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Socialization has become part of the strategic repertoire of left-wing politics, generating a broad range of ideas and tools for socialist praxis. The focus has primarily been on social reproduction — in other words, areas beyond industrial production, such as housing, public transport, and hospitals. Yet what is often overlooked is that socialization is by no means merely about who holds the deed to a property; it also requires a transformation of socially necessary labour. The question, then, is not only who owns which means of production, but also who is able to appropriate whose labour.
This dimension has received little attention in current debates. Yet Marx and Engels already drew a direct connection between private property and the division of labour in The German Ideology, describing the two as “identical expressions”: one refers to appropriation in relation to the product, the other in relation to the activity. This is an analytical distinction, but in social reality the two coincide.
If, in view of the intensifying care crisis, we want to advance socialization as a perspective for socialist politics in the field of social reproduction, a feminist expansion will be necessary. The central questions must be who performs which kinds of work and under what conditions, how this relates to historically entrenched relations of oppression, and how the working class is internally divided — and thereby weakened — through different positions within the processes of production and reproduction.
Analyses of the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism provide an important starting point. They demonstrate how different forms of devaluation and hierarchization within the working class are produced and entrenched precisely through the division of labour itself. If socialization is not merely to alter the formal ownership of the means of production, but to transform the relations of domination that are bound up with them, it must ultimately be understood as a project to abolish every hierarchical division of labour. Understood in this way, socialization can counteract the divisions that fragment the working class and develop into a shared perspective for different sections of the class.
Accordingly, feminist socialization seeks to overcome the separation between the spheres of production and reproduction that is deeply rooted in the gendered division of labour. It understands socialization as a process that goes beyond the abolition of private property: it aims to create an Economy for the Common Good, in which planning and production are organized around life and human needs. From a feminist perspective, this makes the development of new infrastructures particularly important for collectively securing a good life for all, in the sense of an “infrastructure socialism”.
Such a transformative perspective directly challenges contemporary forms of authoritarian crisis management, which are themselves organized through division: different sections of the population are played off against one another; risks such as old age, illness, and unemployment are increasingly privatized; and hatred and violence are mobilized in ways that create fertile ground for ongoing processes of fascisation.
Against this backdrop, feminist socialization also aims to build new forms of collective activity and solidarity. These can begin at the local level, in neighbourhoods and communities, and thereby establish a crucial basis for countering authoritarian shifts. At the same time, such a perspective makes it possible to understand feminist, queer, and anti-racist struggles as integral components of left-wing politics and socialist transformation, and of making feminist socialization a shared point of reference across different social movements.
Gender Relations as Relations of Production
In their discussion of the parallel between private property and the division of labour, Marx and Engels also return in The German Ideology to the historical origins of this equation: “This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others”. The division of labour between men and women (and children) therefore represents nothing less than the gendered expression of property relations. It determines who within the family is entitled to dispose of whose labour. A feminist expansion of the debate on socialization must consequently seek to abolish this division of labour and thereby also free existing gender relations from their characterization as relations of domination. Contrary to what liberal feminists would have us believe, the problem cannot be solved simply by redistributing care work differently or more “fairly” between the genders, or by shifting responsibility between the state, the market, and private households. Instead, what must be transformed are the structures that make gender a central axis of exploitation and domination under capitalism — and not just of women.
Since the 1970s, feminists drawing on Marxist theory have shown how the gendered division of labour is constitutive of the separation between the spheres of production and reproduction. At the same time, this division is closely connected to the construction of a public sphere associated with paid labour, politics, and law and a private sphere in which reproductive activities are feminized, depoliticized, and rendered invisible. The devaluation of the supposedly female “production of life” (Frigga Haug) in relation to the supposedly male production of commodities helps to keep the costs of reproducing labour-power low. These costs, in turn, affect wages, raise the rate of profit, and contribute to the broader process of capitalist valorization. This is a structural principle of capitalism. Its historical manifestations and the means and mechanisms through which it is managed may change, but its underlying logic persists. This distinction is crucial for understanding contemporary forms of crisis management. They do not necessarily break with this principle, but may instead merely reorganize it under changed conditions, redistributing the costs of crisis onto groups that are already disproportionately burdened. Feminist socialization therefore means confronting the structure of the privatized production of life. It also means decoupling social reproduction from the imperative of economic growth to which the logic of transfer payments remains tethered.
