Rebecca Carson, Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital, Brill, 2023 (hbk), Haymarket Books (pbk) 2024. Pbk £25 UK, $20 USA.
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RATING: 80
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Buy this book?
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I find myself in an awkward situation here. I am not convinced by the principal argument put forward in this book (regarding the status of human life and nature as ‘immanent externalities’ to capital). But a subsidiary argument (that analysis of social reproduction should take into account the three circuits of capital addressed in Capital Vol. II, and incorporate a focus on varying temporalities) is a fundamental contribution that makes it essential reading. It should transform the way that social reproduction is addressed; and it stands, and is arguably strengthened, if the principal argument fails. I focus primarily, then, on this aspect of the text.
Carson identifies Capital as an ‘unfinished project’, and aims to ‘philosophically reconstruct’ it from the perspective of reproduction, with a focus on ‘the ever-changing relationality between the logic of value accumulation and the concrete world’; capital’s reproduction process, she claims, ‘entails a central contradiction between capital’s abstractions and non-capitalist life-making processes’ (1). Across all three volumes of Capital, she suggests,
'Marx deploys two distinct concepts of "life": that of capital’s life on the one hand and that of organic matter on the other. Marx ascribes capital a life-like manner due to its self-reproducing nature as automatic subject, where its medium of reproduction is the money form, which is both capitalist and non-capitalist. By contrast, Marx then ascribes human actors - who are often personifications of the capitalist relation, such as property owners or labourers - an irreducibly non-capitalist, organic life, existing in metabolic relation to nature' (3).
In short: ‘The primary tension in capitalism is that between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of human life and nature … Concrete life engenders natural limits that in turn create limits for capital’s movement of value. Correspondingly, capital’s abstractions determine the practical form of concrete life. The tension between these two forms of life lies at the core of this book. The book dialectically analyses [to] what extent concrete life is produced by capital’s abstract form and to what extent it remains independent’ (4).
Carson argues that approaches that take labour as their starting point are too narrow to capture the full extent of the relationships involved, unhelpfully restricting debate to a focus on paid versus unpaid work (or wage labour versus other forms of labour). To progress, it is essential to expand the focus on wage labour and ‘simple reproduction’ set out in Capital, Volume I, and embrace the perspective of ‘expanded reproduction’ set out predominantly in Capital, Volume II, and in part in Volume III (largely written, as she notes, before Volume II). This entails a focus on all three circuits of capital - commodity capital, productive capital, and money capital. And like love, or charity if you adhere to the King James Bible (I Corinthians 13:13), money capital is the greatest of these three.
The pertinence of these remarks to debates on social reproduction is immediately apparent: an explicit or implicit contrast between ‘life-making’ and ‘profit-making’ is common in current approaches. For the most part this is theorised in relation to paid and unpaid work (and domestic labour in particular), and where Marx is directly invoked it is in the main through a critique of his supposedly exclusive focus on wage labour in capitalist production, with reference to Capital, Volume I, and in particular the account of ‘simple reproduction’ in Chapter 23; discussions of ‘extended reproduction’ (Munro 2024: 211-13) are rare. At the same time, the literature on social reproduction extends well beyond the issue of paid and unpaid work, addressing the issues of financialisation and debt, depletion, and ecology among others. Carson provides a comprehensive analytical framework within which these and other issues can be systematically addressed.
She begins with a focus on credit and debt, invoking the notion of fictitious capital (Chapter 1), then deals in turn with the ‘money form’ (Chapter 2) and the ‘fetish character’ (Chapter 3). The exposition is clear and soundly based, but I am not convinced by the prominence given to the association between debt and the ‘re-emergence of personal forms of domination’: a debt is no more ‘personal’ than a contract of employment. In both cases the contract may be with an individual entity; but each is a structural relation pertaining to a specific circuit of capital; and debtors are as free to refinance a debt as workers are to move to another employer. Neither option may be easy, but that is a reflection of the structural not personal nature of domination under capitalism. Moving on, Chapter 4 deals with the three circuits of capital, in terms of ‘time and schemas of reproduction’, and Chapter 5 addresses Marx’s 'social theory of reproduction’. Carson locates her project here not in relation to the literature on social reproduction, but within commentaries on the relationship between Marx’s value form analysis and Hegel’s The Science of Logic, seeking specifically to ‘provide an interpretation of the passages in The Science of Logic that refer to reproduction’; and to ‘employ a comparison of aspects of The Science of Logic and Capital with attention to their respective theories of life and "life process" to develop an account of reproduction derived from Marx’s two concepts of life’ (148). I start my detailed analysis with these two chapters.
Carson suggests at the beginning of Chapter 4 that Marx conceives the capitalist mode of production logically as a process of reproduction, and turns to Capital, Volume II, in order to ‘theorise the interaction between the reproduction of capital’s social form and the reproduction of concrete life’:
'Capitalism is, for Marx, both a system that posits its own preconditions and a productive system consisting of cycles or periodicity. According to Marx’s presentation of reproduction in Volume II, constant capital (capital invested in production) and variable capital (capital invested in hiring labour) need to be re-established and renewed within the circulation process, albeit at different rates and following different rhythms and temporalities.
