Marx’s ‘costs of consumption’: A new framework for analysing the economic character of ‘reproductive labour’

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) centers the production and reproduction of labor power under capitalism. This power to labor is determined individually, socially, and in relation to the totality of capital. These powers are produced and reproduced in and through social relations that, while capitalist, have tremendously diverse local conditions and histories. SRT provides a framework to think through the oppressive logics shaping the production, reproduction, and potencies of labor powers understood as diversely constituted. It argues that SRT is committed to the diversity of these labor powers over and against conditions that constrain both these powers and their actualizations in forms amenable to capital. It shows how SRT can offer resources to value the powers to work to satisfy human needs beyond exploitative and other oppressive social dynamics. Specifically, the paper highlights how a normative commitment to labor power can help SRT respond to charges of productivism, ableism, and narrow versions of workerism that are often leveled against left commitments to labor power. Building upon what I understand to be SRT’s normative critique of the form of labor power as constituted through capitalist social relations, the paper concludes by pointing to how SRT can promote struggles for social relations in which labor power could produce, actualize, and reproduce itself in freer ways.

The devaluation of domestic, reproductive, emotional and maternal labour has been extensively critiqued by feminist scholars and activists. Women’s domestic labour is normalised as ‘housework’, considered to have no material or economic recognition (Federici 2012), and childrearing and looking after the home are still often equated with ‘doing nothing’ (Crittenden 2010). Many have argued that cultural and media representations play a constitutive role in normalising the devaluation and thus exploitation of women’s productive and reproductive labour. The media legitimise the continuing lack of social, political and economic recognition and reward of motherhood by symbolically naturalising and masking maternal labour, for example, by representing mothers’ work as ‘natural’ and a product of intrinsic maternal love (Douglas and Michaels 2004). Building on this scholarship about the cultural construction of maternity, in this chapter we highlight aesthetic labour as a new(ly) added, previously unrecognised dimension of contemporary maternal labour that has emerged under neoliberalism.

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Most scholarship within social reproduction theory focuses on women’s paid and unpaid care and domestic work, typically within the global North. Rarely has social reproduction theory grappled with unfree labour in commodity supply chains, particularly in the global South. However, these labour relations also involve gendered power relations that cut across the productive and reproductive realms of the economy, which can be illuminated by social reproduction theory analysis. In this article, we reflect on how social reproduction theory can be used to make sense of unfree labour’s role in global supply chains, expanding its geographical scope and the forms of labour exploitation encompassed within it. Conceptually, we harness the insights of social reproduction theory, and Jeffrey Harrod and Robert W Cox’s work on ‘unprotected work’ in the global economy to examine how gendered power relations shape patterns of unfree labour. Empirically, we analyse interview and survey data collected among cocoa workers in Ghana through LeBaron’s Global Business of Forced Labour project. We argue that social reproduction theory can move global supply chain scholarship beyond its presently economistic emphasis on the productive sphere and can shed light into the overlaps between social oppression, economic exploitation, and social reproduction.

This article explores the political economy of eldercare labour and the gendered politics of care work in China. Building on insights from research conducted in 2016–17 in Shanghai, we argue that gendered regimes of productive and reproductive labour, processes of class formation and economic reforms articulate with a regime of differential urban citizenship rights – urban and rural hukou – in shaping and influencing the lived experience of paid eldercare workers. As a framework for understanding ‘who cares’ in local eldercare labour markets in China, we follow recent work interweaving social reproduction theory (SRT) and intersectionality. In conversation with those debates, we experiment with mobilising intersectionality alongside SRT as we explore these eldercare workers’ paths into the sector, but argue that attention to the Chinese context and Chinese feminist contributions can also transform SRT and intersectional approaches through historically and materially grounded analyses of evolving relations of exploitation and oppression. This approach enriches the feminist political economy of paid eldercare through attention to who is channelled into this work in one of the world’s largest, and fastest-ageing, economies.

This article establishes a conversation between the work of materialist socialist Charles Fourier and Marxist social reproduction theory (SRT). SRT has laid the ground to explore who produces the producer, in order to analyze and integrate the role of reproductive labor into a comprehensive Marxist view of the capitalist economy. In the context of the critical re-appraisal of the labor of social reproduction, Fourier offers a key materialist perspective which is also present in Marx: the identity between labor and desire in the socialist project. Fourier's materialism, I show, greatly influenced both Marx and Engels, for whom labor was also to be re-organized in order to fulfil human passions, according to our natural inclinations and needs, and not the other way around. Revisiting reproductive labor from a Marxist and Fourierist lenses is thus also reconnecting with our bodies and desire in a Spinozist manner, and envisioning that any social transformation will also be the result of a dialectical revolution initiated from below, at the level of the living infrastructure or affect. In Fourier, the continuity between production and consumption (and between humanity and nature) is a guiding principle for the socialist society to come. This article argues that in addition to the critique of existing power structures and forms of alienated labor that must be materially and strategically replaced, Marxism also needs to cultivate forms of labor and modes of the labor process where pleasure is affirmed, and where desire can find fertile grounds to re-imagine a different society and push back against the rule of capital.

Feminists have long demonstrated the invisibility of women's reproductive labor, performed in bearing and raising children, maintaining households, and socially sustaining male labor. Every wave of feminist struggle from the late nineteenth century onward has actively queried the inequalities that characterize women's performance of such work, variously referred to as unpaid domestic and care work, domestic labor, or care work. Robust traditions of scholarship on women's unpaid work animate various disciplines, often spilling into political struggles for adequate recognition of this work. As the pandemic has rendered visible once again the reproductive labor of women the world over, this article offers an overview of social reproduction theory, feminist legal theorizations of reproductive labor, and how we might recuperate a rich tradition of theorizing on social reproduction to develop a materialist approach to law's regulation of reproductive labor across the marriage-market spectrum with a view to social and economic justice.

For decades, Western feminism struggled to make visible a whole range of everyday practices that have been understood as mundane and assumed to be about love and obligation. These naturalised and gendered practices have been referred to as domestic or reproductive labour since the 1970s. Feminist approaches in animal studies have long argued that there is a gendered ethics of care which links women to concern for other animals through everyday practices, but has tended to emphasise the practices and ethics of gendered care by humans for other animals. This chapter however, suggests the possibility of intra-species carework; that animals also care for humans. The chapter examines the different forms of carework undertaken by human owners for dogs and by dogs for humans. Data is drawn from interviews with people living with dogs and indicates that the carework of humans and dogs can be understood as a set of emergent labour practices. The range of reproductive, caring and emotional labour tasks already familiar to feminism, can both be extended to incorporate care for other animals and also overlaps with some of the ways in which dog companions care for the humans with whom they are in relation.

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in education emerged out of a concern with education’s relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction feminism developed out of feminist interventions regarding the role of women’s unpaid care-work in the reproduction of capitalism. In this paper, we suggest that the renewed energy surrounding social reproduction feminism provides an opportunity to revisit social reproduction theorizing in education. We review the fields’ histories and ready the ground for an integrated framework. At the heart of this integration is a feminist analysis of reproductive labor in its contradictory relationship to capitalism. Expanding the analysis from the reproduction of capitalist relations to the reproduction of life under capitalism, this approach avoids the pitfalls of determinism and attends to students’ participation and teachers’ work in the contested labor of social reproduction.

The economic policies of the European Union can deepen the crisis of social reproduction in its member states by impacting the availability of (paid) public or market-based services of childcare, healthcare, long-term care and domestic work and the (unpaid) reproductive labour provided by individuals. Western European Union member states increasingly address the crisis of social reproduction by outsourcing the provision of reproductive labour to migrant workers, often from countries in Central-Eastern Europe, many of which in turn suffer from reproductive labour shortages caused by emigration. In this context, it is pertinent to assess to what extent European Union economic policy recognises the existence of crises of social reproduction in its member states and if the solutions proposed to address these differ for Western and Central-Eastern Europe countries. This article achieves this through a critical frame analysis of European Union economic policy documents issued between 2011 and 2023 to four countries selected due to their position in the reproductive labour migration chain: Belgium and Austria (as examples of destination countries which rely on Central-Eastern Europe labour migrants for care and domestic work), Poland (as example of both an origin and destination country), and Slovakia (as an example of an origin country).

