Introduction
The structural relationship between gender and imperialism has mainly been theorised in relation to the servitude of colonised women to empire. The literature examines women in systems of unfree labour such as slavery, convict settlements and indentured work, and evaluates the role of gender, sex and sexuality in the history and structuring of imperial systems (Woollacott 2006). There are also important critiques by feminist thinkers of Islam of the perverse logics
through which Western imperial power seeks to justify its geopolitical domination by posing as the ‘liberator’ of indigenous women from native patriarchal cultures, thus laying bare Euro-American domination of the Muslim world and its particular indebtedness to key tropes within contemporary feminist discourse. (Mahmood 2008, 81)
Others expose the gendered dimensions of the global inequality created by international systems that emerged at the end of colonialism and show how modernisation has been accompanied by the ‘systematic pauperization’ of the Third World (Dhawan 2014, 10).
There is general convergence around the fact that colonial systems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were indelibly marked by gendered forms of exploitation and oppression. Marginalised feminist histories or histories from the margins of empire demonstrate several respects in which such exploitation was exemplified. Relevant examples include the military comfort system used by Imperial Japan, then the colonial power in East Asia, during the Sino-Japanese War. In the lead-up to the Second World War, Japanese armed forces established so-called comfort stations in mainland China, where Chinese women were enslaved and subjected to sexual violence. While military-aged Chinese males were summarily executed or conscripted into forced labour schemes, Chinese women of childbearing age were systematically raped or forced into sex slavery, primarily because Chinese women were viewed as the embodiment of the Chinese nation – women as boundaries of the nation on to which identities such as race, ethnicity and sexuality are mapped and instrumentalised by state and capital. In this regard, feminist scholarship understands the (gendered) violence of the postcolonial nation state as being a problem of the nationalism that is in fact the product of imperialism, and therefore deeply implicated in its violent structures (Dhawan 2014).
Imperialist wars have also constituted a basis of reproductive labour in the colonies and in the contemporary period. Luise White has delved into the complexities surrounding wartime prostitution in Nairobi following a sudden increase in urban populations to meet the city’s labour requirements during the Second World War (White 1990). This included an influx of British Imperial troops and Italian prisoners of war, as well as native labourers in search of productive wage employment or reproductive work. Prostitution expanded and evolved to accommodate the special conditions and burdens of wartime Nairobi, often reflecting the size and characteristics of the male workforce. History tells us that during times of imperialist crisis, the costs of empire are borne primarily by the subjects of empire, not least by its female subjects.
Yet women’s experiences of empire were not without contradictions, as urban wage economies did at the same time present pathways for accumulation for women in the reproductive labour economy. Prostitution in that early colonial period mirrored the material conditions under which the migrant labour regime was unfolding (White 1990). For male migrants, prostitutes performed tasks normally associated with domestic labour in advanced capitalist societies: that is, the privatised maintenance of a home. Precisely because the social reproduction of the urban industrial workforce in these ways was so critical for the stabilisation of colonial capitalist economy, and labouring women central to this process, prostitution did in fact also accord women significant control over not only their own wealth, but also that of their families and kinship groups (Ossome 2018).1
A brief typology of empire deployed here is important to clarify. All colonies from the late nineteenth century were embedded in the global system of capitalist exploitation and extraction that typifies imperialism, although some distinctions pertain between the two. In his description, Samir Amin (1977) draws a distinction between the imperialism that emerged around 1880 along with the monopolies as the main crisis of the world economy, which is not to be confused with colonialism or expansionism. The imperatives and effects of imperialism were distinct. Imperialism is the result of the growing centralisation of capital and tends to aggravate uneven development. The implementation of colonial policies including taxation (Tarus 2004), land alienation (Moyo and Yeros 2007), forced migrant labour, indirect rule, peasant commodity production and settler estate agriculture raised a series of contradictions in this context of dominance of monopolies and establishment of finance capital. In the contemporary period a neo-colonial situation pertains as the primary instrument of imperialism following the demise of direct colonial domination (Nkrumah 1965), at the same time as imperialism finds itself in a deep crisis precipitated in part by its inability to reproduce the conditions of its stabilisation (Yeros 2023). But how, as Marx (1986) examined in relation mainly to production, do capitalist societies produce the material conditions of their reproduction? This question is at the core of my analysis.
