Marnie Holborow, Homes in Crisis Capitalism: Gender, Work and Revolution, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Hbk £76.50, ebook £61.20. Paperback will be 2025!
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RATING: 92
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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Three books that have appeared recently, taken together, provide a basis for a new approach to critical global political economy free of the lingering effects of obsolete assumptions and perspectives left over from the last century. Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion (2023) is one; Gabriella Alberti and Devi Sacchetto, The Politics of Migrant Labour (Bristol University Press, 2024), which will be the subject of my next review, is another. Mau sets out brilliantly the manner in which the essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production reconfigure the material conditions of social reproduction, and work to turn people into workers and reproduce them as such, while Alberti and Sacchetto provide a richly empirical and theoretically sophisticated analysis of the production and reproduction of the global working class, with an emphasis on the politics and political economy of mobility across the world market. Holborow's Homes in Crisis Capitalism stands alongside them, complementing them with its superb analysis of the contemporary relationship between households and capital. Holborow addresses the themes of social reproduction and the care economy from the standpoint that today 'households [in the Global North] are more diverse and conform less to the traditional two-parent, heteronormative nuclear family model' than in earlier generations, so that a fresh look at these issues needs to begin from the perspective of the diversity of forms of household. It will be no surprise to anyone, of course, that the heteronormative nuclear family is far from being the dominant form even in the Global North, let alone in the Global South. But it still features as a point of reference, as do other transient referents such as the 'male breadwinner', the 'standard employment contract', and the 'welfare state'. There is an urgent need to rebase the critique of political economy afresh for the global circumstances of the 21st century, rather than rethink it through the categories of a different time, and between them Mau, Holborow, and Alberti and Sacchetto lay the groundwork for doing so.
Holborow starts from the position that ‘homes’ are varied – some institutional, and by no means all the rest housing a ‘family’. She reminds us that: ‘Taking the longer historical view, households in the past have varied so significantly, both in gender status and childrearing arrangements, as to make claims about one type of family absurd’ (60). She centres her critique on the idea of the 'nuclear family' (a household constituted by a heterosexual couple with children) not only because it is no longer the majority household type, but also because of the way in which it is still deployed ideologically as a norm. Specifically, the ‘ideal of a two-parent nuclear, middle-class, suburban and white family, with men as the sole wage earner and women devoting themselves to taking care of the home and children, was [and is] a class and racial construction’ (58). At the same time she insists throughout on the fundamental differences between working-class families on the one hand and middle- and upper-class families on the other, and addresses changing patterns in this and other areas on the basis of the proposition that ‘the social relations of the capitalist system are what determine family and household arrangements’ (19). She takes from Engels his historical materialist perspective on change over time, his fundamental contrast between bourgeois and proletarian families respectively, and the nuanced approach to the principal components of male privilege that this generated. She takes a global perspective from the start, in particular as regards flows of labour migration across the world market, and the role they play in what is now clearly the global political economy of family life. And the book is bang up to date, focusing on COVID and post-COVID developments without losing sight of change over the longer term. In addition, it is clearly written; it displays discriminating judgement and common sense throughout; it is short enough to serve very well as an introductory text while opening out at the same time to more advanced debates; and it is grounded in an excellent range of secondary literature, some of which I list below. In short, it is a very useful text indeed, and why it is not available as a paperback, I have no idea. It would sell like hot cakes.
Holborow highlights throughout the particular burden placed upon working-class women in relation to the maintenance of homes, insisting at the outset that the latter have become ‘people’s social safety net of last resort' as a consequence of the 'expanded care functions of homes in neoliberal capitalism’ (3). But she does not take the home, the family, or gender as the first point of reference, proposing instead to understand social reproduction as part of the totality of capitalist relations:
'I take issue with some social reproduction theorists who propose recentring social reproduction alongside commodity production at the core of the capitalist economic system. I understand social reproduction not alongside capitalist production but shaped by it. Modifications and changes to social reproduction systems – whether health, education, welfare or homes – have occurred because of capital’s differing needs regarding labour supply, and from new developments in capitalist production and economy. They have also taken place because of political contestation and mass movements against the old sexist social reproductive order’ (5).
Against this background, Chapter One explores further the broad judgement that ‘the social relations of the capitalist system are what determine family and household arrangements’ (19), in a way that explicitly avoids the ideas of either a strictly one-way relationship or, crucially, a necessary congruity between social reproduction on the one hand, and capitalist accumulation on the other. On the one hand, 'exploitation in capitalism takes the form of the extraction of surplus value by the capitalist class from the working class', and the wage is related to individualised social reproduction in that 'a base line is established around what is needed for the reproduction and replenishment of labour power': 'The worker complies with this exploitative wage regime, not through repression or rules, nor even the force of prevailing norms but, in Marx’s memorable phrase, through ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’ (on which see Mau, Mute Compulsion). But while wages are 'the crucial condition of household social reproduction', ‘whatever the social role that families play objectively, it is obvious that nobody sets up home or decides to have children with the idea that they are providing the maintenance of the workforce or reproducing the next generation of workers’ (20). And more broadly, at a mid-point in an excellent reflection on the relationship between 'homes' and 'work' today:
'Unpaid labour in the working-class home is not as directly economic nor as straightforwardly profit-making as wage labour in capitalist production. Household social reproduction is dependent on capitalist production in so far as it is mediated by the wage, itself constituted in capitalist production. Furthermore, social reproduction which takes place in the home is not the only means by which labour is made available to capitalism, immigration being an obvious exception. More substantially, attempts to equalize social reproduction to commodity production tend towards an over-functionalist, one-dimensional economic picture of social reproduction, implied by Bhattacharya’s term ‘people making’. Social reproduction in homes ... is far from static and constitutes a social unit with changing functions and composition. Social reproduction may indeed be one ‘condition of possibility’ of capitalist production, but it involves a more complex reality than merely one social structure articulating with another. Processes of social reproduction form part of the overall social relations and often come into conflict with what capital needs at any one time. This is more evident in systems of health and education, but it is also true for households. The tensions and contradictions, including ideological and political ones, between homes and families and the capitalist system, are many and can give rise to social instability’ (23-4).
This leads to a discussion on 'childbearing and capital's needs', which is developed further in Chapter Six. For now, it is important to note a crucial point: ‘Women have far fewer children today’ (25).
