ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Social Reproduction

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Following their Trip episode about Cleaning, the ACFM crew take a closer look at the hidden labour that keeps the economy running. Would public canteens solve 80% of our problems? Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by my friend's Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today on this special microdose, we are talking about social reproduction. So, guys, why do we want to talk about social reproduction today?

Well, we did an episode about cleaning, and cleaning is a classic example of social reproduction, as understood by people who use that particular language and theoretical framework. And we know that social reproduction is a term that gets, used a lot in left circles and left theoretical circles. It's a term we use a lot. It's a term I, it's one of those theoretical pieces of jargon that's passed into my everyday discourse, like difference, resentiment, and the others, no, but social reproduction really has. Well, I was trying to read up on social reproduction yesterday in preparation for this and I had too much social reproduction work to do. So, no, I mean, I think it's sort of

interesting social reproduction because it's got more popular. It's got much more popular over the last of 10 to 15 years and it's sort of interesting to think why. I think it also is like an extension. It's sort of like provide some more tools for thinking through the discussion we had in the main trip, the main trip on cleaning where we only touched on it really. And so in a way, you know, we want to provide tools for people to think about it and see how introducing this concept alters the way we're thinking about stuff such as cleaning, but also, you know, all of the struggles, the sort of like struggles around social reproductive work, both waged and unwaged, you know, the sphere of the economy in which you could term reproductive work

or social reproductive work is really cut very big and it's been growing and it will be, it'll keep growing, I think, if you include things such as healthcare. So it's an important thing to get your head around. Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested in all of those things. And I suppose just the general principles of what are the tasks and the things that we need to do to prepare us to be workers and who does that work? And what does it mean in 21st century capitalism? And are we doing less or more of it? And how is it tiring us out? And what does it do in terms of our relationship to wage labour, but also to our relationships to other people? So all of that is interesting stuff. But before we get into this episode, we should mention that you can go even weirder and leftier by subscribing to our newsletter, which we will be now sending out with every new trip. So no more than once a month, with bonus content and updates from the ACFM crew,

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by going to navara.media forward slash support. So, on with the show. So, social reproduction, where should we start? Maybe should we start with a few definitions of what actually we are talking about here? The concept of social reproduction, particularly how it gets picked up in sort of socialist, feminist-feminist circles, it derives from Marxist theory, really. And so you can sort of understand it as the work of reproducing an input into capital, if you want to put it that way, right? So it produces a commodity social reproductive work. it's the work that goes into making a commodity, that commodity is labour power.

It's one of the inputs into capital. In that sort of way, we can think about it as an economic sort of term. It doesn't really arise that much. It's of not much interest to orthodox economics, to be honest. So unwaged social reproductive work will not be included in the measure of GDP gross domestic product, for instance, because there's no economic value instantly attached to it. But it's a concept that it's sort of Marxist, the reproductive work that goes into, in fact, we could probably split it into a few things.

One of them is that work of maintaining and regenerating workers. And then we'd also include the raising and nurturing and perhaps even training of future workers, i.e. childcare teaching, perhaps we can go into all of this. And then there's another thing where we would incorporate in this conception of social reproduction, as thought about as an input into capital, and that's the, like maintaining those who can't work, or perhaps a retired sort of elder care, perhaps. So it's producing a commodity, labour power, right?

But that commodity is a very unusual one. In fact, it's unique in a couple of ways. One of the ways in which the commodity of labour powers is unique, is that it's a commodity, unlike others, which on the whole isn't produced through capitalist means. right and we're going to get into that a little bit later so that's quite unusual as a commodity but it's also a commodity of a very particular sort because that commodity is made up of human beings living breathing sociable human beings you have to fit into society you know be able to operate in

society that category human being is not something that can just be reduced to labour power Our needs, our potential, et cetera, far exceed just what capital wants from us, our ability to go and work and labour, etc. And so that's the important thing, basically. There's a constant sort of drive by capital just to reduce us to labour power, to try to push all the other bits, you know, to erode all the other bits that make us a human being, etc. But because we're more than labour, that means we're the one commodity that can revolt, basically, can be insubordinate and can demand more or can demand something else. So it's that dual nature. Social reproduction produces labour power, but it also produces human beings. And I think that's probably one of the most important concepts of social reproduction.

It may seem very abstract now, but we can get into it and explain how that helps us to think through this kind of, work and its potentials, I think. Yeah, I mean, in concrete terms of people that are asking, what does this actually mean? In practice, what social reproduction means? It is the work of reproducing life in general and the conditions of life. So it's cooking, looking after the kids, like cleaning the house, is this sort of thing that normally gets put under the heading of social reproduction. And the concept of social reproduction is used by people from Marx onwards who are trying to think about the fact that, well, those are all obviously. forms of labour. They're obviously forms of work. And there is some difference between those

kinds of work and the kinds of work that go on in the factory, for example, producing salable commodities. But the going to work that goes on in the factory, obviously in some ways, depends upon these kinds of work. So what do we say about these kinds of work? How do we understand them? And for example, it's quite often, social reproduction as a concept, is quite often confused with domestic labour. But actually, there is a school of thinking, specifically within anglophone, socialist feminism, going back, really going back to the early 80s that calls itself social reproduction theory. And the social reproduction theory people see themselves as quite critical of the earlier domestic

labour theorists, people like the wages for housework campaigners, because people like those, the people who were theorising domestic labour in the early 70s, we're mostly just saying, well, this is all, like washing up is work, just like all other work. You can't produce value in the factory without it, therefore it is value-producing labour. The social reproduction theories were saying, no, it is work and it is socially necessary work, but it has somehow it's qualitatively or systemically different. And that's where this term comes from. But when you're talking about the question of, like, what does or doesn't count our social reproduction?

