For the wheels of capitalism to keep turning, everything that gets used up in the process of production must be replaced. In Capital, Marx calls this “simple reproduction.” The bales of linen and reels of thread that have been cut up and sewn into coats, and the shearing scissors and sewing machine needles worn down over months or years all must be renewed. But it’s not just raw materials, machine parts and other inanimate components that need reproducing. Tired bodies and wearied minds of workers must also be refreshed by rest, food, and leisure. Production and reproduction might seem distinct, Marx argues, but they’re actually inextricably linked. It might feel like the hours we spend away from work are our own, but as long as we show up to work the next day, everything we do to unwind, blow off steam, or care for ourselves or the people around us goes to feed the endlessly hungry machine of profit.
Marx’s discussion of the role of reproduction was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Marxist feminists who argued that one of the epochal shifts inaugurated by capitalism was a new and gendered distinction between the spheres of production and reproduction. The masculine, public sphere of politics, the workplace, and the market came to be seen as the domain of rational work, while the feminine, private sphere of the home, family, and care, came to be seen as a place of retreat from the brutalities of capitalism. Home sustained the moral and emotional needs of the (male) worker.
This gendered transformation in work corresponded to a transformation in the role of Christianity within Western societies. Toward the end of the medieval period, people began to believe that the family, not the monastery, was the central Christian institution. The academic study of theology increasingly separated from the monastic life of prayer and worship, and (white) women came to be seen not as workers but as natural mothers and housewives. The spiritual work of prayer and moral instruction came, then, to be seen as women’s work. As formal separations between church and state took hold across the Western world, Christianity became associated with the realm of social reproduction.
This new division between the spheres of production and reproduction—the market and the household—makes it seem as though they are not only separate but opposed to one another. In this model, Melinda Cooper argues, resistance to capitalism often ends up being imagined in ways that parallel conservative politics, in terms of defending the sphere of reproduction by seeking to shore up existing social structures and relationships. Even supposedly radical movements often end up appealing to nostalgia for an imagined past where people related to one another outside of the logic of the market and were more deeply connected to “community, land, and family.” That’s why feminist movements repeatedly ally themselves with the right, as happened both in the 1970s “porn wars” and the contemporary reactions against trans liberation; and why groups like Extinction Rebellion double down on ideas of borders and nation-states in their fight against climate change. But if we see the public and private spheres in the terms of capitalism as a whole, it becomes clear that they are not opposing tendencies but two parts of the same process: production and reproduction.
For critical theorist Nancy Fraser, the conflict between these spheres is the central contradiction of capitalism. On the one hand, capitalists want to extract as much profit as possible by taking away the resources that workers need to survive. On the other hand, reproduction is a necessary part of the productive process. Production does require at least some workers who are able to feed and clothe themselves and get enough sleep to function at work. It needs new workers as older workers retire, die, or quit, and it needs those workers to have some degree of education, skills, and knowledge about how to behave. For Fraser, this central contradiction produces crises of care. At certain points, capitalist exploitation begins to eat into the resources available for people to care for themselves and for one another, and this produces a series of crises, which usually result in a rebalancing of the system. But these crises of care are also moral crises: the more exploitative capitalism becomes, the more likely it is that this will produce a crisis of faith in the fundamental goodness of the system.
The problem, Fraser thinks, is that social reproduction—care—is undervalued and undermined by capitalism, even as capitalism relies on care for its survival. For Cooper, capitalism needs institutions like race, the family, and the nation in order to ensure the unequal distribution of wealth, yet it also works to undermine and transform these institutions in search of ever greater profits. The very care work that is crucial to our collective survival is also how the inequalities of capitalism are reproduced. If we want to understand care, Cooper argues, we have to think about its entanglement with violence.
Historically, Marxist feminists have sought to demonstrate the value of social reproduction, for example, by quantifying the economic contribution of unpaid housework and care work to the economy. By emphasising that women’s contributions lay not only in the physical work—scrubbing floors, chopping vegetables, and changing diapers—but also in the less tangible work of comforting crying children, soothing the nerves of stressed husbands, and charmingly hosting dinner guests at parties, Marxist feminism also influenced subsequent discussions of the immaterial and affective labour which have become increasingly central to many people’s daily work lives. But to say that women’s work is valuable is not the same thing as saying that it is good.
French Marxist Louis Althusser’s famous essay on “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is also concerned with the question of how capitalism reproduces itself. Althusser argues that workers need three things: material resources such as food, clothes and housing; the knowledge and skills necessary to do their jobs; and, crucially, to learn how to act in accordance with the ruling ideology of the society they live in. In capitalism, Althusser suggests, the work of ensuring that people behave as they are expected to is divided between what he calls the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). The Repressive State Apparatus belongs to the public sphere and is made up of the government, the army, the police, the prison system, and the legal system. Through the RSA, the power of the state is exercised primarily through violence and coercion, forcing citizens to behave as they are supposed to. But the RSA also requires a certain degree of ideological buy-in. The violence done by the police is only possible if at least some citizens believe that it is necessary for maintaining social order. Wars waged by the state rely both on a degree of social acceptance of the cost of war and on people’s willingness to join the army.
