INTRODUCTION

As we know, the emergence of economics as a science marks the historical moment of transition towards modernity, with its main characteristic being the separation of man from nature in the search for "rationality" (^{Naredo, 2015}). Therefore, in economics, separating elements to better study and understand them results in a way of simplifying socioeconomic phenomena. In this separation and simplification, the economic discipline leaves aside social reproduction as a structural element for life and for the economic system itself.

Thus, this simplification has effects, interests and implications. As Nelson asserts "feminist scholarship suggests that fundamental concepts of Western thought -especially hierarchical dualisms of reason over nature, and separation over connection-are fundamentally tied into a gender ideology that also ranks men over women" (^{Nelson, 1996}, p. 133). Under the argument of objectivity, economic discipline renders invisible or of less value females and whatever is symbolically understood as "feminine".

This is one of the strongest criticisms from feminist economics and despite the theoretical developments in this regard (^{Federici, 2013}; ^{Nelson, 1996}; ^{Vogel, [1983] 2013}), the structure of separation and invisibility prevails in the field. To broaden this reflection, this article examines formal/informal and productive/reproductive binary categories. Usually, the informal economy was viewed as a buffer that would eventually disappear in the process of capitalist development with the growth of urbanization and industrialization (^{Breman & Van der Linden, 2014}). However, in Latin America informality was never meant to fade away and it is very likely that the socioeconomic phenomenon that is called the informal economy would not be informal at all, but rather constitutive of the multiple ways in which society organizes itself to reproduce and guarantee its livelihood.

This article contributes to the debate on the importance of social reproduction for the capitalist system through economic analysis. The central thread is the relationship between the Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and the popular economy as an alternative approach to informality. Two interrelated arguments are made: First, the SRT rethinks the importance of work and reproduction, not only of the labour force but also of the socioeconomic system. As the SRT claims, the main activities, functions, and tasks that the working class reproduce occur outside of the workplace and are invisible (^{Bhattacharya, 2018}). Furthermore, the SRT resituates work as the articulating lynchpin of the analysis and emphasizes the value that reproduction work produces. Second, the popular economy -understood as the multiple economic activities not formally recognized- is essential to the functioning of society, whose workers demand the guarantees and the conditions for reproduction with social justice. Economic discipline has labeled these activities as informal and proposes measures such as formalization, flexibilization and reductions in labour cost. However, public policy implementation contributes to major work instability, labour insecurity and a greater precariousness.

A literature review was carried out to identify contributions from recent research and to map out a future public policy and research agenda. This article begins by outlining the feminist debate on reproduction and the contributions of the SRT. Second, it proposes a dialogue between the SRT and the popular economy to broaden the analytical framework within which economic research addresses social realities. Third, it analyses the mechanisms adopted to reduce informality in Latin America where the production sphere is privileged with unsatisfactory results in work conditions. Final reflections highlight the need to broaden academic debates involving critical feminism as a structuring base.

In Latin America a broad spectrum of popular economic activities has emerged in response to the context of the precariousness and flexibilization of labour. The region has experienced a stable and high informal employment rate and now the elevated rates of labour informalization reach the global level (^{Breman & Van der Linden, 2014}). Because the popular economy has contributed to social reproduction communities, questions concerning its recognition, organization, and threats are of special pertinence to economists and social scientists who seek to transform the conceptual frameworks in order to understand the socioeconomic phenomena and to contribute to social transformation.

AN EXTENDED AND CRITICAL CONCEPT OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

We argue that the contributions of feminism to economics are necessary in order to reconstruct an economic theory and practice that incorporates differences, recognizes its dilemmas and critically analyses social inequalities. Through a repeated denunciation of the androcentric nature of economics' understanding of the world, feminist scholars highlight injustices in terms of inequality and recognition. Feminists prove that differentiations and hierarchies between men and women are fundamental to the organization of capitalist societies (^{Cielo et al., 2016}). ^{Agenjo-Calderon (2016)} claims that the economy is misunderstood as a historical concept based on a particular subject (white, bourgeois, male, adult and heterosexual) who has been thought of as the center of knowledge (epistemological subject) and whose individual experience (homo economicus) is the only one that is of any interest for the discipline.

Hence, the core hypotheses of mainstream economics, scarcity and the rational economic man, provoke a divorce from economic phenomena, creating a science which tries to be objective by applying mathematical methods moving away from social complexity and falling into the trap of a dichotomous world vision (^{Xie, 2020}): Economic/non-economic (political and social), work/non-work, State/market, public/private, productive/reproductive, valorized/valueless. This binarism is based on a radical separation placing arbitrary limits on a normative logic shaping economic phenomena to satisfy the theoretical hypotheses.

