Social Reproduction beyond the ‘proper job’: For a Spatially sensitive 'SRT' beyond Productivity Functionalism

At the core of theories of social reproduction (SRT for short) are Tithi Bhattacharya's pointedly formulated guiding questions: “If worker’s labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? […] What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?” (cf. Bhattacharya 2017: 1). According to the initial assumption of the SRT, productive labor power not only constitutes the source of wealth of capitalist societies. It is also the only commodity that is ‘produced’ outside of capitalist commodity production. The question under which social conditions this happens ̶ and thus also the question of the relationship between the labor used to produce commodities and the labor used to reproduce human beings ̶ is thus at the center of the analysis. Theories of social reproduction are essentially fed by Marxist-Feminist debates of the late 1960s, especially the debate on domestic labor. The focus was originally on the private household, the family, and the domestic and care work performed predominantly by women without pay. Since the end of the Fordist production and family model, theories of social reproduction have been challenged to update and expand their theoretical tools. In the face of a globally increasing hybridization, informalization, and fragmentation of work, a clear merit of their perspective is of all to have always thought of work in the plural. Nevertheless, a theoretical narrowing to productive wage labor can still be traced in Marxist-Feminist thought. Instead of focusing primarily on the family and its function for the reproduction of (male) wage labor power, current Theories of social reproduction have broadened the analysis to include non-family reproductive instances such as the state and civil society and take the expanding commodification of formerly unpaid domestic and care work into account. Nonetheless, they still have two voids: On the one hand, a productivity-functionalist focus on commodified (wage) labor power persists, which is in tension with processes of hybridization and fragmentation of labor on a global scale, the specifics of unpaid domestic and care work, and the labor pluralist perspective of feminist economics. On the other hand, theories of social reproduction hardly take the spatial constitution of social reproduction and its crises theoretically into account. Thus, it is difficult to speak of "the" crisis of social reproduction, since it is always spatially constituted. My contribution thus aims at problematizing these two voids and outlines proposals for overcoming or extending reproduction-theoretical Feminist-Marxist thinking in the face of a global hybridization and fragmentation of labor in the context of growing socio-spatial inequality. To overcome productivity functionalism, theories of social reproduction can be inspired by proposals to decouple the concept of the proletariat from employment status and to focus instead on the social vulnerability of propertyless labor subjects. On the other hand, to integrate space as a category of analysis in theories of social reproduction, connections to feminist geography, sociology of labor, and sociology of space could prove fruitful.