Circulation renews the conditions of production that will repeat if capital’s abstract forms continue to move towards self-valorisation. Circulation, as an interruption to the time of production, distributes commodities ripe for consumption, engages the extraction of resources and facilitates investment and infrastructure. The cyclical nature of capital’s reproduction, as it moves between production and circulation, entails contradictions when encountering the concrete reproduction of life and nature, rendering reproduction a process that is both dynamic and cyclical. Therefore, Marx uses the economic sense of "reproduction" in capitalist social relations to understand the renewal of cycles of production mediated by abstractions. Here, contradictory processes and temporalities unfold when the reproduction of capital’s abstract form mediates - and is mediated by - the concrete reproduction of human life and nature’ (105).
Consumption, or the sale and purchase of commodities, is as important an aspect of the capitalist mode of production as is production. And overall, and importantly, ‘the social content of the reproduction of the system is mobilised by money, begetting further money in a cyclical process. The wage relation underpins this dynamic, acting as the premise for accumulation, linking the reproduction of the lives of persons to the reproduction of capital’s abstractions. Under capitalist conditions, money (received as wages or accumulated as surplus value) grants access to the material means of maintaining and reproducing the lives of historical individuals. In this way, the monetary relation establishes the cyclical - and therefore temporal - form that social reproduction takes’ (105). And as ‘reproduction unfolds at the level of circulation and thus in time’, it ‘requires the mediation of credit to uphold its structure’ (106).
The fundamental contribution this makes is to broaden the focus on (but not away from) labour and the productive circuit of capital: ‘In relation to the commodity form, there are productive capitalists, merchant capitalists and consumers; in relation to the money form, there are salaried workers, money capitalists and debtors; and so on. The actions and conditions of reproduction of these lives, too, mediate the movement of capital’ (111); and circulation ‘joins the different elements within the whole of social life together, creating systematic social relations’ (113). In isolation the productive, commodity and money circuits of capital reflect only certain moments within the circulation and reproduction of total social capital, but once understood from the point of view of the whole they are ‘retrospectively rendered to be aspects of a larger mechanism’ (117).
This ‘larger mechanism’ of the circulation and reproduction of total social capital provides a correspondingly larger framework for the analysis of social reproduction that includes the roles of capitalist, merchant and financier on the one side, and worker, consumer and borrower/debtor on the other. Consumption ‘plays a pivotal role’ (120), and, like production, it connects in various ways with credit and debt. This enlarged perspective provides a more developed conception of the (contradictory) relationship between capital and human life with which the book begins, and a basis for addressing ‘life-making’ under capitalism systematically as an ‘aspect of a larger process that perpetuates the capitalist organization of society’ (Munro 2024: 209). The ‘driving motive’ behind each of the three circuits of capital is capital’s self-valorisation, or ‘the valorization of value’ (128, citing Capital, Volume II, p. 180); but at the same time: ‘Human life persists as a transhistorical physiological entity in metabolistic relation to the historically constituted sensuous world through the mediation of labour (136-7):
'These two elements (the life of capital and human life), through their ongoing practical mediation, create one another anew: People living in capitalist societies, and living within different relations therein, become different kinds of people with different historically determined needs. While the movement of the value form shifts based on its encounter with the natural limits imposed by living elements, it simultaneously subsumes these limits into its own logic. Therefore these limits remain fundamentally relational. … Analysis from the perspective of circulation and reproduction reveals a central contradiction of capital, where capitalist variables meet non-capitalist variables in dialectical co-existence (137).
These are processes that unfold over time. Carson draws on Tomba (2009) to argue that each of the three circuits of capital has its own temporality, and their circuits are therefore marked by ‘interruptions’ - between investment and production, for example, or between production and sale; and human life and the sensuous world also have their own temporalities, which form natural limits to potential valorisation (137).
All this is very well said. Following, Chapter 5 recapitulates the position that ‘social and capital reproduction are better understood with a reorientation to the reproduction of life, human and natural, analysed through its mediation by capital’s abstractions’ (141); that ‘in social reproduction theory thus far, the co-existence of the economic and non-economic is largely understood through the tension between the reproduction of human life and wage labour, and not between human life and capital’s process of reproduction’, that analyses along these lines ‘fail to account for the reproduction of capital as a social form’ (142); and that:
'When analysis considers social reproduction as the mechanism that reproduces labour power - and not as a concrete manifestation internal to capital’s abstract movement to self-reproduce - it fails to include an analysis of the social reproduction of those who are excluded from wage labour. Moreover, the precise role of finance and ecology in capital’s reproduction are obscured. Finance (and financialisation) entail a monetary process of circulation and reproduction of capital’s abstractions, while ecology provides the necessary material for capital’s sustenance. The two indirectly affect the capital-wage relation and are thus only partially comprehendible from the perspective of wage labour’s reproduction’ (142-3).
