Section 1: A Brief Introduction to Social Reproduction Theory 

Social reproduction theory (SRT) focuses on the production of labor powers and, even more importantly, on the ways these powers are continuously reproduced in the midst of and in large part for capitalist exploitation. The theory therefore sits at the intersection of two key features of capitalism. On one hand, it takes up the exploitation at the heart of capitalism while, on the other, it is equally committed to exploring the social relations through which labor powers are generated and maintained as exploitable commodities in the first place. SRT thus unites the logic of exploitation with the social relations through which the labor powers at the basis of such exploitation are themselves generated.

Yet there is more than one way to hold the exploitative logic of capital together with so many capitalist societies’ oppressive social relations. The version of SRT I will explore here is a Marxist kind that sees capitalism as imbricated in racist, misogynistic, and multiply disabling social dynamics that are not reducible to, not mere functions of, its logic of exploitation. Oppressive social relations within capitalist societies have their own force which is conceptually distinguishable from while also, in a practical way, deeply situating the ways capital exploits labor powers. I am particularly interested in a version of SRT that can explore the radical potentials that emerge when these two sides of capital are set in tension against each other by struggles against their seamless social reproduction. 

Some accounts of capitalist social reproduction, however, have a harder time doing just that. Martha Gimenez, for instance, argues that Marxism’s commitment to theorizing the core logic of exploitation is too sidelined when theorists try to connect it with capitalist social formations and all their intersecting oppressions. In a different vein, Italian post-autonomist theorists of social reproduction worried that too narrowly tailored notions of “exploitation” and “value” would politically sideline workers and the unemployed who do not directly grow capitalist value by being exploited. They then stretched the core logic of capital by conceiving all of society as a kind of “social factory.”

But the best way to build out SRT’s radical framework is to chart a middle path between the reductive approach on one side which makes all social harms into functions of capital and the expansive approach on the other which challenges the very logic of capital in order to include a broader set of social harms. On the view developed here, the logic of capital must be tied to a given capitalist society’s actual organization of labor, and the actual ways such labor produces and continuously reproduces its own and others’ labor powers through a socially specific fabric of violence. After all, if SRT is to help orient anti-capitalist struggles, the theory can neither void the basic logic of capitalist exploitation, nor bypass social experiences of violence by pointing to the logic of capital alone. It must show just where, how, and through which kinds of labor powers the nested violences of capital are brought to bear in ways that can spark resistance. When the abstract logic and the socially concrete modes are held together, SRT offers a critical theory of both capital as such and actually existing capitalist societies. It does so through tying the former to critical diagnoses of the more local and specific fabric of social relations which capitalist exploitation rests on and through which it reproduces and conditions so many ways of being oppressed. The theory is then concretized through the social research, while the social research is coordinated in a radical criticism by the theory.

Taken together, this has been called SRT’s “unitary” commitment: SRT views capitalist societies as dominated by the violent logic of capitalist exploitation, a logic which is itself set in unfolding motion by the myriad ways labor powers are oppressed, that is, the ways they are prepared and then used for (or in surplus populations excluded from) just this domination. This view of capitalism as socially reproduced through exploited labor powers is then well-suited to chart the ways labor powers are divided along racial, gender, “ability”, and so many other, often intersecting oppressions. These oppressions deeply color how labor powers are formed, sustained and contribute to both capitalist exploitation, and the social relations through which exploitation proceeds. These dynamics, along with so many other oppressive forces, shape the concrete reality of labor powers in how they are made (produced), sustained over time (reproduced), as well as their highly segmented access to and participation in labor markets. Though there are indeed other constructions, this brief outline provides the starting point for SRT as further developed in this paper.

Section 2: Social Reproduction Theory as Critique

SRT does not simply analyze the relations that help concretize the abstract logic of exploitation via the labor powers it rests on, and then stop there. SRT also objects to the social realities of the capitalist societies it analyzes so well. It is, in other words, a critical theory. As a critical theory committed to overcoming what it objects to, SRT sees the exploitation of labor powers, and the way such powers are continuously prepared for and then offered up for such exploitation as a problem that requires a real world, not just a theoretical resolution. I’ll turn now to the nature of the problem, and then I will develop the special nature of social reproduction strikes as promising strategies in the face of the problem. 

On a social reproduction view, the exploitation central to capitalism does violence to labor powers in three, nested but conceptually isolatable ways. To begin, the first level of the problem is that capitalist exploitation transforms labor powers from capacities to freely develop and satisfy needs into tools for the private accumulation of value. Under capitalism, we are generally enriched by neither the emergence of new needs, nor any newly developed abilities to satisfy them. A broad and evolving set of needs, and our broad and evolving strategies for satisfying them are in fact held hostage by and reduced to capital’s over-arching need to exploit labor powers for surplus-value. Capital blackmails a narrow version of abilities into satisfying capital’s need to exploit labor for its own self-expansion. Worse, a rich diversity of labor powers are cut down and made to fit into this narrow, value-maximizing mold. This first level of the problem can then be thought of as the problem of capitalist exploitation, as the damage such exploitation does to the labor powers capital abuses in order to grow.