To promote more adequate forms of economic practice, critical feminist economics has proposed a deconstruction that questions the centrality of (male) markets and seeks to recover the "other" invisible females. ^{Pérez (2004)} states that a key androcentric bias is the restriction of the scope of study to markets, which have been placed at the center of economic discourse through the construction of a dichotomous structure that identifies economy with markets and work with paid work. This binary structure has gender implications, since markets are linked with concepts regarding the individual, activity, choice, and competition which are identified in our culture with masculinity while women and femininity are rendered invisible as non-economic and valueless (^{Nelson, 1996}).

This critical deconstruction does not only seek to change the rates of women's participation in the field of economics; rather, it is focused on examining the contributions made by feminist perspectives on the discipline, to promote an economic science that responds to the challenges of society. For example, the recognition and understanding of economic subjects as "relational individuals" (^{Pérez, 2014}, p. 128), who reflect on their "reproductive rationalities" (^{Quiroga, 2014}, p. 45), and would draw us closer to an economy that considers human beings in relation to each other and even to the environment. Here, the latter is also considered a subject of reciprocity: "if we protect it, it takes care of us" (^{Agenjo-Calderón, 2016}, p. 103).

Thus, one of the most important feminist contributions to theoretical analyses has been the denunciation of multiple processes that renders invisible the reproduction work (^{Federici, 2013}; ^{Fortunati, 2019}) and the vindication of the value that this process has for the capitalist system despite mischaracterisation as realms of non-value by classical political economists (^{Picchio, 1994}).

As a general category, reproduction refers to the dynamic processes of change linked to the perpetuation of social systems. Therefore, three different levels of theoretical abstraction must be distinguished: social reproduction, biological reproduction, and labour force reproduction (^{Benería, 2019}). Social reproduction is associated with the conditions that maintain a social system. Biological reproduction (procreation) refers to the raising of children and differs from labour force reproduction which denotes the process by which human beings become workers and can participate in production. However, recent feminist discussions refer not only to the production process but to the reproduction of life, as we will see below (^{Bhattacharya, 2017}).

Within Marxist political economics, the reproduction of the industrial workers' labour force was linked to a more general process considered "social reproduction", in which class inequalities between capitalists and proletariat were incessantly exacerbated. In the 1960s and 1970s, the theorization of reproduction referred to maintaining existing life and the reproduction of the next generation, achieved mainly through women's unpaid care work and "domestic" tasks.

In the following decade, Marxist feminist analyses of social reproduction and capitalism proposed a dual approach, viewing patriarchy and capitalism as different systems which structured the contemporary class and gender exploitation system (^{Gidwani & Ramamurthy, 2018}). However, in the 1990s, the "one-system" approach was conceptualised, considering patriarchy and capitalism as integral parts of the regime of exclusion, inequality, and exploitation of women's unpaid work (^{Federici, 2004}). With the emergence of globalisation and the change in the mode of production at the international level, feminists thinkers such as ^{Katz (2001)} analysed the link between the political-economic, political-ecological and cultural changes in social reproduction that have accompanied and enabled not only the daily and generational reproduction of people and their labour and social relations, but also the renewal of the material foundations of capitalism.

^{Ferguson (2019)} identifies two feminist streams of thinking regarding work and reproduction. On the one hand, "equality feminism" focuses on the sexual division of labour throughout class societies, which assigns responsibility for physiological reproduction, childrearing, and "domestic work" to women and other "productive" tasks to men. On the other hand, "social reproduction feminism" focuses on the ways in which the patriarchal control of women's work is implicated in the ongoing reproduction of capitalist society. In the first approach, political projects for women's emancipation involve denouncing the unnatural and unjust sexual division of labour. Thus, the political objective is women's empowerment and the expansion of their choices by means of the integration of women into the paid workforce. In the second approach, oppression is not only based on a moral sexual division of labour, but also a political-economic configuration determined by the dehumanising logic of capitalist accumulation. In this latter approach, freedom is imagined as "a total reorganisation of all labour to disrupt capitalism's tendency to privatize and dehumanize the production processes involved in meeting subsistence needs" (^{Ferguson, 2019}, p. 355).

In this vein, the SRT emerges as an approach that examines the complex network of social processes and human relations that produce the conditions of existence for the capitalist system (^{Bhattacharya, 2017}; ^{Federici, 2019}; ^{Ferguson, 2016}). According to Tithi ^{Bhattacharya (2017)}, the SRT extends the traditional understanding of Marxism and capitalism in two transformative ways. First, the SRT proposes a broader but more specific reading of the economy, understanding capitalism as an economic system involving workers and owners, but also examining the modes of extensive (daily and generational) social reproduction of the system. Second, the SRT takes on questions of oppression (gender, race, sexuality) as structural relations shaped by capitalist production.

