Alessandra Mezzadri: Radical Feminism's Social Reproduction Theory
Radical feminism has consistently emphasized the pivotal role of social reproduction in the development of capitalism. Early analyses of social reproduction were primarily based on domestic labor, though they also addressed a small amount of unpaid labor more broadly defined. These perspectives held that the process of value generation was related only to the sphere of production and treated "productive" labor as synonymous with "paid" labor. In contrast, several recent methodological approaches view social reproduction as a "theory" in itself. This Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) employs the concept of social reproduction to focus on how labor power undergoes daily and intergenerational reproduction through private and public institutions within the context of contemporary capitalism. These recent studies appear to focus on analyzing the "circuit of care" capable of reproducing laborers; these circuits are both connected to and distinct from the circuits of capital and value generation. At the same time, these studies strive to avoid the "dualism" that views patriarchy and capitalism as two independent systems.
The following analysis begins by reviewing past and present discussions of social reproduction, focusing on the rise and expansion of informal labor and informalized labor. It argues that our understanding of contemporary capitalist labor relations can only be deepened by interpreting the sphere and activities of social reproduction as value production. In fact, the reproductive sphere and its activities play a key role not only in shaping labor relations but also in extracting surplus value—a point that is even more evident in developing countries or regions, namely the "majority world" [1]. Specifically, this article contends that the sphere and activities of social reproduction contribute to the process of value generation through three channels: first, by directly strengthening labor control, which increases the rate of exploitation; second, by absorbing costs as capital systematically externalizes the costs of reproduction, which constitutes a de facto subsidy to capital; and third, through the process of the formal subsumption of labor to capital, which remains prevalent in the majority world. In short, in discussions regarding the relationship between social reproduction and value creation, the exclusion of informal and informalized labor inevitably leads to a "dualist" misreading of capitalist development. I will state in the conclusion that emphasizing the value-producing character of unpaid labor carries political significance for an inclusive politics (and theory). Such a politics (and theory) can reflect the primary characteristics of the contemporary world of labor, aiming to construct mutual support between struggles over production and struggles over reproduction.
I. Social Reproduction: Early and Recent Discussions
The recently published anthology Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, has reignited discussions on social reproduction and its role and (re)configuration under capitalism. This collection contributes in several ways. First, it proposes examining social oppression through a Marxist theory of class; in this view, social oppression is not merely a phenomenon of the superstructure, but should be seen as a constituent element in the process of class formation. Second, it aims to clarify the processes of reconfiguration and commodification of social reproduction during the neoliberal stage of capitalism. Nancy Fraser is particularly distinctive in this regard; her essay re-sketches the entire history of capitalism according to different regimes of social reproduction and analyzes the current neoliberal stage. Meanwhile, Susan Ferguson’s essay on the issue of childhood greatly advances our understanding of neoliberal "socialization." Third, it hopes to "reconcile" Marxist and feminist analyses of capitalism within the context of a "unitary theory" of capitalism. The agenda of this theoretical project is certainly valuable, as it successfully demonstrates the key role social reproduction plays in contemporary capitalism. However, some of its discourses are overly hostile toward other theories that share intellectual and political concerns—for instance, David McNally’s highly selective critique of intersectionality theory—or too hostile toward early analyses of social reproduction, which are the primary subject of this article. Specifically, early analyses of social reproduction explained the role played by the reproductive sphere and its activities in constructing capitalism and creating value through the production of a "unique" commodity (labor power). Some SRT research, however, has failed to fully recognize these significant contributions. Indeed, one could say that packaging social reproduction as a "theory," for better or worse, might be seen as an attempt to reintegrate earlier analyses into a broader (Marxist) scope of research.