To identify a political lever for transforming the relationship between (re)production and gender, however, it is essential not to understand gender relations simply as an expression of relations of production. Gender order is not merely derived from economic structure. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci, relations of production can instead be understood as a complex ensemble of economic, political, and ideological practices through which hegemony — and therefore consent to dominant policies — is organized, and subjectivities, including gendered subjectivities, are formed. Cultural ideas of masculinity and femininity, including their binary and heteronormative organization, naturalize social responsibilities and thereby stabilize the separation between production and reproduction. We encounter these ideas in the form of sexism, for example, but we also continually reproduce them through our everyday actions. Put pointedly: by working in positions assigned to women within the gendered division of labour, we are produced as women whose subjectivities can come to appear almost naturally aligned with society’s expectations and prescribed gender roles.
The heteropatriarchal family, as an ostensibly private site of social reproduction, is safeguarded both institutionally and discursively — for example, through spousal income splitting for tax purposes, the design of parental benefits, and the systematic discrimination against families with more than two parents. Contemporary struggles over reproductive justice and the rights of queer and trans* people can also be understood against this backdrop. The intensity with which the demands of these groups are opposed indicates that they challenge the existing social order in different ways. In right-wing discourse, state control over female reproductive capacity is also connected to migration policy — for example, when the AfD presents itself as the “party of normal families” and portrays the “Great Replacement” as a project of “gender ideologues”.
When Frigga Haug describes “gender relations as relations of production”, she is therefore emphasizing that gender is far more than an individual characteristic. Social practices of reproduction are organized along gendered lines as part of societal relations of production as a whole. The institutional arrangements and the “ideologies of care” produced within them justify and normalize unequal and exploitative care arrangements in our societies. From a queer-feminist perspective, reorganizing these relations through feminist socialization is therefore essential. Conversely, transforming capitalist relations of production cannot be separated from struggles over gender and the family. Put differently: without political struggles over their cultural and symbolic orders, relations of production cannot be fundamentally transformed. Against this backdrop, queer politics should not primarily be understood as a struggle over individual sexual or gender identities, but as resistance to a hierarchical gender order and the organization of labour associated with it. Precisely for this reason, queer politics touches the core of capitalist relations of domination and belongs at the centre of socialist politics, rather than — as so often happens — being relegated to the margins of social conflict as a matter of individual lifestyle.
Double De-Privatization
Care arrangements, like all aspects of modes of production and ways of life, exist in historically specific forms and are therefore subject to change. With the onset of the crisis of Fordism, declining profit rates, and stagnating wages, the model of the “family wage” that had prevailed for a period in West Germany began to erode. Women’s participation in paid employment rose continuously from the 1970s onward, partly out of economic necessity and partly in response to demands made by the second-wave women’s movement. Professional care services were expanded as a result, albeit far too hesitantly. From the 1990s onward, neoliberalism as a project of domination also began to reshape this field. Services previously organized through the welfare state and oriented toward the common good were increasingly subjected to standards of economic efficiency through concepts such as New Public Management and “indirect control”, or were directly privatized. Hospitals, outpatient and residential care, daycare centres, and services such as cleaning and cooking in public institutions all became subject to these processes. Yet capitalist valorization encounters certain limits in the field of care. Whereas productivity in the industrial sector can be increased through rationalization and technological innovation, care work is time-bound and relational. It can only be rationalized to a limited extent without undermining its essential qualities.
Private companies operating in care and other social sectors — as well as public institutions and nonprofit providers — therefore tend to pursue profitability through downward pressure on wages, deteriorating working conditions, reduced staffing levels and quality, and increased prices and fees. Not least for this reason, a growing proportion of care work is once again being displaced into families and private households. What Janine Brodie described as a “double privatization” in relation to the United States as early as 1994 has taken place and continues to unfold. Although increased participation in paid employment gave many women greater economic independence, it did not fundamentally restructure the gendered division of labour. Instead, this division persists as “a discernible lag in adapting to new circumstances”, which is experienced by many women as the double burden of paid employment and unpaid care work.