Second, and in a deeply ironic twist, capitalists’ competition for private enrichment off the backs of labor powers develops ever-greater technologies for need-satisfaction, the fruits of which are increasingly beyond the reach of those whose labor powers lay at their very basis. Capital’s extraordinary development of productive technologies is due to neither the individual genius of great inventors nor to any supposed forward march of history. And new technologies are certainly not developed to make it easier to satisfy the needs of the vast majority. Rather, capitalists reinvest some of the profits from exploiting labor powers to better compete with other firms. This means technologies of production are continuously developed in way that intend to capture larger and larger market share, not for the easier need satisfaction of the proletariat. This second level of the problem can be thought of as the problem of alienation which circumscribes and cements capitalist exploitation. The proletariat’s labor powers are exploited in the development of technologies that would make easier, freer need-satisfaction possible in many ways, but the proletariat is precluded from directing and accessing just these possibilities. Because surplus value is held privately, capitalist exploitation and alienation reproduces proletarian labor powers as divorced from proletarian abilities to direct, control, or enjoy what their powers have accomplished.

Finally, even tragically, this alienating exploitation also deepens the violent powers of this damaging social structure. Labor powers are not just exploited and exploited in alienating ways, but this exploiting alienation contributes, at the same time, to growing the social power of capital over and against labor powers. The more labor powers are exploited through alienation, the more capital grows as a social force holding need-satisfaction hostage to ever-further alienating exploitation. In other words, capital’s alienating exploitation is part of a feedback loop that expands, deepens, and hardens this over-arching organization of domination and violence. Synthesized in SRT’s unitary view, each element is part of an interlocking fabric of violence deployed by any and all capitalist societies against the varying arrangement of labor powers at each one of their bases. To extend the metaphor, the best versions of SRT insist on investigating the specific weft and warp of the fabric of violence as it unfolds in different capitalist societies.

This demand for concretization means that social research prompted by SRT is often oriented by questions like: What are the gendered, racial, and “disabling” dimensions of working day in and day out to reproduce different labor powers, and how do they relate to the inter-generational labor also required to reproduce powers fit for exploitation? Or, how do gendered, racialized, and “ability”-based divisions of labor within and across industries select for, and through such selection, deepen these differences? Or, in another register, which labor powers have their social reproduction under-supported or downright undermined and, through those dynamics, who then has a harder time accessing or is entirely excluded from labor markets? As a result, who then is disproportionately stuck in dependent relations and/or subject to state oversight and carceral violence?

In this light, capital’s abstract reliance on proletarian labor powers is also, at the same time, reliance on a divided, segmented proletariat that experiences its classed nature in different ways. While the fact of having to exchange labor powers for a wage remains constant (or, in relations of dependency ripe for abuse: rely on those who do), the lived conditions and experiences of being “working class” hang for every individual on so many of their other, enveloping, concretizing social relations. Thus, in addition to exploiting labor powers abstracted away from the specific nature of any living, breathing personality, such exploitation also rests, at the very same time, on the different kinds of damage done to real, live, flesh and blood human beings with all of our different histories, struggles, and opportunities for resistance. Even as he stressed the abstractness of labor power, Marx himself also wrote: “we mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being.” Labor powers inhere in our living personalities, personalities that are formed in ways that depend on how and where our physical form is embodied, engendered, racialized, subject to the enforcement of border regimes, and so much more.Since oppressions often overlap, SRT offers a version of what may be thought of as a radical, anti-capitalist version of intersectionality. In being anti-capitalist, SRT has an “intersectional” view of the proletariat. Capital is still central as capital is absolutely reliant on dominating proletarian labor powers. This domination is the key to capitalist exploitation. Yet across the proletariat, capital’s relation to exploitable labor powers is extraordinarily uneven. Women, racialized minorities, queer people, “disabled” people, those without unions, and those without documentation, in general, have to attempt to sell their labor powers with steep disadvantages. When they cannot, they are disproportionately, and precariously dependent on those who do. I’ll have more to say about this later, but paying attention to the specific ways that proletarians experiences their class need not be a recipe for liberal versions of identity politics. In fact, giving space to theorize concrete differences provides tremendous theoretical and political advantages.

