Globalisation, phase III: The Global Social Reproduction Crisis

Wednesday, April 1st, 7pm

Athens beach, Saturday, 14 March 2020. During the Coronavirus outbreak, many Athenians left the city for the countryside on the first day that shops, movie theatres, cafes etc were ordered to shut. This was Saturday, March 14. Many suspected then that a lockdown would follow shortly (as it did on Monday, 23 March 2020).

How does the present global health crisis impact the historical meaning of ‘globalisation’ as a keyword that remains defining of the contemporary in art and society since 1989 and the end of the Cold War? This lecture considers a possible periodisation of capitalist globalisation in which its first two phases (the long 1990s and the juncture of the global financial crisis) were associated mostly with changes and problems in capitalist production, while the Covid-19 crisis initiated in 2020 points to a global crisis of social reproduction. Argued from a Marxist feminist perspective, the analysis will point to the political dilemmas generated by the pandemic in a global context where the struggle against neo-fascism and capitalist totalitarianism was already a political need in many parts of the world.