We were talking about this when we were preparing our notes. And the example we came up with was, well, okay, getting up in the morning, making the breakfast for your husband and probably his children as well, before he goes off to work in the factory. That is definitely social reproduction. That's the ideal example of socially reproductive labour. Well, if you are an unpaid housewife, actually, if you're if you're someone who's being paid a wage to do that, then it gets a bit more complicated. but that's what that is the type of thing that the term has been deployed to try to describe and then once you get past that then you there are all kinds of other activities which we can think about well are they usefully thought about as social reproduction or are they not usefully thought about social reproduction so I think we could get onto that now we could

get onto the question of what is and isn't social reproduction but Nadia do you want to add anything to this general definition. Yeah, thanks, Jeremy. That's that's really helpful what you guys said. And I think thinking about it, you know, in the starting of thinking about the post, just post for this kind of era husband and what are the activities that are needed to prepare that person to be a waged labor the next day is the kind of the useful framing I find to start. So it's making, you know, it's making the breakfast. It's making sure the house is clean, doing the food, shopping. But I think there's also another level, which is about, you know, and this is also why it's linked to cleanliness, like, you know, that person having a shower,

having clean clothes to put on, and also perhaps being emotionally prepared for the next day at work. And this is one of the bits that I think will be interesting to think about when we start to think about the 21st century later is that perhaps there are also other processes which are to do with emotional care, which are even more hidden, and I'll come back to that in a second, which are important to be able to produce that worker. So to produce the waged laborer in the 21st century, you know, people perhaps working in the gig economy, like what are those things that are necessary to create that docile enough, but also strong enough physically and mentally capable enough person that is going to work in the Amazon factory, is going to work in, you

know, doing a repetitive task, or is going to work in the gig economy of some sort, or even go to the office and, you know, more classical terms. And I was thinking about this and I was thinking, well, in the 21st century is, you know, Netflix and scrolling, like, do they play a role? Are these things part of capitalism actually co-opting part of the quote-unquote care that is necessary to create that kind of, or supplanting the care that is traditionally done by humans, to create that being in the form of a waged labor for the next day. It tends to be helpful for me to think about it in the kind of the day before and the next day. But going back to something I just said in terms of it being hidden,

I think this is key, is that most social reproductive work is hidden. It happens without society recognizing it as work. And I think you're right, Jeremy, like it is unpaid, but arguably, you know, perhaps we're using other processes like, you know, going drinking in the pub or drinking at home or like gaming or whatever to also reproduce us as workers or to chill our minds in a way to produce us as workers for the next day. So we'll unpack all of this, I think. But yes, I think in short, it's like what are the processes that prefer you for as a worker to work and who is doing that. work. Well, that does point to the thing I wanted to talk about, actually, is what are the boundaries? Like, what is in social reproduction? What is, what, or what can, what broader sets of activities can be included in social reproduction? And I'd say, well, one reason there's been a lot of interest in the concept in some circles over the past 10 to 20 years is because

there's been growing interest in the, in theorising and understanding the importance of forms of labour, like teaching or medical care or looking after sick people or childcare. At the moment, really, the fashionable frame for thinking about those things is just in terms of care, which is something we've done a whole episode about, and the work of care. And there's a very strong overlap between caring work and social reproduction as concept and as categories of things. There's also the sort of classic sociological concept of socialisation, which is the idea that all people, especially children, they don't just need to be looked after physically. They need to be subject to all kinds of intensive attention and care and training in order to make them able to deal with increasingly complex societies, like the ones we live in. So one of the social theorists who uses the term social reproduction a lot is Pierre Bourdieu, the great French, sort of post-Marxist, really, a theorist.

And when Baudieu talks about social reproduction, he doesn't really mean what we're talking about here so much. He's using that, he's using the term a bit in a bit more of a sort of mid-20th century structuralist register, according to which when you talk about social reproduction, you're really talking about everything that just keeps the social order going. So you're talking about ideology, for example, the way in which it reproduces the norms of the ruling class. about the education and the way in which it basically reproduces and legitimises an existing class

structure. That's really what Baudieu means by social reproduction. But Boudure talked a lot about, you know, the role of the education system, for example, in maintaining systems of social stratification. And that's because the education system is really the main agent of socialisation in our society after the family. And so, and then from that point of view, you can say, well, according to some ways uses of the term social reproduction even in this socialist feminist register that we're mainly concerned with today

teaching which would be a kind of care work and a kind of socialisation work would definitely count as social reproduction because teachers are I mean teachers are basically doing things which in pre-industrial societies are done by family members and community members but which are all necessary to turning the child actually

into a productive labourer as well as a socialised citizen because they're not really separable things. So that's something you might think of as social reproduction, although normally the social reproduction theorists are normally not talking about things like teaching. They're not talking about things really that people always get paid for. I mean, with all of these concepts, it's like, you know, what's it useful for?

What's it do for us, basically? It's probably the most useful way to think about it. And so with like social reproduction theory, that dual nature of it, you know, it basically produces labour power, and like the production of labour power, the capital's growth is a thing around which our societies are organised, right? You know, it's a thing that gets measured in GDP. It's the thing that, you know, governments say they're trying to bring about, etc, etc, etc. But at the same time, you know, we're reproducing human beings and that's much wider, right? So I think, you know, the purpose of that concept of social

reproduction or its utility is that it helps us to think through about how capital and the dynamics and the needs of capital, sort of structure our lives without it, without being, reducing our lives and our activity to just, to just the ease of capital. And so if you think about it in terms of teachers, I think that's sort of useful. It's a useful category to apply to teachers. Because part of their job is to produce workers. All of our job now, we're told. All of our job, right up to the level of people teaching postgraduate students. We're increasingly told our only job participants workers. Yeah, and so, like, universities will be measured by, you know, what are the earning potential of these graduates from your course in two years time

or something preposterous like that, right? So it's like, so that is something which is really a disciplining and increasingly disciplining thing on the activity that a teacher or a university lecturer will do. But like, that is not, that is not the only thing that's going on in the heads of university teachers, university lecturers or teachers. they are also very, very aware that they are trying to produce, you know, well, well-rounded, you know, human individuals. You know, they have to deal with actual living, breathing humans. Do you know what I mean?

