The Social Reproduction of Pandemic Surplus Populations and Global Development Narratives on Inequality and Informal Labour

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the COVID-19 crisis through a social reproduction lens, with a focus on the restructuring of reproductive sectors, the world of work and the generation of differentiated surplus populations, and considers the implications of this reading for global development debates on inequality and informal labour. Learning from the pandemic and the social reproduction of the surplus populations it generated, the analysis argues that debates on inequality should be re-centred on its existential nature and its embeddedness in social oppression, and that labour relations should be considered as key reproducers of inequality. It also argues that informal labour should be increasingly understood as playing the reproductive role of ‘global housework’ in contemporary capitalism.