Martha E. Gimenez, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays, Brill, 2018; hbk, $174.
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RATING: 95
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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A short version of this review was published at Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, which is a site well worth a visit.
To prove of value and relevance in the present day, Marxist theory must demonstrate its capacity to provide a convincing analysis of contemporary capitalism on a global scale, and at the same time link that analysis to the variety and complexity of the lived experience of people around the world, and the social and working relationships in which they find themselves. Gender relations, mediated by class, are central to this, and it is fair to say that despite the advances that have been made, there is no comprehensive Marxist analytical framework incorporating them that enjoys general acceptance. This volume of collected essays, published over more than four decades, reveals that the development of such a framework has all the time been hidden in plain sight.
The recent re-publication of Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Haymarket Books, 2013, first published 1983), Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today (Verso, 2014, first published 1980), and Christine Delphy, Close to Home (Verso, 2016, first published 1984), reflects renewed interest in Marxist and Materialist Feminist approaches that had been out of fashion for a while. In the meantime, ‘intersectional’ approaches have displaced those that prioritize class, and a literature on ‘social reproduction’ has emerged. Over the intervening years the world has changed, so that many points of reference of the 1980s, whether in social relations or global political economy, are now a lifetime away. Martha Gimenez highlights some of these changes in the introduction to this collection of her essays – the great diversity in family and household circumstances in the United States and elsewhere, the increasing difficulties that working class women and men face in securing their survival, and the manner in which assisted reproductive technologies increasingly separate sexuality from procreation, all in the context of a wave of revolutions in the forces of production, the establishment of capitalist accumulation on a genuinely global scale, and the universal experience of ‘permanent job scarcity and relentless competition and change’ (13) to which this has given rise. She makes the case for a renewal of Marxist-Feminism, with a primary focus on the oppression of working-class women, from the starting-point that ‘the functioning of the mode of production determines the mode of reproduction’ (12). Her conceptualization of ‘capitalist social reproduction’ (in a new essay, Chapter 13) constitutes the crowning achievement of what is revealed here as a lifelong intellectual project of exceptional coherence, originality and power. The essays are organised thematically, and for the most part chronologically, with some combined or edited in order to achieve the best expression of the overall project. The resulting volume represents not just a decisive step forward in relation to debates over gender and social reproduction, but more broadly a comprehensive approach to contemporary capitalist development on a world-wide scale that recognizes that ‘the reproduction of labour power and the reproduction of capital are moments in the dialectical reproduction of the system as a whole’ (13, ft. 42) and draws out stark implications for the reproduction of people, and the poor in particular. It thereby points a way through and beyond the limitations of approaches that have moved away from a recognition that ‘under capitalist conditions, reproduction takes place under historically specific conditions in which production determines reproduction’ (16). The publishers, and Sébastien Budgen and the editorial board of the Historical Materialism Book Series, are to be congratulated on the initiative that has enabled Gimenez to make this work available to a wider readership. It should appear in paperback within a year.
Gimenez’ own geographical and intellectual trajectory is pertinent. She addressed these issues first at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the 1970s, from the perspective of someone, brought up in Argentina, who grasped the sense and relevance of Marx on first acquaintance, but only slowly came to realize the depth and dimensions of gender oppression in the United States in particular and so make sense of US feminism. Her relative isolation from major centres of feminist debate, along with her retirement in 2007, meant that, as she disarmingly confesses, she only became aware of recent social reproduction theory when putting this collection together. Her approach is shaped primarily by the work of Marx and Engels themselves, but draws also on the work of Godelier and Althusser, which was enormously influential among the Latin American intellectual left in the 1970s. The fortunate consequence of this personal history is that these essays, published from 1975 onwards, constitute a sustained and undeflected deployment of a non-deterministic structural Marxism that challenges the claim that Marx failed to integrate the question of the reproduction of labour power into the theory of capitalism and took for granted its availability (288), but equally devotes much of its energy to exploring specific empirical changes to household and family structure, the relationship between wage and unwaged work, the commodification of domestic production and deskilling of domestic labour, and the ‘out-sourcing’ to the consumer of key aspects of production itself (as with ‘self-assembly’, for example). Marx’s distinction between the capitalist mode of production (CMP), in which the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers reveals the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and specific capitalist social formations (CSFS) in which the particular trajectory of change and resulting totality is the result of ‘many determinations and relations’, is central. More broadly Marx’s method is used ‘to identify the non-observable structures and social relations underlying the visible patterns of interaction between men and women that place the latter in a subordinate position’, on the grounds that ‘[his] most important potential contributions to feminist theory and politics reside precisely in the aspect of his work that most feminists ignored: his methodology’ (347, ft. 5, 348).