Much of the scholarship identifies the principal contradiction of the capitalist system in the neo-colonies as being between monopoly capital and the over-exploited masses of the periphery – or between workers and the oppressed masses on the one side and the imperialist bourgeoisie who exploit and dominate them on the other. Others identify the contradiction between colonial rule and national liberation as the most basic contradiction under imperialism. Imperialist expansion of capitalist profits through the capturing of natural resources and markets is well understood, as is the idea that imperialism not only extracted and exploited resources from the global South, but also entrenched an economic structure that creates and sustains deep inequalities for it to function (Lenin 1917; Frank 1966; Nkrumah 1970; Amin 1976; Tandon 1977). Furthermore, the primary contradiction between workers and the imperialist bourgeoisie ‘feeds itself and determines the existence and development of other contradictions’ (Tandon 1977, 109) such that anti-imperialist strugglers are invariably or possibly engaged in ‘permanent revolution’.
Central to the structure of inequality that this expansion necessitates is a system of gendered labour. This is fundamental to its reproduction and sustains capitalism both in the core and the peripheries. In this regard the literature suggests a fundamental contradiction nestled deep within the structure of accumulation. Whether in relation to surplus value production (Federici 2004; Elson 2015; Mezzadri 2024) or the demand for the reproduction of surplus populations (Ossome and Naidu 2021a), capitalism draws on reproductive labour for its functioning but does not support the reproduction of that labour (Fraser 2016; Naidu and Ossome 2016). This is indicative of a deep crisis of imperialism (Yeros 2023) as well as underlining the social dimensions of the crisis.
The foregoing suggests significant limitations in thinking about the structure of social reproduction that is fundamental to capitalism in purely economic terms. Indeed, a historical understanding of the nature of capitalism shows that the reality of reproduction exceeds the economic dimension alone. On a fundamental basis, because of the complexity within social reproduction itself, the question arises regarding how to stabilise a mode of production and accumulation around a factor of production, one that is so foundational to capitalist accumulation, over which capitalists have no direct control. That is, how does capital organise labour, which is fundamental to its stability, which it seeks to expropriate, but to whose reproduction it does not contribute (Fraser 2016)? This complexity partially arises because the reproductive economy has historically required a higher and greater level of ideological organisation to make it function; here we might consider the role of patriarchal institutions, sexism, racism and devaluation of reproductive labour, which also make it harder to define and demystify the real nature of exploitation within the sector (Fortunati 1981). The organisation of social reproduction outside of capital therefore lends to capitalism itself, at least in part, its volatility and vulnerability to periodic crises. The crises of social reproduction that emerge periodically must be understood in their social and political dimensions, as well as in relation to world historical changes in the structure of capitalism.
Core to my argument is that under the current conditions of global capitalism that are responsible for the massive immiseration of working people across the Third World, the social reproduction of the mass of unemployed workers and waged workers takes on a different significance as it is no longer being guaranteed by wages and income from petty production alone. Rather, the social reproduction of working people depends largely on a regime of gendered labour that is both productive and reproductive, as well as the access of such labour to reproductive resources such as the commons, customary lands and nature, as well as wages and state subsidies. The point here is to assert the contemporary significance of a gendered substratum of labour that is functioning both in central relation to capital and despite it.
