‘Life’s Work’ Amidst Financialized Land Expropriation: Contributions from Social Reproduction Theory on Struggles for Land and Home

Keywords: social reproduction theory, racial capitalism, land expropriation, housing financialization, dispossession
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper aligns contributions from feminist social reproduction theory (SRT) and anti-racist and decolonial geographies to outline co-constitutive ties between financialized land expropriation and the ‘life’s work’ of those whose dispossession it relies on (Mitchell et al. 2004). It draws from ongoing empirical research on how state managed housing development is shaped by financialized modes of racial capitalism and the consequential struggles for land, home, and social reproduction. I explore land expropriation in this context as a conditional material process encompassing strategic disinvestments in human lives and means of subsistence, confiscations of devalued spaces, capacities and resources, and their conscription into pathways of exponential profit (Federici 2014; Fields and Raymond 2021; Fraser 2016).

Anti-racist and decolonial scholarship contextualize land expropriation with geographies of colonial dispossession and racial governance whose attempts at spatial division and commodified land relations have long been contested by abolition, refusal, and radical resurgence (Daigle and Ramirez 2019; Dorries et al. 2019; Gilmore 2022). In turn, SRT scholarship highlights a dialectical relationship between land expropriation and the labors of everyday life. The latter, despite being placed ‘outside’ capital, is both value generating and value producing precisely because its exploitation is intrinsic to racial capitalism’s accumulation potential (Bhattacharya 2017; Katz 2001; Mezzadri 2020). Leaning into these interstices, I ask: If financialized land expropriation is contingent on foreclosing capacities for social reproduction and dispossessing racialized, gendered, and colonized subjects, what is revealed about the value capacity of labors, lives, and land relations excised by racial capitalism?