Unproductive Workers and State Repression

1043284 RRPXXX10.1177/04866134211043284Review of Radical Political EconomicsMunro research-article2021 Conference Proceeding Unproductive Workers and State Repression Review of Radical Political Economics 1–8 © 2021 Union for Radical Political Economics Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/04866134211043284 DOI: 10.1177/04866134211043284 rrpe.sagepub.com Kirstin Munro1 Abstract Social Reproduction Theory, as advanced by scholars such as Bhattacharya (2017) and Ferguson (2019), is at its core a theory of the revolutionary capacity of “unproductive” workers such as teachers, nurses, and social workers who are disproportionately women and disproportionately employed by the state. However, Social Reproduction Theory overlooks the contradictory and antagonistic role of the state in the lives of people, as the reproduction of labor power in capitalism proceeds via antagonism and state repression. The task of teachers, nurses, and social workers is the production of not just any life but that of a docile, exploitable worker. JEL classification: B51, B54, P1, I3 Keywords contradictions, gender welfare, poverty and well-being, Marxist theory, productive labor versus unproductive labor, women 1. Introduction Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is a recent offshoot of Marxist-feminism (Arruzza 2016; Bhattacharya 2017; Ferguson 2019) that argues for the revolutionary capacity and working-class position of unproductive workers whose waged and unwaged work is involved in the reproduction of the commodity labor power. From Dalla Costa and James (1975), SRT borrows the idea that women who perform tasks on an unwaged basis related to the reproduction of labor power are members of the working class and thus capable of participating in class struggle. From Lise Vogel ([1983] 2013), SRT borrows the notion that labor power is reproduced not only in the family household on an unwaged basis by mothers and wives, but also on a waged basis by unproductive workers. In combining these two insights from twentieth-century Marxist-feminist scholarship to argue for the revolutionary potential of workers outside the “productive” economy, SRT has done much to overturn Marxist orthodoxy and shed light on the importance of unproductive labor carried out by disproportionately women of all races and racialized men. While Bhattacharya and Ferguson gesture toward it in places, this SRT does not specifically examine how the reproduction of labor power relates to the crisis-ridden reproduction of capitalist society. What Ferguson and Bhattacharya offer instead is a foreshortened account in 1 University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX, USA Date received: March 2, 2021 Date accepted: August 12, 2021 Corresponding Author: Kirstin Munro, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, 1201 West University, Edinburg, TX 78539-2999, USA. Email: kirstin.munro@utrgv.edu 2 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0) which exploitation and domination are extrinsic to the organization of production and reproduction. My critique of SRT is based on my view that exploitation and domination are inherent to the organization of production and reproduction in capitalism, and that the reproduction of capitalist society proceeds by perpetuating these forms of organization. Unproductive workers are complicit in the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole, just as productive workers are. Thus, SRT is not a critical theory of capitalist society. SRT can be best described as a revolutionary strategy aimed at correctly identifying the working class on the assumption that the correct definition, along with transitional demands (Trotsky [1938] 1981) connected to this correct identification of the working class, can help to bring about communism. While the term “social reproduction theory” has recently been co-opted by non-Marxists—for example in the liberal/ progressive subfield of feminist economics—SRT as originally conceived by Trotskyist scholars such as Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Ferguson theorizes the revolutionary capacity of “unproductive” workers, focusing on occupations such as teachers, nurses, and social workers who are disproportionately women who are disproportionately employed by the state. In doing so, SRT overlooks the contradictory and antagonistic role of the state in the lives of the working class, as the reproduction of labor power in capitalism takes place via state repression domination.1 In this paper, I argue that the task of teachers, nurses, and social workers is the production of not just any “life” but that of a docile, exploitable worker, and that this reproduction of labor power by employees of the state can’t be divorced from state repression.2 First, I provide an overview of the reproduction of labor power in capitalist society building on my previous work (Munro 2019, 2021), arguing that accumulation and the reproduction of capital cannot be divorced from the reproduction of labor power and vice versa. Second, I discuss the contradictory but repressive nature of institutions such as schools, health care facilities, and social service agencies, and I argue that professional state employees whose work involves the reproduction of labor power—disproportionately women—have a state repressive function in capitalist society. 