The first essay outlines the ‘scientific and political relevance of Marxism for feminism’ (45-9), primarily through a critique of liberal feminism and the limitations inherent in the attainment of civil rights: ‘so long as feminists struggle only for [liberal] goals, the advancement of “middle-class” women will continue to be predicated on the continued exploitation of the majority of women who, through their labour in factories, offices, and other women’s homes, provide the structural support for their sisters’ privileged “liberated” status’ (47). The second, which outlines the structural Marxist approach, highlights the perils of ascribing too specific and enduring a content to such abstractions as individual biology, sex/gender systems, ‘mothering’, and ‘patriarchy’, in isolation from modes of production. The adoption of the concept of the ‘mode of physical and social reproduction’ within capitalism here allowed Gimenez to recognize the nuclear family and male breadwinner as currently dominant forms without mistaking them as fixed for ever. A passing reference to the ‘pitfalls of multiple causality’ (67) and a rueful comment that in the present historical conjuncture, ‘Structuralist Marxism is not likely to have a noticeable impact in the development of American feminist theory’ (81) pave the way for a cool dissection of intersectionality in two chapters that characterize it, in so far as it has pretensions as theory, as effectively a lowest common denominator for gender specialists with otherwise conflicting agendas and primary concerns, at best an analytical rather than a theoretical framework, and at worst a new form of liberalism that denies capitalist exploitation. A complementary chapter on ‘materialist feminism’ finds it to be either intersectionality or Marxist feminism by another name, depending on the practitioner.
These are fundamental contributions. But the true strength and originality of the volume comes in Part Two, in a series of linked essays that build towards a new account of capitalist social reproduction. First, a comprehensive framework for the study of population explores the relationship between the CMP and fertility, mortality and migration, starting from the proposition that ‘capital accumulation is indifferent to and independent from rates of population growth’ (133), and addressing changes in the technical relations of production, and their effects at the level of the household. The connections are complex, and mediated by ideology and class struggle, but reflect the proposition that ‘the kinds of migration processes, household composition, social stratification, population structure, composition, and distribution characterizing a given CSF at a given time are all structural effects of capital accumulation’ (137; and Figure 1, p. 138). The same essay offers an initial analysis of pronatalism and reproduction, locating the roots of the former in the alienated character of labour. The following two chapters then explore reproduction and procreation under capitalism, in typically dialectical fashion: on the one hand, structural and ideological pressures make socially prescribed parenthood a ‘precondition for all adult roles’ (162), and in the course of capitalist development women are ‘segregated in the home as reproducers of the present and future generation of workers’ (178); on the other, with the developmentof reproductive technologies, ‘biological processes have been fragmented and opened to manipulation, thus bringing about unforeseen changes in the social relations within which children are brought into the world’ (188). These technologies, ‘as they split intergenerational social reproduction from procreation, give rise to the capitalist mode of procreation’ (189), in which ‘the technological fragmentation of the biological process of reproduction … makes it possible for individuals or couples to purchase the different elements of the reproductive process to “build”, eventually, a baby for themselves’ (190). The development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) splits intergenerational social reproduction from procreation, making it possible to identify the technological fragmentation of the biological process of reproduction as ‘part of the overall development of the productive forces or forces of production’ (195). So capitalist development, ‘at the same time it selects this family form as the most “functional” for daily and intergenerational reproduction, constantly undermines it through changes in the productive forces in the realms of production and reproduction’ (196). The commodification of all the facets of the reproductive process, marked by market relations of procreation and the outsourcing of production, has given rise to what can be defined as a ‘mode of procreation’: ‘the combination of the biological elements of the process of reproduction through relations of procreation independent from sexual relations and from the social relations of reproduction’. And this in turn undermines ‘taken for granted, obvious or “natural” meanings of motherhood (197).
In Chapter 9, what has been identified as the ‘feminization of poverty’ is shown to be better seen as the immiserisation of the working class: rising male unemployment, declining opportunities, and the insufficiency of the wage to support a family provoke major changes in women’s decisions regarding marriage, child-bearing, and household formation, and confirm at the same time the indifference of capital to the reproduction of the working class as a whole (in brief because capitalist development continually displaces living labour and renders it redundant):
‘Lack of access to the basic material conditions necessary for physical and social reproduction on a daily and generational basis threatens the intergenerational reproduction of the working class among all races, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. The immiseration of the working class culminates in the breakdown of its intergenerational reproduction. Poor parents, particularly poor single mothers, are placed under conditions that deprive them of their ability to reproduce people with marketable skills. This situation may be ‘functional’ for the economy, insofar as the demand for skilled and educated workers is not likely to rise dramatically during the near future’ (225).
The theme is expanded in Chapter 10, on the dialectics of waged and unwaged work: poor households no longer reproduce labour power, but rather simply produce people, ‘and people, in themselves, without marketable skills, have no value under capitalist conditions’ (247). The striking conclusion, completely in accord with a classical Marxist perspective and with contemporary empirical data, is that capital does not care if the price of unskilled labour falls below the cost of its daily and generational reproduction.
