{"id":21547,"date":"2022-05-10T19:43:57","date_gmt":"2022-05-10T19:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=21547"},"modified":"2022-05-10T20:01:14","modified_gmt":"2022-05-10T20:01:14","slug":"on-the-frontier-of-whiteness-expropriation-war-and-social-reproduction-in-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2022\/05\/10\/on-the-frontier-of-whiteness-expropriation-war-and-social-reproduction-in-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"On the frontier of whiteness? Expropriation, war and social reproduction in Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article written by Olena \u00a0Lyubchenko<\/a> was first posted by LeftEast<\/a>. It addresses the tensions amongst the Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperial aggression. \u00a0It opposes Ukrainian nationalist attempts to promote \u00a0Ukraine’s future as a ‘white European nation’ and champions \u00a0the Left’s attempt to \u00a0locate the struggle within a global framework against all exploitation and oppression.<\/strong><\/p>\n

ON THE FRONTIER OF WHITENESS? – \u00a0EXPROPRIATION, WAR AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION IN UKRAINE<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Mariupol after Russian imperial invasion<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I have been writing and re-writing this short reflection for seven weeks. Weeks spent aiding relatives and friends in fleeing Ukraine and directing solidarity funds to the Ukrainian resistance and mutual aid organizing. Having walked the streets of Mariupol almost every summer since I was a child, and for the last time in the summer of 2019 before the pandemic \u2013 my father\u2019s grave is in a village just outside Mariupol \u2013 reflection is a difficult task. In cities like Mariupol, we are witnessing the destruction of hospitals, schools, theaters, and critical infrastructures like roads and railways. The damage amounts to a direct extirpation of Soviet-era public infrastructures by the Putin war machine \u2013 an\u00a0act of \u2018decommunization\u2019<\/a>\u00a0indeed. What has been for working-class Ukrainians, a slow and depressing three decades of class decomposition, immiseration, and depopulation, has for the last two months accelerated into massacres, destruction, and forced displacement. It is the destruction, too, of history and memory. The war tends to cancel all exceptions, nuances, discussions.\u00a0 I hope that this darkest of hours carries the task of necessary critique for a different future.<\/p>\n

As horrifying images of devastation, death, and rape in places like Bucha circulate widely online, and as fleeing Ukrainian women with children are welcomed in Europe while undeserving \u2018Others\u2019 are barred from entry, we are told time and again by Western and Ukrainian elites that \u2018Ukraine is fighting a European war\u2019 and \u2018Ukraine is defending Europe\u2019. In this context, the emerging idea of \u2018Ukrainianness\u2019 and its equation with \u2018Europeanness\u2019 is mediated through a conceptualization of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty and self-determination are increasingly understood by local elites to be bound up with incorporation into \u2018fortress Europe\u2019 and the making of the \u2018Ukrainian nation\u2019 as \u2018white\u2019 and \u2018European.\u2019 The concept of \u2018self-determination,\u2019 borne by the internationalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperial revolutionary left is instrumentalized today. In the use of Western and Ukrainian elites, the history of local internationalism, communism, and anti-fascism is separated from \u2018self-determination\u2019 through Eurocentric maneuvers.\u00a0 Ironically, in this sense, this utilization is not far from\u00a0Putin\u2019s own attacks<\/a>on Ukraine\u2019s self-determination, which he scornfully asserts is bound up with Leninist principles of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.<\/p>\n

Recent scholarship on Eastern Europe, which attends to race, class, and imperialism (and less so to gender and sexuality), explores the variegated peripheralizations of different Eastern European and post-Soviet countries vis-\u00e0-vis \u2018Europe\u2019.[i]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0These peripheralizations materialize as nations\u2019 unequal levels of access to \u2018whiteness\u2019, meaning, their inclusion into the capitalist economy on European terms, \u2018middle-class\u2019, Western, (un)communist nations \u2013 the supposed winners of neoliberalism. Historically, the \u2018whiteness\u2019 of Eastern Europeans has been contingent. While versions of \u2018Europeanness\u2019 are elevated, any deviations from the presumed norms of such identity risks a loss of status with attendant material repercussions for the populations of the \u2018post-socialist\u2019 space. Disciplined through dispossessive IMF loans, energy policies, precarious migrant work opportunities, and remittance dependence, the region and its peoples have been remade as precarious \u2018Europeans.\u2019<\/p>\n

In an effort to unsettle the present preoccupation with military-strategic questions, as well as the methodological campism and nationalism that has plagued many of the debates on the war in Ukraine that dwell on the terrain of the military-industrial complex, I propose to shift attention instead to a critique of political economy and an honest engagement with the capitalist state in Ukraine, the racializing elements of Ukrainian nationalism, the everyday dynamics of social reproduction in Ukraine, its \u2018European\u2019 future, and the theatrics of European and North American sympathies against a background of colonial violences elsewhere.<\/p>\n

In this piece, I situate the war in Ukraine within the broader context of Ukraine\u2019s position in global patterns of production and social reproduction[ii]<\/sup><\/a>, focusing in particular on its racialized and gendered dynamics. Using social reproduction feminism, I trace how, since 2014, Ukraine\u2019s militarization has been intimately linked to austerity measures, effectively displacing the burdens of resisting Russian aggression and preparing the state for a highly unequal process of \u2018Euro-Atlantic\u2019 integration onto households and especially women. Militarization, austerity, and aggression in this context act as processes of dispossession and primitive accumulation. They \u201cgenerate global reserves of labour-power whose cross-border movements are at the heart of the worldwide production and reproduction of capital and labour.\u201d[iii]<\/sup><\/a>In this way, racialized citizenship reproduces precarity and exclusion for some and security and inclusion for others, just as the Ukrainian working class\u2019s historical differentiation within global capitalism is being rewritten and instrumentalized.[iv]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Good Europeans<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the first few weeks of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, the world witnessed\u00a0racist violence<\/a>\u00a0on Ukraine\u2019s borders with Poland, Romania, and Hungary. African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern refugees, as well as\u00a0Roma citizens<\/a>\u00a0of Ukraine, and thousands of international students studying and working in Ukraine, were barred from crossing borders, and were sometimes even obstructed from boarding trains carrying refugees to the EU by Ukrainians who\u00a0formed human chains<\/a>. Journalists reporting from the border wearing blue and yellow pins quickly denounced this discrimination, then swiftly moved on to images of Ukrainian children receiving toys from friendly German volunteers. \u201cStranded Indian students watched as Ukrainian pets crossed border to safety,\u201d read one\u00a0headline article<\/a>. In North America and Western Europe, restaurants have been serving Ukrainian dishes, donating the proceeds to the war effort in Ukraine, while malls have been lit up in blue and yellow. Tech giant Amazon\u2019s website now boasts a \u201cHelp the people of Ukraine\u201d button. Some of the biggest\u00a0corporate landlords<\/a>\u00a0in Canada \u2013 those that have been evicting working class households during the pandemic while raising the prices for already-inadequate housing \u2013 have \u2018banded together\u2019 to offer free and subsidized housing options for Ukrainians fleeing to Canada.\u00a0 The media and Western policymakers have decided that Ukrainians are \u2018good,\u2019 \u2018European\u2019 citizens, who are valuable, educated, IT professionals. Racism was treated not as a structural issue, but as bad behaviour.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian resistance to the Russian military is celebrated as heroic, brave, and democratic,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0simultaneously\u00a0<\/em>self-determination, national liberation, popular violent resistance elsewhere is not extended the same celebration, instead labelled terrorist, with \u2018heroes\u2019 jailed, \u2018illegalized\u2019, and so on. Our responsibility is to ask, \u201cwhy?\u201d. Surely, the circumstances confronting the citizens of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza, Ethiopia are also exceptional? By the end of 2021, the conflict in Yemen alone had caused 377,000 deaths, nearly 70 per cent of them children younger than five.[v]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 We did not see free toys and food on the Polish border for those women and children, but rather\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0tear gas, water cannons, truncheons, police dogs, and razor wire. Just some months ago, Poland was becoming the latest frontline of high-tech surveillance deterrence on its border with Belarus.\u00a0 In October 2021, its government\u00a0approved<\/a>\u00a0the installation of a \u20ac350m border-security fence along half its border with Belarus, reaching up to 5.5 metres, with advanced cameras and motion sensors directly profiting arms and tech companies.\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cFrontex awarded a \u20ac100m (\u00a391m) contract last year for the Heron and Hermes drones made by two Israeli arms companies, both of which are used by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Capable of flying for more than 30 hours and at heights of 10,000 metres (30,000 feet), the drones beamed almost real-time feeds back to Frontex\u2019s HQ in Warsaw.\u201d Poland also hopes to adopt a \u201cvehicle-mounted sound cannon that blasts \u2018deafening\u2019 bursts of up to 162 decibels to force people to turn back.\u201d Shall we also just ignore how Poland was a handmaiden to the\u00a0forces<\/a>destroying Iraq and Afghanistan while at the same time instituting a far-right sexist regime at home? Ukrainian\u00a0troops<\/a>, too, went to Iraq. The UK, Canada, and France, among others, have been quick to send money to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine, while the ICC has been struggling to find funds to prosecute war crimes in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq. Our responsibility is to ask why. Liberal justice is intertwined with systemic racism as Western resources are funneled to Ukraine for a \u2018crisis in Europe\u2019 but\u00a0withheld<\/a>\u00a0in situations when Western countries are opposed to accountability for their own war crimes. The same thing goes for\u00a0humanitarian relief<\/a>. In this light, as Ralph Wilde\u00a0writes<\/a>, the theatrics of official European sympathies for Ukraine appear as \u201ca sociopathic, racist gaslighting of the people of Iraq\u201d, and the many others dispossessed by European and North American wars.<\/p>\n