2. Is Reproducing Labor Power a Good Thing? Labor power is the capacity to produce use values, which only becomes a commodity when it is offered for sale on the market. The commodity labor power is sold by the owner of labor power— the free laborer—because he has nothing else to sell as the result of the historical process of forcible expropriation. The existence of the capitalist necessitates the existence of the seller of labor power, and the imperative of accumulation necessitates that labor power remain constantly available on the market. The wage is not exactly equal to the full amount of labor time necessary for the reproduction of labor power day-to-day or intergenerationally because of the unwaged time involved in transforming commodities into use values and raising children (Quick 2018; Vogel [1983] 2013), what Lise Vogel ([1983] 2013: 158) calls the “domestic component of necessary labour.” State programs such as public education, health care, and other welfare state benefits also contribute to the nonequivalence of the worker’s wage and the worker’s subsistence level (Conference of Socialist Economists 1977: 4). Understanding the cultural norms that prescribe working class “needs,” the specific proportions of inputs, the social assignment of tasks, and the arrangement of people in space is an empirical question for historians—the reproduction of labor power has been carried out in a variety of ways during the history of capitalism (Vogel [1983] 2013: 154). 1 What I mean by domination is not “the domination of people by other people, but . . . the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute” (Postone 1993: 30) and reproduce. 2 Liberal feminist economists appear to make the same error in their veneration of “caring professions,” though a complete analysis of liberal/progressive feminist economics is outside the scope of this short article. Munro 3 The imperative of accumulation means that capital must “tend to socialise (that is turn into a collective activity) the general conditions of capitalist accumulation” (Cockburn 1977: 63). While the focus in Marxist-feminism is frequently on women, households, household production, and their role in the reproduction of labor power, labor power can be replenished via other means—such as proletarianization—and in other sites, such as schools, “labour camps, barracks, orphanages, hospitals, prisons, and other such institutions” (Vogel [1983] 2013:159). Marx writes that to be a productive worker is “not a piece of luck, but a misfortune” (Marx [1867] 1976: 644)—the same misfortune is also true for unproductive workers whose work, whether waged or unwaged, contributes to the reproduction of labor power. In their Trotskyist analysis, class struggle for SRT theorists involves workers attempting to recapture for their own use and enjoyment a portion of the value created through their labor that had been “stolen” by capitalists.3 Transitional demands calling for redistribution (the minimum program) are seen as a stepping stone toward the ultimate end of workers—now broadly defined to also include those engaged in the work of reproducing labor power—seizing power and centrally planning an equitable form of distribution (the maximum program). However, contra the traditional Marxism of SRT,4 “Exploitation and domination are intrinsic to any conceivable arrangement of capital accumulation. . . . [W]e are all compelled to participate in the reproduction of capital as a social relation” (Hunter 2021: 404–5). If exploitation and domination are inherent to the organization of production and reproduction in capitalism, then the reproduction of capitalist society proceeds by perpetuating these forms of organization, no matter the rates of exploitation or the amounts of redistribution. While SRT theorists may speak about “life-making” in order to paint these “life-making activities” (and the people who perform them) in a virtuous light (Jaffe 2020), the life that is made in capitalism is a worker who must compete with other workers for the opportunity to sell her labor power, spending much of her life maximizing surplus value. Seen in this way, the task of reproductive workers is the reproduction of not just any life but that of this race of peculiar commodity-owners, the sellers of labor power. Thus, the reproduction of labor power in capitalist society is not virtuous “life-making,” but rather one aspect of a larger process that perpetuates the capitalist organization of society. In conventional Marxist usage, “social reproduction” correctly refers to the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole, a process shaped by the imperative of endless accumulation. Accumulation and the reproduction of capital cannot be divorced from the reproduction of labor power, and the reproduction of labor power cannot be divorced from the reproduction of capitalist society, nor from the class antagonism and social misery inherent to it.5 Indeed, capitalist society as a “whole . . . maintains itself only through antagonism” (Adorno [1966] 1973: 311). 