In the meantime (Chapter 11), ‘scientific and technological change have affected sexuality and reproduction in ways previously thought possible in the realm of science fiction; and increases in women’s labour force participation, levels of education, and political involvement have challenged traditional gender roles and the sexual division of labour’ (257), while the range of use values produced domestically has narrowed as commodification has advanced, leading to ‘the deskilling of domestic labour and the transformation of most domestic workers into consumers of commodities rather than the producers of use values’ (266). A short chapter on self-sourcing, or the transfer of aspects of production to consumers themselves, rounds out the multi-faceted picture of the relationship between households on the one hand, and capitalist production on the other.
All of this builds towards Chapter 13, which sets out the logic of capitalist social reproduction. Here Gimenez addresses the frequently encountered criticism that Marxist political economy takes for granted the production of people and so fails to recognize the importance of social reproduction. In response, she shows that Marx does in fact provide a framework for addressing these issues, and one moreover that avoids the trap of viewing the labour of social reproduction exclusively as gendered household labour. Her first step is to invoke the contrast between the two levels of analysis identified above: the capitalist mode of production, at which level ‘class relations function independently from the personal characteristics of their bearers’, and specific capitalist social formations, where gender, racial, and other oppressions matter, as capitalists pit workers against each other, creating and recreating economic and ideological divisions’ (288). She quotes from Capital, Vol. 3:
‘It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers … which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same from the standpoint of its main conditions – due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations of appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances’ (Capital, Vol. 3, Lawrence & Wishart, 1959, pp. 791-2, cited p. 288-9).
The exposition of the capitalist mode of reproduction that follows proceeds accordingly, first exploring the logic of the capitalist mode of production, then turning to the detail of the ‘empirically given circumstances’ of the present day in which it is embedded. The starting point is not the existence of two separate and complementary spheres – whether production and reproduction, ‘public’ and ‘private’, or ‘domestic’ and ‘capitalist’, but rather the insistence that ‘If production be capitalist in form, so, too, will be reproduction’ (Capital, Vol. 1, from Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 566, cited 289), and a focus on the specifically Marxist concept of the production of labour power, rather than the production of people. The capitalist, Marx says here, ‘produces the labourer, but as a wage labourer’ (ibid, p. 571). As Werner Bonefeld puts it elsewhere, what is at issue is the reproduction of the individual not just as a human being, but as a propertyless producer of surplus value. And as Gimenez puts it:
‘In the theory of the CMP, Marx includes the production and – given that production is a continuous process – reproduction of the labourer as a wage-labourer, just as the labourer, through the labour process constantly produces and reproduces capital and, therefore, the capitalist. The production and reproduction of capital entails the production and reproduction of the relations of production or class relations – the relations between capitalist and wage-labourers – which is a social relation with a material base, i.e. their respective relationship to the means of productions. This is a process of social reproduction within the capitalist mode of production (290, emphasis original).
The passage that follows is equally important:
‘At the same time, Marx excludes, from the theory of the CMP, the physical reproduction of the labourers, the owners of labour power: ‘The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist must [sic] safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and propagation’ (ibid, citing Capital, Vol. 1, p. 572).
Feminists and social reproduction theorists have found this comment objectionable. But Gimenez explains precisely how it is consistent with Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production: ‘as the productivity of labour grows, the demand for labour declines, and an ever-growing mass of surplus population is generated’ (293), in a process that is specific to the capitalist mode of production:
‘The labouring population … produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus-population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 625, cited 293-4).
It is quite wrong, therefore, to suggest that Marx reaches this conclusion because he takes a ‘naturalistic’ view of human reproduction; and Gimenez interprets it politically: ‘capitalists are indifferent to the workers’ fate except when it may impinge on their own safety and ability to accumulate. Workers are left to their own devices, to survive as best as they can within conditions set by the ebb and flows of capital accumulation and the success or failure of working-class struggles’ (294).
I dwell on this point at length because it is the key to the specifically capitalist mode of reproduction, and its implications are stark, especially now, when the creation of labour markets on a global scale coincides with successive revolutions that displace labour from the production process. To reiterate, it arises not from the nature of human beings, but from the inherent properties of capital: ‘That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 635, cited p. 296).
Gimenez then turns to the historically specific characteristics of social reproduction in social formations where capitalism is the dominant mode of production, and access to the material conditions of reproduction is ‘secure for the capitalist class, small business owners, rentiers and the more privileged stratum within the working class’, but ‘variable and insecure for the working class, particularly the lower strata constituted by temporary workers, underemployed, unemployed and the poor’ (297). In the concept of capitalist social reproduction emphasis is on
(1) ‘the determinant role of capital accumulation, the class structure, and the state of the class struggle underlying capital accumulation, upon the conditions of reproduction of the social classes’ (298);
(2) ‘the reproduction of the working class as a whole, including the reproduction of the various strata that fragment the working class, and taking into account the effects of economic changes upon the extent to which working-class men are able to participate in the process of reproduction’ (ibid); and
(3) ‘the contradictions of capitalism that constantly alter and disrupt access to the conditions of reproduction for different sectors of the working class’, meaning that ‘the economic survival of the working classes, and their physical and social, daily and generational reproduction, is at the heart of the class struggle’ (299).