Undoubtedly, one of the most controversial points of divergence in discussions of social reproduction—whether early or recent—is whether social reproduction plays a role in the process of value generation. Within Marxist internal discussions, this is by no means a minor issue. In fact, if for some the greatness of early radical feminist analysis of social reproduction lay in its subversive approach to the constitution of value, for others, this was precisely where early feminism met its limitations. The following analysis aims to highlight the solid theoretical foundation of early discussions of social reproduction and their views on value. At the same time, it aims to clarify why we cannot easily dismiss these early analyses and claims, but must instead focus on informal and informalized labor in the contemporary world, shifting our focus from the "West" to "other regions" (namely the majority world where the bulk of humanity labors). Indeed, as long as we break free from Western-centric analytical paradigms and study the actual characteristics of labor relations for the global majority, we will recognize the role social reproduction plays in the extraction of surplus labor and the process of value generation. In short, from the perspective of the lives of the majority of the world's people, social reproduction does indeed create value, and it does so in the Marxist sense.
II. The (Important) Value of Social Reproduction: Early Discussions
Undoubtedly, on the question of the relationship between paid and unpaid labor, the discussion of social reproduction originated first with the 1972 publication of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. This was a political pamphlet primarily focused on domestic labor, but in a broader sense, it concerned unpaid labor. For the first time, it emphasized how capitalism relies first and foremost on the process of production and reproduction—both biological and social—of workers and the commodity of labor power, processes which mostly occur outside the so-called traditional spheres of production and value generation. While this pamphlet did not provide a deep analysis of how social reproduction generates value, after its publication, several radical feminist scholars sought to add the necessary theoretical depth.
Leopoldina Fortunati focused not only on domestic labor but also on sex work, exploring how reproductive work is in fact socially constructed as a sphere of "non-value" within productivist models, thereby being excluded from the Marxist understanding of value generation. She argued that the de-valorization of social reproduction should be seen as a "self-fulfilling prophecy." Silvia Federici’s feminist analysis of primitive accumulation is built around a similar theoretical project, viewing primitive accumulation as a brutal gendered process involving the dispossession, degradation, and domestication of women, as well as the savage destruction of women's bodies through witchcraft accusations and trials. In Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Federici points out how capitalism was established first upon the dispossession of empires and colonies, and subsequently upon the exploitation and exclusion of certain populations, preventing them from creating (or appropriating) value. Her feminist theory of primitive accumulation explains how all these events predated the better-known process of the enclosure movement, which is usually regarded as the hallmark of early capitalism. Similarly, Federici’s project aimed to subvert more traditional analyses of value by presenting a complex (and bloody) politics and history that demarcated the social boundaries of value far beyond transformations in the sphere of production. The entire body of research by German feminist sociologist Maria Mies began with her 1982 analysis of The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market, which likewise aimed to refute the myth that value is generated only within the sphere of production. In fact, Mies’s analysis of domestic labor challenged theories that completely separated the sphere of production from the sphere of reproduction, pointing out how the process of "housewifization" systematically blurred the source of value, both obscuring women’s productive contributions to the market and degrading those contributions as non-value producing. In Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Mies further expanded these insights. Like Federici, Mies elaborated on the links between patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism, analyzing the transformation of housewifization within the global economy. Rhoda Reddock’s research pointed out that housewifization had vastly different impacts on enslaved women versus indentured laborers. For enslaved women, housewifization was primarily intended to control the rising costs of slaves and plantation labor resulting from death or sexually transmitted diseases. Angela Y. Davis also addressed this in Women, Race and Class, specifically mentioning Black enslaved women in the United States.
Antonella Picchio, a Marxist feminist economist who is less well-known internationally, arrived at similar conclusions regarding the exclusion of social reproduction activities from the sources of value. Indeed, through a compelling study of the way classical political economy (including Adam Smith and David Ricardo) explored labor costs, Picchio emphasized that excluding reproductive activities from value calculations was not only a political problem but also a question of how to explore the value of labor based on the entire literature of classical political economy; that is, treating the value of labor as an exogenous parameter determined by the total reproduction of a given society at a given point in time. This practice of treating labor value as an exogenous factor led to an inaccurate conflation of labor value with labor costs (i.e., wages), rather than viewing labor value as an endogenous factor of the capitalist system. Furthermore, whether one possesses a wage income has often been considered primarily a political issue, but it is in fact a legal one, as Picchio points out regarding the British Poor Laws and their legal and gendered distinctions between the able-bodied (males) and the non-able-bodied.