Following this overview, Chapter Two provides a balanced evaluation of Engels' 'first Marxist attempt to grasp historically the overlap of social and gender relations’ (37). The core strengths of his analysis are the insistence on the fundamental difference between working class and bourgeois families, to which Holborow returns throughout (39-42; cf. 50, 56, 64, 68, and Chapter Five), and his insistence that the patriarchal family was neither universal historically, nor a permanent feature of capitalism: 'the accumulated growth of women in paid work, as Engels foresaw, has contributed to the unravelling of old rigidly binary gender norms and to the breakdown of the dominance of the nuclear family and has led to changed social and political expectations’ (49). This leads Holborow to identify a 'deep irresolvable contradiction' in contemporary capitalism, and to deploy the base-superstructure metaphor to examine it further:
‘The phenomenon of growing numbers of women in paid work ... brings to the fore the contradiction at the heart of the capitalist family – that capital requires more workers including women, but refuses to provide extra social services and support for care and domestic work. This deep, irresolvable contradiction and the social tensions that it creates have become more apparent during the multifaceted social crises of the 2020s. ... The value of the superstructure–base description in relation to the family and other social reproduction domains, as Chris Harman highlighted, is that it allows for the differentiation between capitalist social relations, which are subject to constant change, and the capitalist mode of production which, outside revolutions, forms the relatively stable basis for the whole social order. Those who seek to recentre social reproduction at the heart of the capitalist economy overlook this vital distinction and instead present a model which tends to lend to systems of social reproduction too much permanency and fixed economic functionalism. Situating social reproduction as part of the superstructure takes into account the constantly changing character of the different components of social reproduction – not only the people-care that takes place in the home, but also health, education and welfare systems. Indeed, individual households in capitalism are undergoing significant changes in composition, experiencing a deep crisis in the maintenance of their living standards, and bearing the brunt of weakened health services, social services and care services. As the privatization of care has become entrenched across societies of the Global North, as gender inequality and discrimination persist, the demand to shift the burden of social reproduction away from individual homes to socially provided facilities becomes a vital political demand for the whole of the working class. Capitalism has proved unable to provide even modest advances in this area because care on the cheap in a highly individualized form is what works best for capitalist profit accumulation. Yet this individualized form of care is also pulled in contradictory directions. Capitalism needs care on the cheap, but it also needs ever more waged female labour and one is potentially undermined by the other' (49-51).
I shall suggest in conclusion that this contradiction is not so deep and irresolvable for capital as Holborow suggests. But still, the case could not be more clearly put.
The following four chapters address related themes: homes and ideology; work in the home and care on the cheap; homes within a new working class; and 'the contradictions of home life in capitalism', and a conclusion follows. All in all, they strip away the accumulated residues of debates from different times, and lay down a clear and comprehensive foundation for exploring the relationship between homes and capitalism today, this being the great contribution that Holborow makes. Chapter Three makes the case that the 'force of the ideological construct of the family resides in its claimed universality, although its assumed characteristics stem from the white, upper-and middle-class family', and highlights the way in which this obscures the distinction between working-class and middle- and upper-class families respectively, the first a source of labour, and the second a ‘contractual means of protecting and amassing wealth’ (56). As she points out, the ideal of a two-parent nuclear, middle-class, suburban and white family, with men as the sole wage earner and women devoting themselves to taking care of the home and children, 'continues to inform assumptions about family life', not least in the minds of policy makers:
'Homes as consisting of a white, cisgender man and woman and their biological children remain the default norm even in the EU. A 2016 overview of ‘family-friendly’ policies in Europe produced by the European Commission [Latest edition, with the same cover, European Commission 2018] displayed on its cover a photo of two pairs of white hands encircling a cut-out of very clearly a woman and man holding hands with two children’, despite the fact that:
'The proportion of live births outside marriage across the EU stood at 42 per cent in 2018, nearly a fifth more than in 2000. In 2013, single-person households accounted for almost one-third of the private households across EU countries. Later figures have single persons constituting slightly more than half of the households in Paris and four German cities. Census data from virtually any European country show that today’s homes and households are married couples, lone parents with children, (increasingly) cohabiting couples with children, single people with no children, same-sex couples with or without children, blended families, adoptive families, non-binary or trans people with or without children, intergenerational with grandparents living in the home or with children returned home as adults. Such a range of home living arrangements clearly demonstrates that the nuclear family is only one household-type amongst many, and a type on the wane, certainly in the Global North and, in some countries, associated more with affluent, college-educated sections of society' (59). And as elaborated further below, the Global South 'has an average household size of around six people, often spanning three generations'; the average is just over three in North America; in Europe and the United States two-parent households account for only one-third of all people; and only a quarter of Germany's households are families with children (119).
Holborow goes on to note the affinity between neoliberalism and the promotion of [heterosexual nuclear] 'family values', but at the same time she draws on Melanie Heath's review of Jaye Cee Whitehead's The Nuptial Deal: Same-Sex Marriage and Neoliberal Governance (Heath, 2014) to suggest that 'in the current political climate, of offloading more caring responsibilities onto families, same-sex marriage becomes a response to a real social need. Neoliberal capitalism thus reinvents the family as "diverse", to include all homes in this key unit of consumption to shore up the marketization of social life' (63). As Heath summarises: Whitehead 'convincingly shows that the current political and social climate that promotes neoliberal contraction of the social safety net and outsources caring responsibilities onto families makes the nuptial deal too enticing to refuse. There are few alternatives to gaining the benefits from the only state sanctioned care structure - marriage - that also offers a sphere of privacy without direct state surveillance' (Heath 2014: 160). So, Holborow concludes: ‘The adaptability of the family challenges views based on patriarchy which see the sexual division of labour exclusively as a patriarchal set-up to preserve male positions to the disadvantage of women. Rather, the model of the capitalist home can be refashioned to absorb social change through constantly reinventing itself. As long as homes continue to follow the neoliberal model of self-sufficiency, new types can be accommodated’ (63). In another twist, bourgeois households increasingly deviate from the 'nuclear' model in that they have become 'dependent on private labour and migrant workers' to perform domestic and care work (65); and here Holborow draws on Sara Farris's study of 'femonationalism' (2017), which 'shows that the EU integration framework has the subtext that employment in paid labour will "rescue" [migrants and Muslim women] from the backward conservatism of Islamic patriarchy. Ironically, the "gender equality" agenda of the EU is met through a policy which actively directs migrant women towards the care and domestic sectors, which feminists have long decried for being highly gendered' (67; cf. 75). "Home", in short, 'ideologically constructed as a uniform entity, is ... a starkly different experience according to social class and race’ (70).
Chapter Four, 'Work in the Home, Care on the Cheap and How Things Could Be Different', opens by noting the consequences of increased entry of women into higher education and the paid workforce without public provision of support:
‘[T]he system’s refusal to invest in comprehensive public provision of different forms of care has maintained a separation of paid from unpaid work and further embedded gender discrimination in the labour market. Change to the reliance on individualized and marketized care, the last few decades have demonstrated, is beyond what capitalism can or is disposed to offer. Yet only this can begin to both restore people-care to the central position that it should have in any society and allow women to be free from a major source of gender oppression’ (71).
The centre-piece of the chapter is a sensible discussion of unpaid work in the home, building on the important clarification that:
'On the one hand, because it does not generally produce goods for exchange, it is immune from the law of value and market competition. On the other, it is shaped by its function of producing labour power. Unpaid work in the home and paid work in the production process are bound together in capitalism, with one sort of work providing the replenishment and reproduction for workers in the other ... In other words, unpaid work and paid work are linked but distinct. Whereas exchange values are produced in the workplace, the home produces use-values, concrete things that satisfy human needs. Just because the whole of society is organized to produce profit does not mean that every social relation produces value in the same way. The presence of unpaid labour in the home does not make it equivalent to exploitation in the workplace, even though this also contains an element of unpaid labour (that which is appropriated by the capitalist). Presenting both kinds of work as the same, as Aaron Jaffe (2020) shrewdly observes, denies not only the specific nature of surplus value in capitalism but also the class relation which makes its accumulation possible' (75-6).
