SD48 Alessandra Mezzadri "The Scalation of Struggles: Social Reproduction and Formal Subsumption"
Social DisciplineShow Notes
The Escalation of Struggles: Social Reproduction & Formal Subsumption
Alessandra Mezzadri discusses how formal subsumption can be understood through the diverse and rich perspectives of social reproduction, drawing in particular on the Italian Marxist Feminist tradition, to which the concept of the social factory owes a great deal.
Through a feminist reading of her fieldwork in India, and in dialogue with the work of Jairus Banaji, she shows how the Global South reveals the ways in which formal subsumption continues to function through multiple, heterogeneous forms of labour.
Rather than understanding these processes as producing paralysis and political powerlessness, she suggests that they may also open up new forms of antagonism, creating the conditions for the escalation of new struggles.
More from Social Discipline
SD53 Carles Guerra “Tosquelles: El diagnóstico de una locura colectiva”
In this episode of Social Discipline, we talk to Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo about their book Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits. Can we rethink capitalism beyond the familiar language of labour, ideology, social construction, and historical origin? Poliks and Alonso Trillo argue that capital should be understood less as a human-centred mode of production than as a logic of arbitrage: the extraction of value from differentials across time, markets, substrates, and scales. The conversation asks whether contemporary capitalism can still be fought with the concepts we have, or whether the problem has to be reformulated from first principles.
In this episode, we speak with Sunik Kim — Korean American musician, writer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Kim's music has been described as "a frenzied electronic orchestra that sits somewhere between free jazz, noise, and Korean shamanic music. Their writing, spanning subjects from Korean communism to Conlon Nancarrow, has appeared in The Wire, Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, Tone Glow, and elsewhere. We discuss in detail their new essay "Zones of Illusion", tracing the connections between illusion, cognition, class, and the conditions under which sound — and thought — might still escape capture. Today, International Workers' Day 2026, Sunik Kim releases seven CDs of new music, three essays, including "Zones of Illusion", and a book. More details at sunikkim.com. Thanks to Fielding Hope.
SD52 Andreas Petrossiants "We Can Now See Clearly What We Are Up Against"
SD51 in collaboration with Dream Academy and SASUSU Radio Jakob Jakobsen “The Ghost of Jakob Jakobsen”