Key to social reproduction theory (SRT) is an understanding of the ‘production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process’, or in other words: acknowledging that race and gender oppression occur capitalistically. 
David McNally and Sue Ferguson: First, there’s the question of a category transformation. As your question points out, the social reproduction approach transforms our understanding of labor-power. In conventional Marxist analyses, labor-power is simply presumed to be present – a given factor of capitalist production. At best, it is understood as the product of natural, biologically determined, regenerative processes. In socializing labor-power – in unearthing its insertion in history, society, and culture – social reproduction feminism reveals, in the first instance, that labor-power cannot simply be presumed to exist, but is made available to capital only because of its reproduction in and through a particular set of gendered and sexualized social relations that exist beyond the direct labor/capital relation, in the so-called private sphere. It also sharpens our understanding of the contradictory position of labor-power with respect to capital – identifying all aspects of our social reproduction – of our quest to satisfy human needs, to live – as essential to, but also a drag on, accumulation (because capital pays indirectly for this through wages, benefits, and taxes).
These are the key insights of the early generation of social reproduction feminists. But, as more recent scholarship suggests, this approach also reveals labor-power itself to be a more complex, differentiated, category. When one attends to the social reproductive relations, it becomes clear that – despite the equalizing impulses of capitalist value extraction – all labor-power is not the same. Certain workers, indeed increasingly so, are more vulnerable to heightened oppression than others – not due to any difference in the ways in which capitalist laws of accumulation operate, but because oppressive relations beyond the workplace mediate the social reproduction of labor-power, ensuring not only that workers arrive at capital’s doorstep, but that they do so embodying varying degrees of degradation or dehumanization. Leer más…
A Federici se la conoce por su conjugación del análisis marxista y feminista en su obra, con un énfasis en el fenómeno de la (así llamada por Marx) “acumulación primitiva” y la subyugación de las mujeres dentro de las sociedades capitalistas. Vaya por delante que una aportación que intenta incluir la perspectiva feminista en el análisis marxista es, en mi opinión, algo muy meritorio. Si podemos definir feminismo en un sentido amplio como el estudio de las causas, mecanismos y efectos de la desigualdad de las mujeres y hombres, y como la práctica/movimiento que busca la igualdad entre mujeres y hombres, parece claro que una situación de desigualdad evidente en muchos aspectos de la sociedad actual no puede ser ajena a una tradición teórica como el marxismo que busca analizar y cambiar esta misma sociedad: la desigualdad material, la desproporcionada presencia de precariedad laboral en las mujeres trabajadoras, la violencia de género o sexual, la mayor probabilidad de sufrir el trabajo a tiempo parcial no deseado, la posibilidad de ser víctimas de tráfico por redes de prostitución o de verse como meros objetos comerciales en la reciente iniciativa por legalizar el alquiler de vientres son algunos de un sinfín de problemáticas que afectan exclusiva o desproporcionadamente a las mujeres.
12th May 2015, 21h, Cinema Europa, Zagreb, Croatia
Introducción.
marxismocritico.com 