In relation to landed resources, the persistence of the peasantry in Africa today ought to be understood in concrete relation to this social reproductive imperative. Indigenous responses to capitalist monopolisation of land and labour that was consolidated under the colonial reordering of local lineage systems and economies highlight this necessity. Against assertions of a ‘disappearing peasantry’ (Bernstein 2004), Johnson (2004) asks whether what we are witnessing is ‘not the disappearance of the peasantry, but rather its redefinition (Johnson 2004, 54). She adds that precisely due to capitalism’s tendencies towards ‘involution’ via its spatial concentration and centralisation, matched by an expanding sphere of social exclusion:
The peasant form of production as operating according to a driving logic of subsistence and retaining at least some form of control over the means of production is not disappearing. Rather, it persists as rural populations are increasingly marginalized and impoverished by the currents of global capital. The persistence of the peasantry is not a positive process. It stands as a testament of the failures of the development project. (Johnson 2004, 63; emphasis added)
The survival of the continent’s working people amid massive immiseration and dispossession under capitalism cannot, in other words, be thought of apart from both the landed resources that sustain lives and livelihoods in the absence of adequate wages and state support, as well as the labour that is necessary to derive use values from the land. When considered in relation to the overall structure of social reproduction, this labour ought to be concretely theorised as gendered labour, as this neglect has tended to worsen the contradictions internal to the exploited as well as undermine the effectiveness of social movements. For instance, while many Third World land and peasant movements were successful in underscoring the importance of land reform, they experienced varying levels of success in forcing postcolonial states to adopt and implement policies that would upset the economic hierarchy, and most of the land reforms undertaken between the 1950s and 1970s in non-socialist states were impervious to concerns of gender equity.2 Attention to the gendered structure of accumulation would necessarily link agrarian dispossession to the social relations of production and reproduction and in so doing, reconstitute land reforms as a resolution also of the exploitative and oppressive structures within the peasantry and between the peasantry and capital.
This article elaborates the nature, workings and structure of a gendered labour regime in relation to capitalist accumulation and imperialist-induced crises of social reproduction. My aim is first to elaborate the nature of reproductive crises in Africa today, focusing on three major domains of contemporary class struggle: the reconstitution of gendered labour under late capitalism; surplus populations and struggles over the commons; and land and agrarian reforms as a basis for social reproduction. In each case I examine the mechanisms through which imperialism appropriates gendered labour through processes of social reproduction in the Third World. In the final section I reflect briefly on the implications of this structure for feminist anticolonial, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles today.
Gendered labour under late capitalism
Capitalism reconstitutes gendered labour as a fundamental contradiction as it congeals within it both a basis for the ideological governance and control of labouring bodies, as well as the basis for the expropriation of working people. As a weapon of control, for instance, one of the primary modes through which the colonial state historically governed was based on its direct and indirect actions on women’s bodies through maternal health policies, population control, child vaccination and, of course, through compelling women into the biological reproduction of labour for the colonies via childbirth. As a weapon of expropriation, gendered labour again appears as the historical basis of the capitalist state which institutionalises the general and generational dispossession of colonised peoples in continuous cycles whose legacies linger from slavery well into the late capitalist period.
The social and political crises that inaugurate the necessity for social reproduction have found distinct but interrelated expression in scholarship ranging from fifteenth-century transatlantic slavery to nineteenth-century colonial domination. For instance, in relation to the slave, we understand from the literature the objectification (including sexual objectification) and loss of identity that underlies the commodification of slave labour. Spillers likens the ‘Middle Passage’ of Africans to quite
literally being suspended in the ‘oceanic’ … in an undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not-yet ‘American’ either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all. (Spillers 1987, 72; emphasis in original)
The statelessness that accompanies this labour is directly responsible for the non-value that is eventually attached to enslaved, captive labour. The ruse of ‘globalisation’ today is precisely in this mode of stateless capitalism – announcing the entry of massive numbers of working people without the security of political membership into a viciously exploitative world economy.
Furthermore, as Spillers argues, the cultural unmaking of captive labour is a fundamental basis of their alienation both as labour and as political subjects:
Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were culturally ‘unmade’, thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that ‘exposed their destinies to an unknown course’. (Spillers 1987, 72)
The mode of accumulation in the New World thus expropriates from the slave not only their reproductive and productive labours, but in the equation of human lives with only economic value, the slave market itself becomes an agent in maintaining the structural violence that sustains the system (Smallwood 2007, 56). Spillers (1987) and Smallwood (2007) also both point to the fundamental instability of the reproduction of the slave economy because it functioned through the destruction of the black family, where children resulting from such relationships were considered slaves and (since slavery followed the mother’s lineage) as property of the master.