'Work in the labour process and work in the home,' then, 'are not subject to the same discipline and social regulation' (76). So Holborow takes issue with Silvia Federici and others who equate these processes, drawing on Vincent Streichhahn (2020) to argue that the oppressive role of the domestic unit arises not from the 'patriarchy of the wage' but from 'its social reproductive function for capital and the structurally contradictory relation between reproduction and the accumulation of capital' (78; cf. 117). All this having been said, though, the double burden remains the reality for many working women. In response, 'neoliberal social policy shuns direct state investment in favour of tax relief policies for childcare, thereby both supporting the marketization of these services and benefiting higher earners who can afford longer hours of childcare' (80).
At this point Holborow turns directly to the working class family in Chapter Five, 'Homes Within a New Feminized, Diverse Working Class'. She takes as a starting point the fact that in the Global North, 'women's employment rate is slowly approaching that of men', with full-time work predominating (87). An excellent critique follows of recent EU policy, which has sought in numerous ways to force working-class mothers to take paid employment under the banner of 'labour activation', and relied heavily on 'informal' i.e. family child-care to make this possible (88-93): 'Social investment', Holborow concludes, 'frames family policies as employment policies, whose main aim is to reduce caring constraints to maximize labour force participation. It is a "work first" policy (by which is meant paid work)': 'Family policies, as Rooney and Gray (2020) highlight, are in effect employment policies which seek to reduce family constraints for labour force participation. The drive to labour activation disregards work-life balance and the pressures working parents are under. Worse, as Rooney and Gray note, so-called ‘social investment’ policies prioritize the right to work over any right to care' (93).
Underpinning this situation is the fact that even in the wealthiest countries, one wage is not enough to sustain a working-class family. Holborow gives as an example Germany, where women have been pushed primarily into low-paid part-time work, and where 'the number of working poor during the period 2005-15 doubled, the largest increase in any European state' (94). While some women prosper, inequality among working women has risen sharply, as class, race, and the lack of secure citizenship status combine: Germany and other capitalist states are able to 'access a supply of labour with no outlay or investment in their social reproduction, in that migrants have been raised, cared for as children, educated, and survived, in other states' (98). Unsurprisingly, women, and particularly those in front-line low-paid work or service sectors where lay-offs were highest, bore the heaviest costs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and elsewhere: Holborow reviews the negative consequences of working from home, or continuing to do low-paid 'essential' work in difficult and dangerous circumstances, and concludes the chapter with a discussion of resistance against precarious work which offers some telling points on the notion of 'precarity':
'‘Precariat’ tends to rework the notion of proletariat into a compliant entity which, as Kieran Allen [2014] notes, is seen as having succumbed passively to the ‘inevitable’ changes from globalization, including neoliberal individualistic thinking. It also tends to pass over the fact that capitalism involves the commodification of all workers, that class is a relationship that is formed with an opposing class and that struggle shapes the character of the working class at any one time. Worker precarity has been a feature of capitalism every time capital draws in new workers and attempts to intensify exploitation' ... 'The process of fragmentation, competition and proletarianization of sections of salaried white-collar workers is not new. Capital has always sought to increase the surplus it expropriates from workers, and it can do this through various means – through greater division of labour, the intensification of work, longer working hours, greater rates of exploitation and the restriction of workers’ rights. Forms of exploitation of labour are influenced by capital’s ability to draw in surplus or reserve labour. Reserve labour creates, in Marx’s words, ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capitalism in the interests of capital’s own valorisation requirements. This exerts pressure on existing employed workers and forces them to submit to overwork and subjects them to the dictates of capital.’ Such mechanisms in twenty-first-century capitalism being applied to women and migrant workers create pressures across the working class' (105, 108).
In Chapter Six, Holborow takes up 'The Contradictions of Home Life in Capitalism', deploying Marx's concept of alienation to elucidate 'both the contradictions of home life and ... ways in which it can be transformed' (111). 'Home,' she suggests, 'is a key construct in the capitalist ideology of the individual ... configured as apart from society, from the economy, from public life, and ... therefore also a strangely hidden, private space' (112). This is misleading, as it glosses over the 'fundamental social function provided by homes':
'Martha Gimenez [2019: 261-2] summarizes succinctly the different elements that work in the home involves. First, providing goods and services – use-values – for household consumption – cleaning, cooking, childcare and so on – but also, to varying degrees, meeting psychological, emotional and sexual needs. Secondly, homes are sites of consumption, different consumer activities being undertaken to bring food, clothes, household products, etc. into the home. Thirdly, further production of use-values in terms of home maintenance and improvements, and so on. And fourthly, in some cases, the production of goods or services for the market, for example, making goods at home for sale, or, as we have seen, increasingly now in some economies working from home as part of paid work' (113).
Production in the home, though, is highly inefficient, with the same labour-intensive routine tasks carried out in millions of separate small units, and at the same time increasing reliance on individual homes to provide basic needs means that those needs go unmet where essential resources, such as widely unaffordable utilities, are lacking.
Homes, then, should be located in the 'totality of social relations', starting with childbearing and rearing, on which Holborow first states what might be described as the standard point of view:
'Childbearing is of benefit to the ruling class for it must occur if the labour force is to be replenished through generational replacement. Women’s assigned role in this work, and in birthing and childrearing, also impacts on another need of capital: its constant need for more workers. Women are thus drawn into labour but without society assuming responsibility for the home care tasks that they do; this means that women participate in paid labour with one hand tied behind them, as it were, a situation from which ... capital benefits for it forces them to the bottom of the labour market where they can be super-exploited. But, from the point of view of capital, the more women enter paid labour, the more women’s vital role in social reproduction is pitted against their availability for exploitation. Therefore, at different times in history, capital has alternated between its dependence on women’s reproductive role and its need for more women in the labour force. For capital, this is a balancing act; for women, it represents the nub of their oppression' (114).
However, more generally, drawing on Cammack (2020):
'Understanding capitalist society in its totality also involves the recognition that those structures and systems within it, including systems of social reproduction, are also subject to the changes wrought by the system. This applies to all systems of social reproduction but also to social reproduction in homes. While domestic labour itself is not subject to the degree of transformation of industrial production, because it remains relatively simple, small-scale and repetitive, its activities do undergo changes due to capitalist developments and how this affects patterns of consumption in individual homes. These affect classes differently. Households can take advantage to a lesser or greater degree, depending on their income, of advances in industrial production to make some kinds of work in the home easier and less time-consuming. The extent and availability of state services can also affect the burden of household labour across different economies. There are other specific developments in capitalism which have altered the nature of home life. Intensified competition for work, the increase of precarious contracts, the absolute and relative increase of female participation in the labour market, wider choices regarding childbearing, the development of reproductive technologies, the expanding labour market on a global scale, the impact of digital and internet-based technologies, the expansion of goods and services – particularly care services and ready-made food – have all impacted on domestic labour and activities' (116).
As this suggests, there is some overlap between Holborow's approach and my own - but here she draws a significant conclusion that complements and adds to it:
'The fact that the work–home relationship of labour in capitalism leaves women mainly, though not exclusively, bearing the brunt of domestic labour and also, alongside migrant workers, often at the bottom of the labour market, does not require us to theoretically describe domestic work in its own terms but rather to grasp it in the specific and changing functions that it plays for the system as a whole. From this point of view, identifying women’s work as uniquely ‘caring’ or ‘affective’ is misleading and underestimates the changing contexts in which this work is performed ... The social reproduction role operates ... not on its own terms, but within the broader context of capital relations, which varies in character and composition over time' (116-7).