The media\u2019s emphasis on Molotov cocktails in Ukraine gives the impression that this war is being won solely on the strength of a radical strategy of people\u2019s self-defense \u2013 much like that of the Palestinians, who of course receive no such adulation. Ukraine is a different context of \u2018protecting your land\u2019 not because fighting for self-determination is not strong \u2013 on the contrary, we have witnessed the collective strength and courage of Ukrainian resistance, but because the Ukrainian war effort is being led from above by the state apparatus and supported from the outside by a well-funded fighting force, wrapped in imperialist, capitalist interests. This factor begs a distinction between popular Ukrainian national interests\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>the interests of the Ukrainian capitalist state as well as an account of how the latter has dispossessed the former through\u00a0militarization-cum-austerity<\/em>\u00a0since 2014. Ukraine inherited 30% of the Soviet military stockpile, has quadrupled its military spending over the last ten years, and had nearly 500,000 troops (250,000 regular and a 250,000 strong national guard, which incorporates neofascist groups like the Aidar and Azov battalions within its ranks) before the outbreak of hostilities. It has an advanced domestic arms industry and has become the recipient of highly sophisticated anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft systems, drone technologies, and heavy weapons as in recent months. In short, Ukraine has a professional standing army that is arguably\u00a0more impressive<\/a>\u00a0than any of NATO\u2019s Eastern European members (and only behind Turkey and Russia in the region). Since the invasion, the US has committed more than $1.7 billion in \u2018lethal aid\u2019 to Ukraine in addition to $2.5 billion spent between 2014 and 2021, including\u00a0training<\/a>, and with more from other NATO allies.\u00a0<\/sup>\u00a0On April 28, US Congress authorized $33 billion for more artillery, antitank weapons and other hardware as well as economic and humanitarian aid. As the New York Times\u00a0reports<\/a>, when combined, \u201cthe United States would be authorizing $46.6 billion for the Ukraine war, which represents more than two-thirds of Russia\u2019s entire annual defense budget of $65.9 billion\u2026By comparison, the Pentagon last year estimated the total war-fighting costs in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2020 at $816 billion, or about $40.8 billion a year\u201d. The drastic increase in US military aid and, importantly, the invocation of Roosevelt\u2019s Lend-Lease Act of 1941, thereby deeming Ukraine\u2019s defense \u201cvital to the defense of the United States\u201d,\u00a0foretells escalation, and US interests in a long war<\/a>. While this \u2018aid\u2019 has helped check the Russian advance, it is important to think over the long-term how militarization \u2018trickles down\u2019 into the lives of working-class people trying to make ends meet.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s no bread, let them eat guns: Neoliberal reforms and militarization<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The militarization of Ukraine since 2014 has been coupled with neoliberal reforms aimed at facilitating the growth of capital at the expense of the reproduction of working-class households. Since the war began in 2014, the state has institutionalized dramatically lower costs of social reproduction through what Jennifer Mathers calls \u201cextraordinary demands on civilian society \u2013 and particularly on households and women whose resources are already overstretched\u201d, justified and normalized by the needs of the war effort and calls to \u2018sacrifice\u2019 for \u2018the nation.\u2019[vi]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The cost of\u00a0 national security spending, which has quadrupled in the past decade, has been socialized through austerity budgets \u2013 with women absorbing the cuts to the social wage and the public sector. International financial institutions like the IMF have placed strict limits on social spending, with significant implications for women, including de facto elimination of fuel subsidies, causing higher prices for gas, heating, electricity and transportation, sweeping spending cuts on health, education and child assistance benefits, and a major reform of the pension system. Arguably, starting in 2015, \u201cde-communization laws\u201d[vii]<\/sup><\/a>, which banned Communist political parties and symbols, renamed Soviet-era cities and streets, and facilitated the persecution of Leftist scholars and activists all under the same sweeping label, also included the \u2018de-communization\u2019 of social policy. New social and economic reforms were extended in the name of the modernization and Europeanization of what little of the welfare state remained following the \u201890s Shock Therapy reforms. Contravening the Ukrainian constitution, which proclaims Ukraine to be a welfare state,\u00a0Commons<\/em>\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0that the reforms have included reduced fines for employers for non-compliance with labour laws, deregulation of occupational health and safety codes, a newly financialized pension system, decreased medical spending, and movement towards the privatization of healthcare. In comparison to 2013, in 2016 the state\u00a0cut spending<\/a>\u00a0on health care by 36.3%, on education by 36.2%, and on civil service by 30.6%.[viii]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 The economic reforms pushed by the IMF and adopted by the Ukrainian state, have accelerated rising inequality, with 67% of Ukrainian households in 2021\u00a0characterizing themselves<\/a>\u00a0as \u2018poor\u2019. Dispossession through\u00a0austerity-cum-militarization<\/em>\u00a0has resulted in feminization of precarious employment and poverty.<\/p>\n