The SRT proposes the existence of two separate but articulated spaces: the production space and the reproduction of the workforce space. According to this theory, the labour force is reproduced by means of three interconnected processes: (i) through childbirth; (ii) through activities such as feeding, resting and care that regenerate workers outside of the production process and allow them to return to it and; (iii) through activities that maintain and regenerate non-workers outside of the production process, i.e. children, adults, disabled or unemployed people who were or will be workers (^{Bhattacharya, 2018}).

Thus, the SRT provides the following elements for enhancing the socioeconomic analyses and for appreciating the possibilities for other forms of organising life-making: the understanding of the capitalist totality, work as a pivotal category, pointing to the separation of social reproducers from their means of livelihood, the reassertion of the political importance of social reproduction, and the underscoring of the struggles of social movements in the face of capitalist oppression (^{McNally & Ferguson, 2015}).

In this view, the SRT proposes the notion of capitalist totality to apprehend capitalism as a system, an organic whole that encompasses the sphere of extra-market relations (^{Bhattacharya, 2017}). The SRT highlights the complex but unified way in which the production of commodities and the reproduction of labour power takes place, a fact that has been overlooked by the traditional approaches of the economic discipline. Considering capitalism as a social totality is crucial to "understand how or why its parts are mutually constituted in ways that regularly reproduce certain relations and social patterns or tendencies, and regularly rule out others" (^{Ferguson, 2016}, p. 48).

The SRT reveals another important element for economic discussion by assessing the role of human labour in creating and reproducing society. Analyses of labour have long been central to economic theory. Classical economists such as Adams Smith and David Ricardo considered work to be a central factor (^{Smith, [1776] 1996}). Marx, François Quesnay (1694-1774) and other Physiocrats were the first economists of capitalist society and the first theorists to identify the nature of productive labour, which they associated with agriculture (^{Federici, 2019}). Nevertheless, the role of labour as a practical human activity in its broader sense, related to the reproductive realm, is a recent analytical development. According to ^{Vogel ([1983] 2013}), the domestic-labour literature makes the reproduction of labour-power in capitalist societies visible by reconceptualising necessary labour to incorporate the processes of reproduction of labour-power. From her perspective, necessary labour has two components: First, the social component, which according to Marx constitutes the labour that produces value equivalent to wages, bound with surplus labour in the capitalist production process. Second, the domestic component refers to the unwaged work that contributes to the daily and long-term renewal of the bearers of the labour-power commodity and of the working class, deeply veiled in Marx's analysis. From this perspective, "domestic labour became a concept specific to capitalism and without fixed gender assignment" (^{Vogel, [1983] 2013}, p. 192). Capitalism's need to secure the reproduction of the working-class induces capital and the State to control and regulate female and other minority reproduction; even if not all women have to give birth, given that "social responsibility for birthing and raising the next generation is coded as female" (^{Ferguson & McNally, 2013}, p. XXIX).

Locating work in a capitalist totality implies that reproducing society is not only a domestic affair, but an essential activity. Thus, the analysis needs to incorporate not only the workers linked to production processes in terms of accumulation of capital, but rather workers in a broader sense, as social reproducers whose activities are indispensable for the functioning of societies. This point is relevant to the debates and analyses of informality, among others.

The SRT further seeks to theorise work in ways that can explain forms of oppression other than gender and class and focuses on the processes of separation of social reproducers from the means of livelihood. On this point, the SRT offers relevant contributions because social reproduction activities are value-producing, not only in terms of the traditional labour theory of value which refers to the domain of commodity production, but, as the SRT reasserts, because it is not the object that has value but such value is created by human work in its productive and reproductive forms (^{Mezzadri, 2020}). Following this argument, Mezzadri affirms that reproductive realms and activities contribute to processes of value-generation through three channels: "first, by directly re-enforcing patterns of labour control, expanding rates of exploitation; second, by absorbing the systematic externalisation of reproductive costs by capital, working as a de-facto subsidy to capital; and, third, through processes of formal subsumption of labour" (2019, p. 33). The separation of social reproducers from the means of livelihood, processes of dispossession and accumulation of capital are closely related to "primitive accumulation" and profoundly motivated by capital's need to appropriate value and to perpetuate the conditions of oppression (^{Federici, 2004}; ^{Harvey, 2003}).

As such, the SRT adopts a strong political stand, offering a theoretical analysis of how the capitalist system functions, including its weaknesses, its conflictive and contradictory relations, and proposes ideas for overcoming it. This theory helps to understand that any victories in terms of gender rights, achieved in the formal economy or outside of it, can only be temporary because the material basis of oppression is tied to the entire system. The social reproduction approach is able to set forth the importance of struggling on many fronts, but with an explicit anti-capitalist orientation (^{McNally & Ferguson, 2015}).