At its heart, then, is not a fixed allocation of roles between women and men or between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres, but a ‘permanent crisis of reproduction caused by the indifference of capital to the physical and social reproduction of the workforce’ (300). It is only within this framework that domestic labour takes on a gendered form of a specific kind:
‘The working classes are always in a crisis of reproduction because wages, except under exceptional circumstances (e.g. US economic prosperity after WWII), are seldom sufficient to cover the cost of daily and generational reproduction. Working-class relations of reproduction are, consequently, fragile, unstable and, for unskilled workers, impossible to sustain and yet they are also a survival strategy. Under capitalist conditions of unemployment, job scarcity and universalised commodity production, which requires the prior sale of labour power to satisfy most basic needs, working-class men and women enter into relations of reproduction in a context that places those agents of reproduction who are also wage earners in a position of power over those who are only domestic workers, and turns the position of domestic worker into a structural alternative to that of wage worker. Domestic labour becomes an economic ‘option’, an alternative to wage labour for working-class women, which places them in a dependent position with respect to men’ (299-300).
As always, though, the analysis proceeds dialectically – these circumstances prompt changes in patterns of formation of relationships and households:
‘In the US, for example, the effects of the 2008 recession undermined the possibilities for family formation for some sectors of the mostly white working class, as employment opportunities for poorly educated men declined, at the same time that women’s levels of education and employment opportunities rose. Low-income men who cannot support families do not marry, and working women are less likely to marry men who cannot earn at least as much as they do. Men and women eventually marry, but after having had children with more than one partner. In 2012, almost 41 percent of all births were out of wedlock’ (300).
It follows that ‘to attribute the oppression of working-class women solely to childbearing and their responsibilities for daily and generational reproduction, or their responsibility for the reproduction of labour power … naturalises the effects of the expropriation of the means of production and the complete dependence of working-class men and women on the sale of their labour for a wage’ (301, original emphasis). Here Gimenez connects directly with the classic account of social reproduction made by Antonella Picchio, confirming its particular relevance for the present day.
Gimenez then develops further the distinction between the reproduction of labourers, and the reproduction of labour power. Starting from Marx’s comment that: ‘In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labour power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 182, cited p. 302), she draws out the implication labour power in the form of the generalized capacity to work that changing patterns of accumulation demand is only partially developed within the family, and less so if the domestic environment is not conducive:
‘Historically, whether or not households actually enhance or undermine the maintenance and/or reproduction of basic labour power and the reproduction of specific kinds of labour power depends on the economic and cultural resources available to the agents of reproduction, i.e. on their location in the class structure and socio-economic stratum within the class. The oppression of the poorer sectors of the working class entails, among other things, the relative inability of adults – whether for lack of skills themselves, lack of time, or both – to develop adequately their children’s capacity for learning and developing intellectual skills’ (303).
At the same time,
‘Capitalism is inherently contradictory; it relentlessly exerts its power and, in the process, it transforms the material conditions underlying people’s experiences at all levels (family, work, consumption, recreation, and so on). Such changes sometimes tighten its ideological hold, but they can often undermine it, as critical forms of consciousness, political objectives and social movements emerge. The rise of its "gravediggers" is far in the future but, in the meantime, its constant revolutionising of production and experiences triggers ever present challenges to its domination’ (306).
The success of struggles that are fought subjectively under identity banners that divide the working class, while important to those who may benefit from them, ‘leave the structures of capitalism intact and does not further working-class power and understanding’ (307). Hence, she argues, the need for ‘a working-class women’s feminism, in solidarity with all workers regardless of gender and other differences’, rather than ‘a social reproduction feminism, primarily concerned with the female portion of the working class’ (308).
Part Three, finally, broadens the empirical focus of the collection to address the impact of global capitalism on working women in two chapters, and concludes with a review from 2005 of Marx’s relevance to feminism. As the first two chapters address the themes of the book from the same theoretical premises but from a somewhat different perspective – more ‘global’, and less ‘theoretical’ - readers less familiar with the theory dealt with elsewhere might find it helpful to read this part first. Similarly, readers largely unfamiliar with the literature on Marx’s contribution or lack of it to the issue of women’s oppression might like to read the last chapter first.
In summary, these lucid essays are the product of a rare intelligence, allied to an admirably disciplined intellectual practice. By taking seriously the unified application of historical materialist analysis to all aspects of production, including the production and reproduction of human life itself, and applying itself to the circumstances of the present, the collection transcends Marxist Feminism. There are areas where perhaps the analysis might be supplemented – for example, to bring out the significance of the fact that the scientific and technological advances that drew the biological processes involved in human reproduction into the realm of capital, with all the consequences that Gimenez draws out, were not in evidence in Marx’s time. But that is by the way. This collection should be recognised as a founding text for renewed Marxist theory, fit for the 21st century and beyond.