For the two million people who have been displaced by the war in Donbass, prior to the outbreak of the current aggression, social reproduction has been nearly impossible during the last eight years.\u00a0 In November 2014, the Ukrainian state stopped funding government services in the separatist areas of the region, including pensions. This is a particularly stark example of the expropriation of past labour and the current disposability of retired workers in the country. Many Ukrainian citizens entitled to an old-age pension, who happened to live on the other side of the front line, had to cross the border into Ukrainian-controlled territory in order to receive their pensions. In 2016, a strict control measure was introduced by the Ukrainian government, requiring \u201cinternally displaced persons\u201d to register at an address in government-controlled territory and check in bimonthly to maintain pension eligibility. Many elderly people, mostly women living in the occupied regions, have had to travel\u00a0every 60 days for up to 24 hours<\/a>\u00a0on buses, walking, waiting in long queues, without shelter and basic conditions like bathrooms,\u00a0to access their pensions<\/a>\u00a0averaging a meagre $90 per month. Those workers unable to travel due to health and mobility issues were left without even this income. From December 2018 to April 2019, 18 elderly people died from mostly heart-related health complications as they made the difficult journey through the \u2018contact line\u2019 separating the belligerents.[ix]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The UN estimates that\u00a0400,000 people<\/a>\u00a0have lost access to their pensions since the 60-day rule was implemented in 2016. Ukraine\u2019s Pension Fund reportedly has\u00a0accumulated a debt<\/a>\u00a0of 86 billion hryvnas (approximately US$3.5 billion) owed to pensioners who live in non-government controlled areas. This represents a direct expropriation of Ukrainian working people by the state, legitimized by war.<\/p>\n

Violence against women has also been\u00a0heightened<\/a>\u00a0because of the war. Mathers writes that \u201cmasculinized bodies travel to participate in combat operations as soldiers. When they return to the peace world to recover from the physical and psychological injuries of war, they are cared for largely by households as a result of cutbacks in the state\u2019s provision of health care.\u201d[x]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0In 2018, the Ukraine-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions respectively saw a 76% and a 158%\u00a0increase in reported cases of domestic violence<\/a>\u00a0compared to the average of the previous three years. Members of the military and police are exempt from administrative proceedings in courts of general jurisdiction, which essentially serves to protect them from criminal prosecution for domestic violence.<\/p>\n

Migrant Labour, Social Reproduction, and \u2018Frontier Whiteness\u2019<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Post-Soviet Ukraine\u2019s industrialized economy, public infrastructure, and skilled labour force underwent a period of primitive accumulation through the neoliberal Shock Therapy reforms, forming its own flavour of the capitalist state, that of a neoliberal kleptocracy.[xi]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 As a result,\u00a0like other Eastern Europeans in the \u201890s<\/a>, Ukrainian mothers and grandmothers have been working as migrant domestic workers, leaving their families behind, cleaning the homes of rich Italians, Germans, Poles, Americans, and Canadians and doing the social reproductive work previously borne by the Western \u2018white women\u2019.[xii]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0This was my mother, too. Since 2014, a dramatically larger number of Ukrainians has been mobilized as cheap social-reproductive labour, remitting much of their income to cover the gaps in state provision at home and compensate for the damage of war and militarization. These workers were not greeted with hot soup, phones, and EU benefits on any border of the European Union as their country was being plundered by \u2018European-oriented\u2019 neoliberal reforms. Here is a \u2018happy\u2019 story of a Ukrainian migrant worker, displaced by poverty and war,\u00a0in Poland during COVID-19<\/a>:<\/p>\n

IDI4 came to Poland from Berdiansk in 2018. Her 5-year-old daughter joined her in September 2020. Her husband died in the war in October 2019. In Ukraine, she studied accounting, and had various jobs in retail and administration. In Poland, she studied medical care in a training college and now works as a cleaner in a surgical block at a hospital. [\u2026] At the hospital, there are now thorough procedures, a great amount of protective equipment that needs to be worn and changed, regular tests and repeated training sessions to ensure cleanliness. She feels responsible and takes care to clean thoroughly before traveling home. She receives a 250 PLN Covid bonus. Her daughter goes to playschool while she is at work, but accompanies her in extra cleaning work at a doctor friend\u2019s house, where the daughter plays with his children while she cleans.<\/p>\n

In 2020, the number of Ukrainian workers living abroad was\u00a0estimated<\/a>\u00a0at between 2.2 and 2.7 million, equivalent to 13-16% of total employment in the country. By the end of February 2020, the number of Ukrainians\u00a0in Poland<\/a>\u00a0had risen to 1,390,978, 44% of whom were women, mostly employed in the precarious care sector in bigger cities. Ukraine is the world\u2019s tenth-largest\u00a0recipient of remittances<\/a>\u00a0in absolute terms, and in 2020 these formed 9.8% of the country\u2019s GDP.[xiii]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0According to\u00a0new data<\/a>from the National Bank, in 2021 remittance flows to Ukraine surpassed $19 billion.\u00a0 In 2018, 33% of remittances came from Poland, 32% from other EU Member States, 9% from Russia and 9% from the United States and Canada.\u00a0\u00a0Remittances<\/a>\u00a0 have contributed about 50-60% to the recipient household budgets and \u201cin comparison to households not receiving remittances, expenditures of families with migrant workers for housing and education were 2-4 times higher and for food 20% higher.\u201d Whereas in Ukraine, the costs of social reproduction have been off-loaded onto the households preparing workers to be sent abroad, in the EU countries, the arriving Ukrainian labour power is \u2018cost free\u2019 \u2013 that is, it is \u2018paid for\u2019 by the past labour of households and communities in Ukraine, while its ongoing renewal through subsistence is cheap because migrant workers are excluded from state benefits and EU social citizenship at large.<\/p>\n

