Ahilan Kadirgamer.
A majority of women are employed in Sri Lanka’s apparel industry which is a main contributor to the GDP. Feminist Economics analyses the gendered workings of the economy, including inequalities in employment and wages.
The 2020s is turning out to be a decade of great unravelling of the global order much like the 1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the aggravation of the debt crisis in countries like Germany, paved the way for the rise of fascism and tremendous destruction with World War II. Only time will tell the depth of the contemporary unravelling and its fallout.
The current global crisis has no doubt been generated by the long capitalist downturn shaped by neoliberal globalisation and financialised accumulation over the last five decades. The crisis prone character of the neoliberal project are evident from the debt crisis affecting the global South in the 1980s, the East Asian economic crisis of late 1990s, and the North Atlantic Financial crisis of the 2008; the latter in particular has shaken the very heart of the metropolis and remains unresolved to this day.
This contemporary precarious capitalist order faced the tremendous shock of the Covid pandemic. Over the last three years a deepening debt crisis affecting more than seventy developing countries remains unresolved, and in fact those countries are suffocating further with the austerity policies of the IMF.
The global hegemony of the United States – that emerged following the crisis of the 1930s – with its vast military complex and a free market economic order are also now in its last stage. While the post-September 11, 2001 imperialist venture of the Bush regime unleashed a “war on terror” destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, and created havoc around the world, we are now facing an even more naked new imperialism. The Trump regime is undermining the very structures of capitalist accumulation that had sustained the US Empire for close to a century. The future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the military alliance between the US and Europe is now in question. World trade with a free market regime that had brought massive gains for the West is now being undone. In this context, empires rarely go gently into the night; their dissolution comes with tremendous destruction as with the world wars.
How do we understand our world amidst such great unravelling? Does economics as a discipline provide any ideas about the underlying economic structures and processes that are devastating the lives of working people? In this column, I address some of the critiques within the economic discipline itself in seeking to understand economic crises.
Critiques of economic theorising
The economic crises of the mid-nineteenth century and the search for an alternative social system motivated Karl Marx to carry out the deepest study of the capitalist system. Although Marx was influenced by German philosophy, French socialism and literary and political writings from all over the world, he relied heavily on the body of thought called British political economy for his analysis of capitalism. His magnum opus Capital has the subtitle A Critique of Political Economy, which gave radical analysis of the workings of the capitalist system. Marxist theorising over the last century and a half have delved into many aspects of capitalist production and the economy more broadly, leading to a range of research, writings, and debates from finance and markets to labour, land and the peasantry.
Even as these Marxist critiques and a different understanding of the economy was emerging, another shift was underway in British academia led by Alfred Marshal, with economics becoming an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century. From understanding the economic processes that shaped the modern world as philosophers and political economists, there was a turn towards understanding the economy as a so-called science with laws of supply and demand. Indeed, this shift that disembodied the study of the economy bereft of its broader social and political underpinnings had serious consequences for both describing economic processes and prescribing policies.
This narrow analysis of the economy led to both a flawed understanding of the causes and consequences of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the failed policies that further aggravated the crisis. John Maynard Keynes, a student of Marshal led a critical turn from within the British economic establishment. He published his profound book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, where he provided path-breaking analysis and policies for governments to intervene during times of crisis.
I often draw from Marx and Keynes in analysing the economy. However, the point I want to make here is that crises lead to debates about the workings of the economy, including with new theories and even iconoclastic ideas that shape economics as a discipline. The sad state of this discipline in our times is that it relies heavily on neoclassical economic theories with an ideological commitment to the market. This dominant school does not help understand much of the workings of the economy, and provides little by way of solutions that can address both the everyday and long-terms problems faced by governments, and certainly not the challenges of the working people and their economic lives.
Feminist economics
It is this frustration with the orthodoxy in economics that has led to the emergence of a significant body of critical scholarship called heterodox economics. But such critiques are not just about neoclassical economics alone, and they also arise out of debates from within Marxist and Keynesian economics. I would like to address here an emerging school of thought called Feminist Economics, which provides many insights about the workings of the economy in the contemporary world.
Feminist Economics analyses the gendered workings of the economy, including inequalities in employment and wages, the crippling extractive mechanisms of finance capital in the countryside, the social supports for production and forms of exploitation that reaches deep into the homes, priorities and exclusions in fiscal policies and budget making, and a range of other matters that call for a fundamental rethinking of how economies work and the policies that should be adopted.
My own turn towards feminist political economy, draws from the research of feminist anthropologists and sociologists, who delved into the workings of the capitalist system and its relationship to production in the home and informal spaces. Such work provides a critique of political economy that focuses only on production in factories and formal institutions, and the different forms of exploitation of workers in those spaces.
In more fundamental terms they brought up the concept of “social reproduction.” They critiqued economic analyses that was blind to the fact that for production in formal spaces of factories and farms to take place, there was considerable work being done in the informal spaces particularly by women.
That is somebody is cooking the food, caring for the elderly and children at home, and reproducing the social conditions necessary for the worker to go work in a factory. The same goes for work on farms where family labour is rarely considered. In other words, the surveys and statistics, including GDP measurements – as total goods and services produced in a country – have huge gaps in terms of not recording different forms of production that are undertaken in communities, and particularly inside homes.
Analysing the current conjuncture
The current conjuncture that is likely to see tremendous political, economic and social changes in the world require analysis of global changes linking it to the impact on households. Indeed, the ongoing debt crisis devastating developing world will also drastically reshape landed relations and women’s work in the countryside. For example, the austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the trade barriers put up by the Trump regime, will reduce production at all levels from the formal sector including factories and public services, informalised production in cottage industries and even everyday production in the kitchens of households. There will be less state support in the form of social welfare for the elderly and children, with the social burdens further exploiting women.
Even the food available in the homes are likely to decline with people eating less nutritious food, if not outright hunger. The imposition of such social burdens are likely to come with misogynist political attacks on women.
It is such worrying issues facing our contemporary world that are going to be discussed at an international conference on Feminist Economics, titled ‘Women, Development and Social Transformation,’ organized by the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) and the Law and Society Trust (LST) on 5th April 2025 at Sri Lanka Foundation Institute in Colombo. The conference will feature international economists from Asia, Africa and Latin America, including Jayati Ghosh, Mayada Hassanain, Natalia Flores Garrido, Sumangala Damodaran, Nida Kirmani, C. P. Chandrasekhar, Mini Sukumar and many others. It will hopefully generate much needed analyses and discussions about the ongoing crisis in Sri Lanka and the world over.
Courtesy of the Daily Mirror.