The political and cultural management of these processes is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, the state continues to promote women’s individualization and economic self-responsibility in order to expand the labour force and legitimize wage levels that increasingly require all adults within a household to engage in paid employment. On the other hand, traditional images of gender and family are being politically and culturally reactivated to provide ideological support for the renewed transfer of care work into the private sphere. The attacks on the welfare state by the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz threaten to create unprecedented gaps in provision, intertwined in multiple ways with shifts in the gender regime. Current debates over rearmament and compulsory military service, for example, serve on the one hand to justify an industrial policy oriented toward military production that is likely to have limited economic effects, and on the other as an “ideological cement” legitimizing cuts to social spending.
The accompanying ideals of soldierly masculinity, self-sacrifice, and authoritarian discipline connect both with the digital cultures of masculinity found in the “manosphere” and with the business model of so-called “tradwives”, who use social media to promote a return to traditional gender roles and hierarchies as a lifestyle choice. These symbolic offerings stand in stark contradiction to economic reality. A stable “family wage” has long ceased to exist, and a single-breadwinner model would be financially viable for only a vanishingly small number of households. Yet in the face of growing overwhelm, right-wing narratives appeal to a widespread longing for an allegedly contradiction-free past. The resulting tension is highly explosive, both individually and socially.
In this situation, feminist movements must oppose both cuts to social provision — which disproportionately affect the most vulnerable groups — and the (re)staging of authoritarian masculinity that accompanies them and strengthens the potential for racist violence and violence against women and queer people.
Feminist socialization can provide a strategic orientation in this context. It addresses not only the devaluation of care work under capitalism, but also the ways in which gender itself is constituted as a relation of domination. As a perspective for political transformation, this requires a “double de-privatization” of care work.
By this we mean the following: The first dimension is to free central areas of social reproduction from an economic logic oriented toward valorization and profit. This is the goal of the existing socialization movement. The second — and specifically feminist — dimension is to remove care work from the feminized isolation of overburdened private households to which it has been relegated by the separation of the productive and reproductive spheres. This does not mean that all care work should be professionalized or transferred into public institutions. Rather, it means that society must assume collective responsibility for this enormous field of socially necessary labour. This could involve new infrastructures that soften the boundaries between private and public: services could be extended into people’s homes, relieving both caregivers and those receiving care, while embedding them within broader social networks. Such networks are able to develop when spaces and services exist that encourage new forms of care relationships within neighbourhoods.
Feminist socialization therefore does not simply seek to expand state-run services or services that are oriented toward the common good. It aims to dissolve the “separation nexus” (Frigga Haug) between the private and the public. The goal is not a straightforward transfer of activities from one sphere to the other, but their reorganization through greater permeability between the two. In the long term, this can succeed only if we recognize that contemporary practices of care — family-based and gendered — are not natural arrangements, but historically recent developments. It is therefore also necessary to create spaces in which different practices of care can emerge, accompanied by transformed “modes of relating” (Bini Adamczak), beyond both conventional forms of volunteering and informal assistance that can be appropriated for capitalist purposes. The reproductive practices of queer people, who are often excluded from dominant forms of social organization, already point toward forms of communal care and mutual responsibility beyond the heteronormative nuclear family model. There is therefore substantial practical experience of sustaining reliable care relationships outside the family and developing collective structures for non-familial forms of care. A politics of new care relations can build on these longstanding practices.
This also requires rethinking the meaning of the public itself. Experience shows that provision can remain inadequate even — or especially — when it is publicly organized. Political intervention here therefore means not only providing existing services with better funding, but also asking which needs existing public infrastructures prioritize, and how these infrastructures can actually be democratized. This applies both to participation in decision-making within individual institutions and to the collective determination of social priorities at the municipal, regional, and national levels. Needs do not arise independently of social relations; they are formed in and through them and especially through relations of care, and are therefore also politically negotiated within these relations. Such processes of negotiation must include, above all, the perspectives of those who are systematically marginalized or excluded by existing structures. Care then ceases to appear as a private problem or an individual exception and becomes visible as a universal condition of social life. This also transforms our understanding of social planning: away from technocratic control and toward the question of how social reproduction can be organized so as to enable a good life for all.