The social reproduction of EU citizens and Ukrainian workers is geographically determined and entangled in co-constitutive dynamics of gender, race, and class, against the backdrop of the \u201cthreat\u201d of Black and Brown refugees. Gendered labour \u2018produces the nation\u2019 and forms the boundaries of Europe. As Daria Krivonos and Anastasia Diatlova argue, \u201cit is through the symbolic exchange of women and their reproductive labour between East and West that Europe comes into being.\u201d[xiv]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0One of the paradoxes of Central European anti-migrant rhetoric toward the Global South is that this region has benefited heavily from migration from the East,\u00a0including Ukraine<\/a>.[xv]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0While Polish women are employed as domestic workers in Western European countries, \u201cin their contacts with domestic workers from Ukraine, Polish employers nonetheless often behave as self-appointed paternalistic representatives of Western values and lifestyles.\u201d[xvi]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Whiteness, then, forms not a dichotomy but a gradient.[xvii]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Gradations of \u201cperipheral whiteness,\u201d or proximity to Europe, move from Brussels to Warsaw, from Warsaw to Lviv, from Lviv to Donetsk. The racialization of Eastern European women in the care and domestic work industry has concrete political economic modes of operation, embedded in the commodification of care in neoliberal Western Europe[xviii]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0and the continuous feminization of poverty in Eastern Europe, with its own flavour of dispossessive militarized austerity in post-2014 Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Just like migrant labour, Ukraine\u2019s assisted reproduction technologies industry or \u201crepro-tourism\u201d is also deeply dependent on transnational networks, class and racialization \u2013 quite literally oriented towards the reproduction of \u2018white\u2019 European babies by \u2018poorer\u2019 white socially reproductive labourers. The surrogacy industry in Ukraine positions itself as more competitive in contrast to surrogacy industries in India or Thailand in large part due to the \u2018whiteness\u2019 and \u201cEuropeanness\u2019 of the workers. During the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, the BioTextCom commercial surrogacy agency in Kyiv was in the\u00a0spotlight<\/a>, when mostly Western-European bound babies born to Ukrainian gestators became stranded \u2018stateless\u2019 in a hotel due to pandemic lockdowns. Once accused of human trafficking because doctors provided biomaterial from unknown Ukrainian sources instead of biological parents, the industry is in the spotlight again amid Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.\u00a0 The Ukrainian state does not collect official statistics on surrogacy in Ukraine, but it may be a leader in the commercial surrogacy industry for foreigners, with an estimated 2,000-3,000 surrogacy babies born yearly. While the\u00a0cost<\/a>\u00a0to prospective parents is US$38-45,000, surrogate mothers are paid only $300-400 monthly and another $15,000 at the end of pregnancy. When the invasion began, around 800 couples were\u00a0expecting a child<\/a>\u00a0from a surrogate mother in Ukraine. Due to the invasion, surrogate mothers, nurses, and children are all stranded once again. Surrogates are placed in a situation where they must continue to provide care beyond the agreed-upon contract and await payment until the adoptive Western parents are able to register the baby, born stateless \u2013 neither a Ukrainian nor an EU citizen, and unregistered in Ukraine. Some Ukrainian surrogates\u00a0are unable to flee<\/a>\u00a0into Western Europe away from the war, fearing that they may be \u201crequired to register as the babies\u2019 legal guardian under the less permissive surrogacy law\u201d. The EU border regime and differential and unequal regulation of reproductive industry and labour across the East-West divide, downloads the economic risks associated with surrogacy (potentially life-long) onto the worker.<\/p>\n

The commercial surrogacy industry in Ukraine is an example of outsourced reproduction for wealthier Western countries, whereby reproductive work need not migrate to the EU at all, but rather completely takes place inside the periphery. In 2018, journalists\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that the surrogate market brings over $1.5 billion USD to Ukraine annually. While surrogate pregnancy and birth do not count toward the surrogate mother\u2019s time worked for pension purposes, the industry and its clients rely on the \u2018free\u2019 past social reproduction of the surrogate mother in Ukraine as well as the country\u2019s general infrastructures of care, much from the Soviet era. Ukrainian surrogates give up all rights related to controlling their pregnancies, while risking the abandonment of unwanted children, particularly those with\u00a0disabilities<\/a>, by client parents. Egg donors and surrogate mothers in Ukraine \u201care constructed in the discourses of infertility clinics and recruitment agencies as bearers of whiteness (both in terms of producing white children and belonging to \u2018white culture\u2019), femininity and hypersexuality in relation to the predominantly European recipients.\u201d[xix]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The BioTextCom \u201cAbout Us\u201d\u00a0webpage<\/a>states, \u201cWelcome to the largest European type donors base. Ukrainian genetic pool is considered to be the best for infertility treatment\u201d \u2013 characterizing Ukrainian nationality explicitly as European and more fertile, therefore implicitly more desirable than surrogacy in the Global South, not to mention homogenizing different Ukrainians.\u00a0 Following Hill Collins\u2019 critique of citizenship and nationalism from a Black Feminist perspective, I posit that in selling \u2018whiteness\u2019 for cheap, BioTextCom racially demarcates the \u2018good\u2019 vs. the \u2018bad\u2019 kind of womanhood: white women, who birth the \u2018right kind\u2019 of children, the desirable future European citizens (in this case), in contrast to the undesirable \u201cOthers\u201d.[xx]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 The description of egg donors on the database is racially classified by \u201cbeauty, intellect, health, humanity\u201d \u2013 in this exact order of priority. The \u2018beauty\u2019 part is demarcated by both the exoticism of Eurasian \u2018mixed\u2019 origins and the nevertheless resulting \u2018whiteness\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people say that beauty of Ukrainian ladies is explained by numerous conquests and resettlements of people that resulted in rich genetic mix. We can\u2019t know for sure about it. The only thing we can claim for sure is that experts and female beauty devotees unanimously say that Ukrainian women are the most beautiful in the world, if we mean European type of appearance. Regular built and body weight, fair eyes, hair and skin, fine face features count in favour of Ukrainian donors.\u201d<\/p>\n

