SRT provides a wealth of empirical description,
especially of domestic labour in Western capitalist societies and the provision
of education, healthcare, and other waged labour contributing to the
reproduction of labour-power. Yet it is based on multiple confusions regarding
Marx’s categories and method. Tithi Bhattacharya explains that ‘social reproduction
theorists perceive the relation between labor dispensed to produce commodities
and labor dispensed to produce people as part of the systemic totality of
capitalism’.[1] It would be correct to
state that labour producing the commodity labour-power is ‘part of the systemic
totality of capitalism’; but by referring to domestic labour and work in the
health care, education, social security and welfare sectors as ‘social
reproduction,’ SRT substitutes this component of social
reproduction for the whole of social reproduction in capitalist society,
which, according to Marx, must include the reproduction of labour-power, means
of production and surplus value.
As
Marx explains in Capital Volume 2,[2]
social reproduction includes an exchange-value component and a use-value
component, because both are necessary for the accumulation of capital.
Establishing that unwaged and non-profit-making labour contributes to
the reproduction of labour-power is very important, but as Paddy Quick points
out, the labour categorised as ‘social reproduction’ in SRT cannot even
reproduce labour-power, much less capital, because this requires in addition
the labour embodied in wage goods, namely the commodities produced by
Department 2 of capitalist production (food, textiles, clothing, medicines,
building materials for constructing housing, etc.), which in turn depend on
means of production produced in Department 1. She concludes that ‘SRT fails to
situate this work within the social relations of the capitalist mode of
production. Despite its use of Marxist terminology, it is inconsistent with the
most basic Marxist understanding of capitalism.’[3] Thus
the definition of SRT itself represents a confusion of Marxist categories.
Another problem is that SRT doesn’t recognise
unwaged domestic labour in working-class households as value-producing labour.
It sees labour-power as a ‘unique’ commodity because it is not produced capitalistically,[4]
yet there are countless other commodities that are not produced
capitalistically and billions of people engaged in such production. They are
swept out of sight, because SRT’s persistent confusion between value-producing
abstract labour and surplus-value-producing productive labour renders the
former invisible. For example, Bhattacharya says Marx shows how surplus-value
is produced in the cycle of production of commodities,[5] seemingly
unaware that not all commodity production involves surplus-value production.
This confusion between Marxist categories is
more explicit in another SRT text, the introduction by Susan Ferguson and David
McNally to Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women. They ask,
‘does domestic labour produce (surplus-)value?’; state that ‘labour in the
household… produces use-values, not commodities whose sale realises
surplus-value for the capitalist’; and criticise Vogel for falling ‘into the
trap of arguing that domestic labour is a component of necessary labour in the
sense in which Marx used the term in Capital’.[6]
They assume that only surplus-value-producing labour produces value, forgetting
that Chapter 1 of Capital Volume 1 deals with socially necessary labour
that produces value but not surplus-value. SRT thus rejects an extremely
important achievement of some participants in the domestic labour and wages for
housework debates – namely, establishing that domestic labour produces value –
in favour of the weakest formulations by others.
The confusion between the categories of abstract
and productive labour also precludes recognising another important distinction.
