Social reproduction names the labor — domestic, affective, biological, educational — required to produce and sustain human beings as laborers, members of communities, and bearers of social relations. It includes the work of cooking, cleaning, caring for children and the elderly, maintaining emotional bonds, transmitting cultural knowledge, and sustaining the biological capacity to work. This labor is overwhelmingly performed by women, disproportionately by women of color and Indigenous women, and is largely unwaged.
Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s made the central argument: the invisibility of reproductive labor is not an oversight but a structural feature of capitalism. Capital requires a constant supply of laborers — fed, clothed, rested, socialized, emotionally functional — but does not pay for the labor that produces them. The “housewife” is not outside the capitalist economy but is its unpaid foundation. The demand for wages for housework was not primarily about money but about making this exploitation visible and refusable.
Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004) extends the analysis historically, arguing that the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a campaign to discipline women’s reproductive power, destroy communal subsistence economies, and enforce the gendered division between productive (waged) and reproductive (unwaged) labor that capitalism requires. This connects social reproduction to the decolonial analysis: the imposition of wage labor on colonized peoples involved the simultaneous reorganization of reproductive labor along lines dictated by colonial governance.
Social reproduction theory matters for relational ontology because it reveals that the relations constituting persons — relations of care, feeding, teaching, sheltering — are themselves products of labor, and that the organization of this labor is a political question. Who reproduces whom, under what conditions, and at whose expense are questions about the relational constitution of persons, not merely about economics.
Related terms
- Refusal of work — the practice social reproduction theory informs
- Autonomism — the political tradition
- Silvia Federici — key theorist
- Extractivism — the broader logic of appropriation
- Anti-work — the tradition that includes reproductive labor refusal
- Settler colonialism — the political structure that reorganizes reproductive labor