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Most conceptualizations of social reproduction and its relationship to capitalist production, especially those within the field of feminist political economy, are derived from Marx’s use of the notion (1993 [1885]). Cindi Katz’s (2001, p. 711) now iconic understanding of social reproduction as the ‘fleshy, messy, indeterminate stuff of everyday life’ is deliberately broad and imprecise, as is its conception as ‘life’s work’ (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2004). Other definitions, still laid out in broad brush strokes, are more cut-and-dry, along the lines of social reproduction as ‘the process by which a society reproduces itself across and within generations.’³ Yet others have had a preference for more detail. For instance, Brenner and Laslett’s (1989, pp. 382–383) now 30-year old definition of social reproduction is still much repeated:

the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, the ways in which the care and socialization of children are provided, the care of the infirm and elderly, and the social organization of sexuality. Social reproduction can thus be seen to include various kinds of work – mental, manual, and emotional – aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care necessary to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation.

It is feminist critiques of classical Marxism as well as feminist political economy analyses of social reproduction’s defining relations and categories – labour, work, home, gender, race, class, sexuality, the family, life, and value – that have led to the de-naturalization and problematizion of social reproduction. In 1969, a century after the publication of Marx’s Capital, Margaret Benston (1969) published an article entitled ‘The political economy of women’s liberation’ in the Monthly Review. For Western feminism, Benston’s pioneering piece placed ‘the politics of women’s liberation within an anti-capitalist framework’ and identified ‘domestic labor as the material basis of women’s structural relation to capitalist production and their subordination in society’ (Federici 2019). In doing so, Benston helped to inaugurate the field of the political economy of gender. The following decade saw a proliferation of work in this area of socialist feminism, which re-envisioned critical political economy as feminist political economy by opening its categories to epistemological scrutiny.⁴

Socialist feminist political economy’s most important contribution was the concept of social reproduction.⁵ A number of feminist scholars made important and wide-ranging contributions demonstrating that capitalism cannot reproduce itself capitalistically; rather, it downloads the burden of its own reproduction onto women in the form of unwaged work. This was an invaluable insight into how capitalism as a system of private property and exploitation worked in tandem with patriarchy, even though there was no agreement as to the actual nature of this relationship between these two systems of exploitation and oppression. The centrality of the concept of social reproduction, however, was so accepted and uncontested that it became synonymous with the field itself, coming to be known as social reproduction feminism (Ferguson 2020). Not only did this field gender classical Marxist political economy’s focus on production, but it also expanded conceptualizations of the modes of production, as well as historicizing and spatializing patriarchy, paving the road towards a more unitary theory of oppression.

In these earlier studies of the role of women’s domestic labour in the renewal of labour-power and non-workers, such as children, youth, and adults out of the workforce, the household as the socio-spatial unit of social reproduction was privileged. Contemporary feminists have moved beyond household-based analyses, investigating other sites and modalities of social reproduction, such as those of day care centres, schools, institutions of higher education and training, recreation centres, health centres, and hospitals. These studies were combined with those that explored the ways in which the relations of production are recreated through the inter-generational transmission of material, emotional, and affective resources, including through the nurturing of individual characteristics such as self-confidence, and the establishing of group status and inequality, such as through access to education. Intermeshing with these studies were those that encompassed human biological reproduction centering particularly on childbirth and the obligation of maintaining kin networks and relationships, such as those ordained by marriage, and thus the study of the social organization of fertility and sexuality (Kofman 2017) as well as social constructions of motherhood (Bakker 2007). More recently, scholars in the field have recognized that bonds of care are a central ethic and need within social reproduction, including nurturing in ways that keep people psychically, emotionally, and mentally ‘whole’. Social reproduction is, thus, heavily implicated in subjectivity formation in that it comprises the embodied material social practices of those engaging in both the material and emotional activities and relations that bring everyday life into being.

While the activities and relations of social reproduction in these studies have been prescribed and overdetermined as women’s work, this has been an exercise fraught with omission, not least in circumscribing who counts as ‘woman’. We concur that in many parts of the world women, whether in conjunction with the state, private sector, other family or community members, or on their own, are still central to processes of social reproduction that maintain human life – those that either must be done if people are to survive, or those that lead to improved living conditions or a greater sense of well-being. The epistemological turn of moving beyond the household has enabled a reorientation of social reproduction to the global capitalist system at large and to the multifarious ways in which the renewal of labour-power occurs, such as (ironically) through an increased engagement in the social reproduction of other households via intra- and trans-national migration by nurses, teachers, and live-in caregivers and the flows of remittances these migrants send back to their families. This expanded gaze has led to an increasing recognition that not all women participate in social reproductive work, at the expense of embodied others who do, most commonly across classed and racialized lines, and that other marginalized groups – for example, children, refugees, immigrants, modern-day slaves – regardless of gender, are also heavily engaged in such work.⁶