There is no doubt that it is precisely the reification and fetishism of the wage as the value of labor rather than the cost of labor that provides the premise for a productivist understanding of value generation. Clearly, productivist Marxism does not regard the wage as the "true" value of labor power, as it must account for the rate of exploitation. However, its objective is to resolve the question of the value of the commodity of labor power within the same paradigm—that is, taking labor power as the standard for measuring the value of all other commodities. In fact, this is where the primary problem of productivist analysis lies. It seeks to extend the scope of the labor theory of value beyond the realm of commodity production. Specifically, it attempts to apply this theory to evaluate the value of the labor power commodity as a measure of value. This leads to a paradox: although the unique commodity of labor power is recognized by social reproduction theory as a special commodity, when it comes to its value, it appears to be reduced to the same treatment as other "vulgar" commodities.
Whether the labor theory of value occupies the core position of Marxist theory in the analysis of capitalism is a question worth exploring. For example, David Harvey has recently attempted to locate a consistent theory of value in Marx—in other words, whether the original Marxist analysis was intended to demonstrate the limitations of Ricardo’s understanding of value. As another feminist economist, Diane Elson, incisively pointed out, what one finds in Marx is not just a labor theory of value, but a value theory of labor. However, I believe we do not need to raise more complex ontological questions about labor value in order to prove that social reproduction can produce value. We only need to point out that this question falls entirely outside the scope of the labor theory of value. Furthermore, as social reproduction theory acknowledges (in line with the perspectives of earlier feminist scholars of social reproduction analyzed above), Marx rarely addressed the circulation of this most unique commodity—the worker—under capitalist conditions.
One way to resolve this theoretical problem is to expand the labor theory of value to include how capitalism produces workers. This seems to be the choice of many scholars of social reproduction theory, who emphasize the importance of distinguishing between use-value and exchange-value when differentiating "labor" (viewed as use-value) from "labor" (viewed as exchange-value). This perspective belongs to a Marxist interpretation that tends to view all activities capable of reproducing "labor power" as related to use-value, and thus as non-value-producing activities, while viewing all activities related to "labor" as value-producing activities. The Marxist scholar Paul Smith adopts this research path, and some of his analyses rely on this view. Based on the distinction between use-value and exchange-value, Smith denies that domestic labor can produce value, and derives from this binary opposition that reproductive labor can never become social labor. However, this view appears to be a mere tautology; it does not prove that social reproduction does not produce value, but rather takes it as the assumed premise of the argument.
III. From the West to the "Other" Regions
Geography is always important to the way we explore the world and explain the logic of its operation. Early feminist scholars concerned with social reproduction—most of whom worked or studied in countries where unpaid labor (not limited to domestic labor in the narrow sense) was prevalent—were keen to emphasize the value-producing characteristics of social reproduction. For example, the research of Italian scholars such as Dalla Costa, Fortunati, and Picchio may have been influenced not only by the massive presence of women's unpaid domestic labor in Italy (and elsewhere) but also by the unpaid and informal labor prevalent in Italy’s overall development. Federici’s thought was clearly influenced by observations of the working conditions of women and men in former colonies during the Fordist and post-Fordist periods. Meanwhile, Mies spent her life studying India; her observations of homework and housewifization in Narsapur were clearly central to the development of her entire body of research.
