Beyond “gender backlash”. Political economy of biological and social reproduction in Poland.

This paper centers on Poland as a case study to argue that debates on abortion—frequently framed as cultural, value conflicts or “culture wars”—must be re-situated within a political-economic analysis of social and biological reproduction, debates within Social Reproduction Theory and the pluralizing approaches to SRT (Mezzadri et al. 2024). Drawing on past research on democracy and abortion and current study of the political economy of reproduction, I show how reproductive work is made functional for a post–state-socialist form of capitalism combining neo-liberal marketisation, socialist productivisation, and conservative moral regulation. In Poland, structural struggles of economy and reproduction intersected in 1956 (when abortion was legalized under a productivist approach), in 1993 (when abortion was restricted during transition to capitalism and formal democracy), and between 2016- 2023, when issues of biological and social reproduction—amid debates over abortion and unpaid, activist reproductive labour during “care crises”—proved decisive in re-democratisation processes (Grabowska 2023). Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews and 5 focus groups on biological and social reproduction in intersectional contexts of migration, generational differences, and gender, this paper argues that at individual level “reproductive biographies” reflect the interplay between the (lack of) reproductive agency and continued reproductive labor, exploited by the state to maintain hybrid arrangements that render biological and social labor both: indispensable and invisible. Following Rai’s concept of depletion, I demonstrate how costs of reproductive work are reproduced across intersecting social positions, and how individual experience of this labor is systematically undervalued and politically unprotected (Rai 2024). Using Mezzadri’s notion of subsumption—the incorporation of reproduction into capitalist accumulation—I argue that informal provisioning becomes indispensable to new capitalist accumulation, which relies on unpaid reproductive labor while externalising its costs (Mezzadri 2019), and simultaneous promotion of paid “productive labor” rooted in Poland’s socialist productivism. In conclusion, I argue that pluralized approaches to social reproduction—analyses of capitalism’s contradictions, and the multiplicity of reproductive sites,—can help overcome existing crisis within Eastern European feminist theory and practice, caused in part by rejection of Marxist political analysis and lack of empirical interests in social realities of reproduction.