It's very hard to, you know, not to do the stuff about where I want this kid to have a good life. You know, if I can help him have a good life, I want him to do that, you know, and that may not be from just increasing his earning potential. And it's that dual nature of it, you know, the fact that like we're trying to reproduce labour power, that's the thing that government wants us to do, right? But at the same time, there's human relations there. We know that those kids, their potential, is much wider than just a potential to labour. I think it is useful to apply to things such as teaching and lecturing, etc. I think it is, but I would say that still predominantly the vast, vast majority of social reproductive work happens in the home or because that person has to sleep, eat, wake up, be washed, etc. And, you know, perhaps in other times it would happen in more social spaces. But I think what is interesting for us is that to think about like, and maybe we could talk about this later, maybe we could talk about this now, like what happens when you collectivize some of these processes? Like even

if you think, right, we agree, fine, we are preparing workers for their exploitation as wage labourers, can those processes be collectivised? My theory is that in the 21st century, this is becoming increasingly, like, atomised. So, you know, it's no longer, and we'll start, we'll talk about this in a bit, but, like, you know, because you don't have the housewife, like, chain to making those things possible, or, you know, the parents or whatever, you then have, you know, whether it's takeaways or whether it's sending your laundry off for five quid

or, you know, there's task rabbit or whatever. All of these kind of like atomized labors who are doing the work for you so that you because you just don't have the time to do that work yourself or we don't have the institutions to do it collectively. I actually wasn't

thinking about Netflix and scrolling in the vein of leisure at all. I was thinking that these have become necessary processes to numb the mind in order that the person can work the next day. Like in the absence of them, like, I don't know, revolution or something. You know, I think a lot will change if you suddenly didn't have like the internet or streaming services. I think it's a really good point as well, the way in which this work of social reproduction has become more and more individualised

and commodify. Because obviously the classic like narrative about this stuff is that, well, in your prehistoric hunter-gather or neolithic, like early agricultural communities, then most social reproductive work is carried out, like most other work, actually, is just carried out collectively all the time. And then really what, and then what happens, I mean, that's also true, presumably in like medieval peasant communities.

Well, it is. I mean, insofar as we understand the way farming took place. And, you know, child-rearing, I mean, there wasn't really such a thing as child-rearing. really separate from the rest of life and labor. And then in the industrial revolution, of course, you go through this phase where, you know, people are moving from the peasant villages to the cities. And of course, the conditions are so bad in the earliest industrial cities in Britain that people are just dying. Like social labor just isn't reproducing,

isn't being reproduced. This is partly where Marx gets the idea from, because Marx is observing the fact that over the course of the 19th century, you know, the bourgeois state in Britain has itself been forced to regulate the factories and to bring in child labour laws and things like this, because things were getting to the point where the greed of individual capitalists was such that they would just exploit labour past the point where it was able to reproduce itself. And, yeah, eventually the supply of labour was going to dry up if something wasn't done about it. And that's how Marx understands the social, economic function of a lot of those reforms. But then, of course, the emergence of the sort of 20th century idea of the nuclear household

organized around the activity of the housewife, which as we talked about on the cleaning episode is very historically specific. It's really, it's the experience of people between the 30s and the 70s, basically. But partly what that does is to create this little island, which is sort of a bit like the way in which social democracy tries to protect, like, things like the education system from the exigencies of the market, to a little bit protect. protected from market relations and capitalist relations. And of course, that's the dilemma for the housewife in the mid-20s centuries. She's sort of free from immediate capitalist exploitation in the way that, unlike her husband, but she's totally subjugated. She's also subjugated to it

because she's dependent on her husband, and she doesn't even have the relative autonomy of an economically independent agent like he does. And so, but then once that little, that little island, of the, that little fortress of the household is breached by the shift into neoliberalism, post-wardism, women going into the workplace. What we don't get is exactly what socialist feminists really wanted, say in the early 70s, which is collect much more provision of collective child care, even like the socialisation and collectivisation of household tasks in some ways. So what you get instead, indeed, is the move into this kind of frantic era where social reproduction is just, is actually no one is really given enough time to do it.

Everybody's having to work too long hours to even be able to do it. And those who can afford to do so, our end up being encouraged to basically employ people whose labour is worse, less than theirs in the market, like to do the work. And increasingly now we're living in this era. We're trying to find devices. We're trying to find apps.

We're trying to find automatic, you know, robot floor cleaners and things. And we're trying to get our food delivered by drones so that all that work of social reproduction can be done for us. So I think you're right. I think that's a really useful way of thinking about it. There are other communities and families organising themselves in different ways in Britain today. You know, there are lots of people who live in extended families

where the grandmother does all the cooking all day, you know, and everyone goes to work or to school, and it's like multi-generational extended family households. And it's solved by that. you know, I don't know what the statistics are, but there are loads of people who live like that. The nuclear family is very, very difficult to sustain as a unit of itself in terms of like getting all of the work and the unseen work and the social reproductive work and the like labor work done within that unit. It's like absolutely exhausting for most people who are trying to live that

way without care or help from other members of the community or, you know, or other services, etc. I mean, this is one of my favorite tropes of yours, Nadia, is the idea that the solution, the socially solution to many of our problems should be canteens, public canteens, which I think is really, that is really, that's the answer to the question, isn't it? If we had public canteens, like, there should be public canteens, and they should be, like,

really incredibly well-resourced, like, youth and child, like, facilities, like, which are staffed by people with, like, doctoral-level training, who are paid really well. So that basically, if you are tired from working all day on your workers' cooperatives' renewable energy plant or whatever you're working at or working in your Institute of Higher Education funded for the good of the collective, not for the good of capital, if you're tired all day from doing that and you haven't got the energy to cook and clean, where you just, the family goes to the down to the canteen. And if the kids are bored, they can go to the recreational facility and socialize with the other kids. And if they're not getting on with the other kids, they'll have someone who's like a doctoral level expert in group psychology helping them get on with the other kids. And that's what we want. That is what we want. And partly this sounds already utopian, but it's also, it's just rational because part of the problem is, part of the problem is, like, in the context humans evolved in that tribal hunter-gatherer context, all this stuff was done collectively. Like, childcare in those kind of context is done more collectively, apart from with really small children. And that actually does produce these economies of scale. it produces these economies of scale, which means people don't have to do all this kind of work alone and isolated,

and they don't have to reproduce labour inefficiently. And a lot of this work we're talking about, cooking and entertaining children, which I'm obviously, I don't think any regular listen to the show will fail to pick up by now, that my life is often quite dominated by cooking and looking after kids, and it has been about 15 years or so. And I feel like a lot of the time, this is stuff that could just be done, according to economies of scale collectively in ways that would be much less exhausting and boring

for all the individuals involved. Also, the other thing about canteens, which is great, which is not just about the family going down and eating together, but it provides a local, like, state or somehow, like, governmentally funded, state-funded institution where you can also socialise in a really kind of unpressured way and you just go down, there's very little choice of what's on what's being cooked

