Factors of Social Reproduction

With this insight it is argued here that a proper understanding of SRT needs to identify and incorporate all of the life providing resources that contribute to the well-being, or as Katz (2004) says, the realization of self – which among other factors include the environment.

This should need no justification but as Ferguson (2017) writes: “At the most basic level, all life forms derive sustenance from their environment.”

By keeping our focus glued to wages and market-defined-living-conditions we engage in reductionism and lose sight of other values that are central to human reproduction, and we indirectly mystify how this concept of social reproduction actually happens. SRT shows us labor as a commodity that is produced by, and not only remunerated by the market. Its production as such relies on a number of interacting factors that subsidize or accommodate this wage relation. Failing to understand the inter-relation between these factors, vectors, leaves us hailing market exchange and exposure as an improvement, without understanding how it effects the other vectors. The following section will show the ways that these factors have been enumerated.

Image 12: The Ecological Economists’ view of Social Reproduction Theory

Marxist feminists have brought attention a number of hidden factors in the creation of the household, the family, the worker, and thus the society. Trying to understand the way childhood and childcare reproduces the social and work world, Katz (2004) examined how play prepares children for productive activities while Ferguson looks at how childhood in general is transformed by capitalism (2017). Fraser (2013) for her part stresses the subordination of women to the social reproduction sphere, and through that includes a number of factors related to unpaid, unrecognized work. Saritas Oran (2017) writes about the pensions that sustain the worker after the wage-life has ended as Ferguson (2017) and Katz (2004) have about “capitalist childhoods.”

Fine (2017), Katz (2004) and Fraser (2012, 2013, and 2017) speak of the whole set of state and communal services and provisions that provide infrastructure and social architecture: including but not limited to vias (and the regulation) of transportation, communication, electrification, water supplies, schools and health care, along with supports provided by the “welfare-state”

(a concept which numerous authors including Fraser cited above, would object to without attempting to putting it into a historicized lens of compromise and struggle). Other writers have brought to light the idea that community acts as a buffer between the downward pressures on wages and the ability of an individual or household to sustain themselves (González-González, 1978; Moser, 2009; Greene, 2017). This idea of community can be seen as having a number of coinciding and separating spheres operating at differing scales but which support the “workers’”

reproduction through countless services and “subsidies” to the wage. The idea of community starts with the unpaid labor and nurturing at the household level and then expands into a world of overlapping and differentiated spheres. Other theorists who go beyond more limited versions of SRT have asked us to also consider concepts of social reproduction as “the reproduction of culture and ideology which stabilizes (and sometimes challenges) dominant social relations”

(Rai et al., 2013). As far as the literature review into this field has sent me, the closest that comes to enunciating the idea I am trying to establish as including the environment under the factors or vectors. Ferguson does so but without returning to the subject when she says that SRT

“directs our attention to a broader definition – one that includes those relations that generate and sustain workers for capital” (Ferguson, 2017, p. 113). Fraser for her part comes the closest when she suggests that the environment is a separate but perhaps parallel sphere of struggle to SRT. The argument here is only to close the space between the two and bring the social into the environment from which it comes, and recognize the interface between the environment and the social as a key resource, not only for capitalist reproduction but for social reproduction.¹¹ In the search for a meaningful theory to help explain what I have encountered in the field, I have found Social Reproduction Theory to incorporate both the way in which the household

11 I first became interested in this idea after I was assigned to carry out fieldwork in an indigenous community in Chiapas in 2010, when I was told that the poorest of the poor could be identified by their necessity to bring firewood from the mountains. They were too poor to afford gas, I was told. When I began following these families, I found out that the firewood gathering activity was much more – it was a day in the forest between a mother and her children. The way home was difficult but the whole day was not spent laboring but was quite treasured. When I returned in 2016, this practice was no longer possible as the forests had been sold and enclosed. Now, these women were no longer the poorest of the poor, but in their inclusion into modernity something had been lost. This was the beginning of my attempt to articulate the relationship between my studies of household economics and the environment.

is subsumed into the system, and a way of showing how the pressures coming from various angles impact the household. This follows Bannerji’s suggestion that “We need to venture, into a more complex reading of the social, where every aspect can be shown to reflect others, where every little piece of it contains the macrocosm in the microcosm” (2005, p. 144; as quoted in McNally, 2017).

In this sense this thesis utilizes a framework that sees seven factors of social reproduction working in concert in the production of living conditions: The Wage; The Community;

Social Protections; Public Services; The Environment; Citizenship (Rights); Debt; and the Environment.

3.4.1. The Wage.

The ability to live a life worth living is framed by a focus that begins and ends at the wage and its ability to buy into the commodified landscape. Showing us that this is not enough, Lavinas has elaborated on how the states that do the best job reducing poverty are the ones that provide the highest levels of decommodified services (2013, p. 38). Through this lens we can see other factors that in the end work together to determine the conditions faced by families and individuals. In this way, despite the fact that the primary study area, El Salto, Jalisco, Mexico, is an industrial area with relatively high wages, the lack of public services can be seen to work against the households’ social reproduction.