The Marxist-feminist literature rethinks the historical ‘transition’ from feudalism to capitalism in the West by employing a Marxist-feminist critique to the Marxian notion of primitive accumulation – the basic historical process for the development of capitalism – by alleviating its silences about the indispensable aspects of capital accumulation (Federici 2004). These aspects include the emergence of a new sexual division of labour that reduces women’s purpose as well as their body to only a breeding machine for labour power, as well as a new patriarchal order that forcefully isolates women from waged labour, making them dependent on men through the heteropatriarchal institution of marriage. State complicity in denying women control over their bodies effectively ‘degrades maternity to the status of forced labour’ and confines women to reproductive work (Federici 2004, 92).
Further implicating the ideological structure in the expansion of empire, McClintock writes that:
controlling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic. By the turn of the century, sexual purity emerged as a controlling metaphor for racial, economic and political power. (McClintock 1995, 47; emphasis added)
Reproductive struggles were a crucial part of efforts to gain material resources and fulfil moral imperialist ambitions and, perhaps ‘more than any other realm of social life, reproduction demonstrates how the most intimate actions and desires [of colonising regimes] are connected to debate and interventions that flow from community, colonial, and international regimes’ (Thomas 2003, 4).
The colonial imposition of the Western model of capitalist development on the colonies bore certain implications for newly liberated nations in the Third World. The ‘progress’ of capitalist societies was based not only on the exploitation of ‘free’ wage labourers, but fundamentally too, on the exploitation of non-wage labourers as well as on plunder and colonial/neo-colonial exploitation. For developing nations to follow this model meant to similarly succumb to (gendered labour) exploitation and to entrench gender inequality in the process of accumulation (Mies 2014, 202). In this regard, consideration ought to be given to the ways in which gender inequalities might emerge within the developmental paths being taken in Africa, and in the current phase of monopoly finance capitalism, what these inequalities mean for working people of the Third World.
There is a real danger of replicating unjust developmental paths since a system of unequal exchange is entrenched under imperialism: that is, a situation in which international specialisation is rooted in the unequal rates of exploitation of labour power throughout the world system (Amin 1976, 128). What is sufficient for this form of unequal exchange is that commodities are produced for the international market. It is, in other words, not necessary for the capitalist mode of production to dominate the different social formations in all spheres, and this reality has social implications. In Amin’s argument, ‘the area interested in the export economy has no “need” of the rest of the country’ (ibid., 206). It is not only the productive resources of poor countries that are diverted to develop the centres of capitalism. At the same time as extraverted development is producing a large immiserated population with little recourse to the state and national resources, it has not spared the reproductive labour, whose need becomes more profound amid such dispossession.
This core–periphery articulation of gender and unequal exchange has been examined through theorisations of the flow of a predominantly female, caring labour from the periphery to the core of the world systems in the terms of unequal exchange.3 For instance, following Arrighi (1994) and drawing on the structural formulation of historical capitalism, Valiani (2012) has shown how a particular kind of gendered labour becomes incorporated into the world capitalist system as it restructures and enters a new phase. Her primary argument is that the material expansion of systemic cycles of accumulation have led to the (re)intensified exploitation of female caring labour. One element of this exploitation was through the global integration of nursing labour markets which were conceived as part of the radical restructuring and reorganisation of the financial expansion of accumulation (Valiani 2012). Such incorporation of gendered labour amid capitalist expansion is also increasingly undertaken by sub-imperialist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Gulf that heavily depend on labour importation and have entrenched a system of super-exploitation of migrant workers.
Perhaps controversially, one might also link the large reserve of Zimbabwe’s active labour force resident in South Africa today to the punitive relationship between the imperialist core that broke ranks with Zimbabwe following the radical land reforms there at turn of the century.4 Those reforms, Moyo and Yeros argue, demonstrated that Third World countries do not have similar capacity as ‘the centre of the capitalist system … [to resolve their] national and agrarian questions … [by exporting their] social contradictions beyond [their] borders in the interest of domestic “social peace”’ (Moyo and Yeros 2007, 103). Rather, ‘under imperialism, peripheral capitalism, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, has been unable to resolve the national and agrarian questions and thus exhibits recurrent economic, social, and political crises’ (ibid.). The nature of the social crisis is fundamentally ‘the inability of the labour force to reproduce itself’ and emanates from the fact that ‘Peripheral capitalism is in a chronic state of social crisis, evident in the statistics of high infant mortality, chronic malnutrition, vulnerability to preventable disease, low life expectancy, and high illiteracy’ (ibid., 104). The social crisis intensified in Zimbabwe under structural adjustment, was exacerbated by sanctions, and has persisted to the present day.
While Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reforms released large amounts of arable land to indigenous populations for the first time, it did not sufficiently address other social inequities like gender which continue to assert, among others, an unresolved agrarian question related to gendered labour (Ossome and Naidu 2021b, 346).5 The imposition of imperialist sanctions against the regime in Zimbabwe had a heavy human toll, decimating the industrial, agriculture, service and manufacturing sectors and leading to unprecedented migration of both productive and reproductive labour. In contrast to the colonial period, however, contemporary labour migrants to South Africa are encountering ongoing deindustrialisation and a post-apartheid regime that quite effectively foments difference as a basis of governance and labour regimentation. The result is xenophobic violence and severe fragmentation of working people, with gendered reproductive labour unsurprisingly constituting the most stable mode of incorporation into the informal workforce.
From a Third World vantage point a critique of migrant women’s labour, therefore, relates the necessity of devalued gendered labour in advanced capitalist countries to the peripheralisation of this labour in the global South. This is elaborated in Hassim’s argument that gender inequality underwrites the global care chain, such that its sustenance would not be possible ‘without intensifying the global inequality in care provision’ (Hassim 2008, 397). It is also highlighted by Valiani’s (2012) examination of the flow of a predominantly female, caring labour from the periphery to the core of the world systems in terms of unequal exchange.
Contemporary imperialism is also undergoing structural changes that are producing a surplus population to which it is unable to respond. As Prasad and Yeros argue, these structural changes
have been marked by a deepening systemic crisis of social reproduction. Although the crisis of social reproduction has been inherent in the whole trajectory of capitalist development, the question of social reproduction today has entered a new phase by the permanent crisis of monopoly capitalism itself. We are in a late phase of neocolonialism, whereby monopoly capitalism is unable to resolve its crisis other than by the massive expansion of labour reserves especially in the peripheries of the world economy. One of the basic elements of this process is a global agrarian transition marked by rural–urban migration without commensurate industrial transition. (Prasad and Yeros 2024, 3; emphasis added)
The reality is of deepening immiseration in much of the peripheries, which have ‘entered a trajectory of massive labour reserve formation’ (ibid.) that does not contain similar possibilities for industrial absorption of labour. The majority of the population ‘consists of non-proletarian working people who are either no longer engaged in agriculture or are spread over many occupations in urban and rural areas, including agriculture’ (ibid., 4). The ensuing crisis of social reproduction is permanent to the extent that ‘proletarianization will lag far behind the growth in numbers of non-proletarian working people’ as the rural exodus continues apace (ibid.). The intensification of rural–urban migration does not, however, necessarily mean a process of de-agrarianisation since the evidence suggests a deepening articulation between urban and rural households through both productive and reproductive relations that are driving the demand for land (ibid.). I now examine in some detail this suggested link between land and social reproduction.
Land and social reproduction in the agrarian South
The second major point in my elaboration is the relationship between land, social reproduction and agrarian reform. Utsa Patnaik (2012) shows as fallacious the claim that capitalist accumulation is today globally independent of reliance on peasant agriculture. She highlights how the intensive international division of labour is primarily aimed at reopening lands of the global South to meet the increasing demands of the North, and as a continuation of the primitive accumulation that spurred Northern industrialisation. Patnaik critiques the ‘absolute immiserization’ that has accompanied finance capital’s renewed dominance and attempt to control land, minerals and other primary resources in the global South through the promotion of an economic ‘discipline’ of domestic fiscal contraction, free trade and free capital flows (Patnaik 2012, 250–251). This new process of primitive accumulation and accompanying immiseration does not simply signify greater inequality: unlike the historical European colonising migrant, today’s displaced peasants and displaced workers of the South simply have nowhere to go. In the competition they face with capital over land and resources, they pose the question of sovereignty of food and natural resources. Akram-Lodhi and Kay (2010) similarly show the struggle of land and the commons in the global South as fundamentally anti-imperialist to the extent that it must be waged in direct confrontation to multinational corporations.
