I started Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression after six months of working from home at my first full-time job. For many people, including me, remote work has allowed work-life to expand into home-life-- and vice versa. Over the past months, I have become accustomed to the introduction of Zoom meetings and project deadlines into typically ‘personal’ times and spaces. The blending of the workplace and the home has caused many of us to reevaluate the lines we traditionally draw between the two spaces. Reading Social Reproduction Theory provided me with a framework to understand this experience; the essays in the collection all focus on examining the extension of ‘work’ into the everyday. The concept of ‘social reproduction’ allowed me to contextualize my own experience of restructuring my life around a job while understanding how the capitalist conception of ‘work’ has always structured our entire days and lives.
Edited by Marxist feminist scholar Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory challenges and expands on Marx’s model of capitalist production. Traditional Marxist work focuses on commodity production as capitalism’s most essential process; the authors of this book add that the social reproduction of the capitalist worker is also integral to the functioning of capitalism. In the introduction, Bhattacharya captures social reproduction theory’s central questions: “If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?...What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?” Social reproduction theorists seek to understand how everyday social systems such as education, childcare, transportation, and healthcare function to reproduce the workers necessary for the perpetuation of capitalism.
Unifying the essays in Social Reproduction Theory is the project of exploring the fundamental and multifaceted connections between economic exploitation and social oppression. In her own essay in the collection, Bhattacharya notes that the work of social reproduction disproportionately falls to women and other socially marginalized groups and, in fact, is often the source of their oppression. The labor involved in activities such as housework, childcare, and eldercare is typically unwaged and viewed as separate from other, more traditional forms of capitalist ‘work.’ Marxists broadly describe this dynamic as the concept of ‘separate spheres’-- the idea that spaces of production (i.e., workplaces) are separate from spaces for the reproduction of labor (e.g., households, schools). The authors in Social Reproduction Theory argue that although these two spheres may sometimes be spatially distinct, they should be understood as mutually constitutive spaces. The demands of the capitalist workplace inevitably shape the surrounding spaces and systems. Investigations of capitalism, therefore, must necessarily incorporate social reproduction activities and the ways in which social identities such as gender, race, and sex influence the distribution of this labor.
Social Reproduction Theory provides a clear but nuanced overview of an important Marxist feminist intervention. I particularly recommend the chapter by Nancy Fraser on neoliberal capitalism’s ‘crisis of care,’ and Susan Ferguson’s chapter on the liminality of capitalist childhoods. As a whole, Social Reproduction Theory is perfectly positioned to help us make sense of our current capitalist system and the mutations to come in the future.
