Social Reproduction Feminisms

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Ferguson, Sue; Bhattacharya, Tithi and Farris, Sara R.. 2021. Social Reproduction Feminisms. In: Bev Skeggs; Sara R. Farris; Alberto Toscano and Svenja Bromberg, eds. The Sage Handbook of Marxism. London: SAGE Publications, pp. 45-67. ISBN 9781473974234 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

Social Reproduction (SR) feminism is the name given to that set of conceptualizations from different strands of Marxist and socialist feminism trying to explain these processes of life-making, how such processes are part of capitalist accumulation and what this means for how we as individuals and as a society produce and maintain our lives and human capacities. SR feminism is thus a loose but nonetheless broadly coherent school of thought – one that identifies and develops the insight that the social labours involved in producing this and the next generation of workers plays an important role in the capitalist drive to produce and accumulate surplus value. The tradition picks up on, and aims to correct, the naturalization of the gendered division of labour seen in Marx’s critique of capitalism and in the socialist tradition more broadly. It does so by developing an insight at the heart of Capital Volume 1, where Marx identifies ‘labour power’, or our capacity to labour, as the ‘special commodity’ that the capitalist needs to set the system in motion and keep it running. Our labour power, Marx tells us, has the ‘peculiar property of being a source of value’ (Marx, 1977: 270) because with that labour power, we create commodities and value for capitalism. The appropriation of our surplus labour by capitalists is the source of their domi- nance. Without our labour power, then, the system would collapse. But Marx is frustratingly silent on the rest of the story. If labour power produces value, how is labour power itself produced?

In this chapter we outline the trajectory of SR feminism, particularly as it unfolded in Europe and North America, by focusing upon the main theoretical contributions. By critically engaging with Marx’s critique of political economy, SR feminism extends his analysis to grapple with the ways in which the social reproduction of labour power ground processes of accumulation in relations of social oppression.

This unfinished project has, as we show below, a pointed political message: the fight against capitalist exploitation must be, at one and the same time, a fight against social oppression.

Item Type:

Book Section

Keywords:

Social reproduction; wages for housework; domestic labour; life-making activities

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Sociology

Dates: