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The Problem of Reproduction: Waged and Unwaged Domestic Work

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‘Capital’ in the East

Abstract

The paper will focus on feminist debates, which have sought to address and substantially reformulate the question of reproduction as explicated by Marx in Capital. Beginning with Friedrich Engels' exploration of the relationship between family and state and Rosa Luxemburg’s attempt to address colonialism through the concept of ‘enlarged reproduction’, Marxist Feminist scholars have sought to explore how the reproduction of labour, as well as the labour of reproduction, may explain the dilemma of women’s work in contemporary (and prior) stages in capitalism. In recent years, the changing nature of work has given more impetus to earlier debates over unpaid housework of the 1980s. Thus, affective labour as a subset of immaterial labour and the new concept of care work seeks fresh insights into shifting frontiers of labour and commodification. Given that feminism opened up the category of ‘work’ most productively in the history of that category and that it continues to do so, how far are these new issues and debates relevant to us today? At present, labour studies  is dominated by the question of the future of work, which appears to have great traction with earlier feminist concerns about rethinking value and visibility of labour. If there is not to be, as historians will assert with confidence, an end of work, are there already fundamental changes in the nature of work? How may the entry of more and more of the work of social reproduction into exchange relationships affect future landscapes of labour?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Later communists, such as Mao Zedong, echoed this dictum. It should also be noted that in Origin, Engels also evoked slavery to discuss the family. He pointed out that the word itself derived from famulus, meaning slave. There have been many later discussions about the resemblance of family relations to slavery and servitude.

  2. 2.

    Sen’s notions of cooperative conflict and capabilities have also had considerable impact on these questions. In a well-known compilation of essays, scholars have discussed the gender implications of his theories (Agarwal et al. 2003).

  3. 3.

    The first statement of the domestic community in relation to colonialism is perhaps that of Meillassoux (1981). In the South Asian context, the celebration of the domestic as a locus of resistance and of anti-colonial nationalism is most famously that of Partha Chatterjee (1989).

  4. 4.

    I have discussed these issues elsewhere. See Introduction of Accumulation in Post-Colonial Capitalism (Mitra et al. 2016) and in Chap. 4 of Domestic Days (Sen and Sengupta 2016).

  5. 5.

    The Live-in Caregiver Program in Canada was introduced in 1992.

  6. 6.

    Care Work in America: An Interview with Nancy Folbre by Rohan Mascarenhas, Russell Sage Foundation, September 17, 2012. http://www.russellsage.org/blog/care-work-america-interview-nancy-folbre. Accessed on 9.6.2014.

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  1. Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Samita Sen

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  1. Samita Sen
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  1. Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Achin Chakraborty

  2. Department of Economics, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

    Anjan Chakrabarti

  3. Department of Economics, University of Kalyani, Kalyani, West Bengal, India

    Byasdeb Dasgupta

  4. Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Samita Sen

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Sen, S. (2019). The Problem of Reproduction: Waged and Unwaged Domestic Work. In: Chakraborty, A., Chakrabarti, A., Dasgupta, B., Sen, S. (eds) ‘Capital’ in the East. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9468-4_11

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