This event will be hosted in hybrid format. RSVP to attend in person. Please RSVP by no later than 9 am on April 29. Register for the Zoom meeting.
This symposium spotlights cutting-edge work in the field of social reproduction. Thematically and geographically, it excavates the tradition of Soviet and Eastern European feminism, which was intersectional with class avant la letter, and which has been largely erased by the transition to capitalism and the arrival of Western feminism in postsocialist lands in the 1990s. Chronologically examining its different stages, the papers will evaluate its unrealized potentialities and continued relevance, both as analytical and political perspectives.
PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE
11:00 am-12:00 pm – Anastasia Kalk, “From Communes to Kommunalizatsiya: Soviet Feminist Theory of Family Abolition”
The demand to abolish family is making a hopeful resurgence in Marxist and feminist critique. Contemporary family abolition theories by Sophie Lewis, Michele O’Brien, and Alva Gotby advocate for communalizing family work in society. However, by aligning more closely with 1970s Anglo-American feminist discussions than with Soviet feminist debates, I argue that this new critique of the family fails to challenge the prevailing view in feminist theory that parenting and housework should stay private rather than public responsibilities. This recent discussion tends to translate the family abolition idea into the nonpolitical goal of organizing small-scale private and residential communes. In contrast, the Soviet feminist tradition as represented by Aleksandra Kollontai and Nadezhda Krupskaya allows feminist and political thinkers to interpret the family abolition demand as part of a broader political movement for public childcare and dining infrastructure.
LUNCH
1:00-2:00 pm – Alexandra Talaver, “State feminism under state socialism: a fictitious marriage?”
Drawing on extensive archival research and a broader study of the Soviet Women’s Committee as a key women’s political agency in the USSR after World War II, the talk opens with an overview of how elite Soviet women carved out space within state structures, then turns to the what was questioned as a "fictitous marriage" between the Soviet Women’s Committee and Soviet trade unions. Focusing on the Commission on Problems of Labor and Everyday Life of Women and of Mother and Child Protection, the talk shows how an apparatus formally tasked with raising women’s productivity quietly reoriented its agenda toward protecting mothers, easing domestic burdens, and expanding childcare—often sidelining economic arguments in internal debates in favor of the everyday realities of overworked women. It explores how reproductive labor became both the language of women’s claims and the terrain on which the state sought to manage demographic anxieties and gender norms.
2:30-3:30 pm – Olena Lyubchenko, “Reproduction or Redistribution? Approaching the Question of Soviet Distinction”
Much of the socialist feminist research on women’s work and social policy in state socialist societies like the Soviet Union has been undertaken from what I call a distribution-centric approach. This approach traces the distribution of surplus to the households in the form of social citizenship and state benefits, and ultimately distinguishes state socialist societies only quantitatively - not qualitatively - from other post-war welfare states. Though this is important work in its own right, I argue that a distribution-centric approach leaves out important phenomena about the systematic functioning of the Soviet Union and its distinct social form inside global capitalism. Following newer trajectories within the field of critique of political economy, in this paper, I posit that we must return to a Marxist-Hegelian concept of reproduction, which moves beyond the narrow definition of reproduction as ‘care work’. Instead, I argue that to understand Soviet distinction at the level of social form, we ought to disentangle identity that is often presumed between immediate relations of production and social reproduction and the reproduction of the total system of global capitalism and its components. I argue that such a reproduction-centric approach avoids two errors: calling everything capitalist - a loss of specificity and distinction - or treating ‘non-capitalist’ domination as outside of capitalism - a loss of mediation. Concretely examining the role of wages, money, prices, socially necessary labour time in the Soviet system in the post-war era, my paper intends to answer the following questions: What was the relationship between production and social reproduction under state socialism? What was distinct about state socialism in contrast to the Keynesian welfare state? And, most importantly, to what extent was concrete life modified by the value form, and to what extent did it retain its relative independence?
4:00-5:00 pm – Adela Hincu, “Equality – Why and How: Socialist Women and the Transnational Sociology of Gender”
As Hungarian sociologist Zsuzsa Ferge presented on socialist approaches to equality at the 1974 World Congress of Sociology in Toronto, sociological research on women and gender was just coagulating around the Research Committee for Sex Roles in Society of the International Sociological Association. Ferge, who was only marginally involved in that process, argued that “equality was not an end in itself,” but a necessary condition for human flourishing. With her, a host of Marxist theory and empirical research from Eastern Europe maintained what came to be simplified as the preeminence of class over gender in discussions about women’s equality. This talk reconstructs the history of institutional struggles for women’s equality within ISA and for developing a transnational field of women’s and gender studies over the 1970s and 1980s, asking about the place of socialist women and Marxist approaches to social equality within them. It argues for historicizing the class-gender debate from the perspective of epistemic inequalities engendered by the transnationalization of sociology in the late socialist period.
5:30-6:30 pm – Elena Gapova, "Class, Gender, and Citizenship in the Belarusian Revolution/Uprising of 2020"
Analyzing the 2020 protests in Belarus, this paper highlights the prominent role played by women—especially after the arrest of male opposition candidates—many of whom also belonging to a new class of IT professionals and creative precariat striving for rights and recognition as carriers of a broader societal and economic transformation. Being integrated in the global post-industrial service and creative economy, these groups have engaged in full-scale defiance of the paternalist state, placing the quest for liberal citizenship at the core of the Belarusian revolution and simultaneously putting social limitations to its appeal.
