Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

Neoliberal Political Economy and Value Transmission 35
political projects and global governmental bodies. 15 Its institutionalization
means that socialization agents, such as schools and tertiary institutions, also
become embedded in neoliberal value systems. Institutions are crucial for how
they shape values and ideas. Once certain values and ideas become institutionalized,
they present powerful forces for continuity that rest on established path
dependencies. When care and the bodies who care are not configured into these
path dependencies, the contribution of women (carers) to sustaining human societies
is erased.
The value of care in patriarchal societies is usually associated withwomen’s
work that is unpaid and happens in the privacy ofthe home. Neoliberal globalization
as agendered process devalorizes women’s bodies and care work, especially
where global care chains consist of mostly migrant women from developing
countries. When this sex/gender system (which determines agendered
division of labor) is socialized to be “natural,” the gender binary becomes internalized,
and care is devalued. This system also reinforces the idea of the binary
between the productive and reproductive economy—where the productive economy
is viewed asmale, paid for, and rewarded, while reproductive work is
viewed as elastic and mostly unpaid, contributing to the feminization of poverty.
Neoliberalism has contributed to acrisis in social reproduction because it depletes
the emotional, cultural, and material resources necessary to sustain the
well-being ofhuman beings. 16 Effective socialization of the sex/gender system
matters structurally for masculinized economic relations that, on one hand, value
men’swork and, on the otherhand, devalue women’swork that maintains the
emotional and physical health of people. 17 The devaluing ofwomen’s work also
contributes to the concentration of women in precarious work that has become
characteristic of late modernity. This is work that is short term, low paid, and
without benefits.
Neoliberalism’s logic of commodification and capital accumulation has contributed
to the dismantling of welfare states that offered asafety net to poor and
vulnerable people, contributing to the greater precariousness of work, access to
housing, and health. Precariousness is aconsequence of the hegemony ofthe
free market. The compact of labor, the state, and the private sector has shifted
to erode workers’ rights and bargaining power with aconcomitant decrease in
government’ssocial expenditure through austerity measures.Precarity is both a
social and astructural economic condition and is aconsequence of the erosionof
the state’s welfare provisioning that has fueled migration from developing regions
to developedcountries.This migration enables aflexible labor market embedded
in an international division of labor that is raced and gendered, with
15
16
17
Sylvia Walby, Globalization and Inequalities (London: Sage, 2009), 42–45.
Peterson, “International/Global Political Economy,” 180–82.
Ibid., 181.