Locating the Theory to the System

Importantly there are different ways this theory has been located with respect to, outside, or alongside capitalist production and providing us the image of two concentric flows feeding into each other. This section looks at the various ways that SRT has been thought to relate to the capitalist system. We can see in the illustration (Image 9) how Fine, Rai et al., and Harvey relate these circuits as concurrent. Instead, writers like McGregor (2019) or Bhattacharya (2017) and Fraser (2012; 2013; 2017) suggest that instead these circuits are located within the capitalist system. The ecological economists offer us a way forward: everything is inside the natural world.

Starting with the history of capitalism as the origin of women’s domination (Wood, 2002;

Federici, 2004; Fraser, 2017) we see that necessity for the laborer to be produced by the unpaid labor of the (mostly) women would actually be one of the inputs that goes into capitalist production, through an unrecognized subsidy to the wage. But furthermore, by incorporating the state and a host of social protections and services as part of the resources that are called upon for individual social reproduction, we can see the household as subsumed by the system. To his credit Harvey also illustrates how the services and protections are brought into the circuit, but in his co-centric cycles, he identifies (also correctly) this as part of the

8 Consumer demand, and demand creation through mass production and low prices (Rivera-Ferra, 2009), create the condition where mobile production seeks out the cheapest inputs.

realization circuit in the form of State Expenditure. This continues to exemplify the idea of dual circuits. Fraser (2017) sees the misunderstanding of these circuits as being entangled with “the defense of male domination.” Mohandesi and Teitelman (2017, p. 38) tells us this vision “allows us to deepen our understanding of the capitalist mode of production by showing how its rise was partly based on the manifold subsumption of socially reproductive activities under capitalist relations.” Furthermore, the ideas of social reproduction theory incorporate the theory of intersectionality into it while rejecting its architecture of separate circuits of exploitation. Instead, SRT posits that the vectors of intersectionality are all rooted in a relationship explained by the needs for capital’s reproduction. Intersectionality posits that there are “multiple oppressions” that are either “interlocking” or “intersecting”

and form a hierarchy of circuits of oppressions as existing in a spatial temporal landscape, unmoored from a causal agent/logic “deriving some kind of social order or system from these parts.” (McNally 2017, p. 99).

McNally explains that while some versions of SRT “lapsed into a fundamental dualism which posited distinct modes of production and reproduction (known as ‘dual systems theory’) the most sophisticated contributions to the field sought out a unitary conceptualization in which these were theorized as two moments in a complexly unified social process.” This provides the second model of SRT which is subsumed within a “a capitalist mode of production and reproduction that entails historically specific relations of gender and racial oppression.”

(2017, p. 111).

Bhattachayra (2017), in her interpretation and enunciation of the theory deploys the idea of a false dichotomy between class struggle and new social movements. She names such diverse struggles as the women’s movement, the peace movement, the ecology movement (2017, p.

88), as potential sites for class struggle, warning of the need to rethink the “working class” as Image 10: The Marxist view of Social Reproduction Theory

including more than just the struggles of the worker, and for the wage (p. 89). The unemployed and unremunerated need to be brought to the foreground of the fight for the resources necessary to reproduce one’s life to the standards one deserves or expects. The centric nature Bhattacharya’s vision, specifically, the interface where this struggle takes place, between those with demands and the powerful forces in society which are able to meet them, is contested by McGregor. McGregor (2019) rejects Bhattacharya’s assertion that these struggles can take place independently of labor. Bhattacharya simultaneously makes note that trades unions have frequently been in opposition to these other struggles, including the environment, racial justice or feminism. For McGregor, an appropriate analysis of the productive systems shows that there is no other “arena” where social mobilization can make demands on capital other that the site of production. To her, those that are able to meet all of these demands are those who control the circuit of production. To simplify, Bhattacharya notes that all of these social struggles, for better working conditions, accessible transport and healthcare and water, higher wages and social protections, need to be included under the umbrella of social reproduction, while for McGregor all of these struggles for social reproduction need to be reworked as labor struggles.

