them.
The Social Wage, Mode of Production Debate, and Patriarchy
Movements to expand the social wage, through paid parental leave and government‐provided childcare among other collective support for reproductive work, are long‐term components of socialist feminism (Fraser 2013). These movements within socialist feminism spurred innovations within Marxist feminist social reproduction theory. Marxist feminist analyses of free trade zones began with the admission that class politics are central to questions of social reproduction and the gendered oppression of women (Fernández‐Kelly 2000). Marxist feminist scholars did not simply expand the definition of “production” to include unpaid and racialized reproductive labor as its hidden center, but asked what it revealed about capitalism as a whole. Marxist feminist scholars who analyzed the experiences of women in the postcolonial Third World demanded increased attention to the landlessness of rural women, a large proportion of rural women, and the erasure of their work on subsistence family farms (Agarwal 1994). This erasure had two components: first, women's subsistence agricultural work folded into the logic of reproductive labor at large, as work unrenumerated by land title, wages, ownership of goods produced, or social value. Second, economic measurements of the rural economy used the family as the primary economic unit and erased the lives, labor and value of rural women (Beneria et al. 2016; Sen and Grown 1987).
Marxist feminism as a theoretical and activist framework became increasingly criticized by many feminists for relying solely on Marx's analysis of capitalism, and therefore missing the ways in which women's exploitation was a consequence of multiple forms of oppression. Instead of centering capitalism as the sole form of exploitation shaping women's lives, socialist feminists argued that patriarchy was as important for women's historical and contemporary oppression as Marxist analyses of capitalism. In the 1980s, Marxist feminists and socialist feminists in Euro‐America fiercely debated whether patriarchy was intrinsic to capitalism in what was called the mode of production debate (Kuhn and Wolpe 1982; Vogel 1983). The debate centered on whether patriarchy was an “extra‐economic” force used for labor control under capitalism, whether it was the systemic tool at hand to maximize capitalism's efficiency, or whether it was systemic to capitalism (Barrett 1980; Brenner 2000; Gibson‐Graham 1986). The corollary of this debate was a political one for working‐class women. Socialist feminists challenged the Marxist feminist precept that the overthrow of capitalism was a necessary first step for women's liberation and freedom (Delphy 1984). Socialist feminism in this debate framed women workers' class struggle as a betrayal, or at best, an unnecessary distraction. Instead they argued that women's oppression was primarily an ideological force that produced “woman” as a category of subjection (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Socialist feminists today have taken up the unitary or integrated theory (rather than the “dual systems theory”) for ongoing analyses that integrates patriarchy and capitalism. In fact, some feminist scholars argue that socialist feminism was an early feminist attempt to theorize the intersection of sexism, class oppression, and racism (Joseph 1981; Naples 2003).
Exchange Value, Surplus Value, and Social Reproduction Theory
Gayatri Spivak proposed an alternative reading of reproduction and production to shift the question of patriarchy and capitalism to questions of value. In her article, “Scattered speculations on the question of value,” she emphasized the imbricated quality of use value to exchange value in the international division of labor. Spivak reframed the binary opposition between economics and culture that was embedded in the mode of production debates about capitalism and patriarchy. Instead, she emphasized, “the complicity between cultural and economic value‐systems.” She cited the centrality of women in the international division of labor beginning in the mid‐1960s that relied on patriarchal social relations to produce women as super‐exploited workers (Spivak 1985, p. 83). She emphasized the “affectively necessary labor (that) brings in the attendant question of desire” (Spivak 1985, p. 80). Himani Bannerji raised another question about cultures of resistance that linked them decisively to the relations of production. In her critique of subaltern studies as culturalist, Bannerji says, “any project of decolonization which separates property and power from moral proprieties, avoids the issue of social justice” (Bannerji 2001, p. 72). These interventions stressed the necessary porousness of conceptual divisions between reproduction and production. Marxist feminists demanded a more careful analysis of how the affective, libidinal, and moral realms functioned in the service of capitalism. They sought to clarify the relationship between value, particularly exchange value and surplus value, and values, including ethics and use value, in capitalism to better attend to the desires and needs beyond that system.
Spivak's and Bannerji's attention to morality and affective labor raised concerns that are now central within social reproduction theory. Social reproduction theory attends to cultural and economic analyses of reproduction in global capitalism. In Tithi Bhattacharya's description, it “is primarily concerned with understanding how categories of oppression (such as gender, race and ableism) are coproduced in simultaneity with the production of surplus value” (Bhattacharya 2017, p. 14). Two key insights mark Marxist feminist debates about social reproduction in capitalism: first, the blurred distinctions between reproduction and production for the accumulation of capital on the one hand, and an accumulation that immiserates workers' lives on the other (Nash and Fernández‐Kelly 1983; Ong 1987). The second key insight of social reproduction theories systemizes Marxist feminist attention to social relations of racism, sexism, casteism, and religious bigotry as central relations that fuel the capitalist accumulation of wealth (Cooper 2017; Mojab 2015).
Affective Economies, Anticapitalism, and Anticolonialism
As economic relations and as embodied cultural logics, these forces affect women differentially between and within genders, on the basis of race, ableism, caste, and citizenship‐status. Affective economies include the shadow work, of deference, and the emotion work, of affection, in waged reproductive work and sex work (Boris and Parrenas 2010; Hochschild 1983). It also includes emotion and the erotic as necessary resources to reproduce resistance to capitalist regulation (Lorde 1984). Affective necessary labor, as Rosemary Hennessy writes, “permeates the circuit of nature‐bodies‐labor through which needs are met and social life is reproduced” (Hennessy 2013, p. 66).
Queer theories of sexuality raise possibilities for explicitly anticapitalist politics of embodiment and social organization that refuse normative social forms of belonging and desire (Ahmed 2006; Pitts‐Taylor 2016; Povinelli 2011). Roderick Ferguson, in his definition of queer of color critique, emphasizes its recognition of the displacement of normative regimes of gender and sexuality under capitalism, even as they are systemically co‐constituted. “As capital disrupts social hierarchies in the production of surplus labor, it disrupts gender ideals and sexual norms that are indices of racial difference” (Ferguson 2004, p. 17). Marxist feminists theorize how dominant regimes of gender alongside embodiment, ability, and disability are enforced through laws and prison (Ahrens 2008; Gilmore 2007; Spade 2011). Yet these differential theories of embodiment challenge the state and industries that profit from oppressive regimes of nationality, race, class, and gender. Anti‐racist transformations of reproductive technologies and sex practices seek to dismantle reproduction as the critical site for the replenishment of capitalist profit (Briggs 2017; Roberts 1997; Willey 2016).
Current Marxist feminist debates question “reproduction” as configured by relations of life‐being under capitalism; what Melissa Cooper calls Life as Surplus (Cooper 2008). The embodied, affective, and material sites of life‐being demand attention to interspecies coalitions and planetary values of existence (Hawthorne 2002). As Marxist feminists assail the environmental plunder of capitalism, as intrinsic to its ongoing primitive accumulation, they seek answers outside global commodity exchange (Tsing 2005). They theorize an alternative ecologically synergistic economy led by reproductive workers in their greatest numbers, including domestic and care laborers, peasant farmers, and indigenous hunters‐gatherers (Salleh 2011).
Anticolonial women's movements, from