There are numerous implications here for theories of social reproduction. First, the relevance of a Marxist perspective is reinforced, and it is shown to be capable, if all three circuits of capital are taken into account, of addressing a range of issues beyond that of value and wage labour. Second, the approach adopted does not privilege either productive labour (as some Marxist approaches do), or gender (as some feminist approaches do). Rather, it allows for full consideration of these aspects alongside others. And while it does suggest that over time the logic of capital will assert itself increasingly over ‘non-capitalist life’, it identifies limits to its capacity to do so, and moves sharply away from a rigid, monological and deterministic model. Third, by addressing the specific logic of the three circuits of capital and their varying temporalities, and interactions between them, and insisting that human life and the sensuous world have their own temporalities too, and tend to ‘interrupt’ the circuits of capital, Carson produces a systematic model which is at the same time complex and non-deterministic, and one that demands, as it should, close empirical analysis of individual circumstances, specific conjunctures, and trajectories of change. In short, she complicates, quite rightly, the relationship between the reproduction of capital, and the reproduction of human and planetary life. Fourth, this has immediate implications for approaches to daily and generational survival, whether generally of individuals, households, and humanity at large, or specifically of individual workers and the working class. In particular, it highlights the wide range of choices and strategies available, and the constraints they come up against. At the simplest level, individuals or households under pressure may take on more wage labour, resort to borrowing, or cut back on consumption - all aspects, as noted above, that are prominent in the literature on social reproduction. Over the longer term, they may invest in the acquisition of education and skills, at the cost of delayed entry to the labour market, but with the prospect of better returns. In all these aspects, constraints intensify as the hold of capital over daily life grows stronger. A striking implication of this, when the issue of temporal cycles are brought to the fore, is that longer-term or inter-generational decisions are still choices made in the present, and therefore an aspect of day-to-day survival. For example: can an individual afford to invest in a college degree? or, on a genuinely inter-generational level, can an individual or couple afford to take time out of paid work to have a child, and be confident of having the resources to raise one in the future if they do? At the same time, capitalists face challenges arising from intensified competition - not only do producers have to compete for workers, but capitalists in the commercial sector have to price and move their stock, and financial institutions have to seek returns on their assets. The strategies adopted create opportunities for households dependent on labour, to offset the challenges they face, and the calculus of the prospects for social reproduction over time is accordingly complicated. And governments have to juggle with a bewildering array of trade-offs in making policy - family policy and employment policy, as much as decisions on interest rates, taxation, and citizenship - to take their programmes forward, adding further complexity to the circumstances that individuals and households face.
If there is one over-riding implication of all this, it is cautionary: theorists of social reproduction, especially if they favour a one-dimensional approach or privilege a specific issue, should take a step back and contemplate the complexity of social reproduction under capitalism, and the difficulties attendant upon simplistic or over-deterministic conclusions. And as it happens, this is a conclusion that is reinforced by the way in which the principal argument advanced by Carson fails. So I turn to this.
A crucial ambiguity appears in Carson’s argument when she addresses the concrete character and the logic of the relationship between capital on the one hand, and nature and human life on the other, asserting in a single continuous statement that I present in two parts that (1)
'Capitalism largely treats nature and human life as self-replenishing and readily available, to be used to produce value without functioning a priori as capital but material outside of capital. They are often extracted as use values and not compensated for as exchange values'.
And (2)
'In this way, capital’s reproduction logically disavows its own means of reproduction, which is a requirement for the means of reproduction to remain external to capital’s abstract system of values. This becomes clear when we look to the disavowal of the social activity that goes into the upkeep of the labourer and the lives of people in capitalist society more generally: Social reproduction is necessarily external to value production, which is why it can be a reproductive agent of the capital relation. The logic of the social reproduction of capital will always rely on the disavowal of what is other to it. Irrespective of changes occurring at the level of social rights, capital will nevertheless continue to degrade the mechanisms that sustain the extraction of profit (144-5, emphasis mine).
The online Cambridge Dictionary (which may or may not have a connection to Cambridge) usefully defines ‘to disavow’ as ‘to say that you know nothing about something, or that you have no responsibility for or connection with something’; it defines ‘to degrade’, as ‘to cause people to feel that they or other people have no value and do not have the respect or good opinion of others’, or ‘to spoil or destroy the beauty or quality of something’. There is a crucial difference between them. Capital acts upon and transforms nature and human life, but in its constitutive abstractions it does not know them or take responsibility for them. It does not logically follow from this either that it will prove compatible with their continued reproduction, or that it will degrade them in general terms, let alone in terms of the mechanisms that sustain the extraction of profit. This is not something that can be simply asserted - it requires empirical substantiation. In fact, this is consistent with the spirit of the question with which Carson began: the open-ended issue of the extent to which concrete life is produced by capital’s abstract form and to which it remains independent (4). But here, as she goes on in the same paragraph, she gets into deeper trouble. Again, I divide the extended comment she makes into two parts: (1)
If a given society, for example, achieves aspects of gender equality in social reproduction, the exploitation of social reproduction will shift to exacerbate another form that will likely carry a racialised and gendered character. Social reproduction, or the reproduction of labour power, is racialised and gendered as a historical reality, and its gendered nature has thus been, in practice, necessary to capital. Capital, therefore, should not be understood as a practical reality without its gendered or racialised composition: logically, capital’s development becomes internal to capital itself though [sic: I read it as through] the mediation of the concrete by the abstract.