but it's affordable for everyone and it's just a way to collectivise that job and I think every local area should have a canteen. That mention of like the housewife and sort of like what we call

a four-day sort of set up as society like that's, it's an interesting, it's a useful way to sort of position where this concept of social reproduction comes from because it like it emerges out of that second way feminism where there's a really big concern about the housewife right and so you know part of what's what's going on with like trying to reach for categories such a social reproduction is to try to make all of this this work which is sort of like invisibleize it takes place inside a home housewives it isolated etc you know in this

isolated separate sort of sphere and so that's what like consciousness raising groups are supposed to be, you know, the sort of bedrock of the second way feminist movement. And it's about, let's make this work visible by talking about, getting together and talking about it and realizing the sort of commonality. So one of the groups that we've sort of like floated around is this group called Wages for Housework. And this is one of the demands. You can understand it in all sorts of ways. But like wages for housework as a demand, it's a way to make this, to make that work visible basically, right? You say, well, you know, this is work, real work, you know, a work a bit like the work that goes on in a factory.

And like, you know, the way they do that is say, look, you know, the work in a factory couldn't take place without the work that goes on in the home, basically. That's the early iteration of this conception of social reproduction. Under the Fordist era, when the housewife was, you know, a very predominant way of organizing your household, the costs of that reproductive work would be included in the man's wage, and it would be called the family wage. And of course, that constructs at least a very, very strong potential for patriarchal relationships, whereas the man earns the money and, you know, the woman's reproduction is dependent on the man's wage. And so the demand for

wages for housework was, no, the state should pay us for that work. Therefore, we'd have somewhat sort of, somewhat independence, basically, in terms of money, perhaps. Some people in how wages for housework thought it was an actual demand to get actual money. money for housewives was an important point. The other just thought it was more of a sort of pedagogical thing. You know, we want to make this work visible. I think what happens to the concept of social reproduction, it gets picked up again later on, basically, becomes a big,

I think it gets renewed interest, you know, around the early 2010s in that sort of era. And I think it gets picked up there for a particular reason, basically, partly to do with all of this stuff that we've talked about, you know, the sort of like the crisis in, in sort of neoliberal social reproduction regimes, of neoliberal social reproduction regimes where you wage is stagnate to such a level

that you need dual-income families in order to buy a house or to survive, et cetera, you know, these sorts of things. I think social reproduction gets picked up, partly because that needs thinking through, but also I think it's like a reaction to the sort of liberal identity politics, which is sort of dominant in the feminist movement at that time.

You know, initially the feminist movement is very concerned with like material economic and structures, etc. But then the horizon of liberation gets lost in like the, well, whenever 1980s, 1990s and like feminist movement or large parts of it, they move towards like a politics of recognition. You know, so it's a move away from struggling around material and economic issues towards struggling over like cultural values or like status hierarchies, these sorts of these sorts of things.

The early 2000s is probably. probably like the high point or the low point of that particular form of politics, you know. And I think lots of people, lots of feminists were looking as a way in which it was just obvious in the sort of post-2008 crisis era when you've got austerity, etc. The huge pressure on social reproduction coming from these big economic forces that you needed a concept which could include those, do you know what I mean? Which you could grapple with those. I think that's why social reproduction theory came back into vogue.

I think that's when people start to think much more expansively about social reproduction, partly because so much of it has been moved into the wage sphere and because it's become highly financialized, these sorts of dynamics. Yeah, I think that's right. That's a good narrative. I can fill in with a little bit more specific detail, I guess. So obviously, the women's liberation in the late 60s and early 70s, It involves many different strands of feminism.

There's many different strands of feminist theory, feminist practice. There isn't one feminism. There definitely isn't one, second wave feminism. And even the women's liberation movement proper is really, you know, in its nascent form in the late 60s, nearly 70s, is in the process of trying to work out a set of political positions and they get worked out in different ways by different people and different groups. But within that movement,

one of the most important strands is various kinds of socialist feminism. And socialist feminists are trying to work out, well, how do we understand exactly the relationship between forms of gender power, the role that women play in society generally, and capitalism more broadly. And if you want to put this fairly simply, the question is, well, how do we understand the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, if we recognise patriarchy as a specific system of power, which predates capitalism. How do we work out that relationship?

And some people who become the capital R, capital F, radical feminists, come to the conclusion that actually patriarchy is the real enemy. Capitalism is more or less incidental. It's not as important. And patriarchy means men exercising power over women, and it's men's power over women that has to be resisted by women as a group without getting distracted by issues like socioeconomic class and the promise of socialism and what have you.

And then other people develop various forms of what's sometimes called dual system theory. You understand what there is patriarchy and it has a history and there's capitalism, it has a history, and they interact with each other in specific ways. And the interactions produce particular outcomes and contexts of particular times. And then the term social reproduction, it is around, it's a round within the lexicon of Marxist theory more broadly, partly because Louis Altaire, the great French structuralist Marxist, uses the term in some of his writing in the 60s and 70s, but he's talking more about the way in which ideological institutions helped to reproduce class relations, as I was talking about before,

with reference to Baudieu, and the term is around because people like Baudu use it, etc. But then what has come to be known as social reproduction theory, like S.R.T, in the English-speaking world really gets established in the early 80s with the publication of Lee's Vogel's book. And Lee's Vogel's book is called Marxism and the impression of women towards a unitary theory. And the clue is in the title they're unitary. And really, actually what Vogel argues in that book is a kind of Marxist purism, that you don't need any kind of a theory of patriarchy at all, and that all you need is to read Capital by Marx very carefully and read what he says about social reproduction and the role of domestic labor in

social reproduction and you will understand everything you need to understand about the nature of women's oppression in the capitalist society and it and it's fair and then that book doesn't nobody read I mean that comes out in 83 just before Marxism in general becomes really unfashionable in the English speaking academy and nobody reads it much indeed as Keir said until the 2010s when really people start reading it again for all the reasons Keir gave, and because really, I think there's a general sense, that the sort of the liberal feminism, which has become globally hegemonic in many ways, you know, has reached the limit of how far it can emancipate women

without addressing issues of class, social inequality, and labour in any meaningful way. And so people like Titi Bata Charia become very prominent in the United States, for example, by reviving sort of social reproduction theory. And to this day, Titi Bata Chariah, promote a particular version of social reproduction theory, which, to be honest, it basically does just say, all you ever have to do is go and read Marxist Capital. That's all you really need to do. All this, like, faffing around, around intersectionality and specific theories of, specific theories of gender, what have you, you don't need to worry about. It's not totally

dissimilar to the way in which some people use the term racial capitalism. They try to produce a generalised theory of kind of racial, of race, slavery and capitalism, which understands it all as a sort of singular system, although generally the racial capitalism theorists don't have the same commitment to not really reading anything except Marx, which people at Batataria do seem to have into, I am kind of a caricaturing Batatoria here, but broadly speaking, that's how it goes. So we should mention, we said we would mention on the show, there was a great video made by Plan C years ago. There's only about seven minutes long called WTF is social reproduction, and that is a very good introduction to an excellent.