In contrast, scholars within the field of social reproduction theory usually focus on Europe and North America. In practice, they prioritize the capitalist institutional construction of care institutions and their transformation during the neoliberal stage, which is closely linked to the developmental trajectories of these regions. However, development in these regions is not representative of the development of the global economy as a whole. Furthermore, social reproduction is not synonymous with care; this inaccuracy has become a characteristic of certain liberal feminist economic analyses. Social reproduction theory also acknowledges that the meaning of the term "social reproduction" is far broader than the concept of care, encompassing both the reproduction of life and the reproduction of capitalist relations—that is, the reproduction of laborers and the reproduction of labor power. However, within the social reproduction theory camp, there are not many scholars who focus on labor relations, labor practices, or labor processes. In fact, social reproduction theory seems primarily concerned with "societal reproduction" as defined by Barbara Lasslett and Johanna Brenner, thus shifting the analytical lens toward the more classic Marxist concept of reproduction, namely the propagation of capitalist inequality. While this is indeed a field worth studying, it risks narrowing the scope of the discussion on social reproduction. Moreover, if we focus primarily on institutional issues, it becomes difficult to understand concerns regarding the nature and boundaries of value, because in Marxist analysis, the source of value is labor. It can be said that once we shift our attention from care systems (or social reproduction in its narrower sense) to the dominant labor relations in contemporary capitalism, and move our geographical focus from the "West" to the "Other regions"—that is, looking at how the majority of the world's population toils—we cannot easily dismiss the subversive radical claims of early feminist social reproduction theorists.
The majority of people in this world engage in informal economic activities or are bound by informal labor relations. According to International Labour Organization (ILO) data, in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Arab states, and the Americas, 85.8%, 71.4%, 68.6%, and 53.8% of the total employed population, respectively, are engaged in informal labor (in the informal economy) or informal work (in the formal economy but still effectively based on informal relations). The share of informal employment in total employment across emerging and developing economies is estimated at 69.6%. Given that these economies account for a significant portion of the total global workforce, even on a global scale, 61.2% of the total employed population is classified as informal or informal labor. Casual workers and the self-employed are included in this vast world of informal and informal employment, also known as the "laboring classes"; they may be highly vulnerable petty commodity producers or various forms of disguised wage laborers. Once upon a time, informality was wrongly regarded as one of the primary characteristics of "backwardness" and "traditional" socio-economic structures within developing regions, but in the neoliberal global era, informality is not only growing exponentially but has also found new channels of transmission. With the rise of the gig economy, crowdsourced work, and the so-called "precariat," these channels continue to systematically reproduce this labor force characterized by highly unstable relations in developing regions—and now, in developed regions as well.
In particular, the rise of global commodity chains and production networks has facilitated an infinite cycle of the transmission, redefinition, and expansion of informal labor relations. In surplus-labor economies like India or China, global commodity chains can rely on informal labor in various ways. Informalisation can be based on rural-to-urban migration, mediated by legal status; for example, China and its reliance on the hukou [2] system mediate the flow of approximately 300 million migrant workers from rural areas to cities every year. Alternatively, informalization can rely on "traditional" forms of social stratification, intertwining social oppression with class oppression; for instance, informal labor in India is constructed along lines of gender, caste, and mobility, thereby shaping forms of "conjugated oppression," where the extraction of surplus value and submission to regimes of social stigma interact.
Crucial to the argument presented here is that, in the complex situation where informal labor relations are prevalent and expanding, it is extremely difficult and entirely misleading to distinguish between value-producing and non-value-producing spheres and activities strictly based on tasks and/or remuneration. In fact, analyses of how exploitation unfolds in these contexts demonstrate that the sphere and activities of social reproduction play a direct and critical role in constructing the process of surplus labor extraction, increasing the rate of exploitation, and thereby generating (exchange) value. Specifically, the sphere and activities of reproduction can generate value directly in at least three ways.
First, by intensifying the control over workers' labor outside of working hours. Evidence from countries such as Vietnam, the Czech Republic, and India indicates that the rise of factory dormitories is expanding the ability of employers to control labor power far beyond the actual labor process. Based on the concept of the "dormitory labor regime" defined by Pun Ngai and Chris Smith, the intensification of labor control has a direct impact on increasing the rate of exploitation. In this context, any distinction between working time and reproduction time becomes blurred, as social reproduction becomes highly individualized and incorporated into the value creation process. Furthermore, as Hannah Schling noted regarding the Czech Republic, within the dormitory, "non-working time" becomes the basis for producing compliant labor subjects.