And (2)
However, this does not mean that capital cannot function otherwise: Capital’s abstractions, as abstractions, possess an indifference to the concrete (we do not get a distinction between use value and exchange value without an indifference to the concrete on the side of the mediation of the abstraction). Hence, interpersonal forms of domination can develop and regress within the framework of a capitalist mode of production. Evidently, it is possible to have more or less egalitarian forms of capitalist relations (145).
Carson has gone astray, and reaches a dead end when she acknowledges capitalism’s ‘indifference to the concrete’. But at the same time, she cannot let go of familiar concrete aspects of capital’s relationship with ‘life’ up to the present. It is essential to recognise the history and presence of gendered and racialised exploitation, but it does not follow that these or any other concrete forms taken by exploitation become ‘internal to capital itself’, in the sense that they are permanently incorporated into its abstractions: her critical thinking has gone only so far, and not far enough. Worse, she has strayed from the crucial insight that social reproduction is driven not by a single circuit of capital but by plural inter-connected circuits with different temporalities both between themselves and with its own (which are also plural). Logically, as noted above, this leads away from any simple deterministic vision of the specific concrete connections between the logic of capital and human life (or nature), and by the same token away from any simple monological notion of the connection between capital and gender, or race, or anything else outside the purview of its abstractions. This should lead her away from philosophy to theoretically informed empirical investigation. No amount of logic, Hegelian or otherwise, can get over the fact that the relationship between capital on the one hand and human life and nature on the other is indeterminate, and cannot be understood without empirical investigation informed not only by Marxist theory but also by the ‘empirical positive sciences’.
Carson resists this conclusion, and wants to find a logically watertight way round it. She argues as follows at the end of book:
The critique of political economy cannot methodologically think the empirical positive sciences, while the positive sciences are necessary to give relevance to the critique of political economy. By contrast, the positive sciences cannot convincingly think the ontology of capital, yet capital impinges on their subject matter. Here, the status of non-capitalist elements acquires philosophical difficulty. How precisely do they uphold or challenge the reproduction of capital’s social form, and how would one tell? Answering such questions might require an exit from the methodological particularities of the critique of political economy; subsequently, there might not be an easy route back. Equally, a deconstruction of Capital - departing from the undecidable tension between Marx’s two concepts of life - might conclude that the Marxist enterprise inadequately accounts for the very thing that makes its systematicity possible. On the other hand, my analysis opens up the possibility of resolving these issues by delineating the logical place of the elements that exceed the epistemological framework of the critique of political economy. This, in turn, establishes a framework to begin synthesising logical concepts with empirical detail (185-6, emphasis mine).
She is kidding herself. The material character and physical properties of human life and nature do lie outside the logic of capital and are unknowable to its abstractions. So insofar as the critique of political economy is an analysis of human life and nature on the basis of capital’s abstractions, it can only take us so far. That is precisely why Marx (and Engels) made such an effort to keep up with developments in the ‘empirical positive sciences’, as this was essential if one’s goal was to determine the implications of the capitalist mode of production. Carson recognises that ‘capital’s abstractions alone are unable to conceive much of the content with which they are mediated, such as biology, physiology and further affective qualities’ (140), but she does not want to look into a void in which she cannot tell whether and if so how ‘non-capitalist elements’ uphold or challenge the reproduction of capital’s social form. The capitalist mode of production does not entail gender, or race, or any other specific aspect of human life or nature, so it is not possible to address its relationship with them without an ‘exit’ from its abstractions. But despite this there is still no point at which the broader ‘methodological particularities of the critique of political economy’ must be abandoned. Grounded in the historical materialism set out from the German Ideology onwards, they remain throughout the basis on which capital’s relationship with life and nature is to be explored. Accepting the risk of drowning in deep Hegelian waters, I suggest that the problem is that Carson is too taken with the idea of human life and the life of capital as directly comparable forms of life. I haven’t made a precise count, but I guess that references to ‘the life of capital’ and ‘the “life” of capital’ are about equal in number throughout the text. Capital does not have a physiological or organic life, for all that it reproduces itself on the basis of its own determinations. Carson knows but does not accept this. Otherwise she would not write as if capital has its own ontology, different from that of human life. Recognition of capital’s abstractions, logic, or ‘life process’, does not give capital its own special and different ontology, because there is only one physical, material world. Capital has effects insofar as its processes are part of it. The circuits of capital play out in concrete manifestations in the real world or not at all.
