Reproduction as production: Thinking with the ILO to move beyond dichotomy

Abstract

Taking off from the ILO's initiative on carework, this article reconsiders the Marxist dichotomy between productive and reproductive labor and asks what work has care performed within global capitalism? As a theoretical intervention, it aligns itself with those who see reproduction as productive, making people and subsequently the labor power necessary for other forms of production to occur.As a historical intervention, it rethinks literature on reproductive labors along four dimensions: first, pregnancy and birth as a form of work in itself; second, the quotidian activities of daily life performed for oneself and household members, including cooking, maintenance around the domicile, caring, and nurturing, as also work; third, paid household and carework, such as home health aides and domestic cleaners, as commodified reproductive labor in intimate settings; and fourth, public reproduction through social services and infrastructure, such as clinics, schools, and water systems. To illustrate the variety of ways that reproduction is production over time and space, I will draw on a capricious body of scholarship, as well as my own empirical research on wageless and low-waged household labors, their relationship to exchange and use value, and their circulation within relations of power between nations as well as gender and class.

The Orange County gardeners of COVID‐19: Making breath in landscapes of racial suffocation

“…Still, it is necessary to go further to clarify how even acknowledging the reproductivity of residential gardeners' labor reaches a limit, not simply because reproductivity is productive in itself (Boris, 2019), but because the human exceptionalism in most scholarship elevates the reproduction of “humans” within the circuits of value production for capital. After all, plants are not considered subjects to be reproduced but objects to be consumed through the senses.…”

The historiography of social reproduction and reproductive labor

“…I have used the term reproductive labor repeatedly, but I have not yet defined it. Historian Eileen Boris characterizes reproductive labor as comprising four dimensions: pregnancy and childbirth, unpaid household labor, paid household labor, and finally, “public reproduction through social services and infrastructure, such as clinics, schools, and water systems” (Boris, 2019, p. 284). Reproductive labor often entails care work, or caring labor, which consists of “any face‐to‐face, often hands‐on, service that contributes to the physical, emotional, psychological, and cognitive maintenance and development of the individuals receiving the care” (Huang, 2017).…”

“…What distinguishes Hardt and Negri from the more standard Marxist feminism with which they are genealogically intertwined is their highly capacious approach to the problematic of value generation, an approach that seeks to "decouple[e] labor from value" (Negri, 1999, p. 77). On the analytical clarity offered by tracing value production, see Boris (2019); Mezzadri (2019Mezzadri ( , 2020. A generative engagement with the problematic of what constitutes "labor" can be found in Schwartz-Weinstein (2010).…”

Part-time work: the co-production of a contested employment model for women in Austria and internationally, 1950s to 1980s

“…Part-time work was part of a broader debate on household labour and its economic value already well before the 1970s, which are commonly understood as the crucial period when feminist activists were rethinking labour relations (e.g. Boris 2019b ).…”