Taken together, capitalism can be thought of as simultaneously abstract from the standpoint of capital and concrete from the standpoint of different and intersecting proletarian oppressions. And through SRT, the two sides are intimately connected in a critical vein. The domination of labor powers provides the key to understanding capital’s continuous social violence, as it is precisely here that the abstract and the concrete meet. SRT pays attention to the in principle infinite determinations of the concrete as the social keys to understanding how capital’s logic of exploitation is brought to bear in different ways on the class as a whole. By “determinations” I mean the particular ways capitalist societies are experienced as dominating by different proletarians. The greater the detail with which the fabric of violence is mapped, the more determinate the domination becomes, and the more specific SRT’s criticism can become. In this way the abstract logic of capital can be grounded in the experiences of so many proletarian oppressions, while the mediated experiences of such domination can be coordinated not in a logic that abstracts from the root of the problem, but in a far more radical version of theory.

Radical anti-capitalists can take heart, however, in the fact that the reproduction of capitalist social relations through its essential violence and segmentation is not just criticizable, but inherently unstable. This unstable social reproduction creates more than a few opportunities for organized resistance.

 

Section 3: What Is a Social Reproduction Strike?

 

From the standpoint afforded by its domination, capital is moved by nothing more than the maximum possible rate of labor power exploitation and then the seamless reinvestment of surplus-value to, in a never-ending cycle, expand and deepen this domination. It does so in an abstract way. What I have meant and mean here by “abstract” is that the analysis of capital’s continuous drive to augment value – its valorization – can proceed without the slightest reference to the specific determinations of so many damaged lives at its basis. Valorization though exploitation is the goal regardless of the specific circuits through which value is generated, and regardless of the specific living personalities it constrains in doing so. The peculiarities of the labor and the laborers at its basis are inconsequential, or better, matter only insofar as they either contribute to or challenge its circuits of value-generation. Even when afforded what appear to be moments of recognition, like when advertisements use idioms of the dispossessed, or when foreign firms promise to hire from local communities, capital does so on the basis of careful calculations that attempt to balance potential disruptions against maximum valorization. 

The flipside of this violently abstract logic of capital is, as I have argued, the concrete reality of the social order it has to be tied to; a social order which always affords a landscape rich in potentially radical forms of resistance. The segmented markets for labor power that capital relies on reproduce not just violent oppressions, but also the needs and motivations for responding to so many specific forms of violence. What can be thought of as social reproduction struggles are then located where specifically constrained labor powers, resisting as labor powers, also confront broader, dominating, oppressive social conditions. Social reproduction struggles challenge the enveloping fabric of capitalist societies’ violence by pulling on a particular stitch. Though social reproduction struggles often take the form of labor struggles, when they do so they are not only labor struggles. They are, as I’ll develop in what follows, labor struggles with social dimensions that exceed their workplaces.

When pushed far enough, the political development of social reproduction struggles can pose destabilizing challenges to capital’s continuous valorization. In other words, social reproduction struggles can strike at the very heart of capitalism. The most powerful political tools in confronting capitalism will be the ones that do not merely question, or momentarily slow, but entirely stop capital’s generation of surplus-value. I am, of course, talking about organized workplace stoppages, or strikes. As the most radical form of social reproduction struggle short of general strikes and full-scale revolutions, I will now turn to developing what, in my view, social reproduction strikes are. I’ll offer a few elements of a definition as well as some illustrations to help provide some clarity on what is quite often a fuzzy, or over-extended concept.

In my view, social reproduction strikes are collective forms of work stoppages that:

1. Rest on an shared understanding that connects the specific determination of workers’ proletarian conditions to the broader fabric of capitalist violence,

2. Articulate social demands beyond their workplace that try to unravel some threads of this fabric of violence, and

3. Strategically root their struggles in solidarities generated within their communities.

What do these admittedly vague elements of a definition look like in the real world? Let me offer a few examples. When women doing unwaged housework go on strike to protest women’s social subjugation, this is a social reproduction strike. It is also a social reproduction strike when, for instance, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strikes against the systemic racism of their public school system. Likewise, when nurses working for a for-profit hospital in Massachusetts went on strike for safer staffing levels and against the extreme exploitation they were expected to tolerate because so many of them were women, this can also be thought of as a social reproduction strike.

Whether through unions or not, unwaged or waged, and whether directly generating capitalist value or not, in each case a social reproduction strike is at least partially galvanized by responding to a specific aspect of working class experience: it is crystallized around some common shared aspect of the workers’ living personalities. This, for lack of a better word, “identity” is then used as a springboard for demands that are rooted in but which also socially exceed the specific nature of the work and its unacceptable conditions. For instance, the international wages for housework campaign certainly also reached into value-generating factories, but it primarily organized women working without a wage in the home. Despite the name of the movement, the strikes were often against wages, and against the entire idea that wages were a good way to determine the value of women’s socially necessary reproductive labor. Women organized workplace stoppages as women (a determination of the abstract, generic proletarian condition) to challenge the naturalization of women’s unwaged work in the home, and, crucially, to push back against the dire social effects of this violent arrangement. In doing so they explicitly centered not just patriarchy, but white supremacy and heteronormativity. While the strikes that were part of or connected to this campaign certainly stopped work, they did so with goals that went beyond their workplaces. 