Platforms as a “Care Fix”
Infrastructures designed along these lines can relieve households — and women in particular — while simultaneously counteracting forms of crisis management that disproportionately shift the costs of social reproduction onto racialized workers. Today, we are witnessing not only the renewed transfer of work and responsibility to private households, but also the growing organization of many reproductive activities through precarious market relations. Digital platforms have expanded enormously since the 2008 financial crisis, and a wide variety of domestic services are now offered and administered through them. In Germany, examples include Helpling and Putzperle for cleaning; Careship and Pflegix for home care; Lieferando, Wolt, and Gorillas for food delivery; Babysits and Betreut.de for childcare; Superprof for private tutoring; and Pawshake for dog walking.
The growth of this sector is driven by several developments. On the demand side, increasing household overload is creating a growing need for these services. The more Germany’s export-oriented model of accumulation comes under pressure from geopolitical conflict, trade wars, and technological competition, the more competitiveness is increasingly produced through exploitation, welfare cuts, and declining standards rather than innovation. The resulting precarization of everyday life, combined with the double privatization of care work, means that growing numbers of people can no longer reliably secure their own social reproduction — either financially or in terms of their physical and emotional capacities. The crisis therefore no longer affects only marginalized groups, but increasingly broad sections of the population. For many households, it is consequently convenient to turn quickly to commercial service providers when gaps in provision emerge. Dowling therefore describes “platformization” as part of a “care fix”: an arrangement that temporarily closes gaps in social provision without addressing the structural crisis that produces them.
On the supply side, the expansion of digital “care fixes” is made possible by the fact that platform work is even more precarious than other forms of paid care work. This keeps services relatively affordable, allowing some households to delegate care work to others in exchange for low wages. Gig workers face insecure incomes, highly flexible and often unpredictable working hours, and inadequate social protection. It is therefore no coincidence that the majority of them are migrants. The pressure experienced by households thus contributes to the legitimization of a racialized division of labour. People can find themselves complicit in an increasingly racist management of the crisis of social reproduction. Right-wing struggles for hegemony can build on precisely these dynamics. The racialized management of gaps in care provision does not operate only through platform labour. The recruitment of care workers from countries on the global periphery also displaces the crisis geographically. The stabilization of social reproduction in the Global North therefore rests, in part, on a form of “care extractivism”, in which care capacities are mobilized along global inequalities while generating new shortages of care elsewhere.
Left-wing responses to these forms of crisis management must therefore begin by showing how solutions that benefit some are in many cases enacted at the expense of others. By focusing on the problem of hierarchical divisions of labour, feminist socialization can reveal how the structural conditions that enable such forms of crisis management can already be transformed today. Analyses of “racial capitalism” (Cedric J. Robinson) must therefore also be considered in terms of their implications for the design of socialization itself.
Exploitation and Expropriation
Nancy Fraser argues that these kinds of divisions within the working class are rooted in a fundamental mechanism of capitalist accumulation: the separation between exploitation and expropriation. Building on Rosa Luxemburg’s account of “permanent primitive accumulation”, Fraser argues that capitalism remains structurally dependent on an “extra-economic” sphere from which it can appropriate labour-power and natural resources without bearing their full costs. Historically, expropriation took forms such as territorial dispossession and enslavement. Today, it is manifested above all in the fact that the costs of reproducing labour-power are no longer fully covered by wages.
The distinction between expropriation and exploitation in the process of capital accumulation is also connected to the “invention of the white race”: the social production and attribution of racialized differences in the context of colonialism, slavery, and the plantation economy. Certain groups are systematically marked as different, inferior, or less worthy of protection and are thereby pushed into forms of labour that may be violent, particularly precarious, disenfranchised, or outsourced. Politically, this process is supported by imperialist relations between the “centre” and “periphery”, as well as by migration regimes and ideological practices of racist discrimination.