References
Marx, Karl. [1884] 1978. Capital, Volume II, London: Pelican.
Munro, Kirsten. 2024. Social Reproduction, in Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva, eds, Marx: Key Concepts, Edward Elgar, pp. 203-216.
Tomba, Massimiliano. 2009. Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective, Historical Materialism, 17, 1, 44-65.
Carson identifies Capital as an ‘unfinished project’, and aims to ‘philosophically reconstruct’ it from the perspective of reproduction, with a focus on ‘the ever-changing relationality between the logic of value accumulation and the concrete world’; capital’s reproduction process, she claims, ‘entails a central contradiction between capital’s abstractions and non-capitalist life-making processes’ (1). Across all three volumes of Capital, she suggests,
'Marx deploys two distinct concepts of "life": that of capital’s life on the one hand and that of organic matter on the other. Marx ascribes capital a life-like manner due to its self-reproducing nature as automatic subject, where its medium of reproduction is the money form, which is both capitalist and non-capitalist. By contrast, Marx then ascribes human actors - who are often personifications of the capitalist relation, such as property owners or labourers - an irreducibly non-capitalist, organic life, existing in metabolic relation to nature' (3).
In short: ‘The primary tension in capitalism is that between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of human life and nature … Concrete life engenders natural limits that in turn create limits for capital’s movement of value. Correspondingly, capital’s abstractions determine the practical form of concrete life. The tension between these two forms of life lies at the core of this book. The book dialectically analyses [to] what extent concrete life is produced by capital’s abstract form and to what extent it remains independent’ (4).
Carson argues that approaches that take labour as their starting point are too narrow to capture the full extent of the relationships involved, unhelpfully restricting debate to a focus on paid versus unpaid work (or wage labour versus other forms of labour). To progress, it is essential to expand the focus on wage labour and ‘simple reproduction’ set out in Capital, Volume I, and embrace the perspective of ‘expanded reproduction’ set out predominantly in Capital, Volume II, and in part in Volume III (largely written, as she notes, before Volume II). This entails a focus on all three circuits of capital - commodity capital, productive capital, and money capital. And like love, or charity if you adhere to the King James Bible (I Corinthians 13:13), money capital is the greatest of these three.
The pertinence of these remarks to debates on social reproduction is immediately apparent: an explicit or implicit contrast between ‘life-making’ and ‘profit-making’ is common in current approaches. For the most part this is theorised in relation to paid and unpaid work (and domestic labour in particular), and where Marx is directly invoked it is in the main through a critique of his supposedly exclusive focus on wage labour in capitalist production, with reference to Capital, Volume I, and in particular the account of ‘simple reproduction’ in Chapter 23; discussions of ‘extended reproduction’ (Munro 2024: 211-13) are rare. At the same time, the literature on social reproduction extends well beyond the issue of paid and unpaid work, addressing the issues of financialisation and debt, depletion, and ecology among others. Carson provides a comprehensive analytical framework within which these and other issues can be systematically addressed.
She begins with a focus on credit and debt, invoking the notion of fictitious capital (Chapter 1), then deals in turn with the ‘money form’ (Chapter 2) and the ‘fetish character’ (Chapter 3). The exposition is clear and soundly based, but I am not convinced by the prominence given to the association between debt and the ‘re-emergence of personal forms of domination’: a debt is no more ‘personal’ than a contract of employment. In both cases the contract may be with an individual entity; but each is a structural relation pertaining to a specific circuit of capital; and debtors are as free to refinance a debt as workers are to move to another employer. Neither option may be easy, but that is a reflection of the structural not personal nature of domination under capitalism. Moving on, Chapter 4 deals with the three circuits of capital, in terms of ‘time and schemas of reproduction’, and Chapter 5 addresses Marx’s 'social theory of reproduction’. Carson locates her project here not in relation to the literature on social reproduction, but within commentaries on the relationship between Marx’s value form analysis and Hegel’s The Science of Logic, seeking specifically to ‘provide an interpretation of the passages in The Science of Logic that refer to reproduction’; and to ‘employ a comparison of aspects of The Science of Logic and Capital with attention to their respective theories of life and "life process" to develop an account of reproduction derived from Marx’s two concepts of life’ (148). I start my detailed analysis with these two chapters.
Carson suggests at the beginning of Chapter 4 that Marx conceives the capitalist mode of production logically as a process of reproduction, and turns to Capital, Volume II, in order to ‘theorise the interaction between the reproduction of capital’s social form and the reproduction of concrete life’:
'Capitalism is, for Marx, both a system that posits its own preconditions and a productive system consisting of cycles or periodicity. According to Marx’s presentation of reproduction in Volume II, constant capital (capital invested in production) and variable capital (capital invested in hiring labour) need to be re-established and renewed within the circulation process, albeit at different rates and following different rhythms and temporalities.
