Framing social reproduction in the age of financialisation 1

Abstract

An appropriate starting point is with capitalist economic reproduction which forms a part of social reproduction but to which the latter is not reducible. Whatever the ways within which it fits into interpretations of Marx’s value theory, a number of important implications for social reproduction arise out of this representation of economic reproduction. In short, the moral and historical elements in the value of labour power are complex and differentiated by who gets what and how, in the broader circumstances of social reproduction. It is vital to acknowledge that the shifting relations between economic and social reproduction are neither unilinear nor even (back and forth) linear. Social reproduction is an opportunity that is liable to expand in the coming period as neoliberalism seeks avenues for renewing accumulation that draws upon expanding the role in social reproduction of private capital in general and of finance in particular, even if tempered by austerity tendencies.