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Social Reproduction and the

Constitution of a Gendered Political
Economy
a
Isabella Bakker
a
York University, Department of Political Science, 4700 Keele
Street, North York, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada
Version of record first published: 17 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Isabella Bakker (2007): Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered
Political Economy, New Political Economy, 12:4, 541-556

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 New Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2007

REVIEW ESSAY

Social Reproduction and the

Constitution of a Gendered
Political Economy
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ISABELLA BAKKER

This review essay outlines and compares several recent contributions in feminist
political economy with particular emphasis on the renaissance of the concept of
social reproduction.1 Most definitions of social reproduction relate to three
aspects: (a) biological reproduction of the species, and the conditions and social
constructions of motherhood; (b) the reproduction of the labour force which
involves subsistence, education and training; and (c) the reproduction and provi-
sioning of caring needs that may be wholly privatised within families and
kinship networks or socialised to some degree through state supports.2 Whereas
discussions of social reproduction in the 1970s and 1980s focused on womens
domestic labour as subsidising capitalist reproduction under Fordism, more
recent interest in the concept reflects the increasingly privatised forms of social pro-
visioning and risk that characterise the neoliberal moment in the global political
economy. In other words, the everyday activities of maintaining life and reprodu-
cing the next generation are increasingly being realised through the unpaid and paid
resources of (largely) women as states withdraw from public provisioning, with the
result that capitalist market relations increasingly infiltrate social reproduction.
Hence, the renewed focus on social reproduction seeks to place its costs at the
centre of an analysis of the capitalist system of accumulation as well as relating
it to questions of how the surplus in such an economy is distributed.
I will draw on a series of concepts and debates within feminist political
economy literatures to help explain fundamental processes of restructuring in
the global political economy of the early twenty-first century. A central assump-
tion is that a historical feminist political economy approach is better able to
make sense of the changing ontology of the global political economy than can

Isabella Bakker, York University, Department of Political Science, 4700 Keele Street, North York,
Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada.

ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online/07/040541-16 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13563460701661561
 Isabella Bakker

more positivist and empiricist perspectives which theorise transformation as

abstract and generic shifts regardless of time and place.
With this in mind, the first section addresses the challenges of an historical
approach and focuses on links between capitalism, market society and the struc-
tures of everyday life to illuminate transformations in social reproduction. It
addresses the question of capitalism as a system of accumulation and power
over both life forces and life forms. Following a brief discussion of state forms
and macroeconomic restructuring, a distinction is drawn between work and
labour to illuminate key aspects of these links between power, production and
social reproduction.
The second section deals with the relationship between governance, govern-
mentality and social reproduction in order to address the clash between political
rationalities grounded upon ahistorical, generic conceptions of the individual,
on the one hand, and, on the other, communal and reciprocal notions of the indi-
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vidual and society. It explores the way that neoliberalism intensifies the privatisa-
tion and reprivatisation of social reproduction, such that a new gender order with
its specifically individualised governmentality is increasingly an object of
global struggle. In both sections an effort is therefore made to explore the dialectic
between the globalisation and intensification of capital, on the one hand, and
systems of social reproduction and everyday life on the other. Throughout the
review essay, suggestions are made for further research.

Historicised material life and social reproduction

Everyday life
Concerned with the material conditions of human existence, Fernand Braudels
economic history looks from the bottom up as well as the top down as two
components of social reality that can be highlighted by what he called an illumi-
nating dialectic. In the first volume of his trilogy, The Structures of Everyday Life,
published in 1981, Braudel provides a comprehensive survey of geography and
demographics, diseases and epidemics, crop failures and famines, and a detailed
examination of how human beings have adapted to these material pressures
through different forms of diet, lodging and costume. These human practices
are directly linked to social reproduction biological reproduction as well as
the social provisioning of food, shelter, clothing and health care. In the subsequent
volumes, everyday life is linked to market society and the upper echelon of world
capitalism. Daily human practices are also linked to long-term historical struc-
tures. The event is, or is taken to be, unique; the everyday happening is repeated,
and the more often it is repeated the more likely it is to become a generality or
rather a structure.3 And further: Some structures, because of their long life,
become stable elements for an infinite number of generations.4 This then
signals one trajectory for understanding social reproduction and the gender div-
ision of labour over time as part of a dialectic of duration across different
spatial and social formations.
In this analysis, social reproduction is not confined to the household, but forms
the foundation of Braudels hierarchical model of the economy as consisting of:
542
 Review Essay

capitalism
market economy
material life/civilisation

At the top of the pyramid, above the market economy (the mechanism linking the
spheres of consumption and production) and upon the back of the subsistence
economies of material life (which preoccupy some 90 per cent of the population
during the period Braudel writes about), rests capitalism. It is defined by a struc-
tural asymmetry that endows social groups (merchants, financiers) with the power
to manipulate the market economy and create conditions of unequal exchange.5
Braudels view of capitalism is radically different from a Marxist understanding
of the term. Capitalism for him is not the most recent stage in a historical sequence
of modes of production, but has been potentially visible since the dawn of
history. It is a parasitic structure that inserts itself into the chain leading from
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production to wholesale trade [. . .] to occupy the strategic points controlling the

key sectors of accumulation.6 As such, capitalism does not replace but indeed
requires the lower levels of economic activity. Economic history can be partly
understood as the interaction between top and bottom of the pyramid, a conflictive
relationship between the imperatives of capitalism and the necessities of material
life, or between capitalist production and social reproduction.
Braudel argues that material life is the life that man (sic) throughout the course
of his previous history has made a part of his very being.7 This suggests a dialec-
tical relationship between agency and structure: material life consists of everyday
practices that in their multitude and over time add up to and form the historical
structures that, in turn, act back on us and define our actions. They appear immu-
table and natural if they appear at all and Braudel emphasises the durability of
these structures (la longue duree) and the unconsciousness with which these
practices are carried out:

I think mankind is more than waist-deep in daily routine. Countless

inherited acts, accumulated pell-mell and repeated time after time
to this very day, become habits that help us to live, imprison us, and
make decisions for us throughout our lives.8

Going beyond Braudels original argument, household production can be con-

sidered as a case in point for such daily, unconscious routines. This then signals
one trajectory for understanding aspects of social reproduction over time.
Indeed, the politics of the everyday offers a current consideration of the separation
of life purposes (such as working life, family life and sex life) and the social con-
struction of such spaces.9 Feminist geographers, in particular, have built on some
of these insights to link the social and material relations of social reproduction to
the use and nature of spaces and places. The second section below offers a further
consideration of these approaches.
It should be noted that, despite Braudels many valuable conceptual inroads, he
does not apply gender to his analysis and does not explicitly consider the sexual
division of labour in his trilogy. However, I have tried to suggest several ways
in which his conceptualisations of material life can aid us in understanding the
543
 Isabella Bakker

historical dynamics that underpin social reproduction. For example, we can ask
key questions about the particular forms of social reproduction such as: (i) how
far and under what conditions is social reproduction transformed as a result of
the deeper saturation of world capitalism into the life worlds of the everyday?;
(ii) what are the hierarchical consequences for social reproduction at each of
the three levels or moments of formation of world-economies in the Braudelian
triad?; and (iii) perhaps most fundamentally, Braudels emphasis on the structures
of everyday life forces us to consider the links between subsistence and locality, on
the one hand, and production and commerce, indeed the mobility and power of
capital, on the other does this generate a set of commensurate or contradictory
social relations?
Such questions relate, albeit in a different way to a second strand of thinking
that relates contemporary trends in social reproduction to longer historical pro-
cesses, drawing on the work of Marx and Engels and Gramsci. Two aspects
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will be briefly considered below. One relates to Marxs focus on species being
and what it means to be human (as elaborated in his 1844 Manuscripts). In particu-
lar, humans ability to think and work creatively is reflected in Gramscis work as
well as in more current feminist accounts of care work. The other aspect relates to
Marxs observations on primitive accumulation and dispossession as a pre-requisite
for creating the conditions for capitalist accumulation. Indeed, the historical process
of the separation of production from reproduction evokes comparisons with the
current moment in the global political economy. I begin with a discussion of
original or primitive accumulation.

Primitive accumulation, new enclosures and social reproduction

In Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici revisits Marxs concept of primi-
tive accumulation as a foundational process upon which the development of capi-
talist relations was premised. Primitive accumulation, as Marx articulated the
concept in Volume 1 of Capital, refers to the expropriation of public/common
lands that date at least from the Enclosure Movement of the sixteenth century.
This process of expropriation/dispossession of the means of subsistence for
local communities and primary producers created the conditions for a workforce
dependent upon the sale of their labour power in return for a wage in the
market that is, a condition for the capitalist system of accumulation. Federici,
however, examines primitive accumulation from the viewpoint of the changes
it introduced in the social position of women and the production of labour-
power.10 She argues that the transition to capitalism provides a test case for fem-
inist theorising as it illustrates the redefinition of productive and reproductive tasks
and the constructed character of sexual roles and divisions of labour in capitalist
society. More fundamental to her analysis which relies on an account of the
execution of hundreds of thousands of witches at the beginning of this modern
era is to document the social and historic conditions under which the body
has become central to defining the constitution of femininity. An ontological
grounding of the body within capitalist development allows her to conclude that
the promotion of life-forces turns out to be nothing more than the result of a
new concern with the accumulation and reproduction of labor-power.11
544
 Review Essay

In her account, the social decline of the midwife and the hunting of women as
witches undermined womens control over reproduction and specifically contra-
ception, and institutionalised the states control over the female body which was
a precondition for its subordination to the reproduction of labour power.
Witches provided alternative forms of knowledge and morality to capitalist patri-
archal rationalisation. She concludes that just as the Enclosures expropriated the
peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from
their bodies, which were thus liberated from any impediment preventing them
to function as machines for the production of labor.12
Federicis discussion reflects the earlier contributions of feminist political
economy13 and links primitive accumulation to their prior insight that Marxist
accounts tend to hide and naturalise the sphere of reproduction.14 In the latter
part of Caliban and the Witch, she turns her attention to neoliberal globalisation
and argues that this involves a new round of primitive accumulation and a ration-
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alisation of social reproduction aimed at destroying the last vestiges of communal