3. State Repression via Health Care, Education, and Social Services An understanding of the repressive functions of state institutions involved in the reproduction of labor power—and the extent to which employees of these institutions are implicated in state violence and repression—is largely absent from SRT. In this section, I would like to argue something a bit more nuanced than to merely say teachers are cops, nurses are cops, and social workers are cops—which is not to say I would entirely disagree with that sentiment. Rather, I wish to 3 For a different view of class struggle, see “Class and Struggle: On the False Society” in Bonefeld (2014: 102), which argues, “The critique of class society finds its positive resolution only in the classless society, not in a ‘fairer’ class society.” 4 For an overview of the critique of traditional Marxism, see O’Kane (2018). 5 What I mean by social misery is the types of harm inflicted on people by the specific organization of society. 4 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0) emphasize the contradictory nature of these occupations (London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group 1980)—both from the perspective of the workers carrying out this work and from the perspective of the working-class people being worked upon. Althusser’s essay “On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production” ([1970] 2014) was a key influence on many Marxist-feminists of the 1980s. In this essay, he argues that schools serve an ideological function in capitalism—they are what he calls an Ideological State Apparatus—and while it is not emphasized or elaborated upon (Barrett 1980), Althusser suggests that schools may simultaneously serve a repressive function, meaning they secure “by force (physical or otherwise) the political conditions of the reproduction of relations of production.” I would like to suggest that health clinics and social service agencies similarly serve repressive functions, with employees of these institutions serving as agents of state repression while at the same time providing—at least to a limited extent—services to the working class. Schools, social service agencies, hospitals, and health clinics are examples of sites outside the family-household where labor power is reproduced, and the repressive nature of these institutions in capitalism has been extensively theorized,6 as has the role of professional women in these institutions.7 For example, Foucault ([1963] 1989) argues that medical practitioners have power over and objectify patients, with Lawler (1991) and May (1992) arguing that these insights apply not only to physicians in the past, but also to present-day nurses. Diers and Molde (1983) and Allen (2015) discuss the gatekeeping functions of nurses—that is, the extent to which it is part of nurses’ jobs to deny access to services rather than provide services. Dyer (2002) discusses this gatekeeping function in the context of government austerity, and Khalil (2009) discusses nurses’ classification of patients as “good” and deserving of health services and “difficult” and thus subject to rationing and denials of care. Dale and Foster (1986: 37) discuss the historical case of health inspectors and health visitors, largely women, whose role was to teach modern hygiene practices to the working class, as “middle class women became involved in judging working-class mothers,” while Neocleous (2000) links the history of sanitation reform and heath visitation explicitly to state administrative violence and the repression of the working class. Wilson (1977) and Dale and Foster (1986) discuss the history of women in the social-work profession, pointing to the repressive functions of this work. Ellis (2011) discusses the gatekeeping functions of workers in social welfare agencies, and the limits to the use of discretion by these workers, updating the results from Lipsky ([1980] 2010), in which public servants are portrayed as having decision-making power over scarce resources. And the repressive qualities of schools and teachers are discussed by Schmidt (2001), Taylor (2013), Rancière ([1987] 1991), and Illich (1971), to cite a few examples in an extensive literature. The role of teachers in maintaining and exacerbating inequality is discussed in Vaught and Castagno (2008) and Fergus (2016). Public education as a repressive state institution is an explicit emphasis in Betasamosake Simpson (2014), Shange (2019), and Hill (2010). Professionals employed by the state in occupations related to the reproduction of labor power, disproportionately women,8 are tasked with carrying out the commands of the state and enforcing its rules. This entails both denying services as well as providing services, often with only paltry resources available to do so, and punishment or redundancy if regulations are not followed. They 6 The repressive nature of the family-household has also been theorized, for example, by Barrett and McIntosh ([1982] 2015). The capitalist state’s seeming fixation on enforcing the family-household is discussed in Munro (2021), with an emphasis on the UK case. For the US case, see Cooper (2017). 