To prove of value and relevance in the present day, Marxist theory must demonstrate its capacity to provide a convincing analysis of contemporary capitalism on a global scale, and at the same time link that analysis to the variety and complexity of the lived experience of people around the world, and the social and working relationships in which they find themselves. Gender relations, mediated by class, are central to this, and it is fair to say that despite the advances that have been made, there is no comprehensive Marxist analytical framework incorporating them that enjoys general acceptance. This volume of collected essays, published over more than four decades, reveals that the development of such a framework has all the time been hidden in plain sight.
The recent re-publication of Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Haymarket Books, 2013, first published 1983), Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today (Verso, 2014, first published 1980), and Christine Delphy, Close to Home (Verso, 2016, first published 1984), reflects renewed interest in Marxist and Materialist Feminist approaches that had been out of fashion for a while. In the meantime, ‘intersectional’ approaches have displaced those that prioritize class, and a literature on ‘social reproduction’ has emerged. Over the intervening years the world has changed, so that many points of reference of the 1980s, whether in social relations or global political economy, are now a lifetime away. Martha Gimenez highlights some of these changes in the introduction to this collection of her essays – the great diversity in family and household circumstances in the United States and elsewhere, the increasing difficulties that working class women and men face in securing their survival, and the manner in which assisted reproductive technologies increasingly separate sexuality from procreation, all in the context of a wave of revolutions in the forces of production, the establishment of capitalist accumulation on a genuinely global scale, and the universal experience of ‘permanent job scarcity and relentless competition and change’ (13) to which this has given rise. She makes the case for a renewal of Marxist-Feminism, with a primary focus on the oppression of working-class women, from the starting-point that ‘the functioning of the mode of production determines the mode of reproduction’ (12). Her conceptualization of ‘capitalist social reproduction’ (in a new essay, Chapter 13) constitutes the crowning achievement of what is revealed here as a lifelong intellectual project of exceptional coherence, originality and power. The essays are organised thematically, and for the most part chronologically, with some combined or edited in order to achieve the best expression of the overall project. The resulting volume represents not just a decisive step forward in relation to debates over gender and social reproduction, but more broadly a comprehensive approach to contemporary capitalist development on a world-wide scale that recognizes that ‘the reproduction of labour power and the reproduction of capital are moments in the dialectical reproduction of the system as a whole’ (13, ft. 42) and draws out stark implications for the reproduction of people, and the poor in particular. It thereby points a way through and beyond the limitations of approaches that have moved away from a recognition that ‘under capitalist conditions, reproduction takes place under historically specific conditions in which production determines reproduction’ (16). The publishers, and Sébastien Budgen and the editorial board of the Historical Materialism Book Series, are to be congratulated on the initiative that has enabled Gimenez to make this work available to a wider readership. It should appear in paperback within a year.
Gimenez’ own geographical and intellectual trajectory is pertinent. She addressed these issues first at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the 1970s, from the perspective of someone, brought up in Argentina, who grasped the sense and relevance of Marx on first acquaintance, but only slowly came to realize the depth and dimensions of gender oppression in the United States in particular and so make sense of US feminism. Her relative isolation from major centres of feminist debate, along with her retirement in 2007, meant that, as she disarmingly confesses, she only became aware of recent social reproduction theory when putting this collection together. Her approach is shaped primarily by the work of Marx and Engels themselves, but draws also on the work of Godelier and Althusser, which was enormously influential among the Latin American intellectual left in the 1970s. The fortunate consequence of this personal history is that these essays, published from 1975 onwards, constitute a sustained and undeflected deployment of a non-deterministic structural Marxism that challenges the claim that Marx failed to integrate the question of the reproduction of labour power into the theory of capitalism and took for granted its availability (288), but equally devotes much of its energy to exploring specific empirical changes to household and family structure, the relationship between wage and unwaged work, the commodification of domestic production and deskilling of domestic labour, and the ‘out-sourcing’ to the consumer of key aspects of production itself (as with ‘self-assembly’, for example). Marx’s distinction between the capitalist mode of production (CMP), in which the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers reveals the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and specific capitalist social formations (CSFS) in which the particular trajectory of change and resulting totality is the result of ‘many determinations and relations’, is central. More broadly Marx’s method is used ‘to identify the non-observable structures and social relations underlying the visible patterns of interaction between men and women that place the latter in a subordinate position’, on the grounds that ‘[his] most important potential contributions to feminist theory and politics reside precisely in the aspect of his work that most feminists ignored: his methodology’ (347, ft. 5, 348).