It is the position of this researcher that they are both right but that the ordering is not as relevant as defining what this Social Reproduction Theory actually includes and how it can be useful.

The inclusion of these other factors by Bhattacharya has helped open the panorama of how this issue can be understood, and the focus of McGregor can align activists with each other in a direction where change could stem. The point of this thesis is to attempt to understand how it is that water, and the environment, fit into the social. From the actions taken by Bhattacharya to open the window of how this theory represents the whole world and our relationship to it – this thesis stands at the edge of this ledge and looks anew into the distance. The subject is sitting in a context, in relation to numerous other subjects and realms, uniquely positioned, uniquely included and excluded from a blend of countless systems of rights and privileges, each creating its own unique system of rationality and normativity. Social Reproduction Theory seen in this light is much more than the way the worker is reproduced – it becomes the way society is reproduced, the way it is sustained, the way it consumes and metabolizes and becomes again – not the individual, not the worker, not the household, not the city, but the society. De la Peña (forthcoming) paints us a theoretical politic of intertwining systems of being, each with distinct thresholds of varying

“bureaucratic” densities between them. In this version of the theory, social reproduction can be seen as having numerous “vectors” which are not mutually exclusive and are in relationship to each other as much as to capital.

A final vision of this relationship, and the one adopted by this thesis is shown in the final vision.

This borrows from the field of ecological economists and insists that the social, economic, and environmental all have distinct positions in a hierarchy usually misunderstood. Following Polanyi’s presentation of the economic system embedded in human culture, the Ecological Economists show this “social” as embedded within and historically evolved from, a natural world (Daly & Farley, 2011, p. 8; Costanza et. al., 2013; Georgescu-Roegen, 1993 [1971]; See also in relation to water Boelens et al., 2016, p. 3). While some ecological economists have argued that our destructive relationship with our environment comes from our inability to

appropriately account for the costs, due to poor data (Costanza, 2007), other are pushing to subsume our understanding of the economic as a subset of the social which is a subset of the environment. Costanza’s solution is to bring true costs into the economic equations while on the other side Moore (2015) insist that the solution is in realigning our understanding of the economic as subsumed by the social which is subsumed by the natural world.

The importance of this cannot be understated, especially in the current crises of climate, water, contamination and extinction. The presumption that the economic somehow sits outside of this evolutionary setting or that it should be allowed to define the relationship between nature and the social is, from this perspective what has brought this mess into being. Economic logic has both produced and justified a reductionist understanding of progress subject to a logic of minimizing costs through the externalization of factors of production and reproduction). Harvey (2018) and Moore (2015) refer to this as the tendency of capital to extract from nature for the purpose of accumulation. The facility of capitalists to utilize the rules of the system to their benefit, even if that means applying a very specific

“rationality” which allows them to, and then justifies the need to hide the true costs of their “economies.” This is applicable from the lowest levels of capitalist reproduction, to the system’s highest logicians.⁹ Even mainstream economists such as Larry Summers have brought this tendency to the foreground, arguing that the problem with contamination is solved by finding the poorest people with the fewest rights and dumping/externalizing on them – or as he says, seeking out the “vastly under polluted” periphery.¹⁰

Image 11: The Feminist view of Social Reproduction Theory

9 US state senate candidate and Massey Coal owner Don Blankenship, who notably served prison time for workplace crimes resulting in the deaths of men in coal mines, once said in a debate about environmental and safety regulations: “I couldn’t be in business if I had to follow the law.” Blankenship and Kennedy (2010)

10 Summers said later that this was a joke but nevertheless, both the rationale and justification for it are very real.

As it is proposed here, the environment is at once a setting in which the subject is located as it is a factor that is integrated into the social reproduction of the individual and family.

From the discussion above we can see various points in which the environment is acted upon by the “economic” and the “productive.” Here it should only be mentioned that of course this differs from the theorizing of the environment as human constructed. The “world” that humans inhabit is a construction, brought into being by their imagination and participation in the social, yet by this use of the environment I refer to something pre-human and sustaining, which is not only non-commensurable, it is beyond our comprehension and our true relationship with it can be only considered as both beyond our understanding and control.