This article offers an account of the relationship between “essential” and the category of labor by examining how reproductivity, as the foundation—what is essential—to all work, life, and sociality, is, as Kalindi Vora argues, rendered (and renders those who perform it) into racialized surplus, a condition of devaluation and disposability premised on the extraction and exhaustion of life. I draw on a year of ethnographic research with domestic worker activists following the 2014 implementation of California’s Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (AB 241). This breakthrough bill overturned domestic and at-home care worker labor exclusions grounded in New Deal labor legislation that shored up the rights (and category) of the industrial worker and offered major concessions for organized labor while legally cementing the exploitation and unfree labor conditions of the South’s Black women domestic workers. Rather than positioning California migrant women’s domestic worker activism as a compelling teleological and linear challenge and victory against Jim Crow–era exclusion, however, I tarry in the overlap and disjuncture that such tied fates represent under settler racial capital and demonstrate how this alternative tracing of reproductivity confounds notions of labor, value, and inclusion at the core of the U.S. racial liberal state. I contend that the conditions of New Deal industrial capitalism, shaped as they were by Jim Crow anti-Blackness and the afterlife of reproductive slavery, now form the originary knot through which current-day racialized migrant women’s reproductive labor and life is appropriated under the neoliberal reorganization of care in the United States. I term this atemporal modality of racialized extraction essentially surplus, a “racializing process” that subsumes the life and bodies of racialized migrant women as if they essentially occupy the same category of surplus life occupied by Black women domestic workers historically.

This chapter explains how the language of entrepreneurship masks subordination and alters the exploitation of reproductive labor. Tracing the implications of neoliberalism’s human capital theory for contemporary views of children, child-rearing, reproductive labor, and the advent of innovation education, the chapter interrogates both the intensification of mothering and paid domestic work. Using gig economy care work platforms like Care.com as an example, the chapter shows how domestic workers are increasingly called on to brand themselves and are treated as individual entrepreneurs. In doing so, the chapter attends to how reproductive laborers are being incorporated into the neoliberal notion of homo entrepreneur. This dynamic reveals how digital care work platforms obfuscate and perhaps even worsen the stratification of reproductive labor while claiming to solve problems in care work through a novel digital platform.

Higher educational attainment has been linked to better health and economic outcomes. However, little is known about how family caregiving responsibilities influence individuals’ educational trajectories in the United States (U.S.). Currently, 26% of U.S. undergraduates have at least one dependent child. While some literature describes the experiences of college-student parents, few studies examine the myriad ways family caregiving may singly or simultaneously present, including caregiving for children, relatives, household members, and older adults. The literature shows that caregiving for relatives, household members, and older adults is a common experience, with 20% of Americans providing care for an adult. Guided by social reproduction theory and reproductive labor, this paper examined qualitative interviews (n=31) from the Educational Trajectories & Health study to understand how caregiving responsibilities, broadly defined, influenced educational trajectories. Participants who identified as women discussed bearing disproportionate expectations to take on family caregiving responsibilities, including caregiving for siblings and aging parents. For most participants, family caregiving responsibilities substantially influenced educational decisions. Some experienced additional caregiving responsibilities but still attained their educational goals; others with family caregiving responsibilities discussed stretching and substituting resources in an effort to manage but ultimately having to step back from their stated educational pursuits. Situating these findings within broader social and structural contexts, this analysis examines educational disruption when family caregiving responsibilities arise. Findings have implications for policies that support students with family caregiving responsibilities at school, state, and federal levels.