The first essay outlines the ‘scientific and political relevance of Marxism for feminism’ (45-9), primarily through a critique of liberal feminism and the limitations inherent in the attainment of civil rights: ‘so long as feminists struggle only for [liberal] goals, the advancement of “middle-class” women will continue to be predicated on the continued exploitation of the majority of women who, through their labour in factories, offices, and other women’s homes, provide the structural support for their sisters’ privileged “liberated” status’ (47). The second, which outlines the structural Marxist approach, highlights the perils of ascribing too specific and enduring a content to such abstractions as individual biology, sex/gender systems, ‘mothering’, and ‘patriarchy’, in isolation from modes of production. The adoption of the concept of the ‘mode of physical and social reproduction’ within capitalism here allowed Gimenez to recognize the nuclear family and male breadwinner as currently dominant forms without mistaking them as fixed for ever. A passing reference to the ‘pitfalls of multiple causality’ (67) and a rueful comment that in the present historical conjuncture, ‘Structuralist Marxism is not likely to have a noticeable impact in the development of American feminist theory’ (81) pave the way for a cool dissection of intersectionality in two chapters that characterize it, in so far as it has pretensions as theory, as effectively a lowest common denominator for gender specialists with otherwise conflicting agendas and primary concerns, at best an analytical rather than a theoretical framework, and at worst a new form of liberalism that denies capitalist exploitation. A complementary chapter on ‘materialist feminism’ finds it to be either intersectionality or Marxist feminism by another name, depending on the practitioner.
These are fundamental contributions. But the true strength and originality of the volume comes in Part Two, in a series of linked essays that build towards a new account of capitalist social reproduction. First, a comprehensive framework for the study of population explores the relationship between the CMP and fertility, mortality and migration, starting from the proposition that ‘capital accumulation is indifferent to and independent from rates of population growth’ (133), and addressing changes in the technical relations of production, and their effects at the level of the household. The connections are complex, and mediated by ideology and class struggle, but reflect the proposition that ‘the kinds of migration processes, household composition, social stratification, population structure, composition, and distribution characterizing a given CSF at a given time are all structural effects of capital accumulation’ (137; and Figure 1, p. 138). The same essay offers an initial analysis of pronatalism and reproduction, locating the roots of the former in the alienated character of labour. The following two chapters then explore reproduction and procreation under capitalism, in typically dialectical fashion: on the one hand, structural and ideological pressures make socially prescribed parenthood a ‘precondition for all adult roles’ (162), and in the course of capitalist development women are ‘segregated in the home as reproducers of the present and future generation of workers’ (178); on the other, with the developmentof reproductive technologies, ‘biological processes have been fragmented and opened to manipulation, thus bringing about unforeseen changes in the social relations within which children are brought into the world’ (188). These technologies, ‘as they split intergenerational social reproduction from procreation, give rise to the capitalist mode of procreation’ (189), in which ‘the technological fragmentation of the biological process of reproduction … makes it possible for individuals or couples to purchase the different elements of the reproductive process to “build”, eventually, a baby for themselves’ (190). The development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) splits intergenerational social reproduction from procreation, making it possible to identify the technological fragmentation of the biological process of reproduction as ‘part of the overall development of the productive forces or forces of production’ (195). So capitalist development, ‘at the same time it selects this family form as the most “functional” for daily and intergenerational reproduction, constantly undermines it through changes in the productive forces in the realms of production and reproduction’ (196). The commodification of all the facets of the reproductive process, marked by market relations of procreation and the outsourcing of production, has given rise to what can be defined as a ‘mode of procreation’: ‘the combination of the biological elements of the process of reproduction through relations of procreation independent from sexual relations and from the social relations of reproduction’. And this in turn undermines ‘taken for granted, obvious or “natural” meanings of motherhood (197).
In Chapter 9, what has been identified as the ‘feminization of poverty’ is shown to be better seen as the immiserisation of the working class: rising male unemployment, declining opportunities, and the insufficiency of the wage to support a family provoke major changes in women’s decisions regarding marriage, child-bearing, and household formation, and confirm at the same time the indifference of capital to the reproduction of the working class as a whole (in brief because capitalist development continually displaces living labour and renders it redundant):
‘Lack of access to the basic material conditions necessary for physical and social reproduction on a daily and generational basis threatens the intergenerational reproduction of the working class among all races, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. The immiseration of the working class culminates in the breakdown of its intergenerational reproduction. Poor parents, particularly poor single mothers, are placed under conditions that deprive them of their ability to reproduce people with marketable skills. This situation may be ‘functional’ for the economy, insofar as the demand for skilled and educated workers is not likely to rise dramatically during the near future’ (225).
The theme is expanded in Chapter 10, on the dialectics of waged and unwaged work: poor households no longer reproduce labour power, but rather simply produce people, ‘and people, in themselves, without marketable skills, have no value under capitalist conditions’ (247). The striking conclusion, completely in accord with a classical Marxist perspective and with contemporary empirical data, is that capital does not care if the price of unskilled labour falls below the cost of its daily and generational reproduction.