The movement achieved perhaps its largest success in terms of work stoppages in 1975 in Iceland. Women in Iceland women organized a “day off” to demand greater equality by withholding labor of all kinds, including household work. It was the first contemporary social reproduction strike, and it would serve as a kind of model for developments over a generation later. In 2016 Polish women protested en masse against abortion restrictions, including through the All-Poland Women’s Strike organization. That same year the Ni Una Menos collective in Argentina organized a women’s strike to protest femicide. Since then the strike movement has in Argentina, expanded to protest all forms of gendered violence, and become a model across much of Latin America. Both drew inspiration from the Iceland women’s strike. These strikes, largely organized around International Working Women’s Day, reached new heights in the late 2010s, particularly in Spain where over 5 million women were on strikstrike on March 8th, 2018. In the U.S. the highest level was reached shortly after the election of President Trump, on March 8th 2017. A broad coalition of radicals and left-liberals organized massive protests around the country, with three school districts having to be closed due to mostly women teachers being out on strike. Once again, each of these strikes had social goals beyond their workplaces.

The CTU went on strike in 2012 and 2019, both times tying the workplace conditions of disproportionately Black and Latina education workers (not just teachers), to the socially engineered deprivation of the communities they play a key role in reproducing. The striking workers certainly wanted better working conditions, but crucially, this demand was conceived of and then argued for as a political response to the combined effects of racism and misogyny. When interviewed about the the 2019 strike, former vice president, and now president of the CTU, Stacey Davis Gates put it this way: “This is about breaking down systems of white supremacy that ask for flexibility and demand that black children in the city adjust, demand that Latinx children in the city wait in line…I am about being a part of the coalition of people that’s needed to help transform this. My children will be on the picket line today and every day, until their schools get exactly what they deserve.” The workplace was thereby a site of struggle within and for the broader community which, through effective communication and organization, was powerfully integrated into the union’s labor strategy. This strategy was informed by a broader, social reproduction style analysis of their local conditions. The effectiveness of the Chicago teachers’ earlier strike set the stage for the massive public school teacher’s strike wave which then swept the U.S. starting in early 2018. Interestingly, integration within the community, and broader political demands tied to that integration, seem to have been a strong predictor for the success of this highly uneven “Red for Ed” strike movement.

The final example I want to develop relies on the nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts who, starting on International Working Women’s Day, went on the U.S.’ longest strike of 2021. The nurses struck against unsafe staffing in their for-profit hospital. They also understood that this staffing policy was filtered through the misogyny which both discounted their expertise, and which expected that the disproportionate number of women working as nurses would shoulder burdens of care beyond what was beneficial for their patients and, in some cases, beyond what was humanly possible. As a for profit hospital, St. Vincent’s cut labor costs by reducing staffing, and maximized revenue by only holding patients in the hospital for their most profitable periods of greatest illness. The results were not only over-worked nurses, but higher rates of readmissions for entirely predictable acute health emergencies, many of which would likely have been resolved with longer, but less intensely billable hospital stays. 

Many St. Vincent nurses were striking, at least in part, as women against the dangerously unhealthy staffing levels imposed upon them by administrators. The strike was therefore also in part against the widespread common sense, tapped into by hospital administrators, who figured women would either more readily accept or could at least be compelled to take on additional burdens of care. In striking, the nurses compellingly tied who they were to their workplace conditions, and then tied those conditions more broadly to the health of their community. It was easy to then recognize the horribleness of constraining mostly women healthcare workers, through their identity as women, to putting the generation of private profits over their own health and the health of their patients. 

Each of these strikes share three key features in common, features that collectively amount to each of them, in their own way, being a social reproduction strike. First, each was a proletarian struggle organized around a specific way of being proletarian. The (mostly) unwaged work in the home, the waged work in the school, and the waged, profit-generating work in the hospital were disproportionately done by women, with the second being disproportionately done by Black women and Latinas. Second, each used a specific determination of their proletarian position as a jumping off point to help generate broader solidarities beyond their workplace. Rather than distracting from their struggle, rooting their strikes in the particularities of what Marx would call their living personalities created avenues for others, through their own proximate conditions, to make strong, solidarizing political connections. Finally, each strike had political aims that touched on broader issues of social reproduction. Those striking under the banner or in the footsteps of the wages for housework campaign challenged women’s position vis-à-vis social reproduction more broadly, the Chicago teachers challenged their school system’s unchecked reproduction of deepening racism, and the Worcester nurses challenged the misogyny of understaffing and whether decisions about people’s health ought to be guided by the priorities of well-being and care, or by a private firm’s profit-maximization.