And here she returns to reinforce the earlier argument that reproduction and production are not equivalent, 'either in terms of the accumulation of surplus value or in terms of labour processes':
'"People making" is not the same as commodity production as it does not extract surplus value as such, nor does it involve the same direct exploitation dimension. Social reproduction is not a given like capitalist social relations, nor is it the origin of "free labour" in the way that class relations are. Rather, social reproduction depends on already existing social relations and varies according to the changing needs of capital accumulation' (117).
A brief reminder of the variation in family size and composition across the world and of the shift away from the single (male) wage model is followed by an equally brief discussion of family abolitionism that features Sophie Lewis's Full Surrogacy Now among other sources before returning to Marx and Engels (120-22), and a case study (123-6) of Ireland, where the 1937 constitution recognised the family as 'the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society' (123), to the point of stipulating that: 'The State shall ... endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home'. Thankfully, things have changed, not least in relation to fertility rates, which fell dramatically during the 1996-2006 boom, to a low of 1.6, and after some ups and downs stood at 1.54 in 2022, with an average age of over 31 for the birth of a first child. Turning to alienation and drawing fruitfully on Gimenez (2019: 257-73), Holborow suggests that 'estrangement, commodification, the fixation on time as value and the encroachment of lived time by market time, all these have come to apply to home life under capitalism' (128).She then discusses the ever-wider prevalence of violence in the home, revealed and exacerbated in the pandemic, the connections to the ever-increasing objectification, marketization and commodification of human bodies, and the complicity of the state. The chapter concludes with a summary of the factors behind the erosion of 'the norm of the patriarchal heteronormative nuclear family, and the rise of diverse family forms' (131), and the continuing issues that point to a need for social transformation and a renewal of comprehensive and publicly funded care provision, giving this succinct chapter a comprehensive scope that suggests that it might advantageously be read first as an introduction to the book as a whole.
Homes are 'a vital social prop for capitalism, but they are not the only site of social reproduction, which consists rather of 'the systems through which health, education and people-care are provided by the state, society, and homes. The concluding chapter examines capital's inability prioritise investment into public and community support for homes in this context, noting in doing so that existing Marxist feminist accounts of social reproduction have enormously expanded our understanding of the ways in which it is intertwined within the capitalist mode of production, uncovered the degree to which care work in the home contributes to capital accumulation, and even sometimes claimed that 'social reproduction systems are as essential to capitalist relations as production itself'. From the starting point that 'the capitalist mode of production shapes all social institutions, including social reproduction', Holborow advances four propositions (136-7). First, 'social reproduction carried out in homes is not a stable, uniform process, but one which is subject to the changing needs of capital. It is shaped by social pressures which pull in different directions, both economic and ideological, which means that the relationship of homes to capitalist production is tense and unstable, a characteristic which can become lost in more functionalist, static accounts of social reproduction'. Second, 'capital needs more female waged labour yet this has the potential to undermine the provision of people-care in the home. This constitutes as Nancy Fraser (2014) notes, a deep contradiction for capitalism, one caught between extending and expanding the exploitation of labour and the long-term preservation of the commodity of labour'. Third, 'the changing state of the sites of social reproduction – health, education and welfare systems but also individual homes – can be explained in terms of the changing labour needs of capital accumulation whose priorities come into conflict with existing methods of delivery of these services'. And fourth, 'if social reproduction is part of the superstructures of the capitalist system, then it follows that substantial changes to it will require a change also in the economic foundations of capitalism. Today, with the crisis of social reproduction, this conclusion seems even more relevant. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore (2018) put it, to ask capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism' (137). A second set of propositions reflect the fact that 'the experience of homes in capitalism ... differs radically according to class' (ibid): good jobs and careers for women 'most likely depend on other women – low-paid and marginalized – who carry out domestic and care work in their homes'; for working-class women 'gender equality has remained stubbornly unattainable. Low pay, part-time jobs and pay inequality are the norm and parents suffer the greatest penalties'; 'women’s double shift – paid work and the work they have to do at home – with all the knock-on effect of lower pay, less job progression, more part-time work, periods out of paid work – remains an insurmountable obstacle to gender pay equality'; in work-poor households, 'women are pressurized, often due to inaccessibly expensive childcare services, to drop in and out of paid employment or to work part-time to fit in with their socially designated care roles – in effect, a state-sponsored ‘mother-worker regime’. Thus, 'in capitalist class society, there is a dual organization of work in the home, one commodified as wage labour by those that can pay for it, and one carried out by themselves for those who cannot' (138-9).
After a brief discussion of the fracturing of feminist currents along political and class lines in the light of these developments, Holborow turns to the crisis of care, starting from the indisputable truth that the main concern of the European Union’s current flagship policy of ‘social investment’ is 'to increase its labour force, including recruiting female paid labour in a "mother-worker" model': where once it talked of the need to build welfare states, 'the EU now sees states as fashioners of a deregulated labour market to suit employers and promoters' (142-3):
'Today’s "social investment" model does not even claim to have a rights-based rationale. Instead, it proposes a "human capital" approach to human beings, and redrawing state–family boundaries to prioritize what capital needs in terms of a labour market, which amounts to the further economization of the social' (143).
Holborow then declares that social democratic welfare statism is bankrupt, insists on the need for 'a complete reorganisation of social reproduction', which capitalism is incapable of delivering, and celebrates the various modes of mass mobilisation by women across homes, workplaces and working-class communities, engaging social movements and radical socialist parties in opposition to these developments. With this, the book comes to a close.
This is a great book. It only it were available in paperback, I would recommend its immediate adoption as required reading on any and all courses concerned with the politics or political economy of contemporary society, with Chapter Six as the point of entry. Nothing else offers a better place to start. This is because Holborow understands social reproduction not alongside capitalist production but shaped by it, starts with homes rather than families and recognises the very varied forms they take, recognises, crucially, that the relationship of homes to capitalist production is tense and unstable, discriminates consistently between bourgeois and working-class families when she does turn to them, and remains attentive throughout to a wide range of contemporary empirical evidence.
I differ from Holborow, though, in one particular. As noted above, she follows Nancy Fraser in identifying the potential for capital to undermine the provision of people-care in the home as a consequence of its need for more female waged labour as 'a deep contradiction for capitalism, one caught between extending and expanding the exploitation of labour and the long-term preservation of the commodity of labour'. I disagree. There is no crisis of care from the point of view of capital, as it enjoys and continually creates new supplies of labour in the ordinary course of its development, and is indifferent to the devastating consequences for the homes, families and communities around the world on which it feeds. If so, of course, all the stronger is the case for a complete reorganisation of social reproduction.
References and further reading
Allen, Kieran. 2014. 'The Precariat: new class or bogus concept?', Irish Marxist Review, 3, 9, 45-8.
Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2020. Liberating Women from “Political Economy”: Margaret Benston’s Marxism and a Social-Reproduction Approach to Gender Oppression', Monthly Review, 71, 8, 1-14.
Choonara, Joseph. 2020. 'The Precarious Concept of Precarity', Review of Radical Political Economics, 52, 3, 427–446.
Coontz, Stephanie. 1988. The Social Origins of Private Life: A history of American families 1600–1900. London: Verso.