In this global contest of accumulation, gender inequality is being reconstituted as a contemporary agrarian question (Ossome and Naidu 2021a). The core of our theorisation is that contemporary models and trajectories of capitalist development that are premised on industrialisation tend to mask the gendered substratum of the structures, institutions and processes that support agrarian livelihoods in the absence of adequate wages and state support. This gendered agrarian labour becomes crucial because even in its late industrial phase, capitalism continues to rely on the exploitation and expropriation of land and labour as the basis of accumulation, drawing largely on women’s and family labour. Historically structured by the colonial capitalist economy, this labour remains mostly semi-proletarianised,6 constituted by both the traditional labouring classes and reproductive labour.
The shift in this present context of a neoliberal trajectory of development, especially as relates to the global South, is that every productive activity is now a mere act of survival, largely disarticulated from accumulation. Yet acts to try and maintain bare life assume less importance to both national and global concerns, necessitating a shift from an exclusive focus on exploitation and surplus value creation (the predominant lens through which processes of social reproduction have been theorised in the literature) to the more political question of survival, not just of labour but of human life under different phases of capitalist accumulation (Ossome and Naidu 2021a, 64). And while the diminished contribution of agriculture to GDP in developing countries is noted in much of the literature (see, for example, Adesina 2017),7 productivist arguments linking agriculture to capitalist development fail to grasp the reproductive significance of land, a relationship that is socially structured around a regime of gendered labour. In other words, in productivist arguments, agricultural development is disarticulated from the social and political questions raised by the enduring demand for land in the agrarian South. In the still largely agrarian societies of the global South, land and agrarian reforms are not irrelevant as land still constitutes the basis for survival of millions of households. These dynamics and economies of survival are what reconstitute gender as a contemporary agrarian question (Ossome and Naidu 2021a, 2021b).
The agrarian question of gendered labour asserts both a political and social dimension of gender inequity: it is political to the extent that the demand for land, nature and the commons, as the basis for social reproduction, necessarily reconstitutes the peasantry in general and the gendered labourers within it as subjects of the state; and it is social to the extent that the ensuing class struggle has to concretely account for the social differentiations among the peasantry itself which, beyond class, demand attention to the ethnic, caste, class, gender and racial constitution of agrarian classes. Furthermore, the progression of inequalities based on the gendered exploitation of labour and unabated environmental destruction in the global South have accelerated under the current model of industrialisation. These societies, therefore, cannot be expected to develop under the same conditions of imperialist dispossession that pertained under colonisation. For these reasons, it is crucial to both assert the continued relevance of the peasant and agrarian questions in the postcolonial trajectories of development in Africa, as well as to examine them from the vantage point of the needs and structure of (under)development in the global South. Imperialism necessitates that the peasant and agrarian questions in the South must also be analysed in relation to their globalised dimensions.
The reality of environmentally uneven exchange (Ajl 2023) includes not just the phenomenon of peripheral underdevelopment and de-development through drain, primitive accumulation and unequal exchange in the world market. It is also concerned with how accumulation on a global scale has often been structured by grabbing peripheral use values (Ajl 2021), including labour, soil fertility, forests and the degradation of Southern capacities for social reproduction (Ossome 2020). The export of pollution, the enclosure of atmospheric space, and rising Southern climatic disasters similarly result from this unequal exchange (Ajl 2021). The challenges of reproducing the global labour force, therefore, also constitute a fundamental lens through which to understand the commodification and concentration of nature and land as a gendered structural feature of development.
The enduring centrality of land is important to reiterate here for the reproduction and survival of working people in the agrarian South. The surplus populations being produced and expended en masse at the peripheries of global capitalist accumulation retain crucial links to land (including private land and the commons) and peasant agriculture, which is in turn dependent on gendered labour, thus highlighting the continued relevance of gender equitable redistributive land and agrarian reforms as a key basis of development and liberation. Gendered labour and land relations occupy an important position in the determination of equity and justice, including through the dismantling of the colonial patriarchal basis of accumulation, the de-segmentation of labour, and the utilisation of land and landed resources based on the needs and priorities of the South (Ossome, forthcoming).