property and community relations.
Linking the new enclosures to the rationalisation and (re-)privatisation15 of
social reproduction is also the standpoint from which a number of other authors
are approaching the forces of neoliberal globalisation. For instance, in Power, Pro-
duction and Social Reproduction (2003), Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill explore
the re-privatisation of the governance of social reproduction and the ways in which
this is a counterpart to a general increase in the range, depth and scope of socio-
economic exploitation in global capitalism amid wider conditions of primitive
accumulation. Here, re-privatisation involves four shifts that relate to the house-
hold, the state and social institutions along with the governance of the basic mech-
anisms of livelihood, particularly in poorer countries. The first concerns the
re-privatisation of social reproduction which represents a dual moment: one that
returns the work of social reproduction to where it naturally belongs, the house-
hold, and, simultaneously, we see womens traditionally caring activities increas-
ingly performed in relationships that are commodified. The second is a
transformation of societies into collections of individuals or collections of families
away from ideas of a collective social entity. The third involves the shift from the
formal (market-based) to the real (life-world) subordination/incorporation of
labour to capital involving as noted above, processes of primitive accumulation
and the transnational dimension of the neoliberal attack on social provisioning.
Finally, the fourth relates to basic issues of survival and livelihood, for
example, food security as increasingly determined by the world market rather
than by considerations of local self-sufficiency, sustainable agriculture and the
constraints of ecology.16
Bakker and Gill suggest we need much more research on the transformation of
state forms. Privatisation, they argue is not only reflected in the privatisation of
state assets, a trend that increased massively throughout the 1990s, but also in pri-
vatisation of parts of the state form itself. Two dimensions of this shift are singled
out: first, the privatisation of previously socialised institutions associated with pro-
visioning for social reproduction, (such as welfare agencies and the voluntary
sector) and, second, the alienation or enclosure of common social property
which they see as part of a new global enclosure movement.17
545
 Isabella Bakker

Gill and Bakker argue for further work on how social reproduction is reshaped
by the more liberalised framework of trade and investment. Examples would
include, first, the World Trade Organization and the Treaty on Intellectual Prop-
erty Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS not only allows for the extension of private property
rights over life-forms but also legally and constitutionally locks in these shifts
thereby reshaping or channelling the actions and functions of governments
toward the market-led model of development. Second, the trade mechanisms
of the General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS) have been linked to
changing rules and norms of the provisioning of a wide range of social services
which are central to meeting the needs of social reproduction, including health
care and education, agriculture and finance. The GATS is one of a range of
mechanisms which will tend to promote greater privatisation of the public
sector and its assets, according to principles of equal treatment for both
foreign and domestic buyers.18 These authors all argue for a new epistemology
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of globalisation that questions the invisibility of social reproduction in an

analysis of global political economy.19 Third, Janine Brodie refers to this
tension as the paradox of necessity: neoliberalism has stripped away
mechanisms and institutional supports, the capabilities of states, while simul-
taneously maximising the need for social intervention because of the socially
destabilising effects of unfettered markets.20 This paradox could be explored
with respect to a range of state forms in the global North and South in future
research on social reproduction.

Forms of state and macroeconomic restructuring

Other research concerns global macroeconomic changes and their implications for
the funding of social reproduction. This is because fiscal systems are changing in
ways that have significant implications for gender equality, such as in the trend
toward regressive taxation systems. Scholars draw a connection between what
appear to be aggregate relationships related to growth and the structured male
bias that is built into the economic models that inform neoliberal policies.
Diane Elson explains male bias as the bias that operates in favor of men as a
gender and against women as a gender.21 This male bias frames public policy
in the sense that policies are implemented from the perspective of male work
and life patterns. From this standpoint, Elson and other feminist economists
have tracked the neoliberal policies of structural adjustment of the international
financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World
Bank in an effort to underscore that intended and unintended outcomes may
ensue that are related to the gender division of labour, the social reproduction
of labour and relations within households. At the macroeconomic level, the
assumption that wage labour is considered to be an unproduced resource leads
to assumptions about the infinite flexibility of womens labour and the efficiency
of cutbacks in, for example, health care. These assumptions rest on womens
labour taking up the slack of reduced public service provisioning and thereby
intensifying the work and subordination of women and other marginal groups.22
Gender Responsive Budgeting initiatives in more than 70 countries around
the world are one innovative means to incorporate the hidden aspects of social
546
 Review Essay

reproduction in public policy decisions about budgetary resources, their allocation

and distributional consequences.23 More work like this involving systematic and
painstaking analyses of budgets, monetary policy and exchange rate regimes
needs to be done to challenge conventional macroeconomic models and the ortho-
doxy of the economics field.
What unites some of this work is the hypothesis of what I call an intensifying
contradiction between the global reach and power of capital (which is partly a
product of initiatives and reforms promoted by the IMF and the World Bank)
and the erosion of the conditions of social reproduction, including the biosphere,
of the majority of the worlds population under neoliberalism. Put differently, key
research and practical questions concern the extent to which these forces in the
global political economy contribute to a crisis of social reproduction and the
ability to maintain sustainable conditions of social reproduction given current pat-
terns of capital accumulation.
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Research also needs to concern collective action in the face of such a crisis, and
how different forms of state may embody alternative responses to address it.
Indeed, there are already compelling examples from Latin America of new
forces engaged in new practices and discourses of politics focused on social repro-
duction. A history of community welfare provision through womens neighbour-
hood associations in several Latin American countries offers an example of
politicising the sphere of social reproduction. For instance, voluntary community
kitchens set up in countries such as Chile, Bolivia and Peru offered immediate
relief from economic crises which began in the 1970s and intensified in the
1980s and 1990s, and provided basic sustenance for families and communities
in the absence of social provisioning through the state. Some writers suggest
that womens participation in these collective efforts politicises the private
sphere and creates skills, social networks and a sense of purpose connected to
the functioning of the community. These activities also raise broader questions
about the nature of, and responsibility for, social provisioning.24
As the literature on gender and welfare states also illustrates, the institutions
associated with states and markets in the Scandinavian countries have agitated
to decommodify key components of social reproduction and compress earnings
differentials in the labour market. By contrast, a more neoliberal form of capital-
ism focuses on the property rights of capital and its mobility and is marked by a
relatively limited redistributive intervention on the part of the state for social
reproduction, thus intensifying inequality. The latter is more likely to give rise
to more private patterns of social reproduction suggested at the outset of this dis-
cussion. Both types of regimes will also lead to different levels and types of
migration suggesting that the degree to which social reproduction becomes trans-
nationalised will vary based on domestic support for social provisioning in both
sending and receiving countries.25
The nomadic form of neoliberal capitalism thus gives rise to a series of research
questions concerning the dialectic between local and transnational social forces in
the constitution of social reproduction in an era of intensified globalisation. This
puts the question of social reproduction firmly on the agenda of not only compara-
tive political economy but also sociology, human geography, heterodox econ-
omics and dialectical anthropology.
547
 Isabella Bakker

