Tithi Bhattacharya’s Public Lecture

26 Sep 2024 - 17:00 / 26 Sep 2024 - 19:00

Centre for Comparative Literature presents

our 2024 Northrop Frye Professor
Tithi Bhattacharya
Purdue University

Public lecture:  Social Reproduction Theory as Diagnostic, Abolition as Politics: Reimagining Anticapitalism (Audio on YouTube)
Date: Thursday, September 26, 2024 from 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Location: Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Room VC 323

Since the welcome renewal of scholarly and political attention on care and social reproduction, there has also been an unspoken ahistoricization of care as a beautiful, even virtuous, expression of human labor. Care, as practiced within capitalism, however, is a dialectical unity of opposites.  On the one hand it constitutes a stubborn, intractable aspect of humanity that refuses capitalist modifications. On the other, as an act inserted into capitalist social relations, and part of it, it can be limited in its welfare functions. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) that studies the social relations through which human beings create (birth), maintain, and generate labor power is concerned with both these dimensions for labor power for under capitalism, labor power is both inseparable from a living, breathing human being, as well as an exploitable commodity. But while SRT can be a diagnostic of capitalist social relations that has the unique potential to reveal both the stable procedures of capital as well as its fault lines, abolition, as learnt from the Black radical tradition, must be its politics. SRT, in itself, does not point towards a solution, merely outlines the problem; it is abolition that creates that horizon of liberation giving us a futural glimpse when care can transcend need and become a principal.