Cooper, Melinda. 2019. Family Values: Between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism. New York: Zone Books/Near Futures
Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England,
Engels, Friedrich. 1884. Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,
European Commission, Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. 2018. Family-friendly workplaces – Overview of policies and initiatives in Europe, Publications Office, 2018, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2767/488841.
Farris, Sara. 2017. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The rise of femonationalism. London: Duke University Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 2014. ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review 2/100, July/ August, 99–117.
Heath, Melanie. 2014. ‘Review of Jaye Cee Whitehead, The Nuptial Deal: Same-Sex Marriage and Neoliberal Governance’, Gender and Society 28, 1, 159–61.
Jaffe, Aaron. 2020. Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon: Work, power and political strategy. London: Pluto Press.
Leacock, Eleanor Burke. 1981. Myths of Male Dominance. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Nachtwey, Oliver. 2019. Germany's Hidden Crisis. London: Verso.
Näre, Lena. 2016. ‘Neoliberal Citizenship and Domestic Service in Finland: A return to a servant society?’ in Berit Gullikstad, Guro Korsnes Kristenesen and Priscilla Ringrose (eds), Paid Migrant Domestic Labour in a Changing Europe: Questions of gender equality and citizenship (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 31–53.
Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore, 2018. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A guide to capitalism, nature and the future of the planet. London, Verso.
Rooney, Cliona, and Jane Gray. 2020. ‘Changing Family Dynamics and In-Work Benefits’, Social Policy and Society, 19, 2,185-205.
Whittle, Jane. 2019. ‘A critique of approaches to “domestic work”: Women, work, and the pre-industrial economy’, Past & Present, 243, 35-70.
Holborow starts from the position that ‘homes’ are varied – some institutional, and by no means all the rest housing a ‘family’. She reminds us that: ‘Taking the longer historical view, households in the past have varied so significantly, both in gender status and childrearing arrangements, as to make claims about one type of family absurd’ (60). She centres her critique on the idea of the 'nuclear family' (a household constituted by a heterosexual couple with children) not only because it is no longer the majority household type, but also because of the way in which it is still deployed ideologically as a norm. Specifically, the ‘ideal of a two-parent nuclear, middle-class, suburban and white family, with men as the sole wage earner and women devoting themselves to taking care of the home and children, was [and is] a class and racial construction’ (58). At the same time she insists throughout on the fundamental differences between working-class families on the one hand and middle- and upper-class families on the other, and addresses changing patterns in this and other areas on the basis of the proposition that ‘the social relations of the capitalist system are what determine family and household arrangements’ (19). She takes from Engels his historical materialist perspective on change over time, his fundamental contrast between bourgeois and proletarian families respectively, and the nuanced approach to the principal components of male privilege that this generated. She takes a global perspective from the start, in particular as regards flows of labour migration across the world market, and the role they play in what is now clearly the global political economy of family life. And the book is bang up to date, focusing on COVID and post-COVID developments without losing sight of change over the longer term. In addition, it is clearly written; it displays discriminating judgement and common sense throughout; it is short enough to serve very well as an introductory text while opening out at the same time to more advanced debates; and it is grounded in an excellent range of secondary literature, some of which I list below. In short, it is a very useful text indeed, and why it is not available as a paperback, I have no idea. It would sell like hot cakes.
Holborow highlights throughout the particular burden placed upon working-class women in relation to the maintenance of homes, insisting at the outset that the latter have become ‘people’s social safety net of last resort' as a consequence of the 'expanded care functions of homes in neoliberal capitalism’ (3). But she does not take the home, the family, or gender as the first point of reference, proposing instead to understand social reproduction as part of the totality of capitalist relations:
'I take issue with some social reproduction theorists who propose recentring social reproduction alongside commodity production at the core of the capitalist economic system. I understand social reproduction not alongside capitalist production but shaped by it. Modifications and changes to social reproduction systems – whether health, education, welfare or homes – have occurred because of capital’s differing needs regarding labour supply, and from new developments in capitalist production and economy. They have also taken place because of political contestation and mass movements against the old sexist social reproductive order’ (5).
Against this background, Chapter One explores further the broad judgement that ‘the social relations of the capitalist system are what determine family and household arrangements’ (19), in a way that explicitly avoids the ideas of either a strictly one-way relationship or, crucially, a necessary congruity between social reproduction on the one hand, and capitalist accumulation on the other. On the one hand, 'exploitation in capitalism takes the form of the extraction of surplus value by the capitalist class from the working class', and the wage is related to individualised social reproduction in that 'a base line is established around what is needed for the reproduction and replenishment of labour power': 'The worker complies with this exploitative wage regime, not through repression or rules, nor even the force of prevailing norms but, in Marx’s memorable phrase, through ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’ (on which see Mau, Mute Compulsion). But while wages are 'the crucial condition of household social reproduction', ‘whatever the social role that families play objectively, it is obvious that nobody sets up home or decides to have children with the idea that they are providing the maintenance of the workforce or reproducing the next generation of workers’ (20). And more broadly, at a mid-point in an excellent reflection on the relationship between 'homes' and 'work' today:
'Unpaid labour in the working-class home is not as directly economic nor as straightforwardly profit-making as wage labour in capitalist production. Household social reproduction is dependent on capitalist production in so far as it is mediated by the wage, itself constituted in capitalist production. Furthermore, social reproduction which takes place in the home is not the only means by which labour is made available to capitalism, immigration being an obvious exception. More substantially, attempts to equalize social reproduction to commodity production tend towards an over-functionalist, one-dimensional economic picture of social reproduction, implied by Bhattacharya’s term ‘people making’. Social reproduction in homes ... is far from static and constitutes a social unit with changing functions and composition. Social reproduction may indeed be one ‘condition of possibility’ of capitalist production, but it involves a more complex reality than merely one social structure articulating with another. Processes of social reproduction form part of the overall social relations and often come into conflict with what capital needs at any one time. This is more evident in systems of health and education, but it is also true for households. The tensions and contradictions, including ideological and political ones, between homes and families and the capitalist system, are many and can give rise to social instability’ (23-4).
This leads to a discussion on 'childbearing and capital's needs', which is developed further in Chapter Six. For now, it is important to note a crucial point: ‘Women have far fewer children today’ (25).
Following this overview, Chapter Two provides a balanced evaluation of Engels' 'first Marxist attempt to grasp historically the overlap of social and gender relations’ (37). The core strengths of his analysis are the insistence on the fundamental difference between working class and bourgeois families, to which Holborow returns throughout (39-42; cf. 50, 56, 64, 68, and Chapter Five), and his insistence that the patriarchal family was neither universal historically, nor a permanent feature of capitalism: 'the accumulated growth of women in paid work, as Engels foresaw, has contributed to the unravelling of old rigidly binary gender norms and to the breakdown of the dominance of the nuclear family and has led to changed social and political expectations’ (49). This leads Holborow to identify a 'deep irresolvable contradiction' in contemporary capitalism, and to deploy the base-superstructure metaphor to examine it further:
‘The phenomenon of growing numbers of women in paid work ... brings to the fore the contradiction at the heart of the capitalist family – that capital requires more workers including women, but refuses to provide extra social services and support for care and domestic work. This deep, irresolvable contradiction and the social tensions that it creates have become more apparent during the multifaceted social crises of the 2020s. ... The value of the superstructure–base description in relation to the family and other social reproduction domains, as Chris Harman highlighted, is that it allows for the differentiation between capitalist social relations, which are subject to constant change, and the capitalist mode of production which, outside revolutions, forms the relatively stable basis for the whole social order. Those who seek to recentre social reproduction at the heart of the capitalist economy overlook this vital distinction and instead present a model which tends to lend to systems of social reproduction too much permanency and fixed economic functionalism. Situating social reproduction as part of the superstructure takes into account the constantly changing character of the different components of social reproduction – not only the people-care that takes place in the home, but also health, education and welfare systems. Indeed, individual households in capitalism are undergoing significant changes in composition, experiencing a deep crisis in the maintenance of their living standards, and bearing the brunt of weakened health services, social services and care services. As the privatization of care has become entrenched across societies of the Global North, as gender inequality and discrimination persist, the demand to shift the burden of social reproduction away from individual homes to socially provided facilities becomes a vital political demand for the whole of the working class. Capitalism has proved unable to provide even modest advances in this area because care on the cheap in a highly individualized form is what works best for capitalist profit accumulation. Yet this individualized form of care is also pulled in contradictory directions. Capitalism needs care on the cheap, but it also needs ever more waged female labour and one is potentially undermined by the other' (49-51).
