Social Reproduction Theory Quotes

“If our kitchens are outside of capital, our struggle to destroy them will never succeed in causing capital to fall. —Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“The fundamental insight of SRT is, simply put, that human labor is at the heart of creating or reproducing society as a whole. The notion of labor is conceived here in the original sense in which Karl Marx meant it, as “the first premise of all human history”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker? Put another way: What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“every form of capitalist society harbors a deep-seated social-reproductive “crisis tendency” or “contradiction.” On the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other hand, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“Ferguson urges us to reconsider the child as a liminal, ambiguous figure, one capable of both compliance with capital and collusion with chthonic revolutionary energies.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“What exactly are capitalist productive relations? And how are children implicated in them?”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“Slavery and immigration are two of the most common ways capital has replaced labor in a bounded society.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“labor power itself is the sole commodity—the “unique commodity,” as Marx calls it—that is produced outside of the circuit of commodity production”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“determining the definitional contours of SRT, using SRT to develop and deepen Marxist theory, and exploring the strategic implications of applying SRT to our current conjuncture.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“Weeks’s approach coincides with our own in that it is dissatisfied with efforts to align “work” with “a more equitable distribution of its rewards”—in other words, to think about how our working lives might be improved. Instead, Weeks points to the fundamental incommensurability of capitalism with any productive or creative sense of work. Hence her volume urges us to think about how the right to work and the right of refusal to work can be reimagined under the sign of an anticapitalist political theory.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“in capitalist societies the majority of people subsist by combining paid employment and unpaid domestic labor to maintain themselves . . . [hence] this version of social reproduction analyzes the ways in which both labors are part of the same socio-economic process.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“gives a fuller picture of production and reproduction than Marx’s political economic theory does, that extends questions of democracy not only to the economy but to personal relations.”9”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“severing the integrated relationship between class and gender. Contributors to Mojab’s volume show how decoupling feminism from capitalism carries the twin perils of emptying out the revolutionary content of feminism which “reduces gender to questions of culture” and of “reduc[ing] gender to class relations.”8”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“This book is an attempt to begin that process by highlighting the critical contribution of SRT to an understanding of capitalist social relations.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“points the way toward thinking about how “gender and class intertwine in capitalist production.”7”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“first, that it is a methodology to explore labor and labor power under capitalism and is best suited to offer a rich and variegated map of capital as a social relation; further, that this is a methodology that privileges process, or, to use Lukács’s words, we believe that the “developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical ‘facts.’”6”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“Indeed, it is precisely because social reproduction scholars have so effectively applied and extended its theoretical insights to a diverse set of concerns in such creative ways that it is useful to compile and outline its key theoretical components along with its most significant historical applications.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“exploitation (normally tethered to class) and oppression (normally understood through gender, race, etc.)”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“what it means to bind class struggle theoretically to the point of production alone, without considering the myriad social relations extending between workplaces, homes, schools, hospitals—a wider social whole, sustained and coproduced by human labor in contradictory yet constitutive ways.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“oppression is theorized as structurally relational to, and hence shaped by, capitalist production rather than on the margins of analysis or as add-ons to a deeper and more vital economic process.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process,”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“unlike all other commodities under capitalism, the “unique” commodity labor power is singular in the sense that it is not produced capitalistically.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“our understanding of capitalism is incomplete if we treat it as simply an economic system involving workers and owners, and fail to examine the ways in which wider social reproduction of the system—that is the daily and generational reproductive labor that occurs in households, schools, hospitals, prisons, and so on—sustains the drive for accumulation.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“The framework thus seeks to make visible labor and work that are analytically hidden by classical economists and politically denied by policy makers.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression

“Capitalism, however, acknowledges productive labor for the market as the sole form of legitimate “work,” while the tremendous amount of familial as well as communitarian work that goes on to sustain and reproduce the worker, or more specifically her labor power, is naturalized into nonexistence.”
― Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression