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.)
[2] Marx 1978.
[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.
[9] Mezzadri 2022.
[10] Bhattacharya 2018, p. 14.
[11] McNally 2018, p. 96.
[12] Crenshaw 1991, pp. 1251–2.
[13] Bannerji 2005, p. 149.
[14] Marx 1973, p. 100.
[15] Teltumbde 2002.
[16] Collins 2019, 29–34.
[17] Banerjee and Ghosh 2018.
References
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