Ideological State Apparatuses, by contrast, belong for the most part in the private sphere, where they function primarily through persuasion, encouraging people to accept and abide by the rules and values of that society. Where the RSA is more or less a single entity, the ISAs are multiple: education, the family, trade unions, the media, churches, and cultural institutions, among others. The ISAs work primarily by ideology, by teaching us to see ourselves and our relationship to the world around us in particular ways, but are ultimately backed up by the violence of the RSA. If you occupy a university building, fail to take care of your children in the way that society expects, get too aggressive on a picket line or cause a fuss at an art gallery, sooner or later someone will call the cops.
Together, Cooper and Althusser highlight that the ways that we care for each other within capitalism cannot be straightforwardly disentangled from the kinds of violence capitalism relies on to keep reproducing itself. Families, schools, and hospitals may keep us alive, but the love, kindness, and care we encounter there are inextricable from the violent divisions of race, class, and gender which structure our world and determine who is kept alive and who is left to die. Families are where most of us first experience care from the people around us, where we learn who we are and how to love; but they are also places that teach us what is expected of us within society, where inequalities of wealth are reproduced through patterns of inheritance, and where we learn how to behave, how to internalise the moral and cultural values of the world around us. Churches can cut across some of the divisions produced by the structure of the family, and yet the care and kindness practiced by church communities can be deeply entangled with, for example, policing the boundaries of proper moral behaviour, especially in relation to sexuality. Schools and universities likewise function as sites of both care and violence. Every week I taught at a UK university, I asked my students to log their attendance via an electronic system, which alerted me to check in on students who might not be doing well. But that same system also kept track of migrant students so they could be deported if they failed to abide by the terms of their visas.
Because capitalism is full of internal contradictions and constantly in a process of transformation, different ISAs may come into conflict with one another. For example, in neoliberal Western economies, as service work increasingly replaced manufacturing roles and jobs became more precarious, it has become important that workers are flexible, getting along with different kinds of people and adapting to different kinds of workplaces. Educational institutions play a key role in teaching young people these skills, often less by the explicit content of curricula and instead by simply throwing together young people from different households and even different towns. As students learn from their peers and teachers how to get along with one another, these social skills can start to seem like a threat to families headed by adults formed in different contexts for different kinds of workplaces. The entanglement of care and violence that plays out in different forms in individual ISAs is no less present in the conflicts between different ISAs. A child might go to school and find there a message of love and self-acceptance that is lacking in their family; or they might find themselves bullied and publicly shamed for aspects of themself which are affirmed by their family.
Christian responses to various crises of social reproduction have tended to position Christianity on the side of reproduction against the ravages of the market. When crises of care occur, it is often churches that step in to fill the gaps, running foodbanks, homeless shelters, crèches, or even schools and hospitals. As Fraser’s work suggests, these interventions may do important work to help people survive. But this very work also functions to perpetuate capitalism, both by keeping it going on a material level and by ensuring that the moral legitimacy of capitalism remains intact. When Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, announced that he was going to try to intervene to stop the rise of predatory payday loan companies by promoting church-run credit unions in the UK, he did not argue that a society built on debt was fundamentally immoral but that people needed access to “good finance” and to opportunities for “reasonable” debt. This is not an argument against capitalism but an argument for a rebalancing of capitalism in favour of social reproduction. Exploitation has gone too far: we need to give people the resources that they need in order to survive so that they can continue being exploited at a more reasonable pace. As Cooper’s work suggests, these interventions often enact violence along lines of race, class and gender: the church which runs a homeless shelter also kicks out residents for being gay or having sex outside of marriage; the Christian charity which offers material resources to street sex workers also calls the police on them “for their own good.”
In a crisis, it is often tempting to look to the past, imagined as a better time, and to argue that we should return to what we once had. Here, too, Christians and non-Christians alike tend to argue that a return to the past would mean a return to forms of care which once existed and have since ceased to be, and to gloss over the entanglement of those forms of care with violence. The Fordist settlement of the mid-twentieth century offered higher wages and better social security for middle-class white people in the West, but these were made possible by rigid orderings of gender and race at home, and by colonial exploitation abroad. The philanthropic and social justice-oriented Christianity of early industrial capitalism saw charitable and social work proliferating alongside eugenic notions of social purity. These cases show that even the most sincere expressions of love within a social order founded on violence tend to be formed by that violence.
Social reproduction is not always nostalgic or conservative, however. If social reproduction must change and adapt to the ever-changing needs and demands of capital, then Christians can also get caught up in the conflicts between ISAs produced by these shifting forms of care and violence. Christians might react against the risks of hookup culture by doubling down on purity culture, or they might struggle against religious homophobia by showing up at Pride marches funded by weapons manufacturers. But refusing the violence of a new phase of capitalism by clinging to older forms of violence is not any more radical than rejecting older forms of violence in favour of new ones.
We cannot simply give up on the work of keeping ourselves and others alive. Nor can we simply choose to care for one another in ways that do not also tangle us up in systems of violence.
If we want to understand the place that we occupy within the great and unrelenting machine of capitalism, then perhaps the questions we should be asking are not about how the threads of violence and care intertwine in our daily lives, at work, at home, and at play. If we want to transform the great machine of capitalism, Marx suggested, we need to start by recognising the “invisible threads” in which our lives are caught up. How would we understand our daily lives differently if we started from the assumption that care and violence are not opposites, but rather the warp and weft from which the world is made?
Marika Rose is Assistant Professor in Systematic Theology at Dublin City University. She is the author of A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence (Fordham University Press, 2019) and Theology for the End of the World (SCM Press, 2023).
Image Credit: U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
