and conflict and continuous political and social struggles. What role do critical approaches to reproduction play here? In the next section we turn our attention to the particularities that reproductive commons located in urban environments are facing.