of the concept. And there are also loads of videos of lectures by Lees Vogel and Baticharia and Sylvia Federici as well, talking about the idea. And, but I would say, an awful lot of what they say is summarised very well in that seven-minute video by Plan C. And so, but I would say since then, it has been, the idea has been picked up and developed by a new generation of thinkers, so many of whom, you know, really what they're motivated by is the need to assert a left position within feminism. Shout out to Joe Littler's book, Left Feminisms that came out just last year,

and against the kind of really, the dominance of a kind of liberal middle-class individualism and a kind of politics of representation rather than the politics of work, solidarity and struggle within academic feminism. And it has been kind of really productive. So I'm quite, ambivalent about the social reproduction theory stuff as a concept.

Because on the one hand, I am opposed to the idea that all you ever have to do is go and read capital, which is a very, it's an idea that recurs again and again in the history of radical theory. And apart from anything else, it's just boring. Like, even if it's right, it's too boring to live with. And I also, I'm sorry, I think you cannot, I'm sorry, but you cannot get away from the fact that patriarchy does predate capitalism and that capitalism may use elements of patriarchy and retool into its own advantage, but they are elements of patriarchal culture which clearly predate it and derive some of their efficacy, moral authority, and psychic potency from predating it. And I think if you try to downplay that, you can't really

understand what's going on in terms of the relationship between gender and class oppression, et cetera. But that doesn't alter the fact. The social reproduction, you know, is this really useful concept. It's really useful for loads of things. It's really kind of illuminating. It's a really useful shorthand. It's also, I would say, it's illuminating for getting people to think about the sheer, like, the sheer, like, reality of the demands of social reproduction in everyday life in a way which is productive. We were getting ready for this. I was thinking about the fact that, well, you know, as someone who has, like, two kids and is in an equal partnership and we don't have a cleaner. And so I've always got a lot of housework to do. You know, and I'm always

moaning about it. I know, moaning about it on the show. I'm always talking about it. I'm really conscious that all through that period of my life, that's been true. Ever since my first kid was born, it's been really variable, the extent to which, like, comrades and colleagues who don't have kids of their own, have been in any way sympathetic to that, or have even been able to really get their heads around the fact that it does really change your life just in terms of the amount of free time you have in a day. My experience has been that the comrades who have been most sympathetic to it, even if they're very young people, of like, any gender or sex, you have no,

and have no children, for example, are people who know some social reproduction theory. Whereas honestly, like, friends who come more out of things like the sort of Foucautian anarchist tradition, like never been very sympathetic at all, because within the norms of that tradition where you just shouldn't be having kids, should you? You shouldn't be living in a household, you bourgeois scum. So I really sort of appreciate it just as a, because it is a lens which gives people a way of thinking about the fact that there's just an awful lot of stuff to do. Once you become responsible, especially for other people's lives, there's a lot of stuff to do. And just that notion is really powerful.

And it helps illuminate many different aspects of contemporary life, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think to be honest, like, obviously if you have kids, there's a whole different dimension to it. But, you know, like, I'm a person who lives by myself, and the housework never ends. Like, it never ends. And unless you want to live or you allow yourself to live in squalor, or it's collectivized, or somebody else is doing it for you, paid or unpaid, then you are doing a lot of social reproductive work. And I think why this is important is also linked to both consciousness and being allowed to develop as an intellectual being, right? I think these are important

when we think about the housewife, but it's important when we think about, you know, everyone being so exhausted in late capitalism. Like, it's very difficult to be able to develop yourself intellectually. If you are spending all of this time, like cleaning and cooking and you know, like washing and laundry and like putting away laundry and like our least favorite task as we've collectively talked about. Well, Dave, we did talk about that on the show. We said we were going to and we ran out of time. You should tell people what that's about. Yeah, we were, okay, so we were, I think we've agreed. I'm not sure. I definitely mean Jeremy agree with this. We'll have to, I'll have to check in with

here in a minute, but like the most, the universally most annoying piece of work. The ACFM position is the most annoying bit of housework is putting away the clean laundry. No, it's just, it's just that, isn't it? As we were talking about, like, how all, there's a satisfying element to many elements, any, many bits of housework. You know, even cleaning can be really satisfying and doing the washing, hanging it out is fun. But then when you finally got to put it away again, You've got to put, it always feels like just one job too many, having to put the clothes away and having to sort them into piles and put them in your drawers.

Like, that's the thing I always wish a robot would do for me. Yeah. I must concur with the ACFM line. We have a cupboard in this house, which is where the clean washing goes, it's called. And I was getting some washing in from May the other day. And I said, shall I put it in there? She's, don't put it in there.