The expropriation of some makes possible the exploitation of others because it lowers the costs of social reproduction and thereby reduces the value of labour-power as a whole. Making explicit reference to debates on the gendered division of labour, Gargi Bhattacharyya uses the concept of labour to illustrate this distinction: “The perceived boundary between work and non-work goes to the heart of the practices of differentiation for exploitation and expropriation that make up racial capitalism.” The issue, however, is not limited to reproductive activities. It also concerns the corresponding devaluation of particular subjects and of the labour they perform in the interests of capitalist accumulation. For Bhattacharyya, social reproduction therefore also involves determining the ways in which people are able to participate in capitalist formations at all: as workers or potential workers, as temporarily or permanently excluded non-workers, or in hybrid positions between these two categories.
This hierarchical ordering of those deemed “surplus” has a disciplinary effect. The mere existence of these people places pressure on workers who remain integrated into the system, intensifies competition within the working class, and thereby improves the conditions for capitalist exploitation. This contributes not only to the precarious reproduction of individual workers, but also to the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole. Bhattacharyya therefore emphasizes that the delegation of domestic work to migrant women is merely the most visible example of the racialized externalization of social reproduction. “The direct contribution to remaking a household is easily visible, but the more diffuse supplementary that occurs through the subordination of some in the workforce, that is far harder to assess.” Bhattacharyya also draws attention to the reproduction of the expropriated subjects themselves: whose reproduction is even taken into account, who must secure their own survival, to what extent and under what conditions, and which lives society effectively allows to perish all depends on how subjects are positioned within capitalism. The more a person is rendered “surplus”, the less institutionally secured their reproduction becomes.
Several consequences follow from this for a feminist — and, more precisely, intersectional — conception of socialization. First, social infrastructures that provide for everyday needs in areas such as healthcare, education, care, and childcare, youth services, disability support, women’s shelters, counselling services, housing, culture, and mobility must be organized in such a way that they are genuinely accessible to everyone. They must take different needs into account and respond to these in ways that secure the reproduction of all, regardless of origin or legal status. Only in this way can pressure on households be reduced on the demand side — particularly in the context of platform labour — while simultaneously preventing vulnerable groups on the supply side from being systematically pushed into precarious forms of work. Social infrastructures also function as a kind of “second wage”. Sabine Nuss argues that secure access to socialized infrastructures of essential services would enable wage-dependent workers to overcome “some of their lack of property”: “To this extent, they would be more ‘resilient’ in the face of the uncertainties of ‘the market’; their exclusion from the social conditions of production would be less absolute.”
For socialist movements, this is crucial for another reason: organizing social reproduction in this way can weaken competitive pressures among workers and thereby reduce divisions within the working class. The goal of dissolving the separation between the spheres of production and reproduction thus also entails overcoming the distinction between what counts as economic and what is treated as non-economic, so that the social value of reproductive activities is no longer determined by this boundary.
Here, too, it is crucial that such economic transformations are not separated from the “politics of the cultural”. With regard to racism, Stuart Hall argues that it functions as a medium “through which the white fractions of the class ‘live’ their relations to other fractions, and through them to capital itself”. He thus also analyses racism as a mechanism through which white fractions of the class are incorporated into the dominant project. Within this arrangement, consent to a racialized division of labour is exchanged for privileges that remain unavailable to others. It consequently positions those who are “included” against other sections of the class. Socialization must therefore address both the racialized and gendered classifications through which divisions of labour and social hierarchies are stabilized. A perspective limited to social policy cannot adequately grasp the close interconnection between economic and cultural forms of domination.
This also reveals a certain tension with regard to democratization, which is a fundamental component of socialization. On the one hand, democratic participation must be expanded in the ways described above. On the other, emancipatory principles — such as equal access or the prioritization and protection of particularly vulnerable groups — cannot themselves be made subject to majority discretion. Democratization is therefore not simply a mechanism of participation. It is also a political process through which society negotiates which forms of life and provision should be collectively binding.
Finally, democratization must also extend to the design of new infrastructures themselves in order to overcome their paternalistic and passivating logic. Of particular importance is the gradual transformation of the ambivalent relationship between support and control within welfare-state services toward forms of support and collective appropriation. For racialized and poor people in particular, the punitive dimensions of welfare-state provision can mean that public services are used less than they otherwise would be because of fear of discrimination and humiliation. Feminist socialization can therefore productively connect here both with traditional left-wing critiques of the welfare state and with more recent abolitionist debates.
