On Being and Appearing: Social Reproduction and the Family Form

"And how should we respond to the task set before us, that is, the task of practically and theoretically partaking in the de-formation of the social totality? If, as Beverley Best puts it, 'capital's social forms serve the perceptual delinking of the production of surplus-value from its source in people's cooperative labour', then what is the form that enables this 'perceptual delinking' in the case of unwaged reproductive activity?"

"In The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital , Leopoldina Fortunati declares that the real difference between production and reproduction is that 'while production both is and appears as the creation of value, reproduction is the creation of value but appears otherwise'. How should we understand this puzzling claim? What does it mean for reproduction to appear otherwise? And wouldn't our task, as critical theorists, be to identify this form, expose its contradictions, and prefigure alternatives not foreclosed by its logic?"

Unwaged reproductive labour creates value but is often presented in forms that mask its connection to capitalist surplus-value. The perceptual delinking of surplus-value from cooperative labour requires identification of the social form that conceals unwaged reproductive activity. The family is proposed as the social form of appearance through which unwaged reproductive labour is rendered other to the commodity form and not mystified by wage relations. Marx's critique of capital's necessary forms of appearance is the methodological tool for analyzing and exposing the form-specific contradictions of reproductive labour and for imagining alternatives.

Read at The Philosopher