Every moment in which the relations between productive and reproductive spaces are forged by capitalism is also a moment of potential interruption of these social relations (^{Ferguson, 2016}). Waste pickers, street vendors, motorcycle taxi drivers, teachers' and health care workers' unions, peasants, Afro-communities and indigenous movements struggling for their rights in the face of injustice and capitalist oppression, can upset the capitalist system. Therefore, when the internal relationship of all the oppressions with the capitalist totality is politically highlighted, such struggles can promote a class consciousness (as opposed to a sectoral one), a consciousness of the common goal to fight together against capitalist oppressions (^{Bhattacharya, 2015}).

BEYOND THE INFORMAL ECONOMY: A CRITICAL DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SOCIAL REPRODUCTION THEORY AND THE POPULAR ECONOMY

Since the appearance of informality as a category in 1971, the formal category has been associated with salaried jobs and its contrary self-employment. This description, proposed by the anthropologist Keith Hart changed the way in which the problem of urban excess labour supply was conceptualised, and provided an explanation of how the migrant poor managed to adapt and survive within the constraints of peripheral urban economies (^{Portes & Schauffler, 1993}). Rather than defined and separate economies with no interaction or overlap, the informal economy is conceived as a process which results in degrees of informality (^{Castells & Portes, 1989}).

^{Guha-Khasnobis et al. (2006)} recognize two main strands of analyses of the informal economy. The first strand examines the different levels and mechanisms of economic activities, and the nature of organisation through formal or informal processes. The second strand explores the reach of official governance and the relationship of economic activities to regulation. ^{Chen (2012)} identifies four dominant schools of thought regarding the informal economy:

Yet none of these strands or schools contemplates social reproduction. The informal economy is considered useful to many policymakers, activists and researchers "because of the significance of the reality that it seeks to capture: the large share of the global workforce that contributes significantly to the global economy" (^{Chen, 2012}, p. 3). However, as the SRT affirms, it is necessary to understand "how realms of social reproduction co-constitute the dynamics of exploitation observed in production, as they co-produce the key processes necessary to extract labour surplus from labouring masses, and hence co-participate to the overall generation of (surplus) value" (^{Mezzadri, 2020}, p. 157). In this view, an important part of the socioeconomic phenomena is unknown by the informal economy.

In recent analyses of women and men in the informal economy, the ILO (2018) proposes an international standard to distinguish between employment in the informal sector and informal employment. The former is an enterprise-based concept defined in terms of the characteristics of the workplace, while, informal employment is a job-based concept defined in terms of the employment relationship and protections associated with the job of the worker. Analysing the criteria used by the ILO in light of the SRT, we encounter the permanence of a binary definition that identifies a problem by means of its opposite, making it a tautology (^{Giraldo, 2016}). This reading of socioeconomic phenomena is based on the production sphere of the economy ignoring the dynamic and complex elements that are part of the capitalist totality where production and reproduction have hierarchical relationships. Likewise, the populations labeled as informal do not have political legitimacy or the possibility of institutional dialogue. These populations must fight to create a political society where they can claim rights and recognition from the State (^{Chatterjee, 2011}). For example, waste pickers in Latin America were taken into consideration in the formulation of public policies through resistance and political struggle (^{Parra, 2016}; ^{Samson, 2009}; ^{Sorroche, 2016}).

In both the global south and global north, we can find various activities developed outside of the factory setting and outside the formal realm of the conventional economy. This undervalued set of activities affects the lives of roughly two billion people, or over 61 percent of the world's workforce (^{OIT, 2018}). Faced with the impacts of economic crises that upset labour conditions, economic policy reiterates flexible working conditions and formalisation processes, disregarding the nature of popular economic activities and benefitting accumulation and the profits of capital. Thus, this is not only a demographic question, but a real process of value-generation (^{Mezzadri, 2019}) despite the fact that neither economic statistics, nor the GDP take into account the value generated by the popular economy. In sum, the people who work on the streets and reproduce life in the city are not a minority, and neither is their produced value nor its importance for the reproduction of the economic system minor.

Considering the political dimension in the work of social reproduction, Latin American scholars claim these activities not as informal, but rather as popular economies (^{Diniz, 2019}; ^{Gago, 2008}; ^{Giraldo, 2017}; ^{Roig, 2017}; ^{Vega & Bermudez, 2019}). Based on this approach, the popular economy category does not imply a subjectivity of suffering or lack, as with other terms such as informal, precarious, external, or survival, and therefore seems to offer a political potential (^{Millar, 2019}). This critical approach can establish a dialogue with the SRT in which theoretical contributions enhance the economic discipline.

In Latin America, considering the totality of self-employed workers and employers in the informal sector as a proxy for the number of informal economic units, the ^{OIT (2018)} estimates that 76.6% of all economic units are informal and also that informal employment is higher among women (54.3%) than it is for men (52.3%). Instead of being an abnormality, the popular economy prevails. Due to the multiplicity of activities that can be regarded as part of the popular economy, establishing a single definition is counterproductive. Indeed, it would be falling into the same criticism directed at mainstream economics that seeks to establish categorical limits by ignoring the complexity of society with interactions that generate new forms of social relations.