Local or nationally organized infrastructures can, of course, only constitute the starting point for a movement toward feminist socialization. On the one hand, social reproduction is organized through an imperial division of labour structured by global economic interdependencies, trade regimes, debt relations, and military conflicts. On the other hand, migration and border regimes associated with this organization selectively regulate access to the conditions of reproduction. Movements for feminist socialization must therefore seek shared interests, mutual points of reference, and opportunities for cooperation with struggles for freedom of movement and against militarization.
Fascization and Violence
Feminist socialization is therefore not a distant model for a better future, but a necessary and urgent counter-movement in the here and now. The authoritarian management of the crisis of social reproduction is increasingly condensing into a tendency toward fascization. Social crises are no longer treated primarily as political questions of distribution and organization that can be resolved politically. Instead, they are increasingly managed through the everyday production of inequality, competition, and selective inclusion. Migrants, feminists, and queer and trans* people in particular are constructed as external and internal enemies who supposedly threaten a “natural order”. The promise of restoring that order can appeal to a desire for clarity and security among the population.
These processes do not originate exclusively with right-wing actors. They are embedded in the authoritarian neoliberalism of the political and social centre. State policies, social practices, and cultural interpretations intersect to produce hierarchies along the lines of gender, race, and class, which are consolidated through exclusion and the normalization of devaluation.
The increase in violence must be understood within this context. Gender-based, anti-queer, and racist violence can be interpreted as a disciplining of bodies and as an attempt to restore challenged hierarchies and thereby compensate for a perceived losses of social control. The possibility of resorting to violence becomes more visible in times of crisis, but it is already embedded in existing social relations. If the gendered and racialized division of labour is understood, following Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, as ultimately another expression of property relations, then it becomes clear that control over people’s labour-power also entails control over people themselves. Eva von Redecker emphasizes that property entails not only the right to control and use something, but also claims to abuse and destroy it. Through the concept of “phantom possession”, she shows how historically and culturally embedded claims to control other people do not simply disappear when their institutional forms — such as slavery or patriarchal marriage — are abolished. Yet these are not merely ideological remnants of past systems of domination. Precisely because gendered and racialized divisions of labour continue to be reproduced through everyday actions, institutions, and social practices, the associated claims to control are continually reproduced materially as well. Violence can therefore target anyone who is “marked” within these relations by gender, skin colour, or other characteristics, regardless of their individual circumstances. Here, too, cultural classifications and attributions intersect with people’s positions within the social division of labour and with the claims to control that result from those positions. Queer ways of life become targets because they evade assignment to a binary gender structure, its allocation of people to particular spheres of (re)production, and state control over reproductive capacities. Attacks are also directed at those who are made into a canvas onto which fears of social decline and precarious expectations for the future are projected. This applies to people of colour as well as the unemployed and the unhoused.
Feminist socialization must therefore also be understood as an antifascist practice. The organization of social reproduction produces not only workers, but social relations as a whole. The way socially necessary labour is organized determines what kinds of relationships, dependencies, hierarchies, and forms of subjectivity emerge from it. Changed relations of care will not abolish entrenched forms of domination “overnight”. On the contrary, practices of solidarity must be gradually reclaimed following decades of neoliberal individualization and indifference. But critique alone is not enough. A social antifascism must also develop practical proposals for alternative ways of living and transformed relations of solidarity and care under present conditions. This will require suitable spaces, formats, and opportunities through which people can gradually develop confidence in the power of their own — and, above all, collective — action.
Securing everyday needs on the one hand and democratizing the institutions responsible for meeting them on the other can therefore become a means of reshaping society. What matters is that we break with neoliberal logics of individualization, personal responsibility, and “kicking down”, so that tangible improvements in everyday life do not appear merely as “social benefits”, but instead become connected to self-empowerment and the collective appropriation of social power to shape society. Creating this possibility through the construction of new social infrastructures, through care and health centres, and through active neighbourhood policies against securitization and displacement is therefore also a task of feminist socialization. In this sense, feminist socialization can become a practice that goes beyond a policy of “antifascist economics”. Its aim is not simply to “buy off” people’s right-wing attitudes through better social policy, but to create new forms of solidarity, neighbourhood relations, and shared responsibility as a cultural practice.
