Key messages

• Crises of working-class social reproduction are normal and recurrent features of capitalist development, central to the mechanisms through which capital reproduces itself.

• Changing patterns in working-class strategies for social reproduction are always dependent on or determined by changes in capital accumulation.

• We are not witnessing a ‘capitalist crisis’, but a global crisis of working-class economic survival.

Introduction

Having corresponded over a number of years, the two authors present here, under equal joint authorship, a commentary built around ten propositions that offer a Marxist perspective on the relationship between capitalism and the social reproduction of the working class. From their own work, they have drawn as far as possible, for ease of reference, on Martha E. Gimenez, Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (Gimenez, 2019) and Paul Cammack, The Politics of Global Competitiveness (Cammack, 2022). The first three propositions address some of the effects of capital accumulation on the material conditions of the working class; the next five address working-class social reproduction, and the last two situate it in relation to relevant features of the dynamics of development of the capitalist mode of production. While we necessarily engage with the abundant literature on social reproduction, migration, precarity/informality and capitalist development itself, we do not intend to offer a comprehensive assessment of any of it. Instead, we offer the ten related propositions as an overarching framework, illustrating their relevance with selective reference that prioritises what we see as the best recent research.

Working-class poverty, unemployment and economic insecurity

Production and reproduction are transhistorical, that is, universal features of all social formations; we approach social reproduction historically, in the context of the capitalist mode of production, hence, as capitalist social reproduction, that is, as processes and social relations determined by the relations of production, whose empirical manifestations reflect the characteristics of the capitalist social formations within which they are observed (see further Dickinson and Russell (1986), cited in Gimenez, 2019: 279; Gimenez, 2019: 298–9, 305–6; Munro, 2024: 209). Among such processes, the reproduction of the population, the labour force and labour power are the focus of this article.

The dynamics of global capitalism inevitably produce poverty, unemployment and widespread economic insecurity, and consequently place vast sectors of the working class – in wealthy and poorer countries alike – in a permanent crisis of social reproduction: this is an inherent effect of capital accumulation or self-reproduction. More importantly, these ‘crises’ reflect the state of the class struggle worldwide, though they tend to be ideologically perceived as effects of ‘excess’ population. We are critical of the Malthusian perspective which posits that there has always been, and there always will be, a surplus of people in the world. Against this view, our first proposition is that in all social formations where the capitalist mode of production prevails, the number of potential members of the labour force will be in excess of the demand for labour. The presence of millions of poor, unemployed, homeless and malnourished masses cannot be understood in abstract terms, as excess or surplus population tout court, but as an effect of changing patterns of capital accumulation which both undermine and preserve non-market relations of production in forms that vary historically. If this is visibly so where ‘pre-capitalist’ or non-capitalist (‘informal’) relations of production predominate (Sanyal, 2007; Bhattacharya et al, 2023), it is all the more the case when the capitalist mode of production (CMP) prevails. This is because full proletarianisation and universalisation of commodity production make the economic survival of the propertyless population dependent on the sale of their labour, while competition between capitalists drives some out of business and forces others to replace workers by machines, giving rise to a constantly renewed shedding of workers and a permanent reserve army of labour: ‘within the CMP, population will always be “excessive” in relationship to the demand for labour, whatever its rate of growth may be’ (Gimenez, 2019: 134).

Although varying in detail, such circumstances are all too prevalent among undocumented national or international migrants all around the world, who find themselves scrabbling for a living at the bottom of the global labour pyramid, and may well shape the perceptions that many have of ‘the migrant’.