In the meantime (Chapter 11), ‘scientific and technological change have affected sexuality and reproduction in ways previously thought possible in the realm of science fiction; and increases in women’s labour force participation, levels of education, and political involvement have challenged traditional gender roles and the sexual division of labour’ (257), while the range of use values produced domestically has narrowed as commodification has advanced, leading to ‘the deskilling of domestic labour and the transformation of most domestic workers into consumers of commodities rather than the producers of use values’ (266). A short chapter on self-sourcing, or the transfer of aspects of production to consumers themselves, rounds out the multi-faceted picture of the relationship between households on the one hand, and capitalist production on the other.
All of this builds towards Chapter 13, which sets out the logic of capitalist social reproduction. Here Gimenez addresses the frequently encountered criticism that Marxist political economy takes for granted the production of people and so fails to recognize the importance of social reproduction. In response, she shows that Marx does in fact provide a framework for addressing these issues, and one moreover that avoids the trap of viewing the labour of social reproduction exclusively as gendered household labour. Her first step is to invoke the contrast between the two levels of analysis identified above: the capitalist mode of production, at which level ‘class relations function independently from the personal characteristics of their bearers’, and specific capitalist social formations, where gender, racial, and other oppressions matter, as capitalists pit workers against each other, creating and recreating economic and ideological divisions’ (288). She quotes from Capital, Vol. 3:
‘It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers … which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same from the standpoint of its main conditions – due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations of appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances’ (Capital, Vol. 3, Lawrence & Wishart, 1959, pp. 791-2, cited p. 288-9).
The exposition of the capitalist mode of reproduction that follows proceeds accordingly, first exploring the logic of the capitalist mode of production, then turning to the detail of the ‘empirically given circumstances’ of the present day in which it is embedded. The starting point is not the existence of two separate and complementary spheres – whether production and reproduction, ‘public’ and ‘private’, or ‘domestic’ and ‘capitalist’, but rather the insistence that ‘If production be capitalist in form, so, too, will be reproduction’ (Capital, Vol. 1, from Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 566, cited 289), and a focus on the specifically Marxist concept of the production of labour power, rather than the production of people. The capitalist, Marx says here, ‘produces the labourer, but as a wage labourer’ (ibid, p. 571). As Werner Bonefeld puts it elsewhere, what is at issue is the reproduction of the individual not just as a human being, but as a propertyless producer of surplus value. And as Gimenez puts it:
‘In the theory of the CMP, Marx includes the production and – given that production is a continuous process – reproduction of the labourer as a wage-labourer, just as the labourer, through the labour process constantly produces and reproduces capital and, therefore, the capitalist. The production and reproduction of capital entails the production and reproduction of the relations of production or class relations – the relations between capitalist and wage-labourers – which is a social relation with a material base, i.e. their respective relationship to the means of productions. This is a process of social reproduction within the capitalist mode of production (290, emphasis original).
The passage that follows is equally important:
‘At the same time, Marx excludes, from the theory of the CMP, the physical reproduction of the labourers, the owners of labour power: ‘The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist must [sic] safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and propagation’ (ibid, citing Capital, Vol. 1, p. 572).
Feminists and social reproduction theorists have found this comment objectionable. But Gimenez explains precisely how it is consistent with Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production: ‘as the productivity of labour grows, the demand for labour declines, and an ever-growing mass of surplus population is generated’ (293), in a process that is specific to the capitalist mode of production:
‘The labouring population … produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus-population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 625, cited 293-4).
It is quite wrong, therefore, to suggest that Marx reaches this conclusion because he takes a ‘naturalistic’ view of human reproduction; and Gimenez interprets it politically: ‘capitalists are indifferent to the workers’ fate except when it may impinge on their own safety and ability to accumulate. Workers are left to their own devices, to survive as best as they can within conditions set by the ebb and flows of capital accumulation and the success or failure of working-class struggles’ (294).
I dwell on this point at length because it is the key to the specifically capitalist mode of reproduction, and its implications are stark, especially now, when the creation of labour markets on a global scale coincides with successive revolutions that displace labour from the production process. To reiterate, it arises not from the nature of human beings, but from the inherent properties of capital: ‘That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 635, cited p. 296).
Gimenez then turns to the historically specific characteristics of social reproduction in social formations where capitalism is the dominant mode of production, and access to the material conditions of reproduction is ‘secure for the capitalist class, small business owners, rentiers and the more privileged stratum within the working class’, but ‘variable and insecure for the working class, particularly the lower strata constituted by temporary workers, underemployed, unemployed and the poor’ (297). In the concept of capitalist social reproduction emphasis is on
(1) ‘the determinant role of capital accumulation, the class structure, and the state of the class struggle underlying capital accumulation, upon the conditions of reproduction of the social classes’ (298);
(2) ‘the reproduction of the working class as a whole, including the reproduction of the various strata that fragment the working class, and taking into account the effects of economic changes upon the extent to which working-class men are able to participate in the process of reproduction’ (ibid); and
(3) ‘the contradictions of capitalism that constantly alter and disrupt access to the conditions of reproduction for different sectors of the working class’, meaning that ‘the economic survival of the working classes, and their physical and social, daily and generational reproduction, is at the heart of the class struggle’ (299).
