A Feminist Political-Economy Narrative Against Austerity

Abstract:

These notes offer a feminist reflection on austerity as an aggressive neoliberal policy based on principles of faith in neoclassical economics and having dramatic social effects on living conditions and a disastrous regressive influence on the distribution of incomes and equality. The focus is on how to use a feminist perspective to introduce a change in the narrative based on women’s experiential knowledge of human vulnerability, caring relationships, and unpaid domestic work. This narrative change requires a political subject capable of shifting power relationships and willing to do so, and also a sound theory that can bring to the surface structural connections and tensions in the economic system, including those inherent in the capitalist production and social reproduction relationship. The transnational political feminism is presented here as a subject of perspective. With regard to theory, we propose combination of the classical macro-founded surplus approach, reappraised by Piero Sraffa, and of the Smithian micro capability approach developed by Amartya Sen. Both approaches explicitly challenge the neoclassical paradigm. The surplus approach does it with regard to functional distribution (set at the institutional and political level), and the capability approach does it with regard to a multidimensional individual, embedded in a social context. Both approaches are extended to include the fact that the responsibility of adapting real lives to profit and financial rent falls increasingly on women’s shoulders, discharged into the household.

Keywords::

• austerity
• distribution
• feminism
• social reproduction
• vulnerability
• well-being

Notes

In these notes I do not offer any empirical information. On the gender effects of the crisis and its austerity policy, see the extensive analysis contained in UN Women (2014).

For a well-argued perspective on men’s relationship to caring, see Tronto (2013:67–94).

On the specific attack against women’s autonomy in the process of primitive accumulation of capital, see Federici (2004).

The United Nations conferences of the 1990s played a major role in offering a political space to the international and global women’s movement. On the occasion of the conferences, the practice of social forums was introduced, imposed by grassroots groups. Within these events women’s groups started to organize autonomous spaces, the first one being “Planeta femea” at the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro (June 3–14, 1992). At the Fourth UN Conference on Women, held in Beijing, September 1995, 30,000 women gathered at the social forum and managed to have a direct influence on the governments’ negotiations. On the issue of counting unpaid domestic and care work, one of the hottest political issues during the negotiations, the international women’s movement had a major role in the final drafting of the Platform of Action. We owe to that action the wealth of official statistics on time use now produced regularly by several countries.

A seminal work on counting unpaid domestic work was produced as a background paper of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 1995 Human Development Report by Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont and Elisabetta Pagnossin-Alisakis (1996): 105–155.

The literature on time use and care work is impressive and fast growing, here I mention only Valeria Esquivel, Debbie Budlender, Nancy Folbre (2008). An insightful work on the present tensions inherent in the current restructuring of care is Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2010). On the whole, even the champions of heterodox academic economic debate on austerity ignore the issue. One exception, due to Sen’s being a feminist economist, can be found in Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi (2009).

The bibliography on the capability approach is very vast; key works include Amartya Sen (1985, 1987a) and Martha Nussbaum (2002, 2003). See also Ingrid, Robeyns (2005) and Bina, Agarwal, Jane, Humphries and Robeyns (2003). An up-to-date and informed bibliography can be found at www.hd-ca.org.

For an important work on Sraffa and marginalism, based on Sraffa’s unpublished papers, see Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Annalisa Rosselli (2011).

In actual fact Sraffa, in his book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960) treats wages as net wages, paid at the end of the production process. For a discussion on Sraffa’s theory of subsistence and net wages on the basis of his papers at the Wren Library in Cambridge, see Picchio (2010).

Sen’s approach has merged into a coordinated collective effort, initiated by his late friend Mabub Ul Haq, who gave more attention to the applied analysis of human development undertaken by the UNDP, and in particular by the Human Development Report Office, which since 1990 has published annual reports. This tradition of the well-being approach is growing and producing important empirical work.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antonella Picchio

The author is a retired professor of political economy at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and a member of CAPP (Research Centre for Public Policy) in the Department of Economics of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Rome 3, and at the New School for Social Research, New York. This short article draws on the notes of the author’s presentation at the closing Round Table “Gender Equality in Austerity Measures” at the Twenty-Fourth IAFFE (International Association for Feminist Economics) Annual Conference, “Gender Equality in Challenging Times,” Berlin, July 16–18 2015.