Centring Social Reproduction through Decentring and Decolonising ‘Malestream Economics’

One of the ways in which social reproduction is overlooked, occluded and ‘hides in plain sight’ is through the dominance of mainstream (neoclassical) economics from policy-making, imaginaries of the future to ‘commonsense’ thinking about human societies, individuals and their relationships with the more than human world and communities. The gendered assumptions of malestream economics presents a vision of ‘homo economicus’ which is not only patriarchal/sexist, but racialised and ableist. The axiomatic logic of malestream economics thus creates a vision of ‘the economy’ which, inter alia, almost completely ignores the natural foundations and inputs for the human economy and the sphere of reproduction in its focus on monetised spheres of production and consumption, even as the formal ‘economy’ is utterly dependent upon both ‘nature’ and ‘social reproduction’. This paper traces the colonial roots of modern economics to colonised Ireland in the 17th century and the invention of key macroeconomic concepts such as ‘national income’ to debates the 1930s around statistically measuring what is included (and excluded) from Gross Domestic Product, the dominant measure of ‘economic growth’. The violent-colonial and extractive origins of these, and other key elements of mainstream economic thinking, will be explored in this paper, while also highlighting how the slow and structural violence of malestream economics still continues today in new forms. From a psychological-cultural point of view, one may say that the current economic system and economic thinking behind it, is ecocidal, resulting in death or Thanatos, rather than supporting life and life supporting systems or Eros. The paper will then outline an alternative/s understandings of ‘the economy’ and ‘economics’ that is more diverse, locally situated and attentive to issues of social, distributive, procedural and identity-based justice, gender equality, racial equality and climate and ecological sustainability, and a view of the more than human world as more that simply resources. The aim here is to establish that while malestream economics is utterly unfit for future purpose for guiding humanity in our turbulent century ahead as we navigate the ‘polycrisis’ of intersecting climate, land, food biodiversity/nature and social emergencies, what replaces it has yet to be decided.