7 A theme in much of this literature is that state repression via schools, social service agencies, and health clinics proceeds on an uneven basis, with special scrutiny reserved for members of racialized groups, immigrants, disabled people, gender and sexual minorities, single parents, the childless, and others who are unwilling or unable to conform to social norms related to the white, heterosexual, bourgeois family-household. 8 Women are the majority of public-sector employees in the United States (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021), United Kingdom (UK Office for National Statistics 2019), Canada (Statistics Canada 2021), and Australia (Australia Bureau of Statistics 2021). Munro 5 decide who receives health care and who is dismissed as a malingerer or drug-seeker; who is prioritized for housing, food, and cash benefits, and who has their children seized by the state; who is provided with educational support services for learning difficulties and who is punished with detention, expulsion from school, or even arrest by a “School Resource Officer.” While some well-meaning state employees may wish to subvert the repressive qualities of education, health care, and other social services, the extent to which this is truly possible is limited: As [socialist] workers in those occupations that are termed “professional,” such as social work, or teaching, we are often given impossible problems to solve arising from poverty or from the powerlessness of our “clients.” The resources available to back up our intervention the welfare provision of the state—are a drop in the ocean of need. And besides, it is clear that many other actions of the state and of the economy itself are pulling in the opposite direction, making things worse for the poor. We often feel that we are being asked to manipulate people, to use women's pride in their home or love of their children, for instance, as well as their need of the practical resources we partially control and can give them access to, to induce co-operation. (London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group 1980). Interviews in In and Against the State suggest that members of some working class households feel they require these state services for survival, and must accept reductions in freedom and intrusions into day-to-day life in order to obtain meagre services: “State provision leaves a bad taste in our mouths. State institutions are often authoritarian, they put us down, tie us up with regulations” (London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group 1980). Furthermore, the task of dealing with the state on behalf of the working-class family is assigned to working-class women: “Who answers the door when the social worker calls? Who talks to the head teacher about the truant child? Who runs down to the rent office? The woman, wife, and mother” (Cockburn 1977: 58). Thus, professional women act as the intermediaries between the state and working-class households, while working-class women act as the intermediaries between their households and the state. Repressive state institutions such as education, health care, and other social services are women on both sides (Wilson 1977). 4. Conclusion Schools, health care facilities, and social welfare agencies are contradictory institutions, at once providing needed services to working class households, while at the same time charged with restricting or denying these services—for the purpose of reproducing capitalist relations of production and thus capitalist society as a whole. Furthermore, we can see that public employees— who are disproportionately women—serve as intermediaries between the state, via its repressive institutions, and the working class. Women in the United States and United Kingdom remain overrepresented in public-sector employment as a whole, but are specifically overrepresented in many professions related to the reproduction of labor power, such as teachers, social workers, and health care professionals other than physicians (UK Office for National Statistics 2019; US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021). These occupations are described by liberal/progressive scholars in the field of feminist economics as “caring professions” (Folbre 2012) and by SRT theorists as waged workers involved in the reproduction of labor power or “life-making activities” (Ferguson 2019). While their roles and relationship to the working class are complex and contradictory, I would like to offer the following provocation: teachers, health care workers, and social workers in capitalism do bear a resemblance to the police—tasked by the state with the enforcement of laws and norms, providing but also denying services, and guilty of inflicting psychological and sometimes physical violence on members of the working class. The current popularity of SRT has driven a surge in scholarly interest in Marxist-feminism, unproductive labor, and the reproduction of labor power—frequently neglected and overlooked 6 