It is also the case that while embodiment has been a presupposition for the labour engaged in processes of social reproduction (and production) it is increasingly no longer a prerequisite. The costs of the social wage constitute a drain on the production of surplus value (especially shareholder profits). Capital’s retreat from the social wage has resulted in the increasing financialization and marketization of social reproduction, assigning it a market value (Bryan and Rafferty 2014). This embodied labour moreover can now be acquired flexibly for select slivers of time, on zero-hour contracts at minimum wages and below. Moreover, artificial intelligence (via various platforms that simulate social interaction) and automation are increasingly supplanting embodied labour. Being stripped of waged employment, the body can be ‘employed’ as an encasement of desirable parts and organs – such as hair, blood, kidneys – whereby ‘biotechnologically isolated, manipulated, and disseminated life is absorbed by capitalist processes’ (Floyd 2016, p. 61). For example, biotechnological developments in biological reproduction has led women from being a source of labour–power to becoming a source of living raw material through surrogacy. We understand this multifaceted process of eliminating labouring bodies broadly as a continuation of processes of enclosure.

As the conditions in which social reproduction takes place have become more precarious and attacks upon it have accelerated, its analysis (having fallen into a lull during the 1990s and 2000s) has once again risen to the top of many feminist agendas. With no room for race or other relations of oppression beyond those of class and gender in the early social reproduction analyses, there had been a theoretical divestment, until the most recent revival of social reproduction theory, which brings a rigor to hitherto unaddressed questions (Ferguson et al. 2016; Bhattacharya 2017). In the last decade, social reproduction theory has emerged as an attempt to offer a unitary theory of women’s oppression. Social reproduction feminists have critiqued earlier feminist political economy analyses for not focusing on ‘the multi-faceted complexity of real-world relations and political struggles, as well as the ways in which racial oppression intersects with gendered forms of domination and class exploitation’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 28). In order to avoid such theoretical fallacies, contemporary social reproduction feminists have reconceptualized their ontological presuppositions in regard to the nature of the social. They argue that relations of oppression that are racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized, ‘are not additional systems that just happen to coincide. Rather, they are concrete relations comprising a wider sociality, integral to the very existence and operation of capitalism and class’ (Ferguson et al. 2016, p. 32). We further add that, to examine the constitutive role of racial difference as a historically sedimented formation, the conceptualization of social reproduction could usefully be brought into conversation with postcolonial urban theory. This is central not only to ensuring that our conceptualization of social reproduction is historicized but, as Ananya Roy (2016a) would argue, is also attentive to historical difference as constitutive of the urban.

Notwithstanding its intimate political and theoretical relations with earlier debates, and sometimes because of this, social reproduction theory is often mistaken as a mere synonym of either domestic labour debates or socialist feminism. And yet it is premised upon distinctive ontological and epistemological propositions in that it foregrounds the internal relationship between capitalist value-producing labour and its often omitted predicate, that is non-capitalistically produced social reproductive labour, by focusing on the latter’s necessary but contradictory relation to the capitalist pursuit of surplus value. Through shifting the analytical focus onto this internal relationship, social reproduction theory is able to: historicize the notion of patriarchy vis-à-vis specific modes of production and their attendant social formations; demonstrate that women’s oppression is not a pre-capitalist residue that capitalism merely picks up, but is integral to the very logic of capitalism as a system, and is necessarily reinvented as regimes of capital accumulation change; and argue that historically specific forms of patriarchy and capitalism are not external to one another, but, rather, are co-constitutive of each other.

Our understanding of social reproduction builds upon those of social reproduction theorists in that we do not consider it as a coherent stable construct over time and place, but as an historicized and spatialized construct, speaking to multiple layerings, subject to its own internal dynamics as it is buffeted between the use of labour and resources needed to live everyday life. It includes the embodied labour (paid and unpaid) in conjunction with the resources, such as those of land, ‘nature’, time, technology, and increasingly capital, that enable human and non-human life to occur, the emotional and material needs of everyday life to be met, as well as hopes and dreams for the future, and the material social practices that constitute the organization of daily life and life over generations to take place.⁷ It is about the process of the production of value – both use and exchange value – moulded through the spatialities and temporalities of the everyday and determined through differentiation and struggle.