At its heart, then, is not a fixed allocation of roles between women and men or between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres, but a ‘permanent crisis of reproduction caused by the indifference of capital to the physical and social reproduction of the workforce’ (300). It is only within this framework that domestic labour takes on a gendered form of a specific kind:
‘The working classes are always in a crisis of reproduction because wages, except under exceptional circumstances (e.g. US economic prosperity after WWII), are seldom sufficient to cover the cost of daily and generational reproduction. Working-class relations of reproduction are, consequently, fragile, unstable and, for unskilled workers, impossible to sustain and yet they are also a survival strategy. Under capitalist conditions of unemployment, job scarcity and universalised commodity production, which requires the prior sale of labour power to satisfy most basic needs, working-class men and women enter into relations of reproduction in a context that places those agents of reproduction who are also wage earners in a position of power over those who are only domestic workers, and turns the position of domestic worker into a structural alternative to that of wage worker. Domestic labour becomes an economic ‘option’, an alternative to wage labour for working-class women, which places them in a dependent position with respect to men’ (299-300).
As always, though, the analysis proceeds dialectically – these circumstances prompt changes in patterns of formation of relationships and households:
‘In the US, for example, the effects of the 2008 recession undermined the possibilities for family formation for some sectors of the mostly white working class, as employment opportunities for poorly educated men declined, at the same time that women’s levels of education and employment opportunities rose. Low-income men who cannot support families do not marry, and working women are less likely to marry men who cannot earn at least as much as they do. Men and women eventually marry, but after having had children with more than one partner. In 2012, almost 41 percent of all births were out of wedlock’ (300).
It follows that ‘to attribute the oppression of working-class women solely to childbearing and their responsibilities for daily and generational reproduction, or their responsibility for the reproduction of labour power … naturalises the effects of the expropriation of the means of production and the complete dependence of working-class men and women on the sale of their labour for a wage’ (301, original emphasis). Here Gimenez connects directly with the classic account of social reproduction made by Antonella Picchio, confirming its particular relevance for the present day.
Gimenez then develops further the distinction between the reproduction of labourers, and the reproduction of labour power. Starting from Marx’s comment that: ‘In order to modify the human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of industry, and become labour power of a special kind, a special education or training is requisite’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 182, cited p. 302), she draws out the implication labour power in the form of the generalized capacity to work that changing patterns of accumulation demand is only partially developed within the family, and less so if the domestic environment is not conducive:
‘Historically, whether or not households actually enhance or undermine the maintenance and/or reproduction of basic labour power and the reproduction of specific kinds of labour power depends on the economic and cultural resources available to the agents of reproduction, i.e. on their location in the class structure and socio-economic stratum within the class. The oppression of the poorer sectors of the working class entails, among other things, the relative inability of adults – whether for lack of skills themselves, lack of time, or both – to develop adequately their children’s capacity for learning and developing intellectual skills’ (303).
At the same time,
‘Capitalism is inherently contradictory; it relentlessly exerts its power and, in the process, it transforms the material conditions underlying people’s experiences at all levels (family, work, consumption, recreation, and so on). Such changes sometimes tighten its ideological hold, but they can often undermine it, as critical forms of consciousness, political objectives and social movements emerge. The rise of its "gravediggers" is far in the future but, in the meantime, its constant revolutionising of production and experiences triggers ever present challenges to its domination’ (306).
The success of struggles that are fought subjectively under identity banners that divide the working class, while important to those who may benefit from them, ‘leave the structures of capitalism intact and does not further working-class power and understanding’ (307). Hence, she argues, the need for ‘a working-class women’s feminism, in solidarity with all workers regardless of gender and other differences’, rather than ‘a social reproduction feminism, primarily concerned with the female portion of the working class’ (308).
Part Three, finally, broadens the empirical focus of the collection to address the impact of global capitalism on working women in two chapters, and concludes with a review from 2005 of Marx’s relevance to feminism. As the first two chapters address the themes of the book from the same theoretical premises but from a somewhat different perspective – more ‘global’, and less ‘theoretical’ - readers less familiar with the theory dealt with elsewhere might find it helpful to read this part first. Similarly, readers largely unfamiliar with the literature on Marx’s contribution or lack of it to the issue of women’s oppression might like to read the last chapter first.
In summary, these lucid essays are the product of a rare intelligence, allied to an admirably disciplined intellectual practice. By taking seriously the unified application of historical materialist analysis to all aspects of production, including the production and reproduction of human life itself, and applying itself to the circumstances of the present, the collection transcends Marxist Feminism. There are areas where perhaps the analysis might be supplemented – for example, to bring out the significance of the fact that the scientific and technological advances that drew the biological processes involved in human reproduction into the realm of capital, with all the consequences that Gimenez draws out, were not in evidence in Marx’s time. But that is by the way. This collection should be recognised as a founding text for renewed Marxist theory, fit for the 21st century and beyond.