Social reproduction theory and the capitalist ‘form’ of social reproduction

This paper critically interrogates the meaning attached to social reproduction in the so-called Social Reproduction Theory [SRT]. While SRT represents an improvement over competing approaches to social reproduction along several dimensions, its understanding of social reproduction as referring exclusively to the ongoing reproduction of labour-power does not fully capture the extent to which the reproduction of social life is mediated by the reproduction of capital. Instead of defining social reproduction in opposition to capitalist production, it is argued that their relation should be reformulated as one between a transhistorical content, namely, the need of any society to reproduce itself through a division of labour that mediates its metabolic interaction with nature, and a historically specific form it adopted, as myriad uncoordinated acts of individual production linked together by the incessant circulation of capital along its different value forms in search of self-expansion. Inasmuch as the reproduction of social life thus requires the concomitant reproduction of capital’s abstract nexus as the key mediating link between human life and its condition, the reproduction of social life and that of capital need to be framed as two mutually co-mediated moments within overall capitalist social reproduction.