Circulation renews the conditions of production that will repeat if capital’s abstract forms continue to move towards self-valorisation. Circulation, as an interruption to the time of production, distributes commodities ripe for consumption, engages the extraction of resources and facilitates investment and infrastructure. The cyclical nature of capital’s reproduction, as it moves between production and circulation, entails contradictions when encountering the concrete reproduction of life and nature, rendering reproduction a process that is both dynamic and cyclical. Therefore, Marx uses the economic sense of "reproduction" in capitalist social relations to understand the renewal of cycles of production mediated by abstractions. Here, contradictory processes and temporalities unfold when the reproduction of capital’s abstract form mediates - and is mediated by - the concrete reproduction of human life and nature’ (105).
Consumption, or the sale and purchase of commodities, is as important an aspect of the capitalist mode of production as is production. And overall, and importantly, ‘the social content of the reproduction of the system is mobilised by money, begetting further money in a cyclical process. The wage relation underpins this dynamic, acting as the premise for accumulation, linking the reproduction of the lives of persons to the reproduction of capital’s abstractions. Under capitalist conditions, money (received as wages or accumulated as surplus value) grants access to the material means of maintaining and reproducing the lives of historical individuals. In this way, the monetary relation establishes the cyclical - and therefore temporal - form that social reproduction takes’ (105). And as ‘reproduction unfolds at the level of circulation and thus in time’, it ‘requires the mediation of credit to uphold its structure’ (106).
The fundamental contribution this makes is to broaden the focus on (but not away from) labour and the productive circuit of capital: ‘In relation to the commodity form, there are productive capitalists, merchant capitalists and consumers; in relation to the money form, there are salaried workers, money capitalists and debtors; and so on. The actions and conditions of reproduction of these lives, too, mediate the movement of capital’ (111); and circulation ‘joins the different elements within the whole of social life together, creating systematic social relations’ (113). In isolation the productive, commodity and money circuits of capital reflect only certain moments within the circulation and reproduction of total social capital, but once understood from the point of view of the whole they are ‘retrospectively rendered to be aspects of a larger mechanism’ (117).
This ‘larger mechanism’ of the circulation and reproduction of total social capital provides a correspondingly larger framework for the analysis of social reproduction that includes the roles of capitalist, merchant and financier on the one side, and worker, consumer and borrower/debtor on the other. Consumption ‘plays a pivotal role’ (120), and, like production, it connects in various ways with credit and debt. This enlarged perspective provides a more developed conception of the (contradictory) relationship between capital and human life with which the book begins, and a basis for addressing ‘life-making’ under capitalism systematically as an ‘aspect of a larger process that perpetuates the capitalist organization of society’ (Munro 2024: 209). The ‘driving motive’ behind each of the three circuits of capital is capital’s self-valorisation, or ‘the valorization of value’ (128, citing Capital, Volume II, p. 180); but at the same time: ‘Human life persists as a transhistorical physiological entity in metabolistic relation to the historically constituted sensuous world through the mediation of labour (136-7):
'These two elements (the life of capital and human life), through their ongoing practical mediation, create one another anew: People living in capitalist societies, and living within different relations therein, become different kinds of people with different historically determined needs. While the movement of the value form shifts based on its encounter with the natural limits imposed by living elements, it simultaneously subsumes these limits into its own logic. Therefore these limits remain fundamentally relational. … Analysis from the perspective of circulation and reproduction reveals a central contradiction of capital, where capitalist variables meet non-capitalist variables in dialectical co-existence (137).
These are processes that unfold over time. Carson draws on Tomba (2009) to argue that each of the three circuits of capital has its own temporality, and their circuits are therefore marked by ‘interruptions’ - between investment and production, for example, or between production and sale; and human life and the sensuous world also have their own temporalities, which form natural limits to potential valorisation (137).
All this is very well said. Following, Chapter 5 recapitulates the position that ‘social and capital reproduction are better understood with a reorientation to the reproduction of life, human and natural, analysed through its mediation by capital’s abstractions’ (141); that ‘in social reproduction theory thus far, the co-existence of the economic and non-economic is largely understood through the tension between the reproduction of human life and wage labour, and not between human life and capital’s process of reproduction’, that analyses along these lines ‘fail to account for the reproduction of capital as a social form’ (142); and that:
'When analysis considers social reproduction as the mechanism that reproduces labour power - and not as a concrete manifestation internal to capital’s abstract movement to self-reproduce - it fails to include an analysis of the social reproduction of those who are excluded from wage labour. Moreover, the precise role of finance and ecology in capital’s reproduction are obscured. Finance (and financialisation) entail a monetary process of circulation and reproduction of capital’s abstractions, while ecology provides the necessary material for capital’s sustenance. The two indirectly affect the capital-wage relation and are thus only partially comprehendible from the perspective of wage labour’s reproduction’ (142-3).
