Ignácio Rangel and Silvia Federici: reproductive work at the center of the debate on development

Abstract

 In a post-pandemic context, the discussion about care work has returned to the center of the debate among developmentalists, whether to make care infrastructures viable or to think about  reindustrialization through the creation of a health industrial complex. More than sixty years ago, a little-studied Brazilian Marxist intellectual already selected this issue as a crucial one to understand themes such as agrarian reform, the contradictions of the industrialization process and inflation: this is Ignácio Rangel. In this article, a reading of the agrarian issue in the work of the maranhense economist is offered, taking as a perspective the importance of domestic work (mostly carried out by women) for understanding Brazilian underdevelopment, as well as the challenges to overcoming it. It is argued that less than a side consideration, Rangel, in at least four of his works (basic to the article's argument) - demonstrated that the conditions for transferring work carried out in the “natural economy” (whether in cities or in the countryside) for the emerging job market was one of the main challenges for triggering the process of economic development. In this sense, through the theoretical considerations of Marxist Silvia Federici on the importance of domestic work for the world of production, Rangel's work is read from the issue of care, seeking to identify advances and potential limits of his thinking on this issue, without, however, slipping into certain anachronisms. Finally, it is argued that such a perspective can release new ways of interpreting the classics of Brazilian economic thought.