The Chairperson, Prof. Dzodzi Tsikata, permit me a moment to express my gratitude to the organisers for including me in the celebration. For my part, even though I welcome this opportunity to pay homage and express my personal gratitude to the celebrant, Prof. Akilapa Sawyerrr, I find myself under pressure to preform the task assigned to expectation. Standards even harder to meet, following the quality of presentations so far, that of the keynote and other speakers from yesterday and today.

Presentations so far have disclosed your personality in several capacities, Aki, including what used to be or is your actual name. Of course, this is not the time nor space to divulge names some persons in this room shed as they entered the activist space and what they took up as they transitioned. In your case, what I retain is how deep your convictions run and that for you, name change is a part of the very process of social transformation. Did you perhaps play a pioneering role in this name changing business? I would like to add that in the memoirs speakers yesterday challenged you to produce, perhaps, you could add a chapter on personal transformation of the activist and name change.

Back to my expression of gratitude, Professor. As the chair for yesterday's opening session explained, some of us, female students on the University of Ghana, Legon campus, were struggling with two fundamental questions of essence, being African and a woman. So it is revealing for me that you had a direct connection in providing answers through your student Emerita Professor Takyiwaa Manu. It was under her tutelage I cut my teeth as a feminist (yes, in the 1970s we did not know the term gender activists). General Paper at Sixth Form unravelled alternative ways of understanding several world happenings of our time. Studying Religious Knowledge undermined some deeply held assumptions about the world around us, and opened us to new knowledge systems outside our traditional textbooks, classrooms and lecture halls. We became, in the process, aware of the severe limitations of mainstream education.

I was fortunate that you and others provided a platform beyond our lecture rooms for a certain kind of outlook, a framework that allowed us to understand the national as well as global context, and most importantly, pointed to the solutions. Your impact on the intellectual climate on our university campuses was summed up by most speakers yesterday, the active debates that shaped the minds of young persons, enhancing critical thinking, nurturing social consciousness, developing social awareness. The environment you created helped to cultivate and direct student activism on the university campus. Stepping on the campus of the University of Ghana was refreshing for the likes of me. Campus life of our time was steeped in high student activism, in fact, a worldwide trend, that saw activities on university campuses seeking to change society for the benefit of all. Something sadly missing now ....

There were later instances of work directly under your leadership, like the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI) and more recently, at the retreat discussing the content of the Amilcar Cabral School and developing a framework to offer Marxist Political Education to cadres. I am grateful also, for your publications that deepened my understanding of labour in Africa's history. Thank you for being part of the political environment of the University of Ghana campus that offered me an alternative outlook. Your efforts provided me a rare occasion to continuously combine work as an academic, with political convictions for a certain kind of social change. More importantly, is the fact that you continue, Aki, to provide support and show the way, that what we teach, the textbooks we refer students to, our research as well as publications are all part of the political struggle for social change. Yes, it has shaped my life as an academic giving meaning to what I teach and research. I remain forever grateful to you.

Now to the task assigned me, a discussant on the topic 'The Crisis of Work, Wages and Wealth (generation and distribution) in Ghana. What are the features of the present crisis? Our lead speaker for the day, Mr. Charles Abugre, has pointed to a few and offered some suggestions. I will tackle the topic from another angle, informed by my recent attempts to reconceptualise labour and work to include all activities that create wealth as well as workers' earnings or wages. My quest derived from the conviction of some, especially feminists, who insist that production (generation) and distribution of human needs, (goods and services) should begin with what happens to the very object of the twin process, labour. 1 How is the labouring force produced and regenerated? I am referring to social reproduction. Lately, some scholars are saying that this is where the crisis is and I share that outlook. For, at the centre of the contestations about how wealth is generated and distributed, adequate wage levels, should I say a 'fair' wage, is the cost of the reproduction of human labour.

What is social reproduction? I borrow the rendering that refers to all the activities that go into the actual daily and intergenerational reproduction of life beyond incomes generated in market-oriented exchanges. It includes reproductive labour such as caring, nurturing all efforts that sustains humans to produce, yes generate wealth, from birth, or should I say from conception to death.2 The crisis I contend stems from the intensification of the struggle over who should be responsible for the social reproduction of labour. I would like to state that some of the discussions that came up yesterday around the state and nature of its responsibility to citizens is also the contestation around social reproduction. The contestation that framed the relations between labour and capital right from the onset of commodity production, some observers conclude, is the struggle of workers to get capital to absorb as much of the cost of its reproduction as possible.3 The main contending actors have been the state, capital and the household. The household assumes the main responsibility for social reproduction. But within the household is yet more disputation between females and males leaving women to shoulder an unequal burden. The visibility of such activities, however have been submerged in this space, rendering it valueless. Thus, the numerous actions that go into the social reproduction of human labour over the life course, from birth or be it at conception to death, remain largely undervalued.