References to past Eastern conquests, embodied in Ukrainian women, imply a position of the frontier of Europeanness, civilization, and whiteness that is new. Hiding the increased feminization of precarious work and poverty in Ukraine since 2014, BioTextCom guarantees that most donors are \u201cmiddle class\u201d and primarily motivated by charity and not poverty, as is supposedly the case in the Global South. This is far from the truth. Interviews with surrogate workers show that while some women who engage in surrogacy in Ukraine are displaced by the war in the Donbass region, others from smaller Ukrainian towns, engage in surrogacy to\u00a0supplement<\/a>\u00a0their income for basic needs.\u00a0 Evidently, \u2018Ukraine\u2019 is employed in producing whiteness as it resides on its frontier, where its function is in large part attributed to maintaining a border around civilization for and inside Europe through cheap social reproductive labour.[xxi]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The World is Cheering Ukraine On<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Again, when we hear on the news that \u2018Ukraine is fighting a European war\u2019 and \u2018Ukraine is defending Europe\u2019, amid images of fleeing \u2018poor white\u2019 women with children prioritized over racialized \u2018Others\u2019, \u2018Ukraine\u2019 is being made \u2018white\u2019 in the global imaginary. That is, \u201cthe injunction to \u2018return to Europe\u2019 by way of Europeanization is enabled and conditioned on the mythologies of Western civilization, and that Europeanization at once marks (promulgates) and unmarks (naturalizes) racial whiteness\u201d.[xxii]<\/sup><\/a>The paradox is that Europe\u2019s existence as such has only been possible precisely because of the exploitation of global working peoples through expropriation of resources and today neoliberal economic reforms and reproduced by feminized labour. This includes cheap labour from Ukraine, which is relatively \u2018privileged\u2019 in relation to migrant labour from the Global South (yet by no means as privileged as Western middle-classes).\u00a0 W.E.B. DuBois\u2019s concept of the \u201cpsychological wage\u201d of whiteness illuminates the relationship between race and class in the making of the poor white worker: \u201cIt must be remembered that the white group of labourers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white\u201d.[xxiii]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Constructed by the Ukrainian state and liberal elites and welcomed in the West, Ukrainian nationalism as a process of a \u2018return to Europe\u2019, is entangled in historically unequal gendered and racialized relations of global capitalism, as revealed by a global social reproduction perspective. The already impoverished population of Ukraine, lacking resources in the precarious public sector and healthcare, is subsidizing the war effort with household labour \u2013 socializing the costs of war and defense at the expense of people\u2019s livelihoods. What is the character of Ukraine\u2019s self-determination, whom does \u2018Ukraine\u2019 represent and include, and indeed, what is the future political project? Keeping in mind the structural issues of militarization, nationalism, and austerity, with an eye toward the post-war future, will resistance to Russian imperialism \u2013 with its roots in the Tsarist Russian Empire and contradictory Soviet nationalism policies and dispossession of the peasantry \u2013 translate into building solidarities with anti-imperialist\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0anti-capitalist struggles and movements in the Global South?\u00a0 This would require rethinking Ukraine as an anti-racist, pluralist, socialist political project from below, and, crucially, a critique of Eurocentrism.<\/p>\n

Victory to the working people of Ukraine, solidarity with the Russian anti-war movement!<\/p>\n

