2

Ontology, Method, and Hypotheses1

Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill

Chapter 2 is concerned to advance some of the theoretical and practical

agenda outlined at the end of Chapter 1 by introducing issues of ontology and
epistemology so as to outline a methodological sketch to frame a number of
our main hypotheses.
Thus a starting point for this work is the construction of an appropriate
ontology of the global political economy and the emerging world order. In
constructing this ontology we in effect address the need for a more compre-
hensive approach to the explanation of changing global conditions of
existence, or of a totality that consists of a certain contradictory unity, albeit
a unity in diversity. We think that this ontology needs to encompass the
wider dimension of social life so often referred to in the early Marx (1964) but
relatively neglected in his later work. We also think that a radical means to
do this was introduced by Gramsci (1971). Namely, we start from the idea
that human beings (women and men) make history but as Marx added
not necessarily under conditions of their own choosing (Marx 1973: 1467).
In other words, social knowledge, human consciousness and patterns of
collective action all form part of the making of history.
Of course, Feminist Political Economy has sought to highlight the way in
which the making of history is the work of both men and women. To recognize
this simple fact requires that we pay attention not just to narrowly drawn
productivist frameworks of power and production and their power relations.
In this regard, we offer an ontology that can incorporate the basic social
conditions that make such power and production possible in the first place
including what Feminist Political Economy has called social reproduction,
and indeed to recognize that power relations not only serve to define production
but also the institutions, processes and practices of social reproduction.
Social reproduction discussed at greater length below refers to both
biological reproduction of the species (and indeed its ecological framework)

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I. Bakker et al. (eds.), Power, Production and Social Reproduction
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2003
18 Power, Production and Social Reproduction

and ongoing reproduction of the commodity labor power. In addition social

reproduction involves institutions, processes and social relations associated
with the creation and maintenance of communities and upon which,
ultimately, all production and exchange rests (Bakker 1999). In todays world
social reproduction involves institutions that provide for socialization of risk,
health care, education and other services indeed many of the key elements
of what the early Marx called species-being, social institutions that
distinguish the life of human beings from that of animals (Marx 1964).2
With this stance in mind, at a more historically concrete level of analysis
our ontology for analyzing the changing global political economy includes
a number of specific historical or constitutive structures associated with the
reconfiguration of governance and its relation to the social questions. Thus
in the final two parts of the chapter we outline concepts that correspond to
the dominant historical structures (understood as the patterned or institu-
tionalized forms of human agency) that we think have served to constitute
some of the transformations in the juridical-political, political economy and
social dimensions of the world order of the early twenty-first century. These
structures include the new constitutionalism, disciplinary neo-liberalism,
social reproduction, shifting gender orders, the erosion of the family wage
and the feminization of survival.
Our ontology includes not only multiple forms of commodification,
but also new patterns of exploitation, and control of labor in the
productionreproduction relationship. The ontology should be understood
as a transformative process that not only entails the constitution and recon-
stitution of gender, race and class and ideas about gender, race and class as
expressed through this greater commodification of social, political and
economic institutions. It also entails how a sense of identity and of resistance
can be actualized in this new context of intensified globalization. In this
context, for example, how womens struggles can confront the connected
yet scattered hegemonies of global economic institutions, states, patriarchal
households and other exploitative structures in ways that both challenge
these sites and connections among them, is a key aspect of the politics of a
transnational community of women (Nesiah 1993) and of a politics of
transformative resistance (Gill 2003a) implicit in several Feminist
International/Global Political Economy writings.3 Thus in this work, questions
of social reproduction are related not only to the making of history but also
to the remaking of theory.
Our concepts are then used to help generate a number of secondary
hypotheses that connect to the central hypothesis outlined in Chapter 1: an
emerging global contradiction between the extended power of capital (and
its protection by the state) and progressive forms of social reproduction or,
more broadly, the human security of a majority of the worlds population. Our
secondary hypotheses concern the reprivatization of the governance of social
reproduction and how this is a counterpart to a general increase in the range,