Social Reproduction and Settler Colonial Biopolitics: Reflections from Palestine

According to the autonomist Marxist feminist account of primitive accumulation, land dispossession and proletarianization were accompanied by the housewifisation of women’s work to fulfil the needs of social reproduction to reproduce labour power. This paper develops further the understanding of these processes in the settler colonial context. While Silvia Federici and Maria Mies examine the racialised replication of these processes under capitalist imperialism, settler colonialism aims not to proletarianise the indigenous population, but to remove them from the land. How, then, is social reproduction reordered under settler colonialism? To explore this further, examine the past and ongoing colonisation of Palestine with the added lens of biopolitics. The biopolitical aims of settler colonialism, I argue, are in tension (rather than harmony) with capitalist imperatives of surplus value accumulation. Moreover, given the centrality of social reproduction to the connection between population and land, social reproduction is a target, effect, and a form of resistance to occupation, adding further layers of complexity.