Childhood and the processes of social reproduction in global capitalism: In defense of school playtime

Abstract

Childhood stands, in relation to other social categories, in a structural position of inequity whose injustices are likely to worsen in the social reproduction processes of global capitalism as they become more veiled and subtle.  Here the discussion focuses on how childhood, and children, participate -as they constitute and are constituted by- in the dynamics of the global political economy as positioned by intersections of social class, race and locality.  To illustrate the argument, the reduction or/and the lack of playtime in many state schools of Rio de Janeiro is discussed in its articulation to the precariousness of public schooling offered to working class children making effective the extensive colonization of capital with regards to the processes of regeneration of subjectivities, values and life itself.  In this vein, it is in relation to the children of the periphery countries of global capitalism, those who are poor, Black or Brown, that a depoliticization of their conditions of subjectivization is produced insofar as the belief in the construction of alternatives to the present is foreclosed.