I shall suggest in conclusion that this contradiction is not so deep and irresolvable for capital as Holborow suggests. But still, the case could not be more clearly put.
The following four chapters address related themes: homes and ideology; work in the home and care on the cheap; homes within a new working class; and 'the contradictions of home life in capitalism', and a conclusion follows. All in all, they strip away the accumulated residues of debates from different times, and lay down a clear and comprehensive foundation for exploring the relationship between homes and capitalism today, this being the great contribution that Holborow makes. Chapter Three makes the case that the 'force of the ideological construct of the family resides in its claimed universality, although its assumed characteristics stem from the white, upper-and middle-class family', and highlights the way in which this obscures the distinction between working-class and middle- and upper-class families respectively, the first a source of labour, and the second a ‘contractual means of protecting and amassing wealth’ (56). As she points out, the ideal of a two-parent nuclear, middle-class, suburban and white family, with men as the sole wage earner and women devoting themselves to taking care of the home and children, 'continues to inform assumptions about family life', not least in the minds of policy makers:
'Homes as consisting of a white, cisgender man and woman and their biological children remain the default norm even in the EU. A 2016 overview of ‘family-friendly’ policies in Europe produced by the European Commission [Latest edition, with the same cover, European Commission 2018] displayed on its cover a photo of two pairs of white hands encircling a cut-out of very clearly a woman and man holding hands with two children’, despite the fact that:
'The proportion of live births outside marriage across the EU stood at 42 per cent in 2018, nearly a fifth more than in 2000. In 2013, single-person households accounted for almost one-third of the private households across EU countries. Later figures have single persons constituting slightly more than half of the households in Paris and four German cities. Census data from virtually any European country show that today’s homes and households are married couples, lone parents with children, (increasingly) cohabiting couples with children, single people with no children, same-sex couples with or without children, blended families, adoptive families, non-binary or trans people with or without children, intergenerational with grandparents living in the home or with children returned home as adults. Such a range of home living arrangements clearly demonstrates that the nuclear family is only one household-type amongst many, and a type on the wane, certainly in the Global North and, in some countries, associated more with affluent, college-educated sections of society' (59). And as elaborated further below, the Global South 'has an average household size of around six people, often spanning three generations'; the average is just over three in North America; in Europe and the United States two-parent households account for only one-third of all people; and only a quarter of Germany's households are families with children (119).
Holborow goes on to note the affinity between neoliberalism and the promotion of [heterosexual nuclear] 'family values', but at the same time she draws on Melanie Heath's review of Jaye Cee Whitehead's The Nuptial Deal: Same-Sex Marriage and Neoliberal Governance (Heath, 2014) to suggest that 'in the current political climate, of offloading more caring responsibilities onto families, same-sex marriage becomes a response to a real social need. Neoliberal capitalism thus reinvents the family as "diverse", to include all homes in this key unit of consumption to shore up the marketization of social life' (63). As Heath summarises: Whitehead 'convincingly shows that the current political and social climate that promotes neoliberal contraction of the social safety net and outsources caring responsibilities onto families makes the nuptial deal too enticing to refuse. There are few alternatives to gaining the benefits from the only state sanctioned care structure - marriage - that also offers a sphere of privacy without direct state surveillance' (Heath 2014: 160). So, Holborow concludes: ‘The adaptability of the family challenges views based on patriarchy which see the sexual division of labour exclusively as a patriarchal set-up to preserve male positions to the disadvantage of women. Rather, the model of the capitalist home can be refashioned to absorb social change through constantly reinventing itself. As long as homes continue to follow the neoliberal model of self-sufficiency, new types can be accommodated’ (63). In another twist, bourgeois households increasingly deviate from the 'nuclear' model in that they have become 'dependent on private labour and migrant workers' to perform domestic and care work (65); and here Holborow draws on Sara Farris's study of 'femonationalism' (2017), which 'shows that the EU integration framework has the subtext that employment in paid labour will "rescue" [migrants and Muslim women] from the backward conservatism of Islamic patriarchy. Ironically, the "gender equality" agenda of the EU is met through a policy which actively directs migrant women towards the care and domestic sectors, which feminists have long decried for being highly gendered' (67; cf. 75). "Home", in short, 'ideologically constructed as a uniform entity, is ... a starkly different experience according to social class and race’ (70).
Chapter Four, 'Work in the Home, Care on the Cheap and How Things Could Be Different', opens by noting the consequences of increased entry of women into higher education and the paid workforce without public provision of support:
‘[T]he system’s refusal to invest in comprehensive public provision of different forms of care has maintained a separation of paid from unpaid work and further embedded gender discrimination in the labour market. Change to the reliance on individualized and marketized care, the last few decades have demonstrated, is beyond what capitalism can or is disposed to offer. Yet only this can begin to both restore people-care to the central position that it should have in any society and allow women to be free from a major source of gender oppression’ (71).
The centre-piece of the chapter is a sensible discussion of unpaid work in the home, building on the important clarification that:
'On the one hand, because it does not generally produce goods for exchange, it is immune from the law of value and market competition. On the other, it is shaped by its function of producing labour power. Unpaid work in the home and paid work in the production process are bound together in capitalism, with one sort of work providing the replenishment and reproduction for workers in the other ... In other words, unpaid work and paid work are linked but distinct. Whereas exchange values are produced in the workplace, the home produces use-values, concrete things that satisfy human needs. Just because the whole of society is organized to produce profit does not mean that every social relation produces value in the same way. The presence of unpaid labour in the home does not make it equivalent to exploitation in the workplace, even though this also contains an element of unpaid labour (that which is appropriated by the capitalist). Presenting both kinds of work as the same, as Aaron Jaffe (2020) shrewdly observes, denies not only the specific nature of surplus value in capitalism but also the class relation which makes its accumulation possible' (75-6).
'Work in the labour process and work in the home,' then, 'are not subject to the same discipline and social regulation' (76). So Holborow takes issue with Silvia Federici and others who equate these processes, drawing on Vincent Streichhahn (2020) to argue that the oppressive role of the domestic unit arises not from the 'patriarchy of the wage' but from 'its social reproductive function for capital and the structurally contradictory relation between reproduction and the accumulation of capital' (78; cf. 117). All this having been said, though, the double burden remains the reality for many working women. In response, 'neoliberal social policy shuns direct state investment in favour of tax relief policies for childcare, thereby both supporting the marketization of these services and benefiting higher earners who can afford longer hours of childcare' (80).
