A time of reproductive unrest: the articulation of capital accumulation, social reproduction, and the Irish state

ABSTRACT

By the end of 2013, the Republic of Ireland had exited the bailout and was entering a period of economic recovery. Yet by 2015 the largest collective protest since independence emerged, challenging the proposed introduction of water charges. Since water, multiple successful social movements organising primarily on the terrain of social reproduction have developed. In this article, I argue that this period of reproductive unrest sharpened inherent contradictions in the way that capital accumulation, social reproduction and the Irish state are articulated to one another. Moreover, these contradictions are not unique to Ireland, but rather emblematic of neoliberal states more broadly. The article intervenes into debates on neoliberal crisis management since the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, as well as demonstrates the value of using social struggles as a lens through which to understand potential fractures in the global political economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish capitalism
• neoliberal states
• Irish social movements
• social reproduction
• critical political economy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers and the editors at New Political Economy. The author also received very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper from participants at Historical Materialism Sydney, CPERN, Alternative Futures and Popular Protest and workshops at the University of Manchester. Much of the data collection was conducted as part of her PhD which was made possible through funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the support of the author’s PhD supervisors Andreas Bieler and Christoph Scherrer. Most of all, the author would like to acknowledge the many activists who gave up their time to speak to her.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data

All interviews are coded for anonymity and are available at the author’s discretion.

Notes

1 Understood as the time spanning the GFC, EDC, migration crises, political legitimacy crises, Brexit, and Covid-19.

2 The welfare state is a key example of the state stepping in and providing, but at the same time controlling, the reproduction of the working class (Fraser 2017, pp. 29–31).

3 Recent moves by SMS scholars such as Donnatella della Porta (2017) to bring capitalism back in, still replicates an aggregative rather than integrative analysis.

4 Even in 2018, the Catholic Church ran around 95% of primary schools in Ireland (O’Brien 2018).

5 For example, in 2014 Ireland trusted public institutions the least out of the 27 EU states (Cannon and Murphy 2015, p. 10).

6 The UK newspaper The Guardian described the 2018 abortion referendum as a ‘remarkable political victory for Leo Varadkar’, the Irish Prime Minister (Graham-Harrison 2018), despite Varadkar only supporting the Yes campaign in the final month (Leahy 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The data collection for this article was conducted under a PhD fellowship from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Madelaine Moore

Madelaine Moore is a post-doctoral research in Transnational Social Policy at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She completed her PhD at the International Center for Development and Decent Work (ICDD) at the University of Kassel in 2020. She was a visiting research fellow in global political economy at the University of Manchester in 2018. Her research focusses on water governance, eco-social policies, social reproduction theory and studying social movements from a critical political economy perspective.