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0) topics. SRT theorists such as Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Ferguson have made important contributions that question and overturn Marxist orthodoxies, and shed light on current events such as teacher’s strikes (Bhattacharya 2019) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Bhattacharya 2020; Jaffe 2020; Marxist Feminist Collective 2020). However, SRT overlooks the contradictory role of professional women in public-sector employment related to the reproduction of labor power, as well as the antagonistic role of the state in the lives of the working class. Is it possible to separate the state’s social provisioning functions from its functions related to violence and repression? My answer to this question is no. The reproduction of capitalist society depends on the worker continually reproducing herself as a worker—compelled to do so both “physically and socially” (Clarke 1995: 19–20), as she is at once produced by the capitalist production process and reproduced by it. Rather, the supposedly virtuous “activities of life-making” carried out by professional women state employees such as teachers, nurses, and social workers perpetuate the antagonism and social misery inherent to capitalism. Acknowledgments Many thanks to the panelists and participants in the New Research in the Critical Political Economy of Labor session at the Eastern Economics Association Meetings in 2021 for useful comments and questions, in particular Hannah Archambault, Luke Petach, Luke Pretz, and Anastasia Wilson. I would also like to thank Alex Mach for valuable research assistance locating employment statistics, and Sam Menefee-Libey for conversations that strengthened the manuscript. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD Kirstin Munro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4103-8553 References Adorno, Theodor W. [1966] 1973. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum. Allen, Davina. 2015. Inside “bed management”: Ethnographic insights from the vantage point of UK hospital nurses. Sociology of Health and Illness 37 (3): 370–84. Althusser, Louis. [1970] 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Trans. G. M. Goshgarain. London: Verso. Arruzza, Cinzia. 2016. Functionalist, determinist, reductionist: Social reproduction feminism and its critics. Science & Society 80 (1): 9–30. Australia Bureau of Statistics. 2021. Labor Force Survey January 2021 Table 26b. Employed Persons by Sector (Public/Private) of Main Job, Age, and Sex. Accessed at: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/ labour/employment-and-unemployment/labour-force-australia-detailed/jan-2021. Barrett, Michèle. 1980. Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis. London: Verso. Barrett, Michèle, and Mary McIntosh. [1982] 2015. The Anti-social Family. London: Verso. Betasamosake Simpson. 2014. Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (3): 1–25. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. How not to skip class: Social reproduction of labor and the global working class. In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya, 68–93. London: Pluto Press. Munro 7 ———. 2019. Caring enough to strike: US teacher’s strikes in perspective. Monthly Review, January 15. Accessed at: https://mronline.org/2019/01/15/caring-enough-to-strike-u-s-teachers-strikes-in-perspective/. ———. 2020. Social Reproduction Theory and Why We Need It to Make Sense of the Corona Virus Crisis. Online blog, April 2. Accessed at: http://www.tithibhattacharya.net/new-blog/2020/4/2/social-reproduction-theory-and-why-we-need-it-to-make-sense-of-the-corona-virus-crisis. Bonefeld, Werner. 2014. Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason. New York: Bloomsbury. Brenner, Johanna. 2000. Women and the Politics of Class. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brenner, Johanna, and Barbara Laslett. 1991. Gender, social reproduction, and women’s self-organization: Considering the US welfare state. Gender & Society 5 (3): 314. Clarke, Simon. 1991. The state debate: Introduction. In The State Debate, ed. Simon Clarke, 1–3. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 1995. Marx and the Market. Online paper, April. Accessed at: https://homepages.warwick. ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/LAMARKW.pdf. Cockburn, Cynthia. 1977. The Local State: Management of Cities and People. London: Pluto Press. Conference of Socialist Economists. 1977. On the Political Economy of Women. CSE Pamphlet no. 2. London: Stage 1. Cooper, Melinda. 2017. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservativism. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Dale, Jennifer, and Peggy Foster. 1986. Feminists and State Welfare. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, and Selma James. 1975. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Deacon, Desley. 1989. Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers, 1830– 1930. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Diers, Donna, and Susan Molde. 