 

Section 4: Social Reproduction Theory Redux, or Strikes and the Return of the Concrete

 

In order not to lose the forest for the trees, let me zoom back out and develop these strikes’ broader political demands in a more theoretical register. In refusing to arrange their struggles through generic avatars of an abstract “working class”, social reproduction strikers counterpose their specific labor powers over and against the way capital reduces such specificity to mere gears in its value-generating machine. As we know, from the standpoint of capital, labor powers are valued only to the extent that they contribute to valorization. Capital thereby abstracts from the specific realities of proletarian’s experiences and living personalities even as it rests on them. Yet as Sue Ferguson put it in Women and Work, “concrete labor can never be identical with its abstract form.” Even when capital’s social dominance extends its abstraction of labor beyond value-producing forms of work, and what has been called the “value-form” dominates society more broadly, there is something powerful in staying with the concrete particularities.

Indeed, in both theoretical and practical veins, centering the particularities of workers and their work in strike actions holds a lot of promise. This is the case because doing so turns a key elements of capital’s logic on its head. Strikes which only aim for higher wages, improved safety conditions, different management practices, or anything narrowly tailored to the workplace and work itself leave unchallenged the basic organization of capital around, on one hand, its abstract imperative to valorize and, on the other, the specifically oppressive social relations through which that valorization proceeds. Unlike these more focused kinds of strikes, social reproduction strikes hold wider, radical promise. This is because social reproduction strikes counterpose the lived realities of proletarian life and its broader, enveloping social conditions over and against the numb, abstract logic of capital’s imperative to valorize. In doing so, social reproduction strikes can help clarify the violent nature of capitalism itself, and can provide potential points of rupture. Social reproduction strikes move out in expanding arcs from those striking, to those in their communities, to social relations much further afield. Through what Verónica Gago has called their transversality, social reproduction strikes provide an opportunity to throw the whole capitalist order of social reproduction into question. 

Social reproduction strikes are thus strikes that can be thought of as manifesting a return of the concrete that reverberates with universal implications. Keying into the inherent contradiction between capital’s abstract intentions (the growth of value as such and without any qualifications), and its always concrete mode of proceeding, social reproduction strikes reveal how the reproduction of capital is also, at least potentially, the reproduction of forms of proletarian life and power that can guided by an insurgent politics over and against their reduction to an abstract, universal, and violently imposed common denominator. In its reproduction of so many forms of concreteness appropriate to maximum exploitation, the social violence of capital is also doing something quite risky: it is creating workers who can recognize and respond to this violence in their own lives, and in their societies more generally.

Without discounting either the value of strikes that proceed in a more tailored way, or the value of struggles entirely beyond the workplace, this is what makes social reproduction strikes so potentially valuable. Pointing beyond capital and its social relations, social reproduction strikes question why workers are rendered exploitable in specific ways or why they are otherwise forced to live such constrained lives. To be fair, all strikes require proletarian coordination, and struggles always develop political experience, as well as the possibility for more radical commitments. They provide lessons in and orientation towards more democratic pathways for self-determination than the often authoritarian arrangements of workplaces. In this way, all strikes are responses to some kind of domination. But in making the specific determinations of proletarian identity central to their work struggles social reproduction strikes hold promise for wider struggle. In other words, social reproduction strikes are strikes that fight on two fronts at the same time. They fight against both capital’s accumulation of ‘value’ through alienating exploitation, as well as the specific and specifically oppressive circuits through which it proceeds.

It is not merely that the concreteness of a segment of the proletariat is contrasted against the abstractness of capital. This kind of approach could simply take the form of a liberal version of “identity”, the celebration of which does little to challenge the combined sources of its specific oppression. In social reproduction strikes, however, proletarian concreteness, formed in part through its capital-inflected determinations, pose a meaningful challenge to capital’s abstract domination. Social reproduction strikes push back against the enveloping social organization which pressures workers’ living personalities into just these kinds of work, just these specific ways of valorizing, or facilitating the valorization of capital. Even if only obliquely, they criticize this social commitment to valorization and offer a counter-proposal. By putting a stop to the incessant accumulation of capital they make it possible to value social relations and a manner of social reproduction that have as primary values their own capacities and living, embodied personalities. They propose, again even if only implicitly, a different manner of social integration: one rooted not in a superimposed abstract and violent universality, but in a universality comprised of and devoted to the freedom of the rich particularities at its basis.