Elements of Feminist Socialization
Feminist socialization broadens the very concept of socialization. It is not confined to questions of ownership of the means of production, but addresses the social organization of labour as a whole and the ways in which that organization is stabilized through gender relations and a (post-)colonial constellation, as well as through sexism and racism. It asks how economic exploitation, cultural devaluation, and violence are interconnected. A socialist perspective committed to enabling a good life for all must therefore place the organization of social reproduction at its centre and seek to socialize those forms of labour and care whose privatization, devaluation, and precarization continue to sustain capitalist accumulation. From this perspective, five central elements of feminist socialization can be identified as a basis for developing concrete political approaches:
- Feminist socialization gradually decouples essential forms of social provision from the logic of capitalist valorization and the imperative of economic growth. Instead, it is oriented toward collectively securing the conditions for a good life and explicitly extends questions of access and provision beyond national borders and distinctions based on legal status.
- It breaks down the division between the private and public spheres by removing care work from the isolation of individual private households and reorganizing it through permeable, collectively designed infrastructures.
- It shifts the focus of socialization away from institutional control toward democratic negotiation over priorities, access, and responsibilities at different levels of society.
- It fundamentally transforms the meaning of planning. Needs are not treated as fixed or given; rather, they are understood as the outcome that emerges from processes of social negotiation that systematically incorporate perspectives of care and reshape how political priorities are established.
- Socialization is understood as a practice through which society itself is continually produced. It strengthens collective forms of responsibility and thereby gradually breaks with individualization and competition as fundamental principles of social organization. Approaching the issue from the opposite direction, feminist socialization intervenes precisely where authoritarian crisis management and social division intersect.
The question of how these principles can be translated into political practice must be answered and tested in many different places and at different levels. Yet there are already existing approaches upon which such future efforts can build. These include neighbourhood-based organizing against securitization and displacement, as well as “Solidarity Cities”, which challenge right-wing hate speech and deportation policies; and approaches to transformative justice that seek non-punitive responses to gender-based and racist violence. In several countries, feminist-inspired municipal policy projects have also emerged under the banner of “Caring Cities”. These initiatives seek to gradually de-privatize care, detach it from its gendered assignment, and bring it into the sphere of public responsibility. Their aim is to create spaces of shared responsibility for care while providing services that extend into households and offer support where it is needed. They also focus more closely on the grey areas between the private and public spheres. This includes developing new forms of social infrastructure that make alternative forms of care possible in the first place, as well as outreach services for particularly vulnerable groups and care centres that bring together a range of services close to where people live. All of these initiatives can be understood as “starter projects” for a broader transformation. They cannot, of course, abolish the separation between production and reproduction overnight. But they can generate tangible improvements in people’s everyday lives and connect them to new forms of social interaction and structures of mutual solidarity. In this way, they can provide an important foundation for further political organizing and create spaces in which it becomes possible to imagine a world beyond isolation, competition, and escalating crises — a world in which collective empowerment is combined with the concrete utopia of different relations of care. After all, in the face of organized hopelessness, making hope a lived and material reality is more important than ever.
This article was first published in German by LuXemburg Magazine
K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 3, 9th edition, Berlin, 1990, p. 32.
We use the term “feminist socialization” in line with the history of feminist debates and struggles in the field of social reproduction; however, we aim for an intersectional perspective that consistently takes into account the fact that domination does not function additively, but is interwoven in multiple ways.
M. Candeias, B. Fried, H. Schurian, E. Völpel, and M. Warnke, “Reichtum des Öffentlichen”, Zeitschrift LuXemburg, 1/2020, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/reichtum-des-oeffentlichen
Marx and Engels, MEW, p. 32.
See, for example, Federici (1975), Dalla Costa (1975 [2022]), Vogel (1983 [2019]), Haug (2001), Fraser (2016), and Bhattacharya (2017).
J. Dück, Soziale Reproduktion in der Krise: Sorge-Kämpfe in Krankenhäusern und Kitas, Weinheim, 2022.
Haug, “Zur Theorie”, p. 726.
E. Dowling, The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?, London/New York, 2021.
The term “family wage” refers to a contractual model under which a (usually male) sole breadwinner can support the entire family with his wage income.
