Rethinking social reproduction

“Network," digital illustration for Ojalá © Verte Selva.

Opinion • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • May 8, 2026 • Leer en castellano

When we talk about social reproduction, we are referring to how daily and medium-term efforts in support for collective life are organized on different, overlapping levels.

The feminist economist Amaia Pérez suggests that doing so involves considering, in concrete terms, how we collectively and individually organize the fulfillment of the combination of needs (necesidades) and desires (deseos), which she calls desesidades.

We are witnessing a fierce, protracted fight for the right to determine social reproduction, the means of satisfying our desesidades. Now is the time to collectively understand and rebuild that right.

To answer these questions, we must consider that collective or social life is by no means homogeneous or uniform.

Living in a city in which life is increasingly commodified, holding a stable job and owning your home is not the same as living in constant precarity and facing rising rents.

Living in the country where one was born, with a birth certificate and maybe some rights, is not the same as going through the experience of migrating and living the systematic illegality to which a large part of migrant workers are condemned.

The contrasts, hierarchies, and divisions are enormous.

In order to reflect upon social reproduction from a transfeminist perspective of interdependence that centers the common good, we follow a two-step approach that takes into account the diverse rhythms and cycles of communal support.

First, there are distinctions and divisions we face on what we will call a local level which must be acknowledged. Local here does not refer to the specific scale where immediate reproductive activities happen, but rather to tangible spaces where diverse—and stratified—bodies are concentrated. These bodies are subject to other exploitative cycles and feedback loops that extend beyond that scale.

From the outset, therefore, we must understand how the social map is designed and updated as a mosaic of juxtaposed, conflicting, and tension-filled fragments.

Second, we need to understand the separations and distinctions imposed between diverse units of reproduction, as well as the various processes by which such units are assembled into productive processes on a much larger scale.

AtOjalá we have been working to contribute to this mapping over the past years, as have our compañeres at La Laboratoria.

Now, we seek to move forward in thinking through the second step. We need to decipher and become more aware of how reproduction locally is produced and maintained in this disordered configuration.

Militarization, extractivism, and financialization

We already know that direct or generalized violence against people and territories, which obscures the perpetrators’ identities, combined with increasing militarization is a path that some countries in Abya Yala—including, but not limited to Mexico, El Salvador, and Ecuador—have taken over the past decade. We understand security as it is positioned in official discourse as armed surveillance and control of territories, and securitization has served as a pretext for an excessive escalation of violence.

The militarization of large amounts of territory is deeply intertwined with extractive interests—both in minerals and agribusiness—and with the superexploitation of labor. It also connects to the increasingly diverse forms of financial plunder through public debt and debt incurred by people who are already marginalized, victimized, or criminalized.

We must also take into account the ways in which, over the past years and months, an intense international conflict has been unfolding around the uses and flows of energy, money, minerals, water, and food. 

Ongoing open wars, which include the suffocation and genocide in Gaza and spread destruction to Lebanon and Iran, among others, are one expression of this fierce clash.

As wars are fought over which companies from which countries will profit from the extractive regime, and in what currency, and how such business ventures will continue to be financed, we know it is urgent to invest in the common good. 

Now is the time to prepare for increasingly harsh conditions of daily life in the short and medium-term, and to promote connections between struggles in defense of life, around which urgency is growing.

Cycles and processes redefined

If we take a historical snapshot that begins at the end of World War II, we can distinguish at least three ways of managing the already mentioned material flows, which should, in principle, meet the wide ranging desesidades of diverse units of reproduction.

The first is through public services, and the second is through private enterprise.

For example, the construction of large-scale drinking water distribution networks or of electricity generation and power grids in almost all countries was initially carried out within the public sector, which provided services to at least a portion of the population. In some Latin American countries, long-term access to land was established as a right, and its exchange was kept out of the market.

Over the last 40 years, we’ve experienced the neoliberal privatization drive, which has seen a shift from public services to private corporations.

In both cases, money has been necessary to access the goods required for social reproduction. Whether public or private, services, goods, or products must be paid for. Hence, the overall rise and expansion of wage labor—something that is increasingly precarious—as the dominant form of organizing collective survival.

The third way of managing knowledge, skills, and labor for social reproduction is discussed far less, despite constituting a significant component of daily and medium-term collective survival. These are patterns of reciprocity, cooperation, and mutual aid, which are systematically practiced for daily care and sustenance and for organizing collective enjoyment.

These practices and patterns of reciprocity are generally rendered invisible and at times, they are criminalized. They are negated, studied in an exoticizing manner, and their existence is minimized and presented as a series of disjointed and anomalous practices that deviate from the imposed norms of wage labor and market consumption.

These alternative economies—constituted through collaborative practices, which are made up of a flow of multiple vital energies—are at the very foundation of collective processes, particularly in reproductive units considered “low-income.”

When trying to understand varied processes of social reproduction, we believe it’s crucial to consider the concrete impacts of a range of specific support networks that emerge in popular economies—misnamed informal—through ties that are often fraught but remain stable over time. These take the form of mutual aid and cooperation in the most diverse tasks, and in the multiple associative forms that emerge to sustain productive work and navigate problems together.

This is what we aim to explore in depth in a new series of articles in Ojalá, always relating these forms to the ways in which material flows are managed. These flows form the basis of cycles of social reproduction. Today, they are openly contested and in direct conflict due to the most aggressive factions of capital.

Worsening violence and wars

Wherever they occur, militarization, extractivism, and finance form a triangle that traps and depletes the material basis that makes social reproduction viable and stable.

These conflicts are caused by elites and governments to determine who—which companies, from what countries—will come away with control of resources and the profits that result. From the perspective of transfeminisms committed to the commons, the question is whether we will be able to put a stop to the worst destructive impacts of such attacks and defend and preserve other uses of these life-giving elements to serve the most immediate and urgent desesidades.

From this perspective, addressing the impacts of increased militarization—which alerts us to imminent threats of worsening conditions for social reproduction—is an urgent issue. The extraordinary debt incurred by governments to finance rising military expenditures is borne by women, gender dissidents, and workers in general.

The dispute over fossil fuels and their uses is intense. We are already at a point at which global availability of oil and its derivatives is in decline. Although there is still oil, there will never be as much as there was in the last half-century.

Growing debts on the part of households whose members are trapped between multiple jobs and paying off personal debts are reaching dramatic levels, especially in Argentina.

The global regime we are facing seeks to impose means of controlling energy, water, minerals, food production, and territories in a manner that is contrary to the social reproduction of life as a whole.

That is why we urgently need to reflect and discuss the broad constellation of struggles in defense of life that are already underway and how we can help connect and expand them across borders.