We should therefore take a step back and begin the reconceptualisation of the crisis of social reproduction. But before I go any further into my presentation, I would like us to briefly examine labour markets and factors driving production, wealth generation and its distribution, wages. We are at the threshold of a fourth industrial revolution, which we are told is heralded by the emergence of new technologies (robots, Artificial Intelligence, advances in the manipulation of genetics, nanotechnology and 30 printing); technologies that are altering direct human intervention in production, and are set to complicate a looming ecological crisis and demographic trends (ageing industrialised countries and a youth bulge in Africa).4 These changes we are told will shrink available jobs and informalise further, the existing waged work, increasing the vulnerability of workers.

The emerging forms of high skilled technological occupations, especially those facilitated by digitisation, all bear the characteristics of informality, no employment contract, irregular working schedules, unpredictable work supply as well as the absence of social security, registration and tax compliance. Already, we are witnessing the off-loading of the care burden of ageing northern industrial countries and increased female economic participation in the socalled emerging economies, onto poorer countries like Ghana, through an internationally mediated movement of female migration, producing yet more abusive spaces for female workers.

I have referred to the fact that for some scholars new developments that are characterising the so-called work of the fourth industrial revolution is a return to the origins of capitalist waged work 5; that what is celebrated as the essential features of formal waged work has been the outcome of workers struggles over the years. Thus, hours of work, leave, parental benefits and pension, only exist thanks to often violent struggles of workers against the naked exploitation of capital. Current changes in production, however, is placing workers in situations that allow state and capital to renege on their responsibility to the cost of the social reproduction of labour. Technology is facilitating the processes that ease the shedding of the cost of social reproduction of the labour force no matter where they are placed. Thus current changes in production relations, be they structural or technological, are all ways that they extend the struggle between labour and capital.

Currently, waged work precarity has intensified globally, fuelled by what is termed globalisation, an euphemism for neo-liberalism which emphasises a supposed superior capacity of capital over the nation-state to ensure efficiency in production and distribution. That capacity is often interpreted as the ability to discipline labour. We know what has happened to state-owned enterprises, pushed by strategies informed by this ideological orientation and the ensuing processes of de-industrialisation and de-professionalisation. As enterprises fragment and levels of professional adherence get reduced, some skills even disappear. Thus, even though we live in an era of capitalism marked by commodity production, its supposed default workforce, waged labour, is under continuous threat of extinction and is unequally distributed across and within countries.

In Ghana, waged labour has never been the dominant workforce. For us, major commodities like cocoa had never been produced by waged labour. Even gold that saw higher levels of formalisation is returning to petty commodity production, 'galamsey'. In this discussion, I would also like us to remember that waged income has never been able to support the income needs of workers in Ghana. It took the work of Keith Hart in urban Nima to bring this to policy attention, bringing into the debate the whole question of the informal sector and later, the informal economy. So, in Ghana just like most countries in the West Africa sub-region, peasant and other non-waged production forms (right from subsistence to petty production) have been the hallmark of the generation of wealth.

We know that work, no matter what form it takes, waged, non-waged, full or petty commodity production and subsistence, reproduce and reinforce existing gender orders; fe/male employment and wage gap, labour market segmentation and women's absence in work-related decision making, all built on social and cultural notions about femininity and masculinity, supposed female lower capacity (physical, emotional and mental) for work and sometimes backed by norms that associate women with ritual impurity. Gendered labour markets derive their legitimisation from cultural and religious contexts, often established is the gender order of an idle, stay-at-home, female homemaker, wholly dependent on the active, productive, male breadwinner. Unfortunately, it is this fact that informs policy. Thus, not only are women and what they apply their labour power to devalued but also such gendered framing of productive activities obiliterates women's work from the debate of what it is that both state and capital should shoulder.