1983. Nurses in primary care: The new gatekeepers? American Journal of Nursing 83 (5): 742–45. Dyer, Owen. 2002. BMA suggests nurses could become gatekeepers of the NHS. British Journal of Medicine 324: 565. Ellis, Kathryn. 2011. “Street-level Bureaucracy” revisited: The changing face of frontline discretion in adult social care in England. Social Policy and Administration 45 (3): 221–44. Fergus, Edward. 2016. Social reproduction ideologies: Teacher beliefs about race and culture. In DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education, eds. David J. Connor, Beth A. Ferri, and Sbini A. Annamma, 117–127. New York: Teachers College Press. Ferguson, Susan J. 1999. Building on the strengths of the socialist feminist tradition. Critical Sociology 25 (1): 1–15. ———. 2019. Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction. London: Pluto Press. Folbre, Nancy, ed. 2012. For Love or Money: Care Provision in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Foucault, Michel. [1963] 1989. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Routledge. Hill, Dave. 2010. Class, capital, and education in this neoliberal and neoconservative period. In Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-Liberalism, eds. Sheila Macrine, Peter McLaren, and Dave Hill, 119–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hunter, Rob. 2021. Critical legal studies and Marx’s critique: A reappraisal. Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 31 (2): 389–412. Illich, Ivan. 1971. Deschooling Society. London: Calder & Boyars. Jaffe, Sarah. 2020. Social reproduction and the pandemic, with Tithi Bhattacharya. Dissent Magazine, April 2. Accessed at: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/social-reproduction-and-thepandemic-with-tithi-bhattacharya. Khalil, Doris D. 2009. Nurses’ attitude towards “difficult” and “good” patients in eight public hospitals. International Journal of Nursing Practice 15 (5): 437–43. Lawler, Jocalyn. 1991. Behind the Screens: Nursing, Somology and the Problem of the Body. Edinburg: Churchill Livingstone. 8 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0) Lipsky, Michael. [1980] 2010. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group. 1980. In and Against the State. Edinburgh: Conference of Socialist Economists. Accessed at: https://libcom.org/library/against-state-1979. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1976. Capital, volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin. Marxist Feminist Collective. 2020. On social reproduction and the Covid-19 pandemic. Spectre Journal, April 3. Accessed at: https://spectrejournal.com/seven-theses-on-social-reproduction-and-the-covid19-pandemic/. May, Carl. 1992. Nursing work, nurses’ knowledge, and the subjectification of the patient. Sociology of Health and Illness 14 (4): 472–87. Munro, Kirstin. 2019. “Social reproduction theory,” social reproduction, and household production. Science & Society 83 (4): 451–68. ———. 2021. The welfare state and the bourgeois family-household. Science & Society: 85 (2): 199–206. Neocleous, Mark. 2000. The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Pluto Press. O’Kane, Chris. 2018. Moishe Postone’s new reading of Marx: The critique of political economy as a critical theory of the historically specific social form of labor. Consecutio Rerum 3 (5): 485–501. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quick, Paddy. 2018. Labor power: A “peculiar” commodity. Science & Society 82 (3): 386–412. Rancière, Jacques. [1987] 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Schmidt, Jeff. 2001. Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Statistics Canada. 2021. Table 14-10-0288-02: Employment by Class of Worker, Monthly, Seasonally Adjusted (x 1,000). Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.25318/1410028801-eng. Taylor, Emmeline. 2013. Surveillance Schools: Security Discipline and Control in Contemporary Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Trotsky, Leon. [1938] 1981. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International: The Mobilization of the Masses around Transitional Demands to Prepare for the Conquest of Power: The Transitional Program. London: Labour Publications. UK Office for National Statistics. 2019. Who Works in the Public Sector? Accessed at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/ economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicspending/articles/whoworksinthepublicsector/201906-04#workers-in-the-public-sector-are-more-likely-to-be-women. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2021. Table B-5b. Employment of Women on Nonfarm Payrolls by Industry Sector, Not Seasonally Adjusted. Accessed at: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceseeb5b.htm. Vaught, Sabina E., and Angelina E. Castagno. 2008. “I don’t think I’m a racist”: Critical race theory, teacher attitudes, and structural racism. Race Ethnicity and Education 11 (2): 95–113. Vogel, Lise. [1983] 2013. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1977. Women and the Welfare State. London: Tavistock. Author Biography Kirstin Munro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and member of the Review of Radical Political Economics Editorial Board.