Acumulación por desposesión, género y crisis en el estado español

Abstract

In this paper I examine how the current economic crisis in Spain, as well as the ways in which the State manages it, are shaped by gender. In order to achieve my goal, I adopt the concept of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession as my main analytical axis. I suggest that, far from being a merely foundational process, with the complicity of the State, primitive accumulation appears continuosly throughout the crises of capitalism as a mechanism for overcoming them. It is also a process fundamentally marked by gender. The increase of women’s total work load, as well as the intensification of their reproductive responsibilities, are not simply collateral effects of the current crisis but rather result from a political-economic strategy of privatization and re-housewification of reproduction in the aim of saving the so called real economy. We are thus before a new enclosure of the commons which adopts the form of an updated strengthening of the sexual division of labor within the household. This does not result in women’s exit from the so called productive economy but rather in their increased presence in it.