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Abstract
Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction: productive versus reproductive spheres of labor. This article argues that this opposition too is analytically and politically misleading. Capital is concerned with profit, not with the reproduction of the living labor within which labor-power is always embedded. It is the everyday struggles of living labor that determines its reproduction. These take place not just in the kin-based sphere of the family but in overlapping, shifting places and processes, including struggles for better wages and working conditions in capitalist firms. This paper uses two different contexts in southern Africa to make this argument: an influential debate over how to understand changes in apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s; and a sugar-cane plantation in Mozambique where interdependent contradictions of class, gender and race defined a social division of labor that systematically compromised the reproduction of living labor.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Alessandra Mezzadri, Susan Newman and Sara Stevano, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for patient and generous reading and comments on various versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I am drawing here from my own review of Meillassoux at the time (O’Laughlin, Citation1977), as well as from Meillassoux (Citation1975).
2 A similar argument on migration and proletarianization was developed by Rey (Citation1976) in his work on migration from the Sahel towards coastal plantations in West Africa.
3 In 1974, Afrikaans was introduced as the principal language of instruction for academic subjects in black education from middle school onwards. In 1976, secondary students in Soweto, a black working-class township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, went on strike against the new law, refusing to attend classes and organizing protest meetings. The strike spread rapidly to black students of all levels of education across the entire country, in rural as well as urban areas. The government sent in armed troops to suppress the strike, killing, injuring and detaining hundreds, including school children.
4 Including, in Bernstein’s (Citation1979) sense, not only those who are currently employed as wage workers and indebted workers but also those scratching together a living by combining day labor, petty commodity production and petty trading.
5 A new census was carried out in 2017, but results disaggregated to district and sub-district levels are not available.
6 And hence the right to social security benefits, for which all workers’ wages are docked but for which casual workers are rarely eligible.
7 In 2013, the US dollar was worth 30MT.
8 A woman police commissioner was the first to bring this to media attention: http://noticiasmocambique.blogs.sapo.mz/2012/11/?page=2, Monday, November 19, 2012. http://www.canalmoz.co.mz/1o-pagina/494-edicao-de-19-de-novembro-de-2012/23998-distrito-demanhiça-regista-mais-de-mil-casos-de-violacao-de-mulheres-e-criancas.html
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Bridget O’Laughlin
Bridget O’Laughlin taught anthropology in the United States and development studies in Mozambique and the Netherlands. Her main research interest has been the political economy of Africa. Her recent research focuses on questions of work and health. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Agrarian Change.