At this point Holborow turns directly to the working class family in Chapter Five, 'Homes Within a New Feminized, Diverse Working Class'. She takes as a starting point the fact that in the Global North, 'women's employment rate is slowly approaching that of men', with full-time work predominating (87). An excellent critique follows of recent EU policy, which has sought in numerous ways to force working-class mothers to take paid employment under the banner of 'labour activation', and relied heavily on 'informal' i.e. family child-care to make this possible (88-93): 'Social investment', Holborow concludes, 'frames family policies as employment policies, whose main aim is to reduce caring constraints to maximize labour force participation. It is a "work first" policy (by which is meant paid work)': 'Family policies, as Rooney and Gray (2020) highlight, are in effect employment policies which seek to reduce family constraints for labour force participation. The drive to labour activation disregards work-life balance and the pressures working parents are under. Worse, as Rooney and Gray note, so-called ‘social investment’ policies prioritize the right to work over any right to care' (93).
Underpinning this situation is the fact that even in the wealthiest countries, one wage is not enough to sustain a working-class family. Holborow gives as an example Germany, where women have been pushed primarily into low-paid part-time work, and where 'the number of working poor during the period 2005-15 doubled, the largest increase in any European state' (94). While some women prosper, inequality among working women has risen sharply, as class, race, and the lack of secure citizenship status combine: Germany and other capitalist states are able to 'access a supply of labour with no outlay or investment in their social reproduction, in that migrants have been raised, cared for as children, educated, and survived, in other states' (98). Unsurprisingly, women, and particularly those in front-line low-paid work or service sectors where lay-offs were highest, bore the heaviest costs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and elsewhere: Holborow reviews the negative consequences of working from home, or continuing to do low-paid 'essential' work in difficult and dangerous circumstances, and concludes the chapter with a discussion of resistance against precarious work which offers some telling points on the notion of 'precarity':
'‘Precariat’ tends to rework the notion of proletariat into a compliant entity which, as Kieran Allen [2014] notes, is seen as having succumbed passively to the ‘inevitable’ changes from globalization, including neoliberal individualistic thinking. It also tends to pass over the fact that capitalism involves the commodification of all workers, that class is a relationship that is formed with an opposing class and that struggle shapes the character of the working class at any one time. Worker precarity has been a feature of capitalism every time capital draws in new workers and attempts to intensify exploitation' ... 'The process of fragmentation, competition and proletarianization of sections of salaried white-collar workers is not new. Capital has always sought to increase the surplus it expropriates from workers, and it can do this through various means – through greater division of labour, the intensification of work, longer working hours, greater rates of exploitation and the restriction of workers’ rights. Forms of exploitation of labour are influenced by capital’s ability to draw in surplus or reserve labour. Reserve labour creates, in Marx’s words, ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capitalism in the interests of capital’s own valorisation requirements. This exerts pressure on existing employed workers and forces them to submit to overwork and subjects them to the dictates of capital.’ Such mechanisms in twenty-first-century capitalism being applied to women and migrant workers create pressures across the working class' (105, 108).
In Chapter Six, Holborow takes up 'The Contradictions of Home Life in Capitalism', deploying Marx's concept of alienation to elucidate 'both the contradictions of home life and ... ways in which it can be transformed' (111). 'Home,' she suggests, 'is a key construct in the capitalist ideology of the individual ... configured as apart from society, from the economy, from public life, and ... therefore also a strangely hidden, private space' (112). This is misleading, as it glosses over the 'fundamental social function provided by homes':
'Martha Gimenez [2019: 261-2] summarizes succinctly the different elements that work in the home involves. First, providing goods and services – use-values – for household consumption – cleaning, cooking, childcare and so on – but also, to varying degrees, meeting psychological, emotional and sexual needs. Secondly, homes are sites of consumption, different consumer activities being undertaken to bring food, clothes, household products, etc. into the home. Thirdly, further production of use-values in terms of home maintenance and improvements, and so on. And fourthly, in some cases, the production of goods or services for the market, for example, making goods at home for sale, or, as we have seen, increasingly now in some economies working from home as part of paid work' (113).
Production in the home, though, is highly inefficient, with the same labour-intensive routine tasks carried out in millions of separate small units, and at the same time increasing reliance on individual homes to provide basic needs means that those needs go unmet where essential resources, such as widely unaffordable utilities, are lacking.
Homes, then, should be located in the 'totality of social relations', starting with childbearing and rearing, on which Holborow first states what might be described as the standard point of view:
'Childbearing is of benefit to the ruling class for it must occur if the labour force is to be replenished through generational replacement. Women’s assigned role in this work, and in birthing and childrearing, also impacts on another need of capital: its constant need for more workers. Women are thus drawn into labour but without society assuming responsibility for the home care tasks that they do; this means that women participate in paid labour with one hand tied behind them, as it were, a situation from which ... capital benefits for it forces them to the bottom of the labour market where they can be super-exploited. But, from the point of view of capital, the more women enter paid labour, the more women’s vital role in social reproduction is pitted against their availability for exploitation. Therefore, at different times in history, capital has alternated between its dependence on women’s reproductive role and its need for more women in the labour force. For capital, this is a balancing act; for women, it represents the nub of their oppression' (114).
However, more generally, drawing on Cammack (2020):
'Understanding capitalist society in its totality also involves the recognition that those structures and systems within it, including systems of social reproduction, are also subject to the changes wrought by the system. This applies to all systems of social reproduction but also to social reproduction in homes. While domestic labour itself is not subject to the degree of transformation of industrial production, because it remains relatively simple, small-scale and repetitive, its activities do undergo changes due to capitalist developments and how this affects patterns of consumption in individual homes. These affect classes differently. Households can take advantage to a lesser or greater degree, depending on their income, of advances in industrial production to make some kinds of work in the home easier and less time-consuming. The extent and availability of state services can also affect the burden of household labour across different economies. There are other specific developments in capitalism which have altered the nature of home life. Intensified competition for work, the increase of precarious contracts, the absolute and relative increase of female participation in the labour market, wider choices regarding childbearing, the development of reproductive technologies, the expanding labour market on a global scale, the impact of digital and internet-based technologies, the expansion of goods and services – particularly care services and ready-made food – have all impacted on domestic labour and activities' (116).
As this suggests, there is some overlap between Holborow's approach and my own - but here she draws a significant conclusion that complements and adds to it:
'The fact that the work–home relationship of labour in capitalism leaves women mainly, though not exclusively, bearing the brunt of domestic labour and also, alongside migrant workers, often at the bottom of the labour market, does not require us to theoretically describe domestic work in its own terms but rather to grasp it in the specific and changing functions that it plays for the system as a whole. From this point of view, identifying women’s work as uniquely ‘caring’ or ‘affective’ is misleading and underestimates the changing contexts in which this work is performed ... The social reproduction role operates ... not on its own terms, but within the broader context of capital relations, which varies in character and composition over time' (116-7).
