A necessarily historical materialist moment? Feminist reflections on the need for grounded critique in an age of crises
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Author | Victoria M Basham |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117821992408 |
| Subject Matter | A Necessarily Historical Materialist Moment? Forum on Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117821992408
International Relations
2021, Vol. 35(1) 178 –182
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117821992408
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A necessarily historical
materialist moment? Feminist
reflections on the need for
grounded critique in an age of
crises
Victoria M Basham
Cardiff University
Keywords
capitalism, crises, feminism, gender, race, global violence
The necessity of making sense of our current moment, one characterized – as Andreas
Bieler and Adam David Morton suggest – by the interconnected forces of global capital-
ism, global war and global crisis is clear. Given the continuing body counts attributable to
the prioritisation of rapid economic and industrial growth over ecology, to the expansion
of expeditionary and pre-emptive warfare, and to the liberalisation and deregulation of
economies that has reduced social welfare safety nets around the globe to tatters, it is
pertinent to ask, as Bieler and Morton do, ‘what had to have happened in the past for capi-
talism as a mode of production to emerge and consolidate?’.1 One of Bieler and Morton’s
central aims in approaching this question is to revolt against the ‘violence of abstraction’,
which drawing on Sayer’s seminal work,2 they describe as eschewing the fetishisation of
concepts in favour of analysing social relations rooted in specific historical and sociologi-
cal practices.3 Feminist scholars have similarly asked how patriarchy, as a set of power
relations, has come about, and urged us to pay very close attention to how historical social
relations in different parts of the world shape people’s presents. Just as Bieler and Morton
argue that historical materialism ‘does not relegate the “economic” or the “political” to
spatially separate spheres but conceives of the social constitution of the economy so that
relations of production are embodied in juridical-political and ideological forms’,4 so too
have feminists shown how the political, economic, juridical and ideological have worked
Corresponding author:
Victoria M Basham, Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Law & Politics, Cardiff
University, Law Building, Museum Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3AX, UK.
Email: BashamV@cardiff.ac.uk
992408IRE0010.1177/0047117821992408International RelationsBasham
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