Initial definitions understood the popular economy as the set of economic activities and social practices developed by the popular sectors for the purpose of ensuring the satisfaction of basic needs, both material and non-material, through the use of their own work power and available resources (^{Sarria & Tiribia, 2003}). However, as Gago argues, popular economies must be situated within a historical context of deindustrialization and neoliberal reforms. She suggests that: "popular economies have a political genealogy" (2019a, p. 2). Recent debates reassess the romantic vision of the popular economy closely linked with the social and solidarity economy (^{Coraggio, 2011}). In this view, the popular economy is considered as an alternative form of economy, often associated with the communitarian process, horizontal and democratic organisation and the collective management of resources and property (^{Wanderley et al., 2015}). However, conflicts, individualism and contradictions could be found in the popular economy.

To highlight the complexity of the popular economy, the SRT can provide a systemic analysis of how work in the popular economy is involved in the capitalist system and of the conflictive and contradictory relations that emerge, particularly regarding the generation and appropriation of value. In this way, the categorisation of "popular economy" can be extended to discern how reproductive work plays a crucial role in a non-harmonious space "with tensions, contradictions and conflicts in which it is connected with the worlds of formality, the salary and the search for a livelihood" (^{Vega & Bermúdez, 2019}, p. 351, author's translation).

Indeed, it would be difficult to consider the subsistence of Latin American societies, especially in the contradictory context of urbanisation without industrialisation, in the absence of the popular economy network as a support for its functioning. This economy involves a large sector of society that cannot find a stable job, or that even prefers to be self-employed given the precarious conditions of formal labour. It includes multiple activities that take place on the street as in the case of waste pickers (^{Duarte et al., 2017}; ^{Tovar, 2018}), street vendors (^{Blandón, 2011}), motorcycle taxi drivers, mine workers (^{Barragan, 2017}), catalog sales (^{Cielo et al., 2016}; ^{Vega & Bermúdez, 2019}) and those who define themselves as "scavengers" (rebuscadores), a category of self-description used in the popular sectors which points to the ability to "make a living" (^{Porras, 2017}). For ^{Gago (2016)}, popular economies involve a central reproductive dimension, while the organisation of everyday life is inscribed as a productive dimension, which blurs the boundary between the approach to work categories of the street and the household.

Despite its predominantly local presence, the popular economy is not disconnected from the global market economy (^{Fernández, 2019}). For example, popular Bolivian merchants, who respond to the increase in domestic demand resulting from the commodity boom and the influx of foreign currency, sell low-price Chinese products (^{Tassi et al., 2013}).

Whether on the street, at home, or in other spaces, the popular economy produces goods and services at a very low cost to capital. ^{Giraldo (2020)} criticizes the limited analysis of informality as self-employment where the worker would be the owner of his or her precarious means of production and where a capitalist relationship of exploitation would not exist. Instead, he argues that a great part of the means of production is constituted by all the equipment and infrastructure which are property of the State and corporate capital, and that therefore it is possible to find forms of capitalist exploitation through mercantile exchange. An example of this situation is the people who sell products of the large corporations to the street. These popular economy workers or social reproducers must work for long hours in difficult conditions, in order to obtain some income and buy basic consumption goods. However, the price of these goods is more expensive in absolute and relative terms regarding their income. ^{Roig (2017)} identifies this situation as a regressive cost structure.

Understood in the midst of capitalist totality, the popular economy has been shaped by, and shapes, the social relations of capitalism. Therefore, not an instrumental but rather a reproductive rationality emerges (^{Quiroga, 2009}); one that cannot be reduced to internalising additional costs in individual decisions. Reproductive rationality positions domestic units in the primary place, going beyond the classic public/private separation, hybridising and putting into circulation resources of different types and instituting rights which pose claims far from the labour demands of the formal world (^{Vega & Bermúdez, 2019}).

Recent debates highlight the relationship between popular economies and the multiple forms of financialisation¹. The latter refers to "the increased power of the financial sector in the economy, in politics, in social life and in culture at large... the way financial measurements, processes, techniques, narratives, values and tropes migrate beyond the financial sector and transform other areas of society" (^{Haiven, 2014}, p. 1).

Nonetheless financialisation also affects social reproduction and permeates through the popular economies. Today financial mechanisms, rather than the disciplinary tools available to the industrial capitalist, are increasingly becoming the primary means to control labour, as well as social and economic interests in general.

Usually, the responses to economic crises have been characterised by the dismantling of the 'welfare state' -where it has existed- privatisations, social spending cuts, and the "financialisation of reproduction" (^{Federici, 2018}, p. 75). As a result, an increasing number of people have been forced to borrow from banks or from informal sources of credit with terms of payment, often at high daily interest rates (known in Colombia as gota a gota or drop by drop loans) (^{Malinowitz, 2019}), to purchase services (health care, education, rent) or to buy basic goods.

