Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.) - Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

Social Reproduction Theory

Remapping Class,
Recentering Oppression

Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya

Foreword by Lise Vogel

First published 2017 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

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Copyright Tithi Bhattacharya 2017

Foreword Lise Vogel 2017

Front cover image: Alone we are powerless, together we are strong (1976) See Red Womens Workshop. The Posters by See Red Womens Workshop are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareALike 3.0. Unported License.

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 9989 8 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 9988 1 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0157 9 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0159 3 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0158 6 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

For Shayari and Bill.

And for every woman who has been patronised while trying to change the world.

1. Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory
Tithi Bhattacharya

2. Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism
Nancy Fraser

3. Without Reserves
Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman

4. How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class
Tithi Bhattacharya

5. Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory
David McNally

6. Children, Childhood and Capitalism: A Social Reproduction Perspective
Susan Ferguson

7. Mostly Work, Little Play: Social Reproduction, Migration, and Paid Domestic Work in Montreal
Carmen Teeple Hopkins

8. Pensions and Social Reproduction
Serap Saritas Oran

9. Body Politics: The Social Reproduction of Sexualities
Alan Sears

10. From Social Reproduction Feminism to the Womens Strike
Cinzia Arruzza

This volume came together through ongoing conversations, explorations and engagements among the contributors. It is such collaborations that made this volume possible.

I am grateful for a grant from the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University and generous contributions from the Founders College at York University that allowed us to host a workshop on social reproduction theory in May 2016. Kole Kilibarda ensured the success of that workshop with his unstinting hard work and thoughtful comments at sessions.

David Shulman at Pluto Press is not only one of the best but also perhaps the most patient of editors I have worked with. Sarah Greys wonderful work proved that it makes a great difference when even the copyeditor for a book is a Social Reproduction feminist!

Thanks are due to the Historical Materialism conference, which has, over the years, allowed many of us to explore Marxist ideas without fear of heresy hunting. Many of the ideas and essays in this volume were presented and/or seeded at the conference.

The editors at Viewpoint magazine helped me clarify my own thoughts regarding class formation. I am thankful to them for letting me reproduce my essay for this volume. Thanks are also due to New Left Review (100: JulyAugust 2016), where Nancy Frasers essay in this volume was first published.

Several friends have read drafts of these essays and/or patiently answered my questions regarding several aspects of social reproduction theory. Colin Barker and Charlie Post have always been there to read and comment, whenever asked, usually at unreasonably short notice. Hester Eisenstein is someone I continue to learn from; her friendship and support have sustained both the volume and its editor. Nancy Holmstrom, Cindi Katz, Sara Farris, and Kevin Floyd are friends and comrades to whom I owe much. Their work provides much of the analytical scaffolding on which this volume stands. Mike McCarthy was very generous with his time and insights.

I have been talking to Gareth Dale for over two decades, sometimes about social reproduction theory and sometimes not, both to my benefit.

Also, 2017 marks 150 years from the first publication of Volume 1 of Capital, the one text to which this volume perhaps owes the greatest debt. Chris Harman helped me understand parts of that text in my twenties. I still miss being able to pick up the phone to ask Chris how to make sense of a difficult passage.

I could not write this book without Bill and I would not write it without Shayari. Every day they re-enchant the world for me.

And because of them, every day, I recapitulate to hopes about its future.

What a pleasure it is for me to welcome this important and timely collection of essays. Social Reproduction Theory is probably the first book to draw on the past decades resurgent interest in developing a coherent Marxist-feminist understanding of everyday life under capitalism. And who better to edit it than Tithi Bhattacharya, herself operating on the cutting edge of recent work on social reproduction theory.

The ten essays in Social Reproduction Theory address a range of questions. But one way or another, each contributor tackles the thorny problem of explaining just what social reproduction theory is. Not surprisingly, they do not always agree. Having myself had a go at this demanding task 35 years agoin Marxism and the Oppression of Women, originally published in 1983Im sympathetic with their difficulties. At the same time, I have to recognize that the context in which this work is being developed has markedly changed, and in ways I find very exciting. First, people interested in these questions today benefit from a more developed understanding of Marxism and of history than what was available to us decades ago. And second, they appear to be connected to one another and to the nascent social movements of the twenty-first century, again in contrast to the relative isolation many of us felt in the late 1970s and after.

As proponents of social reproduction theory, the authors are wrestling with both new and old challenges. One of the oldest debates among womens liberationists concerned dualism, or dual-systems theory. By the early 1980s, the verdict was in, at least among Marxist feminists, who shared a desire to replace the dualism of earlier analyses with what they called a unitary account. To put it another way, instead of conceptualizing social reproduction as having two component aspects (for example, production of commodities and reproduction of labor power), they sought to develop an approach that would enclose both production and reproduction within a unitary framework. This is still easier said than done, as several of the essays in Social Reproduction Theory show. The pull of dual-systems thinking remains powerful, something that requires constant vigilance.