It'll never come out. Give it to me. And it's true. Stuff goes in that cupboard. It never comes out, basically, because nobody. likes doing it. Yeah, no, but just to finish my point on this is that the whole issue here is that when you're, okay, yes, it can be satisfying. It is satisfying in many cases my experience, you know, to get something clean or to fix something or whatever. But it's, I find, but it's not intellectually

developing. Like it doesn't allow you to develop as a person and it takes you away from other things like you know relationships in your life or you know to actualize yourself as a complete human being which of course is the point of what it was supposed to do to housewives anyway is it's that kind of isolation so even if you're going to your shopping and you're meeting other people and you're meeting other housewives like you're not able to engage with the world at large as like a full you know human being in society no matter how it is how it is painted to you and the same goes for being able to get involved in political organization. Like if you want to spend your evenings doing Jeremy's favorite thing, going to meetings or whatever, you know, who's going to do the

cleaning and the washing and the cooking and all of that? And so I'm really interested in like how that relates to social reproductive work relates to our ability to actualize ourselves as what I call complete, complete beings in late capitalism. And I think, you know, it's fascinating. Something I constantly think about. There are parts of the house that I just will not clean, or I don't dust things as much as I'd like to, or I'd clean things thoroughly, because I want to be out in the world, meeting people, doing things, like doing politics, socializing, like, you know, having relationships, like, these things are more important to me. At the same time, like, everybody has that line, right, about, like, what's clean enough, like, what's healthy enough, etc. Do you know what I

mean. And so, like, I am very interested in, again, going back to the canteen's thing, which I wouldn't say as a trope. I'd say it's a refrain that I come back to. Yeah, refrain. That's a bit that's the word. Yeah. What happens when we collectivize, like, what happens when we collectivize these things and, and how capitalism, it's like in the interest of capitalism for not to be collectivized. Having said all of that, I come back to this question of like, is it again for feminism that some of these, processes, you know, whether it's like takeaway delivery food or like getting your laundry done for like a fiver, which you can now get done in London, apparently, on an app or whatever,

these sort of things, having it taken externalised, taken out of the house and done by wage labour. Like, is that a gain for feminism? Like, this is a question that I come back to. Because in principle, according to my, you know, political position, like, I want people to be paid for doing things. I don't want people to be exploited and paid ridiculously low wages, but I do want people to be paid. And so I do come back to that question and think, well, okay, well, if we were organizing, you know, in our, like, utopia, in our future, like, what would it look like? And I think what would make it different is, you know, you wouldn't have, you know, deliveroo and just eats, but you would have a canteen, you know, in terms of the food solution, you would have a canteen serving a choice of only three, like, decent things to eat, you know, on your high. street and you could be at home if you want to but you know you could be with other people and have it cooked for you and pay and pay very little perhaps like there would be a communal laundry

solution as well and a communal putting laundry away solution please in all you talk about that's what we need automation to do we need a laundry putting away robot that's how demand it's really really hard for robots to automate that you know they've put they've put loads on those research and we dream don't kill the dream but well i mean it's it's a sort of interesting point that like basically like, it's incredibly hard to automate social reproduction work. So the background to all of this is that like we're living through an age of economic stagnation, basically, the rates of growth, the rates of productivity, you know, the world scale have been declining for a long time. So like it underlies a lot, all sorts of problems that we come to talk about. And one of the,

I think we've talked about it before about this, you know, one of the, one of the, one of the, the explanations put forward is this, is that it's, you know, it's very easy to get, productivity gains in industry by, you know, you can invest in fixed capital automation, et cetera, and you get productivity gains. You've got huge productivity gains. But those productivity gains mean that less people are employed in production. And so people are, workers are pushed out of production and it shrinks as a proportion of like the workforce, etc. And then services grow. And it's like really, really hard to get automation in services, and particularly in like social reproductive work and particularly in interpersonal sort of work. And it's the,

usual sort of explanation for that is that like, well, because social reproductive work and like interpersonal services, they, they depend on like, it's like relations with humans. And so if there's a human doing it, the more people that they have to deal with, the worse the service gets. There was an article by Gabe Wynent fairly recently, Gabriel Wynent, who was sort of saying, like social reproduction theory could add a lot to that whole debate. They call it Bowman's Cost disease in economics, this, that why can you not? get productivity gains in services and social reproductive work. And so he puts forward this idea that, like, it's basically, it's that, you know, that dual

nature, you know, reproducing labour power, reproducing human beings. And like, it's a human being is like the limit, the human being, the bodies, you know, our bodies and our social needs, et cetera, the limit to capital. Like Marx talks about this in the book capital, in the chapter on the working day, where he says there's a limit to how much you can extend the working day, etc, etc. And Gabe Wyden and it says, yeah, but like it's, there's all sorts of other stuff to do with the human body, which means it is not, it makes it really hard to, basically not, not available for the sorts of like homogenization and rationalization that like capitalist automation needs, the drive for productivity that come from capitalist profitability needs. And that's because, you know, all sorts of things, you know, human bodies, uh, in relation to the natural cycles, etc. You know, that's not the homogenized time that. capital wants, et cetera. And there's just lots and lots of stuff about the human body and our lives, which are basically unknowable, you know what I mean? All sorts of stuff that's

going on in our inner minds, do you know what I mean? Even at this very moment, you know, my mind is wandering all over the place of all of these sorts of like psychological things from my background, perhaps, all this sort of stuff. It just means that like humans and like interpersonal relations are just really resistant to the sort of homogenization or rationalization of capital and that also means that like that sort of automating all of that stuff away even under under socialism or communism is basically you know that is basically unlikely collectivising is basically the solution that we'd want to do collectivising with the with space and room for like individual autonomy etc but like automation is basically not going to happen I think

yeah I think you're probably right I think that's definitely right but I want to I want to come back to Nardi's question about the gains for feminism, but to what extent is it a gain? This is one of the big questions that's opened up by both the theorists of domestic labour, like Sylvia Federici, and the social reproduction theorists, is the question as to whether the emancipation of women from the household and their entry into the workplace, whether it really did constitute a game, not just for feminism, actually, but also for the working class. Because, to put it simply, I mean, there's a liberal feminist narrative, according to which, the story of the transition from like the mid-60s to the present is one of unbroken progress and

unqualified progress, whereby people's expectations around gendered social roles have completely transformed entirely to women's advantage. And then there's an entirely pessimistic understanding. Well, obviously there's the conservative pessimistic understanding, but leaving that to one side, there's the, there's a Marxian understanding which says that basically what happened is that women were allowed to enter the labour market in order to drive down wages globally. And women entered the labour market at the same time as the automation of certain industrial processes. We often forget there was a huge wave of industrial automation in the 70s.

It meant that there was no longer any real advantage to capital, so women specialising in domestic labour instead of competing with men in the wider labour market. And basically what's happened is both wages. have been driven down and the family wage is no longer a phenomenon to the detriment of the working class generally. It's a huge loss for the working class that they don't loan, can no longer claim the family wage, meaning again the wage, which allows one wage to keep a family to a reasonable standard. And there's that very pessimistic account. And between those two polls, if you like, come a whole set of questions as to the, well, what is a gain and what isn't

again really. But Nadia, you pose the question. So what do you think is the answer? Well, I do think it's a gain in terms of liberating women from the chains of unpaid war and slavery to a certain kind of relationship because it's effectively like a woman as a slave. I think I brought in this question about like the being being being, I think I brought up this question of of being allowed to develop one's intellectual capacity as an interesting framing to think about this. Because it's, again, I go back to this refrain as, like, woman as female versus woman as person. Like, if woman is just, you know, like a thing that works at home, and because she's female, she has to do all of these different social reproductive tasks to reproduce the

husband, then she's not being actualized as a full, you know, human being. So I do think in a way, like it's a gain for feminism, but that doesn't mean that it's organised in a way that we would support. If we reframe that question of like, is it a game for women rather than feminine, is it a game for women, then you'd just come back with another question, wouldn't you? Well, which women? It certainly has been a game for some women, but it has not been a game for other women, basically. Because of the conditions under which that work is done, you know, the Uber driver is not self-actualizing. The cleaner probably isn't either, do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, I resist that slightly. I have to say, I resist that slightly because I think it's political to also like split women into different kinds of women. I understand your point of what you're trying to say, but I think, like, I think it in general is a gain for women, but I don't think it's necessarily a gain for society because of the way it's organized. Is it a good thing that women are no longer doing as a whole, as a mass, as a group of people,

like doing unpaid work at home to reproduce their husbands and not allowed to be like people in society? Like, yes, it is. Is it good that it's gone out and effectively it's workers, male and female, who are being exploited at very low wages to do this work, like under late capitalism? Like, no, that is not good because there is another solution which capitalism will not allow us to do. I think it's important to stress that for people like Batacharya, I mean, their point would be, look, there are whole categories of women who, especially poor women of colour who now they are having to do very intensive social reproductive labour cleaning and looking after other people's children under exhausting conditions and their like mothers and

grandmothers would have been housewives and just and probably would have preferred that and probably that was better for them their stress levels were lower their life expectancy and health expectations were actually better because the level the rate of exploitation wasn't as high and I think that's a reasonable point. I think it's also clearly true that, you know, it's a huge sociocultural and political shift that we've left, we've denaturalized, denormalized the idea, the assumption that social reproductive labor is kind of biologically necessarily always women's responsibility, that women can't participate in the labor market, et cetera.

So I think all those things can be true at the same time. It can be true that even if you're a very poor woman of color, you've got more chance of going to university and getting a professional job eventually now than you would have had 50 years ago when your chance would have been basically zero. I mean, it has to be then, it really depends where you are. I mean, it is true.

It really has to be said, like, a lot of this stuff, a lot of this stuff is coming out of the states, and that really isn't true. Like, really in the states, there are parts of the states, there are cities in the states where, like, even if you're a poor woman of color, like if you wanted to go to university, your chances were better in the early 60s,

like of getting a scholarship, going to a historically black college. There was all this new deal and great society programs protecting you, and you really are just worse off now, like on any measure, basically. And from that point of view, it's important to take on board those criticisms. But I don't think we have to observe all that and also deny the fact that, well, deny the fact that one of the major reasons for all of these changes is the political success of women's liberation as an emancipatory project.

Because the problem with the kind of Marxist pessimist reading of the whole situation is that it completely marginalises the idea that women's liberation was like an authentic and successful social movement, which I think it was. And I think you've got to be able to say all these things are true at the same time to some extent. But all struggles under capitalism means that when you win, you don't win on your own terms, basically. So, like, if we think about, is it a game for feminism or women, most social reproductive work still takes place in the house that's unwaged, but like a big, you know, this shift towards it, moving into the wage sphere. Like, in some ways, it's a big game because it makes it much more visible. It depersonalises it, right? So this is work. This is not something I do for my husband because of love, right? You know, it depersonalises that relationship, which can make it much more clear. And it also creates potentially, you know, the potential for the commonalities of those doing the work to become much more visible. You know, the housewife, doing the similar work to a housewife in a house next door

or down the street or in a different part of town, that needed, you know, a form of organisation, the consciousness raising group for them to come together and discuss that. That's not necessarily true. If, you know, people doing that work, you know, you can look at like the organising around cleaners, you know, justice for janitors or cleaners in all sorts of ways in terms of that. And I think you can imagine, I mean, we talked about this. the last shade, didn't we? You can imagine a situation in which we're not even in any kind of socialism. You're just in a less violently

unequal mode of capitalism. You can imagine a situation in which, yeah, we have moved into this situation where everyone has a cleaner and cleaner is actually a really good job. Like everyone has a cleaner and it's a pretty big chunk of your income paying your cleaner because you don't want to have to do it yourself, you'd rather have it done

by a professional. It's possible to imagine the society of that nature and the fact that we have, that's not where we've ended up, is part is because of all kinds of other circumstances that people are very familiar with. I mean, the other thing to think about is that, like, there are, like, global care chains, basically. So a lot of, like, they're sort of, like, there's this, in lots of areas of the world, there are, you know, women from the global South come and look after people's children,

and their children have to be raised. They can't raise their children. They have to be raised in a different part of the world. You know, so it's like the victories that we had from, you know, from the feminist movement, they're real victories, but they're victories that then get turned back against you, basically, or get caught up in all of these other inequalities, which haven't been addressed. And so it comes back in this sort of, like, new hierarchies and new distortions and that sort of stuff.

It doesn't mean you don't struggle. It just means, like, basically, that victory has changed the terrain upon which you can struggle for more. Some ways that's a benefit, some ways it's a loss. You know, it's like the commonalities between workers being visible. Well, if you're doing it through a platform app, Once again, that's a step backwards. You don't meet your other workers.

You just, you don't even meet a boss. You just, you know, you follow what's on the app, et cetera, et cetera. You're absolutely right, Kit, that the terrain of struggle has moved and, like, and like where the site of exploitation has, you know, moved. And that's a really important point about, like, you know, poor women doing the work that other women would have done. Like, you know, obviously that's what capitalism has done to it. But my point stands that the fact that less women in the world need to be chained to

the house, like as slaves to their husband, is as like a categorical, like, rule of numbers is a gain for women. You know, the fact that I don't, as I don't have to be married and serving my husband is a good thing. Like, sure, there are a lot of women who are still in that situation, you know, and I, and my politics means that I'm very, very focused on where this is happening and, like, liberating those women is, like, really important. But the fact that I don't have to do that is like a gain. Denatralising oppression is always good, isn't it, I think, right?