Haug, “Zur Theorie”, p. 773.
M. Candeias, “Faschisierung an der Macht”, Luxemburg Online, April 2025, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/faschisierung-an-der-macht
P. Wodrich, “Kampfbereit in der Manosphäre”, Zeitschrift LuXemburg 2/2026, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/kampfbereit-in-der-manosphaere
B. Fried and A. Wischnewski, “Sorgende Städte: Plädoyer für eine kommunale Sorgepolitik”, Zeitschrift LuXemburg 1/2022, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/sorgende-staedte
S. van Dyk and T. Haubner, Community-Kapitalismus, Hamburg, 2021.
See N. Raha, “A Queer Marxist [Trans]Feminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction”, Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, London, 2021, pp. 85–115.
See H. Lutosch, „Kein Kinderspiel“, LuXemburg Online, May 2024, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/kein-kinderspiel
B. Fried and A. Wischnewski, “Vom Leben her planen”, Zeitschrift LuXemburg 1/2024, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/vom-leben-her-planen
U. Huws, “Soziale Reproduktion im Kapitalismus des 21. Jahrhunderts”, Kapitalismus und Kapitalismuskritik, edited by Mirela Ivanova et al., Frankfurt am Main/New York, 2022, pp. 307–335.
M. Candeias, “Faschisierung an der Macht”, Luxemburg Online, April 2025, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/faschisierung-an-der-macht
E. Dowling, “Plattform-Sorge als Care-Fix”, Theorien des digitalen Kapitalismus, edited by Tanja Carstensen et al., Berlin 2023, pp. 206–223.
M. Altenried, “Mobile workers, contingent labour: Migration, the gig economy and the multiplication of labour”, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 4/2021, pp. 1–16, doi.org/10.1177/0308518X211054846
C. Wichterich, “Care Extractivism and the Reconfiguration of Social Reproduction in Post-Fordist Economies”, ICDD Working Papers 25, Universität Kassel, Social Sciences Department, 2019, www.uni-kassel.de/upress/online/OpenAccess/978-3-7376-0632-5.OpenAccess.pdf
N. Fraser, Der Allesfresser: Wie der Kapitalismus seine eigenen Grundlagen verschlingt, Berlin, 2023.
T. W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, London, 1997.
G. Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival, Lanham, 2018.
Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism, p. 48.
S. Nuss, Wessen Freiheit? Welche Gleichheit? Das Versprechen einer anderen Vergesellschaftung, Berlin, 2024, p. 141.
S. Hall, “Rasse, Artikulation und Gesellschaften mit struktureller Dominante”, Rassismus und kulturelle Identität: Ausgewählte Schriften 2, edited by Ulrich Mehlem, Hamburg, 1994, p. 133.
See A. Demirović and U. Hamann, “Vergesellschaftung – und dann? Warum wir kollektive Selbstverwaltung erst lernen müssen”, Zeitschrift LuXemburg 1/2022, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/vergesellschaftung-und-dann
See L. Becker, „Der Horizont eines sozialen Antifaschismus“, Zeitschrift LuXemburg 1/2025, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/der-horizont-eines-sozialen-antifaschismus; L. Becker, B. Fried, E. Otzelberger, B. Sauer, and A. Wischnewski, “Für einen Aufstand der Töchter”, Zeitschrift LuXemburg 1/2026, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/thesen-intersektionaler-antifaschismus
M. Dyroff, M. Pardeller, and A. Wischnewski (eds.), “#keinemehr – Femizide in Deutschland”, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Berlin, 2020, www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/43257/keinemehr-femizide-in-deutschland-1
E. von Redecker, Revolution für das Leben: Philosophie der neuen Protestformen, Frankfurt am Main, 2020, p. 32.
S. Nuss, A. Holm, S. Kaufmann, A. Muzzupappa, and I. Stützle, Der verdrängte Kapitalismus: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen antifaschistischer Wirtschaftspolitik, Berlin, 2025, p. ##.
A. Demirović, “Leerstellen antifaschistischer Wirtschaftspolitik”, LuXemburg Online, Dezember 2025, www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/kritik-antifaschistischer-wirtschaftspolitik
