6. Social reproduction: Care as Unpaid Labour

Welcome to our module on Social Reproduction. This is part of Transforming Lives through Care, an Anthropology subject at La Trobe University.

In the first half this course we've been looking at how care operates in informal settings including within the family or friendship groups and even with animals. 

Now we're going to examine one of the most influential—and provocative—critiques of care under capitalism. Silvia Federici argues that many activities we think of as "care" are also forms of labour that are essential to keeping capitalist society running. Strathern, shows that these ideas may not apply to other cultures, and at the same time, presents the most most profound challenge--in my experience at least--to the what it means to be 'me'.

🎯 Learning Goals

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Define social reproduction.
• Explain Federici's critique of unpaid care work.
• Compare Federici's and Strathern's perspectives.
• Evaluate whether care is labour, love, or both.

🚦 Introduction: Social Reproduction

"Social reproduction "refers to the processes through which societies sustain themselves over time. Every society has to raise children, care for people, pass on knowledge and values, and maintain the relationships that allow social life to continue. 

What about in capitalist societies like our own? In order to produce people to work in banks, build roads, fly planes, we need someone / something to raise children, educate them, care for workers, etc. Social reproduction describes these processes. 

Feminist scholars such as Silvia Federici argue that under capitalism much of this work becomes invisible because it is done in households, is often unpaid, and is disproportionately carried out by women, even though it is essential for reproducing the labour force that capitalism depends on.

📚 Recommended Materials

Read: my summary of 'The Critique of the Gift" and "Transformations"

📘 Essential Materials

Read:  Federici "Wages against Housework"--"totally mystified"--is your family similarly mystified?

"Housework has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character...The unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work."

Federici's argument goes like this: Housework (as usually performed by 'housewives') has been idealised as a form of care. But this in an illusion. Housework--including sex with husband, cooking meals, shopping, changing nappies--is labour. It should recognised as labour not care. And the only way to truly recognise this is to pay housewives wages for their labour. 

Read: From the subsection entitled "A critique of the gift" through to the end of the chapter. In other words, read pages 143-167 of "Chapter 6: Work: Exploitation at issue" in The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia.

"There is domination but not domination through the exploitation of labor."

Marilyn Strathern adds an important anthropological perspective. Studying people on Mt Hagen in PNG (and drawing on materials from around Melanesia), she argues that ideas such as the "individual", "labour" and even "care" are culturally specific. She imples that Federici's idea that individual housewives perform straightforward labour, cannot apply in a straightforward way. Strathern shows how people themselves are created through relationships. A PNG wife, for example does not rightly own her labour in that, according to Federici, a housewife in the West does. Strathern is saying that gender inequality certainly exists in Hagen, but it cannot be adequately explained by the Marxist concept of labour exploitation.

🗣️ Interactive tasks

🏁 Conclusion

Summary

For Federici housewives are exploited. They are exploited because the labour they perform is not paid for. Instead it is hidden away as a kind of myth of naturally caring women. 

But is it the same, when women care for pigs in Melanesia? Their husbands take the pigs and take credit for them. 

Strathern says, absolutely not. It is domination, but it's a different kind of domination altogether. 

Significance

Two enormous developments emerge if Strathern is right:

1. Marxist and feminist critiques may not apply to all cultures

2. A single person is not necessarily an  individual

What’s Next

In what follows, we consider an entirely different way of looking at care. Instead of being characterised by deep-seated principles (such as labour or reciprocity), emotions (such as shame or indebtedness), we will analyse care terms of bodily actions. 

🔎 Further Research