It’s necessary, then, to ask, “If worker’s labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?”

The contemporary sociality is based on social relations inherent to a particular mode of production, within which people are allocated certain roles and positions according to their class. In the capitalist mode of production, social relations are necessarily based on exploitation and are riddled with conflict. In order for the class relations thus established to survive in a bourgeois society, they, as well as the productive capacities they utilize, must be reproduced. One of the key units that ensures the reproduction of social relations and productive forces within capitalism – beside a series of public services that are being systematically suffocated in neoliberalism – is family. This somewhat unromantic fact about family, which was already alluded to by Friedrich Engels (2010), as well as multiple subsequent traditions of SRT4 and the wide struggles for the abolition of white, nuclear, bourgeois family (Lewis, 2022: 36–74), reveals the specific role allocated to the family, namely that of a focal point for social reproduction, which absorbs the problems that arise and accumulate in society. But what are we exactly referring to when we talk about the SRT? Why is it a necessary tool for an analysis of informal labour within neoliberalism? Social Reproduction Theory is all about life-making. Its core tenet is the fact that the accumulation of surplus value is not possible without informal and unpaid labour that generates healthy labour power either through maintenance of direct producers, or by taking care of non-labouring members of the subordinate classes (children, the elderly and the unemployed), or through generational renewal of workers and their lives (birth taken for granted as the biological reproduction of new labour force) (Vogel, 2013:150). In recent times SRT has been used as a characteristic Marxist-feminist tool, a theoretical and critical framework, and a political strategy for tackling the relationship between oppression and exploitation, as well as waged and unwaged labour. It departs from Marx’s understanding of reproduction within the capitalist mode of production (Čakardić, 2020) but expounds on Marx’s theoretical sketch and redirects the analysis from the logic of capital toward labour power (Jaffe, 2020:6–7). It poses the question formulated in the words of Tithi Bhattacharya: “If worker’s labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?” (2017:1). Thus, SRT locates “hidden” processes that enable production, and it seeks to investigate the existential conditions of the worker and analyses the phenomena of life-making and produced gender reality. Nancy Fraser sums up this issue in the following paragraph: Non-waged social-reproductive activity is necessary to the existence of waged work, the accumulation of surplus value and the functioning of capitalism as such. None of those things could exist in the absence of housework, child-rearing, schooling, affective care and a host of other activities which serve to produce new generations of workers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds and shared understandings. Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society (2016). In addition, SRT sharpens the analytical blades we use to make the existing theories of labour more thorough, to better understand the historical phenomenon of gendered and racial division of labour, and to grasp the issue of class and class struggle more precisely. Capitalist societies have separated the social reproduction labour from that of economic production and have “remunerated ‘reproductive’ activities in the coin of ‘love’ and ‘virtue’, while compensating ‘productive labour’ in that of money” (Ibid.). Since capital needs socially reproductive labour to produce and reproduce labour force, it is determined to secure the appropriate amount of this very valuable resource at the lowest possible cost. Neoliberalism does this by informally assigning the responsibility for social reproduction to women, families and communities. This way, it degrades reproduction to the forms that are most suitable for the maximization of capitalist profit. As noted by the proponents of the Wages for Housework Campaign of the 1970s, family is still one of the most fundamental units of social reproduction and life-making, of heterosexual religion and private property, which simultaneously produces coercion and violence to further strengthen its basic economic role (Dalla Costa, 2008). By the same token, it secures the unpaid care work for family members, domestic labour, and what Silvia Federici called “a labour of love” (2012:15). Despite the fact that family represents an “ideological mystification and a political project” (Seymour, 2022), that not all families are the same, that the idea of men as “providers” is undergoing a serious crisis, and that not all families are even heterosexual, the legal and political project of “familialisation” has never been stronger. This is not to be ascribed simply to religion or traditionalist conservatism, but to “the morals of the market”, as expressed by Jessica Whyte. What she means by that concept is a radical rerolling back of the social and the neoliberal practice of outsourcing the burden of social responsibility to families (2019). It is precisely in that context that the Thatcherian hoax about the primacy of family and individualism over society, about the abolition of social responsibility, should be examined. The morals of the market presuppose radical abolition of social roles of the state, reassigning them to the family as the supposedly only unit that is accountable for subsistence of its members. Therefore, its moral role is to secure a shelter, a safe space, an isolated “anti-social” island that is supposed to protect us from all social crises and economic insecurity. Exactly in that line of argumentation Richard Seymour notes: When society is either hostile or indifferent, when public provision is etiolated, when institutions of solidarity are shrivelled and demoralised, the anti-social family can provide a range of services: free transport, help with spiralling debt, financial support against unemployment, care in the event of illness, or shelter against racism (2022). The family thus becomes a shelter expected to accomplish immeasurable effort, and to do it all out of love, because this is understood as a naturally given and necessary moral sacrifice. Neoliberalism, according to our conclusions derived from the discussion in the first part of the paper, literally turns home into a physical shelter that allows the worker to rest before the next day’s labour, a place that gives them a roof above the head and a bed to rest when rest is needed (Bhattacharya, 2013–2014). Rather than having the state and the employers ensure socially conscious and sustainable housing, available and free public transport, public healthcare and education, as well as community services and decent wages and pensions, the morals of the market takes on the role of a mediator between the state and the family and charges the family with all the duties of the state, therefore making the family responsible for all the consequences of social crises, bad living conditions and poverty. However, the socially reproductive capacities of the family are not infinite. We are continuously witnessing not only economic crises, but reproductive crises as well, systemic exploitations of individual and collective abilities for regeneration of people and relations between them, as well as a systemic “care crisis”. “In that case,” writes Fraser, “the logic of economic production overrides that of social reproduction, destabilizing the very processes on which capital depends – compromising the social capacities, both domestic and public, that are needed to sustain accumulation over the long term” (2016). Furthermore, it appears that the ongoing global pandemic brutally reinforced the care crisis and underscored the fact that the economy of the so-called “essential work” disproportionately exploits women (Mezzadri, 2022), especially women of colour (Powell 2020), and makes life intolerable and unhealthy for millions of people (Kisner, 2021).