Under capitalism,
according to Marx, labour is productive ‘if it directly creates surplus-value’.[7] But this definition is
relevant only from the standpoint of individual capital: labour is or is not
productive according to whether it does or does not produce surplus-value for
the individual capitalist. However, as Marx realised when he considered the
capitalist production of articles of luxury consumption, ‘This sort of
productive labour produces use-values and objectifies itself in products that
are destined only for unproductive consumption. In their reality, as articles,
they have no use-value for the process of reproduction,’ and hence, if
there is ‘disproportionate diversion of productive labour into
unreproductive articles, it follows that the means of subsistence or production
will not be reproduced in the necessary quantities’, and the process of capital
accumulation will suffer.[8]
We are therefore looking at two
distinctions – productive versus unproductive labour, and reproductive versus
unreproductive labour – and four possible combinations of them. Productive
labour is reproductive if it contributes to social reproduction by producing
means of production or labour-power, or unreproductive if it produces articles
(like armaments) that do not re-enter the cycle of accumulation. Likewise,
unproductive labour is reproductive if it contributes to social reproduction by
producing means of production or labour-power, as domestic labour does, or
unreproductive if it produces articles or services that do not re-enter the
cycle of accumulation. Alessandra
Mezzadri also criticises the narrow focus of SRT on waged labour, arguing that
‘If capital is defined based on the dominance of labour-surplus extraction,
wage-labour stops being the only form in which exploitation may manifest’, and
therefore the vast number of ‘wageless’ workers exploited by capital around the
world need to be included.[9]
Confusion regarding Marx’s method is
evident when Bhattacharya says, ‘SRT is primarily concerned with understanding how
categories of oppression (such as gender, race, and ableism) are coproduced in
simultaneity with the production of surplus value’,[10]
implying that gender, race, etc. are present at the highest level of
abstraction of Marx’s analysis of capital, and denying the existence of other
systems of oppression. This position is made more explicit in David McNally’s
rejection, partly relying on Himani Bannerji, of ‘the ontological atomism
inherent in the founding formulations of intersectionality theory: the idea
that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that,
in some circumstances, crisscross each other.’[11]
The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by
Kimberlé
Crenshaw, although the notion of multiple systems of oppression already
existed. In her paper on domestic violence and rape, Crenshaw explains that:
The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that
women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that
frequently pursue conflicting political agendas…
Among the most troubling political consequences of the failure of
antiracist and feminist discourses to address the intersections of race and
gender is the fact that, to the extent they can forward the interest of “people
of color” and “women,” respectively, one analysis often implicitly denies the
validity of the other. The failure of feminism to interrogate race means that
the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate and reinforce the
subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate
patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of
women.[12]
Himani
Bannerji sets out to challenge intersectionality, arguing that:
“Race” … is a collection of discourses of colonialism and slavery,
but firmly rooted in capitalism in its different aspects through time. As it
stands, “race” cannot be disarticulated from “class” any more than coffee can
be separated from milk once they are mixed…
This integrity of “race” and class cannot be independent of the
fundamental social organization of gender, that is, sex-specific social
division of labor, with mediating norms and cultural forms… There is no capital
that is a universal abstraction. Capital is always a practice, a determinate
set of social relations… Thus “race,” gender, and patriarchy are inseparable
from class.[13]
Yet Marx’s method, as he explains in the
Grundrisse, proceeds from the concrete as a ‘chaotic conception of a whole’, to ever
higher abstractions before returning to the concrete as ‘a rich totality of many
determinations and relations’,[14] and
‘capital’ is an abstraction. The accumulation of capital can account for
the large-scale induction of women and children into the labour-force because
their cheap labour-power allows for a higher rate of surplus-value. But it
cannot account for domestic violence in working-class families, nor for the
denial of abortion rights to women when labour-power is plentiful, nor for Female
Genital Mutilation. Capital cannot account for the involvement of working-class
Germans in the Holocaust, or the recruitment of working-class Dalits in the
anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002 in Gujarat.[15]
These are expressions of sexist and racist oppression, promoted by
organisations active in families, communities, and the state. The accumulation
of capital doesn’t depend on lynch-mobs or the Ku Klux Klan.
As Patricia Hill Collins explains, the metaphor
of intersectionality isn’t perfect, especially in its sense as a literal
crossroads, yet it has analytic and heuristic value, has helped to generate new
knowledge, and has helped people to imagine social transformation, guiding
their intellectual work and political practice.[16]
If intersectionality is seen as recognition of different systems of oppression,
it can explain why it is important to support struggles against rape, domestic
violence, anti-minority pogroms, caste atrocities, etc., even if they are not
directly anticapitalist. Unlike the metaphor of coffee and milk, it can show
how people who are oppressed in one system can be potential or actual
oppressors in another.
