Cooking meals, accessing healthcare, doing the laundry, caring for children and the elderly, and taking out the trash are daily activities. We rarely think of them as having much social, economic, or political significance. But they do. In our society much of this work is often ascribed to women and also devalued. This hides the fact that all this work is necessary for the reproduction of society, of social relations, of people.
Social reproduction clearly concerns the biological reproduction of children, most of whom will become workers. But one does not have to bear or care for children to engage in social reproduction activities. Every person either engages in social reproduction or pays someone else to do reproductive work each and every day.
In general terms, there are two main classes in capitalist society: those who own and control the means of production (the capitalists) and those who sell their labor power to survive (the workers). Capitalism is constructed around a basic relationship of exploitation. The capitalists profit from the exploitation of workers. Social reproduction deals with the question of how those workers and capitalists are reproduced and maintained.
A social reproduction framework helps us to remember that when we talk about class struggle, we must be concerned not only with the relation of workers and owners at the point of production, but also with the social relations that make and remake those workers and owners. Put another way, social reproduction activities are essential to the maintenance of capitalism, even as capitalist modes of exploitation and domination work to render this work invisible.
Read the full article: https://liberationschool.org/social-reproduction-a-theoretical-framework-with-organizing-potential/
