Seeing with the Pandemic: Social Reproduction in the Spotlight

ABSTRACT

[...]even as appreciation washes through, reproductive care workers are increasingly stepping out to say that garlands are not enough.1 This emergent public reckoning comes on the heels of an extended scholarly rethinking of capitalism, as a growing group of scholars argue that capitalism is always already embedded in gendered and racialized relations of extraction and expropriation.2 Especially generative has been Karl Marx's remarkable historical account of capitalism's origins in a process he dubbed "primitive accumulation. "3 Intent on forestalling moralistic justifications for the system's origins, Marx argued that elites used a combination of land expropriation and violent vagrancy policing to produce both the starter capital and the "free labor" needed to bring that capital to life. Since Rosa Luxemburg, scholars have expanded that account to challenge the more and teleological formulations contained in other parts of Marx's larger oeuvre.4 Rather than see primitive accumulation as focused exclusively on domestic processes and ownership relations, subsequent theorists have pointed to the transnational, racialized, colonial, and gendered processes that characterized its emergence, along with the persistence of these putatively time-limited processes throughout capitalism's existence.5 Prompted by the deep inequities of neoliberalism, David Harvey has argued that the present, in fact, is best understood as a new episode of primitive accumulation, which he names "accumulation by dispossession. The term social reproduction first emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the writings of Wages for Housework and Marxist feminist theorists.7 Focused on the work it takes to make and remake people, "reproductive labor," these social reproduction theorists located an essential dynamic of capitalist accumulation in the production rather than the exploitation of labor power. Like other elements of primitive accumulation, one of the distinctive features of reproductive labor is that it is not "free labor" in the sense defined by Marx.9 A fundamental feature of the workings of capitalist labor, he argued, was that "the worker leaves the capitalist to whom he hires himself whenever he likes . . . but he cannot leave the whole class of purchasers . . . without renouncing his existence.