It is often used to describe, rather than to explain or analyse, the nature of capitalist relations and the labour involved in renewal (or, less commonly, in resisting) them. This isn’t helped by the fact that, in many cases, it appears as a sort of shorthand, a way to catalogue certain types of practices and institutions. With all these claims about the reproduction of the social relations of capitalism, it is no wonder that the term can seem too broad to be of much use. It is around this same time that feminists develop their own theorisation of social reproduction – one that explores and explains the relationship between oppression and exploitation. A century later, both Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu begin from this Marxian insight to theorise the ways in which ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser) and ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu) feature in the broader reproduction of capitalism. More specifically, he tells us, capitalist production reproduces the wage-labourer, the essential condition of further capitalist production. as a connected whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production is, at the same time, a process of reproduction’ (p. In Chapter 23 on ‘Simple Reproduction,’ he urges us to consider that ‘viewed. Marx himself introduces the idea – if not the term – in Volume I of Capital. And even within the Marxist tradition, social reproduction is attributed different meanings. This distinct contribution of SRF is not always self-evident. Social Reproduction Feminism (which I’ll shorten to SRF for the rest of this posting) explores the ways in which the daily and generational renewal of human life (and thus of human labour power) is absolutely essential to the decade-over-decade tenacity not merely of inequality, but of capitalism. But it misses the mark when we’re talking about how the term has been used by Marxist Feminists. Well, that’s an apt definition in many cases. And if you ask Wikipedia, you’ll find it defined at a highly general level as a term used to signal the ongoing existence and renewal of inequality. We see social reproduction theories cropping up, for instance, within Education, Psychology, Sociology and Political Economy. And like all big ideas, it appears in many guises, refashioned time and again to fit specific problems arising in distinct fields of research. She explores the history of this dialectical approach, its variances, and its potentialities providing an answer to the question: social reproduction theory, what’s the big idea? In this article, Susan Ferguson, a contributor to Social Reproduction Theory, shows how SRT can deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. Key to social reproduction theory (SRT) is an understanding of the ‘production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process’, or in other words: acknowledging that race and gender oppression occur capitalistically.
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