Our second proposition, which follows from the first, is that a state of persistent insecurity and uncertainty with regard to employment or income is the universal condition of the propertyless majority in a global capitalist economy. And in an imagined two-class world of capitalists and proletarians, the state of the proletariat would be utterly precarious, and quite specific in character: ‘The higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their own existence’ (Marx [1867] 1976: 799, cited in Bernstein, 2023: 55). We distinguish between this fundamental precarity, which is a consequence of the full development of the capitalist mode of production, and the various forms of precarity that prevail where the process of proletarianisation is far from complete, and the ‘informal economy’ dominates. We acknowledge the rich and varied literature on the latter (Breman, 1996; 2013; Benya, 2015; Bhattacharya and Kesar, 2020; Stevano, 2022), but we insist on the need to distinguish analytically between precarity, informality and flexibility, and the different contexts to which they have been applied, and at the same time we regret the gradual fading from view in this literature and that on social reproduction of the influential perspectives in the 1960s and 1970s that focused on fundamental differences between social formations, class formation and class struggle in the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, or the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ respectively (see for example, Frank, 1967; 1979; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Amin, 1974; 1976).

Precarity may be understood as a state of persistent uncertainty or insecurity with regard to employment, income and living standards, taking quite different forms in a fully developed capitalist society on the one hand, and a situation where a majority of the working class is not yet fully incorporated into capitalist relations of production proper on the other. Informality, prevalent in the latter case, denotes ‘market-based and legal production of goods and services that is hidden from public authorities for monetary, regulatory, or institutional reasons’ (Schneider et al, 2010: 8), and associated with low productivity (World Bank, 2013: 210–13). Flexibility, in contrast, denotes a set of conditions promoted by neoliberal reformers in the advanced capitalist economies in the first instance, including ease of hiring and firing, the watering down or abolition of security of employment, the replacement of relatively generous welfare schemes by social protection centred on limited safety nets and linked to active labour market policies, a move away from full-time or guaranteed working hours, and an expectation that workers will shift smoothly from task to task as the production process requires.

Specifically, by way of example, we challenge, on theoretical, empirical and political grounds, the argument made by Breman and van der Linden and others that equates precarity with informality and flexibilisation, and suggests that a ‘regime of informality’ associated with the Global South, featuring ‘a type of waged employment thoroughly flexibilized and unregulated by public intervention’, ‘has hit the West with full force and is making serious inroads into all sectors of employment’, such that ‘the workforce in developed countries is coming closer to the regime of informality which operates elsewhere in the world’ (Breman and van der Linden, 2014: 926, 928, 933; cf. Mezzadri, 2019: 38; 2021: 1195; 2023: 69; Atzeni et al, 2023).

Theoretically, this fails to distinguish between unregulated forms of precarious work that arise from the incomplete development of the CMP, and those forms, whether ‘gig’ work or task-specific work in complex global production chains, that reflect its perfect realisation in the advanced division of labour foreshadowed in Marx’s ‘general law of social production’ and the figure of the versatile, mobile and flexible worker (Cammack, 2022: 105).

Empirically, it overlooks the fact that such developments are promoted in the ‘North’ by regressive welfare reforms and legislative innovations that do away with the standard employment contract, for sure, but replace it with a new regulatory framework, outlined earlier, that imposes ‘flexibility’. In the ideal labour market as envisaged by businesses, governments and international organisations today, workers are collectively available for a mix of full-time, part-time and casual work, and individually have varying rights that centre on reduced recognition as a ‘worker’, a status that may include such benefits as sick pay and holiday pay, and employer contributions to an individual pension plan, but will exclude guaranteed hours or job security (hence a right to a redundancy payment on dismissal). The adoption in the UK Equality Act 2010 of the designation ‘worker’ as opposed to ‘employee’, with sharply reduced rights, and the more recent success of Uber drivers in winning recognition as ‘workers’ on the basis of this ‘new normal’, point to a convergence on this institutionalisation of flexibility and mobility (Cammack, 2022: 149).

This suggests that a liberal critique of the kind that Bremen and van der Linden offer, which fails to distinguish between the circumstances of the penetration of the CMP in emergent social formations and its effects in advanced capitalist social formations (here, between informality and flexibility), will end up supporting policies that facilitate the development of the CMP itself.