There are numerous implications here for theories of social reproduction. First, the relevance of a Marxist perspective is reinforced, and it is shown to be capable, if all three circuits of capital are taken into account, of addressing a range of issues beyond that of value and wage labour. Second, the approach adopted does not privilege either productive labour (as some Marxist approaches do), or gender (as some feminist approaches do). Rather, it allows for full consideration of these aspects alongside others. And while it does suggest that over time the logic of capital will assert itself increasingly over ‘non-capitalist life’, it identifies limits to its capacity to do so, and moves sharply away from a rigid, monological and deterministic model. Third, by addressing the specific logic of the three circuits of capital and their varying temporalities, and interactions between them, and insisting that human life and the sensuous world have their own temporalities too, and tend to ‘interrupt’ the circuits of capital, Carson produces a systematic model which is at the same time complex and non-deterministic, and one that demands, as it should, close empirical analysis of individual circumstances, specific conjunctures, and trajectories of change. In short, she complicates, quite rightly, the relationship between the reproduction of capital, and the reproduction of human and planetary life. Fourth, this has immediate implications for approaches to daily and generational survival, whether generally of individuals, households, and humanity at large, or specifically of individual workers and the working class. In particular, it highlights the wide range of choices and strategies available, and the constraints they come up against. At the simplest level, individuals or households under pressure may take on more wage labour, resort to borrowing, or cut back on consumption - all aspects, as noted above, that are prominent in the literature on social reproduction. Over the longer term, they may invest in the acquisition of education and skills, at the cost of delayed entry to the labour market, but with the prospect of better returns. In all these aspects, constraints intensify as the hold of capital over daily life grows stronger. A striking implication of this, when the issue of temporal cycles are brought to the fore, is that longer-term or inter-generational decisions are still choices made in the present, and therefore an aspect of day-to-day survival. For example: can an individual afford to invest in a college degree? or, on a genuinely inter-generational level, can an individual or couple afford to take time out of paid work to have a child, and be confident of having the resources to raise one in the future if they do? At the same time, capitalists face challenges arising from intensified competition - not only do producers have to compete for workers, but capitalists in the commercial sector have to price and move their stock, and financial institutions have to seek returns on their assets. The strategies adopted create opportunities for households dependent on labour, to offset the challenges they face, and the calculus of the prospects for social reproduction over time is accordingly complicated. And governments have to juggle with a bewildering array of trade-offs in making policy - family policy and employment policy, as much as decisions on interest rates, taxation, and citizenship - to take their programmes forward, adding further complexity to the circumstances that individuals and households face.
If there is one over-riding implication of all this, it is cautionary: theorists of social reproduction, especially if they favour a one-dimensional approach or privilege a specific issue, should take a step back and contemplate the complexity of social reproduction under capitalism, and the difficulties attendant upon simplistic or over-deterministic conclusions. And as it happens, this is a conclusion that is reinforced by the way in which the principal argument advanced by Carson fails. So I turn to this.
A crucial ambiguity appears in Carson’s argument when she addresses the concrete character and the logic of the relationship between capital on the one hand, and nature and human life on the other, asserting in a single continuous statement that I present in two parts that (1)
'Capitalism largely treats nature and human life as self-replenishing and readily available, to be used to produce value without functioning a priori as capital but material outside of capital. They are often extracted as use values and not compensated for as exchange values'.
And (2)
'In this way, capital’s reproduction logically disavows its own means of reproduction, which is a requirement for the means of reproduction to remain external to capital’s abstract system of values. This becomes clear when we look to the disavowal of the social activity that goes into the upkeep of the labourer and the lives of people in capitalist society more generally: Social reproduction is necessarily external to value production, which is why it can be a reproductive agent of the capital relation. The logic of the social reproduction of capital will always rely on the disavowal of what is other to it. Irrespective of changes occurring at the level of social rights, capital will nevertheless continue to degrade the mechanisms that sustain the extraction of profit (144-5, emphasis mine).
The online Cambridge Dictionary (which may or may not have a connection to Cambridge) usefully defines ‘to disavow’ as ‘to say that you know nothing about something, or that you have no responsibility for or connection with something’; it defines ‘to degrade’, as ‘to cause people to feel that they or other people have no value and do not have the respect or good opinion of others’, or ‘to spoil or destroy the beauty or quality of something’. There is a crucial difference between them. Capital acts upon and transforms nature and human life, but in its constitutive abstractions it does not know them or take responsibility for them. It does not logically follow from this either that it will prove compatible with their continued reproduction, or that it will degrade them in general terms, let alone in terms of the mechanisms that sustain the extraction of profit. This is not something that can be simply asserted - it requires empirical substantiation. In fact, this is consistent with the spirit of the question with which Carson began: the open-ended issue of the extent to which concrete life is produced by capital’s abstract form and to which it remains independent (4). But here, as she goes on in the same paragraph, she gets into deeper trouble. Again, I divide the extended comment she makes into two parts: (1)
If a given society, for example, achieves aspects of gender equality in social reproduction, the exploitation of social reproduction will shift to exacerbate another form that will likely carry a racialised and gendered character. Social reproduction, or the reproduction of labour power, is racialised and gendered as a historical reality, and its gendered nature has thus been, in practice, necessary to capital. Capital, therefore, should not be understood as a practical reality without its gendered or racialised composition: logically, capital’s development becomes internal to capital itself though [sic: I read it as through] the mediation of the concrete by the abstract.