The penetration of finance into popular economies has become a new capital accumulation drive, through an unprecedented growth of consumer credit and a universalising connection to the banking system. ^{Wilkis and Hornes (2019)}, reveal how non-contributory money transfers play a central role in the development of a new monetary infrastructure of the credit market in the popular economy. Hence, subsidies are considered a regular income of the beneficiary and ensure stability and the possibility of payment through a banking system within a mechanism that connects families, market, and State. In this respect, ^{Mezzadra and Gago (2017)} hold that the financialisation of popular consumption and popular economies becomes a crucial field of experimentation, where "spaces and subjects, that were traditionally considered as 'peripheral' (from the perspective of the waged norm, the urban structure, and legal regulation) acquire a new centrality" (p. 479).

We argue that combining theoretical analyses in a dialogue between the SRT and the popular economy can lead to achieving a more integrated economic discipline and political economy approach. Beyond the spectrum of informality, the popular economy approach has expanded our notion of Latin American daily life, where work outside the factory setting, and regarding the street as a place of claims, reveal overlapping productive and reproductive activities that "cheapen the cost of living for all the population" (^{Federici, 2018}, p. 151), but also create the conditions of existence and resistance in the city. Therefore, the popular economy can move the reductionist interpretation of informality beyond its present economic emphasis on the productive and legal sphere and can shed light on the connections between social oppression, economic exploitation, and social reproduction.

PUBLIC POLICY FOR A POPULAR ECONOMY: A FEMINIST SOCIAL REPRODUCTION PERSPECTIVE

From a feminist social reproduction perspective, public policy should not seek to integrate women into the labour market but to implement actions oriented towards social transformation. Addressing gender bias in the design of public policy by introducing a perspective of well-being and an awareness of the existing inequalities in society can hardly fill the gaps (^{Pérez, 2014}; ^{Rai et al., 2019}). Public policy must understand the feminist approach with regard to the social structure and not merely shift the targeting of policies or add the label of feminism or ethnic minorities. The feminist movement in all its heterogeneity re-appropriates the social totality covering issues such as debt, labour, production, reproduction and is capable of a diagnosis of patriarchal and contemporary colonial capitalism in each specific place (^{Gago et al., 2020}).

Latin America is a heterogeneous region without any consolidated welfare States, where the neoliberal paradigm was adopted as the dominant model of accumulation. However, in the last 40 years, the region has suffered and continues to suffer the consequences of austerity policies and debt crises. A period of progressive governments elected in the 2000s opened up the possibility of bringing public policy closer to the demands of the population in terms of its needs and desires of social reproduction.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, significant formalisation processes began in many Latin American countries. Formalisation has different meanings and implications for different categories of informal workers. A formalisation process might be focused on the self- employed in informal enterprises or on workers in informal jobs (^{Chen, 2012}).

Those processes took place under left-wing governments (Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Ecuador); but even in countries with pro-market policies with deeper neoliberal policies (Colombia, Peru), recognition and formalisation policies were promoted by social movements as in the case of waste pickers (^{Parra, 2016}). These different governmental approaches implied different degrees of commitment and diverging approaches to formalisation. While in the south of the continent governments provided infrastructure, machinery, equipment, and increased wages; in countries such as Colombia, with a neoliberal economic policy, workers were abandoned to succeed individually by means of their entrepreneurial capacity (^{Giraldo, 2016}; ^{Rosaldo, 2019}).

The episode of formalisation in the region largely depended on a favorable economic cycle, associated with high raw material prices. When this approached its end and economic growth began stagnating, informality increased once more (^{Salazar & Chacaltana, 2018}). Table 1 contains the informal employment rate in Latin America between 2000 and 2019. As shown in Table 1, the informal employment rate in the region is high, except for Chile and Uruguay. The data illustrates a stable trend of informality, indeed, in Colombia, Costa Rica and Paraguay informality has not changed significantly in the last decade.

Table 1 Informal employment rate (%) in Latin America 2000-2019 

Source: https://ilostat.ilo.org

The adoption of new laws to regulate informality has been the mechanism of choice in the region to reduce informality. Also, public policy includes incentives for formalisation through simplified registration and taxation schemes (monotributo or simple tax) and the extension of the social protection databases (^{Salazar & Chacaltana, 2018}). These policies have focused on controlling popular economies and improving national registers. However, with high levels of unprotected labour, the lack of social security coverage and the organisation and representation of workers are left behind.