The work/labour distinction

A final area to be explored in this section revolves around the distinction of labour
and work, a distinction that allows for an articulation of social reproduction not
entirely mediated by capitalism, and thus for research into alternative systems
of social reproduction.26
Drawing on Marx, Gramsci and feminist writers such as Margaret Radin,
Bakker and Gill argue that in relation to production, the general point is that
work broadly mediates relations between social and natural orders and combines
the theoretical and practical activity of human beings. By contrast, labour is a par-
ticular aspect of work, which, under capitalism, is characterised by the alienation
of the labourer and the appropriation of surplus labour by capital through the insti-
tution of wage labour.
The modern origins of important aspects of this process can be traced to the his-
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torical development of markets for commodities (labour and goods) separated

from social reproduction. In this reading, the commodification of labour reduces
the creative capacities and potentials of workers to an instrumentality, with the
effect that it transforms the advantages of human freedom and its objectification
into means to accumulate profit. Thus a contradictory social ontology emerges
in the nineteenth century with the creation of market society and wage labour,
which becomes a commodity under the rule of capital. This type of labour is
estranged labour. Therefore processes of social reproduction within society
become subordinated to an alien power.27
Indeed, feminist scholars who have looked at the social and productive relations
of the care economy note that aspects of care work can be analyzed as part of a con-
tinuum that reflects degrees of commodification (Janine Radin, Sue Himmelweit,
Nancy Folbre and Julie Nelson). Radin for instance, suggests that if we draw on
the worklabour distinction, then it becomes possible to think of work as always
containing a non-commodified human element, and conversely, to think of the
fully commodified version as labour.28 Similarly, Himmelweit suggests that the
relational aspects of caring work (whether it is paid or unpaid) signal a whole
class of occupations in which workers are not purely motivated by money and
care about the results of their work. Her goal is to challenge the dualism between
home and work, reproduction and production, to allow for care to be part of paid
labour and work to be recognised in the caring activities that go on in the
home.29 This suggests an important avenue for a range of policy.
Most important, Himmelweit argues for identifying policy changes that would
weaken the pressure of inequality which results in people holding contradictory
aspirations (care and self-fulfilment vs. material possessions and need), as well
as forcing people to struggle for survival, preventing them from using time for
creative (and not necessarily just caring) work and leisure. In large part, the
struggle for progressive social reproduction is a struggle for both resources and
for control over time. Institutions like public education and child care are
crucial to the realisation of such possibilities.
The feminist social policy literature has focused more recently on care regimes
and how welfare state regimes organise the care of dependents. Jane Jenson, for
instance, asks three key questions about care and social policy: Who cares?

548
 Review Essay

Who pays? Where is care provided?30 Focusing on the identity of the carer, her
relation to the recipient of care, the financing of care and its institutional locations
all allow us to focus on the architecture through which care is provided. It also
addresses some of Himmelweits concerns about overcoming the spatial bound-
aries of work and care.
Similarly, Folbre makes a number of policy recommendations that reflect the
particulars of this type of activity high labour content yet fairly constant pro-
ductivity and costs borne largely by women despite the social benefits of care.
These include building links among care workers, emphasising common interests
of care givers and receivers, and strengthening of regulatory standards and over-
sight in the care sector.31 Many of the concerns just noted also frame the questions
of governance and governmentality that are reflected in other bodies of research.
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Global governance frames, governmentality and social reproduction

