In my series discussing capitalism and socialism, I want to discuss another Marxist idea: the social reproduction of labor. Basically it refers to a collection of social activities needed to maintain a labor pool. An introductory article (suggested by Coyote) has a good description of how social reproduction occurs:
1. By activities that regenerate the worker outside the production process and allow her to return to it. These include, among a host of others, food, a bed to sleep in, but also care in psychical ways that keep a person whole.
2. By activities that maintain and regenerate non-workers outside the production process–i.e. those who are future or past workers, such as children, adults out of the workforce for whatever reason, be it old age, disability or unemployment.
3. By reproducing fresh workers, meaning childbirth.
It may be noted that social reproduction is essentially unpaid labor, and is disproportionately performed by women. Thus, social reproduction theory draws a connection between Marxist and feminist theory.
However, I would fault the introductory article for failing to offer any good explanatory narrative. Why is social reproduction unpaid, as compared to more “ordinary” labor being merely underpaid? “Capitalism”, “neoliberalism”, and “sexism” don’t cut it as explanations. So in this post, I’m going to offer a basic explanatory narrative, based on externalized costs.
In my article about cap and trade, I defined an externalized costs as “costs generated by producers but carried by society as a whole.” There’s a more general definition, “an economic activity that imposes a negative effect on an unrelated third party.” Carbon emissions are an externalized cost, because the costs are generated by industry, but carried by the rest of society. Social reproduction is also an externalized cost, in that it is a cost generated by the employer/worker relationship, but are paid for by the people who had to give birth to, raise, and regenerate the workers. Because it is an externalized cost, social reproduction is unpaid rather than underpaid, in the same way that the private industry will not account for the costs of pollution unless the government forces them to.
There’s some room to argue against this narrative. For instance, to the extent that social reproduction is performed by one’s spouse, most people wouldn’t consider their spouse an unrelated third party.
But there’s one place where I think the narrative definitely applies, and that is to childbirth and child rearing. The cost of giving birth to and raising a worker is not paid by either the worker or their spouse. Instead, it’s paid in the previous decades by a different family, who worked for different employers. Basically, there’s no reason for a company to assist their workers in raising children. While children might be economically valuable decades later when they grow up, that value is granted to society as a whole, rather than to that specific company.
Our society addresses social reproduction with a variety of policies. I’m just naming policies in the US off the top of my head but we have… tax breaks for families with children, laws requiring maternity leave, Social Security. There’s also the basic fact that married couples share all their income (which is an important and progressive policy, and why marriage should be expanded to cover polyamorous and non-romantic relationships).
Where these policies have gaps, we seem to fill them with social values and expectations. For instance, despite tax breaks, my understanding is that parenting is still exorbitantly expensive. In absence of economic incentives, parenting is considered a moral good, a social obligation, and beyond that: intrinsically rewarding. This also creates a barrier to policies incentivizing parenting, since offsetting parenting costs would be seen as tainting its moral value or harming the quality of parents. Note that I’m basically childfree, so you could say I have mixed feelings on the subject. But that’s best left for the comments.
I am not an expert in any of this, so feel free to question any of my assumptions. Here are a few suggested discussion questions:
- How do women fit into this explanation? Is social reproduction unpaid because it’s women’s work, or is it women’s work because it’s unpaid?
- Should there be policies that incentivize parenting, or is it best left in the realm of social values and expectations? Or something else entirely?
- What other policies would you support to address the problem of social reproduction?
The society should pay for childcare related expenses. No child deserves to grow up in poverty, no child deserves to be denied opportunities due to their parents’ low income. Children don’t choose their parents, thus it’s wrong that some suffer.
That being said, as long as women keep on making babies, there’s no incentive for politicians to change the existing situation. Being the cynic I am, I think that nothing will improve until women collectively decide to stop making so many babies. If the average birth rate declined to less than, let’s say, 1.5 babies per woman, then politicians would freak out. They would start talking about the demographic crisis, they would start passing bills that require the state pay for childcare. (I live in a country with a very low birth rate, and this is what’s happening here.) By choosing to have lots of children despite the immense financial burden, American families are allowing the status quo to perpetuate.
On a personal level, I just don’t understand families that choose to have multiple children despite knowing that childcare is going to be really expensive. I’m childfree by choice, and I wouldn’t have a child even if the state gave me a large amount of cash—childcare is simply too much work and also a pain in the ass. (Which, incidentally, is also a reason for why the rest of society ought to appreciate it a hell lot more.)
Moral good? Fuck the moralizers. If some person is one of the moralizers, then they are free to make ten babies and raise them singlehandedly with no support or else they would come across as hypocrites.
Social obligation? Double fuck the society. If the society believes that it has no obligation to support a struggling mother, then women have no obligation to become mothers. Why should women suffer and endure hardships for the sake of some society that fails to appreciate their service?
Intrinsically rewarding? It depends. Some people enjoy listening to baby screams and changing stinky diapers. Others, like me, see that as a nasty chore.
All the moralizing and talking about the beauty of parenting and sanctity of parenthood that might get tainted with money is just an ugly smokescreen that’s meant to hide the real message that is given to parents, namely, “Fuck you.”
By the way, I actually seriously believe that the society would benefit from a decline in birth rates. Not only that would make politicians finally start to appreciate the free service women (and parents in general) provide, it would also help with the fact that the human population is already too large for the limited natural resources we have on this planet.
Why is social reproduction unpaid… ?
If corporations (or other plutocrats) underwrite human reproduction, they then can make a legitimate claim of (partial?) ownership of the results: the next generation.
Let’s not go that road.
I would look at childbirth and child rearing as having a positive externality: there are direct costs and benefits of children to parents, and presumably parents have children because they consider the direct benefits greater than the costs. The value of children as new workers is an external benefit to the rest of us.
I would phrase, “Because it is an externalized cost, social reproduction is unpaid rather than underpaid,” differently. This is “because” in the sense of a definition, not an actual causal effect. It’s unpaid because we choose not to pay it directly.
Historically, the first capitalist society in England had a big problem with reproduction in the 1800s. Wages were at bare subsistence level, leading to failure of social reproduction. Workers couldn’t afford to raise children fit to become a new generation of workers.
Should there be policies that incentivize parenting? I think raising children should be explicitly paid work, paid for by the government.
@Andreas Avester #1,
I held off on expressing my opinion in the OP, but my views are mostly in agreement with yours. The government should just pay people for parenting, people should lay off on the moralizing, and also declining birth rates might be a good thing. One thing I would add is that in the US, conservatives cry about declining birth rates, but what they really care about is declining White birth rates. If maintaining a steady population was a real concern they could open borders.
@Larry #3,
Okay, I am persuaded by this one. It’s not quite true to say that childbirth is a negative externality imposed by employers since it’s not like employers can coerce people to become parents.
@Larry #3,
Is there a search term for this event?
Siggy @ # 4: … it’s not like employers can coerce people to become parents.
Not quite, but the Hobby Lobby case and forced-birther campaigns show they’re getting closer.
Modern Marxian theory is increasingly examining the notion that, actually, most societies which run production along capitalist lines do not run the household along such lines. The realm of the household and what goes on within it tends to be structured according to older economic paradigms – often paradigms uncomfortably close to feudalism, where work is assigned according to traditionally appointed roles, and regulated by bonds of social and cultural obligation rather than the exchange of capital. There are some households which operate on more socialistic, democratic lines, with duties and activities shared equally by common consent, and some communal or single-person households that operate economically more like the old Greek or Roman model of the independent family working unit (everyone pitches in with everything), but the “traditional nuclear family” (which is anything but) with a single breadwinner is rather feudal in character. The head of said household tends to function like a feudal lord, assigning work and deciding on the use of the results of that work, while spending most of his (and it usually is a his) time and productive effort answering to a higher lord (the employer) as a vassal.
Which is not to say that they are a hang-over from medieval feudalism, rather, as capitalistic structures became dominant in the sphere of primary production, the dislocation this caused to more egalitarian medieval peasant family structures was remedied by adopting a somewhat familiar feudal-style household structure run along hierarchical, patriarchal lines (as aristocratic families had been all along). It must be remembered that most pre-capitalist economic systems made much less distinction between the household and the workplace, because the household tended to be the main locus of production. The reproduction of the household and the reproduction of the workforce were pretty much one and the same for most of human history.
In some ways this makes capitalism parasitic on older economic structures – it could develop its own, fully capitalist, system of regulating the household, but it leaves that to other modes of organization because the current system still just about works.
This is something of a parallel to how capitalism is still somewhat parasitic on non-capitalist resources at the fringes of its world – most of the growth it has demanded and sustained over the last 300 years has come from incorporating fresh resources by exploiting new regions, not from anything it has been doing internally. Marxists used to think that the initial phase of basic capitalisation and brute acquisition of resources for the system was largely over, but many – David Harvey chief among them – point out that actually, it has always been going on and still is. He tends to frame it in terms of colonial exploitation, but on a micro level it occurs with the labour in households too, and the resources that provides.