Thus, formalisation through the extension of social protection and simplified registration and taxation schemes has sought to increase the coverage and to expand and accelerate the affiliation of informal workers to social security systems (^{Campos & Hernández, 2018}). In 2017, Chile had 93.7% of workers registered in a pension system, while 68.1% of workers contributed. In Colombia, the situation was similar, 64.4% of workers were registered and 37.3% of workers contributed (Cepalsat). Thus, the registration efforts might be fiscally unsustainable in the long run, if necessary contributions are not guaranteed (^{Bohoslavsky, 2020}). Further, they do not increase decent employment but rather precariousness, self-exploitation, and individualisation when workers must assume the full cost of social security. In Colombia, the social security cost for self-employment is 30% of the legal minimum wage. For self-employment the levels of profitability are so low that they can only obtain a minimum subsistence income, and access to social protection continues to be denied to lower-income workers (^{Amarante & Perazzo, 2013}).

The region has made important advances where complementary measures were implemented. The regulation of domestic work, which represents 10% of informal work in Latin America (^{Lexartza et al., 2016}), is oriented towards equating the labour rights of domestic workers with those of other formal workers. In Argentina, workers have the right to other benefits such as universal child allowance, therefore formalisation does not imply the loss of pre-existing guarantees harmonising labour policy and social policy measures (^{Messina, 2016}). This process favoured an extension of social protection to domestic workers and promoted the process of formalisation for a minority of them. Notwithstanding, the domestic workers' financial capacity to contribute to social security systems is low (^{Cortes, 2016}).

However, the logic that these formalisation policies follow is the same with which the economic discipline works. Thus, the productive sphere is the main purpose of public policy, while the reproductive sphere is disregarded, with the implications discussed above. Policy to address informality seeks to create more jobs, to increase social security, to regulate informal jobs and to register informal enterprises (^{Chen, 2012}), but the generative and creative aspect of people's everyday practical human activity is overlooked.

A feminist social reproduction perspective means a re-appropriation of the economy and public policy as a space for social intervention (^{Bhattacharya, 2017}; ^{Gibson-Graham, 2006}; ^{Quiroga, 2014}). The challenge lies in imagining public policies for large sections of the population working under precarious conditions, considering not only productive and functional salary relations to capital, but the integral reproduction of life through the interconnection of such diverse issues as housing, public transport, safe and healthy environments, education and access to health, sanitation and social care. Once the reproductive aspects are identified as central to production and work relations, one can consider a policy agenda that supports workers and their families and their communities with complemented measures in provisions on housing and living arrangements (^{Mezzadri, 2020}). This requires public policy to not only register informal enterprises and regulate informal jobs but also to identify the spaces, histories, social relationships, and infrastructure required for the development of such practices.

We argue that the main objective of public policies should be the strengthening of the mechanisms and the organisational practices used by the popular sectors for their subsistence and social reproduction. Defining such organisational forms as informal has socioeconomic and political implications, since a bifurcation establishes assumptions and values about what is and what is not important (^{Nelson, 1996}).

In several Latin American countries, progress has been made in the recognition of the popular economy. In 2011, Ecuador introduced a law that acknowledges the popular and solidarity economy. Although it was based on the experiences of popular actors, the law needed a conceptualisation and identification of alternatives from the State, which launched a process of bureaucratic and institutional reform (^{Nelms, 2015}). In Bolivia, the term "plural economy" was officially adopted in the Political Constitution in 2006; and in 2011 the Organic law of the popular and solidarity economy and of the popular and the solidarity financial sector was issued (^{Wanderley et al., 2015}). More recently, the Argentine government created the National registry of workers of the popular economy, that seeks to recognise, formalise and guarantee their rights and to offer tools that allow them to enhance their work².

In the persistent crisis scenarios, it is crucial to understand how the popular economy has contributed to organising and sustaining communities. Hart's assertion regarding the retrieval of analytical precision should be kept in mind: "if I once sought to translate my own ethnographic experience into 'economese', it is now time to reverse the process and examine the institutional particulars sustaining whatever takes place beyond the law" (2006, pp. 33).

There are no foolproof recipes, but there is a certainty that current formalisation policies have not met the expectations of the communities. In the case of street vendors, formalisation has been accompanied by the implementation of a series of exclusionary policies to clear the streets, plazas, and other public spaces to bolster the neoliberal urban project (^{Crossa, 2016}). Public space is a place both of leisure and work, where social reproduction is developed. Not only street vendors depend on public space for their daily survival; so do motorcycle taxi drivers, waste pickers, and delivery services who shape a distinctive social space that meets their intertwined requirements for economic production and social reproduction (^{Lefebvre, 2013}). In this sense, the popular economy not only generates income from their activities, but also produces wealth from the space, provoking not only a dispute for space, but also for its rent.

Formalisation under capitalist dynamics, ends up producing channels and mechanisms of appropriation of the value produced by the workers. The case of the waste pickers in Colombia illustrates how formalised workers experience declining income levels, produced by the high and unequal costs of formalisation without financing mechanisms (^{Tovar, 2018}). The formalisation process has eight phases to accomplish the technical, administrative, commercial, and financial requirements. Each phase represents additional cost to the taxes, social security contributions and legalisation fees that are not covered by the revenues. In the case of the waste pickers in Uruguay, they had been obliged to form a cooperative and then they were forced to become employees at a plant to continue recycling; but the income earned from the sale of materials to industry was, after deductions, much less. Two misdiagnosed assumptions were made regarding the informal sector waste trade in Uruguay: first, that waste pickers were synonymous with the poor; second, that considering such workers as victims of exploitation was a complete account of their economic condition (^{O'Hare, 2020}).

The Latin American case has the potential to co-construct public policy by identifying different "avenues" of contributions, "communitarian" subjects, as well as its constitutive tensions such as the discussion on value, the tax differentiation between different forms of labour and the various motivations for mercantile exchange, including reciprocity (^{Vasconez, 2012}). In addition, the notion of buen vivir (good living), proposed by the indigenous movements in the Andean region, broadens the idea of economic systems by involving not only the transaction and circulation of objects at market prices, but also by creating and maintaining social relationships and the emergence of particular social identities. 'Making a living' in this broad sense stresses both the 'effort' involved and the aim of sustaining life" (^{Narotzky & Besnier, 2014}, p. 5).

Several points for reflection remain: How can the popular economy be linked to public finances and "social reproductivity", the latter considered as the conditions to good living? How can we become aware of the complexity that underlies the reconciliation of the productive and reproductive tasks in order to generate a public policy that responds to the realities and expectations of those at the periphery (^{Porras-Santanilla & Rodriguez-Morales, 2019})? How can public financial support be increased to develop practical strategies for cultural and creative work -free from prevalent managerial views guided by market logic (^{Dinardi, 2019})? These discussions create new pathways once the veil is lifted that render these forms of production of life, as well as the associated people and work, invisible.

FINAL REFLECTIONS AND CHALLENGES

This article sets forth a reflection on how to overcome formal/informal and productive/reproductive dichotomies prevalent in mainstream economic analyses. For this, a dialogue is proposed between the feminist SRT and the popular economy theory to broaden the understanding of social practices and relations. Rather than using the concept of informality in nominal terms (^{Portes et al., 1989}), this essay challenges it, considering theoretical distinctions to be inherently political.

Wherefore a question arises: How can this discussion contribute to the economic discipline in the understanding of social phenomena? First, it argues that the workforce does not come into being magically or naturally but rather it is produced. Contrary to the individualistic view of society in which each subject must maximise his/her own benefit, the interdependence aspect highlighted by the SRT cannot be ignored by the economic discipline. Second, it contends that social reproduction is not restricted to domestic housework: The SRT disassociates reproduction work from the private and domestic sphere to highlight the fact that it could be paid, unpaid, performed in households, communities, in the street or anywhere else and that such work is not performed exclusively by women. Third, it makes an important distinction between work and labour. While the former widely mediates relations between social and natural orders and combines the theoretical and practical activity of human beings, labour can be conceptualised as "a particular aspect of work which in a capitalist social formation is that part which is appropriated and controlled by capital in the labour-capital relation" (^{Rioux, 2015}, p. 197). In this regard, the wage norm cannot be the only prism through which economics and public policy address socioeconomic issues. Finally, it reasserts the need to understand the relational dynamic between the reproductive and productive realms. If we conceive of the two spheres separately and ignore reproduction, it will be difficult to fully understand how the capitalist system operates and how it can be overcome. Nor can economics disregard the inequalities caused by the systematic invisibility of reproduction intrinsic in the functioning of the capitalist system.

Feminist economics does not only mean an economic approach to social relations with a high participation of women, it is more precisely a social science that does not emulate binaries and acknowledges that some categories, such as gender, informality, scarcity, property, and value, are not stable and are socially produced. These categories are maintained through practices operating across different temporal and spatial scales and are susceptible to change. The discipline of economics must be engaged in a profound empirical work, clarifying the standpoint from which researchers produce their work (^{Haraway, 1988}). Furthermore, feminist economics posits a relational, instead of a rational perspective, to remind us of the interconnectedness between the human and non-human, places, practices, and power (^{Parker, 2016}).

We argue that it is necessary to reconsider the nature of economic life itself and rethink the economy to include all processes which contribute to social reproduction and involve collective systems for sustaining life, especially in times of need (^{Narotzky & Besnier, 2014}). A new critique of the political economy emerges from the encounter between the popular economy and feminist economics. This critique finds its expression in the increased struggles interlinked with productive and reproductive work (^{Gago, 2019b}). Hence, the challenge is not to study the correct distribution of the scarce resources to meet human needs in a productive dimension, but rather it is how to organise daily life assuming a practical indistinction between work on the street and in the household. The latter implies a tough fight, and there are no easy or singular roads to a substantial restructuring of the relations between capital, work and life. Notwithstanding, acknowledging the role of the economic discipline in support of these transformation processes is an important beginning.