Governance
As Fedricis discussion illustrates, historical shifts in philosophies and practices of
governance re-order the social and the political.32 A more recent intervention from
V. Spike Peterson offers a Foucauldian post-structuralist perspective on why the
reproductive economy is essential for understanding the changes associated
with globalisation. Her reframing is based on the interrelation of production,
reproduction and what she refers to as the virtual economy. The latter relates to
two aspects of globalisation: the growth of financial transactions de-linked from
the conventional production of goods and services; and the increasing salience
of an economy of signs that is, the virtual realities associated with cyberspace
and todays information society and the exchange of signs rather than goods.33 Yet
one can rethink this proposition from a historical materialist perspective since
money and signs are both commodities, governed by laws of contract and consti-
tutionally underwritten by states. In that sense, they are real and not virtual. The
extent to which the power of finance and is disconnected from production is
nevertheless an important component of her analysis, whose further articulation
will be welcome.34 In addition, Marieke De Goede, for instance, has offered a
post-structuralist interpretation of finance which examines the ways in which it
has evolved historically as a gendered discursive construction.35
Brodie notes that the earliest liberal regimes of governance rested on the notion
of the separateness of the public sector, the market and the domestic sphere. Each
of these spheres in turn is governed by different rules, hierarchies and responsibil-
ities.36 The domestic sphere assigned women the responsibilities of care while
patriarchy privileged mens position in economic and political life. State regu-
lations and laws reinforced this sexual division of labour and privilege thus
enshrining an idealised gender order. Thus, the development of the welfare state
in the industrialised countries rested on a specific model of the workplace,
home and family that comprised a social wage supported by private capital and
the state. Despite feminists critical stances toward this dual system of social citi-
zenship, they nevertheless recognised the importance of social policies that main-
tained citizens well-being. By the 1980s, the foundations of both the economic
549
 Isabella Bakker

and political aspects of this citizenship regime and its related gender order were in
the process of being challenged and undermined through fiscal squeeze pressures
on most welfare states. Social citizenship was giving way to market citizenship as
the role of both individuals and governments were being redefined at the micro,
macro and meso levels of society. This transformation also signals a change in
the organisation of social reproduction.37
At the macro level, recent work can be identified that addresses such concerns.
Here research has sought to identify how the shift in gender orders is being
increasingly demarcated by international trade and investment agreements and
restrictive fiscal policies which remove the automatic stabilisers of the Keynesian
era, as well as tending to reinforce fiscal austerity measures that have adversely
affected health and education budgets in many countries, particularly those in
sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.38 At the meso level, work has focused
on how labour markets have been reconstituted, feminised and informalised,
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with the resulting reconstitution of the family and of the sites and nature of the
provisioning of subsistence.39
A great deal more research has focused on the restructuring of the micro level of
society and how this involves at the most basic level the reconstitution of the self and
the subject/citizen at the deepest level. This tension is particularly apparent with
respect to gender and social reproduction: women are called upon to become gen-
derless workers and rational economic actors yet at the same time, the social sup-
ports for reproductive and caring work are being weakened or privatised.40

Governmentality
This micro focus is also apparent in a different way in work on governmentality.
Indeed, the construction of a new common sense in Gramscian terms has been
particularly well explored by authors writing in the governmentality tradition.
Much of the literature focusing on governmentality drawing on Foucaults
legacy probes beyond frameworks of governance to ask what the constitutive
elements of governance are at the individual (micro) level. In this vein, Wendy
Brown cautions us not to simply reduce neoliberalism to a bundle of economic
policies with inadvertent political and social consequences, thereby failing to
address the political rationality that simultaneously organises these policies and
extends them far beyond the market. Neoliberalism carries a social analysis
which when deployed as a form of governmentality, reaches from the soul of
the citizen subject to education policy to practices of empire.41 Indeed, market
values are extended to all institutions and social relations, reshaping them accord-
ing to private sector rules and regulations reconfiguring and privatising (social)
risk. Hence, the political sphere is submitted to microeconomic rationality with
the intention of submitting all aspects of human life to concepts of market effi-
ciency and rationality.42 In reality, contradictions of this rationality and resistances
to it are in motion.
The neoliberal turn as a form of governmentality has been linked to key aspects
of social reproduction by Brodie, who isolates the following as significant
dynamics of this process: the simultaneous erosion and intensification of
gender, first noted by Haraway; and the simultaneous demands for autonomisation
550
 Review Essay

and responsibilisation, by which she is referring to the progressive detachment of

individuals from social networks and supports, while at the same time, responsi-
bility for systemic problems is being downloaded onto the individual.43 The
former tension refers to, on the one hand, gender being virtually erased from
policy making and being delegitimised as the basis for claims, leading to the
view that womens reproductive labour is, at best, an externality; on the other
hand, the gaps in social provisioning resulting from neoliberal rationalisation
have increased demands on transnational flows of domestic and service workers
who are largely women.
Isabelle Barker has explored this transnational dimension of governmentality in
the context of the neoliberal subject produced in the arena of elder care in the USA
and the ways in which this is related to the production of migrant care workers in
the Philippines. Barker argues that in the USA, market rationality has articulated
the family as the key site for meeting the needs of elder care. In the supply-side
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country, the Filipino state has actively promoted overseas migration of care
workers by way of techniques of neoliberal governmentality, and sought to
define these workers as exemplary citizens who make a critical contribution to
the national economy. In Barkers words, neo-liberal governmentality is com-
prised of a bio-political apparatus that seeks to produce national loyalty without
the use of social welfare programs that collectivize risk.44 Indeed, remittances
are one of the Philippines largest sources of foreign currency officially totalling
some US$10 billion in 2005 with further vast sums transferred unofficially. It is
therefore not surprising that the Filipino state cultivates a segment of the popu-
lation who are able and willing to go abroad while fostering continued connection
to their country of origin.
Whereas the IMF and the World Bank proclaim remittances as a means to
improve Third World balance of payment problems, the social and material reali-
ties uncovered by feminist researchers suggest something rather different: social
reproduction of the affluent is prioritised over those of unprotected workers, par-
ticularly from the global South.45 More comparative research is needed to make
sense of the broader and gendered impacts of migration and remittances since
they relate to deeper structures of social reproduction in both sending and receiv-
ing countries.
A final contribution to questions of governance and social reproduction, that is
only briefly explored here, are the writings focusing on the everyday, space and
care/social reproduction. Questions related to how people manage their work
and daily lives, especially in the context of a growing climate of inequality in
the distribution of resources between households at the local, national and trans-
national levels lend another entry point for examining the current dynamics of
social reproduction.46 Enquiries into the spatiality of social reproduction can
focus on the production of home spaces (the tasks of the day-to-day such as
child care and food security), environmental degradation and its unequal spatial
toll on childrens bodies, and the relationships between society, the state (policies
and practices) and space, to name a few points of engagement.47
In addition, by focusing on the integrated nature of peoples daily lives, the
everyday standpoint can help us in studying up or researching the powerful insti-
tutions that regulate human reproduction. Such a vantage point connects to the
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 Isabella Bakker