From this liberal perspective, capitalist states are compelled, ‘on pain of extinction’, to make their societies as attractive as possible to footloose global capital. Our third proposition, then, is that in a genuinely global capitalist economy such states are under pressure to intensify economic uncertainty and insecurity, removing alternatives to survival other than wage labour, and actively subordinating their societies to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. The need to turn ‘people’ into ‘workers’, brilliantly addressed in Mau’s indispensable account of the ‘mute compulsion of capital’ (Mau, 2023), was an issue in early industrial England (Pollard, 1963), and as Adrienne Roberts outlines in detail, it prompted state intervention, epitomised by the Poor Law of 1834, which legislated for the mobility of labour, and sought to ensure that the poor would no longer have ‘an alternative to the sale of their labour power on the market for a market wage’ (Roberts, 2017: 83). It is just as much an issue today, which explains why the OECD, the World Bank and the European Commission have expended such efforts in recent years on promoting or enacting reforms to ‘make work pay’ (that is, to make unemployment extremely undesirable), devising mechanisms to make ‘under-employed’ groups join the workforce, and inducing individuals to acquire the skills (or ‘human capital’) that will make them productively employable (Cammack, 2022) – and, as noted earlier, on energetic support for economic migration. Under capitalism, people are turned into wage workers not only through processes of expropriation of means of production and draconian social and economic policies, but also through the main ‘ideological state apparatuses’ such as the family, the church, the media and educational institutions (Althusser, 2014: 232–42).

Capitalist social reproduction

With these considerations in mind, we now turn to the capitalist social reproduction of the population. The physical and social, daily and generational reproduction of the population, which entails the reproduction of the ideologies and beliefs that hold societies together, the division of the population in aggregates that differ in status and power, and the reproduction of the members of those aggregates, are universal features of all societies, assuming different characteristics according to their prevalent mode of production. In capitalist social formations, the reproduction of the propertyless population is subordinate to the pursuit of profit (Gimenez, 2019; Cammack, 2020; Holborow, 2024: 5; Munro, 2024: 211). Our fourth proposition, then, is that prevailing patterns of working-class social reproduction in capitalist social formations are primarily shaped by and subordinated to capitalist accumulation, but are never perfectly arranged to support it. We insist, that is, on the unequal and contradictory relationship between the two; the phenomena scholars conceptualise as crises of social reproduction are the empirical effect of the contradiction between capital and labour and the power of capital over the working classes. This is the basis for our critical stance towards views – widespread in the feminist social reproduction literature – that highlight the dependence of capitalist production on social reproduction – that is, the reproduction of the labouring population – or their interdependence. According to one such perspective, production and social reproduction are equal, and ‘co-dependent’ (Mezzadri, 2019; 2021; 2023; 2024); according to another, social reproduction’s function, under capitalism, is ‘to produce and replenish the classes whose labour power capital exploits to obtain surplus value … [it is] an indispensable background condition for the possibility of capitalist production’ (Fraser, 2014: 61). From the standpoint of historical materialism, however, social reproduction work reproduces only the socialised ‘bearers’ of social relations, that is, the individuals that constitute classes and status groups; in other words, it reproduces classes and status groups as aggregates of individuals, but it does not produce or reproduce the classes themselves. Classes, in capitalist societies, are not solely aggregates of individuals who share a common location in the class and socio-economic stratification structures, but social relations between owners and non-owners of the means of production determined by the logic of capitalism as a mode of production. These relations are constantly produced and reproduced within the context of production: ‘the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth in the form of capital … and the capitalist produces the worker as a wage labourer’ (Marx [1867] 1976: 716). Outside the context of production, capital is indifferent to the fate of the propertyless population as a whole, though it is sometimes concerned with the subsets that might be profitable or politically convenient to train and/or employ. The social reproduction of the population and the reproduction of the social classes are not the same. Capitalism can flourish, surplus accumulation goes on, while large proportions of the population are partially or fully excluded from the labour force and live in conditions of permanent economic uncertainty. Hence we reject the conclusion that social reproduction carried on outside the circuits of commodity production ‘is an indispensable precondition for capitalist production’.