And here she returns to reinforce the earlier argument that reproduction and production are not equivalent, 'either in terms of the accumulation of surplus value or in terms of labour processes':
'"People making" is not the same as commodity production as it does not extract surplus value as such, nor does it involve the same direct exploitation dimension. Social reproduction is not a given like capitalist social relations, nor is it the origin of "free labour" in the way that class relations are. Rather, social reproduction depends on already existing social relations and varies according to the changing needs of capital accumulation' (117).
A brief reminder of the variation in family size and composition across the world and of the shift away from the single (male) wage model is followed by an equally brief discussion of family abolitionism that features Sophie Lewis's Full Surrogacy Now among other sources before returning to Marx and Engels (120-22), and a case study (123-6) of Ireland, where the 1937 constitution recognised the family as 'the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society' (123), to the point of stipulating that: 'The State shall ... endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home'. Thankfully, things have changed, not least in relation to fertility rates, which fell dramatically during the 1996-2006 boom, to a low of 1.6, and after some ups and downs stood at 1.54 in 2022, with an average age of over 31 for the birth of a first child. Turning to alienation and drawing fruitfully on Gimenez (2019: 257-73), Holborow suggests that 'estrangement, commodification, the fixation on time as value and the encroachment of lived time by market time, all these have come to apply to home life under capitalism' (128).She then discusses the ever-wider prevalence of violence in the home, revealed and exacerbated in the pandemic, the connections to the ever-increasing objectification, marketization and commodification of human bodies, and the complicity of the state. The chapter concludes with a summary of the factors behind the erosion of 'the norm of the patriarchal heteronormative nuclear family, and the rise of diverse family forms' (131), and the continuing issues that point to a need for social transformation and a renewal of comprehensive and publicly funded care provision, giving this succinct chapter a comprehensive scope that suggests that it might advantageously be read first as an introduction to the book as a whole.
Homes are 'a vital social prop for capitalism, but they are not the only site of social reproduction, which consists rather of 'the systems through which health, education and people-care are provided by the state, society, and homes. The concluding chapter examines capital's inability prioritise investment into public and community support for homes in this context, noting in doing so that existing Marxist feminist accounts of social reproduction have enormously expanded our understanding of the ways in which it is intertwined within the capitalist mode of production, uncovered the degree to which care work in the home contributes to capital accumulation, and even sometimes claimed that 'social reproduction systems are as essential to capitalist relations as production itself'. From the starting point that 'the capitalist mode of production shapes all social institutions, including social reproduction', Holborow advances four propositions (136-7). First, 'social reproduction carried out in homes is not a stable, uniform process, but one which is subject to the changing needs of capital. It is shaped by social pressures which pull in different directions, both economic and ideological, which means that the relationship of homes to capitalist production is tense and unstable, a characteristic which can become lost in more functionalist, static accounts of social reproduction'. Second, 'capital needs more female waged labour yet this has the potential to undermine the provision of people-care in the home. This constitutes as Nancy Fraser (2014) notes, a deep contradiction for capitalism, one caught between extending and expanding the exploitation of labour and the long-term preservation of the commodity of labour'. Third, 'the changing state of the sites of social reproduction – health, education and welfare systems but also individual homes – can be explained in terms of the changing labour needs of capital accumulation whose priorities come into conflict with existing methods of delivery of these services'. And fourth, 'if social reproduction is part of the superstructures of the capitalist system, then it follows that substantial changes to it will require a change also in the economic foundations of capitalism. Today, with the crisis of social reproduction, this conclusion seems even more relevant. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore (2018) put it, to ask capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism' (137). A second set of propositions reflect the fact that 'the experience of homes in capitalism ... differs radically according to class' (ibid): good jobs and careers for women 'most likely depend on other women – low-paid and marginalized – who carry out domestic and care work in their homes'; for working-class women 'gender equality has remained stubbornly unattainable. Low pay, part-time jobs and pay inequality are the norm and parents suffer the greatest penalties'; 'women’s double shift – paid work and the work they have to do at home – with all the knock-on effect of lower pay, less job progression, more part-time work, periods out of paid work – remains an insurmountable obstacle to gender pay equality'; in work-poor households, 'women are pressurized, often due to inaccessibly expensive childcare services, to drop in and out of paid employment or to work part-time to fit in with their socially designated care roles – in effect, a state-sponsored ‘mother-worker regime’. Thus, 'in capitalist class society, there is a dual organization of work in the home, one commodified as wage labour by those that can pay for it, and one carried out by themselves for those who cannot' (138-9).
After a brief discussion of the fracturing of feminist currents along political and class lines in the light of these developments, Holborow turns to the crisis of care, starting from the indisputable truth that the main concern of the European Union’s current flagship policy of ‘social investment’ is 'to increase its labour force, including recruiting female paid labour in a "mother-worker" model': where once it talked of the need to build welfare states, 'the EU now sees states as fashioners of a deregulated labour market to suit employers and promoters' (142-3):
'Today’s "social investment" model does not even claim to have a rights-based rationale. Instead, it proposes a "human capital" approach to human beings, and redrawing state–family boundaries to prioritize what capital needs in terms of a labour market, which amounts to the further economization of the social' (143).
Holborow then declares that social democratic welfare statism is bankrupt, insists on the need for 'a complete reorganisation of social reproduction', which capitalism is incapable of delivering, and celebrates the various modes of mass mobilisation by women across homes, workplaces and working-class communities, engaging social movements and radical socialist parties in opposition to these developments. With this, the book comes to a close.
This is a great book. It only it were available in paperback, I would recommend its immediate adoption as required reading on any and all courses concerned with the politics or political economy of contemporary society, with Chapter Six as the point of entry. Nothing else offers a better place to start. This is because Holborow understands social reproduction not alongside capitalist production but shaped by it, starts with homes rather than families and recognises the very varied forms they take, recognises, crucially, that the relationship of homes to capitalist production is tense and unstable, discriminates consistently between bourgeois and working-class families when she does turn to them, and remains attentive throughout to a wide range of contemporary empirical evidence.
I differ from Holborow, though, in one particular. As noted above, she follows Nancy Fraser in identifying the potential for capital to undermine the provision of people-care in the home as a consequence of its need for more female waged labour as 'a deep contradiction for capitalism, one caught between extending and expanding the exploitation of labour and the long-term preservation of the commodity of labour'. I disagree. There is no crisis of care from the point of view of capital, as it enjoys and continually creates new supplies of labour in the ordinary course of its development, and is indifferent to the devastating consequences for the homes, families and communities around the world on which it feeds. If so, of course, all the stronger is the case for a complete reorganisation of social reproduction.
References and further reading
Allen, Kieran. 2014. 'The Precariat: new class or bogus concept?', Irish Marxist Review, 3, 9, 45-8.
Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2020. Liberating Women from “Political Economy”: Margaret Benston’s Marxism and a Social-Reproduction Approach to Gender Oppression', Monthly Review, 71, 8, 1-14.
Choonara, Joseph. 2020. 'The Precarious Concept of Precarity', Review of Radical Political Economics, 52, 3, 427–446.
Coontz, Stephanie. 1988. The Social Origins of Private Life: A history of American families 1600–1900. London: Verso.
Cooper, Melinda. 2019. Family Values: Between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism. New York: Zone Books/Near Futures
Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England,
Engels, Friedrich. 1884. Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,
European Commission, Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. 2018. Family-friendly workplaces – Overview of policies and initiatives in Europe, Publications Office, 2018, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2767/488841.
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