previous discussion on transnational care which links households from one city or
region of the world as a part of a chain of labour market divisions and networks of
reciprocity.48 Research on governance in this context needs to problematise the
boundaries between states and markets and be linked to public and private
forms of power, production and social reproduction.
Finally, we will not revisit the debates on scale thinking here.49 It is neverthe-
less important to raise for consideration the questions posed by theorists of social
reproduction about the limits to conventional emphases on the state, capital and
politics as emanating from the sphere of production to the neglect of the processes
of social reproduction and consumption.
In some senses, this takes us back to earlier insights from the domestic labour
debates but also evokes the historical materialist insights of everyday life
suggested by Braudel. It also relates to the moments of forced violent separation
of production from reproduction Marx first wrote about as industrial capitalism
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was being consolidated. As Polanyi reminds us, the very forces of dispossession
that created labour power were challenged in a double movement of social
forces that sought to re-embed key aspects of reproduction in a more socially sus-
tainable manner. An analytically grounded analysis of social reproduction in the
current context suggests that a move to privatise and marketise key aspects of
social reproduction from forces from above is being met by resistances from
below a reaction to what Polanyi called the stark utopia of the self-regulatory
market system in the nineteenth century.

Conclusion
This essay has offered a reflection on some current feminist political economy
scholarship on social reproduction based on different entry points for analysis.
The review began with a consideration of how to understand social reproduction
and the sexual division of labour over time. A historical lens, it was suggested,
offers an ability to ask questions about what the unfolding consequences are of
the deeper transmission of capitalism into the structures of everyday life. The
first section argued that the historical process of separating the means of pro-
duction from the means of social reproduction is an ongoing set of events typified
by what some call the new enclosures. In the same way that peasants were dis-
possessed of communal grazing and farm lands in the 1600s, many aspects that
underpin daily, material life today across the globe are being privatised and expro-
priated by states and private actors through for instance, trade and investment
agreements that serve to dispossess local intellectual property rights and open
social services to private multinationals. Recalling Braudels writings on capital-
ism, the market economy and material life, I argued that there is a dialectical
relationship between the necessities of the lower levels of economic activity
(material life, the market economy) and the imperatives of capitalism. This
Braudel associates with large corporations that specialise in accumulation rather
than production. Indeed, capitalism is seen as a power over production and
social reproduction.
From a Bruadellian vantage point, then, a basic hypothesis is that capitalism as
a system of power and exchange is expanding and encroaching on the other forms
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 Review Essay

of economy, namely the market economy and material life. One result of this
movement has been an increased interest among feminist political economists
and philosophers in thinking about material life from the vantage point of work
versus labour. The commodification of labour under capitalism is characterised
by both the extraction of a surplus from wage labourers by capital and, the depen-
dency of the worker dispossessed from her means of subsistence on that labour for
survival. This means that processes of social reproduction became subordinated to
this form of alienation and commodification. With the capitalist wage labour
relation, the costs of reproduction became externalised to the household and
family, or are left to be realised through the workers wages. Welfare and devel-
opmental states in the post-World War II period mediated this tension to a greater
or lesser extent through welfare structures and the family wage, but, with the
advent of neoliberalism, social reproduction is again being reprivatised. Work
by contrast, is an activity that mediates relations between the social and natural
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orders, that is, it can be creative and it contains a non-commodified element.

Hence, some authors suggest that key aspects of work for social reproduction
and care, such as education and child care, represent an important targeting of
social resources and the possibility for greater control over ones time outside
of the imperatives of capitalism. They argue for a new politics of social reproduc-
tion that limits the extension of capitalist imperatives into the various relations of
social reproduction.
The second section extended these considerations by reviewing some aspects of
philosophies of governance as they relate to the concept of social reproduction.
Neoliberalism, it was argued, represents a specific rationality whereby market
values are extended to all institutions and social relations with the goal of reshap-
ing all aspects of human life according to market criteria of efficiency and ration-
ality. From the vantage point of social reproduction, this means that responsibility
for systemic problems is being downloaded onto the individual, especially women.
Simultaneously, gender as a basis for claims making vis-a-vis states is being dele-
gitimised, thus rendering much of womens labour an externality an activity
that is not problematised as important to public policy either in terms of costs
or benefits. Despite such ongoing rationalisation of social reproductive activities,
the requirements of care work and livelihoods are ongoing, although increasingly
being met through expansion of unpaid work and transnational flows of domestic
and service workers. Hence, the essay explored some of the transnational dimen-
sions of governmentality by highlighting a case study of the production of migrant
care workers by the Philippines state. Both the supply of and demand for this
labour are by-products of neoliberal market rationality and structural adjustment.
A final discussion in the second section relates to social reproduction and the
everyday how people manage their paid and unpaid work in the context of
their daily lives.
Throughout the essay, some potential questions for future research were raised
along with some of the limitations of a social reproduction approach at the current
moment of global restructuring. Any further research will need to confront the fol-
lowing basic questions: (i) reproduction of what and for whom?; (ii) for what pur-
poses and with what consequences?; and (iii) what are the alternatives to dominant
practices that are transforming social reproduction and what prospects do they
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 Isabella Bakker