30.4.22<\/strong><\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a>\u00a0See the following initiatives and works: Tagungsbericht: Historicizing \u201cWhiteness\u201d in Eastern Europe and Russia, 25.06.2019 \u2013 26.06.2019 Bucharest, in: H-Soz-Kult, 17.10.2019. www.hsozkult.de\/conferencereport\/id\/tagungsberichte-8478; Paul Stubbs. 2022. \u201cColonialism, Racism, and Eastern Europe: Revisiting Whiteness and the Black Radical Tradition 1.\u201d\u00a0Sociological Forum<\/em>\u00a037, no. 1: 311\u201319; B\u00f6r\u00f6cz, J\u00f3zsef. \u201c\u2018Eurowhite\u2019 Conceit, \u2018Dirty White\u2019 Ressentment: \u2018Race\u2019 in Europe.\u201d Sociological Forum 36, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 1116\u201334; Daria Krivonos and Anastasia Diatlova. 2020. \u201cWhat to Wear for Whiteness? \u2018Whore\u2019 Stigma and the East\/West Politics of Race, Sexuality and Gender.\u201d\u00a0Intersections EEJSP<\/em>\u00a06(3): 116\u2013132; Sedef Arat-Ko\u00e7. 2014. \u201cRethinking Whiteness, \u2018Culturalism,\u201d and the Bourgeoisie in the Age of Neoliberalism\u201d In\u00a0Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories<\/em>, ed. Abigail B. Bakan and Enakshi Dua. Toronto:\u00a0 University of Toronto Press, 311-339; Agathangelou, Anna M. 2004.\u00a0The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States<\/em>. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a>\u00a0An expanded view of production, as developed by social reproduction feminism arising from Marx\u2019s critique of political economy, includes both production for surplus and various forms of social reproduction\u2014the mental, manual, and emotional labour involved in maintaining existing and future life\u2014as a necessary, integrated process. See Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner. 1989. \u201cGender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives.\u201d\u00a0Annual Review of Sociology<\/em>\u00a015: 381-404; Tithi Bhattacharya. ed. 2017.\u00a0\u00a0Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression<\/em>. London: Pluto Press.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a>\u00a0Sue Ferguson and David McNally. 2015. \u201cPrecarious Migrants: Gender, Race and the Social Reproduction of a Global Working Class.\u201d\u00a0Socialist Register<\/em>\u00a0(Merlin Press, 2014): 1-23; Jennifer G. Mathers. 2020. \u201cWomen, war and austerity: IFIs and the construction of gendered economic insecurities in Ukraine.\u201d\u00a0Review of International Political Economy<\/em>\u00a027(6): 1235-1256.<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a>\u00a0On \u2018differential inclusion\u2019 in North America and Western Europe, please see: Bridget Anderson. 2010. \u201cMigration, immigration controls and the fashioning of precarious workers.\u201d\u00a0Work, Employment and Society<\/em>\u00a024(2): 300\u2013317; Judy Fudge. 2012. \u201cPrecarious migrant status and precarious employment: The paradox of international rights for migrant workers.\u201d\u00a0Comparative Law and Policy Journal<\/em>, 34, 95; Leah F. Vosko. 2019.\u00a0Disrupting Deportability: Transnational Workers Organize<\/em>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press;<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a>\u00a0Taylor Hanna, David K. Bohl, Jonathan D. Moyer. 2021. \u201cAssessing the Impact of War in Yemen: Pathways for Recovery.\u201d United Nations Development Programme, 3-67, 32.\u00a0https:\/\/www.undp.org\/publications\/assessing-impact-war-yemen-pathways-recovery?fbclid=IwAR2RWLa63a38d7JdxDFHpdaod-#modal-publication-download<\/a><\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a>\u00a0Jennifer G. Mathers. 2020. \u201cWomen, war and austerity: IFIs and the construction of gendered economic insecurities in Ukraine.\u201d\u00a0Review of International Political Economy<\/em>\u00a027(6): 1235-1256.<\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a>\u00a0Council of Europe. 2015. \u201cJoint Interim Opinion on the Law of Ukraine on the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) regimes and prohibition of propaganda of their symbols, adopted by the Venice Commission at its 105th Plenary Session,\u201d Venice, 18-19 December.\u00a0https:\/\/www.venice.coe.int\/webforms\/documents\/?pdf=CDL-AD(2015)041-e<\/a>\u00a0Accessed March 15, 2022.<\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a>\u00a0Jennifer G. Mathers. 2020. \u201cWomen, war and austerity: IFIs and the construction of gendered economic insecurities in Ukraine\u201d.\u00a0Review of International Political Economy<\/em>\u00a027(6): 1235-1256, 1239.<\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a>\u00a0OSCE Report, April 8, 2019.\u00a0https:\/\/www.osce.org\/files\/f\/documents\/d\/0\/417005.pdf<\/a>\u00a0 Accessed March 15, 2022.<\/p>\n

[x]<\/a>\u00a0Jennifer G. Mathers. 2020. \u201cWomen, war and austerity: IFIs and the construction of gendered economic insecurities in Ukraine.\u201d Review of International Political Economy 27(6): 1235-1256, 1236.<\/p>\n

[xi]<\/a>\u00a0Volodymyr Ishchenko and Yulia Yurchenko 2019. \u201cUkrainian Capitalism and Inter-Imperialist Rivalry\u201d. In Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (eds.),\u00a0The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism.\u00a0<\/em>Palgrave Maacmilan.<\/p>\n

[xii]<\/a>\u00a0While I focus here in particular on social reproduction, this sector is one among others such as tourism, seasonal farming, construction, where Ukrainian migrant workers find employment \u2013 jobs that are characterized as dirty, dangerous, and precarious.\u00a0 See also Sara Farris. 2018. \u201cSocial reproduction and racialized surplus populations.\u201d In Peter Osborne; \u00c9ric Alliez and Eric-John Russell, eds.\u00a0Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image \u2013 Aspects of Marx\u2019s Capital Today.<\/em>\u00a0Kingston upon Thames: CRMEP Books, 121-134.<\/p>\n