The lives of many Ghanaians show the contrary. Studies on the subject reveal that the male breadwinner gender order for most part of Africa is a fallacy and especially for our context in Ghana. We know that women's paid and unpaid labour sustains families. In fact, Aki's life experience attests to this. In the absence of his father, we were told that his mother assumed the dual parenting role with 'ease', a responsibility that did not stop with her own uterine children but others as well, based on the notion of reciprocity and mutualism. We have had occasion to discuss this and wondered how we can capture it in the whole discussion of wealth generation. I welcome that you have provided the platform for me to share and give further thought to its operationalisation to a wider audience. There is literature that increasingly points to the importance of kin relations which provide certain forms of distribution networks that are essential materially and socially for the reproduction of labour. Such kin networks are anchored especially in female caring and nurturing roles that are considered uneconomic. In fact, women's engagement in income· earning is increasing and many are calling for it as a way to 'reduce poverty'. The call for the expansion in female money income provisioning within Ghanaian households comes without a corresponding effort to insist that males extend into unpaid reproductive work, nor is there a debate for state or capital to shoulder some of the costs. I am not denying that some men take up domestic work. I am only lamenting the un·equalness in the levels of uptake by men in reproductive work while the pressures on women to provide financially for household upkeep increases daily. It is such revelations that lead some of us to go beyond the statement that the story of Africa is the story of its labouring forces. In fact, a critical examination of this story, we would like to state, leads us to conclude that the term should not be 'his·' as in ' his·tory' but rather 'her-story'.

The earnings and provisioning contexts we have captured so far suggests the need to extend our discussions on wages beyond money income. This we can do through attempts to understand what households rely on to meet their daily needs. Such an approach draws our attention to the fact that there are numerous activities that act as 'conduits for redistribution resources, with important implications for social reproduction .. .'. The role of non-market activities, women's unpaid work, be it within the so called domestic sphere or in household income generating activities, as well as kinship networks of exchange, sometimes not wholly altruistic, are activities that support the regeneration of human beings in Ghana especially in situations where it is obvious that waged incomes are inadequate and people certainly are living beyond their money income-earning capacities.

We noted, from our discussion yesterday, the social cost of the present economic order and the need to seek alternatives. It is within discussions on the production and distribution of national wealth that the need becomes more imperative. Production, we have noted, begins with the reproduction of labour itself, of which social reproduction is a continuous process lasting from conception till death. How we conceive of all these activities, the value we place on them and what we make visible for activists' attention in our quest for social change will determine how viable the alternatives we develop will be. Our attempts must place the question of patriarchy at the centre of labour exploitation otherwise the alternatives will be doomed to failure. The crisis is one of reproduction and till we begin to see it as such, the search for alternatives will elude us.

I believe that tools for engaging our disadvantage as a nation and other forms it harbours are the strongest arsenal in the struggle for social change. For, it is indeed one area where the struggle has been most intense, how social problems are framed in the academy, what gets taught, which literature is used to support theory. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxism and Marxist studies suffered a loss of legitimacy and were subsequently demonised. You were among the few, high profile Ghanaian academics who ensured that the Marxist framework and area of study remained viable. We remain forever grateful for your life and your leadership and claim, to keep these doors open. So, in ending my intervention on a positive note, allow me to say, thank you once again, Aki, that you provided the space that gave scholars seeking social change the legitimacy to pursue their work and still operate to expand the critical leftist spaces within academic discourse, and this, for me, is where you stand tall.

References

Bhattacharya, T. (2017). Social Reproduction Theory, Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press.

Bhattacharya, T. (2017a). Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory. In T. Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (pp. 1-20). London: Pluto Press.

Commission on the Status of Women. (2017). Women's Economic Empowerment in the Changing World of Work:. New York: Economic and Social Council. Retrieved August 13, 2019, from https://documentsdds- ny. un .org/doc/UNDOC/G EN/ Nl 7/000/ 25/DOC/ N1700025.DOC

Fraser, N. (2017). Crisis of Care? On the Social Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism. In T. Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression
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Pillay, V. (2016). A New Labor Movement: Securing Livelihoods and Reducing Inequality Through Organiszational Development and Network Building in the Informal Economy. UN, UNWomen. Geneva: UN Women. Retrieved from http://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/csw61-2017/preparations/expert-group-meeting

World Economic Forum. (2017). The Future of Jobs and Skills in Africa: Preparing the Region for the Fourth Industrial