hold for greater empowerment and democracy? These questions, I have argued,
need to be addressed in a context that problematises transformations in social
reproduction across all three levels of analysis (micro, meso and macro), as
well as in their historical, political economy and discursive forms.

Notes
I would like to thank the following for their valued comments: Kate Bezanson, Janine Brodie, Julian Germann,
Stephen Gill, Adrienne Roberts and Hasmet Ulluorta as well as the editors of this journal.
1. Grappling with definitions of social reproduction also characterise early interventions in the debate. Edholm,
Harris and Young provide us with a key entry point into specifying reproduction as a historically and cultu-
rally specific term. They isolate three different reproductions which correspond to different levels of theor-
etical abstraction ranging from the macro to the micro: social reproduction of social systems in their totality
through time; reproduction of the labour force; and human or biological reproduction. They link this defi-
nition to the basic structures that have to be reproduced in order that social reproduction as a whole can
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take place. Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris & Kate Young, Conceptualising Women, Critique of Anthro-
pology, Vol. 9/10, No. 3 (1977), pp. 10130.
2. Isabella Bakker & Stephen Gill (eds), Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the
Global Political Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 32.
3. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th18th Century, Vol. I (University of California Press,
1992), p. 29.
4. Fernand Braudel, On History (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 31.
5. Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism (John Hopkins University Press,
1977), pp. 2931.
6. Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, pp. 620 and 65.
7. Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism, p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 7.
9. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (Allen Lane, 1971) and The Survival of Capitalism:
Reproduction of the Relations of Production (Allison & Busby, 1976).
10. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia Pluto,
2003), p. 12.
11. She is explicitly engaged in a dialogue with Foucaults concept of bio-power that she argues does indeed
register the shift from a type of power built on the right to kill to one exercised through the administration
and promotion of life-forces. However, she notes that the latter relates to the rise of capitalism and the contra-
dictory forces of accumulation and reproduction of labour power. She is also critical of Foucaults collapsing
of female and male histories into an undifferentiated whole, significantly by not mentioning the most signifi-
cant disciplining of women: the witch-hunt (p. 8). See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison (Vintage, 1977).
12. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 184.
13. Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling
Wall Press, 1975); Margaret Benston, The Political Economy of Womens Liberation (New England Free
Press, 1969); Heidi Hartman, The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class and Political Struggle, Signs,
Vol. 6, No. 3 (1981) pp. 366 94; Antonella Picchio, Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of the
Labour Market (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
14. Maria Mies, Patriachy and Capital Accumulation (Zed Books, 1986), also explores the relationship between
primitive accumulation and the witch hunts. She notes that these witch hunts were an especially lucrative
source of money and wealth for those engaged in the process, from those who confiscated witches property
to those who actually carried out the witch burning. In addition to Mies book, this theme is visited in Maria
Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen & Claudia von Werlhof, Women: The Last Colony (Zed Books, 1988),
where they develop the theme of the historical and continual colonisation of women housewifisation,
primitive accumulation.
15. The brackets indicate that, in some contexts, these activities have never been private but kinship-based or
community-based. This reflects Polanyis observation that many forms of social reproduction rest on
relations of reciprocity and redistribution hence, economic activities were embedded in a wider
network of social relations. See The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our

