Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon

Work, Power and Political Strategy

Aaron Jaffe

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780745340548
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786806369
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism?

Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this book, Aaron Jaffe extracts SRT's radical potential, relying on recent struggles, including the International Women's Strike and the teachers' strikes, showing how we can use SRT to motivate socialist politics and strategy.

Using Social Reproduction Theory to appreciate distinct forms of social domination, this unique and necessary book will have vital strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists.

1

Social Reproduction Theories as
Frameworks for Empirical Analysis

My mother is the one who supports me; she is the one who supports all of us. She works as a high fashion dressmaker. Currently she works in a boutique, where she makes bridal dresses—she has always been sewing. My brothers are working too, but … I have more rights because I arrived earlier. They see my mother sick and they do not even take a glass of milk to her; I am the only one who assists her. If her blood sugar goes higher, if she has sudden high blood pressure, I am in charge of checking it and trying to get it lower. Although they see her in pain, they do not even say to her, “Mom, can I help you? Do you need something?” Therefore, I have more rights than them. I am harsher now; I do not know if it is because life made me be like this, but this is how I am. (Nai, on her gendered elder-care and her standing at home)¹

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY

The need for Social Reproduction Theory then stems from two facts—one social and one theoretical. Socially, it corresponds to the lived, unmet needs produced and then constantly reproduced by genderdifferentiating ways of producing frustrated lives dominated by capital. Theoretically, it stems from the fact that a focus on capitalist production alone has failed to provide the resources needed to craft a clear picture that integrates the gendered circuits through which capital passes—particularly the production of embodied labor powers—into an account of how capital reproduces itself in unstable but dominating ways.

The quote from Nai above powerfully illustrates these joint motivations. Like her brothers, Nai is a wage-worker, but she also carefully tracks her mother’s needs as she reproduces her labor powers. Yet Nai is also expected to do more than a fair share of housework. Nai’s experience is far from abnormal, and she explores the possibility that the gender-related extra burdens leveled on her shoulders has made her somewhat harsher. Nai ties her entirely justified frustration to the work she does beyond the fact that, like her brothers, she works for a wage. This is a social reality for Nai, and millions like her. Many social theories are motivated by the need to appreciate burdens tied to but not reducible to being working class, how these burdens have harmful effects, and how they relate to capitalism more generally.

These pressures have pushed some social theorists to adopt dual (or more) systems theories. These tie two or more oppressions to two (or more) distinct causes or logics. However, giving up on a social theory for many partial theories risks never developing an account of how the parts add up to the workings of a whole. Yet, such an account seems necessary if we are to see how distinct forms of oppression operate together in compounding ways. A picture of the whole allows us to craft accounts of their integrations and the underlying motor force that moves oppressions forward in their distinctions, and mutually determining relations.

Developing a comprehensive view of how class and gender relations propel and entrench each other is a long-standing aim of the workers’ movement. What today is advanced by Marxist feminists as “unitary theory” follows an impressive legacy of thinking motivated by and interlaced with political struggle. A very brief historical background of what has come to be thought of as “unitary” theories will show how they alone achieve this aim.

Early Marxist feminists recognized that new social relations signaled a need to understand what was referred to as the “woman question.” In 1886 Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor Marx, and her abusive partner Edward Aveling wrote that the “woman question” was first and foremost a question of economic relations. They understood that “the woman question is one of the organisation of society as a whole,” and described schisms in nineteenth-century gender politics which still hold today.²

When women’s movements are dominated by well-to-do women rather than working class women and socialists, upper class points of view prevented them from inquiring into the problems of “society as a whole.” Such movements might take some helpful steps in challenging discriminatory laws. But they end up “like doctors who treat a local infection without inquiring into the general bodily health.” Well-off women focused on challenging only the most egregious state-backed misogyny which meant: “no attention has been given by them to the study of the evolution of society” as itself a problem for working class women.³

For Marx and Aveling, the answer to the “woman question” was growing a working class, women’s socialist movement. Theoretical questions about how society and its economic roots evolved in oppressive ways could be posed with a force equivalent to the strength of the working class’ pull in the women’s movement. The stronger the hard left of the women’s movement, the more the capitalist nature of society itself could be recognized as essentially oppressive and thrown into question. This work, however, was only a sketch and at times separated the woman question from an analysis of capital. And even though it was developed as a defense of August Bebel’s uneven Woman and Socialism,⁴ by the end of the nineteenth century early roots of an SRT were apparent.

Ten years later, in 1896, the German Marxist feminist Clara Zetkin began to develop some of the economic analysis Marx and Aveling called for. In a speech to the Party Congress of the Social Democratic Party she said, “it was only the capitalist mode of production which created the societal transformation that brought forth the modern women’s question by destroying the old family economic system which provided both livelihood and life’s meaning for the great mass of women during the pre-capitalistic period.”⁵ Once the development of capital pushed women into the workforce, women became reliant on a broader social order for survival. At the same time, women were only integrated into this new, social form of dependence as second class citizens. A women’s movement arose which practically and, through the “woman question,” theoretically sought to challenge and understand why “the development of her potentials as an individual was strictly limited.”

The terms of the so-called “woman question” were sometimes romantically or moralistically phrased. But the contribution of the workers’ movement to this debate was an early and significant progenitor to theories of social reproduction. As a powerful question posed by the left, women’s oppressions can be charted alongside the radical women’s movement’s challenges to them. In the Bolshevik’s revolution, broader questions of social-economic organization as a whole—and its evolution in oppressive ways—were hotly debated. In the early 1920s the revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai developed a radical feminism that can be read as another early progenitor of SRT.

Kollontai noted how the situation of women changed with the emergence of capitalist social relations. Women became increasingly responsible for earning a wage, performing housework, and serving as mothers. In other words, women produced surplus-value for capital and reproduced labor power day to day and inter-generationally. Of course then, “woman staggers beneath the weight of this triple load.”⁶ Though Nai is not a mother, she does reproduce others’ labor powers such that Kollontai’s “triple load” fits quite well. Kollontai was careful to mark the distinction between productive work and the other two parts of the triple load she described. Before capitalism, women in agrarian families had access to what they needed to produce for their needs. In the move to capitalism, however, families were separated from what they needed to produce for their needs, and were relegated to activities such as cooking, washing, cleaning, and mending.⁷ For Kollontai, that women were somehow still tied to families and forced to do this “unproductive” work was a problem that communism would solve. With the growth of Soviet communism, “the individual household is dying. It is giving way in our society to collective housekeeping,”⁸ and, regarding the heavy work of child-rearing, “the collective [is] to assume all the cares of motherhood that have weighed so heavily on women,” leaving mothers only “with the smile of joy which arises from the contact of the woman with her child.”⁹

In the post-war period, Marxists took their feminist concerns in new directions. Instead of framing the debate in terms of the “woman question,” writers and militants became interested in how radical theory and struggle could best understand and respond to different women’s oppressions. Claudia Jones was an important, yet often overlooked figure in developing this more nuanced and strategic outlook. In “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women!” Jones, writing in 1949, forcefully argued that:

A developing consciousness of the woman question today … must not fail to recognize that the Negro question in the United States is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people and fight for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights … The Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro, and the woman, is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness. To the extent, further, that the cause of the Negro woman worker is promoted, she will be enabled to take her rightful place in the Negro proletarian leadership of the national liberation and movement, and by her active participation contribute to the entire American working class.¹⁰

By virtue of understanding that the “woman question” needed to be thought of in terms of race as well as class, Jones was grounding Marxist feminism in specific US social conditions.

In Europe, Italian Marxist feminists responded to the changing social conditions of the welfare state. Active in the wages-for-housework campaigns of the 1970s, writers like Mariarosa Dalla Costa created an internal link between women’s oppression and capitalism by describing women as beholden to their husband’s wage. By reproducing their partner’s labor power sexually and through housework, women helped produce men’s abilities as commodities for capital. In this way, women indirectly added to the value men produced while at work.¹¹ Yet, this creative attempt to link women to the production of value tended to rest on two problematic assumptions. The first was the unwarranted assumption that the situation of women could be understood by reading the working class heterosexual housewife as an avatar for all women (something Jones’ approach already militated against).¹² The second is that there was something politically regressive in holding onto Marx’s idea that some work, even if necessary, does not itself produce value.

Let us return to this question of the “value” of work as a whole. To help make the argument that all work produces value, some theorists relied on an expanded idea of the “social factory.” This concept was first developed by Mario Tronti in the Italian workerist movement. Tronti argued that we could see the entirety of capitalist society as producing value since, within it, social relations were all organized to meet this value-producing goal.¹³ And Tronti was right, society is indeed organized to produce value. This view also had the virtue of keeping society as a whole in view. In doing so, however, it risked flattening out and denying key distinctions. Just because a whole is best understood in one way, it does not follow that each of the parts that make it up can be understood in the same way.¹⁴ Holding that all social relations produce value because society as a whole is organized to do so denies the specific nature of both “value” and the class relation that makes its accumulation possible. There are also political consequences that stem from the expansive notion of “value” in such a view. If every social relation produces “value,” then nearly any form of resistance can be seen as anti-capitalist—even if class relations themselves are not challenged!

This important distinction about “value” was borne in mind and carried forward by later theorists of social reproduction. Although Lise Vogel’s seminal Marxism and the Oppression of Women first appeared in 1983 it remains an extremely important text. Vogel challenged Italian Marxist feminist and workerist assumptions by centering women’s biology. For Vogel, women’s biological role in the reproduction of labor power from one generation to the next—and not women’s day in and day out reproduction of labor powers—is the basis of women’s oppression.

By replacing “working class housewife” with the “biologically reproductive” woman Vogel replaced a set of relations with a biological fact. This move, however, supported relational consequences: women’s diminished power to produce surplus-value during pregnancy and lactation means women tend to be beholden to men. It is not that biological differences themselves or the division of labor in generationally reproducing labor powers itself is oppressive. Vogel is clear: biological difference is not itself the problem. Biology only becomes a source of oppression because workers must secure their existence via a wage. Not the natural, but the social consequences of women’s reproductive biology hinder women’s wage-earning. Women’s biological role in reproducing labor power inter-generationally, Vogel therefore held, makes women less capable or competitive sellers of labor power than men, and therefore dependent on them. Women as workers are socially produced as impaired workers by capitalist social relations.

The contrast between these theories of women’s place in social reproduction can be put more sharply. Where the Italian feminists tended to begin with a one-size-fits-all set of relations figured via the class “housewife”, and from that premise tried to account for oppressive social facts, Vogel began with the one-size-fits-all fact of women’s sexually reproductive biology. From this premise Vogel integrated capitalist social relations requiring competition in labor markets and developed a framework to describe women’s gender oppression. Insofar as both approaches miss the social relations of gendering—through idealization on one side and an over-reliance on biology on the other—these versions of SRT, as foundational as they were, can be improved upon.

In a highly creative approach, Silvia Federici ran both strategies together in 2004 with her highly influential book Caliban and the Witch. Federici offered an account of women’s oppression as a continuous wellspring of capitalist social relations. For Federici, women had been at the center of freer social relations prior to the emergence of capital. If women were to be fitted into capitalism’s oppressive logic of valorization, this gendered freedom had to be constrained and refashioned. The transition to, and the maintenance of, capitalism demanded that women’s bodies be reshaped by oppressive logics of production, and reproduction. Women, quite ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Why Theorize Social Reproduction?
• 1. Social Reproduction Theories as Frameworks for Empirical Analysis
• 2. Power as Potentiality or the Critical Dimension of Labor Power
• 3. The Question of Immanence and the Social Form of Labor Power
• 4. The Body and Gender in Social Reproduction Theory
• 5. Reproducing Intersections and Social Reproduction
• 6. The Socialist Horizon of Emancipation
• 7. Social Reproduction Theory and Political Strategy
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index