Subsuming systems of oppression like patriarchy,
the subjugation of conquered peoples and the caste system under capitalism
precludes an understanding of the complex ways in which they interact with
capitalism, and undermines struggles against them. Attributing all oppression
in capitalist societies to capital and assuming the struggle against capital
will make them disappear is an attractively simple proposition, but reality is
not so simple. Supurna Banerjee and Nandini Ghosh argue that,
While one consequence of abandoning
intersectionality is to understand marginalities as additives (once again going
back to the primary contradiction argument), the other is that it homogenizes
experiences of marginalization. This presents the danger of bringing about an
“add marginalities and stir” approach… In the present political context of
India, this need for intersectional politics is especially important to prevent
playing one minority against the other, as is evidenced in instances of
landless Dalits being mobilized by Hindu right-wing forces against the poor
Muslim population… By providing an exposition of how marginalization is framed
as a product of one’s location at specific points of intersection between
identifications, intersectionality provides an outlook on the search for common
interest as was evident in the Dalit-Muslim alliance against right-wing fascism
in the Gujarat elections of 2017, which led to the victory of the independent
candidate Jignesh Mevani.[17]
By rejecting the most important gains made by
the domestic labour, wages for housework and intersectionality debates, SRT
returns to a framework which allows left-wing white male academics to say that
the struggle against capitalism is the only one that counts, albeit with an
‘add-and-stir’ policy to sexism, racism, etc.
(Paper presented at the workshop on ‘Labour,
Nature, and Technology: Rethinking Capitalist Subsumption’ at King’s College
Strand Campus on 18–19 June 2026.)
Notes
[1] Bhattacharya 2018, p. 2.
[3] Quick 2023, pp. 448–9.
[4] Bhattacharya 2018, pp. 3, 8.
[5] Bhattacharya 2018, p. 13.
[6] Ferguson and McNally 2013, pp. xx, xxv, xxiii.
[7] Marx 1976, pp. 1039, 1044.
[8] Marx 1976, pp. 1045–6.
[10] Bhattacharya 2018, p. 14.
[11] McNally 2018, p. 96.
[12] Crenshaw 1991, pp. 1251–2.
[13] Bannerji 2005, p.
149.
[16] Collins 2019, 29–34.
[17] Banerjee and Ghosh 2018.
Banerjee, Supurna and Nandini Ghosh 2018,
‘Introduction. Debating Intersectionalities: Challenges for a Methodological
Framework’ South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 19, 1–17.
Bannerji, Himani 2005, ‘Building from Marx:
Reflections on Class and Race,’ Social Justice 32(4), 144–60.
Bhattacharya, Tithi 2018, ‘Introduction:
Mapping Social Reproduction Theory’ in T. Bhattacharya (ed) Social
Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, London: Pluto
Press, pp. 1–20.
Collins, Patricia Hill 2019, Intersectionality
as Critical Social Theory, Durham: Duke University Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé 1991, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality,
Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,’ Stanford Law Review,
43(6), 1241–99.
Ferguson, Susan and David McNally 2013,
‘Capital, Labour-Power, and Gender-Relations: Introduction to the Historical
Materialism edition of Marxism and the Oppression of Women, in
Vogel, L. Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Leiden:
Brill, pp. xvii–xL.
Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse. Foundations of
the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), translated by M. Nicolaus,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Marx, Karl (1976) Capital, Volume 1,
translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Marx, Karl 1978, Capital, Volume 2,
translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
McNally, David 2018, ‘Intersections and
Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory,’ in Tithi
Bhattacharya (ed) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering
Oppression, London: Pluto Press, pp. 94–111.
Mezzadri, Alessandra 2022, ‘Unbounding
Exploitation: Labour-surplus extraction, value, and struggles beyond the wage,’
Historical Materialism [online] 13 November. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/unbounding-exploitation/
Quick, Paddy 2023, ‘Capitalism and Household
Production: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Social Reproduction Theory,’ Science
and Society 87(4): 447–74.
Teltumbde, Anand (2002) ‘Damning the Dalits for
the Bania-Brahmin Crimes in Gujarat’ [online] 8 August. http://www.ambedkar.org/vivek/DamningtheDalits.pdf