In this way, I agree with Sue Ferguson’s suggestion that social reproduction strikes confront capital on its own terrain, and Ferguson is absolutely right in holding that doing so is absolutely necessary. Without disrupting the accumulation of value, proletarian struggle can pursue advantages in an economy of recognition, but not the political economy that lies at the heart of capital and capitalist societies’ oppressive social arrangements. Yet as I’ve defined them, social reproduction strikes do disrupt capital’s accumulation of value, and they do so by tying their work stoppage to a refusal to abide by a social order that reduces labor to its common denominator, that makes it a mere abstraction fit for the calculus of maximum value-generation.

Their socially integrated manner of doing so means that social reproduction strikes also construct their own terrain, not beyond capital, but as a radical potentials long-dormant, but stirring within it. Strikes by nurses and school-workers thus value their “life-making” work, which has been borne out in strikes against murderous state and profit-driven COVID policies. To borrow a powerfully evocative phrase from Tithi Bhattacharya, social reproduction strikes value life-making over the death-making cult of capitalism. So, while Nancy Fraser has argued that over and against a capital-engineered ‘crisis of care’, we need a “deep structural transformation of this social order,” keying into the specific values of the striking workers provides some elements of the reconfigured social relations that lie on the other side of the necessary transformation. This is because social reproduction strikes insist not only on the value of and more resources for “life-making” as such, but on the value of freeing up the specific ways of living and making life wrapped up in their different kinds of socially reproductive work.

Indeed, social reproduction strikes often insist that the specific kind of life-making labor being withheld could be done in less racist, misogynistic ways if those doing the work had more social power. Housework would be less oppressive if housing and those working in it were socially organized beyond atomized, individual households. Likewise, instead of cost-controlling administrators determining labor practices that harm patients in one industry and students in another, nurses and education-workers ought to work according to the healthcare and pedagogic standards that they play some role in crafting. When workers have the power to determine the social arrangements of their labor, the work can be done in less oppressive, healthier, and more socially valuable ways. Social reproduction strikes are therefore far from striking against social reproduction itself. In fact, they insist on the value of the work and the workers doing it, and through striking, on the value of workers contributing to just how that work ought to better proceed.

Quite often social reproduction strikes make the case that the kind of the work that they do is good, or at least could be good if organized in a different way. When considered apart from so many forms of domination that circumscribe such work, at their most fundamental levels nursing people to health, and educating the next generation are socially valuable. And this is born out in struggle. No iteration of the international wages for housework campaigns wished to simply end the kind of work that makes and reproduces human beings. Even under the distorting effects of capital, it is hard to argue against nursing people to health, improving the minds and talents of young people, and taking care of other human beings. They are each good things to do. Those who pursue such work, disproportionately women, are very often committed to caring and fostering human potentials in concretely valuable ways. After all, nearly no one chooses to go into work in the home, or for that matter into nursing or teaching only for the financial rewards.

For this reason it is also worth paying attention to the specific forms and values of life-making work that social reproduction strikes propose as implicit counter-values to the impersonal, abstract logic of capital. I want to suggest that it is not just what I have called “the return of the concrete”, but the specific kinds of work and the subterranean values articulated through it by social reproduction strikes that deserve special attention. 

Take, for example, the most recent Chicago teachers’ strike. In 2019 educators struck to keep the children of their community safe from ICE agents, provide at least one nurse per school, reduce over-crowded classrooms, keep janitorial workers in-house, and improve the staffing levels for special education specialists, substitutes, social workers, librarians, before-and-after school programming, as well as for their communities to be safer, healthier places for students to learn. Regarding the latter, the strikers also demanded increases in the city’s affordable housing for the 16,000 homeless students in Chicago. Clearly, the strikers valued education, their role in it, and the way it could be improved for a community in dire need of social support.

To be sure, social reproduction strikes can also include bread and butter goals like improved wages and workplace conditions. And these goals can be set and pursued from the standpoint of workers’ self-interest. But the key to their success is inscribing even the struggle for self-interested goals within a vision of work as basically good, and potentially better when arranged as a good for their community. In tying even workplace conditions to the students’ learning conditions, the Chicago strikers asked the city to value the work done in schools. They asked Chicagoans to decide if they preferred a community where education was seen as a fundamental good and if education-workers’ concerns pursuing it were to be heeded as they struggled for a learning environment in which young people could flourish. They made it clear that the alternative was allowing the long-standing racism inscribed in reproducing the proletariat of Chicago to continue unabated, with the schools continuing as a key cite for reproducing racist oppression. When many Chicago restaurants began offering free or reduced price food for strikers and students out of school, it signaled that the strikers’ strategy of tying the value of their specific labor and living personalities to their social conditions in an overarching criticism of their society was working quite well. Their social reproduction approach to striking garnered powerful social support.

Section 5: A Question of Strategy or, Striking at Which Pressure Points?