554
 Review Essay
Time (Beacon Press, 1944). Another current aspect relates to the situation of many developing economies
where the state has never been a strong force in social reproduction (that is, risk was not collectivised).
Hence one cannot speak of a withdrawal. One can, however, discern the increased infiltration of the
market into daily activities as a mediator of life chances.
16. Philip McMichael, Feeding the World: Agriculture, Development and Ecology, in Leo Panitch & Colin
Leys (eds), The Socialist Register 2007 (The Merlin Press, 2007), pp. 17094.
17. Bakker & Gill, Power, Production and Social Reproduction, pp. 189.
18. Gill & Bakker, New Constitutionalism and the Social Reproduction of Caring Institutions, Journal of
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006), pp. 3557; Mariama Williams, Gender Issues
in the Multilateral Trading System: A Manual (Commonwealth Secretariat, 2003).
19. For instance, Diane Elsons account of the three sectors of the political economy the domestic, the private,
and the public notes that domestic structures are as taken for granted in the new political economy as they
were in the nineteenth century. This not only has economic implications (largely related to omitting the
unpaid work of women) but also includes the undermining of the conditions of supply for a productive
and willing labour force. Diane Elson, The Economic, the Political and the Domestic: Businesses, States
and Households in the Organisation of Production, New Political Economy, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1998),
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pp. 189 208. In particular, the process of globalisation has exacerbated the mismatch between the activities
of the domestic, public and private sectors (pp. 2034) through restrictive fiscal and monetary policies
which externalise the costs of social reproduction, offloading these to the domestic sector. Indeed, the
increased mobility of capital and the reality of tax competition have shifted the burden of social spending
away from firms and high income individuals toward labour and the poor, ultimately leading to a fiscal
squeeze for many governments that signal retrenchment and privatisation of public assets.
20. Janine Brodie, Globalization, Insecurity and the Paradoxes of the Social, in Bakker & Gill (eds), Power,
Production and Social Reproduction, pp. 46 65.
21. Diane Elson, Male Bias in Macro Economics: The Case of Structural Adjustment, in Diane Elson (ed.),
Male Bias in the Development Process (Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 3.
22. See, for instance, Isabella Bakker, The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy (Zed Books, 1994);
Ingrid Palmer, Public Finance from a Gender Perspective, World Development, Vol. 23, No. 11 (1995),
pp. 19816.
23. See http://www.gender-budgets.org.
24. Shahra Razavi, The Political Economy of Care in a Development Context (UNRISD, 2007).
25. Jean Pyle, Globalization, Transnational Migration and Gendered Care Work: Introduction, Globalizations,
Vol. 3, No. 3 (2006), pp. 28395.
26. There was a considerable debate in Feminist Economics between Tony Lawson, Sandra Harding, Dru Barker
and others about critical realism and ontology vs epistemology/standpoint within feminism (19992003).
Lawson argued for a critical realist ontology for feminist social sciences; he was roundly critiqued for: (a)
assuming a common human nature which reflects a notion of shared human needs (Nussbaum) and may
potentially lead to oppressive forms of universalising especially if science is blind to underlying structures
of power; (b) ignoring how economics is a discourse; and (c) not specifying what are the grounds for shared
human objectives interests, needs and motives? Haraway suggests that marginalised viewpoints are necess-
ary not because they are epistemically privileged, but because feminist objectivity requires the joining of
partial and situated views for the connections and openings such knowledge creates.
27. Bakker & Gill, Power, Production and Social Reproduction, p. 21.
28. Margaret Radin, Contested Commodities (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 104.
29. Sue Himmelweit, Domestic Labour, in Janice Peterson & Meg Lewis (eds), The Elgar Companion of
Feminist Economics (Edward Elgar, 1999), p. 28.
30. Jane Jenson, Who Cares? Gender and Welfare Regimes, Social Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1997), pp. 1827.
31. Nancy Folbre, Demanding Quality: Worker/Consumer Coalitions and High Road Strategies in the Care
Sector, Politics & Society, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2006), pp. 11 15.
32. Feminist interventions in discussions of governance have evaluated the construction of historically specific
gender orders and how they integrate processes of production and social reproduction. See Robert Connell,
Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Polity, 1987); Linda McDowell, Life Without
Father or Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism, Transactions, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1991), pp. 400 19;
Elisabeth Prugl, Toward a Feminist Political Economics, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 4,
No. 1 (2002), pp. 31 6; Sylvia Walby, Gendering the Global, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 4
(1998), pp. 3267.

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 Isabella Bakker
33. V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive
and Virtual Economies (Routledge, 2003), pp. 1516.
34. There are some exploratory attempts to link gender questions to the international financial architecture which
increasingly conditions the material and discursive aspects of social reproduction. See Irene Van Staveren,
Global Finance and Gender, in Jan Art Scholte & Adrien Schnabel (eds), Civil Society and Global Finance
(Routledge, 2002), pp. 22846; Diane Elson, International Financial Architecture: A View from the
Kitchen, Femina Politica, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2002), pp. 26 37.
35. Marieke De Goede, Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (University of Minnesota Press,
2005).
36. Janine Brodie, Globalization, Governance and Gender: Rethinking the Agenda for the Twenty-First
Century, in Louise Amoore (ed.), The Global Resistance Reader (Routledge, 2005), p. 247.
37. Isabella Bakker, Neoliberal Govenance and the New Gender Order, Working Papers, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1999),
pp. 49 59.
38. See Marta Guiterrez, Macro-economics: Making Gender Matter (Zed Books, 2003).
39. Saskia Sassen, Towards a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy, in Saskia Sassen (ed.), Globalization
and its Discontents (New Press, 1998), pp. 81100.
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40. Brodie, Globalization, Governance and Gender, p. 251.

41. Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2006),
pp. 38 9.
42. Thomas Lemke, The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucaults Lecture at the College de France on Neo-
liberal Governmentality, Economy and Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2001), pp. 190207.
43. Brodie, Globalization, In/security and the Paradoxes of the Social, p. 63.
44. Isabelle Barker, Importing Care: The Transnational Dimensions of Neo-liberal Governmentality, Center for
International Studies Papers, Bryn Mawr College, 2007, p. 10.
45. Meg Luxton & Kate Bezanson, Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy challenges Neo-liberalism
(McGillQueens University Press, 2006).
46. Helen Jarvis, Home Truths about Care-less Competition, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2007), pp. 20714.
47. Cindi Katz, The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-Vigilance of Children and the Global Retreat from Social
Reproduction, Social Justice, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2001), pp. 4756; Sallie Marston, The Social Construction of
Scale, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2000), pp. 21924.
48. Jarvis, Home Truths.
49. Brian Marks & Sallie Marston, Progress or Regress?, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 29, No. 1
(2005), pp. 1 4.

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