Other scholars argue that social reproduction is ‘essential to the process of capital accumulation’, (Luxton, 2017: 3, cited in Gimenez, 2019: 281, emphasis added), ‘the foundation on which markets, production and exchange rest’ (Ferguson et al, 2016: 28, cited in Gimenez, 2019: 282, emphasis in original). So it is, in the sense that if there is no population, there is no society, capitalist or of any other kind, and vice versa. As an analytical proposition, though, it shares the limitations inherent in ahistorical, functionalist theories of society which overlook the historically specific conditions under which the working classes are reproduced in capitalist social formations.

It is obvious that social reproduction, either narrowly considered, as the reproduction of the population of potential wage earners, for example, or broadly understood, as the reproduction of all the constitutive elements of social formations, is a precondition of production in the same abstract, ahistorical sense that production of any kind, capitalist or something else, is an indispensable condition for social reproduction. Historically, however, in the context of capitalist social formations, where the capitalist mode of production prevails, the goal of production is the pursuit of profits, not the full satisfaction of the majority of the population’s need for employment, good wages or salaries, access to adequate housing, clean water, good food, education, health care and so on. Under capitalism, therefore, working-class social reproduction is subordinate to production. How successfully or unsuccessfully working classes in different social formations are able to reproduce themselves depends on the state of the class struggle. Approaches such as those reflected in the previous quotes from Luxton (2017), Ferguson et al (2016) and Fraser (2014) are one-sided because they give a determinant role to social reproduction or emphasise the interdependence between production and reproduction. In doing so, they overlook the specific nature of the relationship between production and social reproduction under capitalism which, based on the contradiction between capital and labour, is observable in the effects of the power of capital over the conditions of existence of the propertyless population. In the context of capitalist social formations, the exercise of this power manifests itself in the changing conditions of reproduction of the working classes, changes that often trigger migration flows within and across national boundaries, as well as struggles centred around material conditions of economic survival (that is, clean water, housing, schools, higher wages and so on). Whether fought under gender, racial, ethnic or other banners, struggles concerned with social reproduction matters are instances of class struggles (Gimenez, 1999: 174–9; Bhattacharya, 2015, cited in Gimenez, 2019: 285; Gimenez, 2019: 297–306; Mezzadri, 2024: 12).

Changes in the working class’s material conditions of reproduction can also create conflicts between changing patterns of social reproduction (for example fertility and migration) on the one hand, and changes in the quality and quantity of the demand for labour on the other. In any given capitalist society at any given moment the number and timing of births may not relate to the needs of capital; for example, the US and Western European countries with fertility below replacement level and ageing populations rely on immigration to expand their labouring populations. The young among the unemployed may be socialised in ways that do not dispose them to wage labour, while native-born young who could work remain unemployed because employers lower labour costs by hiring immigrant workers or using automation to cut labour costs. Childbearing and rearing, the care of the elderly and the maintaining of households may take women in particular out of the workforce available to capital; and the communities that are built and the ‘shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value’ that underpin them (Fraser, 2022: 55), along with the forms of social cooperation that result, may be inhospitable or even entirely hostile to the generalisation of exploitation by capital (Holborow, 2024: 23–4). In short, existing patterns of social reproduction do not necessarily prioritise the production and replenishment of the classes whose labour power capital exploits to obtain surplus value and unless you believe in magic, they must be assumed to have been very far from doing so when the capitalist mode of production made its first appearance, as indeed they were (Federici, 2004). As the capitalist mode of production begins to assert itself, and uncompetitive capitalists fail while new ones continually appear, and all involved are driven to find more productive techniques, and more lucrative ways of exploiting labour, new products and new markets, its increasing dominance strains current patterns of social reproduction and puts pressure on governments to readjust social and political arrangements to facilitate capitalist accumulation.

