unpacking social/labor power reproduction
I wrote nearly all of my last post, on Rafael Khachaturian's chapter in the capitalist state book, yesterday. I finished earlier today and sent it out. This evening I had some spare time and continued to have partial thoughts echoing in my head that I wanted to flesh out more fully by writing, so here we are, another post. (“And so passed / The time given to me on earth.” https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/)
In that last post mentioned I came up through different corners of marxism than Rafael and as a result I have some confusions and/or quibbles with some of the terms and concepts. I have in mind specifically the terms crisis, social reproduction, and reproduction of labor power. (I don’t think Rafael uses that last one actually, I’ll explain in a minute why it’s on my mind.) I’m going to come back to crisis, maybe here, maybe in a later post, and start with social reproduction. Just to be clear I don’t disagree with anything that I think Rafael is actually arguing, I just think these are terms that I want to think through further.
The term social reproduction is a little ambiguous in the words itself: is ‘social’ the subject doing the reproducing (so it means ‘reproduction by society’ - in which case we can ask who or what gets reproduced) or is ‘social’ it the object that gets reproduced (so it means ‘reproduction of society’ - in which case we can ask who or what does the reproducing)? My impression is that often the term is used in a way that doesn’t resolve the ambiguity - it often refers to unwaged labors important for a wide range of reasons (typically these are feminized labors, the paradigm cases being housework and childcare), though it’s also sometimes used for waged labors that share some degree of similarity (again, typically feminized work), with both often called care-giving. Kirstin Munro has a very good chapter (in the same volume that Rafael’s chapter and my chapter are in) getting into some of this. Two related key points her chapter makes are that much of this activity is directed at reproducing labor power as a commodity available on the labor market, and that this activity is often subordinating/hierarchical/disciplinary/oppressive, and should not be just celebrated or romanticized. (It’s the reference to ‘reproducing labor power’ in that chapter that puts it on my list to discuss here, as that term is also ambiguous.) That seems to me an important point when talking, as Rafael (rightly and insightfully) does about a shift away from a state priority on social reproduction related to neoliberalism.
In important respects neoliberalism is just straightforwardly meaner and worsened people’s lives. Redistributive policies, or rather, the money and resources redistributed by those policies, have sometimes been conceptualized under the term ‘the social wage’, which is a good clarifying phrase insofar as it makes austerity measures analogous to wage cuts. That said, robust state provision of things people need sets up robust state power over people via that control over access to needed goods and services. The personnel in whom that power is concentrated have not always been popular, to put it mildly. (I briefly had a job organizing hospital janitors and cafeteria workers, low paid people, often racialized minorities, who often lived in low income housing. At one point the lead organizer I worked under said, in a half joke but only half joke, that in my tie and sunglasses I looked like a cop and that would be a problem when I knocked on people’s doors to talk to them about the organizing drive. I said that this would be offset by the organizer I was paired with looking very friendly, and my lead said ‘no, she looks like a social worker and that’s worse - the cop at the door might take you to jail, the social worker at the door might take your kids away.’) This is not at all to speak against the social wage, it’s just to say that - as with literal wages - the institutions that pay the social wage have significant power over the people paid. That’s just baked in to the literal wage and the social wage as a social relationship, just as it’s baked into the family or household: whoever controls or influences someone else’s access to means of subsistence has pretty serious power in their hands. As such, while neoliberalism involves a general downward slide, we shouldn’t romanticize the pre-neoliberal era and should recognize that reformist projects for redistribution in capitalism, while better than the austerity they oppose, are also projects for setting up forms of power over working class people (that’s not to say we should oppose such projects, far from it, it’s to say it’s important to get those projects rights - they should be projects of collective democratization of social life, which is to say, building popular power). I’m meandering away from the point I wanted to make a bit.
Getting back to the concept of social reproduction, one meaning of the term, as discussed in Kirstin Munro’s chapter, is the reproduction of society. Insofar as any society exists, it sustains itself over time. Insofar as different kinds of society have different modes of production - capitalist vs non-capitalist societies - they’ll tend to reproduce themselves in different ways, ie, capitalist societies reproduce themselves in capitalist ways. A little more specifically, in capitalist societies, the reproduction of society takes place to a significant degree through the activities of private productive units seeking to profit, to turn money into more money. (Tony Smith calls this the valorization imperative, because Marx refers to capital as value valorizing itself, ie, value becoming more value.) The actions of the set of these private productive units aren’t the only actions that reproduce society but that set is central to that reproduction and subordinate other activities to an important degree.