Second, a second way in which the sphere and activities of social reproduction directly contribute to value creation in today’s "global factory" is through the systematic externalization of the costs of absorbing social reproduction. In the Majority World, where the degree of informality is high, the sphere of social reproduction (family, village, community) and social reproduction activities (domestic labor and other forms of unpaid work typically performed by women) are viewed as a systematic subsidy to capital. In fact, in cases where neither the employer nor the state bears the labor costs of social reproduction, all costs are transferred to the workers and their relatives, to be borne by the family and the community. In Western societies, while the externalization of reproduction costs is interpreted as a crisis of care or a broader crisis of social reproduction, in contexts that have not experienced the welfare state and its constraints on capital, this externalization can be better understood as aimed at directly serving capitalist relations by using unpaid work and life as a direct subsidy to production. The result is the same: employers can expand the rate of exploitation by cutting wages and social contributions, while the losses in production are absorbed and digested by the poor laborers and their socio-economic networks.
Finally, as I have discussed in detail elsewhere regarding the sweatshop system, the third way in which the sphere and activities of social reproduction directly generate value is realized through the process of expanding the formal subsumption of labor under capital, made possible by the fragmentation and decentralization of the global labor process. The proliferation of tasks and activities performed by a labor force dispersed into households demonstrates that the formal subsumption of labor under capital still plays a key role in the process of value generation. This process of formal subsumption is not, as is often described, a remnant of the past; rather, it renders any distinction between production and social reproduction—or work and life—irrelevant, as their time is blended together and both are subjected to the law of value. Since Maria Mies wrote The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market, thousands more villages have been swallowed by the logic of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Within this logic, "unfree" labor relations represent a stable "form of exploitation." These informal and unpaid laborers live simultaneously inside and outside the capitalist world, subverting and blurring our theoretical categories and posing a challenge to our political perspectives.
IV. Conclusion
As this article concludes, one might ask: if we can politically overcome these theoretical differences, then why focus on them at all? In short, if politics can transcend the boundaries of commodity production, can we still support theories that remain anchored to the sphere of commodity production for value creation? I believe this is difficult for two reasons.
First, theoretical differences are always political. To theoretically exclude the sphere and activities of social reproduction from value generation is nothing less than to implicitly or explicitly assume a hierarchy of exploitation, while simultaneously constructing the category of "labor" under highly unequal conditions that presuppose the wage form. Since the wage is the cost of labor and not necessarily the value of labor, this choice implies a capital-centric conceptualization of labor, productivity (often confused with exploitation), and remuneration. From a political perspective, arguing that labor struggles can be combined with the struggles of the unpaid is not quite the same as arguing for the expansion of the social scope of labor struggles to encompass all those whose work is, in more concealed ways, subjected to and subsumed under the dominance of capitalist relations. The former theoretical insight still presupposes a distinction between paid and unpaid labor in struggle; it indirectly accepts the "priority" of paid labor at work and thus inevitably undermines solidarity. In contrast, the latter theoretical insight is more likely to provide a broader foundation for political organization and incorporate all struggles (whether by the paid or unpaid) into labor struggles (and ultimately, reproductive struggles).
Second, if we truly need to develop a "monism" of capitalism to break away from a dualistic understanding of the mode of production, then we cannot conflate the (current) Western experience of labor and work with the "normalized" experience of the world economy. In fact, the Western experience hardly reflects how the population of the Majority World [3] toils. In contexts dominated by the informal economy and informal labor—where nearly two-thirds of the world's people make a living—attempting to make a rigid distinction between labor that produces surplus value and labor that does not is based on an inaccurate, highly dualistic understanding of how capitalism operates. Undoubtedly, we need to avoid the kind of dualism that views capital and patriarchy as autonomous social relations; but at the same time, we cannot create a capitalist monism in our understanding of value that produces other problematic binary oppositions.
In mapping the vast world of unorganized labor in India, Barbara Harriss-White and Nandini Gooptu highlight the way in which the massive numbers of informal laborers in India and elsewhere engage in struggle: rather than participating in "class struggle," they remain confined to "struggles over class." They are still struggling to be recognized as a working class and to develop their class consciousness. Therefore, only by first developing inclusive theoretical and analytical categories can we help the unpaid struggle for recognition and support them through inclusive politics.