So our fifth proposition is that the emergence and development of capitalist production brings about a permanent crisis of working-class social reproduction, a process tendentially repeated on a global scale. As Marx pointed out, though, while ‘the maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must be, a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital … the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and propagation’ (Marx [1867] 1976: 718). In capitalist social formations, the processes of social reproduction of the bulk of the potential labour force are local; however, once capital was able to mobilise across the globe – a process intensified since the 1980s with waves of downsizing and outsourcing – the demand for labour became increasingly global, with disastrous consequences for locally reproduced labouring populations. Under capitalism there will always be a surplus of potential workers because ‘the demand for labour is not identical with the increase of capital, nor supply of labour with increase of the working class … That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself’ (Marx [1867] 1976: 640–1, emphasis in original). Consequently, and at the level of analysis of the capitalist mode of production, its very functioning, which gives priority to accumulation, determines the mode of reproduction, that is, the social relations in the context of which the propertyless population struggles for economic survival. Empirically, at the historical level of analysis, in the context of capitalist social formations, capital is indifferent to the conditions in which the working classes reproduce themselves unless these might threaten capital accumulation (Gimenez, 2019: 12, 13, footnote 42); it is important to keep in mind that underlying that indifference and its effects is the contradiction between the interests of capital and labour.

Our seventh proposition is that capitalist development provokes successive transformations in household structure and patterns of fertility, arising from the persistent commodification of core activities and basic necessities, thus compelling all working-age propertyless individuals to sell their labour for a wage, or to find alternative legal or illegal sources of economic survival.

So, for example, at the same time that capitalist development selects ‘[the nuclear] family form as the most “functional” for daily and intergenerational reproduction, it constantly undermines it through changes in the productive forces in the realms of production and reproduction’ (Gimenez, 2019: 196). In fact, whether individuals marry or not, stay together, separate and form new households, how many children they have, how long and how well they live, whether they stay for ever where they grew up or migrate within and across social formations, whether or not they have access to education, housing, and health and other services are all “structural effects of capital accumulation; i.e. they are determined ‘in the last instance’ by capital accumulation” (Gimenez, 2019: 135–7; see also Cherlin, 2014).

Under capitalism, everything can be reduced to a commodity; besides labour, individuals can sell sex, parts of their bodies, elements of the reproductive process, childcare and eldercare, labour power, the list is endless. As regards biological reproduction, for example, the development of new reproductive technologies fragmented biological processes in the 1970s and opened them to manipulation, ‘thus bringing unforeseen changes in the social relations within which children are brought into the world’: ‘as they split intergenerational social reproduction from procreation, [they] give rise to the capitalist mode of procreation’, making it ‘possible for individuals or couples to purchase the different elements of the reproductive process to “build”, eventually, a baby for themselves’ (Gimenez, 2019: 188–90). It has to be kept in mind, however, that while the commodification of elements of biological reproduction, and those pertaining to daily and generational physical reproduction (for example food, food preparation, child and eldercare, house cleaning and so on) goes on, the social reproduction work that takes place in households, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and so on is labour intensive, with aspects that resist commodification because humans, particularly the newborn, require more for their flourishing than satisfaction of basic, material needs. In capitalist social formations, economic and technological change, and quantitative and qualitative changes in the demand for labour require workers with social and intellectual skills, capable of learning, acquiring some education and participating in older and newer sectors of the labour force. The persistence and deepening of economic inequality, lack of access to the material conditions of social reproduction (that is, nutritious food, health care, maternal care, adequate housing and so on) result in the continuous reproduction of the bottom layers of the propertyless population. Parents without skills and education, unemployed or working for minimum wage might satisfy some of the basic material needs of their children; however, they are less likely to be able to provide the nurturing care, socialisation and education necessary to raise employable members of the potential labour force (see Gimenez, 1987; 2019: 299–303). Their fertility, however, is likely to be high, for fertility tends to vary inversely with income, education and occupational status. Hence the particular phenomenon of high levels of unemployment among young (aged 16–24) unskilled populations around the world, reflected in the British case by the estimated 851,000 ‘NEETs’ (Not in Employment, Education or Training), at the last quarter of 2023, accounting for over 12 per cent of the age cohort (Office for National Statistics, 2024). For many of these, entry into the armed forces has been the means of survival (Chorley-Schulz, 2024), while the British state has pursued punitive (and largely unsuccessful) policies to deal with what have been identified as ‘troubled families’ – that is, families characterised by worklessness and problem debt, poor school attendance and attainment, mental and physical health problems, crime and anti-social behaviour, domestic violence and abuse and children deemed as in need of help (Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017; 2019).

At the same time, the availability and widespread use of contraception, legalisation of abortion, the effects of the Women’s Movement, and increases in women’s education and labour force participation have led to lower birth and fertility rates among the economically stable sectors of the population, particularly in the wealthier capitalist social formations. The intergenerational changes brought about by these and other related developments are profound. In England and Wales, for example, the cohort of women born in 1990 was the first in which 50 per cent remained childless by the age of 30, and on a longer time perspective: ‘The most common age at childbirth for women born in 1975 who reached 45 years and are assumed to have completed their childbearing years in 2020 was 31 years … compared with 22 years for their mothers’ generation born in 1949’ (Office for National Statistics, 2022b: 2). In the United States, it is mainly the college educated that can afford to marry, a trend that social scientists view as signalling the decline of the working-class family (Cherlin, 2014). For a variety of reasons – key among them deepening economic inequality, the high cost inherent in raising children, scarcity of affordable childcare and erosion of pronatalist values, especially among women with higher education – birth rates and the number of births are falling all over the world; they fell during the pandemic and continue to fall, to the point that concerns about a ‘baby bust’ are rising again (see, for example, Coy, 2024).

Our eighth proposition, summarising and reinforcing earlier arguments, is that in capitalist social formations, crises of social reproduction are class-specific, centred particularly on the working class, and determined by changes in capital accumulation. We do not claim to be the first to argue that social reproduction struggles are labour struggles and vice versa, that working-class struggles for better wages and/or working conditions, housing, education, clean water and so on are struggles for the material conditions for social reproduction. We argue, instead, that capital accumulation determines the relations and conditions of reproduction of the propertyless population, and that changes in capital accumulation reflect the balance of power between capital and labour.

Our ninth proposition is that capital accumulation is a permanent source of upheavals and transformations of both the socio-economic structure, and the lives of labouring populations. But this is a sign of the vigour of capitalism, not of its fragility. This does not imply, of course, that patterns of working-class social reproduction respond smoothly or automatically to the changing needs of capital. But on the available evidence, the immediate dynamics of capitalist development – competition between individual capitals, uninterrupted scientific and technological revolution, an ever-increasing division of labour on local to global scales, the constant process of ‘creative destruction’ as obsolete capitalist enterprises die and new ones are born, and the resulting tendency for capital to invade and take over any form of production more ‘primitive’ than itself – tend to reshape patterns of social reproduction, albeit unevenly and sometimes over relatively long periods of time. So, for example, in Cannibal Capitalism Nancy Fraser shows that in successive mercantile, liberal-colonial, state-managed and financialised stages (her typology), capital has periodically become ‘unmoored’ from its ‘social bases’ of racialisation and dispossession, social reproduction, ecology and public power, and ‘turned against them’. But in every case these social bases have been transformed in ways conducive to the reinvigoration of the process of capitalist accumulation, examples given being the rise and fall of the ‘family’ wage, the introduction and subsequent dismantling of the ‘welfare state’, corporate-sponsored egg-freezing, and the double-cup hands-off mechanical breast pump (Fraser, 2022: 44–7, 64–8, 70–1). In every case, the social reproduction of the labouring populations, including both waged and salaried workers, is dominated and reshaped by capital. The same conclusion can be drawn from the ‘conversation’ on social reproduction, women’s labour and systems of life recently published in Dialogues in Human Geography (Fernandes et al, 2023), where Asanda Benya says of the Marikana platinum mine where women work underground that it ‘is not something that is far away from what the women of Marikana do on a day-to-day basis. Rather, it completely determines their daily routines’ (Fernandes et al, 2023: 8), and Alessandra Mezzadri remarks more generally that a focus on social reproduction ‘shows the ways in which the entirety of realms that pertain to the livelihoods of workers are drawn into the process of production’ (Fernandes et al, 2023: 6).