Yet, before elaborating on the other factors of social reproduction it is worth noting briefly about the character of the wage, and the fact that even this notion can be misleading. In many cases, for instance in sweat shops and temporary placement firms in the US, workers are paid a sum but deductions for company transport, rent of safety equipment and even check cashing fees reduce the wages substantially (Greene, 2001). In one case presented in this study, a female worker in El Salto was earning the equivalent of $40 USD per week and paying 20 per week for child care for her three children, and thus despite her low wage, her real wage is something quite different. Furthermore, it is important to note that the wage is not an abstract, asocial, neutral subject – issues of race, gender, power and formality come to the fore and define many aspects of even this factor. Finally, it is important to recognize the absolute fact that household wages do not represent individual access to commodified resources. In many case studies that I have participated in the wage earner distributes the money in an uneven sense – frequently leaving the woman with a small sum by which to manage all household expenses. Wages represent a sort of cash or fiat currency that flows into the household but to be more precise in terms of how that money is (mis)spent and whether it is shared requires a much finer lens than the typical household income category could possibly reveal to us.

3.4.2. The Community.

In this understanding of SRT, through the ideas of care work, caring for the children, caring for the elders, and even caring for the worker is lumped into the greater category

of “community.” The structure can be thought of as a neighborhood, a religious community, an extended family and includes all of the above mentioned references which discuss the “care-economy.” The ability of workers in an industrial setting to show up on time, in lieu of a lack of transportation or childcare, in a household lacking even water service, is often an act of magic. If we understand, as Rist (1997, p. 15) says, that the most important change in social relations was “the appearance – and gradual generalization – of wage labor,” then what existed before, we can imagine as something akin to the community. This idea of the community then highlights the concept of non-commoditized relations.

This construction of Marxist theory begins to ask what is labor and when is it remunerated, when is it given for free, and under what terms. Asking these question begins to reveal a sub-sector of the economy that operates under different logics and through different

“frameworks of calculation” than the fiat money economy. This “care” economy is what supports the aged family members, raises the children, and provides untold hours of “free”

labor in the preparation, care, and reproduction of the worker.

Recently, theorists such as Bhattacharya (2017), Fraser (2017), Katz (2004), Lavinas (2017), and Caffentzis and Federici (2014) have pushed the theory to include a broader range of categories that can be considered part of the struggle for social reproduction.

By putting these theorists together and in dialogue with one another, showing their comparable uses of the theory as well as their divergence, the theory can be seen to have distinct components in relation to each other. First there is the care work that goes on, mostly unrecognized by the society at large, and the struggle to recognize it. From this vantage we can see easily that the household is embedded in a society which provides distinct levels of services and protections.

3.4.3. Public Services.

Interwoven with community and membership to a social order are the infrastructures and the individual’s ability to access them. Access to transport or water services can be seen under a number of lens of inclusion/exclusion. There are even those who argue that services provided by the state also exploit and exclude the poor or even magnify inequalities (especially with regards to water) (Bakker & Kooy, 2010; Walter et al., 2017). Bakker argues that even public systems are embedded in a social order that prioritizes some over others.

The arguments can go around, but taking Lavina’s (2013) observation that poverty is lowest where services are decommodified we can easily understand Public Services to be one of the factors through which our social lives are reproduced. As such they need examined and critiqued and put into relation with other social reproduction factors. High quality services, especially public, but even private are, in this framework explored in relationship to the way they articulate with individual and household reproduction. These can be highly dependent on notions of social protections. This thesis specifically examines the relation these populations have to water services.

3.4.4. Social Protections.

The ability of the individual to participate in the community and the society, and to take risks and their ability to survive outside of the worker-producer relationship, is another realm of Social Reproduction. This can be seen as the safety net that both provides for the ill, and displaced, and the bare minimum that society sets for its members. As noted, these categories blur together and have distinct thresholds (de la Peña, forthcoming), but the social protections that an individual is accorded need deconstructed in order to understand how individuals get by and the steps they take to accommodate these larger, structural factors. Social Protections include the ability to walk from your home to the bus stop or to the work place without being murdered or raped; as well as the system of representation that supports or represses an individual when they are harmed by another or in the workplace.

Additionally, these systems change and pensioners who have negotiated pensions can lose everything (in Greene, 2001) I document how 65,000 workers at a steel mill in Cleveland, Ohio lost their pensions during bankruptcy proceedings). These protections can be seen along a spectrum of factors, from physical security, to welfare for vulnerable populations to crop insurance, to government backed markets – but in order to understand how they play out at the level of the individual we must examine them closely and define who has the right to what and to what degree.

3.4.5. Rights and Citizenship.

The concept of rights highly intertwined with the other vectors as the idea generally underwrites the way an actor is embedded with a social system. In the life course of the actors encountered in the field the difference in the way they have access to the system and the way their needs and safety are respected and represented is key in understanding how they relate to the other factors. In the El Salto Case 1 we see the father in the family was unable to claim justice against injuries he sustained. As Sassen (2006) tells us the concept of citizenship and the nation-state itself is enveloped in a conversation about membership, identity and rights. Bakker (2010) tells us that water, and specifically, access to public water resources, is a key “emblem” of this relationship. Where Callon and Latour (1981) caution us against assuming relationships without first analyzing the relationships we assume, Sassen pushes us to see the way in which globalization or neoliberalism has changed these relationships. In her work she shows clearly how the state has shifted from representing citizens to representing external capital (2006) and how groups and individuals have been increasingly excluded from membership (2014). This echoes shades of the work of Slater (2004) who questions whether we are in fact crossing some threshold into neoliberalism, or whether there has not been a continuum from imperialism straight through to the present.

For me, it is important to put the continuum of the idea of empire, alongside Sassen’s idea showing the changing nature of states to represent these transnational interests informed by Hymer’s argument. Hymer shows, in a dependency argument, how this process represents an evolutionary continuum, continuing the process of specialization, on a global level, following Smith’s ideas of division of labor. Both Hymer and Sassen’s work would lead

us to ask what rights look like when transnational actors become the new state, which is a contentious idea in itself (yet highly pertinent to this study). Regardless, the pertinence of identity and belonging and the way the system represents the needs of individuals suggests that we must tease out these questions. It is not enough to acknowledge the existence of public service or social protections (or wages) but it becomes necessary to identify how different categories of individuals are granted or denied access to these resources.

3.4.6. Debt.

In this analysis, the debt is an important category of social reproduction. Numerous authors have documented the increased submersion into formalized debt relationships that in some ways define our current era (Villarreal, 2004; Graeber, 2011; Lavinas, 2013; Palomera, 2015;

Roberts, 2008; Soederberg, 2014; Morvant-Roux et al., 2015; Baron et al., 2019). There are also numerous writers who speak of debt as a form of currency that goes beyond the reductionism of monetized discourse. In this sense we add in the works of the likes of Zelizer (1997), Graeber (2011), Yuran (2014), Morvant-Roux et al. (2012), Guérin et al.

(2012), Villarreal et al. (2015), to show how the ties between members in a social setting include relationships, co-responsibilities, exchange, repayment and gifts. As Guérin et al.

(2019, p. 41) shows, these relationships are not only undertaken with economic rationalism and the maximizing utility seeking, but they can be seen through the lenses of distinct forms of rationalism.

In the last two decades, formal debts have exploded at the level of the individual and household as consumptive (realization) activities have been “smoothed” through the expansion of these debts (Lavinas, 2017). Simultaneously, secondary financial markets based on the promises of these repayments have become central paradigms for growth in the recent decades (Sassen, 2014; Soederberg, 2014; Lavinas, 2017). It can be argued that the current phase of capitalism, as it reaches for the limits of expansion, is both sustained and fueled by debt. The incursion of debt into the lives of the poor has been both promising their liberation and, simultaneously, their control (Palomera, 2015).

“That finance capital builds on the indebtedness of ordinary people implies that it needs to permeate the structures of social reproduction,” Palomera (2015, p. 1) writes. In this sense it can also be seen from the opposite side of the spectrum, not only as something that has invaded a solid structure, but as a balloon which has dampened the constriction or changes in other SRT vectors. It then both smooths the consumption of households with varying degrees of protections and irregular flows of fiat resources, while it also moors the individual into a relationship within a setting.

Wood (2002) tells us that a complete understanding of social reproduction needs to be imbedded into an understanding of the system, within which there are no exceptions. No one escapes from the systemic implications for social reproduction. Wood (2002, p. 195) warns: “There is also a more general lesson to be drawn from the experience of English agrarian capitalism. Once market imperatives set the terms of social reproduction, all

economic actors – both appropriators and producers, even if they remain in possession, or indeed outright ownership, of the means of production – are subject to the demands of competition, increasing productivity, capital accumulation, and the intense exploitation of labor.”

3.4.7. The Environment.

As mentioned in the introduction, water in its absence is everything. So is the environment in general – the air we breathe, the food we consume, the sacred spaces we go to find sanity, or “connection.” In this thesis it is argued that the environment needs to be considered as a social reproduction factor. It is simply the ability of individuals and households to supplement their survival with free gifts from nature (Harvey, 2018, p. 90). We can see this most clearly in the case studies carried out in farming villages of Chiapas where families continue to survive from the gifts of nature. At the same time we see restrictions to accessing these resources due to privatization, which push families to the market for goods they previously collected from the forest, like fruits and firewood. While our modern ways disconnect us from the direct resources of our natural world, the centrality of nature to the human experience is undeniable. Even our most basic concepts tie us to the environment.

Time, energy, matter are all extremely foundational to our existence and tie us to a physical reality of sunrises, electrons and matter (Deloria, 2012). Birth and death are both decidedly natural processes.

At the same time, the environment is simultaneously more than a mere factor of social

At the same time, the environment is simultaneously more than a mere factor of social