And (2)
However, this does not mean that capital cannot function otherwise: Capital’s abstractions, as abstractions, possess an indifference to the concrete (we do not get a distinction between use value and exchange value without an indifference to the concrete on the side of the mediation of the abstraction). Hence, interpersonal forms of domination can develop and regress within the framework of a capitalist mode of production. Evidently, it is possible to have more or less egalitarian forms of capitalist relations (145).
Carson has gone astray, and reaches a dead end when she acknowledges capitalism’s ‘indifference to the concrete’. But at the same time, she cannot let go of familiar concrete aspects of capital’s relationship with ‘life’ up to the present. It is essential to recognise the history and presence of gendered and racialised exploitation, but it does not follow that these or any other concrete forms taken by exploitation become ‘internal to capital itself’, in the sense that they are permanently incorporated into its abstractions: her critical thinking has gone only so far, and not far enough. Worse, she has strayed from the crucial insight that social reproduction is driven not by a single circuit of capital but by plural inter-connected circuits with different temporalities both between themselves and with its own (which are also plural). Logically, as noted above, this leads away from any simple deterministic vision of the specific concrete connections between the logic of capital and human life (or nature), and by the same token away from any simple monological notion of the connection between capital and gender, or race, or anything else outside the purview of its abstractions. This should lead her away from philosophy to theoretically informed empirical investigation. No amount of logic, Hegelian or otherwise, can get over the fact that the relationship between capital on the one hand and human life and nature on the other is indeterminate, and cannot be understood without empirical investigation informed not only by Marxist theory but also by the ‘empirical positive sciences’.
Carson resists this conclusion, and wants to find a logically watertight way round it. She argues as follows at the end of book:
The critique of political economy cannot methodologically think the empirical positive sciences, while the positive sciences are necessary to give relevance to the critique of political economy. By contrast, the positive sciences cannot convincingly think the ontology of capital, yet capital impinges on their subject matter. Here, the status of non-capitalist elements acquires philosophical difficulty. How precisely do they uphold or challenge the reproduction of capital’s social form, and how would one tell? Answering such questions might require an exit from the methodological particularities of the critique of political economy; subsequently, there might not be an easy route back. Equally, a deconstruction of Capital - departing from the undecidable tension between Marx’s two concepts of life - might conclude that the Marxist enterprise inadequately accounts for the very thing that makes its systematicity possible. On the other hand, my analysis opens up the possibility of resolving these issues by delineating the logical place of the elements that exceed the epistemological framework of the critique of political economy. This, in turn, establishes a framework to begin synthesising logical concepts with empirical detail (185-6, emphasis mine).
She is kidding herself. The material character and physical properties of human life and nature do lie outside the logic of capital and are unknowable to its abstractions. So insofar as the critique of political economy is an analysis of human life and nature on the basis of capital’s abstractions, it can only take us so far. That is precisely why Marx (and Engels) made such an effort to keep up with developments in the ‘empirical positive sciences’, as this was essential if one’s goal was to determine the implications of the capitalist mode of production. Carson recognises that ‘capital’s abstractions alone are unable to conceive much of the content with which they are mediated, such as biology, physiology and further affective qualities’ (140), but she does not want to look into a void in which she cannot tell whether and if so how ‘non-capitalist elements’ uphold or challenge the reproduction of capital’s social form. The capitalist mode of production does not entail gender, or race, or any other specific aspect of human life or nature, so it is not possible to address its relationship with them without an ‘exit’ from its abstractions. But despite this there is still no point at which the broader ‘methodological particularities of the critique of political economy’ must be abandoned. Grounded in the historical materialism set out from the German Ideology onwards, they remain throughout the basis on which capital’s relationship with life and nature is to be explored. Accepting the risk of drowning in deep Hegelian waters, I suggest that the problem is that Carson is too taken with the idea of human life and the life of capital as directly comparable forms of life. I haven’t made a precise count, but I guess that references to ‘the life of capital’ and ‘the “life” of capital’ are about equal in number throughout the text. Capital does not have a physiological or organic life, for all that it reproduces itself on the basis of its own determinations. Carson knows but does not accept this. Otherwise she would not write as if capital has its own ontology, different from that of human life. Recognition of capital’s abstractions, logic, or ‘life process’, does not give capital its own special and different ontology, because there is only one physical, material world. Capital has effects insofar as its processes are part of it. The circuits of capital play out in concrete manifestations in the real world or not at all.
References
Marx, Karl. [1884] 1978. Capital, Volume II, London: Pelican.
Munro, Kirsten. 2024. Social Reproduction, in Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva, eds, Marx: Key Concepts, Edward Elgar, pp. 203-216.
Tomba, Massimiliano. 2009. Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective, Historical Materialism, 17, 1, 44-65.