Conclusion: feminism and anti-imperialist struggles in Africa
We can now look at the implications of the gendered structure elaborated above for contemporary feminist anticolonial, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. The first point relates to the extent to which the class struggle can identify the social contradictions and apprehend them. Amin (1976) has shown that, in advanced capitalist countries, social formation tends to be reduced to the capitalist mode of production. Backward sectors such as small and medium-size entrepreneurs are gradually eliminated and as this elimination takes place the social democratic alliance gains strength and becomes the main enemy. In the periphery, the formal submission of other modes of production places narrow limits on the development of productive forces. The centre of gravity of these struggles against capital as a class tends to shift from the centre of the system to the periphery. This shift reconstitutes the working class at the periphery as the essential force of liberation (Amin 1976), and women’s struggles constitute an essential component of the liberation army to the extent that theirs are struggles to reclaim and defend the reproductive resources that constitute the basis of survival for working people. Such resources might include land (both private and commons), nature, forests, as well as embodied gendered labour which itself is engaged in a constant struggle against its own annihilation.
The second point relates to the political frameworks within which anti-imperialist struggles are waged. The histories of imperialism, uneven development and ongoing processes of capitalist accumulation and dispossession have produced conditions of work and life in the global South that are so dispersed and so unorganised as to require different epistemological and methodological approaches to make sense of them. The task of accounting for the full range of social realities in the global South thus entails adopting a more critical vantage point that frames the phenomena we valorise, the data we gather and the political significance which we attach to that data. In other words, such theorising is marked on all sides by a political imperative, which as I have tried to show, must include the liberation of the gendered commons, and which in turn must be preceded by a critique of the gendered labour regimes that sustain the commons. As we have argued elsewhere, the focus on the reproduction of labour does not sufficiently capture the rapture between capital and labour: today’s reality of utter immiseration of working people warrants greater attention to ‘the reproduction of life, whether it is useful to capital or not’ (Ossome and Naidu 2021a, 82; emphasis added).
Expressed as an agrarian question, this shift towards concrete theorisation of social reproduction also contains within it the possibility of resolution of the political and social dimensions of the classical agrarian question. Furthermore, apart from posing the question regarding its usefulness as a potentially revolutionary class, the dependence of the peasantry on gendered labour today raises the question of gender inequity due to contradictions internal to itself that require greater attention from agrarian scholars. These contradictions, which I have theorised as the agrarian question of gendered labour, compel further reflection on what kinds of solidarities the current conditions of labour under neoliberal capitalism entail, and the particular difficulties that a peasant path upon which reproductive labour greatly relies is likely to encounter (ibid., 83). As such, it entails developing theories that are ‘grounded in material analysis of existing radical social forces’ (Bush 2023) and which ‘[pay] attention to the nuances of national specificities’ (Adesina 2022, 54).
Lastly and relatedly, the question of agrarian sovereignty which I have sought to emphasise here leads me conclusively to the question of national sovereignty and liberation as the fundamental condition(s) of safeguarding the possibility of survival for most of the world. A critical body of Third World agrarian literature has been fundamental in elaborating the necessity of identifying the political subject of the agrarian question, and asserts the indispensability of a gendered analytical lens if the national liberation project is to concretely take on the structure of imperialism:
The … consolidation of monopoly finance capital and the new scramble for monopoly control over the planet’s natural resources and agricultural land have constituted a concerted attempt to reverse the gains of national liberation. The challenge in the current phase is thus qualitatively different: the key issue is no longer the conquest of political sovereignty, in a generalized sense, although colonial questions do persist and even expanding; but [rather] the defence and deepening of the already conquered sovereignty regime. Today, this would be impossible without a gendered understanding of the agrarian question, or enforcement of the differential ecological rights and obligations pertaining to North and South, or regional pooling of sovereignty and coordinated agro-industrial integration. (Moyo, Jha and Yeros 2013, 104–105; emphasis added)
Neither the consideration of the sovereignty of lands, nor of nations, nor of food systems or nature, nor in that case any possibility for a genuine liberation project of the Third World can proceed without a serious consideration of the gendered labour regimes that remain trapped under the immiserating weight of capitalist accumulation centuries into their captivity. The anti-imperialist wars we continue to wage do not constitute any meaningful path to Third World liberation if they do not retain a focus on these materialist feminist histories.