 

The examples of strikes I have focused on were organized both at the “point of production,” and beyond it, at what some have called the “point of reproduction”. Yet, the contrast implied by this distinction is a bit too sharp. The two “points” are not polar opposites arrayed against each other. For SRT, every activity is also, in some minimal way, also a socially reproductive one. Even the simple fact of being exploited in exchange for a wage reproduces the individual worker, the exploitative wage relation, and the profit-seeking social order through which individuals are forced to reproduce themselves via wages.

If, however, we think of “the point of production” as referring to those kinds of work and workplaces which grow the value of capital, then a finer and more helpful contrast comes into view. Strikes at the point of production are then strikes that withhold labor that is being directly exploited via a wage in work that augments capital. The pressure points of a capitalist society are most clearly visible in these industries because it is here that value expands through the exploitation of waged workers. Since capital is essentially committed to growing value, workers’ decision to pull the breaks on this growth is always a major blow. 

Strikes at the “point of reproduction”, however, can also be strikes at the “point of production”. This is possible because some socially reproductive work generates value for capitalist firms. This was, for instance, the case the massive women’s strikes first in Iceland, and then in Argentina, Poland, and elsewhere. Such massive women’s strikes certainly included women who refused to show up for their value-generating work. On my view of social reproduction strikes then, they are not necessarily strikes beyond the point of production.

Still, many if not the majority of social reproduction strikes are indeed not in value-generating fields of work. But this is far from a political point against them. Even when a social reproduction strike withholds labor that does not directly contribute to capital’s valorization, which is to say, in those instances in which the strike is not at a point of production, the strike can nonetheless disrupt the accumulation of value in other, indirect ways. This is the case because capital is highly sensitive at many other points. In order to realize the profits through which value can expand, capital requires extraordinarily complex flows of goods, finances, services, and bodies. The way services contribute to realizing surplus value through their essential role in the increasingly privatized reproduction of labor powers makes the service sector in particular a prime target for strikes’ disruptions. 

Even when indirect, however, disruptions can be highly effective. For instance, though publicly supported public transportation systems do not expand value, in many places they are absolutely necessary if the working class is to arrive at their workplaces which do. Likewise, while a fully public health-care system does not grow value, where the proletariat is fortunate enough to have access to such a system, the services it provides are absolutely essential to the reproduction of the proletariat which, in turn, when employed at points of production, does augment value. Finally, in the midst of the COVID pandemic when teachers refused to work in teaching environments that were obviously breeding grounds for viral spread, the consequences were then felt indirectly but still powerfully by the value-generating firms that relied on schools to mind the children of the parents they exploit.

We can therefore think labor struggles in relation to value accumulation, up to and including strikes, within a social reproduction frame. By consistently applying this social reproduction frame to contemporary labor struggles, K. D. Griffiths has provided an excellent analysis of what, following Kim Moody’s lead, they call “choke points” of social reproduction. Specifically oppressed people can take advantage of the choke-points they may be segmented into and thereby throw a wrench into the gears of capital accumulation. Griffiths writes:

Rather than viewing movements of women, queer, and racialized subjects as reinscriptions of the divisions of the capitalist labor market, or worse, diversions from the class project, [through SRT] they are seen to precede and create the necessary social conditions for broad class action, both activating and potentiating class struggle at “choke points” of logistics and manufacture…SRT is an attempt not only to elaborate but to engage the new terrain of class struggle.

Just two years later, in the midst of the COVID pandemic and uprising for Black lives, Griffiths applied his analysis of “choke points”, previously preserved for logistics and manufacture, to social reproduction itself:

The significance and potential of social reproduction choke points is increasingly obvious in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and a historic uprising for Black liberation and against state violence, as social reproduction workers shut down sites of transmission and risk their own lives to treat the sick, while at the same time logistics workers strike for safe workplaces, for Black Lives, and to demonstrate their social necessity beyond the logic of profit. The inclusion of social reproduction choke points into a strategic analysis of rank-and-file organizing expands the list of sectors and workplaces that might be targets for rank-and-file organizing and helps to flesh out the relationship between rank-and-file organizing and broader social movements.

There are two crucial developments here. The first is that “choke points” that can block the circulation of capital are no longer restricted to the value-generation of manufacture, nor to the circulation via logistics necessary for values to be realized. Beyond these traditional choke points which can be thought through SRT, Griffiths has turned to using SRT to think its own collection of choke points. Workplaces disproportionately staffed by people subject to police violence, or who have their own, or could expose others close to them to serious health risks can be tied to the disruptive power of social movements for Black lives, abolition, full social provisioning, and to simply demanding non-murderous living conditions. 