[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0This number has probably fallen in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

[xiv]<\/a>\u00a0Daria Krivonos and Anastasia Diatlova. 2020. \u201cWhat to Wear for Whiteness? \u2018Whore\u2019 Stigma and the East\/West Politics of Race, Sexuality and Gender.\u201d\u00a0Intersections EEJSP<\/em>\u00a06(3): 116\u2013132, 120.<\/p>\n

[xv]<\/a>Alexandra Levitas. 2020. \u201cCare Work During Covid-19: Public Health Implications of Ukrainian Migration into Poland.\u201d\u00a0CMR Spotlight<\/em>. 19, 2-5.<\/p>\n

[xvi]<\/a>\u00a0Anna Safuta. 2018. \u201cEastern Europeans\u2019 \u2018peripheral whiteness\u2019 in the context of domestic services provided by migrant women.\u201d\u00a0Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies<\/em>\u00a021(3): 217 \u2013 231, 225.<\/p>\n

[xvii]<\/a>\u00a0Researchers have shown that the racialization of Ukrainian migrant workers in Hungary works through the prism of the existing racist discourses about the Roma population in Hungary: \u201cBy complementing contemporary economic and social processes with special substitutional and transformational rules, the social attitude towards someone being a stranger from the \u201cUkraine\u201d appears close to that towards a \u201cGipsy\u201d. This process is significant as the adaptation of content elements of ethnical categories assists articulation of social differences of the \u201cUkrainian\u201d, while making the system of structural inequalities stronger in the local society, a process originating in earlier times.\u201d See Borb\u00e9ly S\u00e1ndor. \u201cThe Ukrainian is a nefarious Gipsy\u201d \u2013 micro-policy of the foreign immigration in the borderland settlement of Kispal\u00e1d.\u201d\u00a0T\u00e9r \u00e9s T\u00e1rsadalom<\/em>\u00a0Vol. 29. No. 3.\u00a0 doi:10.17649\/TET.29.3.2708, 4. See also: Tibor Meszmann and Olena Fedyuk. 2019. \u201cSnakes or Ladders? Job Quality Assessment among Temp Workers from Ukraine in Hungarian Electronics.\u201d\u00a0Central and Eastern European Migration Review\u00a0<\/em>8(1): 75\u201393.<\/p>\n

[xviii]<\/a>\u00a0Sara Farris. 2017.\u00a0In the Name of Women\u2019s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism<\/em>. London: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n

[xix]<\/a>\u00a0Polina Vlasenko. 2015. In (In)Fertile Citizens: Anthropological and Legal Challenges of Assisted Reproduction Technologies, Lab of Family and Kinship Studies Department of Social Anthropology and History University of the Aegean, October, 197-217, 202.<\/p>\n

[xx]<\/a>\u00a0 PatriciaHill Collins. 2009.\u00a0Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment<\/em>. [2nd ed.]. New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n

[xxi]<\/a>\u00a0I thank my colleagues and friends, Lina Nasr El Hag Ali, Rhaysa Ruas, Brent Toye, and Sophia Ilyniak for discussions around this concept.<\/p>\n

[xxii]<\/a>\u00a0Nadezhda Husakouskaya and Randi Gressg\u00e5rd. 2020. \u201cEuropeanization as Civilizational Transition from East to West: Racial Displacement and Sexual Modernity in Ukraine.\u201d\u00a0Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics<\/em>\u00a06(3): 74-96, 76.<\/p>\n

[xxiii]<\/a>\u00a0WEB Du Bois.1935.\u00a0Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880<\/em>. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 700.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

________:<\/p>\n

also see:-<\/p>\n

May Day \u2013 a Ukrainian tradition, Ukraine Solidarity Campaign<\/a><\/p>\n

Ukrainian socialist: \u2019The future of demilitarisation lie in stopping Russia\u2019s war machine \u2013 Vitaly Dudin, Sotsyalnyi Rukh<\/a><\/p>\n

We need peoples solidarity with Ukraine against war not fake solidarity of governments \u2013 Denis Gorbach and Denis Pilash, Sotsyalnyi Rukh<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

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The following article written by Olena \u00a0Lyubchenko was first posted by LeftEast. It addresses the tensions amongst the Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperial aggression. \u00a0It opposes Ukrainian nationalist attempts to promote \u00a0Ukraine’s future as a ‘white European nation’ and champions \u00a0the Left’s attempt to \u00a0locate the struggle within a global framework against all exploitation and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1858,1861,1867,1859,1868,1848,8976,1860],"tags":[9099],"class_list":["post-21547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oppression-liberation","category-alienation-self-determination","category-emancipation-liberation-and-self-determination","category-womens-liberation","category-against-imperialism","category-ex-ussr","category-migrant-struggles","category-other-social-struggles","tag-author-olena-lyubchenko"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"views":7727,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21547"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21552,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21547\/revisions\/21552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}