Conclusion

Smriti Rao has argued cogently that a crisis of social reproduction for labour is only a crisis for capitalism if it involves ‘changes in the quantity or quality of labour power that threaten capitalist accumulation processes’ (Rao, 2021: 42). We go a step further here, exploring the crucial role that such crises play in the development of capitalism, and arguing that crises of working-class social reproduction are generally not crises for capitalism, but rather recurrent features of its ‘normal’ development, and the lifeblood on which it depends (see also Chibber, 2023: 34–8). More fundamentally, such crises are a reflection of the balance of power between the main classes and, as such, are unresolvable within the parameters of capitalism.

While we agree that ‘crises of care’ have ‘deep structural roots’ in capitalism (Fraser, 2022: 54), we disagree with the notion that they denote a contradiction between capital’s need for reproduction and its tendency to undermine it. If the capitalist mode of production were a closed system in which every capitalist enterprise depended on the reproduction of the actually existing population, with no migration possible, it would be appropriate to speak of a contradiction between capitalist production and reproduction. But it is not. Capital, commodity and labour markets are global in scale. As a consequence, crises of social reproduction around the world are increasingly intense. But by the same token, it is increasingly difficult to imagine a ‘crisis of social reproduction’ in any given social formation that would represent an unequivocal crisis for capital.

Throughout this article we have argued that analytical propositions that prioritise reproduction over production are not only misleading, but stand against the empirical evidence substantiating the utter dependence of the world’s proletarianised populations’ economic survival upon employment within the capitalist economy. When capitalism is, for all practical purposes, reduced to a descriptive, rather than theoretical term, the theoretical and political significance of the research findings are lost. It is important, for example, to describe in detail the horrors of the exploitation of labour in mines, or unsafe factories, or point out the incalculable economic and social value of millions of unpaid caregiver labour hours that enter the physical and social reproduction of the population, most of whom are likely to enter the labour force and become, objectively, members of the working class. But it is even more important, theoretically and politically, to theorise the implications of this fact: as long as capitalism prevails, the social reproduction of the labouring populations, that is, their access to employment, housing, education, health care, nutritious food and a healthy environment, is and will be the ‘dependent variable’, because the economic survival of the vast majority of propertyless populations is subordinate to the ups and downs of the capitalist economy. It is important to envision the opposite, not by positing that reproduction is essential for the production of surplus value, but by explicitly linking the critique of current conditions to the possibility of a mode of production where social reproduction becomes the ‘independent variable’ and people’s needs take precedence over profit seeking and capital accumulation (Gimenez, 2019: 156–8). A focus on social reproduction in isolation from its significance as the terrain where class struggles are fought in all capitalist social formations, as a manifestation of the contradiction between capital and labour, can only lead to more scholarship and theory that strengthen, rather than weaken, the current identity divisions undermining the possibility of class solidarity in most capitalist societies. So we end with our tenth proposition: we are not witnessing a capitalist crisis, but a crisis in access to the conditions of economic survival affecting most of the world’s working classes, women, men and children, whose lives prosper or decline depending on the changes in capital accumulation deemed profitable in the social formations where they live.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Paul Cammack is Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. He has published numerous articles on Marxist theory and global political economy. His book, The Politics of Global Competitiveness, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

Martha E. Gimenez is Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder. She has published numerous articles on Marxist Feminist Theory, Population Theory, Inequality, and Marxist critiques of identity theories and politics. Her book, Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays, was published by Brill in 2018.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.