Second, and directly tied to the first, looking at these kinds of social reproduction choke points trains our attention on the kinds of rank and filerank-and-file workers who are likely to be good organizers. As M. E. O’Brien noted, it has long been recognized that socially oppressed people tend to be more committed to and better at labor organizing. Yet, O’Brien takes a valuable step beyond what is often reognized by offering an explanation for just why this turns out to be true. In researching queer and trans workers’ effective organizing efforts in the retail industry, O’Brien showed that queer workers are more likely to succeed due to the combination of their experiences confronting the violences within their workplaces, as well as the communities and cultures they rely on beyond it to survive. Following O’Brien then, SRT can help point not only to the social reproduction chokepoints, but to the workers (often in the service sector) who are best placed to take advantage of them.

The concretizing strategy at the heart of SRT thus keys into specific identities as potential loci for galvanizing their own, and broader struggle. We can therefore expect that social reproduction strikes will be full of, and often led by those who have learned to struggle not just against workplace domination, but against a combination of social oppressions as well. A full analysis of social reproduction choke-pointschokepoints, including the industries and workers best situated to take advantage of them, would require careful economic, sociological, and anthropological work far beyond the scope of a paper devoted to outlining what social reproduction strikes themselves are. I hope, in this more theoretical paper, to have at least clarified that this kind careful empirical work is absolutely essential for SRT’s concretizing ambitions and, more importantly, that such work has a good chance to be politically valuable as well. 

Finally, to pre-empt any misunderstanding, I want to be clear that I am not suggesting strikes for higher wages via unions in value generating industries are unimportant. In fact, I am deeply in favor of a class-struggle approach to union politics, and have the utmost respect for the rank and file strategy of developing shop-floor militancy. After all, on my view, social reproduction strikes can also take place through unions in value generating industries. I am, however, suggesting that SRT and its focus on social reproduction strikes offers a view of struggles, and those who organize and participate in them, that can help specify some strategically valuable ways to disrupt the accumulation of capital. 

Social reproduction strikes have the immense advantage of suturing a response to the violence of capital to a response to the social oppressions that condition its valorization. In pursuing the hope for a better world beyond capitalism’s nested violences, radicals will need political tools that challenge both the logic of capital, its deep commitment to the exploitation of labor powers, as well as the intersectingly oppressive social relations through which labor powers are continuously produced and reproduced in the facilitation of such violence.

 

Section 6: Beyond Social Reproduction Strikes and Towards a Socialist Future

 

Capital-induced crises are already making this kind of suturing work easier. The COVID pandemic has helped spark awareness of what Griffiths called “social necessity beyond the logic of profit”. From its first wave in early 2020, COVID fundamentally altered social perceptions of labor. It did so by forcibly reconfiguring the proletariat not as a mass of isolated individuals each exchanging their labor powers for a wage, but as potential workers who often live with and have deep commitments to caring for loved ones, and who, beyond their living situations, have extensive social relations in their broader communities. 

The speed with which COVID infections repeatedly spread revealed beyond any reasonable doubt the essentially social nature of our lives. Many realized quite quickly that their lives and the lives of the people they loved were more important than their jobs. Many also began to recognize their dependence on previously unsung workers like nurses and teachers. Those most directly responsible for preserving and reproducing our lives quickly became ‘heroes’. The capital-constructed dividing line between “essential” and “inessential” workers then raised the question of which kinds of work is valuable, and valuable from which perspectives. Added to that, a brief moment of social support in the form of supplemented unemployment checks and COVID relief payments clarified that the brutal domination of capital was not quite so fated or fixed. It was, in fact, up for debate.

In the hopefully waning days of the pandemic, that debate is carried forward on one side by the “great resignation”, in which large numbers of workers are choosing to resign rather than continue in harmful, or unfulfilling forms of work and, on the other, by governmental responses to rising inflation. It would be a stretch to think of the great resignation as a social reproduction strike because the vast majority of resignations are not coordinated, not developed as a form of workplace struggle, and do not aim for change further afield. Still, even when done individually, the very act of resigning is a version of reclaiming control over one’s labor powers. And this insistence on self-direction stemming from so many workers’ social imbrications suggests that SRT will likely remain a powerful frame for thinking through and strategically intervening in the labor struggles to come. 

Perhaps this development of workers’ power can help explain why the US federal reserve aims to curb inflation by increasing unemployment, despite the fact that wage-growth is below the rate of inflation and does not appear to be one of its major causes. On top of real wages being eaten away by inflation, this federally engineered unemployment will only increases the private toll of socially reproductive work, work that is already experienced in highly segmented and oppressive ways. The struggles to follow in the near term will then very likely be struggles on the terrain of social reproduction. So, in addition to a social reproduction theory that can help provide clearer pictures of that terrain, it will be increasingly important to pay attention to social reproduction strikes as they attempt to fundamentally change the very lay of the land.