Care work and labour distribution are characterized by social reproduction serving to subsidize capital accumulation through control of profit, labour, and life.

For Marx (2011) the hidden abode of capital accumulation lies in the value added by labour when transforming commodities (C) into a new commodity (C’) which, when sold in the market, sees surplus value appropriated by the employer. Furthermore, Marx (2011) divides C into Fixed Capital (Kf), which includes infrastructure, technology and machinery and Circulating Capital (Kc) that subdivides into Constant Capital – raw materials and intermediate goods – and Variable Capital that refers to labour. This differentiation helps to explain where capital has more flexibility to reduce or increase production costs. While infrastructure and technology are usually expensive investments with limited surplus value margins, as they depreciate reasonably quickly; Circulating capital refers to the inputs that require daily repositioning. Intermediate goods and raw materials are constant, but labour is variable because the need for it fluctuates with productivity levels and technological changes (Marx 1993). Therefore, cost reductions usually aim at acquiring cheaper raw materials, intermediate goods, and labour (Arrighi 1978, 1994; Moore 2011). This shifting is seen especially in times of crisis when capital aims to compensate for the loss of profit margins, as discussed earlier. In particular, under neoliberalism4 the need to cheapen labour is dictated by geographical, racial, and gender global hierarchies in two main ways: (1) sustaining a standard of living through an increased load of unpaid social reproduction work, (2) providing a segmented labour force that is underpaid depending on race, geographical location, and gender. The above further increases and externalises the actual costs of social reproduction globally. Oxfam estimates that the monetary value of unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least USD 10.8 trillion annually (Oxfam 2020 p 8). How much would profit rates reduce if even a fraction of these inputs were paid through wages to consume in private markets or redistributed through taxation for public social security networks? Moreover, this paper argues that circulating capital is the central realm that capital moves towards to increase surplus margins, mainly achieved by externalising the costs of social reproduction in a segmented manner between geographical regions and people (Marchina 2021). After considering the preceding, Marx’s formula of capital can expand as follows: M – C (Kf, Kc (IG, L (C, USR(h*Wd)))) – P – M’ – D’ (2) C: Fixed Capital (Kf) plus Circulating Capital (Kc) Kc: Intermediate Goods (IG) plus Labour (L) L: Commodities (C) plus Unpaid Social Reproduction Work (USR) USR: Hours of Labour (h) * medium wage (Wd) When looking closer into circulating capital, we can expand our shared understanding of the valorisation of capital to include unpaid social reproduction work in its relation to the surplus, calculated by using Picchio’s (2005) proposed formula: number of hours dedicated to unpaid care and domestic work (h) by a median wage (Wd). Regardless, it is worth mentioning that translating the complex processes that sustain life into an x amount of exchange value that fluctuates in the market inaccurately represents the cost of labour (Harvey 2014). In addition, a lingering tension prevails between the natural price of labour (not including unpaid inputs) and its market price established by supply and demand forces, collective bargaining, and other historical processes (Picchio 1992). Moreover, the proposed expanded formula does not explicitly account for tax rates, labour regulations, and public social services, which provide the normative bases for establishing profit margins (see Figure 2). These further obscure the role of social reproduction and the degree of externalisation economic growth relies on to sustain profit margins. In addition to labour, another significant aspect of circulating capital is the daily repositioning of raw materials and intermediate goods (Moore 2011, 2017). Colonisation, imperialism, and current global production dynamics discussed previously have historically endorsed the unpaid extraction of natural resources from the Global South and multiple forms of labour segmentation that permit lower wages, guaranteeing higher surplus rates. Surplus enlarges in intimate relation with the deductions made under circulating capital, sustained mainly by social reproduction practices that are intimately gendered and racialised, presenting social reproduction dynamics as an elemental domain for capitalist expansion. This assertion cannot be analysed in national terms but as an unequal global dynamic, where state regulations, social services, labour segmentation and the mobility of goods, services, and capital are central to determining the rate of externalisation through social reproduction (Bakker and Gil 2003). The complexity of these processes poses essential limits to their measurement; nonetheless, a conceptual approach allows us to deepen our understanding of capitalistic expansion. Economic Issues, Vol. 28, Part 1, 2023 - 25 - Conclusions In a world where the top decile of the population holds anywhere between 55- 75 per cent of total wealth, depending on the country (Piketty 2020 p 671), this paper presents a framework to analyse how social reproduction is intimately tied to increasing externalities that sustain the endless pursuit of capital accumulation. While critical political economy tends to focus on the relationships between capital and labour, a dialogue with SRT offers an expanded understanding that includes the conditions of possibility for a capital/labour relationship of exploitation to emerge. Decoloniality and Fraser’s approach to ongoing expropriation processes in the background of exploited labour showcases capital’s tendency to externalise its actual reproduction costs through global segmentation and the political subjectivation of race and gender. Through this lens, a closer analysis of the relationships between production and reproduction as they relate to surplus extraction further reveals the dual ties between the intensification of unpaid social reproduction caused by increasing economic inequalities, with the conditions of possibility for higher surplus extraction. The expanded formula of the valorisation of capital proposed Figure 2: The expanded process of the valorisation of capital Source: Marchina S (2021) Reproducción social, nodo del ensanchamiento de la desigualdad económica, Tijuana, México: UABC. ST Marchina - 26 - in this paper offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms involved in adapting capital to the loss of profit margins by externalising its costs towards the social reproduction realm. However, the scope of this paper is limited, as the complexity of these processes includes multiple axes of analysis. For instance, global care chains that support social reproduction through unpaid and underpaid inputs, in connection to migration flows that offer cheap labour to the Global North, are crucial elements to consider in the study of the externalisation of the actual costs of capitalist expansion. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of the present discussion is to offer a deeper understanding of these processes that leads to an exploration of solutions to redistribute social reproduction as a powerful strategy to reduce economic inequality.