I bring this up not out of sheer pedantry and interest in terminology, but because there’s a really important issue here, that of social murder. The ongoing reproduction of capitalist society has baked into it the non-reproduction - in various meanings of that term including literal deaths - of some of its component parts. My friend Rob Hunter told me this powerful phrase, I forget where it’s from: the death of the cell is the life of the body. The life of capitalism over time, its ongoing existence, includes many, many deaths of actual people with names, faces, loved ones. The system is a death machine and its death-dealing is not a problem for the system, no more than an earthquake is a problem for the earth’s crust, or a tidal wave is a problem for the ocean. One result of the reproduction of society being an ongoing process of many people surviving and many people dying, all largely for reasons they can barely control, is that people scramble to be among those permitted to have a chance at surviving rather than those consigned to dying.
There’s a similar ambiguity in the term ‘reproduction of labor power.’ Part of what’s unique to capitalism is that class relations are significantly mediated by markets: class in capitalism is significantly organized by the fact that a great many social products and great deal of what this society defines as wealth takes the form of commodities. This includes people insofar as workers sell our labor power as a commodity to employers. Now, the capitalist system needs labor power, to be sure, but there’s not really a systemic imperative to preserve/produce/reproduce labor power, no more than storms have imperatives to maintain the energy that animates them - the system isn’t conscious. Rather, there’s just a pressure acting on all productive units to procure labor power as a commodity. People are present in the labor market as sellers of labor power - providers of labor power to the procuring capitalists - because that’s basically mandatory to have a shot at a decent life. There is a kind of imperative to maintain that reality - the mandatory nature of market participation is maintained by the centrality of commodity production (don’t work, don’t eat!), and by preventing non-commodity/non-market means of meeting needs from getting too widespread.
What I’m fumbling for here is that what gets reproduced is not the set of people who are the working class, but rather a well-stocked labor market, ie, the availability of labor power for capitalists. If workers are oversupplied relative to capitalist needs, they can kick rocks and die, according to the cruel logic of the system. If workers are undersupplied relative to capitalist needs, then populations who are less pressured to be in the labor market find themselves newly so pressured - this is significantly the history of women, child, and elderly laborers and this has played out recently in the US with the erosion in many states of child labor laws. That the supply and demand for labor power as a commodity tends to vary by time and place also has important effects on immigration and immigration policy as well, again generally cruelly.
That’s all to say that the reproduction of labor power is not at all the reproduction of all members of the working class, it’s a process of making sure there is a population of employees available to employers and also killing a lot of people in various ways at various speeds, and the latter facilitates the former. The threat of being pushed into the pool of social nobodies consigned to the worst forms of deprivation helps keep the social nobodies that are the rest of the working class in line. (I literally would quit my job tomorrow if I won the lottery, but my job is the main source of income for my family and I, plus we need the health insurance.)
This may be the same point, I’m unsure, but there’s are also some important differences here in the scale/scope of analysis. State policies do sometimes seek to secure the existence of relatively orderly labor markets, meaning they orient to a large scale. I talk about this in my book and borrow a bit from Michel Foucault, specifically his term ‘biopolitics.’ The term refers to the management of large scale populations and their qualities - birth rates, aggregate health, etc. This is very important historically and in the present and is a very important part of how the state serves the reproduction of capitalist society. Again though, making sure there is a healthy enough and properly socialized population to meet capitalists’ needs is fully compatible with the reality that there’s a regular discarding of (very large) minority populations on a regular basis: biopolitics simply does not require meeting everyone’s needs.
Given the role of private productive units in capitalism and of private purchasing of means of subsistence, it’s likely necessarily the case - and certainly it is often the case historically - that the large scale state project of securing an available population of sellers of labor power plays out via the mediation of private productive units governed but not absolutely controlled by the state. I talked about this in my book in relation to workers compensation laws. Those laws made each employer legally responsible for some of employees’ costs resultant from workplace injuries, and so provided a mechanism for securing the reproduction of a reasonably well-stocked labor market. That mechanism absolutely did not and does not secure the reproduction of - ie, protect - every single worker so much as it works to keep the costs of death and injury from becoming so high and widespread that the disrupt labor markets. Anyway, in the book I talk about how linking individual workplaces to the partial payment for injury costs created a proliferation of bounded local pools which employers gatekept, which means there was also a proliferation of cracks that people could fall into between those bounded pools. More generally, the fact that the valorization imperative is central to capitalism and that production is conducted largely via private units, means that state policies oriented to ensuring the reproduction of labor power in the aggregate - as a commodity available to employers - have a ceiling on them. If they’re too generous to their recipients, well, why work? If they’re too costly or generate too much unpredictability for employers then they disrupt capital accumulation, leading to a) powerful actors being angry at state personnel and sometimes becoming organized to shape policy and b) businesses going under and so some people losing jobs and thus incomes and thus access to means of subsistence. So in capitalism social policy that can be reasonably called reproductive (either social reproduction or labor power reproduction) or protective will tend to have as its real object of reproduction/protection the ongoing accumulation of capital and 1) insofar as it reproduces/protects actual people the latter tends to be a vehicle for the former and 2) capitalist social relations set a ceiling on the quality of life to be had via those policies. (I’ll stress that this isn’t as static as it sounds but rather is a dynamic process: the ‘ceiling’ gets worked out over time historically above all through conflict.)
Again I’m meandering from the point: scale/scope. Let me try to come at this by analogy. An individual capitalist is unlikely to and certainly is not at all required to think ‘I’m a participant in social production’ let alone to act in a way that promotes social production going well. To the contrary, the gist of much of Marx’s writing is that capitalists are likely to be in effect antisocial even relative to capitalism’s social standards: no capitalist is required to maintain the market and often individual capitalists will act in ways that erode the market in general. Part of what the state does is discipline capitalists to the pressures and imperatives of capitalist social relations. That’s part of why capitalists often have what can seem at superficial glance (including the superficial glance of many individual capitalists!) like anti-statist politics. They’re not good citizens of capitalism, so to speak, but resist the system’s imperatives in their class-position-specific-ways (often that resistance is very reactionary; not all resistance is liberatory, far from it). All each individual capitalist really needs to do is navigate the particular corner of capitalist society they find themselves in. If there’s any processes working to mold the larger social whole, those processes are either located in the state or are the emergent result of actions conducted for smaller and more localized purposes. Marx uses the term ‘behind the back’ to get at this. And as I said, a significant subset of the actual practices of state efforts to manage the social whole are practices rooted in shaping the behavior of individual capitalists, trying to get them to pursue their local purposes in THIS way rather than THAT way and those efforts rarely fully succeed.
That is to say that often the mechanisms that reproduce labor power as a commodity are localized - or, to put it another way, the reproduction of labor power in the aggregate is a fractured or dissociated process to a significant degree. That’s similar to (and significantly arising from) the fact that social production in capitalism is itself significantly fractured or dissociated because it occurs to a significant degree via private productive units whose main means of coordination is market exchange. And market exchange tends for various reasons tends to limit and frustrate coordination, and also works to reduce (or at least significantly qualify and organize/channel, in a negative way) the disposition to even attempt to coordinate. And so lots of localized processes add up to reproducing the general availability of labor power as a commodity while simultaneously hurting a ton of actual working class people in various ways. Trying to illustrate this as I’m aware this is overly abstract: think about schools. In the US to lack a diploma is to have a harder time in the labor market. And schools have a rate on a regular basis of people not granted that diploma. That many people get diplomas and some don’t, that’s the actual process of schooling: in important respects the failure to award some people diplomas isn’t a failure of the educational system, it is the working of the educational system. Likewise that there’s an unemployment rate as a normal part of capitalist society isn’t a failure of any system (though it certainly fails in another sense insofar as there’s a lot of additional suffering built in), it’s part of the ordinary working of the social system. This is a wonky way to put it, but there’s an important split between each and all in capitalism. The ‘all’ of the population, of society, of the working class, isn’t really all meaning each and every. It means ‘most’, the socially validated majority, the people given a chance to survive, while a minority but still numerically very large other subset gets fucking wrecked. That each/all split in capitalism is part of what I’ve been fumbling with here regarding social reproduction and labor power reproduction.
None of this is to say I’m disagreeing with either of the chapters I mentioned. I’m not. They’re great and I don’t think they make mistakes regarding the terms I’ve been banging on about tediously. I just think there are important nuances to these terms that have a bearing on how to understand the ongoing presence of mass killing in various forms in capitalism and on the changing (non)consequences of social murder for state personnel and capitalists. This is already too long so I’ll stop here and save a similarly tedious mulling of the term ‘crisis’ for another time. One very last thing, just parking it here in case it’s relevant or any use: I got into the issue of ‘social reproduction’ in my review of Søren Mau’s superb book. (https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/) To quote the review:
“Mau describes class domination as being a division between “those who control the conditions of social reproduction and those who are excluded from direct access” to those conditions. I don’t think it makes sense to say that capitalists control social reproduction. Society’s reproduction occurs through the ongoing and crisis-prone accumulation of capital by many productive units, as other parts of Mau’s book make clear. As such, in capitalism social reproduction is to an important degree under no one’s control. (The ambiguity in some of Mau’s usage of the term ‘social reproduction’ may come from his borrowing from recent work under the heading of social reproduction theory. On the importance of the distinction between the reproduction of labor power and the reproduction of society, and on the role of the state in the reproduction of capitalist society, see: Kirstin Munro, “‘Social Reproduction Theory,’ Social Reproduction, and Household Production”, Science & Society, Vol. 83, No. 4, October 2019, 451–468. https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/10.1521/siso.2019.83.4.45) Class domination within capitalism is rooted in market dependency, and whether people’s access to money arises from the sale or from the purchase of labor power. Members of the proletariat, living off the sale of labor power, face the significantly greater threat of sudden and intense hardship than capitalists, and those threats give capitalists terrible power.”
Alright, I’ve tested your patience too long!
Keep on trucking,
Nate