You know, so it's like it's not natural for women to have to do housework although, you know, there's, obviously there's a big backlash against that, but yeah, as that sort of reproductive work or large parts of it have moved out of the home, moved out of being naturalised, and moved into waged work, like that

raises ever sort of strategic problems, basically. One of the big problems around social reproductive work, but even seen in the wider, in the wider sense, so including things such as healthcare, teaching, et cetera, as well as like cleaning and these sorts of, these sorts of work in elder care, all of this, if we add all of that up, you know, that one of the, one of the difficulties faced by workers who work in that sort of section. And that, I just got, hang on, there's somebody coming down the, there's somebody

just coming into the room. Hang on, who's this? It's Mr. Stats. So I've got some stats here on the scale of like, if we include all of that, like healthcare education, food, accommodation, social work, elder care, that sort of stuff, currently in the G7 countries, these are stats from Helen Hess, an article by Helen Hester, currently it's between 23 and 28% of the workforce work in that sector in G7 countries. And just to put it in context, when manufacturing was like at its height in the 1960s in the US,

It only employed 30% of the workforce. So we can see how dominant that sector is, but the problem with that sector is it's really hard to exercise power. The way that manufacturing workers exercise their powers, they withdrew their labour, they stopped working and it brought the factory to a halt. If your labour is about, you know, caring for other people,

you know, the withdrawal of that labour will fall, first of all, it will fall, the impact of drawing your labour will fall on those you're caring for and probably care about. as well. It's a real impediment to being able to exercise the sorts of the sorts of workers' power that was exercised by manufacturing in the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, which is why a sex strike is so effective, so effective. Because if all women withdraw sex, like, that's a really effective way to get men to pay attention in general. Obviously, a percentage of population is not sleeping with women,

but, you know, there are ways, but there is a, you know, there is a point that you're making care, which is that, you know, you're not going to leave people to die. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the reasons, I mean, one of the reasons why nursing is so badly paid, partly because it's associated with women's work and so it devalued. But like, it's like, well, how do you exercise your industrial leverage as a nurse, basically? You know, really rare for nurses to go on strike on. It's become more common. But, you know, it's the same even for teachers and these sorts of things. I think that's true, actually. This is partly those nurses and teachers are the two conceitial.

of workers that I always think we just haven't really got anywhere in terms of tapping into the latent, the pools of latent sympathy for them in the public, you know, it's one of those things I just wish, if there were more hours in the day, I would definitely do. Like, I definitely, I'd want to do one day. I want to try and get some money from somewhere to set, but a campaign, you know, a campaign for progressive education, basically. I don't want to have to do it. I want to, I want to get, I just want it to happen. I want it to happen. There's a lot of things we want to happen. can't actually do ourselves. He's got too much laundry to fold. He's got too much laundry. There is. They seem it's laundry to fold. But I just think there's whole, the potential,

like, solidarity for teachers amongst parents is huge. And I think there's all kinds of, if you organise parents, they would engage in disruptive action on behalf of teachers. And I think the same is, the same is true of nurses. The same is true of nursing. That's the strategy that was developed in the US. So one of the pioneers of it was the Chicago teachers union in fact they're like really powerful and they they had this i think i've mentioned it before they've got this strategy called bargaining for the common good and it is all about mobilizing the rest of society mobilizing all the people that you're going to impact you're going to impact the teachers therefore you've got to take their needs on board in your demands that you exercise basically

i know it's true well in i mean in this country of course that you know the historic high point of this kind of thing is the 70s and there was there wasn't there were emerging practices we've mentioned mentioned on the show before, by workers who had more immediate industrial leverage and didn't have these care responsibilities, would take action on behalf of, for example, nurses. But that was all criminalised by Thatcher's criminalisation of secondary action, which the Blair government left illegal, and this government has no plans to legalise. As long as secondary union action is criminalised, which is not normal in an OECD country, for that to be illegal, then the most basic forms of workers' solidarity, and support of people who can't go on strike

for the reasons we've talked about are withdrawn. But the trade union leaderships in this country have been completely pathetic about trying to do anything creative along the lines of what the teachers have done in Chicago. I mean, I know from personal experience and experience of many friends of comrades and ours that you try and get the unions to do anything like politically creative

along those lines in this country. They just don't want to know, basically. They think that their idea, they think, well, that's the job of the Labour Party basically. The Labour Party isn't going to do it. We're not going to do it. Well, that's working well, isn't it? But like, the Chicago teaching has been really, really effective and, like, that strategy is really, really effective. And to the level of, like, people would go on strike with demands would be about the budget of the local state,

more into teaching, less into this, more into hell. Do you know what I mean? It just involves a, like, you know, a moving up in the level of things. beyond like sectoral interests because the sector if you just follow sexual interests you will lose basically because the people you will you will hurt will will be the ones who you know need your work with people you care for I mean in a very ACFM line this problem did you I don't I can't remember if you already said this year sometimes called is it just the love problem the love dilemma there is some late american labor theorists and that's what like that's what they call it and that's really it's the fact that you know the it's the the your love for your

the teachers love for their kids, the nurses love for their patients, means they can't go on strike. I think there is a powerful insight here that people do sort of love the people who do social reproduction for them. I mean, we talked about this before on the show. There's all kinds of ideological work done

to make people hate and resent teachers in this country, which I think they have to do because spontaneously people don't hate and resent teachers. But spontaneously people love teachers because they're the people who look after the kids all day. And I think there is, like real, there's these real feeling, and the symbolic status of nurses, you know, kind of in public imaginary, is the most obvious example of this. But we do sort of have spontaneous

feelings of love, which can easily turn into feelings of solidarity for the people who do social reproduction. And that's a potential resource to be exploited politically, I think. We should pitch a TV show to Channel 4 called the Love, Love Dilemma. And they'll think it'd be like some Love Island rip-off, but really it'll be a program about... Hardcore ideology. Industrial Strategy. This is ask you Ah!