A Feminist Political-Economy Narrative Against Austerity

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.